Market Socialism

[TheGodlessUtopian]

What is 'Market Socialism' again? I've heard the term tossed around but don't quite know what it is.

[mykittyhasaboner]

"Market socialism" is used to describe a propostion that outlines the kind of economy a worker's society should have. Basically, the basic economic units of society consist of cooperatives which are collectively owned by their workers, and they relate with all other enterprises or consumers through market exchange.

There are many critiques of such an idea--market exchange is not compatible with socialism, such a model would enourage competition rather than common planning, etc etc.

[ZeroNowhere]

It's essentially a form of capitalism organized around co-operatives.

[The Vegan Marxist]

It was used to help get China out of a underdeveloped state of the economy that it was left in. But from the experience many went through on Market-Socialism, it should've only been used as a temporary ideal for the first decade or so, & then should've broken off of it & back to real socialism. But of course, they didn't, & now capitalism is on mass rise in China unfortunately. Overall, in long-terms wise, Market-Socialism is a failure.

[Ovi]

If market socialism means mainly mutualism, that would be a society without private ownership of the means of production, but based on the principle of occupancy and use (known as possession), without wage slavery since nobody will hold any physical capital, without rent because property is theft, without usury because mutual credit based on no interest would be available to all and with a market instead of planning.

It's anti-capitalist, but most socialists oppose it as well. There are many problem with mutualism;
- one would be the authority of the market; it makes people accept harmful solutions because otherwise the market would phase them out, a situation known as race to the bottom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom); it forces people to accept externalities, instead of having a saying in what affects them
- some monopolies are natural (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly)
- some things are inherently in common, such as the ocean or the atmosphere and cannot be anyone's property or possession, which gives rise to a situation know as tragedy of the commons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons) if profit motive is the drive of the society.
- not everything that is necessary can be sold, for instance information. Scientific research, technological development or writing songs require labor, but they can't be sold without an authority imposing artificial scarcity through intellectual property and restricting progress with patents or trade secrets
- competition in a market economy is a creation of the state and producers would be better off to cooperate than to compete (in a market that would mean monopoly) etc

In conclusion, market socialism is anti-capitalist in nature, but it's not the best way to go. I would also add that besides wage slavery, rent and usury, another thing that we should strive to abolish is the profit motive. Competition, its main cause, is against the interests of those who compete, thus, in a free society, competition and profit motive give way to cooperation and democratic planning anyway.

[ZeroNowhere]

Mutualism is not anti-capitalist. It does not seek to abolish generalized commodity production. Therefore, it does not abolish the private character of production, inasmuch as the product still proceeds into the ownership of a private entity, in this case a group of workers as collective capitalist, and therefore only becomes social wealth through the process of exchange. Our objections are not simply moralistic attacks on the profit motive; rather, such puts one in the same position as a liberal in relation to capitalism. At least speaking for Marxians, our difference with the liberals does not simply involve a different moral position on the profit motive, but rather a recognition of its contradictory character: whereas capitalist production is social, inasmuch as the product does not represent a use-value for its producer (as contrasted with direct use-value production, production for the direct usage of the producer), but rather is a use-value for others, a part of the social wealth, nonetheless the product accrues to a private entity (an individual capitalist or a collective capitalist (join-stock or co-operative)), and therefore it is private. In order to become social, these products must be exchanged as commodities, hence we have the market (the market originates from capitalism, they are not separate phenomena). This exchange, being done on a regular and not spurious basis (commodity production is generalized), means that the products are equalized; they take the form of value. Value finds its form of expression in money, as the universal commodity. However, due to the private character of production, it would be pointless to invest a given amount and produce only this much; whereas this would increment social wealth, it would not increment private wealth, and hence we have the profit motive. On the one hand, profits are reliant on the successful assertion of the social character of production, on sale, whereas on the other, production is not directly social, thereby is divorced from consumption, from its social nature; from this comes overproduction, where the latent possibility of crisis in the separation of purchase and sale in commodity ciruclation as such is provided with necessity, with a platform on which it must act.

And the fall in the rate of profit, the disqualification of the masses from proprietorship (co-ops only mean the creation of a collective capitalist, an entity), and the rest of the lot essentially flow from the same reason that the profit motive and generalized commodity production did, from the dual social and private character of production. Essentially, mutualism does not change the relationship on which capitalism is based, and is simply a form of reformism, of tinkering around with it.

[Ovi]

As much as I'd love to keep on writing 100 pages about the issue, before you state that mutualism is capitalist, why don't you give your definition of capitalism? Otherwise this will be a very long and boring thread.

[mykittyhasaboner]

There is no "your" definition of capitlaism, there is only one. Capitalism is defined by the expansion of value for it's own sake, and that labor time, commodities, and surplus are measured in value. Any kind of anti-capitalist economy would have to be at least geared towards abolishing value in this sense.

It would be more sensible for you to define what you mean by "mutualism" before anyone can assert if it's anti-capitalist or not.

[Queercommie Girl]

Mutualism is not a problem if it's not the majority of the socialist economy, which is planned.

I don't necessarily agree with a 100% planned economy, one reason is that I believe in direct worker's democracy and a minority of workers may simply wish to be mutualists and it would be bureaucratic to impose abstract doctrines on any section of the working class in a top-down manner.

Without direct worker's democracy for every section of the working class, it's not genuine socialism.

[Ovi]

Capitalism is defined by the expansion of value for it's own sake, and that labor time, commodities, and surplus are measured in value. Any kind of anti-capitalist economy would have to be at least geared towards abolishing value in this sense.

Since the soviet union never moved towards abolishing value, that would make it capitalist? Fine with me.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I'm a fan of Iseul's post. Particularly sensible.

Market Socialism is not one coherent philosophy, as such. It has been tried in several different countries, and many people from the Labour Party of 1945-1983 and the Chinese Communist Party may claim to be exponents. It is essentially a marriage of the continuation of the free market (supply/demand mechanisms, rational choice etc.) with a 'big government'-type 'management', if you like. I wouldn't like to say that there is only one type of format that Market Socialism can take on, but look to Social Democrats such as Attlee for a more positive example (comparatively, it's still essentially Capitalism with a shiny face), and to those such as Gorbachev for a thoroughly negative example of Market Socialism.

[ZeroNowhere]

As much as I'd love to keep on writing 100 pages about the issue, before you state that mutualism is capitalist, why don't you give your definition of capitalism? Otherwise this will be a very long and boring thread.
It is possible to supply multiple defining traits which all entail each other. For example, generalized commodity production, and hence value-production, labour only becoming social through the mediation of value, and thus ultimately labour which is both private (so that it must be sold in order to be social) and social (so that its product does not represent a use-value to the capitalist (private or collective) which appropriates it, and therefore it is made for others, although it is the capitalist or entity's private property and thus must be sold to realize this social character). Then, of course, there's the capital relation, by which labourers are paid for the commodity labour-power, and thereby produce a product which goes towards a particular private entity; this, however, is entailed by the spread of the private-social contradiction, inasmuch as the product produced must be sold in order to become social, and therefore is not a direct use-value, but on the other hand, in not being directly social (ie. we don't have socialism), it must pass into the hands of a private entity in order to be sold (rather than immediately becoming social wealth), in the case of mutualism this being the workers as collective capitalist.


I don't necessarily agree with a 100% planned economy, one reason is that I believe in direct worker's democracy and a minority of workers may simply wish to be mutualists and it would be bureaucratic to impose abstract doctrines on any section of the working class in a top-down manner.

Without direct worker's democracy for every section of the working class, it's not genuine socialism.
Under socialism, there is no working class. Either way, socialism's not a question of 'democracy' in the abstract so much as a question of control, namely social control of production, so that production is directly social and done in accordance with a given social plan. Inasmuch as democracy is a necessary condition for this social control, it is entailed. Allowing a certain amount of workers, along with a certain amount of land and means of production, to essentially sell themselves into slavery is not necessary for 'genuine socialism'. Socialism does not entail that certain people be allowed to gather and give up their freedoms to a dictator, and thereafter live under his yoke; capital is a social relation which essentially takes the form of a dictator.

[Ovi]

It is possible to supply multiple defining traits which all entail each other. For example, generalized commodity production, and hence value-production, labour only becoming social through the mediation of value, and thus ultimately labour which is both private (so that it must be sold in order to be social) and social (so that its product does not represent a use-value to the capitalist (private or collective) which appropriates it, and therefore it is made for others, although it is the capitalist or entity's private property and thus must be sold to realize this social character). Then, of course, there's the capital relation, by which labourers are paid for the commodity labour-power, and thereby produce a product which goes towards a particular private entity; this, however, is entailed by the spread of the private-social contradiction, inasmuch as the product produced must be sold in order to become social, and therefore is not a direct use-value, but on the other hand, in not being directly social (ie. we don't have socialism), it must pass into the hands of a private entity in order to be sold (rather than immediately becoming social wealth), in the case of mutualism this being the workers as collective capitalist.

By that reason, wouldn't any society that uses money or labor vouchers be capitalist?

[RedMaterialist]

What is 'Market Socialism' again? I've heard the term tossed around but don't quite know what it is.

Market-socialism could be a transition from capitalism to socialism; possibly also called state-capitalism. According to Marx socialism could only develop from fully developed capitalism. The Soviet Union and China tried (not that they had a choice) to go from half-developed capitalism (semi- feudal/semi-capitalist) directly to socialism. It apparently did not work, and now they both have state- capitalism or market-socialism.

[Queercommie Girl]

Under socialism, there is no working class. Either way, socialism's not a question of 'democracy' in the abstract so much as a question of control, namely social control of production, so that production is directly social and done in accordance with a given social plan. Inasmuch as democracy is a necessary condition for this social control, it is entailed. Allowing a certain amount of workers, along with a certain amount of land and means of production, to essentially sell themselves into slavery is not necessary for 'genuine socialism'. Socialism does not entail that certain people be allowed to gather and give up their freedoms to a dictator, and thereafter live under his yoke; capital is a social relation which essentially takes the form of a dictator.

Actually I think you misunderstood. I'm talking about mutualism here not capitalism. Mutualism has some degree of market exchange, but no private ownership. Everything is collectively owned, like a "small-socialism" on a local scale, so how is anyone "selling themselves into slavery"?

[Thirsty Crow]

Actually I think you misunderstood. I'm talking about mutualism here not capitalism. Mutualism has some degree of market exchange, but no private ownership. Everything is collectively owned, like a "small-socialism" on a local scale, so how is anyone "selling themselves into slavery"?
Workers in the co-ops are still slaves to the market exchange, which represents yet another form of the primacy of capital which directs their productive capacities and their work, and "co-produces" their wants and their lives.
Moreover, it could be argued that, if mutualism was to be implemented on a global scale, there is private ownership in the form of "private" entities before law - i.e. the co-ops.
And I seriously doubt that the conditions of business competition, grounded in the profit motive, could be fruitful for an attempt at a gradual and progressive abolition of the division of labour.

In fact, it seems to me that mutualism, or market socialism, is the most dangerous reformist tendency, being the most viable, most "radical" (if there ever could exist a "radical reformism") of the whole lot.

[syndicat]

There are a variety of things called "market socialism" including the idea of giving everyone stocks in companies. there is a kind of bureaucratic market socialism where managerial regimes that run industries would compete.

what people have been discussing here is self-managed market socialism, where the firms are collectively owned and have some form of democratic control over the firm by the worker-members. even here there are great differences. advocates of the Mondragon model of coops (like David Schweickart, a prominent market socialist) have no problem with coops that are controlled top down by managers and high end professionals, with the workers as a subordinate group. so this "market socialism" would not be a classless society.

even if we consider the more egalitarian and libertarian form, with workers having more actual power of control, there is still the fact that the workers privately accrue surpluses. in other words, if we look at the capitalist economy, a firm makes a profit if its revenue from sale of commodities is greater than the expenses it has taken on in making them. this makes the firm the "residual claimant" in the words of coop advocate David Ellerman. Now, under mutualism or competing self-managed coops, the coop -- the worker collective -- is the "residual claimant." so the workers have an incentive to do what they need to do to reduce expenses and maximize revenue. so they will have the same incentive as capitalist firms to shift costs onto others, as with pollution for example.

they will also have an incentive to maximize income per worker-member.

over time there will be a tendency for the coops to become quite unequal, with great differences in income due to luck and variable success in competition.

