Mutualist here...

Mutualist here, I'm having trouble understanding how exactly mutualism still has production for exchange and the concept of self exploitation and was hoping central-planning advocates could help clarify.

Let me explain first what Mutualism is and what it is not. Mutualism is not worker co-ops and laissez-faire capitalism at least not in our eyes however socialists of other stripes claim it is and I'm curious why.

A mutualist society would have democratically controlled means of production. All goods being produced are exchanged based on labor not other market forces. Exchange of goods can either happen on an individual or collective scale. An example of a collective scale exchange would be a type of single payer food system where a community would have several food distribution centers that don't require patrons to "pay" for anything, you just walk in and take what you want and the mutual aid network responsible for these distribution centers would compensate all of the workers involved from farmers to clerks.

An individual exchange doesn't require an explanation.

What I don't understand is how is this drastically different from other forms of socialism? Ultimately people are going to need to work in a society and are going to need each other's respective goods and services until we reach a FALC situation.

If I labor for ten hours and own the product of my labor what's wrong with me exchanging it for another product that required 10 hours to produce or a form of currency that equals 10 hours of production? How is this still exploitation? If someone is laboring for 10 hours and receives more or less than 10 hours worth of compensation aren't they in turn either being exploited or exploiting?

Other urls found in this thread:

paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2017/03/05/why-law-of-value-really-applies-in-socialist-economies/
reality.gn.apc.org/polemic/leninsm.htm
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

Communism consists in the abolition of all value-measurement.
Tankie central planning is still capitalism as it retains value measurements and therefore the law of value, but Bordigian central planning (which is a combination of in-kind and labor-time calculation) isn't.
Ancoms and councilcoms have planning as well and abolish the law of value, but are not centralized.
The point is, whether something is centrally planned or not has nothing to do with the question of it being capitalistic.
Seeing as you've maintained the M-C-M' loop, SNLT's constant minimization still applies and the society would degenerate over time back into direct exploitation. It's capitalism.

/thread

How though? This would make sense if let's say I bought 100 widgets for 1000 dollars and sold them on a market for 1500 dollars but that's not what's occurring under mutualism

Proudhon invented the term "scientific socialism". That meme is dumb.
Yes you can. Rationing and other such mechanisms work. Under primitive communism, the law of value didn't operate. Even under peasant communes, it did not operate - it did operate in the case of surplus value extraction by feudal aristocrats, however. The law of value only exists insofar as you attach a value to labor and produce to exchange these value.
No. Read Bordiga. That's not socialism.
There are no value measurements in production for use.
No. READ BORDIGA.

I see your read Bordiga and raise you one read cockshott

Cockshott is actually utopian by the original criteria of both Proudhon and Marx - he makes no use of a framework to analyze society and its transition to socialism as a linear process based in critique. Furthermore, his fetishization of democracy as legitimately is dangerous. His works are very useful nevertheless, in that they plot out a path to one possible endpoint of the application of scientific management to the whole of society.
Also, Bordiga's pretty different from both Adorno and Bettelheim (who are more cultural critics than communists) in that he gives a general theory and praxis combined with a rough sketch of what will result. The same could be said for Bookchin, although he is not a Marxian communist. Both do not, however, revert to the "cookshops of the future". It's understandable why Cockshott would do so, being a former tankie whose illusion was violently broken by the swift dissolution of the USSR, but it's no excuse for continuing with the utopianism. His econophysical analysis best expounded in "Classical Econophysics" must be extended into a critique of economistic thinking in ways which extend beyond the traditional reaches of the firm. It is, in fact, a necessity for moving forward in an age where the gig economy, financialization, and automated management increasingly disrupt previous manifestations of capitalist exploitation while preserving their essential characteristics.

