Although I describe myself as a socialist, I would like to learn more about how production would be organised. I have questions which I would be really grateful to anyone who can answer them well.
I hear that workers are entitled the full value of their labour. Does this mean that they own the products they make? If so, if a worker makes a machine, does it belong to him such that he can refuse the communal use of it?
In what way is labour, in either Socialism or Communism (please expand if there are differences between them), compensated?
If you are an advocate of labour vouchers, how is skilled (I'm assuming this means "more difficult") work differentiated from unskilled work when deciding how much is earned by the worker?
If there is no state, which organisation directs production? Which organisation(s) prevent things such as pollution and violence?
How are "negative" jobs taken care of? For example, cleaning toilets or doing garbage collection. Not all of these can be automated away. And even if they could be, what guarantee is there that a worker would share the machine he has made?
It would be nice to have answers which quoted passages if you're going to refer to books, rather than simply referring to the book itself, because although I want to read, I don't have a lot of time, and it would be nice to nail down these points which I regard as rather basic. Thanks.
I would recommend critique of the gotha program in its entirety, its short. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ I will reply with a passage that covers a few points pretty well IMO.
You heared wrong. Its a common rhetoric because its short, it has existed since the 1800's. In socialism you get the products of your labour, minus the deductions to pay for fixing up the means of production, making new means of production and welfare and social services.
No. You use the machines of society. In socialism you get some kind of certificate or stamp or credit that shows you did such and such amount of work, which you can use to get consumer goods of your choice. If you make a machine all on your own, for your own, there not a problem though. You can make a marblemachine in your garage if you want.
Marx describes communism in two stages, low and high, which is a developmental spectrum. High stage communism is where everybody works what they can and want, and can take freely what they need. Low stage communism, which is often referred to as socialism today, is where workers receive what they worked for. The more you work, the more you get. You work one hour, and get a certificate (labour voucher) worth one hour (minus deductions mentioned above). With this, you can get consumer goods worth equal value to what voucher says. The value of a product is hour long, in total, society took to produce that product (averaged out over all products of the same kind).
Skilled doesnt mean difficult, it just means a worker has more education that is needed for the work. Most advocates would say that there is no difference, since work is work. Some may say that work that is hard and thus unpopular (which isnt necessarily skilled, such as mining) may get an extra reward per hour to get people to do it. But this would be the exception rather than the rule. Labour prices only differ because of competition between companies, which can make some labour scarce and some not. In socialism, labour isnt commodified and as such is not competed over, making wage differences unneccecary. The idea that high wages incentivise people to take up certain lines of work doesnt really hold water for the vast majority of jobs. Doctors make a lot of money but theres still plenty of doctors in places with free education and shit doctors pay.
The workers. A state in marxism is defined as an instrument of class rule, not "any form of orginisation".
Mentioned above, you could reward more for shitty, hard jobs that are not rewarding otherwise (no fullfillment, no prestige). Unlike today, I would guess we would mostly see menial labour such as purely physical shit jobs being rewarded with more material goods, which is what psychology says is the only type of work that actually benefits from increased reward for work. Mental labour doesnt benefit from this. I disagree, but thats another question. What else is he going to do with it? He cant sell it.
Owen Wright
Quote To understand what is implied in this connection by the phrase "fair distribution", we must take the first paragraph and this one together. The latter presupposes a society wherein the instruments of labor are common property and the total labor is co-operatively regulated, and from the first paragraph we learn that "the proceeds of labor belong undiminished with equal right to all members of society."
"To all members of society"? To those who do not work as well? What remains then of the "undiminished" proceeds of labor? Only to those members of society who work? What remains then of the "equal right" of all members of society?
But "all members of society" and "equal right" are obviously mere phrases. The kernel consists in this, that in this communist society every worker must receive the "undiminished" Lassallean "proceeds of labor".
Let us take, first of all, the words "proceeds of labor" in the sense of the product of labor; then the co-operative proceeds of labor are the total social product.
From this must now be deducted: First, cover for replacement of the means of production used up. Second, additional portion for expansion of production. Third, reserve or insurance funds to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural calamities, etc.
These deductions from the "undiminished" proceeds of labor are an economic necessity, and their magnitude is to be determined according to available means and forces, and partly by computation of probabilities, but they are in no way calculable by equity.
There remains the other part of the total product, intended to serve as means of consumption.
Before this is divided among the individuals, there has to be deducted again, from it: First, the general costs of administration not belonging to production. This part will, from the outset, be very considerably restricted in comparison with present-day society, and it diminishes in proportion as the new society develops. Second, that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc. From the outset, this part grows considerably in comparison with present-day society, and it grows in proportion as the new society develops. Third, funds for those unable to work, etc., in short, for what is included under so-called official poor relief today.
From critique of the gotha programme, part 1
Dominic Jenkins
Oh to clear up possible confusion: Critique of the gotha programme is basically marx going balistic on some guys he doesnt like and called them retarded. In the first paragraph Marx quotes a line from the Gotha programme, which he opposes. Marx explains that "the proceeds of labor belong undiminished with equal right to all members of society." is retarded.
Jose Lopez
*is how long Goddamn im tired. Excuse other silly writing errors i might have made.
Ian Diaz
Firstly thank you for the recommendation, I'll start reading it. Also thanks for the detailed reply.
What's this business that I think is on to about proceeds of labour? I "heard" also from other sources that contrary to workers owning their products, "society owns what society creates", as such production is entirely socialised. What merit is there to that, and how does it fit with getting the products of labour, and what does it mean for freedom? (Actually I just read the quote after I typed this, but feel free to answer it if you want.)
