Question about the workings of socialism

Jesus, no. You can't just break even, son, that's subsistence existence if everyone does that. There will be goods, but if all sell for mere subsistence no one can buy the surplus goods.

No, straight up no. This is generalized poverty, Marx himself argued against this in his very earliest writings. This is a form of communism, but a fucking awfully poor one that post capitalist communism isn't like.

With what money when they are producing for subsistence without surplus value acknowledging their labor, necessity, and productivity?

Your whole understanding is wrong. All of it.

You explain it then

That needs some qualification–although profits are not used to enrich capitalists there are still profits (i.e. the money from sales is greater than the total money payed to workers plus cost of materials, energy, and means of production). In the "Critique of the Gotha Program" Marx criticized another socialist named Lasalle who wanted workers to collectively receive payment exactly equal to the total money they made selling the goods they had made. Marx instead argued that some of the money from sales had to be set aside for purposes like investing in expanding production, insurance, and replacing means of production, along with social goods like education and welfare for those unable to work. Here's the quote:

What clearly meant was that under socialism the orgs that today's firms will become will operate on a break-even basis, not that the people working there will work and consume at the edge of their biological limit. There being no surplus left at some legal entity representing the factory after replacement costs and people are paid does not imply that everybody lives on subsistence level. The legal structure of a company, a profit-making virtual person with potential to live forever, will not exist. You are mixing up the notion of profit with the more general concept of a surplus.

There is nothing DRAMATICALLY wrong with your though, OP.

Everyone will find SOMETHING wrong. Cause everyone has his own "how-to-socialism".

I think, that profit for the shake of profit does not belong in socialism, though.

But Marx wasn't just talking about replacement costs in that quote from "Critique of the Gotha program", he also mentioned some of the money from sales would be set aside from things like education and welfare (they could be funded by some sort of income tax, but that would be equivalent to just paying workers less and having the profit go directly to fund these programs), and also for expanding production (building more factories if people are buying the product faster than they are able to make them).

Logically I think expansion of production would also have to include investment in new products and technologies, unless you want the economy to be totally static (churning out exactly the same products forever)–the money for new types of production has to come from somewhere if there are no capitalists providing money to startups. I suppose it could come from crowdfunding–funds voluntarily donated by large numbers of workers. But the average person doesn't necessarily have a good sense of what products are actually the most promising in terms of there being a lot of demand for them once they're being made, so that would be an argument for having experts on the government payroll whose job it is to decide what new production there's likely to be demand for, and who use a pool of funds that comes from profits. These people would have to play a similar role to the one played by venture capitalists today, but without the ability to draw on the pool of funds for personal enrichment along with investment, as capitalists do.

What is it said in the Critique of the Gotha programme? Let's see:
No exchange means no money.

As you can see, he is really talking about socialism.

There is no reason Marx can't talk about both the eventual endpoint of full communism and the socialist transitional phase in the same essay. After all, in the quote I previously posted, he spoke twice about how things will change as the "new society develops":

In the first quote you posted, "Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products", I believe he was talking about full communism. Then I think the next paragraph he steps back to talk about the socialist transition phase, opening with the second quote you posted along with the statement that the new society must emerge "stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges". And in this society, he says (in the same paragraph), workers would receive a "certificate" showing the amount of work they had done, with 'deductions' for things like expansion of production and education and so forth included, which they could then use to draw from the "means of consumption" (available goods). That sounds like a form of money to me, i.e. a piece of paper you can use to exchange for goods, presumably "priced" by the amount of labor-time that went into them.

Also, rereading this section, I see that he goes on to explicitly distinguish between the "first phase of communist society" (what nowadays most would refer to as the 'socialist' phase) and the "higher phase" (i.e. full communism). Talking about the first phase, he says there still will be exchanges happening, though unlike in capitalism they will explicitly be recognized as exchanges of labor (after the necessary deductions have been made from the labor contributed by each worker, they can exchange that for goods of equal labor-value):

Marx also recognizes that in this first phase, there will still be inequalities owing to the fact that different people will be capable of supplying different amounts of labor, along with other issues like some workers having families to support while others don't. This form of inequality is something he recognizes as a lingering "bourgeois limitation" that will be a necessary evil in the first phase.

