A note on Labour Vouchers.

[ContrarianLemming]

The question (on the listo f threads now atm) based "wont a gift economy mean people will take more then they need" comes up every other week I'd say, if not more often then that. The question assumes that we don't yet have an adundence of goods so I'm assuming that throughtout this thread..

Often, in these threads, someone will point out labour vouchers and how they could be used in communism to ration goods, this is often unpoular, some of the reasons are unfounded, if not most.

I say "ration goods" because the purists of this forum and so turned off by the word "voucher", ergo, money that they must immediatly claim, to the appluase of comrades that paying someone is a characteristic of capitalism OR we would have capitalism if people were paid OR labour vouchers would lead to capitalism OR it's a form of wage slavery.

I want to explain how none of this is actually through I want those learners to understand this.

First, is paying someone based on work done a characteistic of capitalism? No, the only defining characteristic of capitalism is the extraction of surplus value cupled with private ownership.
Paying someone based on how much they work isn't a characteristic of capitalism, it is the characteristic of a scarity society.

In a scarity society, we all agree rationing of good is needed, yes? How shall we ration them? Perhaps we should use some type of filing system, a mobile one, voile! Labour vouchers.

Claiming that labour vouchers are infact a feature of capitalism is no more accurate then saying that rationing is a feature of capitalism, because that's exactly what labour vouchers are, they are a form of rationing system.

This isn't wage slavery because a society based on libertarian principles would be based on voluntary relationships, you can't force someone to work, they will not starve if they do not work.

Now can we please get past our purist atitude towards labour vouchers, replace the word "labour voucher" with "rationing in a scarity society" and I get the feeling it would be more popular, if not consensus.

[AK]

The question (on the listo f threads now atm) based "wont a gift economy mean people will take more then they need" comes up every other week I'd say, if not more often then that. The question assumes that we don't yet have an adundence of goods so I'm assuming that throughtout this thread..

Often, in these threads, someone will point out labour vouchers and how they could be used in communism to ration goods, this is often unpoular, some of the reasons are unfounded, if not most.

I say "ration goods" because the purists of this forum and so turned off by the word "voucher", ergo, money that they must immediatly claim, to the appluase of comrades that paying someone is a characteristic of capitalism OR we would have capitalism if people were paid OR labour vouchers would lead to capitalism OR it's a form of wage slavery.

I want to explain how none of this is actually through I want those learners to understand this.

First, is paying someone based on work done a characteistic of capitalism? No, the only defining characteristic of capitalism is the extraction of surplus value cupled with private ownership.
Paying someone based on how much they work isn't a characteristic of capitalism, it is the characteristic of a scarity society.

In a scarity society, we all agree rationing of good is needed, yes? How shall we ration them? Perhaps we should use some type of filing system, a mobile one, voile! Labour vouchers.

Claiming that labour vouchers are infact a feature of capitalism is no more accurate then saying that rationing is a feature of capitalism, because that's exactly what labour vouchers are, they are a form of rationing system.

This isn't wage slavery because a society based on libertarian principles would be based on voluntary relationships, you can't force someone to work, they will not starve if they do not work.

Now can we please get past our purist atitude towards labour vouchers, replace the word "labour voucher" with "rationing in a scarity society" and I get the feeling it would be more popular, if not consensus.
This post just made me re-think my position on labour-vouchers, thanks :)

[SeaSpeck]

Who prints the vouchers, how do you earn them, and who prevents counterfeiting?

[HEAD ICE]

Who prints the vouchers, how do you earn them, and who prevents counterfeiting?

Most schemes I've seen have labor vouchers being given on the basis of labor time. For counterfeiting, I've read ideas from tickets to checks with your signature on it and a credit card. Labor vouchers are not "labor dollars". They apply only to you and they can not be exchanged.

The DeLeonists on this board are pretty knowledgeable on this topic and they will soon find this and they will give a better answer (they swayed me in favor of it).

[SeaSpeck]

I've seen have labor vouchers being given on the basis of labor time. .

If that is true, then wouldn't we just wind up back at, "Goods exchanged for work done" and not a Gift Economy?

[HEAD ICE]

If that is true, then wouldn't we just wind up back at, "Goods exchanged for work done" and not a Gift Economy?

Labor vouchers are not exchanged or exchangeable. They are a claim on goods.

[Adil3tr]

We can't distribute on mutual trust and solidarity? Sometimes it seems that we damage our ideals by trying to hard to make them more realistic. Just a thought.

[ContrarianLemming]

If that is true, then wouldn't we just wind up back at, "Goods exchanged for work done" and not a Gift Economy?

ergo, rationing
get past your knee twitching, a gift econonomy is suitable for a post scarity society, or for goods which are already abundant (water).

[SeaSpeck]

get past your knee twitching

I'm not knee twitching anything. I never said that rationing would be a bad idea. In fact, I completely agree with the concept. All I'm asking is, how would we create as system were all the vouchers are interchangeable no matter where you travel? And if you do have to do work to receive vouchers, how do does it still qualify as a gift economy if you have to "pay" in vouchers to receive goods?

[ContrarianLemming]

how would we create as system were all the vouchers are interchangeable no matter where you travel?

You put foward an international idea "lets all use this type of labour voucher with this process" and try to get everyone to agree with it, if a minority of regions decide not to then they would have problems economically trading wth other regions.
It's not hard, considering we all agree it's pretty rational, we all use the same time zone form, it's not really any different.


And if you do have to do work to receive vouchers, how do does it still qualify as a gift economy if you have to "pay" in vouchers to receive goods?

It's not a gift economy, that's the point, gift economy style economics would be used for that which is abundant.

[Quail]

The only problem I have with rationing based on work done is that people who can't work for whatever reason would get a lower ration, unless there was a security type system for those people, in which case why bother rationing based on work in the first place? If certain resources were scarce, couldn't a community acknowledge that fact and agree on how much would be realistic for people to take?

[ContrarianLemming]

The only problem I have with rationing based on work done is that people who can't work for whatever reason would get a lower ration, unless there was a security type system for those people

And any rational society would have one


in which case why bother rationing based on work in the first place? If certain resources were scarce, couldn't a community acknowledge that fact and agree on how much would be realistic for people to take?

Yes, and that's rationing. labour vouchers are a way to efficiantly do this and they encourage hard work. I don't buy into the idea that every worker deserves the same or should get the same wages.
I might make another thread about this.

[Quail]

Yes, and that's rationing. labour vouchers are a way to efficiantly do this and they encourage hard work. I don't buy into the idea that every worker deserves the same or should get the same wages.
I might make another thread about this.

I know that it's rationing, but I think that it would be a fairer way of doing it. I think that it's unfair to have a system where workers who are more capable of doing more work can easily get a bigger share of the resources than those less able. For it to be a fair system it would have to be scaled to take into account each worker's ability at the job they were doing, and the social usefulness of each job, which I don't think is practical.

[ContrarianLemming]

I know that it's rationing, but I think that it would be a fairer way of doing it. I think that it's unfair to have a system where workers who are more capable of doing more work can easily get a bigger share of the resources than those less able. For it to be a fair system it would have to be scaled to take into account each worker's ability at the job they were doing, and the social usefulness of each job, which I don't think is practical.

coincendently I made a new thread tackling this very argument.
The way you propose is fair to, but I believe in incentives, there is to much evidence showing how they work, which is almost enough to send me to opposing ideologies!

However I should add, incentives don't work in creative jobs.

[SeaSpeck]

It's not a gift economy, that's the point, gift economy style economics would be used for that which is abundant.

Ok, I see what you're doing there.

[mikelepore]

Labor vouchers are not exchanged or exchangeable. They are a claim on goods.

I wouldn't have any objection to to labor vouchers being exchanged or transferred. It's only important that the means of production are not placed up for sale, and therefore individuals cannot become owners of them -- not because a rule forbids them to buy them, but because individuals do not find shares of ownership in the means of production to be presented for sale, regardless of how much savings they have available. Do that and there is no danger of human exploitation coming out of the act of exchanging.

Furthermore, I think it can be projected that people of the future will want the option to transfer labor vouchers, for continuation of such cultural practices as giving money as wedding gifts or graduating-student gifts. As with any implementation detail, if people will want such an option then that is the only thing required for the option to be included; that is, our opinion here don't count.

[mikelepore]

Who prints the vouchers, how do you earn them, and who prevents counterfeiting?

I believe there would be a mechanical delivery system at the store. You say, "Computer, give me a video camera, model number 995x." Either the item comes out of the warehouse on the conveyor belt, or else the computer screen says "there is insufficient credit in your account." Your number of hours at work (with any sort of adjustments that public policy calls for) are the credits in your personal account.