There is also the problem that workers who have acquired much more expertise and skill, such as marketing savvy or engineering knowledge, could force coops to pay them more and give them other privileges to work there. so a kind of internal class system will tend to emerge inside the coops.

[RedMaterialist]

=syndicat;1895713] in other words, if we look at the capitalist economy, a firm makes a profit if its revenue from sale of commodities is greater than the expenses it has taken on in making them. this makes the firm the "residual claimant" in the words of coop advocate David Eller

Not quite. It makes the firm an exploiter of workers. The profit comes from the fact that workers produce value over and above what they are paid (and remember, they are paid the true value of their labor time, as determined by the market.) This extra value is sold on the market and provides the firm with its profit.


so they will have the same incentive as capitalist firms to shift costs onto others, as with pollution for example.

Why would a worker agree to pollute his own neighborhood? A capitalist will do it because he can move away.


There is also the problem that workers who have acquired much more expertise and skill, such as marketing savvy or engineering knowledge, could force coops to pay them more and give them other privileges to work there. so a kind of internal class system will tend to emerge inside the coops.

Workers who have more skill and, therefore, produce more value, are paid more by the laws of supply and demand, by the market. They don't "force" anybody to pay them more. A class system exists only when one class appropriates or takes, the value which another class has produced.

Have your coop economists even read Marx?

[Armchair War Criminal]

If we define capitalism by the "double freedom" of labor - workers own their labor-power, capitalists own the other means of production - and socialism as worker ownership of the means of production, then market socialism is socialism, not capitalism. If you define capitalism by value and commodity exchange, then no, but ultimately I don't see why the labels should matter.

Nowherezero brings up the good point that anything based on commodity exchange is liable to experience overproduction crises. I'm not sure whether this theoretically holds water, but it at least seems like it might. Further thought needed.

If a market socialist society is to remain socialist (in the classlessness sense) it will need to rethink how finance works; otherwise, some firms will acquire greater amounts of capital[1] per cooperant, and end up producing arrangements functionally identical to unionized capitalist employment. (Consider a janitorial cooperative contracted to service a cooperative of scientific researchers.) The simplest way would probably be to have the means of production "owned" by the state and rented out on a competitive basis, with reinvestment rates determined by a tax - this might or might not meet your definition of "market socialism." If anybody know of good elaborations of some specific models, point it out.


Why would a worker agree to pollute his own neighborhood? A capitalist will do it because he can move away.
Workers might have less incentive to do so, but the incentive is still there, because the members of the polluting cooperative don't bear the full costs of their choice.

That said, I don't think externalities are an important theoretical challenge to a market-based social division of labor. Slap a Pigouvian tax on it, just like the liberal state.

[1] Or "schmapital," if you object to the term here. Sewing machines, factories, computers, quanta of the means of production, you know the deal.

[Victus Mortuum]

Some firms will acquire greater amounts of capital[1] per cooperant, and end up producing arrangements functionally identical to unionized capitalist employment. (Consider a janitorial cooperative contracted to service a cooperative of scientific researchers.)

Regarding a system of widespread worker-coops, I think you'd have a more fundamental issue. Imagine a janitorial coop that contracts another janitorial coop to service the coop of sr. The obvious solution would be to simply outlaw employment contracting between worker coops. Or maybe just outlawing worker coops employing individuals not in the coop. If a cooperative at a science research facility needs to have janitors work there, the janitors would join that coop, become equal members (that is, equal 'owners' and controlling participants). That's how I see this system working, at least.

[RedMaterialist]

If we define capitalism by the "double freedom" of labor - workers own their labor-power, capitalists own the other means of production

If that were the definition of capitalism, capitalists would never make a profit. Capitalists pay for the labor-power and they pay for the means of production.
They then sell the product on the open market and get more for the sale than what they paid. Any way to explain this? Check out a guy named Karl Marx.


Nowherezero brings up the good point that anything based on commodity exchange is liable to experience overproduction crises. I'm not sure whether this theoretically holds water, but it at least seems like it might. Further thought needed.

Every 7-10 years there is another crisis in the commodity exchange business, brought on by overproduction. The latest one is the housing crisis (in the U.S.). Overproduction of houses, of mortgage credit. Also discussed by K. Marx.




Workers might have less incentive to do so, but the incentive is still there, because the members of the polluting cooperative don't bear the full costs of their choice.

Cooperative Widget Factory is located on the Clean River. One mile downstream is Socialist City which uses the river for drinking, bathing, etc. There are a lot of babies in Socialist City.

Cooperative Widget Factory decides to dump 200,000 tons of mercury sludge one night into Clean River. Their reasoning? Hey the capitalists got away with it and besides somebody else has to pay for some of it!

The next morning a few million Socialist City citizens show up with pitchforks. And, somebody forgot to tell Cooperative Widget Factory that they can't call in the police, National Guard or the 82nd Airborne, because, you see, all the military (including the generals) are citizens of Socialist City.

Other cooperative factories are watching all this on the nightly news. Suddenly they discover the virtues of going green.

[syndicat]

me:
in other words, if we look at the capitalist economy, a firm makes a profit if its revenue from sale of commodities is greater than the expenses it has taken on in making them. this makes the firm the "residual claimant" in the words of coop advocate David Ellerman.

you:
Not quite. It makes the firm an exploiter of workers. The profit comes from the fact that workers produce value over and above what they are paid (and remember, they are paid the true value of their labor time, as determined by the market.) This extra value is sold on the market and provides the firm with its profit.


what you don't seem to understand is that you can't object to a stipulative definition. such a definition is neither true nor false. it just tells us how Ellerman intends to use the phrase "residual claimant."

the advantage of Ellerman's concept of "residual claimant" is that it picks out an important feature that the capitalist firm and the worker coop have in common. each captures the surplus...as measured by excess of revenue over expenses.

in each case expenses are not an accurate measure of real social costs and revenues are not an accurate measure of real social benefit. if a worker coop builds automobiles, it profits from people pumping greenhouse gases and other dangerous exhaust gases into the environmental commons...the atmosphere. It doesn't have to reimburse the population for those costs.

your blather about the labor theory of value ignores the problem here.

me:

There is also the problem that workers who have acquired much more expertise and skill, such as marketing savvy or engineering knowledge, could force coops to pay them more and give them other privileges to work there. so a kind of internal class system will tend to emerge inside the coops.

you:
Workers who have more skill and, therefore, produce more value, are paid more by the laws of supply and demand, by the market. They don't "force" anybody to pay them more. A class system exists only when one class appropriates or takes, the value which another class has produced.


So what do you see as the source of the much higher incomes...not to mention power and status...of the bureaucratic class, either the managers, lawyers etc in the corporate capitalist system, or the old Soviet bureaucratic class? Their class power lies in the relative concentration of decision-making authority and key kinds of expertise in their hands. This enables them to dominate workers and from this domination flows their ability to appropriate higher incomes and also to sustain their class power. This is a relation of class oppression and exploitation. And this could continue even if property is collectively or publically owned.

A capitalist apologist would also say that lawyers, managers, top engineers and accountants etc are properly recompensed due to "laws of supply and demand." But they say that about all workers too. So how does this fit in with your blather about the labor theory of value? These "laws of supply and demand" operate in the context of a structure of class domination.

Part of the way this works in corporate capitalism is that access to the development of one's skills and potential abilities is limited by one's class situation. For example, the education system is set up to shuffle children of the working class mostly into working class jobs, and only a minority into managerial or high end professional positions. You, on the other hand, simply take the distribution of knowledge and skills and experience for granted.

but if in a socialist society education at all levels is equalized and is entirely free, from pre-school to graduate school, and if training is available throughout life to ensure a wide democratization of the expertise and knowledged needed to make decisions in industry, what's the point to (1) concentrating power in a managerial/professional hierarchy as at Mondragon? (2) paying people throughout their lives more because, at public expense, we provided them with an enjoyable educational experience?

you see, this illustrates the way advocates of "market socialism" end up as apologists for the bureaucratic class.

[Armchair War Criminal]

Regarding a system of widespread worker-coops, I think you'd have a more fundamental issue. Imagine a janitorial coop that contracts another janitorial coop to service the coop of sr. The obvious solution would be to simply outlaw employment contracting between worker coops. Or maybe just outlawing worker coops employing individuals not in the coop. If a cooperative at a science research facility needs to have janitors work there, the janitors would join that coop, become equal members (that is, equal 'owners' and controlling participants). That's how I see this system working, at least.
You've pretty well articulated what our goals should be. But how do we implement them?

Remember, the research cooperative isn't hiring janitors, it's buying janitorial services from another firm. Various inputs - scientific labor, janitorial labor, expensive lab equipment, cheap janitorial equipment - combine to produce a commodity, research, which the research cooperative sells to the government or a pharmaceutical manufacturer or whatever. The members of the research cooperative, because they controlled access to the means of production, were able to buy janitorial services at lower per-hour rate than they reaped in net remuneration.

And the unfortunate thing is that this capitalist-like dynamic is going to be present, to varying degrees, in every inter-firm venture to produce a commodity, if their capital intensivities don't equate. (And, for purely technical reasons, some goods and steps in the production process are going to be more capital-intensive than others.) A car manufacturer buys tires from another supplier? Bam. The tire manufacturer needs rubber? Bam. You could require complete vertical integration of every step leading up to a particular commodity, but that would be ridiculously inefficient, result in black markets, and wouldn't even change the fact that capital intensity varies between different commodities as well as the different steps in their production, so that systematic income differentials are going to persist.

The "socialism" of market socialism thus seems to require a constant K:L ratio between firms, while the technical demands of a complex economy demand otherwise. Clumsily, you could require firms to "pair up" year-to-year with firms with a complementary K:L ratio: for instance, if the communewide standard were $100,000:worker, a 30-member cooperative with $4M in land and equipment could pair with a 15-member cooperative with $500,000, the 45-member supercommittee agreeing on a rule on how to share their collective revenues between them. Less clumsily, a similar result could be obtained by vouchers. Individuals would still have the power to move consumption around throughout their life-cycle through private banking, but they wouldn't be able to transform it into self-valorizing capital. Additionally, having this sort of system removes a powerful incentive not to take on new members, which on its own would hasten the class formation process and probably produce structural unemployment.

[Armchair War Criminal]

If that were the definition of capitalism, capitalists would never make a profit. Capitalists pay for the labor-power and they pay for the means of production.
They then sell the product on the open market and get more for the sale than what they paid. Any way to explain this? Check out a guy named Karl Marx.
Yes, I've heard of this Mr. Marx fellow! It's important to his conception of capitalism that, under it, workers have a natural right to their labor-power, which they exchange to the capitalist in return for its value. The ruling class cannot use political methods to compel labor, as under slavery or feudalism, but only the Hobson's Choice of "work or starve."


Every 7-10 years there is another crisis in the commodity exchange business, brought on by overproduction. The latest one is the housing crisis (in the U.S.). Overproduction of houses, of mortgage credit. Also discussed by K. Marx.
Right. Obviously. But we don't have any empirical data on market socialist economies (although there are tempting parallels with small craft production, not that I believe that was ever strictly dominant as such.) If access to quanta of the means of production is fixed by the number of cooperants, as I've discussed above, you're not dealing with self-valorizing capital. I'd be surprised if there weren't cyclic phenomena of some form, but the rules of the game are still different.


Cooperative Widget Factory is located on the Clean River. One mile downstream is Socialist City which uses the river for drinking, bathing, etc. There are a lot of babies in Socialist City.

Cooperative Widget Factory decides to dump 200,000 tons of mercury sludge one night into Clean River. Their reasoning? Hey the capitalists got away with it and besides somebody else has to pay for some of it!

The next morning a few million Socialist City citizens show up with pitchforks. And, somebody forgot to tell Cooperative Widget Factory that they can't call in the police, National Guard or the 82nd Airborne, because, you see, all the military (including the generals) are citizens of Socialist City.

Other cooperative factories are watching all this on the nightly news. Suddenly they discover the virtues of going green.
Do you really want to task spontaneous mob justice with finding the optimal trade-off between preservation and production? This seems like just the sort of technocratic problem that bourgeois intellectuals solved ages ago. (I mean, not at the level of political economy, but.)

[MellowViper]

When the means of production is held in common by workers and not the bourgeoisie, it ceases to be a capitalist mode of production. Worker owned cooperatives competing on a free market would lead to a classless society, plain and simple. Its not capitalist.

