"Building socialism" vs. "achieving socialism" in a single country

[Die Neue Zeit]

Much of the sectarian pissing contest revolves around the vague policy of "socialism in one country." However, what does this phrase really mean?

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/620/macnair.htm


The problem of failure to grasp the character of the nation-state system as part of an international state system and subject to the world market was one the centre shared with the rightwing, and was more profoundly disastrous than the failure to grasp the problem of the class character of state forms. It, too, has its origins in Marx and Engels.

“Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie” (Communist Manifesto).

[...]

The growth of the SPD, however, gave rise to a shift in Engels’s attitude. An increased emphasis was placed on the defence of Germany as the country in which the workers’ movement was strongest. In 1891 the initial emergence of an alliance of France with Russia threatened a war in which Germany might be attacked on two fronts (as, in the event, happened in 1914).

Engels wrote to Bebel that “we must declare that since 1871 we have always been ready for a peaceful understanding with France, that as soon as our Party comes to power it will be unable to exercise that power unless Alsace-Lorraine freely determines its own future, but that if war is forced upon us, and moreover a war in alliance with Russia, we must regard this as an attack on our existence and defend ourselves by every method ...”

And “if we [Germany] are beaten, every barrier to chauvinism and a war of revenge in Europe will be thrown down for years hence. If we are victorious our party will come into power. The victory of Germany is therefore the victory of the revolution, and if it comes to war we must not only desire victory but further it by every means.”

The same position was publicly adopted by Bebel on behalf of the SPD, and Engels published it (as his own opinion) in France.

With this we have arrived at the position which the SPD took up in August 1914. It is, in fact, dictated by the inner-logic of the combination of the claims that “the proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie” and that the (nation-) state is “an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy”. In August 1914 these commitments left the centre as badly enmeshed in the defence of “national interests” as the right, and led them to support feeding the European working class into the mincing machine of the war.

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/737/stalinistillusions.html


Nonetheless, behind the screen of lies there is a heart and centre of the political problem and it is one still relevant today after the fall of the USSR, etc. This is the so-called ‘law of uneven development’. Trotsky, in fact, accepted this ‘law’ when it was thrown at him in the 1920s, and in The permanent revolution (1931) adapted it into the ‘law of uneven and combined development’.

The blunt fact is: even if it was Lenin, rather than his successors, who developed the idea of ‘building socialism in a single country’ on the basis of the ‘law of uneven development’, he was wrong: as is shown by the later history of the 20th century. And Trotsky’s adaptation of it was also wrong.

The ‘law of uneven development’ is, in fact, not a theoretical law at all. It is an abstract-empirical generalisation, like the bourgeois economists’ ‘law of supply and demand’. Like the ‘law of supply and demand’, it does not look below surface appearances, and as a result has only limited predictive power.

It would seem from the above that there's a significant difference between "building" and "achieving." Until the rather "revisionist" Congress of Victors, both sides agreed that achieving their common view of "socialism" within a single country was impossible. When one side gave way, some elements of that side went so far later on as to declare the achievement of "communism" within the USSR as something to be met by 1980... before other elements settled for the increasingly market-based mechanisms of "developed socialism," as pointed out by an ironically "revisionist" Enver Hoxha (since Mao was either too busy early on or dead later on).

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/ope/archive/0809/att-0160/leadershipconcepts.pdf


The achievements of the Stalin tyranny were undoubtedly impressive. A 21st century world, that looks on in amazement at China’s rapid ascent to economic super-power under a system of ’market socialism’, forgets the even faster industrialisation that planned socialism achieved in Russia during the 1930s and 1950s. And unlike the Chinese industrialisation, which has been socialist in name but capitalist in essence, the Russian industrialisation under the communists followed much more closely the prescription laid down in the Communist Manifesto and quoted earlier: ”The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.” The centralised, state owned economy established in the USSR during the late 1920s and early 1930s, is now stigmatised as ’Stalinist’, but was a perfectly orthodox implementation of the original Communist Manifesto.

[Note: By "socialism," Cockshott here refers to the traditional monetary conception of it.]



So, how many more complications will the Stalin era bring up?

[Q]

Socialism in one country is obviously impossible in todays world. Capitalism will isolate any individual socialist country, plus, if it isn't able to supercede capitalism, the socialist country will be forced to play in the imperialist game of country competition, where each country very much behaves like a company in its own right.

I also think though that we cannot wait for the magic day we see a united world revolution in which we tak over capitalism in one big swoop, that is just silly.

So we need to look at the things from a practical view: how will the revolution develop in its first instances? I think socialism can work if the revolution has at least reached a few of the capitalist "axis" countries (there are not that many of these anyway: USA, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, China, Japan and perhaps Russia) in order to overcome any isolation attempts and strive to supersede capitalism from an economical point of view. From that point on we can work our way outwards as the capitalist countries simply cannot "compete" to superior socialist economics and will know socialist revolutions in their own right.

Also, I think there is a need for communists to organise on an EU level, as the EU is more and more becoming a statelike structure. Besides, being able to transform the EU to socialism in one go, will mean an absolute lethal blow to capitalism!

[Intelligitimate]

“Thirdly, the victory of socialism in one country does not at one stroke eliminate all wars in general. On the contrary, it presupposes wars. The development of capitalism proceeds extremely unevenly in different countries. It cannot be otherwise under commodity production. From this it follows irrefutably that socialism cannot achieve victory simultaneously in all countries. It will achieve victory first in one or several countries, while the others will for some time remain bourgeois or pre-bourgeois. This is bound to create not only friction, but a direct attempt on the part of the bourgeoisie of other countries to crush the socialist state’s victorious proletariat. In such cases, a war on our part would be a legitimate and just war. It would be a war for socialism, for the liberation of other nations from the bourgeoisie. Engels was perfectly right when, in his letter to Kautsky of September 12, 1882, he clearly stated that it was possible for already victorious socialism to wage “defensive wars”. What he had in mind was defense of the victorious proletariat against the bourgeoisie of other countries.”
- The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution, 1916

[Vanguard1917]

The issue on which Lenin's Marxist perspective differed from the perspective of Stalinism was not whether a socialist party can come to power in a country while other countries remained capitalist -- obviously a socialist revolution is not going to take place everywhere at exactly the same moment. The difference of opinion was on whether a socialist society could be built in one country. Stalinists thought it could: they thought the society in Russia was a socialist one. Marxists like Lenin thought that it couldn't: they recognised that socialism cannot exist within the confines of a single, and furthermore backward, country while capitalism continued to exist at the centres of the world economic system.

[The Author]

This is an interesting matter. Macnair is right about Lenin being the originator of the concept of socialism in one country. I once mentioned this in a post I made nearly three years ago,

http://www.revleft.com/vb/national-bolsheviks-t34639/index.html?p=798893&highlight=country#post798893

I know people like to separate Lenin from Stalin over this matter, but the truth is quite the opposite. Take the time to read Lenin's Our Revolution, and you'll see why. Lenin stated clearly that Russia had all that was necessary to build socialism in that country without having to wait and becoming dependent on other countries for assistance or revolution.

I don't agree with Macnair however, on saying the law of uneven development is merely an abstraction. The fact that the level of development in dependent countries around the world is much lower compared to the more advanced capitalist countries is quite apparent. We might see "growth and development" in cities in China and Dubai and other countries where skyscrapers and businesses were multiplying over the past few years (before the financial crisis). But compared to the developed countries, the other countries are sharply behind in industrial and agricultural capability. I even think some of the developed countries have contradicting regions where development in some areas is better than development in other areas, which declined or lay fallow over the years.

The problem of socialism in one country depends on the country in question and the international situation. If multiple countries have revolution a la 1848 and we see the institution of socialism in different countries, that would make the progress through the transition much easier. But if we get a situation where only one country at a time initiates the socialist revolution, then we start to run into problems. In a large country like the U.S.S.R. or the P.R.C., the new socialist states would be mostly capable of solving a lot of problems on its own in terms of material resources and labor power without reliance on capitalist countries. But when it comes to a much smaller country, like Cuba, Albania, the DPRK, or Nepal, then matters become much trickier. You have the problems of acquiring and maintaining material resources, labor, finance, building and maintaining infrastructure, etc. You could try the socialism in one country path through "self-reliance," but it certainly is easier said than done, and ultimately you have to rely on other countries for support. In this case, revolutions in more than one country are ideal; but if such a condition is absent, you can only take your chances and borrow resources from capitalist countries- requiring a lot of diplomacy and negotiating and dealing, and making things very difficult. This, on top of the problem of bureaucracy and how to combat it while at the same time organizing a democratic centralist community among the workers on how to operate the economic, political, and cultural aspects of the country. Naturally, there will be problems, and contradictions. But that's part and parcel of the real world, and the best way to go about solving those problems is going step-by-step.

[Tower of Bebel]

I think a discussion about "what is socialism?" is in order. Lenin adored German state capitalism too much. The question of "monetary" socialism too raises questions about the what's socialism and what's meant by "the lower fase of communism". I think there are already 3 different conceptions of socialism to be found in this thread alone (based on the social definition of the Soviet Union).

(old thread btw).

[Vanguard1917]

I know people like to separate Lenin from Stalin over this matter, but the truth is quite the opposite. Take the time to read Lenin's Our Revolution, and you'll see why. Lenin stated clearly that Russia had all that was necessary to build socialism in that country without having to wait and becoming dependent on other countries for assistance or revolution.

Is that what he actually said? Which passage in 'Our Revolution' are you referring to?

[The Author]

Is that what he actually said? Which passage in 'Our Revolution' are you referring to? Yes. It was quoted in my old post, but I'm more than happy to re-quote the passage:


Infinitely stereotyped, for instance, is the argument they learned by rote during the development of West-European Social-Democracy, namely, that we are not yet ripe for socialism, but as certain "learned" gentleman among them put it, the objective economic premises for socialism do not exist in our country.Does it not occur to any of them to ask: what about the people that found itself in a revolutionary situation such as that created during the first imperialist war? Might it not, influenced by the hopelessness of its situation, fling itself into a struggle that would offer it at least some chance of securing conditions for the further development of civilization that were somewhat unusual?

"The development of the productive forces of Russia has not yet attained the level that makes socialism possible." All the heroes of the Second International, including, of course, Sukhanov, beat the drums about this proposition. They keep harping on this incontrovertible proposition in a thousand different keys, and think that it is decisive criterion of our revolution.

But what if the situation, which drew Russia into the imperialist world war that involved every more or less influential West European country and made her a witness of the eve of the revolutions maturing or partly already begun in the East, gave rise to circumstances that put Russia and her development in a position which enabled us to achieve precisely that combination of a "peasant war" with the working-class movement suggested in 1856 by no less a Marxist than Marx himself as a possible prospect for Prussia?

What if the complete hopelessness of the situation, by stimulating the efforts of the workers and peasants tenfold, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilization in a different way from that of the West European countries? Has that altered the general line of development of world history? Has that altered the basic relations between the basic classes of all the countries that are being, or have been, drawn into the general course of world history?

If a definite level of culture is required for the building of socialism (although nobody can say just what that definite "level of culture" is, for it differs in every Western European country), why cannot we began by first achieving the prerequisites for that definite level of culture in a revolutionary way, and then, with the aid of the workers' and peasants' government and Soviet system, proceed to overtake the other nations?

January 16, 1923
II

You say that civilization is necessary for the building of socialism. Very good. But why could we not first create such prerequisites of civilization in our country by the expulsion of the landowners and the Russian capitalists, and then start moving toward socialism? Where, in what books, have you read that such variations of the customary historical sequence of events are impermissible or impossible?http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/jan/16.htm

Here's a part of the passage which I didn't quote from my earlier post, but I think warrants some attention:


Our Sukhanovs, not to mention Social-Democrats still farther to the right, never even dream that revolutions cannot be made any other way. Our European philistines never even dream that the subsequent revolutions in Oriental countries, which possess much vaster populations in a much vaster diversity of social conditions, will undoubtedly display even greater distinctions than the Russian Revolution. The point is that in spite of the contradictions inherent in the different countries, it was still possible to build socialism and carry out the socialist revolution by rallying the workers and peasants to overthrow the capitalists and landlords and enact revolutionary changes. There was no waiting period, just an attempt to try to carry out revolution in one's own country no matter what the difficulties for bringing about the changes would be encountered.

[Dave B]

Building socialism meant building state capitalism as a minimum programme.



V. I. Lenin, REVISION OF THE PARTY PROGRAMME; October 1917



This is the objective state of affairs. In a revolutionary situation, during a revolution, however, state monopoly capitalism is directly transformed into socialism.

During a revolution it is impossible to move forward without moving towards socialism -- this is the objective state of affairs created by war and revolution. It was taken cognisance of by our April Conference, which put forward the slogans, "a Soviet Republic" (the political form of the dictatorship of the proletariat), and the nationalisation of banks and syndicates (a basic measure in the transition towards socialism). Up to this point all the Bolsheviks unanimously agree. But Comrades Smirnov and Bukharin want to go farther, they want to discard the minimum programme in toto.


http://www.marx2mao.net/Lenin/RPP17.html (http://www.marx2mao.net/Lenin/RPP17.html)


More like the ‘political domination of the working class by the organisational domination’ of the Jacobin Bolshevik Party, as Trotsky put it.


And;

V. I. Lenin THE IMPENDING CATASTROPHE AND HOW TO COMBAT IT October 1917






Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly.


http://www.marx2mao.net/Lenin/IC17.html (http://www.marx2mao.net/Lenin/IC17.html)

V. I. Lenin, SESSION OF THE ALL-RUSSIA C.E.C. APRIL 29, 1918





What is state capitalism under Soviet power? To achieve state capitalism at the present time means putting into effect the accounting and control that the capitalist classes carried out. We see a sample of state capitalism in Germany. We know that Germany has proved superior to us.

But if you reflect even slightly on what it would mean if the foundations of such state capitalism were established in Russia, Soviet Russia, everyone who is not out of his senses and has not stuffed his head with fragments of book learning, would have to say that state capitalism would be our salvation.
I said that state capitalism would be our salvation; if we had it in Russia, the transition to full socialism would he easy, would be within our grasp,


http://www.marx2mao.net/Lenin/SAR18.html (http://www.marx2mao.net/Lenin/SAR18.html)

and selected at random from the now infamous;

V. I. Lenin, "LEFT-WING" CHILDISHNESS AND THE PETTY-BOURGEOIS MENTALITY





To make things even clearer, let us first of all take the most concrete example of state capitalism. Everybody knows what this example is. It is Germany. Here we have "the last word" in modern large-scale capitalist engineering and planned organisation, subordinated to Junker-bourgeois imperialism. Cross out the words in italics, and in place of the militarist, Junker, bourgeois, imperialist state put also a state, but of a different social type, of a different class content -- a Soviet state, that is, a proletarian state, and you will have the sum total of the conditions necessary for socialism.




http://www.marx2mao.net/Lenin/LWC18.html#s3 (http://www.marx2mao.net/Lenin/LWC18.html)


And while we are there how does;


V. I. Lenin THE MILITARY PROGRAMME OF THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION





Thirdly, the victory of socialism in one country does not at one stroke eliminate all war in general. On the contrary, it presupposes wars. The development of capitalism proceeds extremely unevenly in different countries. It cannot be otherwise under commodity production. From this it follows irrefutably that socialism cannot achieve victory simultaneously in all countries. It will achieve victory first in one or several countries, while the others will for some time remain bourgeois or pre-bourgeois.


This is bound to create not only friction, but a direct attempt on the part of the bourgeoisie of other countries to crush the socialist state's victorious proletariat. In such cases a war on our part would be a legitimate and just war. It would be a war for socialism, for the liberation of other nations from the bourgeoisie. Engels was perfectly right when, in his letter to Kautsky of September 12, 1882, he clearly stated that it was possible for already victorious socialism to wage "defensive wars". What he had in mind was defence of the victorious proletariat against the bourgeoisie of other countries.


http://www.marx2mao.net/Lenin/MPPR16.html (http://www.marx2mao.net/Lenin/MPPR16.html)


link up to the Brest Treaty where ‘The Lefts dare not put the question in a straightforward manner. ‘

[More Fire for the People]

The missing addendum to "socialism in one country" is "and other ones that are ready too".

[Vanguard1917]

Yes, that's almost the whole article, but where does Lenin say that socialism could be built in Russia alone?

We're talking about a person who was over and again categorical that the survival of workers' power in Russia depends on the spreading of the revolution to other countries.



We always staked our play upon an international revolution and this was unconditionally right ... we always emphasized ... the fact that in one country it is impossible to accomplish such a work as a socialist revolution.




...you all know to what extent capital is an international force, to what extent all the big capitalist enterprises, factories, shops, etc., all over the world are linked up together; this makes it obvious that in substance capital cannot be completely defeated in one country. It is an international force, and in order to rout it the workers must also make a concerted effort on an international scale. Ever since 1917, when we fought the bourgeois-republican governments in Russia, and ever since the power of the Soviets was established at the end of 1917, we have been telling the workers again and again that the cardinal task, and the fundamental condition of our victory is to spread the revolution to, at least, a few of the most advanced countries.





...from the very beginning of the October Revolution, foreign policy and international relations have been the main questions facing us. Not merely because from now on all the states in the world are being firmly linked by imperialism into a single system, or rather, into one dirty, bloody mass, but because the complete victory of the socialist revolution in one country alone is inconceivable and demands the most active co-operation of at least several advanced countries, which do not include Russia. Hence one of the main problems of the revolution is now the extent to which we succeed in broadening the revolution in other countries too, and the extent to which we succeed meanwhile in warding off imperialism.




The proletariat has been victorious in one country, but it is still weak internationally. It must unite all the workers and peasants around itself in the knowledge that the war is not over. Although in our anthem we sing: “The last fight let us face", unfortunately it is not quite true; it is not our last fight. Either you succeed in uniting the workers and peasants in this fight, or you fail to achieve victory.




Everyone knows the difficulties of a revolution. It may begin with brilliant success in one country and then go through agonising periods, since final victory is only possible on a world scale, and only by the joint efforts of the workers of all countries.


emphases mine

[Die Neue Zeit]

Why do you confuse "building" with "achieving"? And how do transitional measures fit in?