[JazzRemington]

The question (on the listo f threads now atm) based "wont a gift economy mean people will take more then they need" comes up every other week I'd say, if not more often then that. The question assumes that we don't yet have an adundence of goods so I'm assuming that throughtout this thread..

Well, this criticism that you're talking about is based on the faulty reasoning of attributing personality characteristics particular to a Capitalist society to a communist society (or in the least any society that's based around a gift economy). Hypothetically, any society based on the free exchange of goods and services would necessitate a complete change in morality and ethics, thus there probably wouldn't be problems of people taking more than their fair share - or at least these people wouldn't be endemic and would be easily managed, as it were. Medieval peasants circulated goods and services amongst themselves without the need for money, and they had even less of a surplus than we do in our contemporary society.

Secondly, I believe a gift economy is technically based on the free exchange of goods and services where there is no immediate good or service received in exchange. If one is using labor vouchers, then there is no gift economy - one cannot obtain a good or service without "spending" labor vouchers. Whether or not there is a massive surplus is not the issue, here. I know you said that it wouldn't be a gift economy if there were labor vouchers, but it's not exactly clear from what you've written. It reads like you want labor vouchers with a gift economy.

Thirdly, for a gift economy to become widespread there has to be a massive surplus. If there is scarcity, there needs to be a way to ration good or services (either through direct bartering or using money), which would invalidate any possibility of there being a gift economy (as I've said above).

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

I think folks are looking at the question wrong, if only because it's so difficult to conceive of a classless society of material abundance while living in capitalism.

Labor vouchers are still a representation of value, since the value of a product is determined by the amount of labor that went into it.

The connection between the direct act of producing and the direct act of consumption needs to broken. Elderly folks may not be as capable of producing as younger folks, while at the same time having increased needs (medicine, medical care, special foods, special shoes, walkers, etc.). Are we going to say "too bad pops, you don't have enough labor vouchers for that?" How about people working on cures for the latest disease who spend hours doing independent research without anything to show for it at the moment?

People have to want to labor instead of needing to labor. As Einstein put it, "Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom."

Labor vouchers as a claim on goods is just a form of rationing. It's like what existed in the USSR.

If there is scarcity we have a major problem. Material abundance is key to classless society.

If we are short on something people want or need our answer should not be to put restrictions on what does exist, but to immediately rectify that situation and produce enough to satisfy those wants and needs!

Of course there is scarcity and then there are production delays. There's a big difference between not being able to satisfy your needs and having to wait 2 months for a new laptop you want. The main thing is that the means to satisfy everyone's wants and needs are in existence.

But with modern technology we can organize production with relative ease. The consumption habits of people are already being recording by online retailers, retail stores (with "loyalty" cards), etc. All we really need to do is expand that (and integrate other useful inputs, including direct requests), producing for need and sweeping away the economic mechanisms of the old society in the process.

The better we become at this, the more we can eliminate production queues to the point where everyone can labor freely without worrying about how their wants and needs will be met.

At most we'll need a way of divvying up socially necessary labor. For example we would divide the total amount of labor required to meet the needs and wants of all among all the able bodied folks, adjusting for individual circumstances where required.
That amount will be greatly lowered by the integration of countless people who now work jobs we will have no need for (insurance agents, tax collectors, etc.) as well of those excluded from the production process (unemployed, etc.).

You could swipe your card to track the socially necessary labor you preform.
Satisfying your social responsibility will then allow you free access to all of society's product.


It's only important that the means of production are not placed up for sale, and therefore individuals cannot become owners of them -- not because a rule forbids them to buy them, but because individuals do not find shares of ownership in the means of production to be presented for sale, regardless of how much savings they have available. Do that and there is no danger of human exploitation coming out of the act of exchanging.

Have you heard of hoarding, black markets, etc?

In a post-scarcity society of course this would be absurd and unnecessary. But in a post-scarcity society so would rationing.


Furthermore, I think it can be projected that people of the future will want the option to transfer labor vouchers, for continuation of such cultural practices as giving money as wedding gifts or graduating-student gifts. As with any implementation detail, if people will want such an option then that is the only thing required for the option to be included; that is, our opinion here don't count.

Mike's socialism is a strange mix of utopianism and pragmatism. At any rate, it's no more likely to lead to human emancipation than it is to become a reality.

[mikelepore]

The problem with talking about "post-scarcity" is that the technology needed to make it possible may not be invented until 500 years in the future. If you're going to talk about a "gift economy" in a "post scarcity society", why don't you also talk about how it will relate to interplanetary travel on star ships? It's just as removed from the present day potential of technology. its basic requirement is the replicator device seen on Star Trek, so that people will be able to consume all they wish to, without any requirement to work, because anything that you ask for will automatically pop out.

A labor time compensation system is something that the workers could implement a week from next Tuesday, or any time the workers become ideologically prepared to make a fundamental change. It's not waiting for any new technology to be invented. It just uses the facts that technology knows about now, and these facts are: the production of goods always occurs at a finite rate, the rate of consumption does not have any known upper limit, and these two rates have to be forced artificially into correlation. Using proportionality to labor time isn't the only possible method to limit the consumption rate to the production rate; society could also use fixed rations or other methods, but I think using proportionality to labor time is the method with the most advantages.

[Zanthorus]

Labor vouchers are still a representation of value, since the value of a product is determined by the amount of labor that went into it.

Well to begin with, the value of a product is not determined by the amount of labour that went into it, but by the amount of labour-time which is socially necessary for it's production under the prevailing conditions of production. I could take a hundred hours producing a sack of grain but assuming a fairly competitive marketplace I'll end up selling the sack for the same amount as the guy who only put in fifty hours. Secondly, the wages of the labourer are not determined by the value they create whilst at work, else the capitalist would be unable to reap a profit. Wages are determined by the value of the labourers means of subsistence. Since labour-vouchers represent a claim on work performed rather than work necessary for the reproduction of the labourer they differ in at least one important way from wages. Thirdly, and this is the reason for my pedantic correction of your definition of value, the value of a product is not what the classical economists envisioned it as i.e simply an amount of labour embodied in a product with a view to exchange. Value is the form which the products of abstract human labour take in the exchange process between private, autonomous production units which regulates that exchange. Value can't be worked out by simply timing how long it takes to produce a certain commodity, it can only be worked out and validated through the market. In a socialist/communist society based on associated production labour would not be regulated by the exchange mechanism but apportioned out in accordance with a definite social plan. Therefore it is false to merely say "oh look labour-time calculations, that means value, and value means capitalism!" The similarities are only superficial since content and form are altered.

[nickdlc]

What if your talk to the machine went something like this:

"Computer give me bread, soap and diapers for my growing family." and then it says "there is insufficient credit in your account."

Are we seriously gonna start charging for every use-value made? Would you want that?

What we need to do is find out the total labour hours necessary to meet the standard of living for the whole of society at that point in time. We take the mass of the productive workers and divide up all the labour time necessary between them. So on average maybe it comes out that 10 hours weekly are needed. At the very minimum that's the amount necessary to maintain ourselves at that level of living. That's the amount we must as productive workers work weekly for society.

Because the objective measure of accounting is the labour hour we know how many labour hours went into producing articles that are free to society. So as workers we from the very get go may decide food, health care, public transportation, housing are all free access. And we know how much this costs because we keep records of it expressed in labour hours.

As productive capability increases more and more things become free access maybe a couple of years later workers decide because of the very low number of labour hours needed to provide clothing that it is now in the sphere of free access.

Because we control the means of production in common we would want that our labour becomes more productive and so we vote on labour saving machinery and mobilise and train the labour necessary to build that machinery. So that for the next year the minimum to reproduce our society goes down to 9 hours.

What I'm saying is we need an objective measure of account this could be the labour hour. We need to know how much labour is going into the things we consume. Once we see that the amount of labour embodied in an object is very little we vote to put it in the sphere of free access. Most importantly the workers in their productive facilities keep track of this and don't hand it over to other people to do the work for them.

What is more we should right down in our constitution that all labour is voluntary and no one can be coerced into doing labour they do not want to do.

Things that have alot of labour embodied in them could easily be shared. Your being determines your consciousness, the means of production are now in common guess whats gonna happen, more sharing.

[Tablo]

I have no problem with developing a means to ensure that labor is done by members of the community and the use of labor vouchers to ensure there is enough to go around in times of scarcity, but to gives members of society a certain amount based on hours of labor isn't something that would exist in a Communist society.

Here is an excerpt from the Anarchist FAQ since I feel I have repeated some of these basic points about a thousand times.