[ZeroNowhere]

Actually I think you misunderstood. I'm talking about mutualism here not capitalism. Mutualism has some degree of market exchange, but no private ownership. Everything is collectively owned, like a "small-socialism" on a local scale, so how is anyone "selling themselves into slavery"?
Mutualism continues to feature generalized commodity production, and hence the capital-relation. The fact that the workers play as collective capitalist doesn't matter, as the problem with capitalism is not who rules, it's that nobody rules.


Why would a worker agree to pollute his own neighborhood? A capitalist will do it because he can move away.Because here we are dealing with the workers as collective capitalist. Now, all of them could just be nice to the unfortunate worker, but workers don't of necessity have much more compassion than capitalists; rather, if polluting this bloke's neighbourhood would lead to increased profits, regardless of whether he is in favour of it, the rest of the workers, if they didn't do so, would probably get out-competed once some other firm did. Capitalists can be perfectly decent chaps (and certainly don't deserve to die simply by merit of being capitalists), but they are subject to the requirements of value's valorisation.


By that reason, wouldn't any society that uses money or labor vouchers be capitalist?Money, yes, inasmuch as the majority of use-values are produced as commodities. On the other hand, preceding generalized commodity production, it may exist in pre-capitalist societies. With labour credits (as distinguished from Proudhonian labour-money), labour is directly social, done in accordance with a common plan, and therefore we do not have capitalism. They are simply entitlements which allow people "to withdraw from the social supplies of consumer goods a quantity corresponding to their labour-time." Here, products would proceed directly into the total social wealth, and labour credits simply allocate them between various people; they do not circulate, and therefore products are not exchanged (ie. they do not go into private ownership, that is, they do not have to be exchanged in order to become social, but rather become directly social, and labour-credits simply allow them to be withdrawn from the total social store).


According to Marx socialism could only develop from fully developed capitalism.Not necessarily; for example, his later writings on Russia state that, on the basis of the peasant communes at the time, it had the potential to pass 'straight' to socialism, albeit only if accompanied by nations which did possess 'fully developed capitalism'. On the other hand, ultimately socialism would not have developed from fully developed capitalism here.


If we define capitalism by the "double freedom" of labor - workers own their labor-power, capitalists own the other means of production - and socialism as worker ownership of the means of production, then market socialism is socialism, not capitalism.Not really, unless modern co-operatives, despite being perfectly functioning members of the current capitalist order, are somehow socialist. The 'double freedom' of labourers consists in the fact that they possess their labour-power, a commodity, and yet, due to the private character of production, must sell this labour to a private entity, and produce goods for them; ie. their labour is alienated to a private entity, whether it be an individual or collective capitalist. As I said previously:
Then, of course, there's the capital relation, by which labourers are paid for the commodity labour-power, and thereby produce a product which goes towards a particular private entity; this, however, is entailed by the spread of the private-social contradiction, inasmuch as the product produced must be sold in order to become social, and therefore is not a direct use-value, but on the other hand, in not being directly social (ie. we don't have socialism), it must pass into the hands of a private entity in order to be sold (rather than immediately becoming social wealth), in the case of mutualism this being the workers as collective capitalist.
Even if one wishes to define capitalism through the double freedom of the labourer, an economy made up of capitalist co-operatives is still capitalism.


Cooperative Widget Factory is located on the Clean River. One mile downstream is Socialist City which uses the river for drinking, bathing, etc. There are a lot of babies in Socialist City.

Cooperative Widget Factory decides to dump 200,000 tons of mercury sludge one night into Clean River. Their reasoning? Hey the capitalists got away with it and besides somebody else has to pay for some of it!

The next morning a few million Socialist City citizens show up with pitchforks. And, somebody forgot to tell Cooperative Widget Factory that they can't call in the police, National Guard or the 82nd Airborne, because, you see, all the military (including the generals) are citizens of Socialist City.Unlike current capitalist systems, where the police are presumably excluded from citizenhood.


When the means of production is held in common by workers and not the bourgeoisie, it ceases to be a capitalist mode of production. Worker owned cooperatives competing on a free market would lead to a classless society, plain and simple. Its not capitalist.No, as the workers would simply form collective capitalists. Class is a relation of production, not a way to classify individuals.

[mykittyhasaboner]

When the means of production is held in common by workers and not the bourgeoisie, it ceases to be a capitalist mode of production.

Only if common ownership entails developing a common economic plan designed without market mechanisms.


Worker owned cooperatives competing on a free market would lead to a classless society, plain and simple. Its not capitalist.Worker's cooperatives competing on a free market could not possibly lead to a classless society, because to have a classless society you need to abolish the division of labor and the law of value. Only a planned economy can attempt to do such a thing.

Market competition would imply that workers would be competiting to produce under the socially necessary labor time, and that enterprises which do so would not only appropriate value in exchange, they would also need to accumulate more and more surplus value in order to stay competitive. If the purpose of production is to create surplus value for the sake of competition, then it would seem that producing use-value for society and the improvement of the lives of workers falls second to that.

This "market socialism" is essentially, capitalism. Just without the kind of private ownership we know today.

[RedMaterialist]

Yes, I've heard of this Mr. Marx fellow! It's important to his conception of capitalism that, under it, workers have a natural right to their labor-power, which they exchange to the capitalist in return for its value/

They do have the right to their labor power, which they, however, exchange for only part of its value. The product of their labor contains the full value of their labor. The difference is the profit which the capitalist pockets.


[/QUOTE]
The ruling class cannot use political methods to compel labor, as under slavery or feudalism, but only the Hobson's Choice of "work or starve."[QUOTE]

No political method to compel labor? Whenever there is a problem with the workers they call in the police or use politicians to bust unions or use the media to demonize socialism.

[Armchair War Criminal]

They do have the right to their labor power, which they, however, exchange for only part of its value. The product of their labor contains the full value of their labor. The difference is the profit which the capitalist pockets.
No, they exchange their labor power for its full value (that is, money embodying the amount of labor-power required for its production, which in the case of labor-power itself defines the means of subsistence.) The product of their labor contains more value than that, however.


No political method to compel labor? Whenever there is a problem with the workers they call in the police or use politicians to bust unions or use the media to demonize socialism.
I'm using "political compulsion" in the old-fashioned sense. Workers are always "free" to leave and starve if they wish.

[RedMaterialist]

me:

[QUOTE]"residual claimant."

Why use this meaningless phrase? Why not just call it profit or surplus-value?


the advantage of Ellerman's concept of "residual claimant" is

that it sounds vaguely economic; residual, marginal, etc.



your blather about the labor theory of value ignores the problem here.

I really doubt if you really understand the labor theory of value.





So what do you see as the source of the much higher incomes

The source of all income is labor.



These "laws of supply and demand" operate in the context of a structure of class domination.

True, and under a society which is changing to socialism, that class which is in domination is the proletariat or working class.



but if in a socialist society education at all levels is equalized and is entirely free, from pre-school to graduate school, and if training is available throughout life to ensure a wide democratization of the expertise and knowledged needed to make decisions in industry,


That's under socialism. In your ideal world we will wake up one day and presto! there will be the socialist society. Unfortunately the real world requires a difficult, long, sometimes bloody struggle to get from capitalism to socialism. One way, not necessarily the best or only way, is to transition through a stage people are calling market-socialism or state-capitalism. Russia and China tried the revolutionary, direct method, without an intervening stage. It was not very efficient, but it worked fairly well for a while.

If you have a better method to get to socialism, let me know.

[Kiev Communard]

The main problem with "market socialism" (if you mean mutualism) is that it ignores the socialized character of modern production and actually glorifies the simple commodity production as the ideal of society, that is, looks backwards, not forward.

[Queercommie Girl]

The main problem with "market socialism" (if you mean mutualism) is that it ignores the socialized character of modern production and actually glorifies the simple commodity production as the ideal of society, that is, looks backwards, not forward.

You mean going back to the days of proto-capitalist merchantile and artisan production? Yes, that is true to some extent, which is why I said a socialist society must have overall and majority economic planning. Mutualism can only be a minority and local phenomenon.

But some people might indeed want to be mutualists, and it is not democratic to bureaucratically impose doctrines onto the people. That's not socialist. Even in Maoist China, there were some mutualist collective enterprises.

However, the kind of "market socialism" introduced in China by Deng isn't mutualism at all, but real capitalism and explicit private ownership.

[syndicat]

The source of all income is labor.



i thought you said it was "supply and demand" that is the explanation for different incomes? maybe you need to get your story straight.

and if you're saying "labor creates all value" that's not what the labor theory of value says, and Marx believed that was false, because it is false. nature itself is a source of value...such as land, minerals, the air we breathe, seeds, the air we breathe.

[ZeroNowhere]

Supply and demand can determine wages, but these wages originate from value produced.


and if you're saying "labor creates all value" that's not what the labor theory of value says, and Marx believed that was false, because it is false. nature itself is a source of value...such as land, minerals, the air we breathe, seeds, the air we breathe.Actually, no, the quote was that labour is the father, the Earth the mother of all wealth. As Marx pointed out in 'Capital', this quote is referring only to use-values; that is, wealth in use-values. However, as regards value, value does indeed originate in its totality from labour, as its substance is general, abstract labour.


But some people might indeed want to be mutualists, and it is not democratic to bureaucratically impose doctrines onto the people. That's not socialist.Being less 'democratic' per se does not make something any less 'socialist'. Of course, if one views socialism, the abolition of capitalism, as merely some 'abstract doctrine', then one suspects that you may be forgetting what capitalism actually entails, namely the rule of things over humans.

[syndicat]

Actually, no, the quote was that labour is the father, the Earth the mother of all wealth. As Marx pointed out in 'Capital', this quote is referring only to use-values; that is, wealth in use-values. However, as regards value, value does indeed originate in its totality from labour, as its substance is general, abstract labour.



nope. labor theory of value is a theory of relative prices of readily reproducible commodities. it's a cost of production theory of prices. Land has a price, but Marx did not suppose that the labort theory of value is an explanation of land price. Marx had a different theory of land prices.

Or consider mineral rights. These have a price. Coal sitting in the ground can be bought. But it's value is not created by labor since it was not human labor that created the coal.

[RedMaterialist]

i thought you said it was "supply and demand" that is the explanation for different incomes? maybe you need to get your story straight.

The source of income is labor. The determination of its price, or what is paid to each employee, manager, etc., is made by the market, supply and demand. Although as capitalism gets more monopolized prices are determined by the monopoly.


and if you're saying "labor creates all value" that's not what the labor theory of value says, and Marx believed that was false, because it is false. nature itself is a source of value...such as land, minerals, the air we breathe, seeds, the air we breathe.

What Marx said was that the value of each commodity is determined by the (socially necessary) amount of labor expended on it.

The point of market-socialism is that it can be used (there may be other means) by workers to take control of the production process and become owners of their own products. There is a real, concrete way to achieve this goal. One example happens when workers in a factory take control of a board of directors. This is now being done through political means in Germany. In Argentina, workers have taken direct control of abandoned factories and have used politics to maintain control.

Salaries usually are set by vote of the workers themselves. You may believe this kind of cooperative will lead to new class divisions, but workers are proceeding without you.

[RedMaterialist]

nope. labor theory of value is a theory of relative prices of readily reproducible commodities.[QUOTE]

You may have a somewhat distorted idea of what the labor theory of value is. A commodity costs $10 to produce (5 for labor, paid per hr.; 5 for machines, interest, and any other cost you can think of). The capitalist sells the commodity for $15. The true value of commodity is $15. His profit is $5. Where does the extra $5 come from?


[QUOTE]Or consider mineral rights. These have a price. Coal sitting in the ground can be bought. But it's value is not created by labor since it was not human labor that created the coal.

The right to dig for coal is not the same as the coal itself. The right is a kind of rent on land. You can't sell coal in the ground. You may speculate or gamble on possible future profits to be made on the coal, but that is different from producing value. Human labor must first get the coal out of the ground. When that happens value (exchange-value) is added to the coal. It only then becomes profitable to the mine owner. How much value is added to the coal depends on how much work is done to get the coal out. The deeper and more dangerous the mine, the more valuable the coal becomes (as long as the labor is socially necessary.)

[RedMaterialist]

[QUOTE]I'm using "political compulsion" in the old-fashioned sense. Workers are always "free" to leave and starve if they wish.