[Vanguard1917]

Why do you confuse "building" with "achieving"?

In what sense?

[Die Neue Zeit]

Technically speaking, when one country has undergone proletocratic revolution and others haven't, and when said country enacts transitional (http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/6th-congress/ch04.htm) measures (http://www.marxists.org/archive/thalheimer/works/strategy.htm), that country *is* "building socialism in one country."

While that phrase later on became a cover for "achieving" (culminating in the 1934 Congress of Victors and later on Khrushchev's bogus 1980 remark), Trotsky meanwhile was very confused about the difference between "transitional" slogans and transitional measures (hence his economistic Transitional Program (http://www.revleft.com/vb/transitional-program-updated-t99491/index.html)). This confusion was exploited by Stalin and co. by means of wrongfully charging Trotsky with "defeatism."

It would indeed be defeatist if a country that has undergone a proletocratic revolution doesn't immediately implement some transitional measures.

[New Tet]

Socialism in one country is obviously impossible in todays world. Capitalism will isolate any individual socialist country, plus, if it isn't able to supercede capitalism, the socialist country will be forced to play in the imperialist game of country competition, where each country very much behaves like a company in its own right.

I also think though that we cannot wait for the magic day we see a united world revolution in which we tak over capitalism in one big swoop, that is just silly.

So we need to look at the things from a practical view: how will the revolution develop in its first instances? I think socialism can work if the revolution has at least reached a few of the capitalist "axis" countries (there are not that many of these anyway: USA, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, China, Japan and perhaps Russia) in order to overcome any isolation attempts and strive to supersede capitalism from an economical point of view. From that point on we can work our way outwards as the capitalist countries simply cannot "compete" to superior socialist economics and will know socialist revolutions in their own right.

Also, I think there is a need for communists to organise on an EU level, as the EU is more and more becoming a statelike structure. Besides, being able to transform the EU to socialism in one go, will mean an absolute lethal blow to capitalism!

A capitalist United States will never stand for a socialist revolution ANYWHERE in the world.

However,I am convinced that a working class revolution that brings about socialism can occur only in a highly industrialized country whose numerical majority is proletarian. I am sure many of you agree at least in principle with this assertion.

Moreover, it seems logical to me that the most fertile ground for socialism is the United States. The U.S. working class must take the lead in overthrowing its ruling class. If the U.S. becomes socialist, who can stand against its might?

This may sound controversial to some (and possibly even outlandish and unfounded to others), but I am not too sure that the American working class, in spite of their clear advantage and opportunity, will step up to the plate and take the lead. Consequently, the U.S. may have to pass through a dark period of fascism (or a more extreme and authoritarian capitalism) before its people decide to swing completely to the left and abolish its economic system.

[Vanguard1917]

Technically speaking, when one country has undergone proletocratic revolution and others haven't, and when said country enacts transitional (http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/6th-congress/ch04.htm) measures (http://www.marxists.org/archive/thalheimer/works/strategy.htm), that country *is* "building socialism in one country."

Yes, technically speaking I basically agree (since building socialism is a process which includes the initial task of overthrowing the bourgeoisie). But is that the same as the Stalinist argument that socialism can be built within the confines of Russia?

[Black Sheep]

Why do you confuse "building" with "achieving"? And how do transitional measures fit in?
And also why do you continuously quote Lenin?
This thread is not about 'did Lenin thought this' or 'that', and even if he did, we do not have to accept his opinion.

Stop quoting Lenin like the quote alone constitutes an argument to your case.
He is not the Pope ffs.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I didn't quote Lenin. I think you had the wrong poster in mind.

[Paul Cockshott]

Yes, technically speaking I basically agree (since building socialism is a process which includes the initial task of overthrowing the bourgeoisie). But is that the same as the Stalinist argument that socialism can be built within the confines of Russia?
What is a country, what is not a country?
What is socialism, what is not socialism?

Unless you are agreed on these things the discussion will lead nowhere.

[Kwisatz Haderach]

What is a country, what is not a country?
Very good point. Is China a country in the same sense that Luxemburg is a country, for the purpose of this argument? I think not.

Rather than declaring the impossibility of "socialism in one country", I think it would be more correct to say that the possibility of building socialism increases with the size of the territory involved. The greater the territory, the easier it is to build socialism there. If you've got the entire planet, it is easiest of all.

[Vanguard1917]

Rather than declaring the impossibility of "socialism in one country", I think it would be more correct to say that the possibility of building socialism increases with the size of the territory involved. The greater the territory, the easier it is to build socialism there.

I disagree. It has less to do with the size of the country's territory and more to do with its economic and political world significance. That's why Lenin repeatedly emphasised that socialism could not be built in Russia without revolution is at least a few of the advanced capitalist countries.

[ZeroNowhere]

Well, to be fair, there is some validity in the statement, so long as it is not taken as a complete guide to stuff (hell, what if a lot of it is tundra?). A country which is large would probably possess more resources, and as such be able to function with less dependence on other countries. For example, Singapore relies on trade for even water and such. However, I am skeptical of the chances of any country being able to build, and certainly maintain socialism on its own. Some socialist communes have existed, of course, but a country is a far larger territory, and the world a larger territory still, and given the state of said communes, if we're looking to raise people's standards of life significantly, it would also be necessary to do more over said territory as well. If a country is still in mainly a peasant economy, then it's quite likely that for everybody to even have enough food to be fairly healthy, production would have to be collectivized (and grabbing peasants to chuck them in shitty factories is what capitalism does). Perhaps this could be done fairly painlessly by building off already existing peasant communes (there are very few, but also quite few peasants, nowadays, though there probably are some drifting around here and there), as well as with help from more developed countries to avoid having to build up their own industry, and hence develop socialized labour to the point where capitalism's hierarchical social relations would choke it, rather than developing it further. Of course, that's perhaps not especially relevant to modern society, but it does give an example of a country requiring aid to build socialism due to lack of production, and lack of resources would have a similar effect (unless we are to rely upon capitalist countries for trade).

[The Author]

Yes, that's almost the whole article, but where does Lenin say that socialism could be built in Russia alone?

He is saying that it is possible to build socialism in Russia and that it cannot be built only in the Western European countries. Russia had all of the resources and labor power necessary to carry out revolution. The common conception drawn by many leftists is that Russia was too severely backward to carry out revolution of any kind- that the only way revolution could be carried out was in the Western European countries first. This was something that was adopted by Trotsky- without revolution in Western Europe, any chances Russia had were doomed because it would slip into backwardness and "reaction" as he claimed. The downplaying of Russia's ability to build a socialist society was a trend which Lenin is criticizing.


We're talking about a person who was over and again categorical that the survival of workers' power in Russia depends on the spreading of the revolution to other countries.I agree with you. And the reason is because this was actually Stalin's position as well:


Can the victory of Socialism in one country be regarded as final if this country is encircled by capitalism, and if it is not fully guaranteed against the danger of intervention and restoration?

Clearly, it cannot, This is the position in regard to the question of the victory of Socialism in one country.

It follows that this question contains two different problems :

1. The problem of the internal relations in our country, i.e., the problem of overcoming our own bourgeoisie and building complete Socialism; and

2. The problem of the external relations of our country, i.e., the problem of completely ensuring our country against the dangers of military intervention and restoration.

We have already solved the first problem, for our bourgeoisie has already been liquidated and Socialism has already been built in the main. This is what we call the victory of Socialism, or, to be more exact, the victory of Socialist Construction in one country.

We could say that this victory is final if our country were situated on an island and if it were not surrounded by numerous capitalist countries.

But as we are not living on an island but "in a system of States," a considerable number of which are hostile to the land of Socialism and create the danger of intervention and restoration, we say openly and honestly that the victory of Socialism in our country is not yet final.

But from this it follows that the second problem is not yet solved and that it has yet to be solved.

More than that : the second problem cannot be solved in the way that we solved the first problem, i.e., solely by the efforts of our country.

The second problem can be solved only by combining the serious efforts of the international proletariat with the still more serious efforts of the whole of our Soviet people.

The international proletarian ties between the working class of the U.S.S.R. and the working class in bourgeois countries must be increased and strengthened; the political assistance of the working class in the bourgeois countries for the working class of our country must be organized in the event of a military attack on our country; and also every assistance of the working class of our country for the working class in bourgeois countries must be organized; our Red Army, Red Navy, Red Air Fleet, and the Chemical and Air Defence Society must be increased and strengthened to the utmost.

The whole of our people must be kept in a state of mobilisation and preparedness in the face of the danger of a military attack, so that no "accident" and no tricks on the part of our external enemies may take us by surprise . . .
I would like unpleasant things like capitalist encirclement, the danger of military attack, the danger of the restoration of capitalism, etc., to be things of the past. Unfortunately, however, these unpleasant things still exist.
To proceed. Formerly, the victory of the revolution in one country was considered impossible, on the assumption that it would require the combined action of the proletarians of all or at least of a majority of the advanced countries to achieve victory over the bourgeoisie. Now this point of view no longer fits in with the facts. Now we must proceed. from the possibility of such a victory; for the uneven and spasmodic character of the development of the various capitalist countries under the conditions of imperialism, the development within imperialism of catastrophic contradictions leading to inevitable wars, the growth of the revolutionary movement in all countries of the world -- all this leads, not only to the possibility, but also to the necessity of the victory of the proletariat in individual countries. The history of the revolution in Russia is direct proof of this. At the same time, however, it must be borne in mind that the overthrow of the bourgeoisie can be successfully accomplished only when certain absolutely necessary conditions exist, in the absence of which there can be even no question of the proletariat taking power.
But the overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie and establishment of the power of the proletariat in one country does not yet mean that the complete victory of socialism has been ensured, The principal task of socialism -- the organization of socialist production -- has still to be fulfilled. Can this task be fulfilled, can the final victory of socialism be achieved in one country, without the joint efforts of the proletarians in several advanced countries? No, it cannot. To overthrow the bourgeoisie the efforts of one country are sufficient; this is proved by the history of our revolution. For the final victory of socialism, for the organization of socialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of a peasant country like Russia, are insufficient; for that, the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries are required.The point is that socialist revolutions are achieved on a country-by-country basis as dominoes in the international tide of revolution. A fallacious attempt has been made in driving a schism in the idea of "socialism in one country" from international revolution. In fact, looking at the matter dialectically, socialism in one country- that is, individual countries- are the quantitative changes which lead to international revolution and victory of the international working class as a whole- which are the qualitative changes in the world situation. Going by a country-by-country basis of revolution, this eventually leads to an international victory of the world working class when more and more countries turn to socialism, imperialism is defeated, and the road to communism the second phase is assured.

[Vanguard1917]

He is saying that it is possible to build socialism in Russia and that it cannot be built only in the Western European countries.

You're claiming he is saying that. I'm asking where. I have shown you quotes where Lenin categorically states that socialism cannot be built in Russia without revolution in the advanced capitalist countries.


I agree with you.

In what way? You just said you disagree.



This was something that was adopted by Trotsky


A person who played a pivotal role in leading the Russian Revolution thought that 'Russia was too severely backward to carry out revolution'?

What Trotsky argued was that it was impossible to safeguard workers' rule in Russia without revolution breaking out in the advanced capitalist countries. And, as we have seen, that was exactly the position upheld by Lenin.

[Paul Cockshott]

What Trotsky argued was that it was impossible to safeguard workers' rule in Russia without revolution breaking out in the advanced capitalist countries. And, as we have seen, that was exactly the position upheld by Lenin.
And for that matter by Stalin

Can our working class and our peasantry, by their own efforts, without the serious assistance of the working class in capitalist countries, overcome the bourgeoisie of other countries in the same way as we overcame our own bourgeoisie? In other words :
Can we regard the victory of Socialism in our country as final, i.e., as being free from the dangers of military attack and of attempts to restore capitalism, assuming that Socialism is victorious only in one country and that the capitalist encirclement continues to exist?
Such are the problems that are connected with the second side of the question of the victory of Socialism in our country.
Leninism answers these problems in the negative.
Leninism teaches that "the final victory of Socialism, in the sense of full guarantee against the restoration of bourgeois relations, is possible only on an international scale" (c.f. resolution of the Fourteenth Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union).
This means that the serious assistance of the international proletariat is a force without which the problem of the final victory of Socialism in one country cannot be solved.

(On the Final Victory of Socialism, 1938)

One should not make to much of the differences between Stalin and Trotsky on this.

[Led Zeppelin]

One should not make to much of the differences between Stalin and Trotsky on this.

Or one should:


Recently, on March 8, 1930, Pravda expounded anew Stalin’s ill-starred theory, in the sense that ‘socialism, as a social-economic formation,’ that is, as a definite system of production relations, can be fully realized ‘on the national scale of the USSR.’ Something else again is ‘the final victory of socialism’ in the sense of a guarantee against the intervention of capitalist encirclement – such a final victory of socialism ‘actually demands the triumph of the proletarian revolution in several advanced countries.’

Link (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/prge.htm)

The same is also said in the article you quoted from above, but you left that part out for some strange reason, so I'll add it:


Undoubtedly the question of the victory of Socialism in one country, in this case our country, has two different sides.

The first side of the question of the victory of Socialism in our country embraces the problem of the mutual relations between classes in our country. This concerns the sphere of internal relations.

Can the working class of our country overcome the contradictions with our peasantry and establish an alliance, collaboration with them?

Can the working class of our country, in alliance - with our peasantry, smash the bourgeoisie of our country, deprive it of the land, factories, mines, etc., and by its own efforts build a new, classless society, complete Socialist society?

Such are the problems that are connected with the first side of the question of the victory of Socialism in our country.

Leninism answers these problems in the affirmative.

Lenin teaches us that "we have all that is necessary for the building of a complete Socialist society."

Hence we can and must, by our own efforts, overcome our bourgeoisie and build Socialist society.
Link (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/01/18.htm)

By the way, I'm not really defending Trotsky against Stalin or vice versa here. Both sides have had their differing positions on this issue for decades; I'm merely pointing it out once more.

Regarding the "safeguarding of the revolution", Trotsky goes on after the quote I posted above and says this, which makes a lot of sense and shows how important the theoretical and practical consequences of the differences of his and Stalin's position on this issue are:


If we assume for a minute the possibility of realizing socialism as a finished social system within the isolated framework of the USSR, then that would be the ‘final victory’ – because in that case what talk could there be about a possible intervention? The socialist order presupposes high levels of technology and culture and solidarity of population. Since the USSR., at the moment of complete construction of socialism, will have, it must be assumed, a population of between 200,000,000 and 250,000.000, we then ask: What intervention could even be talked of then? What capitalist country, or coalition of countries, would dare think of intervention in these circumstances? The only conceivable intervention could come from the side of the USSR. But would it be needed? Hardly. The example of a backward country, which in the course of several Five-Year Plans was able to construct a mighty socialist society with its own forces, would mean a death blow to world capitalism, and would reduce to a minimum, if not to zero, the costs of the world proletarian revolution. This is why the whole Stalinist conception actually leads to the liquidation of the Communist International. And indeed, what would be its historical significance, if the fate of socialism is to be decided by the highest possible authority – the State Planning Commission of the USSR? In that case, the task of the Comintern, along with the notorious ‘Friends of the Soviet Union,’ would be to protect the construction of socialism from intervention, that is, in essence, to play the role of frontier patrols.

The entire thing just becomes absurd when you follow it to its logical conclusion.

[Die Neue Zeit]

And for that matter by Stalin

(On the Final Victory of Socialism, 1938)

One should not make to much of the differences between Stalin and Trotsky on this.

Comrade, I think Stalin was vacillating again. This was the time when Stalin:

1) Engaged in Popular Front antics in Spain (Macnair wrote in his RS book about the problems of popular frontism, based on the binary "unity with agreement, no unity without agreement" collaboration with the liberal bourgeoisie while shooting anarchists and other leftists opposed to this binary thinking);
2) Declared the "achievement" of socialism in the Congress of Victors (hence this rather productive thread, after all the typical RevLeft Trotsky-Stalin bashing threads and amateurish takes on "socialism in one country"); and
3) Engaged in reckless purging (killing many who shouldn't have been killed and not killing many of those who should've been).

As for LZ's circular elaboration of what Stalin said, again it goes back to the thread title: "building" vs. "achieving."

[Paul Cockshott]

Or one should:

Recently, on March 8, 1930, Pravda expounded anew Stalin’s ill-starred theory, in the sense that ‘socialism, as a social-economic formation,’ that is, as a definite system of production relations, can be fully realized ‘on the national scale of the USSR.

That presumably was written by Trotsky.
Well you have to ask what they meant by socialism a social economic formation then, since the socio economic formation of the USSR in say 1960 was indeed very different from capitalism, and in terms of the way the term socialism had been used by the 2nd international, was substantially socialist.

Now we can, in retrospect have criticisms of the 2nd international view of what socialism was - in particular the argument by Kautsky that socialism should remain a monetary economy, but this conception of socialism was the shared foundation on which the debates in the CPSU took place in the 20s and 30s. None of the participants had made a fundamental critique of that concept of socialism.

What do you mean by socialism as a socio economic formation?

You then quote Trotsky as saying:
If we assume for a minute the possibility of realizing socialism as a finished social system within the isolated framework of the USSR, then that would be the ‘final victory’ – because in that case what talk could there be about a possible intervention? The socialist order presupposes high levels of technology and culture and solidarity of population. Since the USSR., at the moment of complete construction of socialism, will have, it must be assumed, a population of between 200,000,000 and 250,000.000, we then ask: What intervention could even be talked of then? What capitalist country, or coalition of countries, would dare think of intervention in these circumstances? The only conceivable intervention could come from the side of the USSR. But would it be needed? Hardly. The example of a backward country, which in the course of several Five-Year Plans was able to construct a mighty socialist society with its own forces, would mean a death blow to world capitalism, and would reduce to a minimum, if not to zero, the costs of the world proletarian revolution.

This was indeed the situation which prevailed by the 1960s and led Kruschov to the confident boast to the USA : we will bury you. At that time the USSR served as a model to people in the 3rd world, and seemed on course to overtake the USA and the West.
Trotsky seriously underestimates the resilience of capitalism. The huge economic success of the USSR did not promote general revolution in the West, though it certainly was a propaganda boost to the CPs in the West at that time.
Yes no capitalist countries or coalition of such was able to think of intervention, but they were able to think of 'containment' and a cold war that lasted 45 years.

