Marx:
"He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another. "
Of course this is not an issue in capitalism, you just let the market decide.
IDK, maybe using supercomputers to simulate the free market? Or… That might not be possible since value is subjective, and the market "determines" prices by billions of people deciding what things are worth every moment of every day for every transaction.
The whole price thing seems to me like one of many glaring flaws inherent to communism, and I'm wondering if any anons here have a solution.
You don't. Value disappears under communism. What Marx here describes is a hypothetical "lower phase" or more primitive "version" of communism he envisioned, under which labor time is temporarily the only determing factor as opposed to value produced for exchange. Communism is to be, and can only truly distinguish itself from capitalism as, the material human community; a society of entirely free association absent of capital and all of its elements (State, wage labor, money, etc.).
Communism doesnt have prices. Its currencyless. Socialism has prices, and marx litterally gives the answer in the quote in the OP.
The value of labour is the socially neccecary labourtime a person produced. IE if a chair takes on avarage 2 hours to make, then for each chair you make you get a labour voucher of 2 hours.
Then society decides how much of what needs to be made and limits the jobs for those products.
The market leave it to the market
OP calculation of labor values is well known: you clock into work like usual, and therefore the amount of hours/time of work is calculated into the price of that commodity, plus the work which went into its ingredients, which also account for the work which went into its own components, etc and so on down the line. You can do this systematically for the whole economy using a leontiff matrix
en.wikipedia.org
I know this has become a meme but READ BASED WPC. all that shit is explained in TANS
Actually this would not be socialism - simply a less veiled version of capitalism. The lower phase of communism would be if the chair was priced according to the average time required for production (ie, chairs produced divided by hours worked), but your chair-building labour was remunerated according to natural units - ie, total hours worked. kapitalism101 explains this in more detail and also very clearly explains how planning isn't necessarily socialist and how the USSR et al were still capitalist:
kapitalism101.wordpress.com
The market doesn't "decide" anything, its an abstract concept. The value of labor in a capitalist market system is determined by the value of abstract labor as a commodity on the market.
The brain doesn't "decide" anything, its an abstract concept. Anthropomorphising the collective behaviour of billions of interacting neurons into some arbitrary grouping like 'the brain' doesn't help us understand anything. We certainly can't use such an abstraction to describe emergent higher-order processes, no sir.
Wew lad.
Wouldn't this promote freeloading though? If you get paid the same no matter how much labour you do.
Read marx.
i certainly shiggy
It actually isn't useful at all unless your goal is to turn the market into a sort of deity.
It's more useful to name the specific logic or set of rules that the system uses instead of treating it like a person.
It's worse than that, actually. Since pay is tied directly to hours and not to productivity, there's no reason not to slack off at 'work' all day and collect a full day's paycheck. You are actually forced to, since if everyone takes their time at work the labour time per unit for every good will start climbing, which will force people to work slower to secure enough labour chits to afford things, which will force the prices up more, etc, etc. It's a proposal for a society that operates like the 'mudpie' strawman liberals make about the LTV.
It's a profoundly silly system when you sit down and think about it for a minute, which is probably why the USSR never attempted to build the lower phase of communism as described by Marx and settled for deliberately misinterpreting it and building state-coordinated capitalism.
Having said that, the system I cited is the only interpretation of Marx's description of the lower phase of communism in Gotha that isn't Prudhonian. We can confidently assume that Marx didn't intend for his lower phase of communism to be Proudhonian on account of all the polemicising he does in Poverty of Philosophy about how Proudhon's system is just naked capitalism.
I mainly bring all this up because when leftcoms talk about how the USSR didn't abolish the Law of Value, they're literally advocating for the mudpie hyperinflationary economy described in the kapitalism101 article I posted before. That article parrots arguments originally made by Raya Dunayevskaya's Marxist Humanist tendency, and when leftcoms get into an argument with tankies about the USSR being capitalist you can guarantee they will cite MH articles as the basis for their arguments.