How does this square with scarcity which cannot be eliminated? For example materials which are in very low supply because they are so expensive (in terms of resources) to create, or where the materials can only be found in one region of the planet?
I don't quite understand. To me it seems intuitive that more intensive or "important" work should be rewarded higher, for example an electronic engineer designing a microchip should be rewarded with a larger amount than someone who sweeps a street for the same time. Marx simplified to use unskilled labour, but he said that skilled labour could be expressed in terms of simply more unskilled labour iirc. How might that apply here?
Though I understand your argument about incentive, I wasn't going to use that argument against you.
What does "diminished" mean in this instance? I don't understand that. If I understand this, workers should work on the means of production; somebody steps in and makes the deductions Marx talks about. Then, the workers are individually given the products which they have made, or are they distributed? How can you make deductions from products? I assume that this is done for example if a worker produces 10 products then 3 of them are taken to cover the deductions mentioned. How are, to use an example which frequently comes up here, NEETs catered for in both lower and upper stages? Sorry if my questions seem dumb, I'll start reading CotGP soon.
Caleb Moore
I also want to add, if Marx regarded barter as the precursor to capitalism which still exhibits law of value, how are these deductions made in order for reinvestment in MoP? How do you convert the deductions in products to new MoP, maintaining MoP and even things like health programmes?
This is so confusing to think about when there's no money in the picture, which I admit is why it's really hard for me to imagine.
Michael Jackson
From what I understand, Marx's notion that skilled labor is reducible to unskilled labor follows from his analysis of how commodities are equally exchanged with labor. Or in case that isn't clear, that the equal factor between commodities is that labor is required to produce them, and so they can be quantified in prices in terms of the amount of labor required to produce them. Obviously labor differs in intensity and skill, but if we are to take what Marx said before as true about labor being the equal factor in commodity production, then Marx says that in the creation of prices capitalism naturally abstracts and assumes labor to be interchangeable. So prices end up representing the lowest common denominator of labor power available, being an abstract unskilled labor. Skilled labor is just reduced to this by capitalism itself in the sense that the same money that buys skilled labor buys unskilled labor.
But, again from what I understand, in the socialist economy itself the only important thing is that, as a matter of accounting, the total number of labor hours represented by vouchers paid out to workers equals the prices of the total product. Otherwise, people produce goods that can't be accessible, because there aren't enough vouchers to acquire them. This would just be inefficient and irrational. Marx's law of value and all of his description of capitalism isn't a law of economy in general. I'm not sure it is reasonable to suggest that we can accurately identify exactly how much work people do in the process of social production, and then turn that into a quantity of social production owed to them. Work is not actually equal and interchangeable. It is just implicit in capitalism that work is interchangeable, and it treats it as such. You could argue in socialism, if you wanted to, that we should decide to reward doctors with more of the social product if you wanted too. There isn't any inconsistency there, it is just a value judgement that you might be asked to argue in favor of. But the important thing for economic rationalism is that the prices in labor vouchers of the social product is equal (or as close as possible) to the labor vouchers in the economy. Or hell, you might even argue in favor of a slight surplus, but we'd just be admitting that some amount of it is going to be trashed and have to address that.
Austin Wilson
Thank you very much for that explanation, it makes total sense to me. If you have an answer for the question I asked in it would be great, but if you don't then don't worry.
William Foster
Keep in mind that theres plenty of different interpretations of marx and that I am by no means an expert.
The goal of communism is to abolish production for exchange and produce collectively for use (among other goals). If a group of workers owned the car they made and had to sell it to other groups of workers, you would still have the fundamental law of value that underlies capitalism. You need to keep in mind that capitalism is the rule of capital, not the rule of the capitalists. A society of competing worker cooperatives still works on the same laws of capitalism, its just that the distribution within companies tends to be more egalitarian. As for freedom, I personally see (and lots of people agree with me) that those under capitalism, no matter what class they are, that they are ruled by capital. A factory owner cannot do anything but reduce costs and try to expand and compete more, because if he doesnt, he goes under. A capitalist has to sacrifice himself and his personal beliefs and goals for the company, he too becomes a slave to capital. So too will worker cooperatives be slaves to capital and be forced to cut corners, cut their own wages and give up their own dreams and goals. By having collective production, you abolish the law of value and free people to truly produce what people need. And to produce how they want to produce.
Marx sayd that higher stage communism comes about once "the productive forces have developed sufficiently". This can be interpreted as more productive capabilities (more automation, better factories) or better orginisation. I would imagine it is a combination of both, where at some point we get to a stage where enough is produced in abundance that we can get by by rationing the remaining products directly, or thinking up some other solution. Communism also will be global, so the locality of resources really shouldn't be an issue. Scarcity of resources is always a question of how labour intensive it is to make it. With the absence of monopolies, the fact that gold is so expensive is because it takes a lot of work to get a little bit.
It might be intuitive because thats how it is now. But think for a moment here. If you paid people the same wage, would people given the choice rather do floor sweeping or mental and rewarding labour? To me it seems that the only reason unskilled labour is paid so little is because it doesnt require and education and as such the labour pool is larger. This created more competition for that job, which drives down the price of that labour. cont..