[quote]The entire thing just becomes absurd when you follow it to its logical conclusion. [\quote]
what is absurd ?
It may have been unpalatable or absurd to Trotsky in the 1930s, but it was more or less what happened in the 2nd half of the century.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Now we can, in retrospect have criticisms of the 2nd international view of what socialism was - in particular the argument by Kautsky that socialism should remain a monetary economy

Comrade, going beyond the "textbook a la Kautsky" (quoting Lenin from 1923 (http://cpgb.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/kautsky-lenin-aspects1.doc)) is something that can't be done properly without appreciating the core of his work, which was on other questions. LZ's conception of socialism is quite monetary (based on Mandel), so he is a "Kautskyite" in the wrong areas.


Trotsky seriously underestimates the resilience of capitalism.

Hence his confused musings on the word "transitional," his inability to differentiate between "transitional" slogans and transitional measures:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/transitional-demands-and-t113345/index.html
http://www.revleft.com/vb/genuinely-transitional-directional-t110383/index.html
http://www.revleft.com/vb/municipal-development-bank-t114824/index.html
http://www.revleft.com/vb/nationalisations-free-services-t116489/index.html
http://www.revleft.com/vb/transitional-program-updated-t99491/index.html

[Led Zeppelin]

That presumably was written by Trotsky.
Well you have to ask what they meant by socialism a social economic formation then, since the socio economic formation of the USSR in say 1960 was indeed very different from capitalism, and in terms of the way the term socialism had been used by the 2nd international, was substantially socialist.

You're confusing building socialism with socialism reached as a historical stage of development.

Stalin said in the quote I posted (which you entirely ignored) that the USSR could build such a society by itself: "Can the working class of our country, in alliance - with our peasantry, smash the bourgeoisie of our country, deprive it of the land, factories, mines, etc., and by its own efforts build a new, classless society, complete Socialist society? [...] Leninism answers these problems in the affirmative."


What do you mean by socialism as a socio economic formation?

It's an irrelevant question (for my answer you can read Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky) because Stalin is saying that a classless society, a "complete socialist" one, could be built within the confines of the USSR.


This was indeed the situation which prevailed by the 1960s and led Kruschov to the confident boast to the USA : we will bury you. At that time the USSR served as a model to people in the 3rd world, and seemed on course to overtake the USA and the West.

Even though this is a side-discussion:

Actually, no, it wasn't the situation which prevailed by the 1960's, because when Trotsky refers to a "complete socialist society" (as does Stalin, by the way) they are speaking of a society which is materially and technologically on a higher level than the most advanced capitalist society has reached near.

In other words, the USSR by the 60's would have to have overtaken materially and technologically the US, which it hadn't. It also wasn't a "classless" society, but it's not important to dwell on that point since the other suffices.


Trotsky seriously underestimates the resilience of capitalism.

Or you seriously misunderstood what Trotsky and Stalin were saying.



what is absurd ?
It may have been unpalatable or absurd to Trotsky in the 1930s, but it was more or less what happened in the 2nd half of the century.

It's absurd to any serious Marxist to believe that a country can build a classless society within its own borders while all around it capitalist systems which are much more advanced are in existence.

Not just to Trotsky in the 30's, but to all of them even today.

As for what JR says about me or my posts; it's irrelevant since he's a common troll who I couldn't care less about.

[Die Neue Zeit]

As for what JR says about me or my posts; it's irrelevant since he's a common troll who I couldn't care less about.

"... Build a new, classless society, complete Socialist society": The textual emphasis is still on "building" rather than "achieving," notwithstanding what happened in real life, and notwithstanding your usual slander.

[Q]

Keep it civil kids.

[Paul Cockshott]

In answer to me asking what is socialism Led Zepplin wrote


It's an irrelevant question (for my answer you can read Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky) because Stalin is saying that a classless society, a "complete socialist" one, could be built within the confines of the USSR.


I would submit that this is far from irrelevant, since unless there is agreement on this the whole debate is pointless.

In the sense in which class was understood in the 2nd international, relating to ownership of the means of production, then the USSR in 1960 was a classless society. The official doctrine was that workers and collective farmers no longer constituted two distinct classes. The old class of peasants had vanished, as had landlords and capitalists. Hence Kruschov could argue for a 'state of the whole people', basing himself on good premises in the Communist Manifesto.

It is only if you take a Maoist position that the situation is different. The Maoists argue that there was a new state bourgeoisie and that under Kruschov capitalism was being reintroduced. Mao of course argued that socialism remained a form of class society.

Thus even if one took Mao's position that classes still existed in Russia in the 50s, that was not a deciding point.

What is missing from all these positions, and your own, is a theory of socialism as a mode of production.

All historical social formations have been characterized by a combination of economic modes of production. We conventionally speak of these modes of production being structured into dominant and subordinate modes, so that we speak of whole periods in which a particular mode of production is dominant. Thus we talk of capitalist societies or slave societies, even though slavery and capitalism may co-exist within a given society.
How does one decide which mode of production dominates a society?


One answer would be to look at the state, which social class dominates. One might on these grounds say that for most of the ante-bellum period the USA was dominated by the slave mode of production, in the sense that the representatives of the slave owners dominated the political system. But behind such political dominance stands wealth. A class can control the state if the economic system they represent provides them with the resources to do so. The shift of political control over the US from slavers to industrialists echoed economic development.



To control the state, a class must control the greater part of a society’s surplus product. Underlying political dominance is control over surplus labour.


What differentiate the contesting forms of economy are two things:


The specific mode in which the social division of labour is organised.
The particular way in which a surplus product is extracted.


The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers - a relation naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity, - which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of state. Marx Capital 3, p791

In the socialist mode of production the division of labour is regulated not by the market but by deliberate planning. The form of extraction of the surplus product that follows from this is also distinct. It is not surplus exchange value of individual enterprises, but instead the surplus is specified in use value form by the plan. If the plan specifies an output in terms of tanks, sputniks and new damns, that output, by it very nature as use values is part of the surplus. This planned, in-natura form of surplus extraction is unique to the socialist mode of production. And this form existed in the USSR.

[Paul Cockshott]

In a socialist economy the extraction of a surplus product takes place by means of a politically determined division of the material product between consumer goods and other products in the state plan. This is socialism's `` innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure ''. Its system of extracting a surplus is quite different from under capitalism in the following respects:


The division of the product is determined directly in material terms rather then indirectly as a result of exchange relations.
The division is determined centrally rather than through numerous local bargains over the price of labour power, hours worked etc.
The actual level of money wages is irrelevant because the supplies of consumer goods are predetermined in the plan. Higher money wages do not necessarily result in increased real wages. Besides which a large part of the real wage is in the form of free or subsidised goods.

This form of extraction rises out of the highly integrated and socialised character of production under socialism. From it is developed the absolute necessity of individual factories being subordinated to the center, and the comparative irrelevance of their individual profitablility. Following on it determines the centralised character of the state and the impossibility of local authorities having an autonomous disposition over resources. All these are invariant characteristics of socialism.

This innermost secret determines the relationship of rulers and ruled as follows; consider two possibilities, either the rulers and the ruled are distinct groups, or they are one and the same.
If, as in hitherto exisiting socialism, they are distinct, then whoever controls the planning authority is both the effective owner of the means of production, and a ruler. These rulers (in practice have the central committee of the communist party), though often venal, can not fulfill their social function by the shameless bourgeois pursuit of self interest. They are compelled instead, to take on the highly social and public role, of so organising the political and ideological life of the society, as to ensure compliance with the plan. One of the most effective ways of doing this is through the cult of a charismatic leader, backed to a greater or lesser extent by state terror.



Personality cults, in which the leader is presented as the General Will incarnate are no accident, but an efficient adaptation to the contradictory demands of a socialist mode of production ( which dictates the dominance of political over civil society), combined with institutions of representative government.

[Die Neue Zeit]

The details of what you said above remind me of my rather brief readings of Mandel, when he argued for the "degenerated workers' state" position over SWP founder Tony Cliff's "state capitalism."

[Paul Cockshott]

The details of what you said above remind me of my rather brief readings of Mandel, when he argued for the "degenerated workers' state" position over SWP founder Tony Cliff's "state capitalism."
It is a long time since that came out so I am a bit rusty on what Mandel said there, but if I recall he only had one of the two points I make above:
that the coordination mechanism was different

He does not develop a concept of the socialist mode of production having a specific mode of surplus extraction.

[Dave B]

I think I agree with the logic of an earlier poster you need to define what socialism is before you can decide whether or not a ‘country’ is big enough for it.

If it just a matter of whether or not it is possible to have state capitalism in one country backward or otherwise then the debate is dead, as we have little Cuba.

Uncle Joe did a passable take on what Socialism/Communism was in 1907.

J. V. Stalin, ANARCHISM or SOCIALISM?




"Future society will be socialist society. This means, lastly, that in that society the abolition of wage-labour"



"labour will be equal, and in society the genuine communist principle will prevail: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Here there is no room for wage-labour."



"Lastly, it is obvious that free and comradely labour should result in an equally comradely, and complete, satisfaction of all needs in the future socialist society This means that if future society demands from each of its members as much labour as he can perform, it, in its turn, must provide each member with all the products he needs. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! -- such is the basis upon which the future collectivist system must be created."




"At the head of this dictatorship stand the masses; here there is no room either for a camarilla or for secret decisions, here everything is done openly, in the streets, at meetings -- because it is the dictatorship of the street, of the masses, a dictatorship directed against all oppressors."



http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/AS07.html (http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/AS07.html)

Also within that Uncle Joe quotes from Engels a bit of an SPGB favourite;


"The society that will organise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the Museum of Antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe" (see The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State)"



And incidentally a bit from Lenins two tactics stuff about supporting the bourgeois revolution etc;



"In order that all this may be acquired, what is called political freedom is needed, i.e., freedom of speech, press, strikes and association, in short, freedom to wage the class struggle.

But political freedom is not equally ensured everywhere. Therefore, the conditions under which it is obliged to wage the struggle: under a feudal autocracy (Russia), a constitutional monarchy (Germany), a big bourgeois republic (France), or under a democratic republic (which Russian Social-Democracy is demanding), are not a matter of indifference to the proletariat.

Political freedom is best and most fully ensured in a democratic republic, that is, of course, in so far as it can be ensured under capitalism at all. Therefore, all advocates of proletarian socialism necessarily strive for the establishment of a democratic republic as the best "bridge" to socialism."


Incidentally Uncle Joe was here arguing against and dismissing silly Kropotkinist concerns about what the Bolsheviks were really about and what they might do if they got into power.

Kropotkin’s collectivism kind of thing was reiterated later on, not having changed much and therefore valid even if it a somewhat lazy and anachronistic re statement of it;


http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/kropotkin-peter/1920/wage.htm (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/kropotkin-peter/1920/wage.htm)

[robbo203]

In the socialist mode of production the division of labour is regulated not by the market but by deliberate planning. The form of extraction of the surplus product that follows from this is also distinct. It is not surplus exchange value of individual enterprises, but instead the surplus is specified in use value form by the plan. If the plan specifies an output in terms of tanks, sputniks and new damns, that output, by it very nature as use values is part of the surplus. This planned, in-natura form of surplus extraction is unique to the socialist mode of production. And this form existed in the USSR.

This analysis is fundamentally flawed in several respects. On one point (in this post) you are correct though. It is vitally important to define what we mean by socialism. If you are talking about the pre-Leninist definition of socialism - as a non market stateless form of society - then we would be basically referring to a radically different mode of production to what you characterise as "socialism" and claim was evident in the form of the USSR. By this pre-Leninist definition of "socialism" the USSR was certainly not socialist. Rather, it exhibited all of the primary features we associate with capitalism such as wage labour, commopdity production and markets. In short the USSR was a form of state capitalism by the classical marxian definition of the term.

But this is not what the main burden of this post is about. What I am mainly concerned with here is to criticise what I consider to be your rather naive approach to the role and significance of planning in the Soviet Union. To say that the economy was not regulated by the market but by planning is a gross exaggeration.


FIRSTLY, as Buick and Crump have noted, citing Bettelheim, in their book
State Capitalism: The Wages System under New Management (Macmillan, London, 1986): when we talk about planning we need to ask ourselves what is being planned and that to counterpose planning to the market is "naive": What state capitalist regimes vainly attempt to do in the field of production of the means of production is not to supplant the market by means of the plan but rather to plan market transactions between enterprises. ...Clearly such an economy is not a free market economy , but it is a market economy , albeit one which is moulded and influenced by the constant attentions of the planners (op cit p.82-3, their emphasis)

Whether or not this approach used was flawed is, of course, a quite separate issue. Enthusiasts point to strong growth of the Soviet Union in the early decades particularly in the heavy industries as evidence of the superiority of "planning" over the "market"; sceptics on the hand, see the marked decline in growth rates in later decades, and the clear signs of stagnation, as evidence of the inherent weakness of the planned economy vis-a-vis unregulated markets in its ability to manage an increasingly complex and diversified economy.

What cannot be doubted, however, is the existence of markets themselves - not only in consumer goods but in factors of production as well. As Wayne Price has noted: Firms made legally binding contracts with each other for raw materials and productive machines, which were paid for by credits (money) in the central banks. Therefore, not only were consumer goods and labor power commodities, but means of production were also commodities, bought and sold among firms.
(State Capitalism vs Libertarian Socialism).

It was the same with labour power - it too was a commodity bought and sold on the market like any other - notwithstandig Stalin's ridiculous claim that wage labour no longer existed in the Soviet Union (what was it that workers got at the end of the week if it was not a wage?). You said earlier that "The actual level of money wages is irrelevant because the supplies of consumer goods are predetermined in the plan. Higher money wages do not necessarily result in increased real wages. Besides which a large part of the real wage is in the form of free or subsidised goods." This is absurd. If you told any Russian worker that the level of their money wages were irrelevant (and by implication they need nor press for higher wages) you would be laughed out of court. If nothing else you completely ignore here the massively important role of the black market and the ability to purchase commodities on this market would be very much dependent on the level of money wages. Besides which I very much question your claim that the supplies of goods were predetermined in the plan. What appears on paper is not necessarily at all the same thing as what happens in reality. Hardly anything was predetermind by the plan in that sense. On the contrary the plans had constantly to be modified to fit in which changing reality (more anon) . One final thing - it is not true that a large part of the real wages of Russian workers were in the form of free or subsisdised goods. The evidence suggests that the wage packet remained the most important single component of income for Soviet workers (Brus W, "The Economic Role of the State: West and East", Survey, XXV, 4, 1980)


SECONDLY, while production was not strictly (directly) regulated by the market in state capitalism ( ibid, p.90) state planners did not have carte blanche in the way they allocated resoruces. They had to allocate it it in a way that ensured an adequate flow of profits. Indeed, state enterprises each had their own profit and loss account and were obliged to pursue profit maximisation as a goal. (D R Steele From Marx to Mises: Post Capitalist Society and the Challenge of Economic Calculation,Open Court, Illinois , 1992 p.267) Certainly, it is true that unprofitable enterprises could continue to operate in state capitalism insofar as "most profits and losses revert to the state, instead of being borne by the enterprises" (Buick and Crump, ibid p.91) This is not so radically different from the situation in Western capitalist economies where the state has, quite often, propped up certain loss making concerns through the use of subsidies and the like, acting in the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. But as with these western economies there is a limit to how the far the state in the Soviet Union could continue to support unprofitable enterprises without jeopardising the ability of the more profitable sectors of the economy to generate surplus value and upon which the financing of the whole state apparatus itself was predicated . For that very reason, pressure would be brought to bear on unprofitable enterprises to improve their performance - for example by managers being penalised for failing to fulfil the plan through the loss of bonuses or managerial status.

THIRDLY. it needs to be grasped that, however insistent the dictates of central planning, there are clear limits as to how much of the economy could be planned in this apriori top down fashion. In an economy in which there are literally millions of factors of production, it is a logistical impossibly to quantify in advance how much of each such factor is needed in relation to every other factor to ensure balanced and proportional growth. There are a number of reasons for this which we dont need to go into here. At this point it will suffice to note that the inherent limits to the central planning system itself necessarily ensured a far more active role for state enterprises than is often supposed within soviet system of state-run capitalism. This was obvious not only in the way these enterprises manipulated the planning process themselves - for example, by understating the amount of productive capacity they possessed (so as to avoid higher targets being imposed on them in any subsequent plan and thereby enabling them to more easily obtain bonuses for fulfilling their plan obligations) but also in the various ruses used to extract extra finance to ensure plan fulfuillment. Even then, they could and did sometimes resort to illegal forms of commercial credit . While state enterprises were presented with a set of aggregated output targets couched in physical terms, the manner in which they set about meeting these targets - for example in decisions relating to the product mix - were necessarily decentralised. You have maintained that the division of the product was "determined centrally rather than through numerous local bargains over the price of labour power, hours worked etc". This is factually incorrect. State enterrpises had a considerable degree of leeway "in the sphere of adjusting wages and working conditions" (Buick and Crump, op cit, p.75) and lists of job vacancies were regularly posted outside factory gates. Arguably, the impostion of the requirement to meet planning targets was a rather inefficient way of running a state capitalist business since it often meant sacrificing quality for the sake of meeting the physical targets imposed on state enterprises . Neverthless, this does not detract from the fact that it was left to the state enterprises themselves to decide how they might do this and, in this regard, costs considerations, deriving from the need - indeed the legal compulsion - to make profit played a very important role.

Given the inevitablity of a significant degree of decentralised decisionmaking within the Soviet economy some commentators have gone so far as to cast doubt on the very characterisation of this economy as a centrally planned one in the first place. One such comentator is Paul Craig Roberts:
Soviet managers were as autonomous as their market counterparts. They set their own plan targets by disguising their productive capacity and overstating their resource needs. Soviet planners served primarily as supply agents for enterprises, endeavoring to supply the enterprises with sufficient inputs to fulfill their gross output targets. The system of material supply could seldom perform this task, and Soviet factory managers made barter arrangements with one another and produced their own inputs. This activity led me to the conclusion that the Soviet economy, like a market, was organized polycentrically and not hierarchically as a planning system. The "central plan" was little more than the summation of the factory managers’ individual plans ("My Time with Soviet Economics", Paul Craig Roberts, The Independent Review, v.VII, n.2, Fall 2002,pp. 259– 264.)