In any case it's becoming painfully obvious that the 'transitional' lower phase of communism is unnecessary given the productive forces available to us today. Scarcity today is almost entirely artificially maintained, we have the means to bypass the lower phase of communism entirely. The only thing we actually need is an economic framework capable of coordinating global production on the basis of actual demand, and we have most of that already in the form of the material accounting systems used inside large capitalist firms.
Fuck, you must be a joy to talk to any time the topic turns to phenomena associated with complex systems
"Gee whiz, insolation has combined with relatively stable atmospheric pressure to increase the kinetic energy of quite a large number of the nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, argon, water etc molecules that are currently in contact with the thermoreceptors that comprise one of the many interacting biological systems commonly referred to as 'me' by more primitive minds who describe the behaviour of complex systems in anything other than excruciating detail."
"Do you mean the weather's heating up?"
"Shut the fuck up Deborah, anthropomorphising these systems is NOT USEFUL! You must name the specific logic or set of rules being followed instead of deifying 'the weather' like some sort of fucking savage"
The whole point is that the market isn't a free agent. It's a system, and should be described as such.
As a point of fact, systems typically aren't anthropomorphized, and where they are they have a nasty tendency of being treated as deities.
Yes, you could argue that humans are basically systems, but socio-economic systems and biological systems are two entirely different things.
only retards and autists like you need clarification
2 hour of working in a hot smelly dangerous place is equal to 2 hours of working in an air-condition comfy place?
*air-conditioned
More like the labor-theory dogma
Under capitalism, working 2 hours of working in an air-conditioned comfy place is worth more than working a hot smelly dangerous job.
I was just arguing against the deification of the market.
Wait I though we wanted to abolish the value-form?
How will leftcoms ever recover?
I'd actually like to see an answer to this
Your whole argument is basically a tragedy of the commons type arguments, but how would it not apply to 'full communism' if you think people would slack if their only being paid labor vouchers, how would they not slack even more if they aren't being paid AT ALL?
Lol, really? I mean the reason is you will get fired. If its a coop people will give bad peer reviews to the slacker and vote on firing him. If its a hierarchical enterprise the manager will fire him like any incompetent at a regular capitalist businesses. Finally, in the rare case that there is some sort of collusion in a coop, like a cartel of slackers, there will be a state auditing agency just like those that check resturaunts periodically for sanitary conditions and give them a health grade, there will be an agency that checks in on businesses to make sure they are running normally and its not just a bunch of dudes smoking weed and collecting a paycheck.
If the kids from that 70s show decided to start a weed smokers coop and just read bordiga and collect paychecks, the state auditing agency will come around and say hey, this isn't right. And shuffle the people around to other jobs, replace the workers in the business to make it good again, possibly dissolve the business. If its people who have a history of doing it over and over maybe they go to jail or are punished in some other way, as they are basically stealing from the community.
I mean, many people today clock into their office jobs, browse reddit and look at cat memes for a while before getting down to work, yet somehow capitalism works with this problem. Also, people don't necessarily have to be working furiously 100% of the time. I mean sure, people could stretch it out to absurd lengths, but if someone takes a sip of coffee or uses the bathroom, we really don't have to go to the nth anal detail in measuring that.
youtube.com
No it isn't - thats why having a labor time system plus additions for environmental externalities is important. Scarcity is not artificial, you absolutely must have some sort of accounting system. Labor, especially skilled labor, is limited. Natural Resources like metals and oil are limited.
Someone has watched too much zeitgeist addendum and thought MUH FALC WILL MAKE US POST SCARCITY. Robots can't turn water into oil. We live on a finite planet with finite resources, there will never be post scarcity, plus the effects of just overproducing everything would be very environmentally detrimental even if it were possible.
in TANS, Cockshott goes over productivity multipliers based on individual workers productivity.
honestly i don't see how slacking is even a problem.
two points:
-the target is to make people work as little as possible.
-aren't the means of production collectively owned and the production and economy processes democratically decided? if a lot of workers slack off, then obviously they feel like their factory should produce less. they can choose to do so, or be recollocated in another working place that is more attuned with their willingness to work.
