Surplus Under Socialism

there is no surplus value in socialism jesus christ

There is no surplus value under socialism as value itself will no longer exist. However in a socialist society there would almost certainly still be a surplus product, a physical surplus of things produced in order to allow for the expansion and maintenance of production, as well as to prevent shortages of consumer goods. The surplus product would be held in common and it's allocation would be decided upon by an administration controlled by all of society.

Yes there is. There has to be at least some surplus reinvested into the production process in order to keep it going. If you make hamburgers, you can't keep 100% of the value you create. Some of it has to go into buying more meat, buns, etc.

Socialism is not a market system. There is no exchange between individual productive units (there are no separate enterprises), goods are simply produced and then allocated.

There is still currency under socialism though.

Surely 'each to his ability each to his need' only applies to full communism.

No, in a society that has actually abolished capitalism there could be no money/currency, as this implies a system of exchange. There could however be a system of rationing according to labour performed, with non-circulating labour tokens/vouchers/credit replacing money. However this would only be used for consumer goods and services (producer goods would be directly allocated to factories/workshops/warehouses) and would only the case until society/the forces of production have developed to the point where free access is viable.

Certainly, but this doesn't imply currency would exist in the lower phase of communism (or socialism if you prefer). I recommend you read the "Critique of the Gotha Programme" is you haven't already.

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm

Yes, both are completely retarded, muke.

Deprecation is a cost of a business and is thus by definition already deducted from the "profit" they make. Maintanance is just a cost. Learn2bussiness.

Litterally market socialism (IE mutualism IE capitalism with coops)

What you would idealy do is that if the worker produce a surplus of money, they just lower their prices until they dont make profit anymore. This is after the state-not-state takes a bit of tax to invest in society wide policies of course, like roads, schools and what have you.

This then gives you the ability to slowly move towards a society where money is abolishes.

How do you allocate the surplus value of a chair? You cut off a leg?

Seriously, OP, think about what you're saying. In socialism products wouldn't be 'sold' so there would be no extra 'money' to allocate.

Its only your autism that doesnt allow for regular currency to exist tbh.

If you remove private and "cooperative" property from society you wont have capital accumulation among individuals, since the possible profit being made goes to society at large, not a subset of workers.

Socialism can have money you autsist.

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Yes, communism is the moneyless one. Socialism is the stage before it without private property and classes.

"Socialism" in this context is just lenin-speak for the lower phase of communism, it's not a separate mode of production you ignorant twat.
Why don't you actually read the Critique of the Gotha Programme? I linked it in a previous post but I can provide a pdf if it makes it easier for you.

If by "lenin speak" you mean the definition most leftists go by today, then yes.

And by that definition, socialism can have money, since its just a lower phase of communism, not the end point.

Because meme argument and I cant read 10 books a day.

All of a sudden the stupidity of tankies makes so much sense. Have you read anything marx wrote?
The Critique of the Gotha Programme isn't even fucking long, it's a glorified fucking pamphlet.

Well I can't guess the lenght of shit just from the name, oh omnipotent leftcomfag.

Well, now that you know it's short, why don't you stop being such a salty faggot and read it?

Link it to me then, like you said you would.

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Critque_of_the_Gotha_Programme.pdf

Who is going to issue this currency? A central bank? Once the whole money apparatus is in place it is easy to exploit and some will have more than others. Those with more money will not want the system to change because of their muh privileged positions. And you'll get another USSR.

If there's money you can't call it socialism. It's going to be state capitalism or a degenerated worker's state.

So no, no money in socialism.

That logic is completely flawed. Just because some guy has a hundred bucks more a month doesn't make them more muh privileged. Nobody owns the means of production privately, so nobody, unless they somehow invent time travel, is going to have substantial wealth over others.

And the ussr didnt fall because of wealth disparity, it fell because of a fuckton of other things.

There are 2 basic rules in socialism, as outlined by Lenin:
1.) who does not work shall not eat
2.) For equal quanity of labour equal quantity of products

It means there will be still inequality (i.e. if you have a family and work as much as a guy who doesn't, he will be richer in the end) but at least you are fully compensated for your work.