The major difference between collectivists and communists is over the question of "money" after a revolution. Anarcho-communists consider the abolition of money to be essential, while anarcho-collectivists consider the end of private ownership of the means of production to be the key. As Kropotkin noted, collectivist anarchism "express[es] a state of things in which all necessaries for production are owned in common by the labour groups and the free communes, while the ways of retribution [i.e. distribution] of labour, communist or otherwise, would be settled by each group for itself." [Anarchism, p. 295] Thus, while communism and collectivism both organise production in common via producers' associations, they differ in how the goods produced will be distributed. Communism is based on free consumption of all while collectivism is more likely to be based on the distribution of goods according to the labour contributed. However, most anarcho-collectivists think that, over time, as productivity increases and the sense of community becomes stronger, money will disappear. Both agree that, in the end, society would be run along the lines suggested by the communist maxim: "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs." They just disagree on how quickly this will come about.

So basically consumption can't be based upon contribution in a Communist society since, by definition, it is not Communist. Either way it is still Socialist and totally cool, but what some of you are suggesting simply is not Communist. Prior to post-scarcity it is fine. It is also fine to establish a means of determining whether an individual is a contributing member of the community.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Well to begin with, the value of a product is not determined by the amount of labour that went into it, but by the amount of labour-time which is socially necessary for it's production under the prevailing conditions of production. I could take a hundred hours producing a sack of grain but assuming a fairly competitive marketplace I'll end up selling the sack for the same amount as the guy who only put in fifty hours.

Right. This is what I meant. I didn't feel the need to explain the whole process since it's been done elsewhere so many times.


Secondly, the wages of the labourer are not determined by the value they create whilst at work, else the capitalist would be unable to reap a profit. Wages are determined by the value of the labourers means of subsistence.

Right.


Since labour-vouchers represent a claim on work performed rather than work necessary for the reproduction of the labourer they differ in at least one important way from wages.

wage n Payment for labor or services to a worker, especially remuneration on an hourly, daily, or weekly basis or by the piece.

This is no different that the argument for the system of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their work."


Thirdly, and this is the reason for my pedantic correction of your definition of value, the value of a product is not what the classical economists envisioned it as i.e simply an amount of labour embodied in a product with a view to exchange. Value is the form which the products of abstract human labour take in the exchange process between private, autonomous production units which regulates that exchange. Value can't be worked out by simply timing how long it takes to produce a certain commodity, it can only be worked out and validated through the market.

And the point is to do away with the law of value.


In a socialist/communist society based on associated production labour would not be regulated by the exchange mechanism but apportioned out in accordance with a definite social plan. Therefore it is false to merely say "oh look labour-time calculations, that means value, and value means capitalism!" The similarities are only superficial since content and form are altered.

I didn't say it would be capitalism. But it also wouldn't be the way the forward to a lasting classless society of material abundance.

“A development of the productive forces is the absolutely necessary practical premise, because without it want is generalized, and with want the struggle for necessities begins again, and that means that all the old crap must revive.” - Marx

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

The problem with talking about "post-scarcity" is that the technology needed to make it possible may not be invented until 500 years in the future. If you're going to talk about a "gift economy" in a "post scarcity society", why don't you also talk about how it will relate to interplanetary travel on star ships? It's just as removed from the present day potential of technology. its basic requirement is the replicator device seen on Star Trek, so that people will be able to consume all they wish to, without any requirement to work, because anything that you ask for will automatically pop out.

A labor time compensation system is something that the workers could implement a week from next Tuesday, or any time the workers become ideologically prepared to make a fundamental change. It's not waiting for any new technology to be invented. It just uses the facts that technology knows about now, and these facts are: the production of goods always occurs at a finite rate, the rate of consumption does not have any known upper limit, and these two rates have to be forced artificially into correlation. Using proportionality to labor time isn't the only possible method to limit the consumption rate to the production rate; society could also use fixed rations or other methods, but I think using proportionality to labor time is the method with the most advantages.

Yea, we've seen your pragmatic arguments many times.

The fact is that the means already exist to meet the needs of the whole world. The problem is that they're not being utilized for such.

[Die Neue Zeit]

The problem with talking about "post-scarcity" is that the technology needed to make it possible may not be invented until 500 years in the future. If you're going to talk about a "gift economy" in a "post scarcity society", why don't you also talk about how it will relate to interplanetary travel on star ships? It's just as removed from the present day potential of technology. its basic requirement is the replicator device seen on Star Trek, so that people will be able to consume all they wish to, without any requirement to work, because anything that you ask for will automatically pop out.

Mike, Nothing Human Is Alien combines the free access fetish of guys like Robbo203 with spontaneist Council fetishes that discard political organization by the workers movement historically.


This is no different that the argument for the system of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their work."

Only two words are missing to make that Soviet slogan consistent with Marx's thinking: his want. To each his want according to his work. This implies that "the means already exist to meet the needs of the whole world," that "they're not being utilized for such" at the present time, that basic necessities can be fulfilled in the new society unless there's some global ecological catastrophe, and that needs-based distribution of basic necessities already goes against the law of value.

[ContrarianLemming]

any society based on the free exchange of goods and services would necessitate a complete change in morality and ethicsYou've lost me :p or were the north eastern native americans superhumans?

A number of people have said material abundance is necessary for classlessness, but this only shows an ignorance of history, we existed as classless and without any surplus goods for a lot longer then we had capitalism, there are to many examples of classless societies that lacked material abundance.

It makes no sense, i don't get the argument, you need to have free stuff in every sense for it to be classless? It is demonstratably false

I think some of you have the wrong idea as to what classlessness is. It's a society without classes, no matter how small.
Take, for example the general italian strike of 1920, for a breif time the anarcho syndicalist lead workers created created factory councils and workers councils and direct democracy and equality in various areas, about 5 million were involved at one point, that was a classless society. they were poor as hell too. The Zapatistas are really poor to, so were a lot of spanish people during the revolution, what else? They were classless and equal.

[Zanthorus]

And the point is to do away with the law of value.

Which would be achieved along with the replacement of the capitalist mode of production by the associated one. No matter what mode of distribution the future inhabitants of the AMP chose to use.

[mikelepore]

What if your talk to the machine went something like this:

"Computer give me bread, soap and diapers for my growing family." and then it says "there is insufficient credit in your account."

Are we seriously gonna start charging for every use-value made? Would you want that?

Enough categories of products have to be earned through work to give people a reason to make the choice to work.

I believe that it will give people enough of a reason to work if sustenance goods are distributed for free (groceries, medicine, education) while luxury products are charged to personal accounts (hobby supplies, entertainment, use of recreation facilitities). I expect that this is the amount of accountability that will be found to be just sufficient to cause people to show up at workplaces and expend the hours.

However, if it is later found that this is not sufficient, if free distribution of necessities does cause people to take ever-lengthening vacations beyond the point where the throughput rate of industry does not reach the needed production quantities, then the same method can be used to debit individual accounts when distributing necessities also.

It's the same algorithm in either case, just a matter of social policy about what control numbers to enter into the computer for food and other products, with a price of zero being one of the possible settings.

Because this method makes the only difference between free access and credited access the difference between numerical settings entered into the software, society can later experiment incrementally with free access in continuously widening categories of products. Society doesn't have to jump into a new system of free access only to find that production levels suddenly collapse. People can begin with the use of material incentives that we already know to be workable, and then make small tests to determine when and where a reliance on material incentives can be discontinued.

[∞]

I think a labor 'card' might be a good answer. This card is determined by the x number of hours someone puts in. With a voucher someone could be able to buy goods like food, or entertainment. Though if foods not in scarcity, we wouldn't need most of it to get purchased. This system is the only method which can allow a gift economy to occur. It is necessary to use Anarcho-syndicalism to stimulate production, so that it is able to transcend into Anarcho Communism.

An Anarcho Communist society is easier to accomplish in a agricultural setting, but the industrial proletariat need a system which can provoke production into a status quo

[mikelepore]

Yea, we've seen your pragmatic arguments many times.

The fact is that the means already exist to meet the needs of the whole world. The problem is that they're not being utilized for such.

It's true that production levels today are able to meet the needs of the whole world, but these production levels are the result of people who have very localized reasons to go to work. People aren't producing this wealth today because we all recognize on an intellectual level that the work needs to get done. The individual member of family X works to acquire the money needed to sustain family X.

There is no data about what the production levels would be if that compulsion were removed, in a system where those who show up for work would receive nothing extra, and those who fail to show up for work would experience no negative repercussion. It's a very real possibility that production would almost completely stop.

To advise the working class to adopt such a system -- one in which there will be no material incentives to work, but the work will get gone anyway -- is to offer people a concept of socialism that they immediately recognize to be based on faith. When the working class hears this "free access" concept of socialism proposed, the reaction is as though you were to tell an audience that each of them is being asked to go up in an airplane and then jump out with an untested parachute. The working class won't begin to listen to socialists until socialists begin to offer the working class a plan that doesn't require faith in the unknown.