Jeremiah Evans
Not a lot with payment. What marx meant was that for calculation methods, you can regard skilled labour as a "produced" kind of labour. To become skilled, you need education. This education costs labour. The value of this education, its labour time, is "imbued" into your labour just like how a machine is imbued with the labour it took to make it. Just like a machine, the imbued labour in you is transferred to the products you make over your lifetime. This is what marx meant. Skilled labour costs a certain amount of labour to make, and that cost in labour is transferred to the products made by that skilled labour. This ties into the previous question pretty well. With the exception of a few highly specialized jobs and mentally challanged people, the vast majority of jobs can be learned by the vast majority of people. This means that the labour market competition that makes wage prices differ doesnt need to happen, because jobs that would normally have higher wages due to scarcity of educated people, would just have more people trained in those skills by society, since it is in societies interest to train the unemployed and unneeded to do useful work. In todays society, a floor sweeper cannot study because he has to sweep floors or find work. In a socialist society, a floor sweeper would have the ability to get education for free and be paid for it, because in getting an education, he is making skilled labour, which means he is producing usefull value for society down the line.
Reduced, less than the full. The common rhetoric is "you get exactly what you produce, the undiminished fruit of your labour". This is said because its shorter than "with deductions for taxes yadayada". What marx means is that the worker doesnt receive exactly what he makes. A pot maker doesnt receive exactly the value of the pot, he receives the value he created, minus deductions for the things noted in that quote.
The workers receive a labour voucher entitling them to their work minus the deductions worth of products. cont..
Aaron Ramirez
You dont deduct from products, you deduct from labour. If someone works for one hour, one hour of labour is created, the stuff he makes in one hour of labour (or rather, he adds an hour of labour to it). Since all products are made by labour, and all skilled labour is a composition of unskilled labour, all products have a value in unskilled labour. This is an abstract amount of labour. The deductions are made from the vouchers a worker receives. In essense, they withhold an amount of vouchers that entitle someone to an X amount of abstract labour. These vouchers can then be used to pay people to provide healthcare, fix the machines, etc, so they too can get food and clothes.
It is not unlike tax, except using labour as a base unit, which makes the whole thing a lot less abstract and more logical once you can switch into the mindset. If you deduct 3 hours per week from workers for healthcare and 4 for fixing the machines, that means that every worker works 3 hours a week to support the people working for the healthcare system, 4 hours for supporting the mechanics that fix the machines and the other hours for other things.
In higher stage communism there wouldnt be a need to work, but the character of work would be so fundamentally changed that it isnt alienating anymore, that people want to work. Or to put it simple, work is fun and not a job anymore, but more like a hobby that is useful for society.
Its pretty hard to wrap your head around it but a quick shortcut is to just think of society as one big employer who pays everyone the same wage, who also sells all the products, and pays people with money that they can not give to other people. This is a pretty terrible analogy and the reality is much different but if you really cant wrap your head around it this is a good temporary trick.
Tyler Hall
I'm writing up a response that I'll post in a bit, but I gotta go grab some food first.
Thomas Foster
Thanks again. if I understand correctly, this labour voucher system is a feature of lower-stage Communism. So let's say that the administration has deducted the amount in labour from some number of people. How does it then make this into services? Because the administration makes the vouchers too. I assume that the "deduction" then isn't really a deduction at all, but rather it means that there are more products in the "product bank" which haven't been consumed, so it's a potential deduction. If I have this right, there is a time in which for example a doctor would work in a hospital for the elderly, in which case he is compensated with labour vouchers (after deduction), but would he get the same if he worked in some other area? What if there was a shortage of doctors in the area of caring for the elderly? Would larger rewards be set up (democratically, I'm guessing) in order to incentivise doctors to care for the elderly? You may have answered this when you talked about physical labour that nobody really wants to do, but I just want to confirm.
In my mind I have the idea of a baker, who is commissioned by society to work for 5 hours, in that time he creates 60 loaves of bread and he is rewarded with 4 labour vouchers (1 is deducted so that less resources can be used by the baker and thus there is more for the rest of society); I assume then that someone can obtain the bread by exchanging 1 labour voucher for 12 loaves of bread. But does the baker have to do this too, if he wants bread? Could it be permissible to work for say 1 hour to produce 12 loaves of bread just for himself? I suppose that doesn't fit in well with the idea of repairing already used MoP.
What if somebody accumulated labour vouchers and bought out all the bread that there is, or even a lot of food, such that there is little left. Would that be possible, and what could be done to guard against it? As I understand it, the only thing stopping them is the labour deduction so that they can't buy back what they've made, they can only buy back less than they've made. Thanks again by the way. It feels good to finally have some level of understanding.
Please take your time, I have to sleep now, so I probably can't respond today, but thanks.
Grayson Anderson
Central government, accountable to democracy, manages the MoP to ensure every person gets the required food, shelter, healthcare to survive, children are properly educated, exceptionally useful infrastructure like power and communication lines are maintained, important projects like advancing of automation and environmental action are undertaken, and the MoP required to do these things are maintained. To have the labor to do these things something akin to the military draft is operated, carefully managed to make sure these things are done but simultaneously that no one's working more than they ought to be. As individuals, people of course have the right to refrain from being drafted to do any given thing but that might end up with the sustenance resources being denied to them (after a proper court trial), forcing them to maintain relationships with individuals who harvested resources outside of the civic duty and are willing to trade them for something those people offer.
Other than the limited domain of what's planned, individuals and groups of individuals do whatever the hell they feel like. If particular instruments of production are used enough that there's conflict about who should use them, those instruments should be documented so it can be determined (by democracy) who gets to use it.
Democracy is able to tune both how much is in the plan and how much worker freedom to deny civic duty should be valued in relation to worker freedom to work as little, as easily, and as safely as possible when they do work.