Old fashioned? Not slavery, not serfdom. What old fashioned sense? But, of course, no worker wants to starve; so he is forced to work for the capitalist. There is something else he is also "free" to do: Arrest the capitalist, put him in jail for robbery, take over the factory and sell the goods he and the other workers have produced.

[ZeroNowhere]

nope. labor theory of value is a theory of relative prices of readily reproducible commodities. it's a cost of production theory of prices. Land has a price, but Marx did not suppose that the labort theory of value is an explanation of land price. Marx had a different theory of land prices.

Or consider mineral rights. These have a price. Coal sitting in the ground can be bought. But it's value is not created by labor since it was not human labor that created the coal.

"In considering the forms of appearance of ground-rent, ie. the lease-price that is paid to the landowner under this heading for the use of the soil, whether for productive purposes or those of consumption, we must keep in mind, finally, that the prices of things that have no value in and of themselves - either not being the product of labour, like land, or which at least cannot be reproduced by labour, such as antiques, works of art by certain masters, etc. - may be determined by quite fortuitous combinations of circumstances. For a thing to be sold, it simply has to be capable of being monopolized and alienated."
-Capital, Vol. III.

Or, if you prefer:

"Things which have no value may have a price."
- Manuscripts of 1861-1863

Another example given is a false oath.


The point of market-socialism is that it can be used (there may be other means) by workers to take control of the production process and become owners of their own products. There is a real, concrete way to achieve this goal. One example happens when workers in a factory take control of a board of directors. This is now being done through political means in Germany. In Argentina, workers have taken direct control of abandoned factories and have used politics to maintain control.

Salaries usually are set by vote of the workers themselves. You may believe this kind of cooperative will lead to new class divisions, but workers are proceeding without you. But regardless, the workers currently proceeding were preceded by Marx, who pointed out that capitalist co-operatives do not lead to new class divisions precisely because they simply reproduce the current ones.

[syndicat]

"In considering the forms of appearance of ground-rent, ie. the lease-price that is paid to the landowner under this heading for the use of the soil, whether for productive purposes or those of consumption, we must keep in mind, finally, that the prices of things that have no value in and of themselves - either not being the product of labour, like land, or which at least cannot be reproduced by labour, such as antiques, works of art by certain masters, etc. - may be determined by quite fortuitous combinations of circumstances. For a thing to be sold, it simply has to be capable of being monopolized and alienated."

thanks for showing i was right. now, in fact people do value the land, trees, coal etc, so they do have value. it's just not "value" in Marx's sense of labor cost of production of commodities.

[ZeroNowhere]

So, in other words, you're contradicting the claim that labour is the only source of value production by using the word 'value' in a completely different sense. That is a very valuable argument.

[RedMaterialist]

thanks for showing i was right. now, in fact people do value the land, trees, coal etc, so they do have value. it's just not "value" in Marx's sense of labor cost of production of commodities.

Trees have value, just not value.

[SocialismOrBarbarism]

I don't think the problem is that mutualism as ideally conceived would be capitalism, because it wouldn't, I just don't see why we'd want a classless society based on all the same mechanisms and hence inefficiencies, crises, etc as capitalism, and which would probably lead quickly back to it.

[Queercommie Girl]

I don't think the problem is that mutualism as ideally conceived would be capitalism, because it wouldn't, I just don't see why we'd want a classless society based on all the same mechanisms and hence inefficiencies, crises, etc as capitalism, and which would probably lead quickly back to it.

Most people probably won't, but a few people might, and you can't just force people to submit to the planned economy en masse in a top-down bureaucratic manner, like Stalin's forced de-kulakisation policies implemented not democratically but from above.

You can't even forcefully destroy small businesses in this way, let alone mutualists.

As long as the majority of the economy is planned, I just don't see the problem. Why be a dogmatic ideological purist in everything? I'm not.

[ZeroNowhere]

I don't think the problem is that mutualism as ideally conceived would be capitalism, because it wouldn't
Oh. Well, there we go, then.

[Zanthorus]

Most people probably won't, but a few people might, and you can't just force people to submit to the planned economy en masse in a top-down bureaucratic manner, like Stalin's forced de-kulakisation policies implemented not democratically but from above.

The majority forcing the minority to participate in a planned economy rather than the market is perfectly 'democratic', so I have no idea what you're blithering about. You're thinking not in terms of democracy, but in terms of personal autonomy, which is not something you can advocate whilst being consistently anti-capitalist, as you are showing brilliantly in this thread.


Why be a dogmatic ideological purist in everything? I'm not.

Of course, Communism is just an 'abstract ideology', which the 'gaping asses' which make up the mass of people are too stupid too understand, so to gain influence, we must give up 'purity', in favour of an opportunistic and slavish subordination to spontaneity. This, in an incredibly cryptic and sarcastic manner, was exactly what Lenin was trying to tell us in What is to be Done?.

[SocialismOrBarbarism]

Oh. Well, there we go, then.

Fine, I'll make a brief comment about your idealist nonsense then.


No, as the workers would simply form collective capitalists. Class is a relation of production, not a way to classify individuals.

What is "class" abstracted from the individuals that actually make up that class? Marxists study social relations between people as they produce, not social relations between people and uh, logical categories.

How can you have capitalism without a bourgeoisie?


With labor emancipated, every man becomes a working man, and productive labor ceases to be a class attribute.

This would be no less true in a utopian mutualist society...

[SocialismOrBarbarism]

Most people probably won't, but a few people might, and you can't just force people to submit to the planned economy en masse in a top-down bureaucratic manner, like Stalin's forced de-kulakisation policies implemented not democratically but from above.

You can't even forcefully destroy small businesses in this way, let alone mutualists.

As long as the majority of the economy is planned, I just don't see the problem. Why be a dogmatic ideological purist in everything? I'm not.

I don't really think the point of this thread is whether we should forcefully expropriate or allow small business and trading and such under a majority planned economy. I'm pretty sure people are still going to want to exchange things and services.

[syndicat]

So, in other words, you're contradicting the claim that labour is the source of all value by using the word 'value' in a completely different sense. That is a very valuable argument.


no, i gave two arguments. first, that land and minerals have prices not due to labor.

also, even by marx's theory labor cannot be the source of value of commodities produced by labor.

here's why. for Marx prices of commodities does not vary accrording to the labor "embodied" in them. why not? because the current price of a commodity depends on the current technological level of production.

suppose that a widget, X, is made at time T1. a bit later, at time T2, a new technology is deployed that reduces the amount of labor needed to produce widgets. so what is the value of widget X? the amount of labor time it took to produce it? Not according to Marx. Marx says that the current value of X will be the labor time it will now take to produce widgets. so it's value will now be less than it was when it was produced.

if this is so, then the value, on Marx's concept of "value", can NOT be the embodied labor, the labor that created that commodity.

now, I don't find Marx's concept of "value" to be important. for one thing, it can't give an accurate picture of the amount of labor invested in producing things because that depends not just on how long someonee works but how intensely. if the employer reorgs production to intensify pace of work, there is more labor used up per hour of work.

it also doesn't provide an accurate picture of exploitation because it deals only with the division between capital owners and sellers of labor power. but there is an exploiting class that doesn't own (significant amounts of) capital, the bureaucratic class -- middle managers, lawyers, high end accounts, industrial engineers etc. These people have significant authority over workers and make much higher incomes as a result. they participate in the exploitation of labor. but the labor theory of value can't account for this.

[ZeroNowhere]

What is "class" abstracted from the individuals that actually make up that class? Marxists study social relations between people as they produce, not social relations between people and uh, logical categories. Correct, we examine relationships existent in production. In capitalism, including mutualism, production has a dual social-private character; that is, it is the production of social use-values, it does not represent a use-value for its producer, and yet it proceeds into the hands of a private entity, a capitalist ('collective' or individual), and may only become social through sale. Class relations exist precisely only in production; as such, there is no requirement that one be able to neatly classify people labourer and capitalist on a whim, but rather both classes only exist due to the repetition of the reproduction process, and are existent only as roles within this. Class analysis here is primarily a description of the reproduction process, and the capitalist exists as long as the capitalist production process exists, as long as the proceeds of labour proceed to a private entity, and this exists so long as we have generalized commodity production, general production for the purpose of exchange. Class division is simply a character of the production process, something produced and reproduced by its nature; that is, that it is both social and private, and hence the product is owned by an entity who must sell it in order for it to become social. This is very much a material feature of capitalist production.


I think that ultimately the reason why people can't be necessarily organized neatly into classes is that class is essentially a relationship that exists only as a part of a process, the process of value's valorization, rather than being something 'static' like the liberal 'amount of income' class distinctions. To illustrate this, for example, one may take co-operatives; as Marx says, these involve, "making the associated labourers into their own capitalist." Here, we can see that it's not so much a matter of designating individuals either labourer or capitalist in general (ie. walking up to them at random and going, "Hey, you're working class"), but rather a matter of social relations of production, of relations which only exist through the reproduction of the production process itself. That is, the labourers are not capitalists in their day to day existence, but neither would they be working class if not for the repetition of the capital-relation, of the ongoing valorisation of value. That is, they are working class precisely in that these relationships are reproduced.

In that case, it is clear that the capitalist is, essentially, the entity towards which the products produced proceed; the entity towards which labour is alienated, through which labour becomes private before it is made social through exchange. This follows from the dual private-social character of capitalist production, where the product must proceed to a private entity before it may become social, and as a result is indirectly social; class division, then, originates from the existence of this role, which in itself only exists through the reproduction of the labour process, only inasmuch as products continue being made for it to expropriate.

This, then, is what the capitalist is, a certain role in the reproduction process. In that case, however, it becomes clear that the designation of ‘the capitalist’ is a description of this process, rather than a label for people; as we have seen above, the labourers in a co-operative factory form a collective capitalist, they form their own capitalist. The misconception of class as essentially a means of labelling people here leads to the false conception of a society of co-operatives being classless, inasmuch as one may not point to a person and say, “He is a capitalist”; rather, this is not the case, inasmuch as class society is not a matter of labelling individuals, but rather of the form which the production process takes, and the relationships thereby created. The associated workers become a collective capitalist, and therefore this is a class society; the existence of the capitalist simply means that labour is neither social nor private, but indirectly social; it is private, and yet not the production of direct use-values, and hence is production consumed by the rest of society; it is social, yet its products are appropriated by, alienated to, private entities, and only become social through the process of commodity exchange. Thus capitalist society is inherently class society, and it is this because the capitalist production process which defines it is precisely a process in which class is immanent, in which the roles of classes are defined and perpetuated. Capital is only capital through the repetition of the production process; if it is not reproduced, then we merely have money, value, but it ceases to be capital. On the other hand, this reproduction is the reproduction of classes; ‘class’ is not a static designation, it is a relationship which is continually reproduced through the repetition of the productive process.

In this light, it becomes clear that proletarians investing in stocks, etc, is no real obstacle to Marx’s class analysis, but rather only to the act of labelling people capitalist or worker in isolation from the production process. Indeed, Marx himself notes that there are situations in which “the worker transforms a portion of his revenue into capital”. The question here is not: is this man a capitalist or worker? Rather, the question is the nature of the capitalist production process, of the roles which is creates and recreates, of the relations which it produces and reproduces. Classes are not simply abstractions from reality which tell us about it, models as it were, but rather describe the reality; what is at issue is simply what reality one wishes to describe. Indeed, it is more or less inevitable that capitalist society would scupper attempts to neatly group people into classes, inasmuch as it is based not on direct social relationships, on personal rule and hierarchy, but rather on the relationships between people turning into material relations; people carry their social power in their pocket, to paraphrase Marx. In a society of personal authority, one person rules over the other through personal force; the relationship of a King to a subject, or a master to a maid, would generally seem somewhat clear-cut. On the other hand, under capitalism, it makes sense that a worker could invest money, value, and thereby come into ‘ownership’ of capital. This simply expresses the fact that here value, money being one of its forms, effectively rules, that the capitalist is essentially simply an embodiment of capital, of value in motion.