[∞]

It's true that production levels today are able to meet the needs of the whole world, but these production levels are the result of people who have very localized reasons to go to work. People aren't producing this wealth today because we all recognize on an intellectual level that the work needs to get done. The individual member of family X works to acquire the money needed to sustain family X.

There is no data about what the production levels would be if that compulsion were removed, in a system where those who show up for work would receive nothing extra, and those who fail to show up for work would experience no negative repercussion. It's a very real possibility that production would almost completely stop.

To advise the working class to adopt such a system -- one in which there will be no material incentives to work, but the work will get gone anyway -- is to offer people a concept of socialism that they immediately recognize to be based on faith. When the working class hears this "free access" concept of socialism proposed, the reaction is as though you were to tell an audience that each of them is being asked to go up in an airplane and then jump out with an untested parachute. The working class won't begin to listen to socialists until socialists begin to offer the working class a plan that doesn't require faith in the unknown.

YO! thats not how it works! It is possible to put in extra work, for labor is free, and nobody is 'regulating' it.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

It's true that production levels today are able to meet the needs of the whole world, but these production levels are the result of people who have very localized reasons to go to work. People aren't producing this wealth today because we all recognize on an intellectual level that the work needs to get done. The individual member of family X works to acquire the money needed to sustain family X.

There is no data about what the production levels would be if that compulsion were removed, in a system where those who show up for work would receive nothing extra, and those who fail to show up for work would experience no negative repercussion. It's a very real possibility that production would almost completely stop.

To advise the working class to adopt such a system -- one in which there will be no material incentives to work, but the work will get gone anyway -- is to offer people a concept of socialism that they immediately recognize to be based on faith. When the working class hears this "free access" concept of socialism proposed, the reaction is as though you were to tell an audience that each of them is being asked to go up in an airplane and then jump out with an untested parachute. The working class won't begin to listen to socialists until socialists begin to offer the working class a plan that doesn't require faith in the unknown.

A main difference between you and I is that I'm not trying to recruit workers to some cause that will be victorious once 50% + 1 tick a box for "socialism."

I'm not trying to sell the class any package deals. Simply by acting in its own interests the working class can abolish all the garbage of present society and bring the new society into being.

Even still it's quite simple:

Now you work out of necessity, dedicating yourself to tasks that you very likely have no interest in. In the new society your needs will be met, allowing you to express yourself freely in your labor.

Sounds like a good deal to me.

Your argument echos the worst kind of capitalist rubbish. "People won't work unless they are forced to."

Where have we heard that before?

"It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

"According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital." - Communist Manifesto

At base, people want to labor. They just don't want to work to enrich their rulers. That's why people spend so much time doing things they don't get paid for: cooking for friends and family, teaching younger people things, building things, creating art, gardening, writing, making website, crafting, etc., and with an energy and enthusiasm that is missing from their paid labor on the job. Similarly, people do socially necessary work all the time when they have an interest in it. People clean and improve their homes without getting paid. They pick up liter in parks they use, maintain sports facilities like public baseball fields and football pitches they or people they know use, participate in neighborhood beautification, etc.

Not to mention that once the means of production are freed up from producing all sorts of useless shit (e.g. low quality electronics that need to be replaced in a year, 573 varieties of bottled water, etc.) our ability to meet our needs will be greatly improved.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

You've lost me http://www.revleft.com/vb/../revleft/smilies/001_tongue.gif or were the north eastern native americans superhumans?

It means that as the relation and means of production changes so does the way people think, act, interact, etc.

People in primitive societies couldn't understand the concept of owning land. People in modern capitalist societies look back at feudal relations and slavery and consider them backward, inhumane, etc. People in a classless society of material abundance will look back at wage slavery and commodity exchange as a barbaric practices.


A number of people have said material abundance is necessary for classlessness, but this only shows an ignorance of history, we existed as classless and without any surplus goods for a lot longer then we had capitalism, there are to many examples of classless societies that lacked material abundance.

It makes no sense, i don't get the argument, you need to have free stuff in every sense for it to be classless? It is demonstratably false

I think some of you have the wrong idea as to what classlessness is. It's a society without classes, no matter how small.
Take, for example the general italian strike of 1920, for a breif time the anarcho syndicalist lead workers created created factory councils and workers councils and direct democracy and equality in various areas, about 5 million were involved at one point, that was a classless society. they were poor as hell too. The Zapatistas are really poor to, so were a lot of spanish people during the revolution, what else? They were classless and equal.

Leaving aside the general confusion expressed here on class, the underlying point can be easily addressed.

We're not trying to go backward to a point where "we find no produced means of production ... Nature there directly provides the means of subsistence, which need not first be produced .... [for people] who has but few wants to satisfy the time" (Marx).

We're looking forward, not back. We're dealing with the creation of a new society issuing out of this one, not the first form of society to emerge.

“A development of the productive forces is the absolutely necessary practical premise, because without it want is generalized, and with want the struggle for necessities begins again, and that means that all the old crap must revive.” - Marx

[ContrarianLemming]

Nothing you say, or, in this case, Marx says, is going to change the fact that there are currently piss poor classless societies, that classless societies which have existed have never needed post scarity to funtion.
Your Marx quotes don't mean shat to me because he's demonstratably wrong.

[syndicat]

Scarcity is part of the human condition. If anything the ecological crisis is making this even more obvious. There is also scarcity in the number of hours of human labor available...especially as we don't want to be working as much as we are now. So we need to be very careful about how we invest human time and other resources.

Practices of hunter-gatherer tribes are not exactly relevant because everyone knew eveyone else, and there was great peer pressure to work for the members of your extended family, and everyone knew if people were contributing and what they were consuming.

The relevant principle of justice here is to remunerate people based on how hard they work, the harshness of the work they do, as well as how long they work. If jobs were organized to at least roughly equalize the pleasant, empowering tasks with the less desireable tasks then equal remuneration would be reasonable.

It actually isn't necessary nowadays to have physical certificates. You could be remunerated via consumption credits to an account accessible via something like a debit card.

Labor time isn't the value of products. Nor is the human cost of labor...harshness, danger, duration...the only cost in production. Value of products depends on how much people value them, that is, how much they desire them, and thus how much they value the kinds of work effort that go into making them. Very complex goods require various kinds of resources and work so that their cumulative value will be higher than simpler goods. But value can change...if the importance to people of certain products change or taste changes or if technical innovations makes certain intermediate parts unnecessary.

[mikelepore]

YO! thats not how it works! It is possible to put in extra work, for labor is free, and nobody is 'regulating' it.

Your comment isn't specific enough for me to know what you're talking about. What is it that you don't want to be regulated, and what did I say that I support that you interpret to be a kind of regulation?

[∞]

Your comment isn't specific enough for me to know what you're talking about. What is it that you don't want to be regulated, and what did I say that I support that you interpret to be a kind of regulation?

You are saying people put a particular x hours of work each. I'm saying people can work as much as they want to, and have the same potential to make vouchers as everyone else.

[mikelepore]

You are saying people put a particular x hours of work each. I'm saying people can work as much as they want to, and have the same potential to make vouchers as everyone else.

People have to sign up in advance to work those hours, and then they have a responsibility to be there. You don't want children to get to school and then find that teacher didn't show up, or passengers are left standing on the roadside because the bus driver didn't show up. Except for the need for scheduling in advance, I agree that people should be able to work any number of hours they choose and get credited for that number. Since we agree on your last sentence, I don't know what you thought I had said when you replied "that's not how it works."

[∞]

People have to sign up in advance to work those hours, and then they have a responsibility to be there. You don't want children to get to school and then find that teacher didn't show up, or passengers are left standing on the roadside because the bus driver didn't show up. Except for the need for scheduling in advance, I agree that people should be able to work any number of hours they choose and get credited for that number. Since we agree on your last sentence, I don't know what you thought I had said when you replied "that's not how it works."

There must be some confusion. We should drop that. I think someone can just punch in their labor credit, and work overtime, during the time the work is over. And an overtime position should be made in preparation to the time it takes to "sign up".

[eyedrop]

During the last year or so I have drifted closer to mikelepores position that we should start with the necessities for living comfortably for free and charge some kind of labour credits for luxury goods and gradually extend the necessities and observe what happens. I image the extension off the free goods to encompass most to be pretty quick if no problems show up.

I can't think of many convincing arguments to why we should go directly to the free distribution instead of gradually phasing to it over a 10 year period.

The most important thing for me in a revolution would be the removal of the top-down hierarchical chain in the workplace and not the free access to goods.

