Question for Ultras/Leftcoms

The Italian left thought it had a dual character that was both bourgeois and proletarian, but that there was a definite proletarian dictatorship following the years afterwards, while the Dutch-German left saw it as decidedly bourgeois because it saw the organic form of communism as it historically appeared in Russia, the workers' council (Soviet), as not being the primary or sole organ representing the communist movement (this type of essentialization of spontaneity and the council has over the communist left's debate been pejoratively dubbed "councilism" over time, both by those inspired by the Italian left as well as some direct ex-members of the Dutch-German left like Korsch).

It's incredibly complex but the greater turning point was the defeat of the communist movement in Germany, upon which the Comintern depended as a pivot for further action. The chain reaction forced the Comintern to adopt a more and more conservative line as the second war it had just survived against the Whites and western European powers had rendered it weak, but it was also still relatively primitive and isolated. NEP may mark the "formal" start of a truly forced central decision that pushed things towards counter-revolution: councils lost power considerable and production isolated and decentralized itself into collective farms that were to produce value and accrue the GDP necessary to purchase and build the things necessary to withstand an attack. Things like the Kronstadt suppression, left communists' attacks were more and more common: workers resisting this decision by the Comintern to play it conservatively with all the consequences thereof, and so on. Bordiga for example did not necessarily think this conservative turn was bad economically, but what he thought was bad was the way in which the Comintern had also completely cut off any serious ties with the international communist movement and now just gave out orders and goods how only itself saw fit. Stalinism and "socialism in one country" is a product of this turn, as it failed to take back an internationalist form.

For a long-ass, precisely chronicled breakdown I recommend When Insurrections Die for this perspective: endnotes.org.uk/issues/1/en/gilles-dauve-when-insurrections-die. If anyone likes Zero Books and Doug like I do, he also had a guy called C Derrick Varn on, who I really like, and they talked about the events and the text at length: youtube.com/watch?v=LKtJBMTXUjY.

Let the dictatorship of the proletariat in the centralized Soviet units, which was already munching away at capital relations for a few years, go unhindered, but at the risk of such a non-productivist decision being fatal for the entire movement.

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They aren't, you marcuck faggot.

another stupid marcsoc yugofag
read marx

You would still be producing commodities for exchange for labour vouchers. All it would do is end production for exchange for the purpose of realizing surplus value.
For something to be truly communized, it would be produced for use alone. Something along the lines of producing and maintaining houses until everyone who needs it has a house. There is no need to systematically exchange the commodity of housing anymore because it has become totally common, like the air we breathe.
Labour vouchers would be an intermediate stage. See

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Production for exchange means you're producing something specfically to sell on a market for a surplus. Labour vouchers eliminate this process and act as direct exchanges of labour.

So can money, in a socialist economy. There are huge problems with labor vouchers which I have mentioned before, such as their lack of transferability in a household, practical problems of customizing every voucher to its specific owner, the rise of a black market with foreign money, the fact that it doesn't account for artists and performers, etc.

Labor vouchers are an option for the higher stage of communism, and only as a means to grant access to rare luxury goods.

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Someone let me in on this meme.

You don't understand what I mean. Money would function just like a labor voucher. Read Towards a New Socialism.

I disagree with Marx on the labor voucher thing, it was way more relevant in his time but it is severely outdated now.

This discussion is fucking pointless. If planned production doesn't work well enough to make money unnecessary you can issue labour vouchers all you want, a black market with some type of currency is going to form. You can't "implement" communism by decree.

Drop that flag

How the fuck could there still be money (accepted by the state) and a planned economy at the same time?

Marxism isn't outdated, just his specific suggestion for labor vouchers, I don't see the reason for clinging to it when we have the means to organize economy as a whole without the problems an economy based on labor vouchers entail

It doesn't matter shit if the government issued currency is called "money" or "labour voucher". If there is no need for anyone to barter, it won't happen, and if there is, it will.

There's a difference between a black market and just allowing capitalism to return openly

If the seeds for capitalist production exist, all you can do is prolong the inevitable with brutal government suppression. You're making the same mistake as people who blame the leadership decisions of a couple of "revisionists" or "capitalist roaders" for the fact that the USSR and China moved more and more towards capitalism.

this

So until perfect communism can exist with magitech we should just not even try to create socialism?

op here this was the question i was hoping to get at when i made this bad thread

Money would function the same as a labor voucher. Production for exchange, overproduction, accumulation, etc. would not exist which means money would no longer be the apex expression of commodity fetishism.