However, the concept of the capitalist as an embodiment of value in motion completely coincides with our previous analysis; the capitalist is simply a role created and reproduced by the capitalist production process, which is, essentially, value in motion, value turning from money into commodities, and finally into more money. Under capitalism, the capitalist is merely an embodiment of this; and yet, in being an embodiment of this, of this production process, their existence is reproduced through the reproduction of this production process, they become nothing more than a part of this production process. Therefore, the production process is not only the production of commodities, but also of the capitalist; once we have conceded this, it becomes evident that the category of capitalist is not simply a means of grouping people together, but of describing the workings of the capitalist mode of production, and therefore capitalists may only defined by their role in the production process, by what they are in the production process, as it is the production process which gives them their only substance, which makes them a thing rather than nothing, and therefore what they are in general is simply what they are in the production process. This, incidentally, makes it fairly silly to talk about a capitalist class existing under socialism (or, similarly, a ‘former-capitalist class’), as is often done in discussions on the USSR, as the production process under the associated mode of production is directly social, and as such necessarily does not create a capitalist class.

[Ovi]

The majority forcing the minority to participate in a planned economy rather than the market is perfectly 'democratic', so I have no idea what you're blithering about. You're thinking not in terms of democracy, but in terms of personal autonomy, which is not something you can advocate whilst being consistently anti-capitalist

Care to explain?

[Victus Mortuum]

Remember, the research cooperative isn't hiring janitors, it's buying janitorial services from another firm. Various inputs - scientific labor, janitorial labor, expensive lab equipment, cheap janitorial equipment - combine to produce a commodity, research, which the research cooperative sells to the government or a pharmaceutical manufacturer or whatever. The members of the research cooperative, because they controlled access to the means of production, were able to buy janitorial services at lower per-hour rate than they reaped in net remuneration.

And the unfortunate thing is that this capitalist-like dynamic is going to be present, to varying degrees, in every inter-firm venture to produce a commodity, if their capital intensivities don't equate. (And, for purely technical reasons, some goods and steps in the production process are going to be more capital-intensive than others.) A car manufacturer buys tires from another supplier? Bam. The tire manufacturer needs rubber? Bam. You could require complete vertical integration of every step leading up to a particular commodity, but that would be ridiculously inefficient, result in black markets, and wouldn't even change the fact that capital intensity varies between different commodities as well as the different steps in their production, so that systematic income differentials are going to persist.

The "socialism" of market socialism thus seems to require a constant K:L ratio between firms, while the technical demands of a complex economy demand otherwise. Clumsily, you could require firms to "pair up" year-to-year with firms with a complementary K:L ratio: for instance, if the communewide standard were $100,000:worker, a 30-member cooperative with $4M in land and equipment could pair with a 15-member cooperative with $500,000, the 45-member supercommittee agreeing on a rule on how to share their collective revenues between them. Less clumsily, a similar result could be obtained by vouchers. Individuals would still have the power to move consumption around throughout their life-cycle through private banking, but they wouldn't be able to transform it into self-valorizing capital. Additionally, having this sort of system removes a powerful incentive not to take on new members, which on its own would hasten the class formation process and probably produce structural unemployment.

I don't see what you're talking about here. In this world of democratic non-monopolized production firms the prices of products and services would still reflect the value of the means of production consumed, the labor-value consumed, and the average rate of profit on that, just with the profit distributed as wages/salary to the workers. Yes, there would be differing wages, based on the democratically set values of those working at the hypothetical coops.

To use your example:

Say a hotel coop is in need of exterminating some pests that have gotten into the building. They need to hire an extermination coop to come in and clean the hotel out. They can hire any of the several that happen to exist in their area at the prices that are specifically established by supply and demand between the several exterm coops and the several potential purchasers of the services. The price paid by the hotel to whichever coop would then be divided by that coop between the new MoP, and the pay of the workers. I mean, I suppose you could say that pay wouldn't be equivalent to labor, it would be equivalent to labor-power+arp is that what you are getting at? Because I don't see how this hypothetical hotel coop is 'profitting' from the work of the exterminators or the janitors.

[Zanthorus]

Care to explain?

The production of commodities, one of the central features of capitalist society, is required because production is carried out by isolated production units which only produce for personal gain. Such a society requires an organising mechanism which nonetheless does not violate the autonomy of each production unit, a mechanism which can be found in the market. Socialism, if it is to mean anything at all, must mean the subordination of production globally to a common plan. The feelings, wishes and particular beliefs of any specific person or set of persons not to participate in this is irrelevant, as their dissasociation from the common plan and continuation of production on a private basis will allow for the restoration of capitalism.

[RedMaterialist]

=syndicat;1896525

here's why. for Marx prices of commodities does not vary accrording to the labor "embodied" in them. why not? because the current price of a commodity depends on the current technological level of production.

Where did Marx say any of this? If you are talking about socially necessary labor time being reduced by a technological improvement, Marx took all that into account in his theory.

Suppose a widget costs $5 labor and $5 materials, machines, interest, etc. The capitalist sells it for $15 which is its true value. He makes a $5 profit. Where does the extra $5 come from?


if this is so, then the value, on Marx's concept of "value", can NOT be the embodied labor, the labor that created that commodity.

Labor is the only thing that creates the value of a commodity.

[Victus Mortuum]

Where does the extra $5 come from?

From the pocket of the customer :D

[syndicat]

If you are talking about socially necessary labor time being reduced by a technological improvement, Marx took all that into account in his theory.


handwaving. I've just given you an argument so prove that, on Marx's assumptions, the value of a commodity is not the labor embodied in it.

let's go over the argument again, shall we? Suppose it took 2 hours to create widget X. now there is a new invention implemented that makes it possible to produce widgets in 1.75 hours. so what is now the value of widget X, for Marx? it's not 2 hours of labor time. that's because the current value of a commodity is the amount of labor socially necessary to produce it right now. and that is 1.75 hours. so the current value of X is 1.75 hours. this is so even tho it took 2 hours to produce it. Hence it logically follows that the labor time "embodied" in a commodity -- that is the labor time it took to produce it -- is not its value. the "embodied labor time" is 2 but the actual value, according to Marx, is 1.75. and 2 is not the same as 1.75. hence value is not embodied labor time.

[Ovi]

The production of commodities, one of the central features of capitalist society, is required because production is carried out by isolated production units which only produce for personal gain. Such a society requires an organising mechanism which nonetheless does not violate the autonomy of each production unit, a mechanism which can be found in the market. Socialism, if it is to mean anything at all, must mean the subordination of production globally to a common plan. The feelings, wishes and particular beliefs of any specific person or set of persons not to participate in this is irrelevant, as their dissasociation from the common plan and continuation of production on a private basis will allow for the restoration of capitalism.
If you don't use force to make everyone comply with the economic planning you revert back to capitalism? That makes absolutely no sense.

[SocialismOrBarbarism]

In this case I really don't see how capitalism hasn't always existed as long as there were commodity producing farmers and communes, selling or trading their goods to the market "entity". These farmers and communes would be, apparently, both proletarians and capitalists, exploiting themselves.


In capitalism, including mutualism, production has a dual social-private character; that is, it is the production of social use-values, it does not represent a use-value for its producer, and yet it proceeds into the hands of a private entity, a capitalist ('collective' or individual), and may only become social through sale.I still don't see how you're not simply treating "capitalist" as simply an abstract economic category.


Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social relations of production, M. Proudhon, holding this upside down like a true philosopher, sees in actual relations nothing but the incarnation of the principles, of these categories, which were slumbering

It is true that Marx talks about the contradiction between the "private-social character" of capitalist production, but he does not divorce this from the existence of actual capitalists. He always talks about it as the social production and private appropriation of wealth, appropriation of social wealth by the few, etc. He even acknowledges in the work you quote from that "The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system.[as I said] But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour."(emphasis mine)

Does Marx here however mean that self-employed people are at the same time capitalist exploiting themselves and workers being exploited by themselves? I think that here Marx was simply making a lexical categorization for purposes of analyzing the relationships of cooperatives within a capitalist society. As we see in the work you quote from, when Marx is talking about cooperatives he is talking about cooperatives producing in what is otherwise a capitalist market, not abstracted from it.


Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale. The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.

Marx confirms that this is what he was doing in "Results of the Direct Production Process":
Some of the labour which produces commodities in capitalist production is performed in a manner which belongs to earlier modes of production, where the relation of capital and wage labour does not yet exist in practice, and therefore the category of productive and unproductive labour, which corresponds to the capitalist standpoint, is entirely inapplicable., But in accordance with the ruling mode of production even those relations which have not yet been subsumed under it in fact are subsumed under it notionally(my emphasis). The self-employed labourer, for example, is his own wage labourer, and his own means of production confront him in his own mind as capital. As his own capitalist, he employs himself as a wage labourer.

The keyword there is notionally, for the purposes of analysis/classification using the categories of capitalist economy because we are referring to non-capitalist producers who, however, are producing within the dominance of the capitalist mode of production and hence capitalist market. Without this capitalist market and mode of production, these categories are inapplicable because the "relation of capital and wage labor does not exist in practice." Why is the capitalist market so significant? Because when an independent producer or cooperative produces for a market dominated by capitalists, the distribution of surplus value inevitably leads to them being "exploited" through the mechanism of the market. But in "mutualism" there is no capitalist to do this. The property of cooperatives, communes and independent producers is not what Marxists would traditionally consider bourgeois forms of property, so at this point it just seems like you're simply stretching and abusing the categories Marx used in his analysis of capitalism to make what seems to be pretty much empty and pointless terminological arguments.

It doesn't really matter whether we can come up with some imaginary market socialist society that would be classless. That's not much of a victory. I think it's more important to ask why such a society would even be desirable and whether it would be in accord with efficient use of the means of production.

[RedMaterialist]

From the pocket of the customer :D

Where did he get it? If he works in the factory he got it by working for the capitalist = worker ($5) uses machinery ($5) to produce commodity worth $15. My question was where does the extra $5 come from?

Or, what you are saying is that the customer paid $15 for something which was worth $10. Why would anybody do that?

[RedMaterialist]

[QUOTE=syndicat;1896629]handwaving. I've just given you an argument so prove that, on Marx's assumptions, the value of a commodity is not the labor embodied in it.


Here is Karl Marx (Capital, Vol 1, Chapt. 1):

The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time.

I guess you believe that every two seconds a new production technique comes along that allows for a shorter production time. I think you should give us a couple examples from the real world. Marx provides us with this example:

"The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value." (from the same Chapter.)

If you are going to argue that Marx's theory of labor value is wrong, then you are going to have to argue that Adam Smith and David Ricardo are both wrong also. Of course, you may be the economic genius capitalism has been waiting for.

[syndicat]

If you are going to argue that Marx's theory of labor value is wrong, then you are going to have to argue that Adam Smith and David Ricardo are both wrong also. Of course, you may be the economic genius capitalism has been waiting for.

duh. i suggest we abandon the outmoded labor theory of value altogether.

[Queercommie Girl]

The majority forcing the minority to participate in a planned economy rather than the market is perfectly 'democratic', so I have no idea what you're blithering about. You're thinking not in terms of democracy, but in terms of personal autonomy, which is not something you can advocate whilst being consistently anti-capitalist, as you are showing brilliantly in this thread.


The democracy would also have to be localised, as the world is not a "single slab of concrete". Democracy that is not localised in practice would still translate to a central authority simply telling local people what to do.

To illustrate this point, consider the policies towards collectivisation in the rural areas of China as advocated by the contemporary radical revolutionary Maoist party MCPC/CCP(M) at the moment. The idea is that each individual village or "geographical unit" would have the democratic rights to decide whether or not to collectivise. It's not something that is solely determined by "democratic voting" by the country as a whole, as if it's just a single political unit.

A question for you: given that LGBT workers are a numerical minority within the working class, suppose 80% of workers who are non-LGBT actually voted to not support LGBT rights, then by your logic of "overall democracy", does this mean LGBT people don't deserve equal rights?



Of course, Communism is just an 'abstract ideology', which the 'gaping asses' which make up the mass of people are too stupid too understand, so to gain influence, we must give up 'purity', in favour of an opportunistic and slavish subordination to spontaneity. This, in an incredibly cryptic and sarcastic manner, was exactly what Lenin was trying to tell us in What is to be Done?.


Don't be ridiculous, I never said I favoured "spontaneity". My point is that under no circumstances can a party "vanguard" like you impose your doctrines on the masses. If you wish to change people's minds, you have to work with them and try to win their hearts and minds, not just telling them what to do.

[Zanthorus]

If you don't use force to make everyone comply with the economic planning you revert back to capitalism? That makes absolutely no sense.

It does, I just explained it to you.