The law of value operates even under barter. M-C-M' is a useful representation which can be generalized to other instances of circulating value. When you exchange a commodity at a certain value, it stets a precedent on the market after which someone else tries to undercut you. Ultimately, this whole process of feedback weeds out firms until only those which have the lowest SNLT are left. It is brutally productivist and alienating.
Stop presupposing market exchanges as the only way to deal with this.

You're conflating capitalist markets with socialist markets.

How does this occur though if pricing is set by labor value not through negotiation? This argument makes perfect sense if applied to the capitalist market place where prices are set based around the most profitable equilibrium for the producer but that's not what's occurring. By definition you can't compete with price in a mutualist economy not by decree of law but because it doesn't make any sense to. There's no incentive for either party conducting a transaction to provide more value than they receive.

When I ever I try and discuss socialist markets with central planning advocates it's like trying to discuss socialism in general with right wingers.

"Socialism is worker control of the means of production"

"Venezuela's economy is bad!"

"Venezuela isn't socialist because workers don't control the means of production"

"Yeah well (insert any other pseudo-socialist state) is bad too!"

This is the same type of strawmanning. Is there something I'm legitimately missing or not getting?


I'm not, obviously central planning is an alternative and I'll take that over any type of capitalism but I don't see how an economy could be more fair, free or efficient with you work 10 hours you receive ten hours maybe less due to creating social safety nets and contributing to other industries which are completely collectivize such as public transit, health care, education etc.

t. havent read enough Cockshott.
plus his theories of socialism are a theoretical response to the austrian ECP, not an exact model of how a future society would work as hes stated several times. Furthermore, the law of value will operate under socialism and its abolition is unrealistic: paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2017/03/05/why-law-of-value-really-applies-in-socialist-economies/

I literally introduced Holla Forums to Cockshott - don't tell me that I haven't read enough Cockshott!
Okay, but that doesn't make him not utopian. I still don't think you know what that word means. It doesn't mean "into the trash it goes" per se, it means that it lacks praxis and therefore needs to be rewritten from the ground up.
Like I said, he needs to read Dauve or Bordiga. I've already read that article.

Well, maybe I'm not getting it. As far as mutualism goes, I've only read "What Is Property?", where he proposes a free market with conventional money, mutual banks, and commune-owned means of production. AFAIK, he did propose something with labor vouchers later on which was more similar to what Bakunin advocated, but I'm unfamiliar with how that worked.

You should try moving to NH with the Free State Project and create Mutualist enclaves within their Ancapistan.

I don't see how we can live in a society where people trade things, hour for hour. Seems like wageslavery to me, just far more literal and honest. Also, food takes months to make, no? I must not understand socially necessary labor time. How can you trade a days work for food, housing, etc… under this system? Can someone beat me over the head with some theory?

is the food thing a joke?

Don't waste your time talking to commies, just move to NH and find other mutualists to join.

Isn't it a shithole?

I didn't mean to be mean but you can create a lot of food over the course of months. It isn't necessarily that we trade hour per hour but rather it's input per input with labor time being a universally applicable standard.

There will be large scale industries providing mutual aid with others. It's not like you go to a hospital and say "I make cars I'll give you ten cars if you treat my cancer just make sure you do it in under 764 hours cause that's all I got". Rather the various economic inputs are used to calibrate this system .

No. In fact, NH has the highest standard of living of any US state. Rent is also super cheap in Manchester (an ideal city for mutualists and left-libs).

You sure about that? I'm going through the comments I have saved and the earliest mention of TANS is from January 2015 (and I save only about 0.1 % of the comments).
I don't know whether he has read Dauve, but he has referenced Bordiga multiple times ("As Bordiga put it, describing the European scene in 1965, the situation is generally unfavourable…" article from 1977, reality.gn.apc.org/polemic/leninsm.htm and more recently in Arguments for Socialism).