Fantastic, so we've replaced a systemic, emergent trend (the drive toward reduction of SNLT to realise superprofits under capitalism) with an army of inspectors. Bribeable, corruptible, inspectors. Everyone in this backward as fuck society is encouraged to drag out their working hours, it's the only way to get 'money'. That includes every single person you've described as having a regulatory role here.
Far from being some 'tragedy of the commons' liberal criticism of Marx, my contention is that paying people in labour tokens still makes their labour indirectly social. In any system of indirectly social production, your incentive is to maximise your own labour token/money/whatever income.
A directly social system (one where people "aren't being paid AT ALL") avoids this problem of indirect incentives You do your part in producing things that are needed, and the wealth of society is freely accessible to you. A system so simple that nobody needed 'payment' for some 100,000 years. All we need to do is leverage our vastly increased information processing and communication capacity to scale it up past the household level that it historically operated at.
Now who's the fucking liberal? You have no fucking clue what you're talking about, and it shows - you only name two actual resources that you think are limited: 'metals' and oil. You could bowl me over with a feather if a communist society ends up deciding to use oil when it orbits an effectively inexhaustible fusion reactor that it has the technology it harvest. And "metals" are limited? What a complete crock of shit! First off you obviously have to define 'metals' because I will laugh at you forever if you think we're going to 'run out' of iron or nickel any time before Kardashev 2. Second, you obviously haven't thought about this very hard because I challenge you to name one other metal that we have actually used up: at worst we've ended up moving the entire planet's supply of one particular metal into landfill, awaiting recovery operations that are relatively more energy-intensive than mining. Used metal doesn't float off unrecoverably into space you fuckwit, and the only reason it ends up in landfill is because of the fucked-up production priorities of capitalism. The only other resource that isn't fully renewable is helium, and hey guess what it isn't vital for industrial civilisation anyway!
I commend you for not trying to sell me some bullshit about food or housing being limited, though. The fact is that an absolutely infinite resource supply isn't necessary to achieve post-scarcity - data processing and bandwidth aren't actually infinite, but the supply was great enough to allow communist productive relations to flourish in information-based industries.
I'm not talking about full automation you fucking retard. Directly social labour in peasant households didn't require automation of the relevant labour and neither does full communism now. And full communism isn't a society where we "just overproduc[e] everything" you fucking retard, a communist society with effectively unlimited resources will obviously still have some systematic signalling mechanism to know when it has produced enough for everyone's requirements. Half of communism's superiority is the avoidance of the massive waste inherent in production for profit.
I'm not criticising TaNS, I'm criticising the Marxist Humanist/leftcom lower phase. Though I do think Cockshott suffers from a certain failure of the imagination - the basic systems he describes could and should be adapted to a higher-stage communist economy.
I've always been partial to this idea, but how is it decided who actually contributes? How about intensity or usefulness of what they're doing? The amount of skill required for it? How much of it they're doing? Of course, if people are to access according to how much they contribute, you need some way to measure that, no? Or is just anyone who contributes *something* allowed to access as much as they want?
Not the person you were replying to btw, but I like this idea more than the labour voucher one, mostly because it's less contrived and doesn't require inspectors. But I cannot resolve these problems in my head at least.
It isn't. a) Every previous class system has operated despite having a group of people contributing nothing and getting everything, and b) 'who contributed' is only a relevant question when there isn't enough to go around, and there's been more than enough to go around for a long time. Is your access to a Linux distro gated based on whether you 'contributed'? Is access to air limited only to 'contributors'?
Under communism, labour is directly social - you aren't 'working' for a paycheck, you're making or doing something for which a definite demand has been identified. As for intensity - eh, it doesn't get measured or rewarded under capitalism and people don't actually give a shit, why would that change under communism?
If it's artistic work, you would gain social recognition (which matters to people more than money even under capitalism, and would presumably apply even more so when free access to resources is the norm). If it's work that requires lots of training, Cockshott makes a very sound argument on this: Since you were supported by society through the whole period of your training, why the fuck do you expect special treatment forever based on it?
But they aren't. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need". This "To each according to their contribution" bullshit is the worst kind of Stalinist distortion.