A question for you: given that LGBT workers are a numerical minority within the working class, suppose 80% of workers who are non-LGBT actually voted to not support LGBT rights, then by your logic of "overall democracy", does this mean LGBT people don't deserve equal rights?

No, but that's not the issue we're discussing. We're discussin the issue of economic planning, but since you take the semi-anarchist position that everything must be 'localised', it's clear we're not going to come to an agreement on this one.


Don't be ridiculous, I never said I favoured "spontaneity".

Yes, you did, you implied it continuously, and are still implying it. Saying that we shouldn't 'impose' our 'doctrines' on people is equivalent to saying that we should give up trying to convince people and subordinate ourselves to the 'spontaneous' movement.


My point is that under no circumstances can a party "vanguard" like you impose your doctrines on the masses. If you wish to change people's minds, you have to work with them and try to win their hearts and minds, not just telling them what to do.

Oh god, "telling people what to do", the absolute horror. Personally, I grew out of refusing to let people tell me what to do when I was 15.

[Queercommie Girl]

No, but that's not the issue we're discussing. We're discussin the issue of economic planning, but since you take the semi-anarchist position that everything must be 'localised', it's clear we're not going to come to an agreement on this one.


It's not the same issue, but it has a similar logic, as far as the debate over local democracy is concerned.

There is a reason why a serious queer activist like me (who is willing to both kill and die for queer rights) would also believe in both direct worker's democracy and localised democracy. Because this is in my self-interest. Without both of these elements, LGBT rights cannot be guaranteed in a socialist state.

It's true that I'm not an anti-anarchist, but on this particular issue my line does not come from "semi-anarchism", but from left Maoism, since the policy of localised democracy regarding rural collectivisation is a policy of the Maoist MCPC, not some anarchist syndicate.



Yes, you did, you implied it continuously, and are still implying it. Saying that we shouldn't 'impose' our 'doctrines' on people is equivalent to saying that we should give up trying to convince people and subordinate ourselves to the 'spontaneous' movement.


No you are just looking at the world in purely black and white terms, which is ridiculous.

So if one does not impose doctrines from above, then the only alternative is to not try to influence people at all? WTF is this logic?

There is a "middle position" of trying to convert people by integrating with them, rather than imposing doctrines bureaucratically from the top.

Consider this: objectively socialism should grow organically anyway, in the sense that objectively it is always in the workers' own interests to be a socialist, if a worker is anti-socialist it's only because he/she is not looking at this issue objectively and clearly enough to realise his/her own interests. Now if this is the case, then surely it is sufficient to convince the worker where his/her real interests lie, there is simply no need to impose anything from above at all.



Oh god, "telling people what to do", the absolute horror. Personally, I grew out of refusing to let people tell me what to do when I was 15.


I don't believe in the blind rejection of all authority, but socialists must always be willing to criticise any authority. As Mao said, (in a country like China where children have been for thousands of years told to always "obey" their parents) young people must have the rights and the willingness to rebel against their parents and elders, otherwise it's not really socialist.

My parents don't agree with homosexuality and transgenderism. Does this mean I should just listen to what they are "telling me to do" and no longer fight for queer rights and just be a "good obedient Confucian child"? :confused:

Fuck that.

[Kotze]

The democracy would also have to be localised, as the world is not a "single slab of concrete". Democracy that is not localised in practice would still translate to a central authority simply telling local people what to do.A place generates electricity with a dam and its residents decide in a locally democratic way how much to charge for that. A river flows from city X to city Y and city X decides in a locally democratic way to pollute it more. A factory's product is in high demand after a natural disaster unexpectedly wiped out the other suppliers; the factory workers could easily take in lots of new people and double output, but they decide in a locally democratic way to only work a little more and to charge much more. A disabled person wants to move to a specific place, the residents of that place decide in a locally democratic way to spare some expenses by not allowing disabled people as new residents.

[Queercommie Girl]

A place generates electricity with a dam and its residents decide in a locally democratic way how much to charge for that. A river flows from city X to city Y and city X decides in a locally democratic way to pollute it more. A factory's product is in high demand after a natural disaster unexpectedly wiped out the other suppliers; the factory workers could easily take in lots of new people and double output, but they decide in a locally democratic way to only work a little more and to charge much more. A disabled person wants to move to a specific place, the residents of that place decide in a locally democratic way to spare some expenses by not allowing disabled people as new residents.

It's funny you always assume the local democracies would always be in direct conflict with each other. Why don't you just assume that each individual within each "local democracy" would be in direct conflict with each other as well?

What I'm talking about is localised democracy within an overall centralised framework, not that the framework does not exist at all.

And frankly, it's better to have different sections of the working class literally fighting for their respective rights than to have a kind of forcefully imposed top-down pseudo-order. Imposed order is often fake, while real democratic socialism is organic.

Better to have the mass chaos of the Cultural Revolution than the imposed semi-fascist order of the bureaucratic capitalists.

Supporters of uniform centralised conformity like you still have not answered my question: what if the "central government" also decides that LGBT rights are not to be supported? Do you think someone like me would just "accept" that kind of decision, regardless of whichever kind of government is in power?

[Ovi]

A place generates electricity with a dam and its residents decide in a locally democratic way how much to charge for that. A river flows from city X to city Y and city X decides in a locally democratic way to pollute it more. A factory's product is in high demand after a natural disaster unexpectedly wiped out the other suppliers; the factory workers could easily take in lots of new people and double output, but they decide in a locally democratic way to only work a little more and to charge much more. A disabled person wants to move to a specific place, the residents of that place decide in a locally democratic way to spare some expenses by not allowing disabled people as new residents.
That's a false dilemma. The opposite of a centralized dictatorial state is not a market. You sound like a randite or something. Having the decisions being taken by people themselves instead of bureaucrats means that decisions are to fulfill these people's needs, not some bureaucratic plans. Prices would be chosen democratically by the people, by negotiations between producers and consumers for instance. You don't need a state dictatorship to cooperate. If some workers aren't wiling to work more hours to increase output, other workers can instead. Nobody owns the factory, thus nobody can keep them from doing that. Having a state forcing people to work more is not a solution. There is no incentive to pollute because people are payed by how much they work, and the manufacturing process would be made to fulfill the needs of all, not some narrow minded profit ideas.

Plus, if people in an egalitarian society only wish to earn as much as possible by taking advantage of other people, then a bureaucratic state is no better and would only seek to increase their own well being at the expense of the workers, e.g. state capitalism at its best. Anyone who would be affected by a decision should have a saying in that, those who harm other people would be held responsible by those harmed, so a free society can make people live harmoniously. A dictatorial state is not held responsible to anyone.

[Kotze]

It's funny you always assume the local democracies would always be in direct conflict with each other.In each of the decision examples I provided a local group has a motivation to act that way, for their advantage, to the detriment of the whole.
What I'm talking aboutis probably a very vague idea, otherwise you would have better answers to these issues than making an appeal to emotion with your blather about "semi-fascist" bureaucracies and whatnot. :)
Imposed order is often fake, while real democratic socialism is organic.Condemning people to use seatbelts is semi-fascist, while flying through the front shield is what true freedom really feels like.
Prices would be chosen democratically by the peopleThat's one of those fluffy promises Michael Parenti warns about.

A decentralised system where everything is co-ops and where only the members of a co-op decide about letting in new members and what to charge for their products and services doesn't end exploitation and easily flips to an order where hardly anything is a co-op anymore: Geographic differences and simple luck will lead to some differences in wealth, these differences in wealth will get more pronounced over time since wealth is also a tool to obtain wealth, the better-off will become the new capitalists.

The ultimate decision whether to accept someone into a residential group or a work-unit group cannot be left to the members of that group. There needs to be an overarching mechanism that also gives weight to the wishes of wannabe members, and sometimes either overrides the decision of the established members or dishes out a penalty/compensation.

[Queercommie Girl]

In each of the decision examples I provided a local group has a motivation to act that way, for their advantage, to the detriment of the whole.

is probably a very vague idea, otherwise you would have better answers to these issues than making an appeal to emotion with your blather about "semi-fascist" bureaucracies and whatnot. :)


To call my point about "semi-fascist bureaucracy" "emotional blathering" just shows that you are a total idiot. How is the bureaucracy in ultra-revisionist China today not "semi-fascist" in many of its actions, such as brutally arresting grassroots union activists like Zhao Dongmin? Or do you still support China today as a "socialist state"? LOL

Your entire example is flawed, because you assume that people will always be selfish and not be willing to actually choose the more altruistic option. That is an incorrect analysis of human nature. Furthermore, why do you rule out the possibility that people can be convinced to change their minds regarding certain policies instead of being told what to do in a top-down manner?

But let's for one second assume your picture of the world: suppose the local group refuses a central directive that supposedly is for the "benefit of the whole"? What can the centre do? According to your logic there is nothing else for the centre to do except to apply force to push the directive through regardless of the local people's wishes. If this kind of thing happens all the time, objectively it would only strengthen the state machine so the state will be consolidated rather than wither away, leading eventually to bureaucratic degeneration.

Which is why I've said the only way to convince the masses is to integrate with the masses, rather than imposing political doctrines in a top-down manner.

This is a serious point that you will ignore at your own peril.



Condemning people to use seatbelts is semi-fascist, while flying through the front shield is what true freedom really feels like.That's one of those fluffy promises Michael Parenti warns about.
That's a BS analogy, especially in the context of what I was talking about. You are a reactionary truly if you think the "chaos" of the Cultural Revolution era is somehow "worse" than the highly imposed "order" in ultra-revisionist China today.

Go to Hitler's Nazi Germany. That was a "highly ordered" and "efficient" society too.

[RedMaterialist]

let's go over the argument again, shall we? Suppose it took 2 hours to create widget X. now there is a new invention implemented that makes it possible to produce widgets in 1.75 hours. so what is now the value of widget X, for Marx? it's not 2 hours of labor time. that's because the current value of a commodity is the amount of labor socially necessary to produce it right now. and that is 1.75 hours. so the current value of X is 1.75 hours. this is so even tho it took 2 hours to produce it. Hence it logically follows that the labor time "embodied" in a commodity -- that is the labor time it took to produce it -- is not its value. the "embodied labor time" is 2 but the actual value, according to Marx, is 1.75. and 2 is not the same as 1.75. hence value is not embodied labor time.

WidgetX takes 2 hrs to produce. WidgetX* takes 1.75 hrs. It is exactly the same type of widget (not the exact same individual widget) except it takes less time to produce. Thus, the value of WidgetX* is 1.75. Now what has happened to WidgetX? It has been cheapened; it is now worth 1.75, just as Marx predicted.

If you went into a store and saw the two widgets, WidgetX and WidgetX* would you pay 2 for WidgetX? Of course not, there is the same model, WidgetX* for 1.75.

The difference is that there is less socially necessary labor time in WidgetX*. And this is how the value of a commodity is determined: the amount of socially necessary labor time contained in it.

This explains why, in capitalism, commodities are continually being cheapened. And this also explains why, in part, the rate of profit under capitalism tends to decrease. As capitalism uses more machines and less human labor, commodities contain less value.

[ZeroNowhere]

In this case I really don't see how capitalism hasn't always existed as long as there were commodity producing farmers and communes, selling or trading their goods to the market "entity". These farmers and communes would be, apparently, both proletarians and capitalists, exploiting themselves.No, as capitalist production did not exist at the time, and there was only petty commodity production, whereas I was only describing capitalism. However, "The basis of the production of commodities can admit of production on a large scale in the capitalistic form alone." That is, such petty property develops into capitalism along with co-operation; the reason for this should be fairly evident, inasmuch as the fact that the product must pass on to a private entity means that the labourers, working together, are producing their product for a separate entity; they work as a collective force, and yet their product is not directly social, but rather must be sold in order to make it so. The collective nature of their work means that, even if they are paid wages in kind, they must nevertheless exchange their labour-power for this, and be paid out of what is initially a single, collective, and yet private owned product. In addition, it is necessary that surplus-value be extracted. Therefore, they must become wage-labourers. This contrasts with the petty commodity producer, who simply makes individual commodities, as well as workers under formal subsumption, who produce simply an individual product, and therefore are only different to the petty commodity producer inasmuch as their product goes off to a capitalist. Thus, historically:


“On the basis of the production of commodities, where the means of production are the property of private persons, and where the artisan therefore either produces commodities, isolated from and independent of others, or sells his labour power as a commodity, because he lacks the means for independent industry, co-operation on a large scale can realise itself only in the increase of individual capitals, only in proportion as the -means of social production and the means of subsistence are transformed into the private property of capitalists.The development of co-operative production (that is, production based on co-operation) is therefore incompatible with petty commodity production, and therefore supersedes it. Whereas under formal subsumption production remains essentially individual, and one may as well simply have the individual producers gifting their profits to the capitalist, under real subsumption this condition may not exist, and therefore the development of the productive forces becomes incompatible with individual commodity production.