Essentially the perspective adopted here is that the planners did not so much guide enterprises as were guided by them (and by their dealings with each other) only "instructing" them to do what they wanted to do to begin with. Insofar as the relationships between enterprises were essentially commodity-based or market relations this has the effect of inverting the conventional wisdom: It was not so much the market that was subordinated to the plan but rather the other way round. Plans were constantly modified to fit the changing economic reality. As Steele notes
But the plans were usually issued after commencement of the period to which they applied, and were always amended repeatedly in the course of 'implementation'. When the government trimphantly announced that the five year plan had been fulfilled, this was a drastically different document than had first been published under that name four years earlier (op cit p.267)

In reality the alleged dominance of the all powerful plan over the market in soviet state capitalism was a myth - even if we completly disregard the embeddedness of the soviet economy within the larger global capitalist economy which in itself would have been enough to compel the the Soviet Union to comply with the dictates of the profit system

[Paul Cockshott]

Robbo raises a number of interesting points here which touch upon very basic issues.
The starting point of the discussion, however, has to remain the question of what socialism is.

We can break this question down into several semantically distinct sub-questions:

1. What are the actual and invariant features of the socialist mode of production which
distinguish it from the capitalist mode of production.

2. As a quite distinct question, what was the view in the pre world war 1 period as to what
a socialist economy would be.

3. As a third and distinct question, how did the USSR at the time I originally
mentioned ( at the end of the 1950s) compare to the pre world war 1 conception of socialism.

4. Did the USSR exhibit the invariant features of the socialist mode of production
at the mentioned time.

5. What features of the USSR economy remained capitalist forms, and why did these persist.


----------------------------------
Question 1

In discussing question 1 we have to bear in mind certain epistemological problems.
We have to ask whether it is possible to foresee the properties of a mode of production
before it comes into existence?

Thus we have to ask how far ideas about socialism in say 1910, before it had been tried
should be relied upon when trying to understand what a socialist economy is.

If we are talking about capitalism or feudalism we rely upon observation of actual societies
and draw our understanding of the concept of capitalism or feudalism from these observations.
We do not, unless we are extreeme free market libertarians,
draw up an a-priori definition against which actual capitalist economies are measured
and found wanting.

The same principle applies to socialism. We can only understand what socialism is and
how it differs from capitalism by looking at actual historical experience. Otherwise
we are no longer historical materialists but, millenarians debating the kingdom of
heaven.

The two features that I cited as distinguishing features of the socialist mode of
production : coordination of production by means of an in-natura plan, and the determination
of the surplus product again in material terms, by the plan, are conclusions from history
not things that were realised prior to socialism being tried out.

For instance, the in-natura plan, was not seriously discussed in the socialist movement
until Neuraths work in the late years of the first world war. One can argue that the
neo-classical economist Barone had discussed it in a rather unspecific way earlier.
Neuraths ideas came from actual experience of the war economy of the central powers
( see Calculation in Natura from Neurath to Kantorovich :
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/standalonearticle.pdf ).
This was later developed in a concrete way by the inovation of the method of
material balances by GOSPLAN in the late 20s, and theoretically by Remak in Germany
at the same time. Arguably, von Neumanns work on general economic equilibrium can
be seen in the same light.

The whole issue of the mode of surplus extraction under socialism, the feature
which according to Marx is absolutely the key to understanding a mode of production,
was passed over in silence by the pre world war I movement. It was also passed over
in silence both by official soviet doctrine and by its western Trotskyist or Chinese
Maoist critics. I would suggest that no marxist trend really wanted to face up
to the issue of surplus extraction under socialism.

Note that when I say that surplus extraction under socialism inherently involves
material specification of the surplus product and that this is an essentially political
rather than an economic process, I am not restricting myself to the history of the
USSR. I am saying that this will be the case in all socialist economies.

-----------------

Question 2

Robbo emphasises the continued existence of monetary forms in the Soviet economy
and this is an important point. But it is by no means clear to me that one can say
that in consequence it did not meet
"the pre-Leninist definition of socialism - as a non market stateless form of society"
is a very arguable proposition on two grounds:

1. there was far from unanimity on the non-monetary nature of socialism

Kautsky had argued for the retention of money and monetary calculation
under socialism. I am not aware that he was criticised for this at the time by
leading Bolsheviks or by Trotsky.

2. it is not clear that socialism was necessarily seen as non state society
except in the very long term

[QUOTE]The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital
from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State,
i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
[\QUOTE]

The communist manifesto argued for state property in the means of production and
spoke of the state withering away as a later stage:When, in the course of development,
class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the
hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character.
The vanishing of the state was seen as a result of socialism rather than
a precondition.


-------------------

Question 3

I was arguing that by the standards of the pre world war 1 movement, the USSR in the
50s was a socialist economy. It had followed the stipulations of the Communist
Manifesto and centralised all instruments of production in the hands of the worker's State,
and to increased the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
It had carried through the measures mentioned in the Communist Manifesto as
being those which were "unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production".
[QUOTE]
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.
[\QUOTE]
Maoists might argue that the USSR had not carried out demand 9, and that
this had to await the Peoples Communes, or the Bulgarian, agro industrial complexes.

The points that Robo raises about the continued existence of monetary forms,
can indeed now be seen to be very important, but it wrong to assume that this
importance was foreseen by the early socialist movement.
The criticisms by social democrats of the Bolshevik attempt to build socialism
in the USSR were based much more on Russia's comparatively low level of
industrial development. By the end of the 1950s, that sort of criticism no
longer carried much weight.

--------------------------------

Question 4

Robo raises important points regarding the limitations on planning in the USSR,
the existence of the enterprise as a subordinate juridical subject, and the prevalence
of the wage form. I would agree that these are important elements of capitalist
social forms that the society retained. But most societies are combinations
of modes of production. They are not pure modes of production. Within this combination
I would argue that certainly in the 1950s, and more arguably right up to the
1980s, the socialist mode of production remained the dominant one in the USSR.

He says that my argument that higher money wages did not necessarily result in
higher real wages is absurd. Why does he think so?

I think it accurately describes the situation.
Since the share of national resources allocated to the consumer goods industry
had been set in the national plan, no increase in money wages could bring about
an increase in real wages. Raising money wages just resulted in the build up
of unspent Rouble balances in peoples accounts since there was no extra consumer
goods for these to be spent on. The consequence was suppressed inflation which
manifested itself as shortages. You do not get queues unless people have more than sufficient
money to buy the goods at the prices at which they are offered.

If market allocation rather than planned allocation had been dominant, the available
money balances would have resulted in :
a) price inflation of consumer goods
followed by
b) an increase in the share of consumer goods in national output

He says that "it is not true that a large part of the real wages of
Russian workers were in the form of free or subsisdised goods."

I did not say that free or subsidised goods made up the majority of
the real wage, I said a large part of it: free education, healthcare,
subsidised fuel, subsidised rents, subsidised bread prices. These
amounted to something very real, and their removal by the Yeltsin
government meant a severe decline in working class living standards.

---------------------------

Question 5. What features of the USSR economy remained capitalist forms, and why did these persist.


I would say the following:

1. the continued existence of money rather than explicit labour tokens as payment for labour

2. the use of monetary aggregates in setting plan targets

3. the consequential retention of the enterprise as a subject of right

The use of money rather than labour accounting is I believe fundamentally a political issue
that relates to contradictions within the working class - between male and female labour
and between different grades of skill. Soviet interpretation of payment according
to labour involved paying different hourly rates to different categories of workers,
with male workers on average being on higher hourly rates. Elimination of money
would have touched on this basic sexual hierarchy.

The use of monetary aggregates in setting plan targets was I believe to a large
extent inevitable during a certain historical period from the late 50s to the
1980s. During this period the number of products and their interconnection
was too large to handle by administrative manual planning, and also too large
for effective computerisation with the then available computer technology.
Kantorovich was working in the late 50s on linear programing models using
computers but at that time matrices 100 on a side were the largest you could handle.
By the 1980s the frontiers of computer technology were catching up with the
scale of the economic complexity, but by that time the political and ideological
environment were no longer favourable to cybernetic planning.

I argue this point in detail in a number of publications.

I am unclear what Robbo thinks a socialist economy is.

[robbo203]

Robbo raises a number of interesting points here which touch upon very basic issues.
The starting point of the discussion, however, has to remain the question of what socialism is.
In discussing question 1 we have to bear in mind certain epistemological problems.
We have to ask whether it is possible to foresee the properties of a mode of production
before it comes into existence?

Thus we have to ask how far ideas about socialism in say 1910, before it had been tried
should be relied upon when trying to understand what a socialist economy is.

If we are talking about capitalism or feudalism we rely upon observation of actual societies
and draw our understanding of the concept of capitalism or feudalism from these observations.
We do not, unless we are extreeme free market libertarians,
draw up an a-priori definition against which actual capitalist economies are measured
and found wanting.

The same principle applies to socialism. We can only understand what socialism is and
how it differs from capitalism by looking at actual historical experience. Otherwise
we are no longer historical materialists but, millenarians debating the kingdom of
heaven. .

Paul , this is an absurd position to take. Think about it. What you are saying here is that we cannot envisage a future society, or define it in apriori terms because to do so is somehow "millenarian". So when the Communist Manifesto talked about the "communistic abolition of buying and selling" or the Critique of the Gotha programme spoke of the "lower" and "higher" phase of communism this was simply inadmissable according to you

Capitalism exists; socialism (aka communism) does not. But that does not mean we cannot say something about the latter albeit in generalised sense. Purposefulness which is a fundamental attribute of human thinking consists in goal oriented action and this by definition requires the formulation of a goal




The two features that I cited as distinguishing features of the socialist mode of
production : coordination of production by means of an in-natura plan, and the determination
of the surplus product again in material terms, by the plan, are conclusions from history
not things that were realised prior to socialism being tried out..

I have to ask myself here what exactly do you mean by "coordination of production by means of an in-natura plan". Literally, a single society wide plan? If so , there isnt a snowball's chance in hell of this being implemented (see below). It is technically out of the question. The state capitalist regime of the Soviet Union practiced what was called a system of central planning but even this was vastly removed from the abstract apriori notion of a single plan for the whole of society

One further point - every kind of social system requires "in natura" planning and coordination of some sort. Pop down to your local supermarket and observe the shelf fillers at work. Communism/socialism will likewise entail calculation in kind but will dispense with monetary calculation






The whole issue of the mode of surplus extraction under socialism, the feature
which according to Marx is absolutely the key to understanding a mode of production,
was passed over in silence by the pre world war I movement. It was also passed over
in silence both by official soviet doctrine and by its western Trotskyist or Chinese
Maoist critics. I would suggest that no marxist trend really wanted to face up
to the issue of surplus extraction under socialism.

Note that when I say that surplus extraction under socialism inherently involves
material specification of the surplus product and that this is an essentially political
rather than an economic process, I am not restricting myself to the history of the
USSR. I am saying that this will be the case in all socialist economies...

Well, of course, this is the point at issue - your characterisation of the soviet union as "socialist" which I emphatically deny

But i also question the whole notion of the surplus product under socialism. Surplus in relation to what? In a system based solely on production for need, I would suggest the idea of a surplus becomes redundant . In capitalism we talk about means of production being replenished out of surplus value produced by the working class - and I appreciate the distinction between "surplus value" and the "surplus product" - but what does it actually mean to say there is a surplus product in a socialist society which is subject to allocation according to socialist principles? There are producer goods and consumer goods certainly but in my view the kind of abstract tension arising from the conflicting demands for these different types of goods or sectors of the economy which is implicit in the concept of the "surplus product" is simply a fiction - the production of producer goods aid the production of consumers goods. This concept of the surplus product arises from a way of looking at society and the production process which would be inapplicable in a socialist society






Robbo emphasises the continued existence of monetary forms in the Soviet economy
and this is an important point. But it is by no means clear to me that one can say
that in consequence it did not meet
"the pre-Leninist definition of socialism - as a non market stateless form of society"
is a very arguable proposition on two grounds:

1. there was far from unanimity on the non-monetary nature of socialism

Kautsky had argued for the retention of money and monetary calculation
under socialism. I am not aware that he was criticised for this at the time by
leading Bolsheviks or by Trotsky.

2. it is not clear that socialism was necessarily seen as non state society
except in the very long term


The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital
from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State,
i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
[\QUOTE]

The communist manifesto argued for state property in the means of production and
spoke of the state withering away as a later stage:When, in the course of development,
class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the
hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character.
The vanishing of the state was seen as a result of socialism rather than
a precondition.

..

.
I think it was more or less universally accepted prior to Lenin that communism and socialism were basically synonyms. Marx and Engels explained why they intially preferred to use the term communism over socialism because of certain negative associations attached to the latter but in the course of the 19th century socialism became the preferred term.

Lenin departed from the Marxian tradition by calling Marx's lower phase of communism, "socialism" - something for which there was no warrant in the works of Marx and Engels - and by equating "socialism" with state capitalist monopoly "made to serve the interests of the whole people"
(The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It). Again there was no warrant for this in the marxian tradition

You refer to the Communist Manifesto and the call to centralise the means of production in the hands of the state. This is true but you neglect to point out that nowhere did Marx or Engels equate this political transition with socialism or communism. In fact they were quite clear that it was a transition BETWEEN capitalism and communism and therefore "not communism". Much has been made of the ten measures cited in the Communist Manifesto but if you read the various prefaces to the manifesto you will see that M & E later came to downplay the importance of these measures almost to the point of rejecting them altogether in the light of development since the Manifesto's first publication.




I was arguing that by the standards of the pre world war 1 movement, the USSR in the
50s was a socialist economy. It had followed the stipulations of the Communist
Manifesto and centralised all instruments of production in the hands of the worker's State,
and to increased the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
It had carried through the measures mentioned in the Communist Manifesto as
being those which were "unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production".
[QUOTE]
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.
[\QUOTE]
Maoists might argue that the USSR had not carried out demand 9, and that
this had to await the Peoples Communes, or the Bulgarian, agro industrial complexes.
.

Like I said there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that these various measures amounted to the existence of a socialist or communist society as such. They were regarded as a means to bring about such a society but, even then, their usefulness in this regard came to be increasingly questioned by M & E






The points that Robo raises about the continued existence of monetary forms,
can indeed now be seen to be very important, but it wrong to assume that this
importance was foreseen by the early socialist movement.
The criticisms by social democrats of the Bolshevik attempt to build socialism
in the USSR were based much more on Russia's comparatively low level of
industrial development. By the end of the 1950s, that sort of criticism no
longer carried much weight.
..

Yes the industrial development of the Soviet Union had opened up the possibility of a socialist society being created there although I would argue that socialism being a global system, the need for a relatively developed infrastructure has to be seen in global terms , and that world socialism (including obviously within Russia) could have been established much earlier despite there being areas where the level of industrial development had been low. The world as a whole had the necessary infrastructure to establish socialism by the beginning of the 20th century; what it lacked was the was the subjective understanding and desire for socialism

However, this is not relevant to the main point which is that both before and since the 1950s the Soviet Union was based on certain crucial economic features which were unquestionably capitalist in nature and that from its very inception the Soviet Union was a state capitalist system (as indeed Lenin had intended)




Robo raises important points regarding the limitations on planning in the USSR,
the existence of the enterprise as a subordinate juridical subject, and the prevalence
of the wage form. I would agree that these are important elements of capitalist
social forms that the society retained. But most societies are combinations
of modes of production. They are not pure modes of production. Within this combination
I would argue that certainly in the 1950s, and more arguably right up to the
1980s, the socialist mode of production remained the dominant one in the USSR.

..


But you dont even define clearly what you mean by socialism. "In natura planning" is hardly a distinctive feature of socialism since as I pointed out it is a technical requirement of every conceivable kind of modern social system including capitalism

I prefer to stick with the traditional or classical definition of socialism as a moneyless wageless stateless social system in which the means of production are commonly owned. I accept that most societies exhibit a combination of modes of production but there is no way you could justify the claim that in the USSR the "socialist mode of production was the dominant one". THe Soviet Union was massively unequal society governed by the exigencies of capital accumulation with wage labour being being clearly the dominant means by which Russian workers acquired the means of living..



He says that my argument that higher money wages did not necessarily result in
higher real wages is absurd. Why does he think so?

I think it accurately describes the situation.
Since the share of national resources allocated to the consumer goods industry
had been set in the national plan, no increase in money wages could bring about
an increase in real wages. Raising money wages just resulted in the build up
of unspent Rouble balances in peoples accounts since there was no extra consumer
goods for these to be spent on. The consequence was suppressed inflation which
manifested itself as shortages. You do not get queues unless people have more than sufficient
money to buy the goods at the prices at which they are offered.

If market allocation rather than planned allocation had been dominant, the available
money balances would have resulted in :
a) price inflation of consumer goods
followed by
b) an increase in the share of consumer goods in national output

He says that "it is not true that a large part of the real wages of
Russian workers were in the form of free or subsisdised goods."

I did not say that free or subsidised goods made up the majority of
the real wage, I said a large part of it: free education, healthcare,
subsidised fuel, subsidised rents, subsidised bread prices. These
amounted to something very real, and their removal by the Yeltsin
government meant a severe decline in working class living standards.
..

But this is precisely the point - you are making the assumption that the "share of national resources allocated to the consumer goods industry
had been set in the national plan". However, the de facto allocation of national resources allocated to the consumer goods industry hardly ever if at all conformed to the stipulations of the "plan". In fact the plans had constantly to be revised to fit in with the ever changing reality

You also entirely overlook the point that there was a very substantial black market economy in the soviet union.