[ckaihatsu]

I believe that it will give people enough of a reason to work if sustenance goods are distributed for free (groceries, medicine, education) while luxury products are charged to personal accounts (hobby supplies, entertainment, use of recreation facilitities). I expect that this is the amount of accountability that will be found to be just sufficient to cause people to show up at workplaces and expend the hours.


This commodity-based thinking and system of accounting is *unacceptable* for any post-capitalist model for the future.

I think you're forgetting that, *by definition*, the productive infrastructure would be *publicly available* for self-motivated mass production (or more limited production runs). If there was a critical mass of demand *and* the same people who were demanding were also willing to do the work required to produce those luxury goods then there could, by definition, be *no remaining hindrances* to those people going ahead and fulfilling *their own* desires for productive output. (If there *wasn't* a critical mass, and "outside" labor would be required, then a political process would necessarily have to be initiated.)

[mikelepore]

This commodity-based thinking and system of accounting is *unacceptable* for any post-capitalist model for the future.

I think you're forgetting that, *by definition*, the productive infrastructure would be *publicly available* for self-motivated mass production (or more limited production runs). If there was a critical mass of demand *and* the same people who were demanding were also willing to do the work required to produce those luxury goods then there could, by definition, be *no remaining hindrances* to those people going ahead and fulfilling *their own* desires for productive output. (If there *wasn't* a critical mass, and "outside" labor would be required, then a political process would necessarily have to be initiated.)

Sorry -- I read your post about fifteen times and I still don't know what you're saying. Anyway, I can see that the problems that need to be addressed aren't covered in your post.

In the classless society of the future, can an individual walk into a store, fill up a cart with anything they like, and walk out without paying for the goods? If so, then I see no reason to believe that there would be any goods on the shelves to take, there would be only empty shelves, because people who don't have to pay for goods wouldn't have a reason to work and produce any goods.

The reasons that Free Access socialists suggest for why people would want to work (1. people will be altruistic and not want to be free-riders; 2. work will be inherently enjoyable; 3. robots will do any work that people don't want to do) are not convincing reasons to me. I try to be polite but frankly I think those suggestions that some socialists offer are ridiculous.

P.S. - Nothing is true "by definition" except for self-referential statements (that reptile over there is a scale-covered animal that lays eggs). Whether some artificial construction, such as a new economic system, will be viable or whether it will fall apart can't be settled by definition.

[ckaihatsu]

Thanks for your patience and for making efforts to understand, Mike.

Allow me to phrase my point this way: In the open-source realm of software, as for the Linux platform, there is a *finite* number of hours that have been spent in the process of writing code in order to make available the sum total of software packages released to the public. While there are some quasi-commercial, cottage-industry-level amounts of commerce around Linux -- to my knowledge and understanding -- for the most part the labors that have gone into the coding, and into the larger Linux cultural domain, have been *voluntary*, or 'altruistic', if you like.

So in this example there is a *given*, *empirical* amount of software development resulting from a certain number of work hours in the past, yielding overall public-benefitting results / outcomes / products. Would this same amount of free, open-source software development have occurred if it so happened -- and we *knew* -- that *100%* of the efforts were *strictly voluntary* -- ?

No, probably not all of the software availability would survive intact -- some vendors are currently able to charge a nominal fee for shipping out Linux CDs to customers, for example. *But* -- there would still no doubt be a number of Linux distributions to choose from, as there are now, with standard sets of applications that do standard things for the user, as there are now.

So it's entirely realistic to say that the public would be able to benefit from the 'altruistic' / voluntary / collectivist efforts of those who are so able and willing to write the code. I'll also note that, due to the nature of the infinitesimally miniaturized material form of computer data, its limitless replication -- with mathematically perfect integrity -- has *negligible* cost. This unique (to put it mildly) characteristic / feature of computer data and operations means that it occupies a *special* place in the material world. How else could one virtually *effortlessly* make endless copies of a book's information? Certainly not through conventional *industrial* physical processes, however efficient its mass production...! (Though, arguably, with automation and robotics, it's getting there.)

Still here? Cool. I'll cut to the chase.

Society has automated roadways, communication switches, mechanical power, and so much more -- 'work that people don't want to do' is *not* a *blanket* term (and neither is 'scarcity', for that matter). We're dealing with *fluid definitions* of 'distasteful' and 'scarcity' here, over *thousands* of work roles, that will change in line with changing technologies and changing societal social standards.

A post-capitalist liberated labor force would have more discretion over material production than even the entire capitalist class has *now* (no more ghost-in-the-machine economics). It would be able to maximize non-commodity (liberated) labor's control over society's sum total of production so as to optimize the machine-worker-consumer "triplet".

Can any part of the total population be *forced* to serve in the role of worker? No, because it wouldn't even *be required* -- as long as some *critical mass* of voluntary participation is extended after the revolution, humanity will enjoy a final ceasing of privation, something never seen before in human history.

[mikelepore]

I wouldn't try to draw too many conclusions from the open source software, because software can be copied an unlimited number of times. This puts the product into a special category. We enjoy knowing that an hour spent writing software may have have saved other people a million hours, and that all steps that are achieved are permanent. Work in general is unlike that. If you plow the soil or repair a broken appliance or heal the sick or drive a truck or wash the dishes, you did it for today only, and tomorrow it has to be done all over again. But the person who wrote a software subroutine, say, ftp or ping or ksh or gzip, has done it once and the world possesses it forever. Imagine if you could wash your dishes with such beauty that everyone's dishes everywhere and forever would likewise be washed by your action -- your attitude toward the work would be of a special kind. Because of this difference, work in general can't be understood by looking at software.

[ckaihatsu]

Yes, I appreciate your point here, Mike, but I also hope that you appreciate the fact that there's actually a wide gray area between the endpoints of work-once-benefit-once and work-once-benefit-forever. I mentioned the examples of traffic lights, electronic switches, and mechanical power, all of which reside in that gray area. *Plenty* of our mechanisms, like light bulbs, require *some* maintenance, and continuous supplies of energy, but are "automatic", or hands-off, for the most part.

I'll entreat you to be more glass-half-full here and to consider if humanity's population has enough constructively minded members to banish inhumane conditions once and for all, given an empowering worldwide proletarian revolution.

[mikelepore]

Chris,

Watch out for cherry-picking for data. All of the people who currently have jobs point to the kinds of work that are NOT automatic. You gave emphasis to a task that is easily made automatic, such as light switching. That is not typical. Most work is not done automatically.

A socialist emphasis on automatic processes can lead to a disasterous result: the working class saying to the socialist: "So, your message tells me that society will be ready for socialism when the day comes that robots replace the bricklayer, the plumber, the tractor driver, the nurse and the teacher. Okay, come back in a hundred years or so, and let us know when you think we're ready."

We have to present the concept of socialism to the working class in a form that is ready now. (Not only ready now, but long overdue.) That requires not relying on any projections about future technology.

The subject of this thread fits in with this message --the practicality of socialism is not placed on-hold and waiting for new technology.

[ckaihatsu]

Mike, I don't mean to be argumentative here -- I'll first state unequivocally that, regardless of any given period's levels of technology, it's the *workers* who should be the ones *in control* of said technology, even if it's as sparing as changing a lightbulb or overseeing automated systems. It's only by building independent networks of solidarity that workers will have any chance of relieving themselves (ourselves) from the superfluous and damaging influence of capital management.

Now, to the finer point of *consumer*-sided issues -- the gray area of material-returns-on-labor-inputs means that plenty of goods and services *do* result from highly leveraged labor, including from past generations of labor-built assets and infrastructure. This built-up knowledge, applied processes, infrastructure, computerization, and automation makes the fruits of civilization that much more readily available (at cheaper prices and from lesser amounts of grunt labor in the present). There's no need to be knee-jerk defensive of the working class around these topics of increased productivity and quality of consumer goods because we *know* that capitalist ownership and management *adds nothing* anyway and *only subtracts* from the process of production -- a labor that is left to itself would *readily* organize the same production on a far better, humane, efficient, and more productive social basis.

Moreover it wouldn't matter if *everything* was *100%* automated -- there would *still* be a group tasked to the *running* of those (computerized mechanical) systems -- the workers -- while there would be a different group -- the bourgeoisie -- that politically organized to *dictate* to those who were running the systems. Only a worldwide proletarian revolution would be sufficient to usurp the *political* rule that exists, and would exist, at *any* level of technological usage.

[Nanatsu Yoru]

If we're talking about a scarcity society, then I agree with mikelepore in that only nonessential goods be covered by labour vouchers. If things like food require vouchers to be purchased, then that is forcing work and is in a way wage slavery.