Right so my conclusion here is that no one fucking knows. I'm being told a different version from every person I ask.

So that's good.

There's a reason I've been telling you to read Marx, instead of taking the word of clueless internet people.

I know I really should, especially after this thread, but I just dont have the time right now with my exams, I was hoping I could at least get a general idea of what definition was right and then when I have more time expand on it with reading.

Fair enough. The problem with asking leftypol for a definition of socialism is virtually every leftist tendency is represented here and many of them have a rather different understanding of what it means. To make things worse I don't think everyone here has necessarily read the material their idealogy is based on.
So unless you need the information in a hurry you're probably better off waiting and reading the material for yourself, I imagine you'll save yourself a great deal of frustration that way.

If you remove property, how will you have trade?

I am basically w/ left-com poster. Some sort of democratic control over the whole social surplus is involved in communism. OP's method 2 is terribly parochial and petty-bourgeois.

One question for left-com poster though – is democratic control exercised at the level of individual communes or eventually will whole continents or even the whole world be a big commune? Seems a little unwieldy at a certain level, unless the scope of the tasks of the world-council are limited (perhaps to observing general trends, analyzing aggregate production data and drawing conclusions to be discussed among other councils)

Simulated markets.

What. The. Fuck.

...

Please dont base your impressions of leftism on this thread.

Its simple. Workplaces produce at marginal cost == price, there is a certain percentage of tax on the added value to go to society at large and their wages are part of the cost of producing the product. The workplace as an entity then sells the products, pays the costs, wages and tax, and then it does it all again. The workers then use their wages to buy goods. The prices of goods will go up and down depending on the current demand and supply, via a computerized system. Noone can make profit of anything, they can only be paid a wage, every means of production is owned by society and society as a whole decides what to invest a percentage of societies fruits into, ranging from extra dividends to all members of society, to making cheap products free or investing the the productive capital of society, like factories.

You have to ignore leftcom poster, he keeps shouting about how people should read marx while at the same time not having read or understanding it himself, leading to things like "there is no value in socialism" even though marx described many forms of value, some of which will always exist.

Oh really? Not even "the workplace as an entity" that "sells the products"?

You won't, that's the point. Instead of things being exchanged on the market things will be directly allocated by a public industrial administration.

I imagine it would be a kind of multi-level administration. While global level planning would be necessary I think it would be pretty absurd to attempt to micromanage everything down to the level of the individual factory.

Value in that particular context refers to socially necessary labour time, and by extension exchange value.

No. Because they are owned by society via the state.

The first of which still exists in socialism and the latter of which does not scale to the first.

So what? There are plenty of state-owned companies as we speak; do you think they don't make profit?

From 'Critique of the Gotha Programme":

What are the "proceeds of labor"? The product of labor, or its value? And in the latter case, is it the total value of the product, or only that part of the value which labor has newly added to the value of the means of production consumed?

"Proceeds of labor" is a loose notion which Lassalle has put in the place of definite economic conceptions.

What is "a fair distribution"?

Do not the bourgeois assert that the present-day distribution is "fair"? And is it not, in fact, the only "fair" distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production? Are economic relations regulated by legal conceptions, or do not, on the contrary, legal relations arise out of economic ones? Have not also the socialist sectarians the most varied notions about "fair" distribution?

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.

Only now do we come to the "distribution" which the program, under Lassallean influence, alone has in view in its narrow fashion – namely, to that part of the means of consumption which is divided among the individual producers of the co-operative society.

The "undiminished" proceeds of labor have already unnoticeably become converted into the "diminished" proceeds, although what the producer is deprived of in his capacity as a private individual benefits him directly or indirectly in his capacity as a member of society.

Just as the phrase of the "undiminished" proceeds of labor has disappeared, so now does the phrase of the "proceeds of labor" disappear altogether.

Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning.