Jonathan Perez
Yes. They pay people to produce things that arent consumer goods. Youre right that its not a real deduction, its an accounting trick. The amount of hours labour vouchers should be equal to the amount of value in consumer goods created and available, because otherwise theres more vouchers than the total prices of all products and shortages will occur. The most important part if keeping the total prices equal to the total consumer goods produced. Since the total value of consumer goods (and thus their price) is equal to the total amount of hours worked by people making consumer goods, you deduct some of their vouchers to pay for non-consumer producing people such as nurses.
Yes
You could but if there is a shortage of doctors in total no amount of extra pay is going to create new doctors. If for some reason there is enough doctors but nobody wants to care for the elderly because its nasty or something, you might do what you said.
Its more like, one hour is deducted to give to the nurse so she can buy bread, and care for the elderly.
Correct. (in reality the time it took to grow the grain and make the flower and gas for the oven would also be added but lets ignore that for now)
No, not really. Although I imagine there is not a whole lot we can do to prevent a baker making a bread for himself or a farmer taking a couple of potatoes directly from the field to eat, without following proper proceidures. The cost of this small scale illegal production wouldn't be too large so I doubt we should worry too much about it.
Why do they need this much bread? Well I guess it would technically be possible but you could make laws against this if it was a problem. But keep in mind that society doesnt consist of one baker. If some weirdo really worked so much and saved them all up to clear out an entire bakery, then people could just go to another bakery somewhere, or another bakery could send some bread. The ability to do this is very limited because in order to buy everything a baker baked in a day, you would need to work a full day too (or even more with deductions). Nobody can become so rich that they can clear a whole town of stuff just for the lols.
Andrew Evans
Is this anarcho-maoism?
Leo James
Let's not ignore it: how is that taken into account for the price of bread?
Luis Carter
Well you simply calculate how much of each stuff you use for one bread, then you calculate how much labour it took to make that amount of stuff, then you add it to the value of the bread.
So if 12 breads takes one hour of work, 5 kilos of flower and a liter of gas: 5 kilos of flower cost half an hour to make a liter of gas cost 15 minutes to make Then 12 breads take a total of 1 hour and 45 minutes, so one bread has a value of 8 minutes and 45 seconds. (Just pulling some numbers out of my ass here obviously). Since every step of the production process know how much labour they put into it, they just add it to the value of the products they used up in production, which they know because the people who made those did the same.
Connor Wilson
But some of the means of production aren't entirely consumed in the process. How does the price account for that?
Also, from what I get, the price of bread will be different depending on the bakery?
Jayden Reyes
You can calculate deprecation. For example, if an oven wears out over 15 years, running for 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, and it cost a total of 100 hours to make it, then every hour it transfers 100/30000th of an hour to the products it makes. So in case of the bread, every bread would gain a value from the oven of 1/12th of 1/300th of an hour.
If the bread is the same, no, because the value of equal products is the avarage time it too to produce by society.
Brody Clark
It sounds like a lot of calculus for a necessarily not perfectly accurate estimation.
Then if I am a baker and, for some reason, I manage to make not 12 breads like average, but 24 breads an hour. Couldn't I sell people two breads for the price of one, in exchange for, say, a chocolate tablet?
Charles Williams
Things dont need to be perfect. They need to be somewhat right.
Your costs would still be there, that math is a bit off, so if you do illegal sales they would detect a lot of material usage with little production. You could make bread illegally and sell it sub-normal prices for chocolate bars but you have to ask yourself if that is worth the risk and trouble. Wouldnt you rather teach other people how to bake bread more efficiently than you do (assuming its technique and not just your bakery having newer, better equipment, in which case it would be pretty unfair for you do sell illegally because it isnt from your own hard work but from the tools from society)
Jace Mitchell
Also these calculations matter the most for macro planning where these differences actually add up. You create a perfect model that tries to approach reality and build in a bit of wiggleroom for calamities and things that happen in reality.
Lincoln Hughes
If things are only somewhat right, will it not generate bread lines ?
And lose my free chocolate bars? Also I was thinking: what if I keep my chocolate bars (or something else) and then bribe someone in the oven factory to get me a brand new oven? I could make 36 or even 48 breads an hour then. I could even ask this neighbour of mine to work for me, unofficially of course (I'd pay him in chocolate bars).
But since it is macro-planning that determines the prices, it has a direct effect on micro, no?
Thomas Cox
Valid concern. The cause of breadlines is a mismatch between the price that is set and the price that would develop if supply and demand were to occur. People like Cockshott who try to develop a mathematically and computationally sound and realistic system therefore advocate the following: Set the price of things made to a price that all of them sell, but no shortages occur. This prevent empty shelves and shelves with shit nobody needs. You then look at the price that is set and if its higher than the cost of production, make more next time, and if its lower, make less.
How many chocolatebars do you want my man.
That oven costs resources too, and every transaction is noted down somewhere, people are involved everywhere. You will be caught eventually, not unlike operating an illegal bussiness today. Why would your neighbour do that? He cant buy anything with chocolate bars. If he worked a normal job he could buy chocolate bars too, and normal stuff. Also by employing him you are paying him less than he makes, so it would make sense for him to report you and get the bakery for himself and make more.
Yes but the deprecation of machines has an almost unnoticeable effect on the end price of individual products simply due to the sheer scale of production. If an industrial oven deprecates 10 minutes an hour, but it produces a few tons of steel per hour, then the price of a nail isnt going to be impacted much by it.
Lincoln Smith
I'm not really well-versed on the tenets of Maoism, honestly; all I know is they have tendencies to be agrarian, focused on the third world, and in favor of radical cultural as well as material change. What exactly about my post was Maoist?
Josiah Smith
Central government, direct allocation of goods, a military draft, stuff like that is kinda of maoistic.