P.S. Still kinda new here... if I've made some sort of glaring error go ahead and let me know.

[ContrarianLemming]

If we're talking about a scarcity society, then I agree with mikelepore in that only nonessential goods be covered by labour vouchers. If things like food require vouchers to be purchased, then that is forcing work and is in a way wage slavery.

P.S. Still kinda new here... if I've made some sort of glaring error go ahead and let me know.

The above is genuis^

(I may overstate the quality of newcomers posts)

it's correct, but i don't think having to work is wage slavery, because we do all have to work.

[Nanatsu Yoru]

it's correct, but i don't think having to work is wage slavery, because we do all have to work.

I don't know. In communism if work is voluntary, then does that mean it's still mandatory? I've always sort of thought that someone who didn't work would be frowned upon, but not forced to.

[ContrarianLemming]

I don't know. In communism if work is voluntary, then does that mean it's still mandatory? I've always sort of thought that someone who didn't work would be frowned upon, but not forced to.

That could work too.

ultimately, untill we're advanced enough to have completely automated production, we do have to work, I just focus far more on making this task enjoyable. People who work in independant jobs without boss', who are autonomous and democratic, they're a lot happier. I would certainly look foward to working in my job if I knew what I said mattered, and I was free to simply get to work without such a hierarchical and authoritarian athmosphere we have in modern jobs.

[mikelepore]

If we're talking about a scarcity society, then I agree with mikelepore in that only nonessential goods be covered by labour vouchers. If things like food require vouchers to be purchased, then that is forcing work and is in a way wage slavery.

P.S. Still kinda new here... if I've made some sort of glaring error go ahead and let me know.

As for myself, I don't make any reference to scarcity and post-scarcity, because I believe that the arrival of the post-scarcity society would probably occur hundreds of years in the future after the socialist revolution. Being such a remote concept, it has no role in forming the goal and program that we must ask the working class to adopt, organizing to enact a revolutionary transformation. I treat it as a permanent truth that natural resources and the rate of production are limited enough to require that they be applied with caution.

Another point to consider. The old dream that automation will make work vanish has been the subject of speculation for a long time. However, there is no real evidence that automation has this potential. Automation (in conjunction with having a classless society) may reduce the work week to just a few hours, and it may eventually make manual labor nearly disappear while most workers compose the instructions for the robots, but that doesn't add up to an essential change in the nature of working. We still have to ask what sort of motivation there would be for individuals to cut off their family vacation time and to force themselves to get back to the routine of going to work. Capitalism or socialism, I see no difference in this characteristic. I believe that material incentives for the individual are necessary in any case. And that's even after the projected degree of automation is developed, so this need for material incentives is all the more crucial before that automation is developed.

To quote another person who posted in another socialist forum about five years ago, and took the position, as I do, that socialism cannot be based on unpaid voluntary work: "If you think that I would go up on your roof and hammer nails into it, and do it for free, so that you can relax inside the house and strum your guitar, you're crazy."

[ckaihatsu]

As for myself, I don't make any reference to scarcity and post-scarcity, because I believe that the arrival of the post-scarcity society would probably occur hundreds of years in the future after the socialist revolution.


- Scarcity *of what?*

- Post-scarcity / abundance *of what?*

Certainly the technology and productive capacity *already* exist to provide basic humane living conditions for the entirety of the world's population -- but it would take overthrowing capitalism to realize it.





To quote another person who posted in another socialist forum about five years ago, and took the position, as I do, that socialism cannot be based on unpaid voluntary work: "If you think that I would go up on your roof and hammer nails into it, and do it for free, so that you can relax inside the house and strum your guitar, you're crazy."


There's a fundamental difference between *goods* and *services* -- we can't just *ignore* the machinery (of mass production) issue, because the machinery already *exists*. What's of paramount importance is by what reasoning is it controlled, and what does it produce, and for whom?

The issue of who provides *service* to whom is much more under an individual's *own* control / discretion if they're liberated from any duress for their life and livelihood.

[Nanatsu Yoru]

- Scarcity *of what?*

- Post-scarcity / abundance *of what?*

(from Wikipedia) Scarcity is the fundamental economic problem of having seemingly unlimited human needs and wants in a world of limited resources.

It's a very basic concept that's discussed a lot. A post-scarcity society is where goods are overproduced to the point that they no longer need to be rationed.

EDIT: Source

[ckaihatsu]

(from Wikipedia) Scarcity is the fundamental economic problem of having seemingly unlimited human needs and wants in a world of limited resources.

It's a very basic concept that's discussed a lot. A post-scarcity society is where goods are overproduced to the point that they no longer need to be rationed.

EDIT: Source


As Marxists we *don't* deal with *static*, *ideal* definitions -- we *know* that quantities and qualities are constantly in dynamic motion and are forever changing as parts within the larger whole.





'[W]ork that people don't want to do' is *not* a *blanket* term (and neither is 'scarcity', for that matter). We're dealing with *fluid definitions* of 'distasteful' and 'scarcity' here, over *thousands* of work roles, that will change in line with changing technologies and changing societal social standards.


So I'll have to repeat my question here: Are we talking about a scarcity regarding the basics of life and livelihood (in contemporary society), or are we talking about satisfying higher-quality, more-discretionary consumer preferences?

There's obviously a trade-off when it comes to goods and services -- productive activity can be simplified to produce more more-basic goods and services that fulfill more people's *basic* / rudimentary human needs, or it can be concentrated into more-complex processes and supply chains to produce more-sophisticated goods and services for *fewer* *more-refined* consumers.

[Nanatsu Yoru]

I wasn't trying to put down an 'ideal' definition, I was genuinely trying to sum it up in a sentence. As for the second part, I'm thinking someone with more than the few posts I have should answer.

Oh and by the way... *could* *you* *stop* *overusing* *the* *asterisks* *please*?

EDIT: Grammar.

[ckaihatsu]

- Whatever -

[mikelepore]

So I'll have to repeat my question here: Are we talking about a scarcity regarding the basics of life and livelihood (in contemporary society), or are we talking about satisfying higher-quality, more-discretionary consumer preferences?

I would make that distinction only regarding the policy of making one product free, while requiring consumers to pay for another product. It is rather universal for socialists to call for free medicine, education, and certain other things. Such goods are not favors done for the individual by their neighbors, but are expressions of the organic wholeness of life. Just as the heart and lungs send fresh blood to the hand and foot, to the benefit of the whole person, the whole society gains when everyone has medicine and education. Certain other needs may be added to this list.

But at some point the list of free goods has to end. If other people are working additional hours so that willingly unproductive people may have access to vacation resorts and consumptive hobbies, a form of exploitation would be taking place. I don't know where precisely to draw the line, and it's not important to know that right now. That decision can be deferred until the people of the classless society are in the position to do something about it.

However, when asking about scarcity, I don't see any distinction between necessities and lurxuries, because both are equally sensitive to the problem of worker incentive. If a socialist is unable to tell me why workers would be motivated to go to work to make hobby equipment, then that socialist is also unable to tell me why workers would be motivated to go to work and make bread and medicine. This problem of workers' incentive doesn't vary with the degree of necessity of the product.

In other words, we don't have any shortage of bread right now, but if we adopt a new system in which the people who make bread don't get paid for showing up at work, then we are likely to suddenly have a shortage of bread. The presently observed abundance of the product is not informative.


we can't just *ignore* the machinery (of mass production) issue, because the machinery already *exists*. What's of paramount importance is by what reasoning is it controlled, and what does it produce, and for whom?

No, the machinery does NOT exist that could free human beings of the compulsion to work. What we have is machinery that provides wonderous things provided that a specific number of trained people are present every minute to operate the machinery. If the workers at the electric power plant don't show up for work tomorrow morning, our lights will immediately go out. If the truck drivers who deliver food don't go to work, there will be no food.

In a socialist society, why will people show up for work? There are only two ways to get people to work: society can either pay people to work, or society can brutally punish people for failure to work. Of those two options, paying the workers is the much preferable.

[Zanthorus]

In regards to the arguments about scarcity. I was just reading through some of Andrew Kliman's stuff and he brings this issue up:


Now at this point, people often try to deny that the constraints I’ve been talking about pose a real problem. Supposedly, the constraints we face are actually very. They say that such things as redistribution of income, the elimination of waste, and increases in productivity obtained by means of revolutionary enthusiasm can allow us to satisfy all of our material and spiritual needs, and work less, and make work creative and fulfilling – and we can do all of this right now, immediately after getting rid of capitalism. This is extremely wishful thinking.