Now as to this question of higher money wages not leading to higher real wages, the sense in which this might be true as you hinted in your reply, is if there had merely been an increase in the amount of money circulating in the economy resulting in an increase in the general price level (including the price of labour power). Then I grant, there would be no increase in the average real wage, the value of which would remain the same. But we are not here talking about merely inflating the currency. We are talking about the effect of an increase in money wages as it affects individual workers vis-a-vis other workers and also in respect of share of consumer goods in the national output

Now unless you have some kind of strict voucher system which rations goods by number or weight to each individual(e.g. 10 oz of butter per individual per month) . it follows that more money at your disposal the more of such goods you can purchase. The mere existence of queues does not necessarily override this consideration. Within a queue the individuals who constitute the queue may have widely different amounts of purchasing power at their disposal enabling some to take more than others. The fact that the distribution point runs out of goods before the end of the queue is reached is neither here nor there. What matters quite clearly in this example is that how much money you have does make a big difference. Indeed having more enables you to purchase more of the good in question and through the hoarding up of said good reduce the inconvenience of having to queue up every day.

So the question I would put to you then is to what extent was the distribution of consumer goods governed by some kind of voucher system. This is an important consideration because if it played only a negligible or small role then the question of the level of money wages in the case of individuals can make a significant difference as expressed via differential purchasing power. And we know of course that the Soviet Union was a highly unequal society. A further consideration is that the Soviet capitalist class had exclusive access to their own network of retail outlets from which ordinary Russian workers were barred






The use of monetary aggregates in setting plan targets was I believe to a large
extent inevitable during a certain historical period from the late 50s to the
1980s. During this period the number of products and their interconnection
was too large to handle by administrative manual planning, and also too large
for effective computerisation with the then available computer technology.
Kantorovich was working in the late 50s on linear programing models using
computers but at that time matrices 100 on a side were the largest you could handle.
By the 1980s the frontiers of computer technology were catching up with the
scale of the economic complexity, but by that time the political and ideological
environment were no longer favourable to cybernetic planning.

I argue this point in detail in a number of publications..

But as I have argued elsewhere the problem of planning is not just a question of the "available computer technology". This is only a small part of the problem though I dont doubt for one moment that the computing power at the disposal of planners has expanded enormously in recent years. The problem really lies there out in the real world and I dont mean simply in accuracy of data upon which computers are able to perform their millions of simulataneous equations. I mean far more in the ability of real world production units to conform to the exacting requirements of the plan. Each departure from the plan disrupts the pattern of interrelationships configured into the plan and the accumulative effect of every such departure - whether as a result of some human shortcoming or the whims of Mother Nature (a wipeout of the canadian grain harvest, say) makes the whole exercise pointless and futile. It will comel continuous recalculation. There is no realistic alternative to a self regulating economic system in which millions of plans intreact in a spontaneous fashion



I am unclear what Robbo thinks a socialist economy is.


Such a self regulating system in which there is no money, no wage labour, no state but instead democratically organised communities producing directly for their needs and the needs of others across the world, with free access to goods and service and completely voluntary labour being the guiding principle

[ZeroNowhere]

We can only understand what socialism is and how it differs from capitalism by looking at actual historical experience. Otherwise we are no longer historical materialists but, millenarians debating the kingdom of heaven.When you find yourself using a comparison with religion as an argument in something involving socialism, I have found that a good therapy is to have your head beaten against a wall a couple of times. At least, it worked on a friend of mine. But ehm, anyways, so we have to see something before defining it?


2. it is not clear that socialism was necessarily seen as non state society except in the very long termA good example, the only problem being the complete absence of the words 'socialism' or 'communism'.


I was arguing that by the standards of the pre world war 1 movement, the USSR in the 50s was a socialist economy.Pre-WWI movement? You mean the one including De Leon?
Anyhow, I suppose I can quote Engels here:

"They [the reforms] are possible because the whole insurgent proletariat is behind them and maintains them by force of arms. They are possible, despite all the difficulties and disadvantages which are alleged against them by economists, because these very difficulties and disadvantages will compel the proletariat to go further and further until private property has been completely abolished, in order not to lose again what it has already won. They are possible as preparatory steps, temporary transitional stages towards the abolition of private property, but not in any other way.

"Herr Heinzen however wants all these measures as permanent, final measures. They are not to be a preparation for anything, they are to be definitive. They are for him not a means but an end. They are not designed for a revolutionary but for a peaceful, bourgeois condition. But this makes them impossible and at the same time reactionary. The economists of the bourgeoisie are quite right in respect of Herr Heinzen when they present these measures as reactionary compared with free competition. Free competition is the ultimate, highest and most developed form of existence of private property. All measures, therefore, which start from the basis of private property and which are nevertheless directed against free competition, are reactionary and tend to restore more primitive stages in the development of property, and for that reason they must finally be defeated once more by competition and result in the restoration of the present situation. These objections the bourgeoisie raises, which lose all their force as soon as one regards the above social reforms as pure mesures de salut public, as revolutionary and transitory measures, these objections are devastating as far as Herr Heinzen’s peasant-socialist black, red and gold republic is concerned."

You will note that Engels is quite clear that the reforms are implemented under capitalism. Unless, perhaps, socialism is a form of capitalism. Still no mention of 'socialism', though. So yeah, their view of what would happen during a revolution caused by a crisis they predicted as happening in the early 1850s (I wrote a bit about this here (http://theinnermountingflame.blogspot.com/2009/09/state-machinery-ten-planks-and-paris.html)) isn't especially relevant to their view of socialism.


But most societies are combinations of modes of production. They are not pure modes of production. Within this combination I would argue that certainly in the 1950s, and more arguably right up to the 1980s, the socialist mode of production remained the dominant one in the USSR.A mixture is not equivalent to a compound.


Such a self regulating system in which there is no money, no wage labour, no state but instead democratically organised communities producing directly for their needs and the needs of others across the world, with free access to goods and service and completely voluntary labour being the guiding principleAhem?

[Paul Cockshott]

Paul , this is an absurd position to take. Think about it. What you are saying here is that we cannot envisage a future society, or define it in apriori terms because to do so is somehow "millenarian". So when the Communist Manifesto talked about the "communistic abolition of buying and selling" or the Critique of the Gotha programme spoke of the "lower" and "higher" phase of communism this was simply inadmissable according to you

Capitalism exists; socialism (aka communism) does not. But that does not mean we cannot say something about the latter albeit in generalised sense. Purposefulness which is a fundamental attribute of human thinking consists in goal oriented action and this by definition requires the formulation of a goal

We can formulate political goals. And we can try 'experiments' with reality in an attempt to reach these goals. And I myself have argued at length for the cogency and the appropriateness of the goals advocated in Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme.

But we must recognise that our knowlege of reality is at all times limited. Our understanding grows with experience and observation of history, but the real world contains far more complexity than is encompassed in our political plans. A goal or political plan is not the same thing as a real mode of production. The goal expressed by a political movement is never more than an outline, and often a hazy and ambigous outline at that. Somebody formulating political goals in the 19th century was necessarily limited in their conceptions to at most a critical appraisal of what already existed, and what seemed logically feasible in contrast to what already existed.

The goals of a political party have a different status from the observations and theories of historical materialism as a science. As a science it has to proceed from the study of real history, and produce theories about the causal relationships that operate in real history.

So yes of course the social democratic movement formulated political goals about the society it wanted to achieve, and it was right and proper that it should do so. But these goals did not constitute
a scientific theory of the socialist mode of production in the way that Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations or Marx's Capital constitute scientific theories of the capitalist mode of production. Social Democracy certainly could "envisage a future society, and define it in apriori terms", but such 'visions' and 'apriori' definitions remained at best philosophical speculations or educated guesses about the future.

If one then uses such philosophical speculations or educated guesses as criteria against which real history is judged, then one is on the teritory of ideology not science. One blocks off questions from investigation.

By studying hithertoo existing socialist societies, one has available something far richer as a source of lessons than any a-priori speculations or earlier political goals could ever have been. Gregory Chaitin (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~chaitin/lm.html)makes the point about a-priori reasoning that one can not get a kilo of theorems from half a kilo of axioms. The richness of your understanding of socialism will be proportional to the information that you put into it. If you work only from the information sources available in the 19th century it will produce fewer theorems than if you start out from information sources available to us now.

All the key practical and theoretical advances in socialist planning : the method of material balances,
input/output tables, Kantorovich's invention of linear programming have arisen from real experience. It do not think you will be able to cite any comparable advances by Western marxists working from purely a-priori deductions about the nature of socialism.



I have to ask myself here what exactly do you mean by "coordination of production by means of an in-natura plan". Literally, a single society wide plan? If so , there isnt a snowball's chance in hell of this being implemented (see below). It is technically out of the question.

This seems to line you up with the arguments of von Mises about the impossibility of socialist planning, for a detailed refutation of their arguments see : http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/%7Ecottrell/socialism_book/calculation_debate.pdf or http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/hayek/hayek.html (http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/%7Ewpc/reports/hayek/hayek.html).

We argue that detailed in-natura calculation is in fact now possible right down to the individual bar-code level. Hithertoo existing socialism lacked the information processing ability to do this, but by the 1950s in the USSR of the order of 10,000 product or industrial inputs were planned by the system of material balances. In numerical terms this was well short of the number of actual products, but the products subject to control orders were the most significant ones in terms of their role in the overall economy. Thus in the USSR at that time a system of in-natura calculation and control did exist in a way that was quite distinct from those that existed in any contemporary capitalist economy.

You are correct to point out that in-natura calculation does occur in capitalist economies, but the calculations are partial and private, involving individual firms and their suppliers. There is nothing
comparable to the All Union material balances that existed in the USSR.

The ability of paper, telex and adding machine methods to carry out detailed planning was limited,
and in the absence of a greater coordination ability, the residual coordination inevitably precipitates
out as monetary calculations. But this precipitation of residual monetary calculation was a historical
inevitability for any socialist economy prior to the development of high performance computer technology.

[Paul Cockshott]

Quote:
I was arguing that by the standards of the pre world war 1 movement, the USSR in the 50s was a socialist economy.
Pre-WWI movement? You mean the one including De Leon?

No. I mean the social democratic movement not the syndicalist movement.

[ZeroNowhere]

No. I mean the social democratic movement not the syndicalist movement.
Oh, in that case, yes, plausibly.

[robbo203]

We can formulate political goals. And we can try 'experiments' with reality in an attempt to reach these goals. And I myself have argued at length for the cogency and the appropriateness of the goals advocated in Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme.
But we must recognise that our knowlege of reality is at all times limited. Our understanding grows with experience and observation of history, but the real world contains far more complexity than is encompassed in our political plans. A goal or political plan is not the same thing as a real mode of production. The goal expressed by a political movement is never more than an outline, and often a hazy and ambigous outline at that. Somebody formulating political goals in the 19th century was necessarily limited in their conceptions to at most a critical appraisal of what already existed, and what seemed logically feasible in contrast to what already existed.
The goals of a political party have a different status from the observations and theories of historical materialism as a science. As a science it has to proceed from the study of real history, and produce theories about the causal relationships that operate in real history
So yes of course the social democratic movement formulated political goals about the society it wanted to achieve, and it was right and proper that it should do so. But these goals did not constitute
a scientific theory of the socialist mode of production in the way that Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations or Marx's Capital constitute scientific theories of the capitalist mode of production. Social Democracy certainly could "envisage a future society, and define it in apriori terms", but such 'visions' and 'apriori' definitions remained at best philosophical speculations or educated guesses about the future...

All this is true as far as it goes even if it rather contradicts your earlier point that "We can only understand what socialism is and how it differs from capitalism by looking at actual historical experience. Otherwise
we are no longer historical materialists but, millenarians debating the kingdom of heaven.". I am saying on the contrary that it is absolutely essential that the working class should have some idea - however generalised - of what a socialist society will be if you are ever going to realise such a society. It has to know in advance what kind of society it wants to create and that, without this apriori understanding, socialism will not come about. Of course the idea or ideal of socialism arises from actual historical experience but this is very different from saying that socialism itself is an extant reality.

In arguing for the absolute need for generalised apriori conception of socialism I am not suggesting we should not go further and make "educated guesses" , as you put it, to arrive at a more detailed and nuanced picture of socialism. In doing so we would be drawing precisely on our knowledge of the kind of developments that have taken place within capitalism itself since the 19th century . An obvious example of this would be the advances in science and technology and the possibilities these hold for the future.

I am all for speculations of this kind, for relating the potential of socialism to the prevailing circumstances of today - putting flesh on the bare bones of our conception of socialism. However, it has to be repeatedly emphasised that the basic skeletal framework of this conception of socialism has first to be place before we can perform this exercise



By studying hithertoo existing socialist societies, one has available something far richer as a source of lessons than any a-priori speculations or earlier political goals could ever have been. Gregory Chaitin (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~chaitin/lm.html)makes the point about a-priori reasoning that one can not get a kilo of theorems from half a kilo of axioms. The richness of your understanding of socialism will be proportional to the information that you put into it. If you work only from the information sources available in the 19th century it will produce fewer theorems than if you start out from information sources available to us now....

You see, this is where the whole problem arises. You contend that there are such things as "hitherto existing socialist societies"; I deny that completely. What you call socialist societies I call state capitalist societies. But let us be clear about this. We are both starting out from an apriori definition of socialism. Yours is what I would call a leninist definition of socialism; mine is pre-Leninist and, I would maintain, far more in line with the whole marxian tradition than yours. Ironically, you can find clear evidence of the latter usage even among the early Bolsheviks themselves. Stalin for example defined socialism as a society without wages, buying and selling and so on. Alexander Bogdanov in his ‘A Short Course of Economic Science’ described socialism as "the highest stage of society we can conceive", in which such institutions as taxation and profits will be non-existent and in which "there will not be the market buying and selling, but consciously and systematically organised distribution." This work, first published in 1897 and extensively revised for the edition in August 1919 was used as a textbook in the schools and study circles of the Russian Communist Party. The process of redefining socialism carried out principally by Lenin marked a clear conceptual break with the marxian tradition. For the leninist tradition "socialism" came to be increasingly tied up with state-administered capitalism

Oddly enough I agree with you - that by studying these so called "hitherto existing socialist societies" we can learn something useful about how to go about achieving socialism. What is absolutely clear from such a study is that the high road to socialism via state capitalism is in fact a complete dead end , we can never advance towards real socialism along this route. Engels while clearly rejecting the notion that state ownerwhip and control had anything to do with socialism nevertheless entertained the vague notion that the the tendency towards state ownership and the concentration of capital was somehow progressive. Here is the relevant quote from Socialism Utopian and Scientific:
The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.

This is what we now need to decisively break away from and what I think lies at the heart of your conception of "socialism" - the idea that the concentration of capital and the associated aspect of large scale planning are somehow desirable or more conducive to socialism. I think this is wrong. While not ruling out some large scale planning in socialism I think the emphasis should be towards more decentralisation and localised forms of decision-making. The principle of subsidiarity should apply




All the key practical and theoretical advances in socialist planning : the method of material balances,
input/output tables, Kantorovich's invention of linear programming have arisen from real experience. It do not think you will be able to cite any comparable advances by Western marxists working from purely a-priori deductions about the nature of socialism.
This seems to line you up with the arguments of von Mises about the impossibility of socialist planning, for a detailed refutation of their arguments see : http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/%7Ecottrell/socialism_book/calculation_debate.pdf or http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/hayek/hayek.html (http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/%7Ewpc/reports/hayek/hayek.html).
We argue that detailed in-natura calculation is in fact now possible right down to the individual bar-code level. Hithertoo existing socialism lacked the information processing ability to do this, but by the 1950s in the USSR of the order of 10,000 product or industrial inputs were planned by the system of material balances. In numerical terms this was well short of the number of actual products, but the products subject to control orders were the most significant ones in terms of their role in the overall economy. Thus in the USSR at that time a system of in-natura calculation and control did exist in a way that was quite distinct from those that existed in any contemporary capitalist economy.
You are correct to point out that in-natura calculation does occur in capitalist economies, but the calculations are partial and private, involving individual firms and their suppliers. There is nothing
comparable to the All Union material balances that existed in the USSR.
The ability of paper, telex and adding machine methods to carry out detailed planning was limited,
and in the absence of a greater coordination ability, the residual coordination inevitably precipitates
out as monetary calculations. But this precipitation of residual monetary calculation was a historical
inevitability for any socialist economy prior to the development of high performance computer technology.

There are a number of different points here which need to be addressed.

First of all, lets just get this straight - the method of material balances is not in itself "socialist". Socialism denotes a system of social relationships in respect of the means of production. It is not a planning technique as such. While you might argue that it would be useful to employ such a technique in a socialist society that does not mean the employment of such technique signifies the existence of a socialist society.

Secondly, you neglect to answer the point that I made in an earlier post. Notwithstanding the employment of the material balances method by GOSPLAN in the Soviet Union, the reality of central planning there was very largely a farce. Of course it is possible to draw up hugely impressive and detailed plans but you are ignoring the central point of my argument which has to do with the relationship between the planning and the actual economic circumstances obtaining. The whole point of planning was to guide state enterrprises in what they did and allocate resources according to some overall plan but in fact what we find is that as a rule plans were constantly modified to reflect what was happening in reality rather than the other way round. In this respect you grossly overestimate the potency of the material balances methods and overlook the built-in distortions that went it - particularly evident in the "bargaining" phase of the planning process when state enterprises negotiatied with the planning authorities over the lists of "indents" and proposed targets prior to the "rebalancing" phase.

I repeat - the problem with central planning is not that we do not have the "high performance computer technology" to compute millions of simultaneuous equations. The problem has to do rather with translating the plan into action. It has to do with the relevance of the plan in the real world. Even the Soviet Union, despite its highly centralised decisionmaking structure, was far removed from the kind of abstract notion of society-wide planning you seem to have in mind. In practice, and of necessity, a huge number of decisions had to be devolved to lower levels in the decisionmaking hierarchy e.g. state enterprises. The rigidity of society-wide planning makes it extremely vulnerable to even the slightest disturbance or perturbation (since this would necessitate comprehensive , not to say continuous, rebalancing) and this is what makes the whole notion completely unsustainable

Thirdly, you contend that I seem to be lining up with the von Mises brigade about the impossibility of socialist planning. Actually, on the contrary, I think your ideas about socialist planning converge with those of Von Mises. You both hold the clearly mistaken idea that socialist planning has to be society wide planning. For my part, I reject this completely. I hold a totally different conception of socialist planning (see http://www.cvoice.org/cv3cox.htm) - namely, polycentric socialist planning. The argument I advance is that the key to refuting the economic calculation argument itself lies in recognising that a socialist system of production will be a largely self regulating system. There will not be one single plan but numerous plans that interrelate and harmonise on a spontaneous basis and not in a predetermined way. This I argue is a much more realistic and promising vision of socialism

[Paul Cockshott]

If we are to have neither buying and selling nor comprehensive planning, I do not see how you expect the economy to be coordinated. I will have to look at your web site to get a clearer idea of what you are proposing.