Asher Wilson
I don't understand how. Say I don't only make bread, but also pastry. What happens if no one wants my pastry, but I decide to keep making it nevertheless?
But you said the value was "the average time it took to produce by society". Isn't the price supposed to be equal to the value? And isn't that the same thing that the cost of production? How can it be higher or lower?
As many as possible. I can trade them for other stuff when I run out of labour vouchers.
Not every transaction. The extra bread I make and trade for chocolate bars isn't. What if the oven factory makes more ovens than average as well? Won't they have the same idea as I did?
Of course he can. He can buy bread. And ovens. And a lot of other stuff too.
I'm paying him less than he makes, but more than he would do somewhere else.
You mean constant capital is almost unnoticeable as compared to variable capital? Or will it become almost unnoticeable? Doesn't that mean the productive forces will drop?
Jaxson Cooper
You dont get paid to make shit nobody needs and you dont get the stuff you need to make it.
Thats the ideal. In reality there might be more or less of the stuff than people want to buy at the cost price, so you set the price at the "market price" and then try to adjust production to match the cost price next time.
Who the fuck is going to accept chocolate bars?
Oh yes if literally all of society is corrupt it might work. At this point you might as well just stop working because nothing is holy.
What kind of fantasy land do you live in that you can pay people in chocolate bars?
No, because everybody makes the same wage and work is guaranteed.
It is not unnoticable, its just very tiny.
David Martin
Also look man if youre just looking for an excuse to say "People will just fuck each other over and pay in unpolished diamonds" then stop beating around the bush and out yourself as the ancap you seem to be.
Nathan Price
If it's not clear, the guy who started replying with isn't me (OP), and I haven't made any posts since
Angel Brooks
Ah ok. It seemed a bit fishy how you seemingly went from interested in learning to "but dont you know everybody is inherently corrupt and also muh chocolate backed currency".
Sorry for accusing you, OP.
Isaac Martin
But how do the people who give me my labour vouchers know no one needs my pastry?
So if I understand correctly, value, the average time it took to produce by society, is the cost price. And there is another price, the one at which I will actually sale my bread, the "market price". And the goal is to make them match. Am I correct?
So how do I set the "market price"?
I am not an ancap but if you prefer unpolished diamonds than chocolate bars, it's fine for me. Actually I would probably require pieces of silver or gold in exchange of my breads, but chocolate bars sounded like a much funnier example.
I don't know if it's corruption, but we obviously have a good incentive to accumulate labour as well as pieces of gold, since we can exchange anything for it. No?
I don't want everything to be holy, but I just kinda expect something better than anti-corruption laws to make the system work. Something more… systemic.
Not everybody makes the same wage: I make more thanks to my extra breads.
Constant capital is tiny? How come we produce much more today than ever before then?
Ayden Butler
They plan what needs to be made. You dont get to make whatever the fuck you like with public resources.
I already explained. You adjust the price if too much is sold or too little is sold, taking into account known price fluctuations that depend on seasons.
You can only exchange it with other people who break the law like you do.
No you dont, you get paid the same wage. The amount of breads you make dont matter.
Jason Johnson
Yeah I get this. But how do they know what needs to be made?
Sorry if I ask you to explain again, but I still don't understand. Which price do I adjust? The cost price or the "market price"? From what you said earlier ("you set the price at the market price and then try to adjust production to match the cost price next time"), I get that I must adjust the cost price by adjusting production itself. Am I right? But then, how do I set the "market price"? Surely I cannot pick some random price. How do I decide what the market price will be? Could you provide me an example?
So? That's it?
Of course it matters. If I sell the extra breads without reporting it, I'll get an extra wage in pieces of gold.
A surprsingly decent article on the very basic way in which production would be organized under socialism, authored by Buick, from its publishing website's wing. It's good because it starts out with a functional refutation of the usual Misesian-libertarian economic calculation problem charge lifted at socialists. Surprisingly, because the SPGB are diehard impossibilists who in that kind historically haven't had much interesting to contribute theoretically, much less practically.
Bentley Reyes
The book towards a new socialism goes highly in depth on this. Im kind of tired of this thread tbh.
Yes.
Thats not what a wage is, buddy. Thats income from theft, which is easily caught because the material you received is logged centrally and check against your output.
Christian Roberts
I'm not surprised because I had never heard of this organisation before (so I didn't expect anything), but it's an excellent article indeed.
Both OP and TANS's fan should read it imo.
Luke Lopez
Can't you go slightly in depth on this yourself? Do you get tired every time you try?
So no matter the flaws of the economic structure, a law will fix it?
What theft? It's a voluntary transaction, with a profit in it both for my clients (who pay their bread cheaper) and for me (who get some pieces of gold besides my normal wage in labour vouchers). As for the materials for the extra bread, I can buy them with my labour vouchers and my pieces of gold, I don't need to steal anything.
Xavier Hill
The economic calculation "problem" should be a more common leftist talking point in general, since a lot of capitalist arguments rest on the assumption that it is a fact, even though it's laughably easy to refute, both practically and in principle.
Connor Long
seems slightly simplistic to me. call it the cynic in me, but it's like the guy just said "what if there was no money!" The first problem that come to my mind would be unsavory labor, as in how do we incentivise it?
Easton Fisher
I got more to do with my life than give answers to everyone. Im not a full time philosopher.
Nathaniel Evans
Will there be diversity in the products on the market in a socialist society? I'm talking food, drinks, electronics.
Owen Williams
There are three ways to do that: 1) make it mandatory; 2) reward it more; 3) make it more savoury.