Everyone is allowed to access as much as they want. The best analogy I can come up with is the peasant household (minus the feudal lord) - dad says he needs a new shirt, someone in the household makes a new shirt. Harvest time comes, people take what they want out of the bounty. People don't slack off partially through social expectations and partly because we're not the emotionally stunted homo economicus that the neoclassicals want us to be - nobody has the capacity to sit there and do nothing for the entire span of their lives. The only reason we think we can is because that's all we do with our free time under capitalism - lay on the couch and try to recover from the last bout of exhausting, depressing work.
Thanks for the response, I understand better now.
If the products of the whole of society can be taken by anyone, what's stopping someone, or a majority of people, doing private labour or even just sitting around and pursuing hobbies, while enjoying things off the back of the people who do work? And why would those people doing work just keep doing it, if they have to work with such intensity, just for others? They don't get anything special for working, do they?
What about the jobs that almost nobody wants to do? Murder investigators, sewage cleaners, etc.
And if the products of your labour are appropriated at the end by "society", how is that any different to capitalism in which porky takes away the things you make? Isn't labour supposed to be entitled to all it creates?
there's literally people who jack off to corpses and to eating shit and you can't imagine someone doing murder investigation and sewage cleaning without the threat of starvation?
Using a computer, record the average of how many units of commodity X are produced per hour, say N. We require N to be monotone decreasing, so that the average labor time can't increase (why would this ever be the case?) Then if your output is less than N units per hour, you are rewarded with proportionally fewer non-exchangeable vouchers.
But, the ideal Communist society involves no labor whatsoever, but instead a democratic plan that satisfies all material needs with no human input.
I think I have that backwards, N should be monotone increasing, as industry should never become less productive.
Read The Poverty of Philosophy, come back to this thread, and apologise for accidentally recreating capitalism.
Spare me the muh robots meme. Marx never once suggested that the higher phase of communism would require all human labour to cease.
You don't need an 'army' of inspectors any more than the IRS needs an 'army' of people to inspect to tax dodgers. If you see on the computerized planning system that a certain firm is failing to make parity with the market clearing price then then planners obviously look into why that is the case: does production need to be adjusted? is there a shortage of skilled workers? etc. And auditing for slackers is part of that question.
Food inspections by fda: oh great, now cooks are being replaced by an ARMY of inspectors
drug inspections and licensing: oh great, now scientists are being replaced by an ARMY of drug inspectors
epa does mileage standards: oh great, now mechanical engineers are being replaced by a MASSIVE ARMY of muh gorrilions of environmental inspectors.
Oversight doesnt require an army, it requires a few people and with the information from a computerized planning system you would need even fewer people to do that job.
Labor vouchers avoid the circuit of capital, unless by indirectly social you mean producing for someone elses use, in which case yes it would be. Nice how you make reference to primitive communism of 100,000 years ago you primitivist, but with modern industrial society you have complex chains of production in which people mostly dont produce directly for their own use, but rather to give to someone else and so on until it gets to a final consumer good. Its easy to say produce for your own use when your living in a hunter gatherer society, a complex modern one requires coordination and measuring efficiency, otherwise your back with the Austrian calculation problem
of course scarcity is real you twat. Anyone with half a brain can figure it out given the idea that
1. Earth is finite
2. Growth requires ever more resources
something has got to give. Saying we don't need oil because of inexhaustible fusion is ridiculous, how can you refute the scarcity of today with some high flown sci fi example of 'fusion' which scientists are as far from creating as faster than light space travel and the fucking singularity OP mentioned. this is all a fucking sci fi fantasy
google.com
Its not my job to research for you but most environmental people realize the earth is fucked both in terms of using up resources as well as carbon emissions, these things need to be planned out to avoid catastrophe.
Yeah, we should have robots mine the landfills, but that doesn't negative the point that recycling those things also takes energy, melting down plastics and metals by burning coal and oil and shit for power plants that turns into carbon smoke in the atmosphere
Well if it isn't unlimited resources, then the resources are limited. AFAIK your argument is basically that modern society is so productive that we don't have to plan at all and just throw up our hands and say fuck it
I mean, i would love it if that actually were possible but 2017 =/= star trek replicator post scarcity society. If you can show me a FALC / post scarcity model that works for here and now im down but until then we need the labor voucher / lower stage system
Actually it was Lassalle who said that, marx was just quoting him.