[con't]

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

…

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

It's okay. It goes something like this.
Communism will involve no commodities. Commodities being things produced for exchange instead of direct use by the immediate producer (think of a peasant manufacturing his own implements).
When a peasant makes a ceramic jar, let's say, the jar has a use-value of holding and preserving food. Aside from HOW MUCH food it can hold, the use-value of the jar is qualitative. The exchange-value is always quantitative.
Now there was a bloke named Ricardo who formulated a theory of value based on the time necessary to fabricate the product. Marx took it and ran with it and elucidated it well. Note I have not read Ricardo. But when it comes to Marx, he abstracts from the product 'socially-necessary labor time' like LeftCom poster just mentioned. But he arrived at it by examining use-value vs. exchange-value and how the two are fundamentally incommensurate. Labor is the one thing that is commensurate behind the production of commodities. This is explained very well in Capital Vol 1. When communes control production and distribution there is no need for exchange in the current sense of the word. Among Marx's basic breakthroughs was the revelation of underlying relations and tendencies beneath phenomenal forms, a la Hegel. The exact nature and dialectic of the wage labor relation, wherein the worker and the capitalist both produce themselves by producing their opposites (each other) was never done before. But as Marx writes in Capital, the worker and the capitalist confront each other as individuals, not members of a class, and thus both as capitalist individuals, in a nominally free and voluntary exchange. However there is no natural basis for this wage labor relation.

Negro. The entire point of simulated markets is that the condition is that they don't make profit.

Your argument is the same as "why wouldn't you privately own the means of production under communism? Means of production exist in capitalism, so why wouldnt we just also not own them under communism?".

The condition in the system of a simulated market i am describing is that they don't make profit. The state already gets tax by a set percentage, there is litterally no argument in favour of making your products more expensive by wanting to make profit. You would ask more money from consumers, after which you then give back that money in some way, because the profit would go to the state and then back to society.

If you want more money to be taxed, just increase tax. The reason state owned companies today make profit is because there is only a few. Every dollar they make profit is extra that they don't have to tax the bourgeoisie for. In this system, there is no bourgeoisie, and profit made just ends up being disproportionate tax, since if the state/society owns everything, there is no difference between profits or tax, other than that tax is a set rate.

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And what exactly was the point of this quotation.

TL;DR All means of production owned in common by society, pay for shit like schools and cripples, then give everyone labour vouchers.

… and thus no surplus value. The quotation describes the distribution of the value of labour in a society devoid of profit, ergo answering answering OP's question

Then there is litterally no market! Either there is an incentive for you to sell your products as expensive as possible, which is what a market is all about, or there is not: you have to chose!

leftcom.org/en/articles/2015-02-15/communist-society-value-labour-and-time-a-reply-to-gilles-dauvé

No mate, thats not what a market is. "You products" don't exist, since all products already belong to society. The simulated market is only used to distribute scarce resources somewhat fairly according to individual needs and labour.

What a load of cock. The time it takes society to create a certain commodity, IE the socially necessary labour time for a product, will still exist even if you have labour vouchers. The only way to abolish it is if it literally takes no time to produce, which is impossible.

You can't have infinite robots so there will be a time which is required to make a commodity.

Also, SNLT does not directly set the exchange value. The exchange value is set by the combination of the SNLT, the total society wide labour time spend on that commodity and the use value of that commodity.

Then again: you said I will SELL them.
Will I decide to sell them or not, who to sell them to, and at what price?

No, no and no. Price is set, you have to sell them because they are not your property and you can't deny other citizens access to the collective labour result. I never said "YOU SEEL THEM", i said they are sold by the workplace, to whomever wants to buy them, at the price set by the system.

If the demand is too high, the price will go up, if the demand is too low, the price will go down. If society deems this product important enough, society will invest capital into it to expand its production capacity and thus increase availability and reduce price.

Forgot to add:

It is a SIMULATED market, not a *free* market.

sounds hella like capitalism to me tbh

but there is no value production in communism for fuck's sake have you even read capital?

we do actually know but leftypol surely isn't a place I'd ask at when you want to learn about theory. You better check out libcom and revleft.

Oh yes, when people use capital to produce good this is exploitation of labour. Lemme just call up all commies and say that we can't do any work.