I still don't see how you're not simply treating "capitalist" as simply an abstract economic category.The 'capitalist' is essentially the embodiment of capital, of value in motion. Value's motion is essentially the content of the capitalist reproduction process. The capitalist is more or less a constant product of the capitalist reproduction process, and yet it is in the nature of capitalism to abolish private property within its own confines, that is, to make capital social capital, and the capitalist no longer a single individual. However, the capitalist form of the reproduction process remains unchanged, and thus the 'abstract economic category' continues to retain a material form in the reproduction process, as what one has is collective and social labour, which produces a 'single' commodity product (that is, not individual products formed of individual, separated labour, but rather a product united as the product of collective labour, rather than separated out into individual products), which is alienated from the producer; the capitalist is the form which this alienation takes, it is alienated unto a capitalist, whether collective or individual.

Therefore, the producers of a co-operative must, out of their own collective product, buy labour-power and means of production. In that case, the process M - C (L, mp) ... P ... C' - M' continues, but it is simply that their product is alienated into their own hands as associated capitalist, and therefore they take on the role of both workers and capitalist(s). Unlike in formal subsumption, their product forms a single produce, due to the collective nature of their labour, and is alienated from them qua labourers as a result; inasmuch as it is a single product, it forms a single property of a single entity (in this case the labourers as a collective, rather than simply individual labourers; this is what gives it its historically progressive form, although also rendering it a form of capitalist production), and only from this may be divided into variable capital, constant capital and profit.


He even acknowledges in the work you quote from that "The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system.[as I said] But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour."(emphasis mine)He elsewhere points out:

“Why, those members of the ruling classes who are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present system – and they are many – have become the obtrusive and full-mouthed apostles of co-operative production. If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production – what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, “possible” communism?”The implication is clear: co-operatives may only supersede the capitalist system if united co-operative societies regulate national production upon a common plan. This is ignoring the 'sham and a snare' bit. Similarly:


(a) We acknowledge the co-operative movement as one of the transforming forces of the present society based upon class antagonism. Its great merit is to practically show, that the present pauperising, and despotic system of the subordination of labour to capital can be superseded by the republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal producers.

(b) Restricted, however, to the dwarfish forms into which individual wages slaves can elaborate it by their private efforts, the co-operative system will never transform capitalist society. To convert social production into one large and harmonious system of free and co-operative labour, general social changes are wanted, changes of the general conditions of society, never to be realised save by the transfer of the organised forces of society, viz., the state power, from capitalists and landlords to the producers themselves.Again, transformation of capitalist society may only take place via general social changes which establish one large and harmonious system of free and co-operative labour. However, the value of co-operatives, as Marx mentions elsewhere as well, is that they show that a separate class of capitalists is not necessary for production; joint-stock companies do the same to a degree, but there by completely severing the capitalists from the production process, thus resolving the antagonism negatively, whereas co-operatives make the workers their own capitalist, thus resolving the antagonism positively.


The keyword there is notionally, for the purposes of analysis/classification using the categories of capitalist economy because we are referring to non-capitalist producers who, however, are producing within the dominance of the capitalist mode of production and hence capitalist market. Without this capitalist market and mode of production, these categories are inapplicable because the "relation of capital and wage labor does not exist in practice." Why is the capitalist market so significant? Because when an independent producer or cooperative produces for a market dominated by capitalists, the distribution of surplus value inevitably leads to them being "exploited" through the mechanism of the market. But in "mutualism" there is no capitalist to do this.Let's look at that quote in further detail:


Some of the labour which produces commodities in capitalist production is performed in a manner which belongs to earlier modes of production, where the relation of capital and wage labour does not yet exist in practice, and therefore the category of productive and unproductive labour, which corresponds to the capitalist standpoint, is entirely inapplicable.Here we are talking about the petty commodity producer, who belongs to earlier modes of production. However, as we have seen, "The basis of the production of commodities can admit of production on a large scale in the capitalistic form alone." However, here we do not have large scale, collective production, and therefore not the production of capitals; on the other hand, that is precisely what we have in co-operatives. Also note that Marx never mentions notions in regards to the co-operative producer. The formulation of the 'self-employed labourer' is also used here:

The punctum saliens will be best brought if we approach the matter as follows: suppose, the labourers themselves are in possession of their respective [ie. individual] means of production and exchange their commodities with one another.It refers to a "lower stage", prior to the capitalist mode of production, to:

the condition of the land-owning farmer living off his own labour and the craftsman, in the ancient as well as in the modern world.Now, if co-operatives were to operate on a similar basis to formal subsumption, with individual producers simply working individually with individual means of production in a factory, and receiving their individual products, then we would indeed simply have petty commodity production, only differentiated by proximity of the labourers' locations. However, in co-operative factories, we have many labourers working together, collective labour, which results in a single, collective product, which thereby, in becoming private (as this is commodity production), becomes the property of a single entity. From there, the proceeds could be returned in their entirety to the workers, just as they could in an ordinary capitalist company (inconveniences to the capitalist aside; perhaps another capitalist shares some money with him as a gift), but nonetheless no profits would be made.

Now, in an economy of co-operatives working on the market, indeed the 'free market', it would seem evident that this could well be a problem in competition. What you would have is essentially equivalent to a capitalist firm today which makes no profits; they would have no money to reinvest in expanding production, and would eventually get driven out of competition by those who did. Ultimately, then, one must have production of surplus-value.

You are correct to stress the effects of the capitalist context on co-operative production, but, as Bordiga pointed out, a 'mutualist' society maintains this effect:

It would be no different if the competition took place no longer between bosses' enterprises and workers' cooperatives but between as many workers' cooperatives as there were enterprises. One of two things would happen: either the workers' cooperatives would try to operate other than as capitalist enterprises and as all the other conditions would remain bourgeois (links by the intermediary of the market) they would be swept aside; or, if they intended to survive, they would only be able to operate as capitalist enterprises with a money capital, wages, profits, a depreciation fund and capital investments, credit and interest etc. The competition between them would not be abolished, so neither would the system of commercial contracts, nor civil law and the state institution needed to uphold it.Of course, due to the falling rate of profit, the maintenance of a rate of accumulation sufficient to prevent profits from falling absolutely (or at least, for a while) would necessitate an expansion in the amount of profit used for hiring new wage-labourers and buying new means of production. Thus, surplus-value production would still have to exist, and on an expanding scope.


It doesn't really matter whether we can come up with some imaginary market socialist society that would be classless. That's not much of a victory. I think it's more important to ask why such a society would even be desirable and whether it would be in accord with efficient use of the means of production.A fair point. Ultimately, even if one does not wish to call it capitalism, one nonetheless has a system operating under a mode of production which reproduces capitalism's laws of motion, and as such may object to it in more or less the same way.

[syndicat]

the amount of socially necessary labor time contained in it.


nope. "contained" is a mere metaphor. labor isn't "contained" in any object.

It took a certain amount of labor to produce it. This is not measured by work hours.

That's because a person X could work in a leisurely manner for an hour and Y could work very intensely in an hour, and thus there is more labor contained in the one hour of Y's work than in the one hour of X's work. This is recognized by all the stratagems that employers use to monitor people, and control the pace at which they work. Moreover, as technical innovation is a constant under capitalism, the hours "socially necessary" to produce any given thing diminish. but the amount of hours it took to produce any given thing doesn't change over time...it remains the number of hours that it took back when it was produced. so the "socially necessary labor time" to produce someting is the amount of time it would take on average now, not the amount of actual time it took to produce it.

anyway, the labor theory of value is a poor theory of prices and an even worse theory of exploitation. better is the Sraffian view that prices are set as cost-plus markups based on the prices of all the factors of production.

managers and high end professionals, the real planning and decision-making cadres throughout big companies and the state, are sellers of labor power but they participate in the exploitation of the proletarian class. this is not accounted for by a theory of exploitation based on the labor theory of value.

[RedMaterialist]

=syndicat;1898341]

nope. "contained" is a mere metaphor.

On the one hand,
labor isn't "contained" in any object.

On the other hand,
and thus there is more labor contained in the one hour of Y's work than in the one hour of X's work.

On the one hand,
This is not measured by work hours. , on the other,
the current value of a commodity is the amount of labor socially necessary to produce it right now. and that is 1.75 hours.

Labor is not contained in a commodity, except when it is. Work hours do not determine value, except when they do.

[RedMaterialist]

better is the Sraffian view

I like the title of Sraffia's book: Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities.
Or as Marx would say: Production of Commodities by Wage-Labour.

[Armchair War Criminal]

ZeroNowhere, your points are well-taken with respect to an economic system identical to capitalism save that all firms are required to be cooperatives. However, as I mentioned earlier, I don't think this is a form which mutualism would be able to maintain if it were to remain classless, and this specific form doesn't exhaust the possible economies under which cooperatives produce, mediated by the market.

Suppose the following setup:

1) All firms are cooperatives.

2) The state/population as a whole functions as a absentee owner of the means of production.

3) During each production period, each firm is allocated a number of vouchers proportionate to its membership. They use these to bid on access to the means of production. Firms in K-intensive industries can buy vouchers (not a permanent stream of them; just for the present year) from firms in L-intensive industries in exchange for consumption credits.

4) A flat tax on net pre-"wage" revenue is levied on all firms, after which the remainder given as consumption credits to members according to their internal bylaws. (Further taxes on individuals, firms, &c. to finance public goods of the traditional sort may exist, but we're not concerned with this now.) This tax is converted to vouchers at the going market rate and redistributed to firms as noted before, in proportion to their membership. Individuals can shift consumption rights around over their lifetime through private banking and take part in private prediction markets.

Given the above, which should be - in theory, and with the standard regulations of the liberal state - allocatively efficient, no endless MCM' loop exists, because firms cannot plow back profits into themselves. Superior personal incomes (as under capitalism) will go to those who can do less with more, whether because of market fluctuations, talent, or innovative techniques, and as a compensating differential for particularly unpleasant or dangerous work, and simply to those who work longer hours.

[syndicat]

Labor is not contained in a commodity, except when it is. Work hours do not determine value, except when they do.

you apparently don't understand indirect reasoning or reductio ad absurdum. if i were to start with your assumption that labor hours to produce is what is "contained" in the product, and also add Marx's definition of "socially necessary labor time", the result will be a logical contradiction...as I have already shown. now, when a logical conradiction follows from an assumption it follows that the assumption is false. hence labor is not "contained" in any object.

[RedMaterialist]

hence labor is not "contained" in any object.

You need to take up your argument with Marx:

"A use value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? Plainly, by the quantity of the value-creating substance, the labour, contained in the article. The quantity of labour, however, is measured by its duration, and labour time in its turn finds its standard in weeks, days, and hours." Capital, Vol I., Chapter One.

"The value of a commodity, therefore, varies directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productiveness, of the labour incorporated in it."
(same.)

"If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value." (same.)

[syndicat]

you're treating political ideas like a religion, quoting Holy Scripture.

[REVLEFT'S BIEGGST MATSER TROL]

When the means of production is held in common by workers and not the bourgeoisie, it ceases to be a capitalist mode of production. Worker owned cooperatives competing on a free market would lead to a classless society, plain and simple. Its not capitalist.

Hmmm...Workers...owning...what must be by definition.."capital"...due to market relations.....What is...that term for people who have capital again?

[REVLEFT'S BIEGGST MATSER TROL]

Basically, I think we can all agree that capitalism is either defined in the Marxian way, where things are produced for exchange value, in addition (and nessacarily most likely) private ownership of the means of production existing.

In which case, clearly market socialism can never actually be anything other than a more equal form of captialism.

Or, if you are to take the dictionary definition - Captialism being private ownership of the means of production, and contrast this with socialism being defined as collective ownership of the means of production, it would seem impossible to declare a federation of indepedant collectives competing with each other as "collective ownership"

I think most of you guys recognise this, which is why most of your rhetoric seems to be around "worker ownership of the means of production" - apperently your society manages not to be capitalistic by outlawing "captialists."