And then he goes on to say that these "defects" are just a feature of the first phase of communism, that in the higher phase there wouldn't be such exchange and instead each would draw from the pool of goods according to their needs, and contribute according to their ability:

I see your point. Sorry I can't discuss it in full length, for I don't have the time nor the focus at this time of a week day. I will try to just get to the point.

Marx:
You:

This is precisely NOT a form of money:
People DO NOT exchange things with each other on a market (and money is nothing but a specific commodity, there's no money without market).
Actually, Marx makes it very clear there is no exchange anymore:
That would make no sense if there still was exchange of commidities.

The only "exchange" that takes place here is whith society as a whole. That is not an actual exchange, just a distribution based on the criterium of value. This criterium being the "bourgeois limitation" of lower-stage communism.
Take an example, just replace value with any other criterium, and you'll see there is no money here.

In my opinion, the reason why so many people, even among the more hardcore leftists, fail to see the difference money and "labour certificate" is that this difference is at the very core of capitalism: people like us, born and raised in a capitalist society, simply cannot get past this idea that "market is natural".

Seems like largely a matter of definition–there is nothing saying we have to define the word "money" in terms of a market system. But if you have a preference for such a definition, fine, we can use some new term for what would exist in Marx's early stage like "labor-token". It is still the case that workers receive fewer labor-tokens than what they actually contribute in labor, and that the subtracted labor-tokens would be distributed for other socially useful purposes, like paying a labor-token "salary" to public school teachers. Another major use for these subtracted labor-tokens would be to pay other workers to expand production (new factories and factory-machines), either to create larger numbers of existing types of products if supply wasn't keeping up with demand, or entirely new types of products that it's predicted would be in demand once they became available. Deciding whose predictions will actually be listened to when determining what new products to make, along with which existing products should be prioritized when expanding production, is IMO one of the most important issues to figure out if you want to implement a socialist system that actually compares well with capitalism in terms of fostering innovation and avoiding frequent shortages of in-demand products, both issues that planned economies have tended to have problems with in the past.

Wait, what do you think would be the difference between "public school teachers" and any other worker?

They are not producing a physical good or service that other *individual* workers pay out labor-tokens to get, so they need something more like a government salary. Of course you could imagine all workers are receiving something like a government salary regardless of whether anyone else actually buys the products they are making. But I think Marx is sort of unclear on whether the labor certificates would be issued in such a centralized way or if he imagined a more market-like system with a bunch of worker's collectives that divide up the tokens they receive from "sales" (other workers trading their own labor-tokens for whatever good the collective is producing) and then, after a government tax for the types of purposes Marx mentioned, this pool of tokens is divided up among the workers according to how much labor they contributed.

Even if the issuing of labor-certificates is done centrally, there is still a need to have a balance between the total labor-tokens workers earn each year for producing goods or providing services, and the total labor-tokens they give up each year in exchange for receiving such goods/services. If you want individual teachers to receive labor-tokens for teaching but don't want individual parents (or other guardians, or the children themselves) to have to pay high fees for for education while people without children pay nothing, the alternative is some sort of automatic deduction from the labor-tokens everyone receives, like an income tax, equivalent to everyone paying a small fraction of their labor-tokens to teachers regardless of whether they are taking care of any children.

Either way, Marx obviously felt there was *some* reason to set education apart from other forms of labor, because he included "schools" in that quote I gave earlier about what would be "deducted" from each worker's "proceeds of labor":

So, I need some clarification, because there are a lot of different views in this thread.

Under socialism, the first phase of communism, or whatever, workers control the means of production, but they still make a surplus of value. This surplus instead of going to a capitalist, is reinvested back into the work place, and anything left goes into society, almost like a tax, as it would pretty much cover the same things taxes do. I assume there would need to be state apparatus in place to collect and distribute this surplus though, as well as make sure the surplus is not simply being stored by workers so they can buy more luxuries.