I thought capitalism was when you have a class of people who own the means of production to exploit those who dont for their own benefit.

you fucking idiot value is mediatedy by capital in capitalism; it's the phenomenon to the noumenon exchange value which is abstract labor my god. And without exchange value there's only use value left which is entirely subjective and not an economic category

Sure buddy, go play in the sandbox with your other mentally challenged friends.

I don't think the time a robot would take to make something would qualify as "labor time" though (assuming the robot is a relatively dumb one programmed for a particular production task, not an intelligent AI that demands compensation for its labor). As an analogy, crop plants take time to convert sunlight and water and soil nutrients into edible parts we harvest like corn or apples, but Marx wouldn't count that as labor time.

The idea of fully automated production actually makes a pretty good argument for something close to Marx's labor theory of value though. In a capitalist system, if machines could make copies of themselves without human labor, if any sort of market competition was in place this should quickly drive down the cost of these machines to barely more than the cost of the materials and energy which you have to feed into them to make a copy of themselves. After all, if I can feed some metal/plastic/electricity costing say $50 into a 3D printer in order for it to print out a copy of itself, then I can sell that copy for any price just above $50 and not lose money, so if different people are trying to sell them and underbid each other, the price is probably going to end up being just barely over $50 (maybe $50.01, say). Likewise, any other good that type of 3D printer can produce will be driven down to the cost of the materials and energy that need to be fed into the printer to make one copy of that good. The same basic principle should apply to things like automated robot factories that can make copies of every machine in the factory, and assemble them into a new robot factory. So without human labor, the cost of all manufactured goods should get driven down to barely more than the cost of the raw materials and energy needed to make them (and the cost of raw materials and energy would go down too as it would be much cheaper to churn out huge numbers of of solar panels, mining and refinery robots, etc.)

Since I don't think a socialist revolution is likely to happen anytime soon (and I don't know if planned economies can ever work much better than they have historically anyway), my optimistic scenario is that if all robot-produced goods became much cheaper than today and meanwhile there were much fewer unskilled jobs around, in democratic countries people would tend to vote for giving everyone a basic income that would allow them to buy enough of these machine-made goods to live a materially comfortable life. The needed cost of such a basic income would be a lot lower than today because the price of these goods would be much lower, so the taxes on people who still have jobs that can't be replaced by machines (creative and intellectual work along with services that require a human touch) probably wouldn't have to be particularly high. Meanwhile since it would be hard to make any profit on manufacturing, capitalists would probably make money primarily on hiring people to create intellectual property for them, like software and new product designs. Also, as I said in my last comment at archive.is/SB4tQ , for typical kinds of intellectual property like software, capitalists aren't really taking advantage of owning the "means of production" but rather taking advantage of the fact that workers need a regularly salary while capitalists can afford to invest in paying the workers a salary while before they have a product to make a profit on. So if all the workers had a basic income and didn't need to worry about salary year to year, you could see a lot more projects that just involved a bunch of workers banding together to work on a project that would take a while to be finished and make money, without the need for capitalist investors to pay them and then own the rights to whatever they created. In that case capitalists might naturally start to disappear and be replaced by a market economy made up primarily of worker cooperatives. Like I said, this is me being optimistic, but I think there's at least a decent chance of increased automation leading naturally to this sort of post-scarcity market economy with capitalists either absent or playing a greatly reduced role.

this is because your understanding of capitalism is based on half assed internet research on various image boards and youtube videos like le libsocrants and le Richard D Wolff certified marxist maymay theorist.
But fuck it, I don't want to rant. No, Capitalism is not just a system of exploitation, otherwise feudalism and capitalism would be identical (both systems exploit a labouring class, don't they?).
Only in capitalism do the means of production (in general) appear as capital. In pre-capitalist societies means of production were what the name says - means for production. The function of using a tool was to build something and then use / consume it. In capitalism however the mop are means for increasing themselves, they appear as capital. And the increase of capital is an end in itself, it doesn't follow any ulterior purpose. To support its growth capital relies on exploiting labor by retaining a part of the value labor has generated. So no you fuckwit there is no capital in socialism as socialism is the negation of the exploitation of labor.

nice argument fuckwit

and let me correct myself: not even use value can exist outside of the capitalist totality; it's through and through a capitalist category. As such it's as well mediated by capital as capital manages to form its own demand. What appears to be useful is dependent on the conditions surrounding accumulation.