Money(-capital) is specifically not but a mere tool, but a historical representation of the value form's highest expression. Marx cautiously shows that this is the case, and consequently proves that viewing money as but an instrument, like (bourgeois) economists/political economists do, is peak idealism. It is not for nothing that the most vulgar sketch of communism reads: no market, no prices and no money.

marxists.org/subject/left-wing/gik/1930/epilogue.htm#h1

>Kautsky is not a utopian, he was just a historical social democra-
marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1902/socrev/pt2-2.htm#s6

And read Lenin: marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/common_liberal.htm.

We should work with what we have and not hold abstract discussions about whether to have currency and what to call it. Instead of declaring barter illegal, an authentically communist movement should "try to create socialism" by working towards making barter obsolete. The right starting point is collective action upon the economic base to give way to communist production relations, not "declaring" them from above.

Marx was talking about capitalism. I'm still waiting for an argument why money takes on the form of the highest expression of the value form when the value form, production for exchange, commodity production, etc. is abolished. Remember that both feudalism and slaveholder society had money ad well. Are you claiming the character of money was virtually the same in 1150 than it was in 1900?

It could be a mere instrument. It isn't right now. Labor vouchers in the lower stage of communism just don't convince me, sorry.

With money you still have rent-seeking and exploitation. I just don't understand market socialism at all.

I'm not a market socialist, why would you have rent-seeking when everything is commonly owned? Where does exploitation occur without wage labor, production for exchange, usury, value form, commodity production?

Yeah, and funnily enough, he was talking about money's necessary abolition in the even of post-capital. Funny how that goes.

It's also like he spent years of his time in the IWA critiquing people like Proudhon for trying to force into existence the "labour money" meme, which in any event would just mean the equality of the wages as money (depository of fixed or variable capital) would then still be coming from a decidedly alienated form of labour: wage-labour, in order to spawn that form of value as "labour money". Please, please, please read Poverty of Philosophy, like, actually do it and try to confront the argument.

Because money-capital is the spawn of these things. There can be nothing that qualifies as money anymore, only use-values. A rare instance where saying "think dialectically" is warranted for you, friend.

It's even worse: Marx noted that history is not unilinear; that even nomadic propertied societies already developed within their primitive modes of production already a money-capital form. Capitalism is the generalization of commodity production, i.e. the totalized control of society into an enduring maxim of capital and all it brings with it: isolated production (private property), wage-labour (surplus allocation towards exchange), the law of value (impersonal economic forces compelling and disciplining more value production) and finally money-capital.

Yes in its very essence, but it was not generalized, because commodity production had always not been generalized. More interesting questions on the function of money for Marxism today, although they have been properly addressed in various forms, tackle the development of money-capital in fiat form, for example. I'd love to discuss this more than having to mouthfeed you basic Marxist notions.

It can't be: money is an unseparable element of private property's birthing of isolated production, and is consequently developed from it to serve only that end.

It never was.

Explain why. All you've given us until now is a shit-tier understanding of just about anything that Marx understood before suggesting labour vouchers.

How do you stop production for exchange when people can trade things for money?

By implementing production for use controlled by collective decision-making and central planning? I don't see where the fuck the problem is. Cooperatives and state firms wouldn't "sell" their things anymore.

You either get the planning right, or people will bargain. No matter if you have labor vouchers or money. It's effectively the same in my scenario, the only difference is that the latter is still transferable.

kill yourself you worthless piece of shit

That's an extremely orthodox understanding of money, and I'm aware of some of the things you say, I know that the generalization of commodity production gave rise to money-capital as we have it today. I haven't read poverty of philosophy though. However, besides this short a priori statement
you don't actually make a point as to why it is such a given that money could take on a different form in a socialist economy. Just because something was, doesn't mean something has to be. I'd like you to actually tackle the points Cockshott makes in his economic framework, and where money actually takes on this form. At this point I have no reason to see as to why money (not capitalist money-capital) is just nothing else but a transferable labor voucher.

I made some remarks in another thread . I think you have a very good understanding of Marxism, but I think you are unnecessarily dogmatic in your historical approach

Whatever, it's the one that makes the most sense and is historically verifiable. There are no understandings of money better than this if you ask me, and this understanding has always been put under scrutiny by Marxists who wish to verify if anything about the essential character of money has changed, but it hasn't. David Harvey for example tried to abstract money (price) from exchange value in his supposedly faithful "easy-making" reading of Capital (Reading Marx's Capital), and consequently got majorly BTFO by Andrew Kliman in his Reclaiming Marx's Capital and even basic fucking theorists as you will see in PDF related.

No, like I said this is already historically verifiable not to be true, and Marx already had access to sources that show that commodity production's generalization didn't even birth in money, but that even the most primitive forms of commodity production, enabled by the accompanying most primitive forms of private property, already had money-capital.

You should, it's one of the earliest and most concise, career-ending texts ever for "labour money" memers! When it was released the last Proudhon could mutter in response was a descent into ever-more spouting anti-semitic conspiracy theories that put Marx, critic of Judaism and religion, into a cabal of Jews out to control the world. Marx, the ascetic trasher of his Jewish kin, a proto-Zionist, imagine that!