He's already read Bordiga, he disagrees with him. In arguments for socialism he literally says:

You can never read enough Cockshott.
Saying Cockshott doesn't have a theory of transition based in historical necessity is strange considering his entire argument (see the first part of TANS where he goes over the soviet mode of production) is that the Russian revolution failed in part because forces of production(with information technology for example) hadn't developed to a level to support socialism. Anyway Cockshott has other problems like his skepticism of the theory of imperialism

No, we're saying that it's literally impossible to have socialist markets, all markets will end up operating according to the law of value regardless of how they are organised, whether monetary, barter or some shitty attempt at constraining them with circulating labour notes.

Such a thing is basically what marx advocated for a "lower phase of socialism" in Critique of the Gotha Program. The thing is such a form of allocation depends upon market circulation having been abolished, labour vouchers can only function as vouchers when they are a simple rationing mechanism that is: a) limited to an individual in order to prevent private transactions, and b) cancelled out upon use, so as not to allow circulation and accumulation.
If you allow such vouchers to circulate they would simply function as money under a different name, it's value would deviate from it's intended value over the course of its circulation and it would simply be a failed attempt at creating a "labour standard". As such the successful implementation of a voucher system can work in the context of a planned economy.

As for what could be more free: I imagine free access to goods would qualify.

I like Cockshott, but it's fair to say he doesn't have much in the way of theory with regard to transition. TaNS was basically a belated plea for the soviet union to implement his ideas in order to avoid collapsing (and in this sense is utopian, not because his proposals are bad). He actually started writing before the soviet union fell, it was never originally intended to be a guidebook for western revolution. He has written other short texts on transition, but they tend to be disappointingly social democratic in nature, advocating the use of parliament to take control. I think he's just as lost as the majority of the left when it comes to figuring out how to actually revolt, he just has a much better idea of what measures to implement once the bourgeois state has been overthrown.

This is what I meant above when I said that Cockshott is utopian. People don't seem to realize what "scientific" and "utopian" mean in the context of socialism. Proudhon and Marx, in developing their respective varieties of socialism, didn't reject the utopians - far from it, they ran with their ideas and fleshed them out in a novel, useful way which went beyond them. Cockshott is the start of what modern socialism needs, but he's far from the end. We're back in the 1830s. Bring his ideas together with communization theory and then we talk.

I saw that. He didn't elaborate on it a terrible lot, though. I see why he wishes that we could claim the USSR as socialism, but I don't see his argument that it was so as one which can be taken seriously because production was organized by planning instead of markets now that I've read Dauve and Pannekoek and Bordiga. Especially in Bordiga's case in Italy, it was entirely acceptable to be a Stalinist - the PCI was an enormous party and frequently won the 2nd-largest number of seats in parliament. We forget it easily now (among a variety of other forms of postmodern neoliberal amnesia), but Soviet-style planning used to be considered at the least a viable alternative to the prevalent market system, well into the '70s. That the USSR was not socialist, however, should not preclude an engagement with its problems - on the contrary, it cannot be meaningfully engaged in a thorough critique if we do accept it as socialism and therefore as well as the final point of the dialectical abolition of capitalism. At least, that goes for Marxists such as yourselves.
I'm not actually a leftcom - I've read a lot of things and my empirical tendencies have gotten the better of me. That doesn't mean that I don't regard left communism as not being the proper theory and practice of Marxian communism, however.

Hm, interesting. Well, as far as I know, he only became popular after I showed people his essay "Calculation In Natura" in the SovCyb thread.
His mention of Bordiga in that article is on a point of agreement over the obvious, that it was not a revolutionary period. There's no mention anywhere of Bordiga's attack on traditional Leninist conceptions of "socialism" as equating the DoTP.

His rejection of imperialism is one of the reasons why I like him - I liked him before I found that article, but now I like him even more!

This needs to happen to be honest.

Obligatory

Not sure, if you can really skip to pure communism without a socialist transition stage, that sounds similar to Ancom and would probably fail for the same reason you need a strong state/military to defend yourself from the remaining porky states i.e. a cold war

Don't comment on things you're familiar with. You clearly aren't familiar with communization theory.