Funnily enough, when this argument is brought up, people often think capitalism applies option 2), and the absence of money will make it impossible. And yet not only is it possible (one simply gets more stuff rather than more money), but capitalism doesn't even actually apply option 2): unsavoury jobs almost always require unskilled labour, and is not paid much at all. What capitalism does apply is option 1): some people, those who do not manage to find a better job, have to take an unsavoury one otherwise they'll die.
Communism will apply all three solutions. It goes without saying that it will adapt option 1), making unsavoury labour mandatory not only for a small, disfavored portion of the population, but for everyone.
Brayden Sanders
Yes.
Christopher Perez
Or should you say that you like "interest in learning" (>>2049477) only in those who do not try and scratch the surface of your discourse. Seems to me that you don't have much to teach.
Leo Parker
When you run a business in capitalism, you have to account for depreciation of means of production in a manner that is no less complex.
Socialism is not literally different from capitalism in absolutely every aspect: If people don't use their consumption vouchers for product X, you can't get the ingredients for producing X. (At least not officially.) So, if you can only sell 1/3 of what you produced at the cost-covering price, you temporarily lower the price and next time around the amount of ingredients you'll get for making that type of product will shrink to just 1/3 of the quantity.
Market price is by trial and error, and you try to sell at a quantity which enables reproduction at the cost price.
^this is from the free-shit-lmao branch of socialism, a very small minority.
Fair point. But you have a good reason to go into such lengths: you're looking for profit.
My question is: why? If I order 60kg of sugar to make my pastry no one wants to buy, why won't my furnisher comply? How does he know no one buys my pastry?
You're ruining your own argument here…
What if I don't want to lower the price, so I can still get the sugar?
No I don't, why would I do that? I try to sell at a quantity which enables me to get pieces of gold besides my wage.
Maybe they are, but none of their supporter seem to be. I have nothing against TANS, but honestly I see no reason to read this rather than anything else right now.
What is SPGB?
Dominic Hall
Thanks for the links btw, I'm gonna read these.
Jackson Rogers
A business, if business is even the right word, won't have the sort of privacy that it has today. It won't be a black box, but rather it will be known what inputs it takes in which quantities, what it is capable of producing, what it actually produces in which quantities, and it will be known how much people consume of what at which prices (though probably not on the individual level). And it will be known not simply in the sense of there being some ministry with people inside knowing that, but it will be public data.
It is possible to have some black market (when has that ever been strictly impossible?), but it's rather tricky. It gets more tricky the more transparent the flows of inputs and outputs around you are. If you figure out how to produce something using less of some input than usual and you can keep that productivity improvement a secret somehow, then you can produce that thing reporting the standard numbers of input usage while putting aside some of that sort of input that you saved for some other use. You can't officially sell that saved input for labour vouchers ("Where does that come from, comrade?"), but maybe you are lucky in that you are working in some sort of facility where you can directly work that input into some useful consumer product, and even if you are that lucky, you probably need several other inputs saved up by some other secret productivity improvement. And how likely is it that all these lucky coincidences happen just where you are? And then you can't just sell it normally for the standard vouchers, you barter with that product or use a flaky crypto-currency. Now, if a big group of people work together, secretly putting aside inputs like that, I think they can really build something with that, but then the probability that at least one of them is a snitch also goes through the roof.
I think it is likely that people will occasionally figure out that they are in an incredibly lucky situation where the stars align and they can pull some bullshit, but I see that more as a situational thing (e. g. there is a flood and you report some things as missing that aren't actually missing), not a threat to the system as such. The section of the economy where I think there will be systematic bullshitting is services (as today!). You claim to do something person-to-person, your customer also supports your story, and there are no produced physical things a third party could inspect to check against your claims. For instance, suppose massage services will be legal while prostitution will be illegal, then I don't see how it will be thoroughly prevented just by having these laws written down somewhere. But I don't think that some black market in services is really a structure where some new class could arise from, it lacks the barriers to entry and the big payoffs so I don't see some super-rich people coming out of that. So I think there will be black markets and corruption, but as a niche phenomenon, and I don't think it means the end of the socialist world. I don't think anyone will sell a train on the black market or anything important like that. SPGB is the Socialist Party of Great Britain, they have some curious position that we don't need prices or anything resembling that, and technology and people being nice will just solve everything. The person I was replying to was speaking positively about an article by them.
Eli Powell
I'll make two different posts because I see two different excellents here, and although your post is quite long, only the first paragraph is related to first excellent I'd like to address.
Assuming all that will be true, technically, how will my sugar furnisher know that no one buys my pastry? What specific public data will he be looking at?
Aaron Cooper
*problematic
How the hell did that happen? Is the a filter or something?
Liam Johnson
The second excellent, I think, resides in the fatal flaws of what you are proposing.
But maybe I'm misunderstanding what you propose, so here is what I've grasped – please correct me if I'm wrong : 1) People spend hours producing things. 2) These hours are counted and "payed" to them in the form of strictly personal labour vouchers. 3) The hours spent producing this or that products are counted as well, and become there "price". 4) The individuals use their labour vouchers to get whatever products they like. The vouchers are then destroyed, for they are strictly personal. The goal of all this, the overall principle determining everyone's actions, is, for every product made, to sell it at a price (as expressed in hours through labour vouchers) matching the actual labour time it took producing it. Do I get it right?
Levi Reyes
Im not obliged to teach you shit if you are an annoying disrespectfull cunt
Levi Green
No link to the article? :(
Jonathan Richardson
Fucking cry about it, Jesus Christ.
Kayden Rogers
Well I'm sorry I have disrespected your beliefs by merely questioning them then.