Average income per person in the world today is only 22% of average income in the U.S. So if we redistribute everything equally, we’ll all have a standard of living less than 1/4th of the current average in the U.S. If we also eliminate waste caused by unemployment, and war, and production to satisfy alienated needs, and if we eliminate waste that now exists because of bosses, jails, ideologists and everything else that is now used to keep people in their place, and if we eliminate the waste stemming from advertising, commerce, and financial speculation – if we eliminate all of this, then, if we’re very lucky, it may be possible to double genuine output overnight. That would be a tremendous achievement. But a doubling of the current figure, 22%, means that we’ll all be living at 44% – less than half – of the current average standard of living in the U.S.

Now factor in some revolutionary enthusiasm, and perhaps some way to increase output that I’ve forgotten about, and add in an extra 10 percentage points because you think that my estimates are way too pessimistic. So imagine that we’d immediately have triple what we now have. That would be a truly stunning achievement.

But it would bring the global standard of living only to two-thirds of the current U.S. average. And that’s before any reduction of working time, before any effort to eliminate unsafe and alienating work processes, before any elimination of speedup, and before any additional investment in new technologies that will reduce the need for human labor. Cutting the workweek from 40 to 30 hours, for instance, immediately brings our standard of living back down to half of the current U.S. average.

The rest of the piece (http://akliman.squarespace.com/writings/not%20by%20politics%20alone%204.2.06.doc) is also fairly good and relevant to the topic at hand.

[ckaihatsu]

I would make that distinction only regarding the policy of making one product free, while requiring consumers to pay for another product. It is rather universal for socialists to call for free medicine, education, and certain other things. Such goods are not favors done for the individual by their neighbors, but are expressions of the organic wholeness of life. Just as the heart and lungs send fresh blood to the hand and foot, for the benefit of the whole person, the whole society gains when everyone has medicine and education. Certain other needs may be added to this list.

But at some point the list of free goods has to end.


Agreed.





If other people are working additional hours so that willingly unproductive people may have access to vacation resorts and consumptive hobbies, a form of exploitation would be taking place.


Yes.





I don't know where precisely to draw the line, and it's not important to know that right now. That decision can be deferred until the people of the classless society are in the position to do something about it.


Okay, but in the interests of *bringing about* that classless society it would be instructive / educational / forward-looking to come to some *conclusions* ourselves about these revolutionary policy issues, if you will.





However, when asking about scarcity, I don't see any distinction between necessities and lurxuries, because both are equally sensitive to the problem of worker incentive. If a socialist is unable to tell me why workers would be motivated to go to work to make hobby equipment, then that socialist is also unable to tell me why workers would be motivated to go to work and make bread and medicine. This problem of workers' incentive doesn't vary with the degree of necessity of the product.


I *really* have to take exception to this line of argument, as I have previously. You're using a conception of *people* -- albeit in the role of workers -- as being balance-sheet-programmed robots. Certainly even today, despite the existence of oppression and exploitation, plenty of people make the decision to do uncompensated volunteer work for purely humanistic reasons.

I'll maintain that as long as a *critical mass* of humanistic minded people are willing to work without compensation for the benefit of society then there will be the basis of a civilization, however rudimentary, that exists *regardless* of the prevailing mode of production and its system of material accounting. (Of course I'm not *condoning* this as any kind of solution -- we could do far better by implementing formal systems of mass planning and production, etc.)

You *really* don't think that on the whole people would be differently motivated in their work efforts to relieve a scarcity of bread and medicine versus making more-discretionary items like hobby equipment or luxuries???





In other words, we don't have any shortage of bread right now, but if we adopt a new system in which the people who make bread don't get paid for showing up at work, then we are likely to suddenly have a shortage of bread. The presently observed abundance of the product is not informative.


I'll invoke the momentum-of-the-revolution argument here -- I'd say that if the world's workers are independent-minded and solidarized enough to usurp capitalism in the first place the political momentum would be there to follow through and fulfill the societal tasks required to abolish hunger, etc., once and for all.





No, the machinery does NOT exist that could free human beings of the compulsion to work.


I'll disagree with you here and maintain that human society has *certainly* far surpassed the technological mark *and* extant productive capacity required to supply every person on earth with the means of humane living. Yes, some degree of work would be required to keep the machines running, but the work would be greatly leveraged and only a critical mass of so-motivated workers would be needed.





What we have is machinery that provides wonderous things provided that a specific number of trained people are present every minute to operate the machinery. If the workers at the electric power plant don't show up for work tomorrow morning, our lights will immediately go out. If the truck drivers who deliver food don't go to work, there will be no food.


While I appreciate and agree with what you're saying at a *political* level, I have to reluctantly disagree with you on a *technical* level.





In a socialist society, why will people show up for work? There are only two ways to get people to work: society can either pay people to work, or society can brutally punish people for failure to work. Of those two options, paying the workers is the much preferable.


Agreed.

[mikelepore]

Okay, but in the interests of *bringing about* that classless society it would be instructive / educational / forward-looking to come to some *conclusions* ourselves about these revolutionary policy issues, if you will.

When I considered educational potential, I reached the opposite conclusion. To hear some socialists talking about volunteer work and free products causes the working class to be repulsed from socialism, because most people realize that such a system couldn't function.

There are a small number of topics in which the conservative working class is actually more realistic than many socialists, and many socialists are lagging in consciousness. This topic is one of them. It is quite true that there are many conceptions of socialism that "couldn't work."

As a socialist I believe that there are some conceptions of socialism that would work very well, but their functionality has to be demonstrated convincingly.


I *really* have to take exception to this line of argument, as I have previously. You're using a conception of *people* -- albeit in the role of workers -- as being balance-sheet-programmed robots.

The fact that people perform work due to personal desire to receive the results, generally not for enjoyment, and not out of awareness that the society needs to see the work get done, has been true since before there was civilization. For something so long and consistently established, the human brain may be may be programmed for it. And that is what must be assumed tentatively, because there is no evidence to indicate otherwise, and the burden of proof is always on the person who makes an extraordinary claim, not on the person who assumes the ordinary.


Certainly even today, despite the existence of oppression and exploitation, plenty of people make the decision to do uncompensated volunteer work for purely humanistic reasons.

I cautioned earlier about cherry-picking. People today do NOT in general perform uncompensated labor. Every time someone makes the claim that people are observed to volunteer to work, they end up citing the same sorts of exceptional cases. They always cite kinds of work that intersect with hobbies (your example of computer geeks who produce free software), crisis responses (numerous times I have seen writers use the example of rescuing someone who is in danger), and activity that is fun only because of the novelty (someone on another cite informed be about hanging holiday decorations). As for the other 99.9 percent of the jobs, people do NOT volunteer. If there were posted ads seeking unpaid volunteers to dig drainage ditches, mix the slurry in a paper mill, or drive a thresher through a corn field, the ads could stay up there until doomsday and people would not show up to volunteer.


I'll maintain that as long as a *critical mass* of humanistic minded people are willing to work without compensation for the benefit of society then there will be the basis of a civilization, however rudimentary, that exists *regardless* of the prevailing mode of production and its system of material accounting. (Of course I'm not *condoning* this as any kind of solution -- we could do far better by implementing formal systems of mass planning and production, etc.)

You refer to the critical mass as though it helped your argument and not mine, but there are no numbers that can show that it helps your argument and not mine.

In this way, your critical mass theory is like the Drake equation: its advantage is that it can't possibly be wrong because it doesn't contain any numbers, and its disadvantage is that without any numbers it doesn't provide any conclusions.


You *really* don't think that on the whole people would be differently motivated in their work efforts to relieve a scarcity of bread and medicine versus making more-discretionary items like hobby equipment or luxuries???

There is no indication that people who produce necessities and people who produce luxuries have have different attitudes toward their work. Signs of personal resistance, such as "oh hell it's monday" and "thank god it's friday", are observed to be the same in both cases.

Often there is no line between producing necessities and producing luxuries. If you make nuts and bolts, or transistors, you don't know or care what kinds of goods those parts will be used for.


I'll invoke the momentum-of-the-revolution argument here -- I'd say that if the world's workers are independent-minded and solidarized enough to usurp capitalism in the first place the political momentum would be there to follow through and fulfill the societal tasks required to abolish hunger, etc., once and for all.

The momentum of the revolution only applies to the instant of the revolution. We're talking about production during the years afterwards.

Your reference to "abolishing hunger once and for all" neglects the point that is in dispute. Producing food will always require that people every day make a special point to return from holiday trips or family activities, and set their alarm clocks, and go to work.


I'll disagree with you here and maintain that human society has *certainly* far surpassed the technological mark *and* extant productive capacity required to supply every person on earth with the means of humane living. Yes, some degree of work would be required to keep the machines running, but the work would be greatly leveraged and only a critical mass of so-motivated workers would be needed.