I do not see why you think that constant adjustment of the plan is infeasible?
If one views it as a cybernetic mechanism, this is what one would expect.

First of all, lets just get this straight - the method of material balances is not in itself "socialist". Socialism denotes a system of social relationships in respect of the means of the means of production. It is not a planning technique.
What I am saying is that these techniques, along with input output analysis, and linear programming arose from the empirical practice of a socialist economy. Look at how Kantorovich formulates the linear programming problem : how to maximise the plan specified mix of material outputs in material terms. Contrast this with how Koopmans and Danzig formulated it when they later discovered some of the same maths in west: how to maximise profits with a given set of commodity prices.

The changed social relations of production cause a quite different formulation of the problem.

The mathematical techniques of the Simplex method are independent of social relations and are just algorithmic, but the problem specification under a socialist and a capitalist economy are quite different.

[robbo203]

If we are to have neither buying and selling nor comprehensive planning, I do not see how you expect the economy to be coordinated. I will have to look at your web site to get a clearer idea of what you are proposing.
.


Coordination in the absence of society wide planning or the market becomes feasible via the self regulating mechanism of stock control aided, of course, these days by the very computer technology you refer to. By all means check out the article for a fuller account of what I have in mind



I do not see why you think that constant adjustment of the plan is infeasible?
If one views it as a cybernetic mechanism, this is what one would expect..


Like I said, the issue is not one of the technical ability to adjust the plan constantly given the computing power at our disposal. It can be done I am sure and you as a computer scientist will know more about this than me. The issue is rather the relevance of the plan to the real world - particularly if I might say, if it is constantly undergoing reconfiguration brought on by even the slightest real world pertubations which would necessitate such reconfiguration (in toto I would add since everything is connected in any input-outpuit matrix). As soon as any enterprise even attempted to fulfil its target, the target would have changed along with the input requirements to fulfil it. This is what makes society wide planning in the abstract completely unfeasible. Even in the Soviet Union, far removed though it was was from this idealised conception of society- wide planning, the plans were quite often not yet even formalised or known sometime after commencement of the planning period in question. How anyone can claim that Soviet production was "guided" by the Plan in these circumstances beats me...



What I am saying is that these techniques, along with input output analysis, and linear programming arose from the empirical practice of a socialist economy. Look at how Kantorovich formulates the linear programming problem : how to maximise the plan specified mix of material outputs in material terms. Contrast this with how Koopmans and Danzig formulated it when they later discovered some of the same maths in west: how to maximise profits with a given set of commodity prices.

The changed social relations of production cause a quite different formulation of the problem...

Ultimately speaking, the Soviet Union was driven by exactly the same economic imperative of profit maximisation and capital accumulation as in the West. State enterprises had to ensure that they operated at a profit and while ultimately all profit and losses reverted to the state, the Soviet State, as with any other capitalist state, had to ensure that enough surplus value was being generated overall and to make use of suitable indicators to that end. In the West the state sometimes subsidises loss-making entreprises which it judges to be in the overall interests of the national capitalist class. But there is a limit to how much it could do this without jeopardising the profitability of other enterprises from which it derived its tax revenue. It was the same with Soviet state capitalism. At the macro-level it had to ensure that the system as a whole was generating sufficient surplus value not only to support the entire bloated apparatus of the state but to finance its ambituous capital expansion plans

Soviet planning was thus subordinate to this higher economic imperative and this is why in fact you found the plan constantly having to be revised to fit in with the changing economic reality - a reality that consisted in state enterprises avidly seeking ways and employing a multitude of ruses to ensure profitability and to avoid being penalised for incurring losses

[Paul Cockshott]

I have had a look at the arguments on the web page you cite.

There seem to be several points that are not explicit that I would like you to clarify:

Are you really proposing that all goods and services be distributed to consumers gratis?

Your use of Lebigs law of the minimum, or selecting the rate limiting factor, is a feasible stage of a planing algorithm, ( we use it in our Harmony algorithm ), but it is only feasible to apply it as a general regulation mechanism if there is a planning system operating at a whole economy level. Otherwise you do not know what is the rate limiting factor.


Beyond that, consider the time complexity of your process. If there are 1 million products that are means of production, and if during the adjustment process say 10% are actually rate limiting, your process would take some 100,000 timesteps to adjust.
This is much slower than a market adjusts.

I suspect that in the general case what you are proposing comes down to a crude variant of Kantorovichs approach, which to be applied generally requires a unified economic calculation process accross society. Hence I do not understand your attack on central planning, since what you propose as the solution to the economic calculation problem essentially requires it.

Your arguments would have more credibility if you spelt out the means by which you propose to use disaggregated procedures to discover rate limiting factors.

[Paul Cockshott]

Ultimately speaking, the Soviet Union was driven by exactly the same economic imperative of profit maximisation and capital accumulation as in the West. State enterprises had to ensure that they operated at a profit and while ultimately all profit and losses reverted to the state, the Soviet State, as with any other capitalist state, had to ensure that enough surplus value was being generated overall and to make use of suitable indicators to that end. In the West the state sometimes subsidises loss-making entreprises which it judges to be in the overall interests of the national capitalist class. But there is a limit to how much it could do this without jeopardising the profitability of other enterprises from which it derived its tax revenue. It was the same with Soviet state capitalism. At the macro-level it had to ensure that the system as a whole was generating sufficient surplus value not only to support the entire bloated apparatus of the state but to finance its ambituous capital expansion plans

Covering costs just one obligation on soviet enterprises, they also had to achieve plan targets, and their bonuses were calculated in large part on that. You also have to distinguish between the classic planning model of the 1950s and the model that was partially introduced in the 1960s when profitability did become more important. My contention however is that the plan remained vital to the coordination of the all union economy right down to the end of the USSR. The catastrophic decline in output once the plan was removed after 91, gives strong evidence that it wat the plan not the market that remained the key mode of coordination right to the end. Those who argue that the USSR was already a capitalist market economy have to explain why there was such a sudden and dramatic change when planning was removed: you got a collapse in production that was worse even than the great depression, you suddenly got mass unemployment, a surge in mortality rates, a huge polarisation of income levels etc. All the classic features of capitalism suddenly operated. Only a willful reluctance to face reality could claim that there had not be a change in the mode of production.

The primary mode of state financing was the turnover tax, this could be added whether an individual enterprise made a profit or not. It was essentially a form of VAT.

[sanpal]

May i ask a question to robbo203?
As I have understood, you as the left communist and perhaps Bordiga's admirer, are against state capitalism after proletarian revolution, and as you say, that it ostensibly pre-leninist marxism. Then to not contradict itself, you should reply to yourself, what then in practice are designated with the important action for nationalization of the bank-financial system stated in the manifesto of the communist party by M&E (point 5.)? Don't you consider it as a "clearwater" state capitalism?

[ZeroNowhere]

As I have understood, you as the left communist and perhaps Bordiga's admirerHe's more SPGB than Bordigist, last I recall.


Then to not contradict itself, you should reply to yourself, what then in practice are designated with the important action for nationalization of the bank-financial system stated in the manifesto of the communist party by M&E (point 5.)?
This has already been gone over. Anyhow, it had nothing to do with 'post-revolutionary state capitalism', though yes, they did, at least at the time, think that the (rather sparse) proletariat would be compelled to nationalize shit in the course of revolutionary struggle brought about by a crisis. Again, a bit on that is here (http://theinnermountingflame.blogspot.com/2009/09/state-machinery-ten-planks-and-paris.html).

But then again, Robin's already made it clear multiple times that he thinks that that section was bullshit.

[robbo203]

Covering costs just one obligation on soviet enterprises, they also had to achieve plan targets, and their bonuses were calculated in large part on that. You also have to distinguish between the classic planning model of the 1950s and the model that was partially introduced in the 1960s when profitability did become more important. My contention however is that the plan remained vital to the coordination of the all union economy right down to the end of the USSR. The catastrophic decline in output once the plan was removed after 91, gives strong evidence that it wat the plan not the market that remained the key mode of coordination right to the end. Those who argue that the USSR was already a capitalist market economy have to explain why there was such a sudden and dramatic change when planning was removed: you got a collapse in production that was worse even than the great depression, you suddenly got mass unemployment, a surge in mortality rates, a huge polarisation of income levels etc. All the classic features of capitalism suddenly operated. Only a willful reluctance to face reality could claim that there had not be a change in the mode of production..

You keep going on about "the plan" remaining the vital "mode of cordination" in the Soviet Union but still you do not address my point about "the plan" having to be constantly revised and often only being implemented well after the planning period commenced. This suggests it was nothing like like the key mode of coordination that you make it out to be . Sure, enterprises had to achieve their targets as well as ensure proifitability but you have to look behind that at the deeper process at work touching on the determination of the targets themselves. It was not as simple and straightforward as you seem to make out. Ultimately, soviet state capitalism was reliant upon the generation of surplus value out of which capital could be accumulated. This was the primary consideration to which the planning system was necessarily subordinated. You are confusing form and substance.

Yes the collapse of the Soviet Union heralded a sharp economic decline , increasing mortality and so on but it is ridiculous to assert such a collapse in itself must signifiy a "change in the mode of production". Did America undergo a "change in the mode of production" during the Great Depression. Or the Weimar Republic? Of course not. Catastrophic declines do not have to signify a change from one social system (or mode of production) to another.


I would remind you also that well before the planning system was dismantled the Soviet Union was already undergoing a relative decline. Growth did clearly slow up after the 1960s and there were obvious signs of economic stagnation. Similarly you talk of of a "huge polarisation of income levels" apparently oblivious of the fact that the Soviet Unuion was already a massively polarised society in terms of income levels. In Russia, the ratio between the lowest and highest wages steadily increased from 1:1.8 just after the Bolshevik Revolution to 1:40 in 1950 (Ossowski S, Patterson S, Class Structure in the Social Consciousness Free Press of Glencoe, New York 1963, 116). According to Roy Medvedev (Khrushchev: The Years in Power ,Columbia University Press. 1976, 540), taking into account not only their inflated "salaries" but also the many privileges and perks enjoyed by the Soviet elite (who even had access to their own retail outlets stocking western goods and various other facilities from which the general public was physically excluded) the ratio was more like 1:100 - making the Soviet Union one of the most unequal societies on the face of the earth. Some amongst this elite became very wealthy in their own right and a much quoted source in this regard is a pamphlet published in 1945 by the Russia Today Society (London) called "Soviet Millionaires", written by Reg Bishop, a supporter of the Soviet regime, that proudly boasted of the existence of rouble millionaires there as an indicator of economic success. It was from among the state capitalist class of the old Soviet Union that many of the oligarchs of today were to emerge using their old connections and networks of contacts

In this and in other ways there were obvious continuties between the old Soviet Union and present day Russia. The discontinuties were not to do with any change in the mode of production - soviet state capitalism was still essentially a variant of the capitalist mode of production - but rather the ensuing chaos, uncertainty and social dislocation arising from the restructuring of this mode of production, giving freer play to market forces

[robbo203]

I have had a look at the arguments on the web page you cite.

There seem to be several points that are not explicit that I would like you to clarify:

Are you really proposing that all goods and services be distributed to consumers gratis?.

Yes. This would be according to the communist principle "from each according to ability to each according to need". However, it is conceivable that alongside a system of free access there would also be a system of rationing based on what I call a "compensation model" which I have written about elsewhere. Basically this would apply to goods lower down the "hierarchy of production goals" I talked about and which, for that very reason (resources being prioritised for high priority goals) would more likely turn out to be in short supply. e.g. luxury items. The compensation model is predicated on the fact that socialism will inherit from capitalism a high degree of spatial inequalities - particularly in the provision of housing. We cannot all live in good quality housing at least in the short term so the proposal is that those of us who have to put with poor quality housing in the short term should be "compensated" by being granted priority access to rationed goods. This accords with natural justice


Your use of Lebigs law of the minimum, or selecting the rate limiting factor, is a feasible stage of a planing algorithm, ( we use it in our Harmony algorithm ), but it is only feasible to apply it as a general regulation mechanism if there is a planning system operating at a whole economy level. Otherwise you do not know what is the rate limiting factor.


Beyond that, consider the time complexity of your process. If there are 1 million products that are means of production, and if during the adjustment process say 10% are actually rate limiting, your process would take some 100,000 timesteps to adjust.
This is much slower than a market adjusts.

I suspect that in the general case what you are proposing comes down to a crude variant of Kantorovichs approach, which to be applied generally requires a unified economic calculation process accross society. Hence I do not understand your attack on central planning, since what you propose as the solution to the economic calculation problem essentially requires it..

I really dont follow what you are saying here and I dont think you have quite grasped what I had in mind either. I am not talking about rate limiting factors operating at a society-wide macro-level at all. I have already explained why I reject out of hand the concept of society wide planning as unfeasible.

What I had in mind was the operation of the "law of the minimum" (along with calculation in kind, a self regulating system of stock control and a hierarchy of production goals) at the micro-level of the production unit. These four basic features of a socialist system of planning would hang togther in an integrated fashion. Contrary to what you assert it would be considerably easier and quicker to arrive at an optimum solution by using such an approach than is the case with the market.

Let me explain with a simple example.

Suppose a production unit produces a given good A

Suppose A requires 3 factor inputs - X Y and Z

To manufacture 1 unit of A suppose the following technical ratios:

2X + 3Y + 1Z

Suppose there is an aggregated demand for A (from various distributors) for 10 units of A but this production unit, on sourcing its input suppliers, disovers the following.

There are 20 units of X, 21 units of Y and 30 units of Z.

Which is the limiting factor? Well, using the above technical ratios, with 20 units of X you can make 10 units of A, with 21 units of Y you can make 7 units of A and with 30 units of Z you can make 30 units of A. So Y in this example is the limiting factor, followed by X and then finally Z

However, as things stand the production unit can only produce 7 units of A (Y being the limiting factor) whereas the demand for A is 10. So what can it do. There are at least two things it can do

1) It can go back to the suppliers of Y and ask if there is any way in which they could increase the supply of Y. The supplier of Y may of course supply other units with Y as well . Let us say these other units produce a range of goods B, C and D . To increase the supply of Y for A may involve diverting some of Y from these other end uses. How is this resolved? It is resolved by ordering these end uses into some kind of ordinal hierarchy A , B, C and D. If A is regarded as being a higher priority than B but not C and D, then B might find its supply of Y being reduced and diverted to A (prompting the producers of B to do something about this) . If A is regarded as being a higher priority than B and C but not D then the same primnciple would apply. The supply of Y to B and C would be reduced in order to satisfy A

2) If A is regarded as being lower in the hierarchy of production goals than B, C or D then the production unit producing A would have to fall back on another option - to change the technical mix of input factors. Technological substitution as this is called is driven by the need to substitute more abundant alternatives for factors that are scarce. This might result in modified technical mix with the following technical ratios to produce 1 unit of A :

2X + 2Y + 3Z

With this new technical mix you get the following:

20 units of X means you have 10 units of A
21 units of Y means you have 10.5 units of A
30 units of Z means you have 10 units of A

X and Z in this example are the joint limiting factors but in this example the demand for 10 units of A is fully met since the limiting factor does not constrain output to anything less than the full demand for A


Of course this is a grossly simplified example but it does serve to illustrate the basic algorithmic approach to this problem. Each individual production unit might well have to deal with several hundred if not several thousand of different inpus but this is vastly different from having to operate at macro-level of an entire economy. A further point to bear in mind - something I think Marx himself eluded to - is that in a socialist economy producers would tend to operate as a rule to produce buffer stocks to cover unexpected fluctuations in demand so that in the above example you might find that the supplier of Y might well have reserve supplies of Y to satisfy the demand expressed by the production unit producing A




Your arguments would have more credibility if you spelt out the means by which you propose to use disaggregated procedures to discover rate limiting factors.


The above is an attempt to do just that and also do demonstrate how in practice the four basic principles I enumerated abopve would interweave . On final point - it is not essential that complete accuracy is obstained . There is a certain fuzziness around the edges of this procedure that must be allowed for. In the real world total certainty is unobtainable. What is important is that you have such a structure or procedure in place that enables you to orient decisions in basically the right direction to ensure a rational allocation of resources. This I believe is just what such a procedure does

[Paul Cockshott]

You keep going on about "the plan" remaining the vital "mode of cordination" in the Soviet Union but still you do not address my point about "the plan" having to be constantly revised and often only being implemented well after the planning period commenced. This suggests it was nothing like like the key mode of coordination that you make it out to be .

Of course plans have to be constantly revised, and of course it is impossible to draw them up without detailed information from subsidiary units of production. I dont see that pointing out something obvious like that has any bearing on the argument, which is why I did not bother with it.

[Paul Cockshott]

Yes the collapse of the Soviet Union heralded a sharp economic decline , increasing mortality and so on but it is ridiculous to assert such a collapse in itself must signifiy a "change in the mode of production". Did America undergo a "change in the mode of production" during the Great Depression. Or the Weimar Republic? Of course not. Catastrophic declines do not have to signify a change from one social system (or mode of production) to another.

Yes but we know that there was no change in government policy or in institutional forms in the USA in 1929.

In 1991 we had american free market economic advisors openly setting out a crash program with the avoid aim establish capitalism. This program was adopted by the Yeltsin government, and the economic collapse followed.

As to economic inequalities, I do not have documentation to hand, but the stuff I read in the 80s indicated that differentials narrowed a great deal in the 50s, and that by the 70s inequalities were comparable to scandinavia.
Perhaps some of our Russian members can contribute some data here.