Lol, does that work for modern society? If you want a shirt, someone has to go pick the cotton, etc. and sew it with a machine. Not everyone can have an industrial grade sewing machine and silk screening thing in their house.
What about if i want a car. Should i just 'produce it'? Should everyone have a mini auto-works in their garage as well? What about the myriad of other high tech products? This is some DIY petit bourgeois survivalist punk bullshit, we have division of labor for a reason?
But that amount of "work as usual" doesn't exist in a vacuum. In capitalism, it is disciplined by real market competition so that productivity increases over time.
After emailing cockshott on this very topic, he somewhat explained that using the minimum amount of labor required as a measure as well as political pressure would act in a similar capacity.
could you post that exchange?
sure
I think that guy was actually referencing solar power, but point taken. Also sustainable energy generators produce far less power than the traditional methods so they would have to be metered more not less. Also its not altogether clear that the energy cost/benefit of solar panels is worth it in the long run, those things are more like an extension of the fossil fuel system than a true replacement of it
Your argument here is a pretty blatant strawman. Sure, we haven't run out of metals, but guess where they are, inside the earth! It takes labor, tools and time to extract them, thus, there are only a certain amount of metals we can use at any given time. Even if you use renewable energy instead of oil, the amount of energy you can use at any given time will be limited by infrastructure and the weather.
Marx clearly defines the latter as the basis for the lower stages of communism in "Critique of the Gotha Program"
You can't, market socialism and mutualism are the only viable forms of socialism.
can't agree more user
Mutualism and market socialism are alright but they are basically just capitalism with more equal ownership of capital.
I support them as a transitionary stage to planned economics using cybernetics, modern information technology has really obsoleted the need for markets as an organizing structure of society
Dear all market socialists,
I've read Cockshott and still stand by my belief that a mixed-market socialist economy with a Georgist land value tax is the best humanity is capable of.
Under capitalism, I get to choose.
And you'll get to choose under socialism.
Even if this wasn't the case, it's a completely meaningless distinction.
Shit meme friend
I've read your post and still stand by my belief that you need to be sent to the gulag.
Sounds a lot like demand, which is one factor in determining prices and wages in the market.
Sounds like a transaction where he exchanges a good/service for a profit.
AKA Capitalism.
LEFTISTS BTFO
I honestly don't like labor vouchers because of their obvious flaws such as their non-transferability and the fact that it doesn't distinguish between kinds of labor, making a retarded tabula rasa with with all theories of job evaluation - such has difficulty, level of danger, level of responsibility, etc. It's retarded egalitarianism and I staunchly believe Marx was wrong suggesting the introduction of labor vouchers, I think a centrally controlled currency is better suited for a transitional society until the law of value is abolished.
How will we ever recover?
This is not a flaw, it's the fucking point. It's meant to hinder private transactions and therefore prevent capital accumulation.
While many interpretations of labour vouchers advocate uniform remuneration (eg. Paul Cockshott in "Towards a new socialism"), there's no real reason this has to be the case. For example if no body wants to be a miner, it's possible society may opt to award, say, 2 hours for ever hour worked in order to entice people to perform that work, just as long as they are aware that this means the rest of society earns less. Of course they may decide to reward such people through indirect means instead (such as reserving high quality houses for such people).
You're just a social democrat then, tacitly advocating a society based on (state controlled) commodity production and capital accumulation.
No, you btfo for not reading vol.2/3 of capital and understanding the CIRCUIT OF CAPITAL
marxists.org
Then you will understand the difference between a labor voucher and a currency
as stated somewhere else in this thread, cockshott does make allowances for productivity multipliers as well as bonuses to certain professions in shortage
Ah, my bad. Thanks for correcting me, it's been several years since I read TaNS and for some reason I had it in my head that he didn't.