While I appreciate and agree with what you're saying at a *political* level, I have to reluctantly disagree with you on a *technical* level.

How is the socialist movement qualified to make any statement about the future potential of automated machinery? If someone with actual education and experience in the subject of automated machinery tells me about its potential, I will ask to see more details about the plan. But the last I heard, automation isn't even developed to the point that a machine might have sufficient pattern recognition capability to see an object and pick it up.

[ckaihatsu]

When I considered educational potential, I reached the opposite conclusion. To hear some socialists talking about volunteer work and free products causes the working class to be repulsed from socialism, because most people realize that such a system couldn't function.

There are a small number of topics in which the conservative working class is actually more realistic than many socialists, and many socialists are lagging in consciousness. This topic is one of them. It is quite true that there are many conceptions of socialism that "couldn't work."

As a socialist I believe that there are some conceptions of socialism that would work very well, but their functionality has to be demonstrated convincingly.


Okay, this is a fair point -- *no one* should put up with being exploited by the wages system, a Stalinist-type ruling bureaucracy, or any kind of foolhardy volunteer work.

You're also specifically addressing the idea of a gift economy, which to many sounds like "the honor system" -- something that sounds childish and would instantly fall prey to corruption and collapse in the real world.

I've addressed this exact topic, in a series of exchanges at another thread here at RevLeft: ‘A world without money', tinyurl.com/ylm3gev

In brief the gift economy may exist wherever the overhead of constant formal monetary exchanges is impractical -- among those who live together in close common quarters, close friends in regular contact over longer periods of time, etc. So the informal everyday economic system of barters and material trade-offs happens in stochastic patterns *within* the larger formal economy of commodity production.

Moreover we can even talk about the portion of the public sector (government) that goes toward the provision of public services for the population en masse -- things like education, health and welfare, sanitation, parks, and so on. While not exactly a 'gift economy', it *is* a collectivization of public funds that goes to providing a 'commons' without nitpicking over who is consuming what of it.

What political visionaries like socialists envision is essentially an *expanding* of this public sector, entirely away from programs of nation-commodification -- as into imperialist warfare -- and *towards* programs that benefit people's more enlightened needs, as for those listed above that already exist. This is a conception of socialism that's worth upholding and advancing.





The fact that people perform work due to personal desire to receive the results, generally not for enjoyment, and not out of awareness that the society needs to see the work get done, has been true since before there was civilization. For something so long and consistently established, the human brain may be may be programmed for it. And that is what must be assumed tentatively, because there is no evidence to indicate otherwise, and the burden of proof is always on the person who makes an extraordinary claim, not on the person who assumes the ordinary.




There is no indication that people who produce necessities and people who produce luxuries have have different attitudes toward their work. Signs of personal resistance, such as "oh hell it's monday" and "thank god it's friday", are observed to be the same in both cases.

Often there is no line between producing necessities and producing luxuries. If you make nuts and bolts, or transistors, you don't know or care what kinds of goods those parts will be used for.




The momentum of the revolution only applies to the instant of the revolution. We're talking about production during the years afterwards.

Your reference to "abolishing hunger once and for all" neglects the point that is in dispute. Producing food will always require that people every day make a special point to return from holiday trips or family activities, and set their alarm clocks, and go to work.


I think you're still focusing too much on a "balance-sheet" mentality. People don't mind working as long as they feel that they're getting something worthwhile in return for their work, and that they're not getting ripped-off -- the method of compensation could be in a societal-collective way (communism), or in an interpersonal way (gift economy), rather than in a personal-bank-account kind of way.





You refer to the critical mass as though it helped your argument and not mine, but there are no numbers that can show that it helps your argument and not mine.

In this way, your critical mass theory is like the Drake equation: its advantage is that it can't possibly be wrong because it doesn't contain any numbers, and its disadvantage is that without any numbers it doesn't provide any conclusions.




I cautioned earlier about cherry-picking. People today do NOT in general perform uncompensated labor. Every time someone makes the claim that people are observed to volunteer to work, they end up citing the same sorts of exceptional cases. They always cite kinds of work that intersect with hobbies (your example of computer geeks who produce free software), crisis responses (numerous times I have seen writers use the example of rescuing someone who is in danger), and activity that is fun only because of the novelty (someone on another cite informed be about hanging holiday decorations). As for the other 99.9 percent of the jobs, people do NOT volunteer. If there were posted ads seeking unpaid volunteers to dig drainage ditches, mix the slurry in a paper mill, or drive a thresher through a corn field, the ads could stay up there until doomsday and people would not show up to volunteer.


Under our current compartmentalized economic system of commodity production what you're saying is entirely true -- there are *costs* to doing volunteer work, and the capitalist system confers a balance-sheet mentality in general. However, despite all of this conditioning and reality people *do* manage to break out of it quite frequently, especially around those physically close to them.

I don't *depend* on this argument, because, as I mentioned, we as a society could do far better by simply abolishing commodity production in favor of a publicly controlled, all-encompassing public sector.





How is the socialist movement qualified to make any statement about the future potential of automated machinery? If someone with actual education and experience in the subject of automated machinery tells me about its potential, I will ask to see more details about the plan. But the last I heard, automation isn't even developed to the point that a machine might have sufficient pattern recognition capability to see an object and pick it up.








It's true that production levels today are able to meet the needs of the whole world

[ckaihatsu]

communist supply & demand -- Model of Material Factors

This is an 8-1/2" x 40" wide table that describes a communist-type political / economic model using three rows and six descriptive columns. The three rows are surplus-value-to-overhead, no surplus, and surplus-value-to-pleasure. The six columns are ownership / control, associated material values, determination of material values, material function, infrastructure / overhead, and propagation.

http://tinyurl.com/ygybheg




Ownership / control

communist administration -- All assets and resources will be collectivized as communist property in common -- their use must be determined through a regular political process of prioritized demands from a locality or larger population -- any unused assets or resources may be used by individuals in a personal capacity only

labor [supply] -- Only active workers may control communist property -- no private accumulations are allowed and any proceeds from work that cannot be used or consumed by persons themselves will revert to collectivized communist property

consumption [demand] -- Individuals may possess and consume as much material as they want, with the proviso that the material is being actively used in a personal capacity only -- after a certain period of disuse all personal possessions not in active use will revert to collectivized communist property




Associated material values

communist administration -- Assets and resources have no quantifiable value -- are considered as attachments to the production process

labor [supply] -- Labor supply is selected and paid for with existing (or debt-based) labor credits

consumption [demand] -- Every person in a locality has a standard, one-through-infinity ranking system of political demands available to them, updated daily




Determination of material values

communist administration -- Assets and resources may be created and sourced from projects and production runs

labor [supply] -- Labor credits are paid per hour of work at a multiplier rate based on difficulty or hazard -- multipliers are survey-derived

consumption [demand] -- Basic human needs will be assigned a higher political priority by individuals and will emerge as mass demands at the cumulative scale -- desires will benefit from political organizing efforts and coordination




Material function

communist administration -- Assets and resources are collectively administered by a locality, or over numerous localities by combined consent [supply]

labor [supply] -- Work positions are created according to requirements of production runs and projects, by mass political prioritization

consumption [demand] -- All economic needs and desires are formally recorded as pre-planned consumer orders and are politically prioritized [demand]




Infrastructure / overhead

communist administration -- Distinct from the general political culture each project or production run will include a provision for an associated administrative component as an integral part of its total policy package -- a selected policy's proponents will be politically responsible for overseeing its implementation according to the policy's provisions

labor [supply] -- All workers will be entirely liberated from all coercion and threats related to basic human living needs, regardless of work status -- any labor roles will be entirely self-selected and open to collective labor organizing efforts on the basis of accumulated labor credits

consumption [demand] -- A regular, routine system of mass individual political demand pooling -- as with spreadsheet templates and email -- must be in continuous operation so as to aggregate cumulative demands into the political process




Propagation

communist administration -- A political culture, including channels of journalism, history, and academia, will generally track all known assets and resources -- unmaintained assets and resources may fall into disuse or be reclaimed by individuals for personal use only

labor [supply] -- Workers with past accumulated labor credits are the funders of new work positions and incoming laborers -- labor credits are handed over at the completion of work hours -- underfunded projects and production runs are debt-based and will be noted as such against the issuing locality

consumption [demand] -- Individuals may create templates of political priority lists for the sake of convenience, modifiable at any time until the date of activation -- regular, repeating orders can be submitted into an automated workflow for no interruption of service or orders


A further explanation and sample scenario can be found here:


'A world without money'

tinyurl.com/ylm3gev


'Hours as a measure of labor’

tinyurl.com/yh3jr9x