Adam Williams
See:
Cooper Powell
Is this the actual Paul Cockshot in your link? The author of TANS?
Mason Gonzalez
Yes, that's basically it. Natural resources will also be part of the price, and these prices are basically political decisions. And it's okay to change the price relative to what that production-cost value says if the selling rate diverges a lot from the production rate. Aside from the demand-adjusted price you pay as a consumer, the things will also have the information of what the non-adjusted price would be printed on them. This makes the economic relations more transparent, and Cockshott and Cottrell hope that this will also lead to some stabilization in consumption behaviour (that is, that consumers will tend to react to this divergence in a way that reduces it).
The destinction between these two prices also have relevance for planning. The consumer demand is also used to re-evaluate the machinery in use for producing consumer items, so high consumer demand for the output is a sort of indirect demand for increasing the production of the machines that produce that output. Suppose some consumer item turned out to be some stupid fad, contrary to what planners believed, and there is specialized machinery for that particular thing that has now become totally unhip. The demand-adjusted evaluation of these machines drops like a rock, below reproduction cost. Now suppose it turns out there is some creative mind among the planners who comes up with a crazy scheme for what these machines could be useful for after all, and that this works out, so the evaluation of this machinery rises again.
Here is the strength of having the plain reproduction-cost data together with the demand-adjusted data: In the capitalist world you would be very uncertain as to whether this new alternative usage of the machinery is actually something that can exist for much longer than the old machines last. You produce with machinery that would be otherwise without use, pure trash. You don't know how much actually reproducing the machinery would cost. But in the world of TANS, you can look at the demand-free data for that. (By the way, the wordfilter for pr0blematic->excellent exists here because shits from tumblr often use that word instead of an actual argument.)
Yes, that's Cockshott. He stopped posting there a couple years ago though.
Caleb Sullivan
Ok, thanks. Please allow me to rephrase this for the sake of my further argumentation.
You said this: What I understand here is that actual people (no matter who they are, let's call them the price-setters) will take actual price-setting decisions based on actual data they already have beforehand. What is this data? . and probably many other things that are, as you stressed out, public data. In the light of all this data, the price-setters set the prices so that the selling rate meets the production rate. If some products are left unsold, they can lower their prices to stimulate consumption; if some other products are too scarce (breadlines), they can raise their prices so that some form of spontaneous rationing occurs. The prices have a direct effect on selling rates (and only on selling rates), so, as I said, the goal of the price-setters is to set the prices so that the selling rates match the production rates, ie: so that there is no over- or under-supply.
But a divergence between production costs and prices isn't satisfactory on the long term, so there is a second step. Here, the planners intervene (once again, it doesn't really matter who they are). Now I am facing a problem here: the only action planners can have is on production. And their only goal, as far as prices are concerned, can be to try and modify, by adapting the production process, the gap between production costs and prices as they've been set by the price-setters. They can aim for a reduction of this gap, or for its widening. What if they try to close the gap?
If there is over-supply of a product, then the price will be lowered, and as a result will be inferior to production cost. That means the planners should find a way to lower said production costs to close this gap. One could think the obvious solution is to reduce the global production of this product; but we are talking price per unit and cost per unit here, so that wouldn't change a thing. The only way for planners to lower cost per unit is to make the productive process more efficient, to invest. As a result, less people can be employed in the production, effectively making the product's cost lower. But another result is that, globally, less labour vouchers will be distributed. And with less labour vouchers available, the selling rate will fall again, despite the lower price set earlier. In the end, we'll have over-supply again.
If there is under-supply, the price will be raised so that there is no breadline, and as a result will be superior to production cost. That means the planners should find a way to. raise said production cost accordingly. Once again, we are talking about price per unit and cost per unit, so increasing global production wouldn't change a thing, although once again it seems like the obvious solution. The only way for planners to raise cost per unit is to make the productive process. less efficient! I don't think I need to develop further here.
So we have this system that mechanically over-invests in branches of production where there is already over-supply, and under-invests in branches where there is under-supply. Obviously, the planners must not try and close the gap between prices and costs. Now what if they try to widen it?
If there is over-supply of a product, then the price will be lowered, and as a result will be inferior to production costs. That means the planners should find a way to raise even further said production cost to widen this gap. We're still talking production cost per unit, so that still means making the productive process less efficient. Here again, I don't think I need to explain further why planners shouldn't take particular actions.
If there is under-supply, the price will be raised so that there is no breadline, and as a result will be superior to production cost. That means the planners should find a way to lower even further said production cost to widen this gap. Once again, we are talking about price per unit and cost per unit, so once again it means making the production process more efficient, ie: investing. Investing will generate over-supply, and this over-supply will in turn be corrected by a lowering of the price, that will be back to square one (with this big difference that now there is no over- or under-supply anymore).
So to sum things up: the planners must have no particular action when prices are inferior costs, and they must try and widen the gap when prices are superior to costs. Assuming that's what they do, the system works fine.
. but the two problems I had identified still stand.
[1/2]
Cooper Nelson
My bad, I made a mistake: if increasing global production in one branch doesn't change the cost per unit, it will have an effect on prices, since what used to be in under-supply will now be in over-supply, driving the price-setters to take a second decision: lower the prices.
[2/3]
Logan Barnes
So we have a seemingly working system. Here come two fundamental problems.
Firstly, what happens here? Over- and under-supply translates into public data, which translates (through a conscious decision) into a modification of price, which translates into a gap between price and production cost, which translates (through a conscious decision) into investment and/or transfers from one branch of production to another, which provoke the end of the over- or under-supply.