Except that wrong, shitface, people like blacksmiths produces commodities to sell. The class of artisans was small, but it was still a class of people. Farmers did not smith their own ploughs, the smith did it for them. Its called division of labour.

Except it does in a simulated market, if you had bothered to read, since society as a whole decides what to use the capital on, the decide if they want to increase the collective capital of society and if so, which parts. It directly serves the wishes of society.

Are you seriously saying that in socialism/communism, we should not ever build new things to produce commodities with? To build ANYTHING, EVER, you need to use resources and labour. If everything is collectivised, even if money does not exist, you still need to allocate a part of what labour creates, and use it to create that new capital.

yeah, so? Capitalism was born out of feudalism. Dialectics motherfucker. And a blacksmith, artisan or peasant wasn't subjected to capital but to something that predatey capital, as their use of the means of production was limited to substitution and not a means to capital accumulation.

Capitalism is the mode of production wherein commodity production was GENERALIZED. There was even in fucking ancient greece commodity production to an extent performed and no one would call it capitalism ffs.

and what is the purpose of such a market, when the society as a whole can decide a production plan without using the market? Are you seriously implying that wide scale production is only possible through markets?

Yes motherfucker, full communism now and always.

Marx didn't characterize capital merely as an object. For him capital has a social dimension as well. In a society where the whole population decides about the production the means of production can't function as capital because capital implies private property, abstract labor and thus exploitation. In such a society labor is still exploited and thus it can't be called communism.

Hail satan

A simulated market allows for simple, relatively quick transition, the ability to exist as a socialist nation within a larger capitalist world (which i know you dont think is possible because muh instant worldwide revolution), it does solve the calculation problem, or rather, it gives us time to develop a solution to it, AND it gives us a convenient way to limit access to scarce goods, without needed a massive bureaucracy of labour vouchers which would need to validate or invalidate jobs or positions.

So yes, I am implying that wide scale production, as of this moment, is not instantly possible without markets.

Impossible

No it fucking doesn't. Just because you use the term "capital" to describe production tools doesn't mean they can be privately owned, hence you can't privately own capital. Its socialism, you can't privately own means of production. Stop being so autistic about words. Not calling means of producing commodities "capital" doesn't make it any different than if we keep using the normal, conventional, widely used definition. A factory owned by the workers is still fucking capital.

Made a minor ordering error:

should be behind

Have you read up on the "calculation problem" for planned economies? Here are two good (but long) articles by market socialists discussing the problems with getting rid of markets entirely:

archive.is/XHl3m

archive.is/L7E2j

Hell, im not even saying that the economic calculation problem can't be solved. It just can't be solved within a considerably short timespan and I would rather have a proven somewhat functional system that solves most of the issues while we work on programming a system to solve the economic calculation problem. To calculate the needs of the entire economy we would need a massive overhaul of information infrastructure, which is simply not realistic when you need to get a society running after a revolution.

Until we can solve that, I would rather use a simulated market to automatically do the logistics of price and use the output of the system to measure what society should invest in next.

im this guy, fyi

derp

Also you really dont need to archive jacobin.

What's derpy? I'm a different user from in case it wasn't obvious, he casually mentioned the calculation problem but I figured you can't count on the fact that or anyone else reading the thread would already know about it.

Bottom-level syndicates such as factories, offices, parent-teacher associations, and neighborhood councils would send recallable delegates up to something roughly on par with a city council. This would feed into a hierarchy of syndicates, about the same as our present municipality/county-district-state-federation tiers, manned by recallable delegates from the next level down. Such a system would probably extend to a region-continent-world level eventually.

The advantage over our current system is that political dissent would more easily be able to ripple up from the lowest levels and the smallest minorities, as well as that democracy would exist in even the far reaches of what is currently the "private" sphere like business and charity.

Will I decide to sell them or not, who to sell them to, and at what price?>>715576
Ok, so let me get this straight: someone will tell me (the workplace) what to sell, to who and at which price. I will have no say in that.
Do I get this right?