If that is correct, I have another question. If there is active state apparatus under socialism, how does the state ever wither away into communism? The whole point, I thought at least, was that under socialism all the old functions of the state slowly become useless, but it seems socialism has created a new function for the state in this case.

Thanks.

Marx is pretty clear that there would be no commodity production in the lower phase of communism (and therefore no exchange between enterprises). It would have to be centralised for this work.

He sets it apart because education would be provided free of charge rather than paid for in labour vouchers. If it's not being "paid" for, it must be deducted from everyone's income for obvious reasons.

You may be right, but can you give a quote that you think clearly expresses this idea? It seemed to me like he was saying that in the earlier stage there would still be "exchange", just re-interpreted as exchange of labor value as opposed to exchange of commodities, see the last sentence of this quote where he does use the word "exchange":

So it doesn't seem obvious that this is incompatible with workers' collectives selling goods as long as the goods are understood as "quantities of congealed labour time" (Marx's phrase from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) and this is what determines their value. But I do think the quote could *also* be compatible with the idea that the only "exchange" is with a central government–you do some labor in exchange for a labor certificate they issue, and can use that to draw from a pool of goods, regardless of whether the goods you made with your own labor are actually taken by anyone or if they just sit in a storehouse unwanted (which would be the fault of the central planners for not exactly predicting how much demand there will be for each type of good). Marx's comments seem general enough that they could apply to either case…but maybe he was more specific in some other work, or maybe I missed something in Critique of the Gotha Program.

I think you're just saying the same thing as the possible interpretation I gave in the second paragraph of comment 709565, right? If individual students or guardians aren't giving up labor-tokens to get an education in the way they give up labor-tokens to draw on other goods in the "social stock", then teachers must be paid with a sort of tax on everyone's labor.

I get the impression from reading commentary on Marx that he left the transition to "mature communism" a bit vague, leaving it to the future to work out the details, but there's a lot of Marx I haven't read so don't take my word for it.

One thing that might hint at what he was thinking: in the Critique of the Gotha Program he talks about the transition happening when "the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth spring more abundantly". So, my guess would be that he imagines, number one, that technology and social organization have developed to the point where it's easy to make a lot more goods with less labor, and number two, people's habits have changed so they're more happy to draw only what they need from the common stock, rather than drawing as much as they can afford in labor-tokens. Also, they would now work more for the creative satisfaction or sense of helping others rather than because they need the labor-tokens–in the same quote he also says the transition will happen "after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want".

If society can make a lot more of each type of good per year than people actually take per year, you could have a situation where goods are stockpiled, people draw however much they need from the stockpile, and when supplies start to run low another batch could be made. And meanwhile if people's motive for working isn't primarily about earning labor-tokens anyway, at that point it might make sense to just drop the whole system of labor-tokens and let everyone take what they need and do the jobs that they find fulfilling. Like I said, they might find the work fulfilling either because the job is interesting in itself, or because they know the community needs volunteers to spend at least some time on a boring job to fulfill some need (like working in a factory for a little while to replenish stock of some good), and they want do their part to help. Marx said in a quote from archive.is/ZmYJc that in a communist society people would more easily alternate between different types of work rather than having to train in one kind of job exclusively:

There's a science-fiction depiction of this kind of transition from socialism with a strong state to a more stateless kind of communism in the book "A Short History of the Future" by W. Warren Wagar, written like a future history book rather than a novel, if you're interested. And speaking of science fiction there's also the idea that automation could continue to the point where all the relativity boring physical labor in creating mass-produced goods could be done 100% by machines, although as far as I know Marx never considered this possibility…you can look into the concept of a "post-scarcity economy" for more on this.

Good job confirming that communism will NEVER work in practice.

Good job confirming that commies actually want the USSR planned economy back, despite it being utter shit.

Educate yourself in the nuances of ideas. The world is far more complex than bumper-sticker slogans mass-produced by right-wing think tanks, and you'd be taken far more seriously if your were able to demonstrate at least some knowledge of the ideas you're criticizing.