I showed you that there are historical origins of money, that money is the consequence of private property, that money historically evolved as the highest form of value's representation, even higher than gold, and that money contains in it the seed of where value comes from, and that private property and wage-labour are thus synonymous because they are both prerequisites for money. What more do you need?

If imperialism (roughly defined by Lenin as net extraction consequent to invasion and occupation) is the highest expression of capitalism, then there can be no imperialism under the communism either, because imperialism is this expression of the capitalist mode of production, or more specifically, imperialism is an expression of commodity production. Again, I am in the position to warrant a "think dialectically" quip here.

I don't want to repeat myself. I did it in the very last thread on TANS, and did so in the very first thread on TANS ever on this board. My biggest problem with Cockshott is that he, consequent of the Stalinist distortions thereof in his time in the BICO (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_and_Irish_Communist_Organisation), does not and it seems cannot understand the genesis of the value form, and consequently does not propose to us a blueprint for a hypothetical society that is meaningfully a new mode of production. What Cockshott gives us is a new mode of capital's management, and capitalism is a mode of production, not of management. Cockshott does gives us the same form money always takes: the expression and actualized excrement of wage-labour in production.

There can be no non-money-capital. Whenever a Marxist says "value" he means "exchange value", whenever a Marxist says "money", he says "money-capital". Money is capital in expressive form, and serves to circulate and complete capital cycles (M - C l/mp … P … C' 0 M') like any other (where M is money!).

I've explained various times that for me labour vouchers are no longer the preferred or likely even to be a necessitated type of solution. What I however affirm is that even if I believe in immediate capital abolition and ASAP communization (i.e., transcdending the need for a communistic lower phase where vouchers or something alike is necessitated for rationing), that labour vouchers are not money, and that labour vouchers would otherwise be a perfectly acceptable solution. In that same thread you linked and I've roughly explained what "my" solution entails.

What I should add to this is that all examples of "gift economies" were in and of themselves oddities that were still commodity production (merely delayed commodity production), and that there have never been socities with property that were barter economies, or barter economies that did not exist exclusively in times of crisis and always depended on the pre-exsitence of capital.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy#Reciprocity_and_the_.22spirit_of_the_gift.22
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm (The part starting from "The bourgeoisie, historically, has…" is here most relevant.)

you know cockshott advocates for labor vouchers in TaNS right?

What's the difference between exchange value and price? And between value and price?

May it be like value/form of value dialectic?

exchange value (also when people refer to value they are referring to exchange value) is the equivalence of different commodities you can exchange eg. a bushel of wheat can be exchanged with 2 chairs, or any number of things that you could even trade with it. this value comes from the labor imbibed in producing the commodity. price is an expression of exchange value in money form. price will fluctuate around the exchange value due to supply and demand, and some other factors.

Basically this. To simplify it: value, also called exchange value, is the rate of exchange between commodites, while price is but a nominal rate of exchange in money-capital.

what's the difference between prices of production that fluctuate around values and market prices? also, how do you transform value to price?

How do you quantify that labor imbided in producing X commodity in order to have the equivalence (exchange value) to know how to exchange commodities (i.e. 1 bushel of wheat instead of 4 for 2 and not 10 chairs).

Sorry, not sure I really understand what you are asking.

Labor input is the only thing produces value. Since this is the case, people started exchanging on roughly the amount of labor that went into each commodity. This is like a sort of natural law(the law of value) that develops. People aren't sitting around actively thinking about this, it's just the way commodity production goes. So essentially no one is quantifying the labor measures in a commodity, these relations develop naturally in an economy with commodity production. I hope this answers your question.

I'll try to be more clear: how do you explain the formation of prices? How do we get by LTV market prices? and production price?

I know that but I am asking for an example where you quantify it and transform into price of production.

Are you asking for a real world example of value becoming price? If so, that's far beyond my capabilities, but Cockshott has a paper on empirical (real world) proof of the LTV. Be warned its pretty complicated, and I can't make a whole lot of sense fron it. Let me know if you want me to dig it up for you.
Money is a commodity, but it is a special commodity in that it acts as a universal exchanger. The price is an average exchange rate of a commodity and an amount of money. Remember these are all averages over the whole economy. We are not examining a single case, but the case as it appears on the whole.

Yeah I was asking for that. Do you have that Cockshott's paper? It would be very appreciated.

I think this is the one, he has more writing on the LTV if you want to go looking.
rock.edu/~eatonak/LTV-FAQ.html#Transformation7
Chapter 6.7 of this lead you in the direction you are looking for, also.

pretty sure cockshott advocates labour vouchers