There are two conscious decisions that need actual people to think about them: interpreting the data to set the price; and interpreting the gap between said price and production cost to plan production. Now what if we try and take the second decision with the input of the first one? In other words, what if, in the process I've just described, we remove this: We will be left with this: Will this new process work as well as the first one? Surely it must, for this overall input are exactly the same. Is it harder to make decisions about where to invest and transfer resources based on the gap between production rate and selling rate, than it is based on the gap between price and cost? Obviously not.
Now let's have a look at the new process: all mention of a price has disappeared. All of them were in the part we removed. And yet the system works, not only exactly as well, but in fact exactly the same.
So we have examined the process through which prices could be used to adapt production to the needs. And what we have discovered is that prices are actually completely unnecessary to this process.
One could object that price has another, immediate effect, one I didn't figure in the process above: it affects demand. "Thanks to the rise of price, no breadline!" But that's just not true. The increase of price has changed neither the global supply nor the global need. The solvent demand has decreased alright; but the actual need hasn't. The breadlines are still there, only they are hidden in people's wallets. As I said above, what actually happens when price rise is that some form of spontaneous rationing occurs. In that regard, it is no different than any form of rationing; and it means, once again, that prices are unnecessary for this task.
[3/4]
Ayden Cook
Nah. Different people have different thresholds for what they are willing to pay, so the following can work: Temporary lower the price to get reduce over-stock, lower output and try to sell that at the production-cost covering price. Technical innovation is not necessary for that. Again, false for the same reason, just the other way around. Complete nonsense.
Yeah, that mistake being the entire post.
Are you seriously arguing for the SPGB position (that people just take stuff of the shelves for free and we use the rate of that happening to plan)? >The breadlines are still there, only they are hidden in people's wallets (…) it is no different than any form of rationing False. Personal budgets are a form of rationing, but a more flexible one than per-person limits. We can set per-person limits for consumption for each item instead of having personal budgets, but that is likely to not make people as happy as that. In a situation with personal budgets, when there are plenty of consumer items I don't really care much about and a few things that I care about a lot, I simply have an incentive not to obtain the things I don't care much about if they are expensive. In the situation with each item having a per-person limit, I don't have that incentive, so one and the same pile of consumer items distributed under this rationing scheme means that people who have a strong interest in having particular things will be more disappointed than under the scheme with personal budgets.
Oliver Morgan
Yeah I've addressed this here:
Are you kidding me? What you've quoted is the conclusion of three paragraphs starting with: And closed (the very following sentence!) by: So yes, this is nonsense. That's the point. Which is I follow with: And how do I conclude? So please stop trying and cherry-picking quotes to make me say the opposite of what I said.
Nice argument. Care to point out where I misunderstood what you're advocating for?
I don't know about the SPGB but yeah, that's what a communist society is.
Adrian Reed
PS: The last part of your post being my more interesting, I'll address it when I'm done with my [4/4] part.
Cooper Johnson
*much more
Curse you, autocorrect!
Andrew Thomas
I genuinely think there is nothing sensible that can be saved from that post. If you want, we can go through those silly paragraphs again: This doesn't follow. Different people have different willingness to pay. So, after the temporary price-drop to get rid off overstocked stuff, you produce and restock a smaller quantity and raise the price again. A technical innovation is not required, just a reduction in output can be enough, to reduce the group of consumers to the set of those who are willing to put up with the price necessary to cover reproduction. What you assume here is mass unemployment brought about by technical change. Mass unemployment. In socialism. Once again, the main thing, the obvious thing, the thing that you can almost always do since there is no change in the state of technology involved, is simply a change in quantity supplied. Recall that different people have different willingness to pay. So, after the temporary price increase to prevent running out, you increase the amount in stock, to be then able to sell it you have to reduce the price again, to add back those less willing to pay a lot to your group of customers. Let's not get distracted by temporary pricing measures from the goal of selling the amount that can be sold at the price that covers reproduction.
The mistake you make repeatedly is that you assume that the way of dealing with a discrepancy between supplied quantity and the quantity people are willing to get at reproduction price is changing the price and then changing the technology of production to correspond to that price. Whereas the supply-and-demand procedure proposed in TANS, and what you also got told here, is that the consumer behavior is used primarily to change the quantity supplied and possibly also do a temporary change of price if the stock gets very small or very big in the meantime, to prevent that the buffer gets completely empty or overfloods.
Julian Taylor
For the third time, this is what I've addressed here:
I don't understand why you make a fuss about it, since both before and after I addressed this I acknowledged that your system seems to work: So whether I addressed your point or not,, it doesn't change a thing.
But I took it into account nevertheless in what followed: >which translates (through a conscious decision) into investment and/or transfers from one branch of production to another Reduce the output in one branch, increase it in another. That's what I'm supposed to have missed, right? Well I haven't, as you can see. And now that this is clear, do you have something to say about the fact that prices are completely unnecessary for this whole production process (notwithstanding the presumed higher flexibility of the rationing part, which I'll address later)?
No genius, what I assume is less working hours.
Jonathan Stewart
"Communism is free shit lmao" is slander by right-wingers. "From each accordng to ability, to each according to needs" does not imply free shit. On the contrary, if you are able to work, you are expected to work, according to ability; and getting according to need does not imply that you are the one dictating to society what your needs are that society then has to meet, no matter how ridiculous your claimed needs are. It means that healthcare isn't a question of your personal budget. It means that if you are an orphan, if you have a disability, if you are frail and old, society will take of you. It doesn't mean you take a wheelchair on a whim just because you feel like doing that.
>do you have something to say about the fact(???) that prices are completely unnecessary for this whole production process You haven't established anything like that.