[Paul Cockshott]

How is this resolved? It is resolved by ordering these end uses into some kind of ordinal hierarchy A , B, C and D.

Yes and who does this?
GOSPLAN of course.

Applying rate limiting factors within the microunit of production is a simple matter of preventing obvious waste. The problem in the debate on socialist economic calculation has always been
the allocation of priorities at the social level not the micro level. You just assume the problem is solved without saying who will solve it or how they will arrive at their ordering of priorities. This hardly constitutes a convincing response to the Austrian school.


Yes. This would be according to the communist principle "from each according to ability to each according to need".

Well you are then defining socialism as being the same as what Marx referred to as the higher stage of communism. If that is the case there is no dispute. As far as I know, nobody claims that the USSR was in the higher phase of communism.

[robbo203]

Of course plans have to be constantly revised, and of course it is impossible to draw them up without detailed information from subsidiary units of production. I dont see that pointing out something obvious like that has any bearing on the argument, which is why I did not bother with it.


You miss the point. The pont is that plan fulfilment was essentially a myth. Triumphant state declarations to the effect that the plan had been fulfilled were in reality referring to a document that was often drastically different to the one that had been put forward at the commencement of the planning period

And yes planning required detailed information of requirements at the level of state enterprises in the form of indents but, even so, there was still a lot of detail that was not incorporated in the planning process. State enterprises also had a vested interest in inflating their requirements.

[robbo203]

Yes but we know that there was no change in government policy or in institutional forms in the USA in 1929.

In 1991 we had american free market economic advisors openly setting out a crash program with the avoid aim establish capitalism. This program was adopted by the Yeltsin government, and the economic collapse followed.

As to economic inequalities, I do not have documentation to hand, but the stuff I read in the 80s indicated that differentials narrowed a great deal in the 50s, and that by the 70s inequalities were comparable to scandinavia.
Perhaps some of our Russian members can contribute some data here.

Again, a change in government policy or instituitional form does not signify a change in the mode of production. Of course free market economic advisors would have the avowed aim of wanting to "establish capitalism" in the ex Soviet Union. This is becuase they dont understand what capitalism is. They think capitalism means the free market. They do not realise that capitalism is a distinct mode of production based upon generalised wage labour and commodity production - as existed in the Soviet Union. As revolutionaries we do not have to go along with how these free market advisors see things - they have an interest in conceptualising the Soviet Union as something other than capitalist. In reality, what their "advice" amounted to was how to to restructure capitalism giving more weight to the free play of market forces

On the question of inequality in the Soviet Union you have to remember that much of this was "in kind" not merely in terms of monetary incomes (and it was not uncommon for some individuals to have multiple incomes among the nomenklatura). Some of the findings which I presented earlier such as Roy Medvedev's book in 1976 represent an attempt to incorporate these "in kind" perks and benefits enjoyed by the Soviet capitalist class

[robbo203]

Yes and who does this?
GOSPLAN of course.

Applying rate limiting factors within the microunit of production is a simple matter of preventing obvious waste. The problem in the debate on socialist economic calculation has always been
the allocation of priorities at the social level not the micro level. You just assume the problem is solved without saying who will solve it or how they will arrive at their ordering of priorities. This hardly constitutes a convincing response to the Austrian school..

You havent quite understood my point. The ordering of priorities is indeed a social matter, something that has to be democratically decided upon by the community at l;arge. However this is not the same as planning.

In the Soviet Union it was the council of ministers that would effectively give GOSPLAN a set of guidelines with which to go ahead and formulate a plan. In a communist society, these guidelines would established deomcratically. However - and this is where your confusion arises - they will not be passed on to some kind of GOSPLAN institution to draw up some huge unwieldy central plan. Rather , they will be disseminated among production units to serve as guidelines in the allocation process. You have already agreed that "Applying rate limiting factors within the microunit of production is a simple matter of preventing obvious waste.". So you are effectively agreeing that the model I have presented is workable apart form the point about production priorities. But if you can see that the question of priorities can be resolved in the way I have suggested above then there shouldnt really be any great difficulty with the model proposed


Well you are then defining socialism as being the same as what Marx referred to as the higher stage of communism. If that is the case there is no dispute. As far as I know, nobody claims that the USSR was in the higher phase of communism.

This is exactly my point. Prior to the Leninist redefintion of socialism, socialism was generally understood to be a synonym for communism. Even the early Bolsheviks understood it in this way as I demonstrated with the quote from Bogdanov. It was not that socialism was equated specifically with the higher phase of communism but rather that it was synonymous with communism and so likewise had a higher and lower phase

[Paul Cockshott]

Again, a change in government policy or instituitional form does not signify a change in the mode of production.

Not always, but sometimes, and a change in the mode of production always involves a change in government policy and institutional forms.

If we see the latter, and also see that following the removal of planning that the economy collapsed, then I think it is reasonable to conclude that the collapse was a consequence of the removal of planning. Your contention was that planning was sham laid over an essentially capitalist market economy, one already driven by the law of value.

Were that the case, the removal of the planning system would have had no perceptible effect.

Since it did have a big effect, the plausibility of your original claim is that much lower.

[Paul Cockshott]

You havent quite understood my point. The ordering of priorities is indeed a social matter, something that has to be democratically decided upon by the community at l;arge. However this is not the same as planning.

In the Soviet Union it was the council of ministers that would effectively give GOSPLAN a set of guidelines with which to go ahead and formulate a plan. In a communist society, these guidelines would established deomcratically.

The ordering of priorities is a social matter, and it is in the long run advantageous to the mass of the population if top level priorities are settled democratically, by a national vote on the division of the budget between headings. But the information available from such democratic votes is quite limited.
It will be complicated enough to set up votes on how much labour is to be allocated to education, health, defence etc. There is no question of such democratic votes being used to allocate priorities right down the line to the millions of intermediate products used in a modern economy.

For the millions of intermediate products, there has to be planning. Democracy can set broad goals, the detailed attainment of these goals has either to be planned or organised via the profit motive.

Nor is there any prospect of using democratic votes to select between tens of thousands of different consumer goods. For this there is no subsitute for a market in consumer goods. It might be a market
in which labour notes were used for purchases from state stores, but it would not be free distribution.
Only if there is a feedback to the consumer telling them how much labour was used to make things
can consumption be guided in a non wasteful way.

You oversimplify when you say that the early socialist movement saw socialism as synonymous with distribution according to need.
Marx qualified the already popular slogan of 'from each according to his ability to each according to his need', by defering this to future higher stage of communism. His account in the Critique of the Gotha Programme was that under the first stage of communism, you would have distribution in proportion to work done, after taxes and social insurance were deducted.

The scheme Marx and Engels seemed to favour was something similar to Owen's labour vouchers. These are spoken of favourably in Capital, Anti-Durhing and suggested in the Critique of the Gotha Programme. If Bogdanov thought that socialism was synonmymous with free distribution, he was reverting to the utopians.

[sanpal]

Yes and who does this?
GOSPLAN of course.


About central planning in the former USSR, it was the true but seems like a joke: there are two plants side by side, one of them produces tractors, second one produces baked bricks, but it was not possible to throw bricks over the wall because these two plants belong to different departments and their material supplying was carried out through GOSPLAN, so the bricks was carried from Moscow to Ural ;)

[sanpal]

... you would have distribution in proportion to work done, after taxes and social insurance were deducted.


with a little note: not 'after taxes and social insurance were deducted' but when in the process of planning of necessary labour the complementary (social) labour will be added.

[Paul Cockshott]

we now call these things income tax and social insurance, recall that when M was writing there were no income tax or social insurance deductions from wages and the welfare state provision was non-existent.

[Led Zeppelin]

You oversimplify when you say that the early socialist movement saw socialism as synonymous with distribution according to need.
Marx qualified the already popular slogan of 'from each according to his ability to each according to his need', by defering this to future higher stage of communism. His account in the Critique of the Gotha Programme was that under the first stage of communism, you would have distribution in proportion to work done, after taxes and social insurance were deducted.

The scheme Marx and Engels seemed to favour was something similar to Owen's labour vouchers. These are spoken of favourably in Capital, Anti-Durhing and suggested in the Critique of the Gotha Programme. If Bogdanov thought that socialism was synonmymous with free distribution, he was reverting to the utopians.

I agree with you on this, but giving you a heads up; you just opened up a huge can of worms (http://www.revleft.com/vb/distinction-between-socialism-t104147/index.html?p=1427375#post1427375).

[robbo203]

The ordering of priorities is a social matter, and it is in the long run advantageous to the mass of the population if top level priorities are settled democratically, by a national vote on the division of the budget between headings. But the information available from such democratic votes is quite limited.
It will be complicated enough to set up votes on how much labour is to be allocated to education, health, defence etc. There is no question of such democratic votes being used to allocate priorities right down the line to the millions of intermediate products used in a modern economy.

For the millions of intermediate products, there has to be planning. Democracy can set broad goals, the detailed attainment of these goals has either to be planned or organised via the profit motive.

Nor is there any prospect of using democratic votes to select between tens of thousands of different consumer goods. For this there is no subsitute for a market in consumer goods. It might be a market
in which labour notes were used for purchases from state stores, but it would not be free distribution.
Only if there is a feedback to the consumer telling them how much labour was used to make things
can consumption be guided in a non wasteful way..

Again, you are missing the point. What I am suggesting is that the broad priorities be established by the community. I am not suggesting that the community democratically vote how to arrange thousands of different products into some kind of ordinal sequence - that would be absurd obviously. The point is that this broad hierarchy of production goals according to which products and services could be classified or grouped would be made available to production units as a guide to the allocation of resources in the way I indicated with my example earlier. It would be up to the production units themselves to use their discretion in the allocation of resources using such a guide. They as part of the community would certainly have no economic incentive to depart from this guide. Market competition would no longer exist

You still seem to have in mind some kind society wide planning mechanism which is not what I am talking about and which is in fact what I have decisively rejected. You say "It will be complicated enough to set up votes on how much labour is to be allocated to education, health, defence etc ("defence"??? against what in a communist society?) But society does not have to "vote" on how much labour is to be allocated to different things. How do you do that anyway in a society based on free voluntary labour? The demand for labour is generated and publicised at the level of the production unit perhaps via something equivalent to our capitalist job centres or other means



You oversimplify when you say that the early socialist movement saw socialism as synonymous with distribution according to need.
Marx qualified the already popular slogan of 'from each according to his ability to each according to his need', by defering this to future higher stage of communism. His account in the Critique of the Gotha Programme was that under the first stage of communism, you would have distribution in proportion to work done, after taxes and social insurance were deducted.

The scheme Marx and Engels seemed to favour was something similar to Owen's labour vouchers. These are spoken of favourably in Capital, Anti-Durhing and suggested in the Critique of the Gotha Programme. If Bogdanov thought that socialism was synonmymous with free distribution, he was reverting to the utopians.

No the point I was making was that in the pre-Leninist marxian tradition socialism was considered to be synonymous with communism. Therefore you could speak of there being a higer and lower phase of socialism and this would mean precisely the same thing as a higher and lower phase of communism.

As for your comments on the lower phase of communism/socialism Marxc was clear that in such a society there would be no money. Labour vouchers would no more constitute money than would a ticket to a theatre he said. So I am not quite sure where you get the idea that you would have distribution in proportion to work done, "after taxes and social insurance were deducted". You are presupposing capitalist relations of production here which is precisely what Marx said would no longer exist in the lower of communism

[sanpal]

But then again, Robin's already made it clear multiple times that he thinks that that section was bullshit.

Do you mean 'that section' as p.5 of the manifesto of the CP?
There is a category of people who name all things which they dislike or which they aren't able to disprove as bullshit

[Paul Cockshott]

As for your comments on the lower phase of communism/socialism Marxc was clear that in such a society there would be no money. Labour vouchers would no more constitute money than would a ticket to a theatre he said.

Yes we all understand that. But the principle of equal exchange still exists, between the worker and society, what the worker gives to society they get back an equivalent in return.

This is quite different from the general free distribution of goods. The latter is only likely to be feasible for a subset of goods and services :
1. where demand is low relative to potential output and the costs are dominated by fixed costs -- for example water supply in Norway or
the supply of data over the internet
2. where some form of rationing according to an objective assesment of need is possible -- as in the UK health care system


So I am not quite sure where you get the idea that you would have distribution in proportion to work done, "after taxes and social insurance were deducted". You are presupposing capitalist relations of production here which is precisely what Marx said would no longer exist in the lower of communism

Not at all, Marx speaks of deductions from payments to labour to cover social security purposes in the critique of the gotha programme. He is attacking the Lassalleans for ignoring the necessity of these.

How do you think that the workers employed in health or education are to be paid if there are no deductions from other peoples labour payments ( wages ?). If society simply issues them with labour vouchers at full time value, and does the same for those producing goods that are not freely distributed, then you will get devalutaion of the labour voucher.

[Die Neue Zeit]

You oversimplify when you say that the early socialist movement saw socialism as synonymous with distribution according to need.
Marx qualified the already popular slogan of 'from each according to his ability to each according to his need', by defering this to future higher stage of communism. His account in the Critique of the Gotha Programme was that under the first stage of communism, you would have distribution in proportion to work done, after taxes and social insurance were deducted.

The scheme Marx and Engels seemed to favour was something similar to Owen's labour vouchers. These are spoken of favourably in Capital, Anti-Durhing and suggested in the Critique of the Gotha Programme. If Bogdanov thought that socialism was synonymous with free distribution, he was reverting to the utopians.I agree with you on this, but giving you a heads up; you just opened up a huge can of worms (http://www.revleft.com/vb/distinction-between-socialism-t104147/index.html?p=1427375#post1427375).

To Paul:

Speaking of cans of worms, I don't remember your TANS book discussing "gift economies." How do they fit into the lower and especially higher phases of communism? Are they identical with the higher phase? What role might energy accounting play in potentially replacing labour credits?

[Paul Cockshott]

To Paul:

Speaking of cans of worms, I don't remember your TANS book discussing "gift economies." How do they fit into the lower and especially higher phases of communism? Are they identical with the higher phase? What role might energy accounting play in potentially replacing labour credits?

You have to remember that political economy is about social relations between people, not about relations between electricity generating plants. If the latter were the social actors, one could construct a political economy around energy, but they are not.

We dealt with the question in detail in;

Cockshott, W Paul & Cottrell, Allin F, 1997. "Labour Time versus Alternative Value Bases: A Research Note (http://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cambje/v21y1997i4p545-49.html)," Cambridge Journal of Economics (http://ideas.repec.org/s/oup/cambje.html), Oxford University Press, vol. 21(4), pages 545-49, July.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Hmmm. Your paper isn't available for downloading.

[Paul Cockshott]

I will see if there is an online version
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/metric/metric.htm
the above contains the evidence against the energy values, but also contains a fair bit of theory in the intro to it.

[Paul Cockshott]

I will see if there is an online version
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/metric/metric.htm
the above contains the evidence against the energy values, but also contains a fair bit of theory in the intro to it.
Here is a slightly more presentable version
http://129.3.20.41/eps/mhet/papers/0406/0406003.pdf

[Die Neue Zeit]

I don't see the word "energy" or "joule" (forgive me, it's also a long while since I took any kind of math beyond business statistics). :confused:

[Paul Cockshott]

As with all i/o table work you start of from monetary quantities. Translation to joules would be a simple scalar transform using current price of electricity. The correlation coefficients are unchanged under such a transform.

[Dimentio]

You have to remember that political economy is about social relations between people, not about relations between electricity generating plants. If the latter were the social actors, one could construct a political economy around energy, but they are not.

We dealt with the question in detail in;

Cockshott, W Paul & Cottrell, Allin F, 1997. "Labour Time versus Alternative Value Bases: A Research Note (http://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cambje/v21y1997i4p545-49.html)," Cambridge Journal of Economics (http://ideas.repec.org/s/oup/cambje.html), Oxford University Press, vol. 21(4), pages 545-49, July.



According to technocracy, human society could be summoned up in human relations, natural production capacity and technology. In all the eras prior to the late 18th century, human labour accounted for nineteen twenties of all labour input into production. But industrialism has reversed that trend, and nowadays only a fraction of necessary work is dependent on human energy input.

We technocrats do affirm that human relations are extremely valuable in any society, but from that does not follow that an economic system generally must be founded upon human relations with other humans. We are not ideologists or philosophers in general. Technocrats are most often engineers, who see an opportunity to increase the efficiency of the productive system as well as eliminating unnecessary bottlenecks of distribution (inequalities) by installing an energy accounting system which accounts for all material production capacity.

It has many benefits, the general being.

1. A reduction of unnecessary labour (we only produce things which the consumers are asking for)

2. An environmentally friendly approach (consumers win in terms of consumption capacity to ask for things with a minimum impact on the environment)

3. We could be sure that what we produce is corresponding with the demand of the population.

4. All human beings would have a decent quality of life.

What differs technocracy from any other libertarian socialist ideology, is that technocrats began from the other end. Instead of beginning with theories about the human being, we began by seeing how we could design a sustainable system to offer a high standard of life for all people. We are thus mainly concerned about results, not the ideological preconditions for the results.

NET (the European technocractic organisation) is upholding humanitarianism as a mean to motivate why we should install energy accounting.

Of course, one could criticise energy accounting out from the motivation factor. If reward is not tied with the human labour, how will people then be motivated to work?

Firstly, the main reason for energy accounting is to divide the entire production capacity of the system into quotas for each individual to possess. The individual is then allocating a part of his or her quota to having the products he or she desire produced.

The technate as a service has a monopoly on all production facilities, transport networks, resources and economic use of the territory of the technate. No matter how the technate is organised, there is no trade within the technate.

The energy credits also have the following traits separating them from all earlier currency systems.

1. When used, they stop to exist.

2. You cannot give them away or use them to trade with other individuals.

3. Your account is depleted and reloaded at the end of each production cycle, so it would correspond to the production capacity of the technate for any given period of the technate.

Economists use to criticise technocrats because they claim that scarcity will do away with the system. They define scarcity as the gap between unlimited wants and limited resources. While we technocrats affirm that wants might be unlimited, it is in the same way true that the human being has a very limited capacity to consume. Hence, as long as no individual human being could stop any other from consuming the products and services of the technate, and the technate has a resource sufficiency to provide for all its citizens, it won't be any problems.

Back to motivation.

The technate is not aiming to maximise production (just production capacity), and hence, we will aim to minimise the labour input for all citizens. Of course, people will have to do a specific amount of hours to get all the benefits of living in a technate - that is a part of its social contract.

If the flat structure of the distribution system of energy credits are proving to cause inefficiencies and low quality, we could install a semi-flat distribution system to give people certain ledgers of consumption levels after the quality of their input.

But our main goal is to eventually phase out most labour, as much as possible. Human beings should have the time to be human and to pursue their happiness. Work for survival is unworthy of a being such as the human being. We should be creative, have fun. All of humanity should be one big aristocracy, almost living as the ancient Gods of mount Olympus according to the myths.

http://www.technocracynet.eu

[Paul Cockshott]

According to technocracy, human society could be summoned up in human relations, natural production capacity and technology. In all the eras prior to the late 18th century, human labour accounted for nineteen twenties of all labour input into production. But industrialism has reversed that trend, and nowadays only a fraction of necessary work is dependent on human energy input.

That is true, but the economic function of human labour is not just to supply energy. A century ago millions of horses laboured alongside us, but now only a vestige of their former race survive as playthings of the rich. If human labour were, like that of the horse, no more than a source of brute energy, the working classes would long ago have gone the way of the horse, dispensed wth by the plutocracy.
But they survive and remain essential to the economy because labour requires the exercise of intelligence as well as effort. The effort has been readily displace, the intelligence has not.

[Die Neue Zeit]

That is true, but the economic function of human labour is not just to supply energy. A century ago millions of horses laboured alongside us, but now only a vestige of their former race survive as playthings of the rich. If human labour were, like that of the horse, no more than a source of brute energy, the working classes would long ago have gone the way of the horse, dispensed wth by the plutocracy.
But they survive and remain essential to the economy because labour requires the exercise of intelligence as well as effort. The effort has been readily displace, the intelligence has not.

Horses are an endangered species? I didn't know this. :(

[Paul Cockshott]

Yes they are almost extinct in the wild and exist mainly as pets of the upper classes. Their economic function, for which they were originally domesticated has been largely replaced by powered vehicles.

[Cult of Reason]

That is true, but the economic function of human labour is not just to supply energy. A century ago millions of horses laboured alongside us, but now only a vestige of their former race survive as playthings of the rich. If human labour were, like that of the horse, no more than a source of brute energy, the working classes would long ago have gone the way of the horse, dispensed wth by the plutocracy.
But they survive and remain essential to the economy because labour requires the exercise of intelligence as well as effort. The effort has been readily displace, the intelligence has not.

From that, then, all that is necessary is to have a side system, alongside the energy accounting system for the machines, that ensures that people go to work and do their jobs properly. There is no reason that such a system would go against energy accounting. There are plenty of options ranging from simple coercion (If you refuse to work you may be put onto rations or treated as mentally ill, or refusal to work can be regarded as a crime) to perks and privileges for those that work in unpopular jobs or unpopular places (If you live and work in Yakutia, usually the coldest place in the Northern Hemisphere in winter, then you may get an extra energy allowance for heating purposes and maybe some facilities in your settlement that would normally be reserved for larger, less isolated, ones).

[Paul Cockshott]

But why energy accounting, why not copper accounting, iron accounting etc. These are all basic inputs to the industrial system and one could construct accounting systems that were consistent in terms of them. Why energy?

If you ask why labour, the answer is that society is made up of people, and the economy is the set of all the relations between people that regulate work and the distribution of its product.

[blake 3:17]

Not too drift too much, but might it be worth looking at the ALBA? Its member countries have both material and political interests in this kind of alliance, and one that we in the global North should be supportive of.

[Cult of Reason]

But why energy accounting, why not copper accounting, iron accounting etc. These are all basic inputs to the industrial system and one could construct accounting systems that were consistent in terms of them. Why energy?

Unlike copper and iron, energy (more precisely exergy or thermodynamically available energy) is fundamentally involved in all productive and distributive processes, and all other inputs can be thought of in terms of energy (that needed to mine copper or smelt iron, for example). It can also be measured and calculated with a fairly high precision and, with the the same machines, the effects of its input are quite predictable. What a certain amount of it can "buy" will not fluctuate anywhere near as much as money, for example.


If you ask why labour, the answer is that society is made up of people, and the economy is the set of all the relations between people that regulate work and the distribution of its product.

I think it better to think of an economy as machine, mechanism or network of such that is concerned with production and distribution, ideally in as efficient a way as possible. E(n/x)ergy in, products out with some human supervision and, alongside that, services with some more human involvement. These products are then drained away by consumption. It is not obvious what human relations have to do with this beyond relations between workers at a workplace and maybe, maybe, the orders to and from the workplace if they are not conducted automatically.

[Paul Cockshott]

[QUOTE=Cult of Reason;1563423]Unlike copper and iron, energy (more precisely exergy or thermodynamically available energy) is fundamentally involved in all productive and distributive processes, and all other inputs can be thought of in terms of energy (that needed to mine copper or smelt iron, for example). It can also be measured and calculated with a fairly high precision and, with the the same machines, the effects of its input are quite predictable. What a certain amount of it can "buy" will not fluctuate anywhere near as much as money, for example.
[\quote]
Iron and copper also enter into all production that uses tools or electricity -- what are the wires made of?

The point is that in principle any one of the 'basic goods' can act as a standard of value.
A basic good is one that enters directly or indirectly into the produciton of all others.

You are right that energy is a more important input than iron or copper, and in consequence the correlation between energy value and market price is relatively high ( around 60% for the UK ). But on this account, labour is an even more important input to all branches of production than energy ( its correlation with market price is around 95% ), so the arguments you use for enerby apply even more to labour.

Energy can be expressed precisely in terms of joules, that is true, but joules of thermal energy and joules of electrical energy are not at all equivalent.

[Cult of Reason]

Iron and copper also enter into all production that uses tools or electricity -- what are the wires made of?

Actually, no. Iron and copper can usually be substituted for, even in production using electricity (aluminium for a the copper, for example; this is commonly done in aircraft because of aluminium's lower density), and it would be very much simpler to account for the only universal thing, the energy expended, than for a set of inputs like iron, aluminium and copper or an aggregate of them. The same applies for labour as well, since entire sections of production of many items have little or no human intervention (maintenance of the machines, mostly) so, if you do not account for the energy expended by the machines directly then you either have to ignore that section entirely (probably unsatisfactory as you might get two products with the same "costs" where one is more highly processed than the other and so has a higher environmental impact) or account for the labour time of each small human action involved, split over each product, for each person (so they get their labour vouchers) for that section of the procutive process.

With known energy inputs to an electricity grid, and with a meter on each machine (if you wanted to go that far), it is a simple arithmetical problem to estimate the embodied energy of a product by, for each machine, dividing the energy input by the quantity of the product output and then adding these numbers up for each machine the product's material inputs had to pass through (including the machines that produced the initial inputs, whether miners or recyclers). I doubt a labour time based system would be simpler.


You are right that energy is a more important input than iron or copper, and in consequence the correlation between energy value and market price is relatively high ( around 60% for the UK ). But on this account, labour is an even more important input to all branches of production than energy ( its correlation with market price is around 95% ), so the arguments you use for enerby apply even more to labour.

By labour I assume you mean labour time rather than labour costs, which would be moot as those vary from region to region (though I would also find it more believable).

I do not see how market price is relevant, though, as energy accounting is a method designed for use in a post-scarcity system, where the market would fail to give sensible prices.


Energy can be expressed precisely in terms of joules, that is true, but joules of thermal energy and joules of electrical energy are not at all equivalent.

I was trying to be careful earlier, but obviously I was not careful enough:


Unlike copper and iron, energy (more precisely exergy or thermodynamically available energy) is fundamentally involved in all productive and distributive processes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exergy

[Paul Cockshott]

The same applies for labour as well, since entire sections of production of many items have little or no human intervention (maintenance of the machines, mostly) so,




Empirically this is wrong as the studies of energy value show, the higher correlation of labour values to prices are because labour is the more important to more production processes than energy.


if you do not account for the energy expended by the machines directly then you either have to ignore that section entirely (probably unsatisfactory as you might get two products with the same "costs" where one is more highly processed than the other and so has a higher environmental impact) or account for the labour time of each small human action involved, split over each product, for each person (so they get their labour vouchers) for that section of the procutive process.

With known energy inputs to an electricity grid, and with a meter on each machine (if you wanted to go that far), it is a simple arithmetical problem to estimate the embodied energy of a product by, for each machine, dividing the energy input by the quantity of the product output and then adding these numbers up for each machine the product's material inputs had to pass through (including the machines that produced the initial inputs, whether miners or recyclers). I doubt a labour time based system would be simpler.

The estimation of costs would be technically no more difficult than with money, it is simply that


the units would be hours, rather than the monetary representation of hours as a present
the workers input would be valued at full cost rather than at roughly 50% cost as at present.





By labour I assume you mean labour time rather than labour costs, which would be moot as those vary from region to region (though I would also find it more believable).

I do not see how market price is relevant, though, as energy accounting is a method designed for use in a post-scarcity system, where the market would fail to give sensible prices.
It is relevant because in a hypothetical post scarcity situation you would not need to calculate costs at all. The fact that you are calculating costs indicates a resource constraint of some sort and hence the continuation of scarcity.

[Demogorgon]

The problem with energy accounting is pretty fundamental and that is that cost of production does not boil down to how much energy is needed to make a good whereas it does boil down to how much Labour. Therefore attempting to calculate an economy based on energy will be calculating with irrelevant numbers.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Well, I suppose energy accounting might work if the labour economy is replaced by a replicator economy. There would still be scarcity in the physics sense, since energy is finite.

[Cult of Reason]

Empirically this is wrong as the studies of energy value show, the higher correlation of labour values to prices are because labour is the more important to more production processes than energy.

Again, is this in terms of labour time or the monetary cost of such labour time, out of interest? Indeed, is it in terms of energy/exergy or the monetary cost of such energy/exergy?


The estimation of costs would be technically no more difficult than with money, it is simply that

1. the units would be hours, rather than the monetary representation of hours as a present
2. the workers input would be valued at full cost rather than at roughly 50% cost as at present.


Assuming no inflation and that pretty much everything else would be the same as money, that still sounds like a more complicated system than energy accounting.


It is relevant because in a hypothetical post scarcity situation you would not need to calculate costs at all. The fact that you are calculating costs indicates a resource constraint of some sort and hence the continuation of scarcity.

At the risk of prematurely jumping to conclusions, it seems you are making the classic error of mistaking abundance or post-scarcity with an infinity or near-infinity of resources. This is not the case, or at least not what I mean by post-scarcity. Post-scarcity is simply the lack of scarcity, i.e. there is enough for all the population (within reasonable limits).

Without calculating costs, an abundance (in the sense of "(just) more than enough") will be squandered so that in the end you DO have scarcity. Abundance will not simply be a situation or a fortunate happenstance, it is something to be achieved and then guarded. Neither can be done without an industrial organisation (or network) and an accounting system to inform the decisions of that organisation (or network).

If there is double the amount of energy available to provide all sensible wants for the population, then that is abundance as long as efficient and economical manufacturing standards are enforced (which requires an accounting system of some kind) and extravagant wants (mansions, luxury "yachts"/ships, private jets etc. for individuals rather than communities) are not pandered to. Without an accounting system, consumers will have no idea how much the stuff they are buying costs their fellow workers in time, themselves in their energy allocation or the environment, and nor will manufacturer be able to do the same for their inputs, which will have either of two effects: the immediate collapse of the system or a later ecological collapse due to unsustainable waste.

In linear programming, if you have optimum solution defined by just one constraint then all other possible constraints that are also resources are classed "abundant". This can be reached through increasing the magnitude of the other possible constraints through increased resource use or improved production efficiency (lower embodied energy per computer, perhaps), or through the reduction of the defining constraint by decreased consumption or increased consumption efficiency (reusable razor blades rather than disposable ones, maybe). For an abundant, or post-scarcity, society, we would want the defining constraint to be that of typical capacity or tendency for consumption (probably made possible by abolishing certain forms of consumption, for instance by replacing housing ownership by allocation (or, for a more "choice-oriented" approach, "rent" in the form of maintenance costs varying by the size or ricketyness of the building) and/or the collectivisation of transportation (why own a car when there can be a large collective car pool used as needed at a higher load factor, so fewer cars are needed in total?)), which itself is limited by the time available to humans per day outside of sleeping, socialising and actually using the stuff they have previously consumed.

In order to maintain such a post-scarcity society, constant accounting of supply and demand must take place, to make sure that, as far as possible for all "staple" products, the former is never exceeded by the latter (otherwise, of course, scarcity returns; temporarily this is not a problem as it can be handled with temporary rationing until the problem goes away: think of something like an unexpectedly high demand in a particular product before production can be altered accordingly). This is most easily done with a universal factor in all production and consumption (both now and forever in the future) that can handle the lack of scarcity (as with a free market all prices would fall to zero or nearly zero in that situation). Thermodynamically available energy (exergy) is the best (perhaps only) candidate.


The problem with energy accounting is pretty fundamental and that is that cost of production does not boil down to how much energy is needed to make a good whereas it does boil down to how much Labour. Therefore attempting to calculate an economy based on energy will be calculating with irrelevant numbers.

Is this market cost or functional cost? If the latter then energy use is the relevant number there is, as it can be universally applied.

[Demogorgon]

At the risk of prematurely jumping to conclusions, it seems you are making the classic error of mistaking abundance or post-scarcity with an infinity or near-infinity of resources.In economics that is precisely what post-scarcity means, if you are going to change the meaning of a technical phrase, don't be surprised when others don't go along with it.


Is this market cost or functional cost? If the latter then energy use is the relevant number there is, as it can be universally applied.
It is, as I say, the cost of producing a good, call it what you will. In a market situation, it will be the cost the price varies around according to various factors. In technical terms you could also describe it as the sacrifice in terms of the amount of other goods that could have been made with those resources.

Anyway, here is your problem. Economics is about allocating resources, not energy, energy is only one kind of resource. Labour is also a kind of resource, but it is necessary to utilise all other resources and the cost of utilising them to society will be how the labour could otherwise have been spent.

Making calculations based on overall cost of production (reducible as I say to Labour) will give you accurate results, using energy will not, because two goods with the same cost of production will not necessarily require the same level of energy to make them.

[Cult of Reason]

In economics that is precisely what post-scarcity means, if you are going to change the meaning of a technical phrase, don't be surprised when others don't go along with it.

If you take my definition, based upon the idea of constraints in linear programming, and substitute for the capacity/tendency of consumption a golden rule of economics (that of infinite material wants) then you end up with what you consider to be post-scarcity: infinite resources. However, since the idea of infinite material wants is not an empirical observation but an assumption that makes the models work as long as, in reality, the capacity for consumption is higher than the actual level of consumption, my definition, which takes account of all this, is more realistic (and doesn't break any laws of physics).

Post-scarcity is simply the situation where supply is greater than or equal to absolute demand (that is, demand unaffected by price, or what it would be if price was zero). If you assume that wants are infinite, as classical economics does, then it is obvious that supply would have to be infinite to match demand if and only if the capacity to consume is also infinite. Since capacity to consume is not infinite, demand can never be infinite, so if there is some finite supply that will be above demand, at which point prices will fall to zero as scarcity has ceased to exist, then you have post-scarcity because supply exceeds demand.


In a market situation,

Energy accounting is designed for situations where markets can only fail, i.e. post-scarcity conditions. It is not meant to be a substitute while scarcity exists (except perhaps temporarily during the transition to post-scarcity).


Economics is about allocating resources, not energy, energy is only one kind of resource.

All other resources can be reduced to energy: energy used for mining, smelting, growing, weaving, etc..

[Demogorgon]

Good Lord, this has been explained to you several times. You cannot reduce cost to energy consumption. The main reason perhaps being that different sources of energy are needed for different things and as a result getting the same amount of energy for different things may have radically different costs.

I'm all for investigating new approaches to economics, but this falls at the first hurdle.

[Paul Cockshott]

I do not accept that human labour can be reduced to energy. The labour of a horse perhaps, but not the labour of a person.

[Hyacinth]

In order to maintain such a post-scarcity society, constant accounting of supply and demand must take place, to make sure that, as far as possible for all "staple" products, the former is never exceeded by the latter (otherwise, of course, scarcity returns; temporarily this is not a problem as it can be handled with temporary rationing until the problem goes away: think of something like an unexpectedly high demand in a particular product before production can be altered accordingly). This is most easily done with a universal factor in all production and consumption (both now and forever in the future) that can handle the lack of scarcity (as with a free market all prices would fall to zero or nearly zero in that situation). Thermodynamically available energy (exergy) is the best (perhaps only) candidate.
Really? That's quite a claim to make. In this thread (http://www.revleft.com/vb/new-economic-system-t110476/index2.html) I raised an objection to exactly this argument, to which I never received an adequate response. But, to briefly reiterate:

[W]hile energy, insofar as, trivially, all production processes employ it, is an objective measure, it does not give us the overall cost of production of goods and services, except its overall energy cost. And while this information is certainly relevant, it isn't the only relevant information. There is no need to handicap ourselves by limiting our focus to only one aspect of production cost, and, at that, not even the most relevant one. Consider, for instance, that the directive to planners to minimize energy expenditures, which, under a system of energy accounting would make sense, might result in the adoption of labour-intensive production methods, insofar as the operation of a fully-automated production line consumes more energy than does the use of human labour power. But, plainly, this is an outcome no one wants. What we want to minimize is the use of labour, not energy. Especially so if we are capable of producing energy in relative abundance. In fact, under conditions of relative abundance, the use of energy accounting in the planning of production becomes pointless, insofar as we no longer need to economize on energy. In contrast, labour is something that we would always want to economize.

And, given the viability, already and if not then in the near future thanks to the growth in computing power and data gathering capability, planning in kind is a viable option. Why would we opt out for energy accounting in light of this? After all, if we can take into consideration all the factors that go into the production of a product, why wouldn't we?