However, would this not just be taking these classes, transfixed before the market socialist "revolution" and assuming they stay the same i.e. that the relations of productions are unaltered? If we get rid of the current capitalists, but keep the type of society that creates them, then surely the former workers have just taken on the capitalists role, albiet in a more eglatarian form, with profits being shared amoung workers in their enterprise. I cannot see how this is "socialism", and it seems to mantain all the fundamental relations that capitalism has now, and taking it as a given everyone on here accepts the basic tennants of historical materialism, even assuming this revolution is sucessful, should result in a very similar society to the one we have now after some time, with constant structural incentives for cooperatives to become more captialistic, increasing as inequalities arise and cause a futher shifting of wealth and power towards the efficient/better profit making coops.

[RedMaterialist]

In which case, clearly market socialism can never actually be anything other than a more equal form of capitalism.





Under full socialism all workers in a society would own all the products they produced. Thus, they would own their own profit their own "surplus value".

It seems to me that market socialism could be a type of economy in which workers exercised more control over their own work. For instance, in Germany, in very large industries, workers control 50 % of the boards of directors. This would be a transition to full socialism.

[Ovi]

A decentralised system where everything is co-ops and where only the members of a co-op decide about letting in new members and what to charge for their products and services doesn't end exploitation and easily flips to an order where hardly anything is a co-op anymore: Geographic differences and simple luck will lead to some differences in wealth, these differences in wealth will get more pronounced over time since wealth is also a tool to obtain wealth, the better-off will become the new capitalists.

If people don't want socialism, there won't be socialism? D'oh.

[Kotze]

If people don't want socialism, there won't be socialism? D'oh.The problem with independent co-ops is that it's enough that a minority — that is the minority that happens to be better off — doesn't want socialism, to flip things over. You might want to read what you quoted.

I also wrote this:
The ultimate decision whether to accept someone into a residential group or a work-unit group cannot be left to the members of that group. There needs to be an overarching mechanism that also gives weight to the wishes of wannabe members, and sometimes either overrides the decision of the established members or dishes out a penalty/compensation.

Do you (and Iseul) disagree with that?

[Armchair War Criminal]

The problem with independent co-ops is that it's enough that a minority — that is the minority that happens to be better off — doesn't want socialism, to flip things over. You might want to read what you quoted.

I also wrote this:
The ultimate decision whether to accept someone into a residential group or a work-unit group cannot be left to the members of that group. There needs to be an overarching mechanism that also gives weight to the wishes of wannabe members, and sometimes either overrides the decision of the established members or dishes out a penalty/compensation.

Do you (and Iseul) disagree with that?
As I noted before, you could achieve this by making access to capital the means of production dependent on the number of members.

[Ovi]

And how is a minority able to force people out of the group again?

[REVLEFT'S BIEGGST MATSER TROL]

Under full socialism all workers in a society would own all the products they produced. Thus, they would own their own profit their own "surplus value".


Right, cooperative enterprises would be producing and accuing profit. I.e. its an equal form of captialism?

[Armchair War Criminal]

And how is a minority able to force people out of the group again?
A minority of firms that are able to obtain greater reinvestment rates, not a minority within any given firm.

[RedMaterialist]

Right, cooperative enterprises would be producing and accuing profit. I.e. its an equal form of captialism?

You can't have capitalism without a capitalist; i.e. someone, or a corporation, which does not produce, yet takes or appropriates the value produced by someone else. The cooperative enterprise produces, creates surplus-value (as under capitalism), but then owns their own product. The product is sold on the market for a profit, which the enterprise keeps for itself.

There are many socialists who believe this "transition" type system cannot work and that the entire market-profit-surplus value system has to be dismantled. However, it seems, to me, to be working in Western Europe, esp. in Germany. I'm not saying Germany is a socialist country, only that there is a transition happening there.

[Kiev Communard]

You can't have capitalism without a capitalist; i.e. someone, or a corporation, which does not produce, yet takes or appropriates the value produced by someone else. The cooperative enterprise produces, creates surplus-value (as under capitalism), but then owns their own product. The product is sold on the market for a profit, which the enterprise keeps for itself.

How is that different (save for the ownership status) from the basic mode of operations of typical capitalist enterprise :confused:?

[RedMaterialist]

The ultimate decision whether to accept someone into a residential group or a work-unit group cannot be left to the members of that group. There needs to be an overarching mechanism that also gives weight to the wishes of wannabe members, and sometimes either overrides the decision of the established members or dishes out a penalty/compensation.

Do you (and Iseul) disagree with that?

It is happening right now in Argentina in the so called Sin Patron (Without Bosses) factories. The workers own the factories and vote on whether to hire someone. These factories are a small percentage of Argentine industry, but they show that it can be done.

[RedMaterialist]

How is that different (save for the ownership status) from the basic mode of operations of typical capitalist enterprise :confused:?

The ownership of one's own production is the whole thing.

A worker owns nothing and can sell nothing but his own labor; he sells his labor on the open market. The capitalist buys the labor (at the fair market value), then puts the worker to work. The product of the work then has more value, what Marx called surplus-value, than what the capitalist paid for. The surplus-value (profit) was produced by the worker but is not owned by him.

[ZeroNowhere]

Under full socialism all workers in a society would own all the products they produced. Thus, they would own their own profit their own "surplus value".

[on the initial phase of communism] Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor.-Critique of the Gotha Programme, bolding mine, italics Marx's.

"[on the tendency of capitalism towards the imposition of its own categories in analyses of other modes of production to which they do not apply] If, however, wages are reduced to their general basis, i.e. that portion of the product of his labour which goes into the worker's individual consumption; if this share is freed from its capitalist limit and expanded to the scale of consumption that is both permitted by the existing social productivity (i.e. the social productivity of his own labour as genuinely social labour) and required for the full development of individuality; if surplus labour and surplus product are also reduced, to the degree needed under the given conditions of production, on the one hand to form an insurance and reserve fund, on the other hand for the constant expansion of reproduction in the degree determined by social need; if, finally, both (1) the necessary labour and (2) the surplus labour are taken to include the amount of labour that those capable of work must always perform for those members of society not yet capable, or no longer capable of working - ie. if both wages and surplus-value are stripped of their specifically capitalist character - then nothing of these forms remains, but simply those foundations of the forms that are common to all social modes of production."- Capital Vol. III, pg. 1016 of Penguin edition, emphasis mine.


Two characteristic traits mark the capitalist mode of production right from the start,

Firstly. It produces its products as commodities. The fact that it produces commodities does not in itself distinguish it from other modes of production; but that the dominant and determining character of its product is that it is a commodity [as with 'market socialism'] certainly does so.

[...]

The second thing that particularly marks the capitalist mode of production is the production of surplus-value as the direct object and decisive motive of production. [as it is in 'market socialism']- Capital Vol. III, pg. 1020.

Really, I've already given enough arguments in this thread to bother replying extensively to simple assertions. I think I'll allow you to do the theorizing, then. How about you explain how this socialism of yours would end the falling rate of profit, crises of overproduction and hence the conflict between relations of production and productive forces which Marx identified in capitalism? If it doesn't, although it completely changes the relations of production, then perhaps this conflict is not in fact a problem with capitalism's relations of production, don't you think?


A worker owns nothing and can sell nothing but his own labor; he sells his labor on the open market. The capitalist buys the labor (at the fair market value), then puts the worker to work. The product of the work then has more value, what Marx called surplus-value, than what the capitalist paid for. The surplus-value (profit) was produced by the worker but is not owned by him.Technically speaking, the product contains exactly as much value as the capitalist paid for. However, in a joint stock company, there is not necessarily any single capitalist. Now, if the current holders of stock were replaced by workers holding equal stocks, then would the relations of production be fundamentally changed simply by a change in faces, despite the fact that the capitalist is merely a personification of capital, of value in motion, and therefore what is essential here is not in what faces capital personifies itself, but rather that it continues to exist and hence personify itself? Certainly, I don't think that you could deny that value's motion, and hence capital and the cycle M - C (L, mp) ... P ... C' - M', continue to exist under your market socialism. How we now have all production involving capital, but not capitalism, is anybody's guess, really.

Further, the workers in a given co-operative factory could not appropriate the entire value produced by them. Firstly, the tendency towards the equalization of the profit rate would mean that prices tend towards prices of production, and hence profits towards the average profit, regardless of the actual work performed in a given industry. As it were, some surplus-value, which here explicitly takes the form of profits, must be both paid for expansion of production, and saved as an insurance and reserve funds. The amount dedicated to accumulation would increase in terms of proportion as the rate of profit fell. If workers don't capitalize this profit, then they'll get driven out of business; as Bordiga pointed out:


It would be no different if the competition took place no longer between bosses' enterprises and workers' cooperatives but between as many workers' cooperatives as there were enterprises. One of two things would happen: either the workers' cooperatives would try to operate other than as capitalist enterprises and as all the other conditions would remain bourgeois (links by the intermediary of the market) they would be swept aside; or, if they intended to survive, they would only be able to operate as capitalist enterprises with a money capital, wages, profits, a depreciation fund and capital investments, credit and interest etc. The competition between them would not be abolished, so neither would the system of commercial contracts, nor civil law and the state institution needed to uphold it. In fact, things would stand rather similarly to if a capitalist paid workers wages comprising all of the money not used for expansion of production and buying of constant capital, and made his income instead from donations from friends and delighted 'socialists'. Would these higher wages represent a fundamental change in social relations? I'm not entirely convinced that they would change much. If they could, however, would it constitute a revolution in the mode of production for all profits to be expended in expansion of production and the various necessary funds? The capitalists could make an income from kind workers (workers are far kinder in their ruthless pursuit of profit than individual capitalists, as we know) donating to them voluntarily, which doesn't change relations of production any more than Engels donating to Marx, or Bill Gates to various causes, so this evidently new mode of production would be sustainable, if outrageously silly.

So yes, just some things to think about.

[Kiev Communard]

-Critique of the Gotha Programme, bolding mine, italics Marx's.
- Capital Vol. III, pg. 1016 of Penguin edition, emphasis mine.

- Capital Vol. III, pg. 1020.

Really, I've already given enough arguments in this thread to bother replying extensively to simple assertions. I think I'll allow you to do the theorizing, then. How about you explain how this socialism of yours would end the falling rate of profit, crises of overproduction and hence the conflict between relations of production and productive forces which Marx identified in capitalism? If it doesn't, although it completely changes the relations of production, then perhaps this conflict is not in fact a problem with capitalism's relations of production, don't you think?

Technically speaking, the product contains exactly as much value as the capitalist paid for. However, in a joint stock company, there is not necessarily any single capitalist. Now, if the current holders of stock were replaced by workers holding equal stocks, then would the relations of production be fundamentally changed simply by a change in faces, despite the fact that the capitalist is merely a personification of capital, of value in motion, and therefore what is essential here is not in what faces capital personifies itself, but rather that it continues to exist and hence personify itself? Certainly, I don't think that you could deny that value's motion, and hence capital and the cycle M - C (L, mp) ... P ... C' - M', continue to exist under your market socialism. How we now have all production involving capital, but not capitalism, is anybody's guess, really.

Further, the workers in a given co-operative factory could not appropriate the entire value produced by them. Firstly, the tendency towards the equalization of the profit rate would mean that prices tend towards prices of production, and hence profits towards the average profit, regardless of the actual work performed in a given industry. As it were, some surplus-value, which here explicitly takes the form of profits, must be both paid for expansion of production, and saved as an insurance and reserve funds. The amount dedicated to accumulation would increase in terms of proportion as the rate of profit fell. If workers don't capitalize this profit, then they'll get driven out of business; as Bordiga pointed out:

In fact, things would stand rather similarly to if a capitalist paid workers wages comprising all of the money not used for expansion of production and buying of constant capital, and made his income instead from donations from friends and delighted 'socialists'. Would these higher wages represent a fundamental change in social relations? I'm not entirely convinced that they would change much. If they could, however, would it constitute a revolution in the mode of production for all profits to be expended in expansion of production and the various necessary funds? The capitalists could make an income from kind workers (workers are far kinder in their ruthless pursuit of profit than individual capitalists, as we know) donating to them voluntarily, which doesn't change relations of production any more than Engels donating to Marx, or Bill Gates to various causes, so this evidently new mode of production would be sustainable, if outrageously silly.

So yes, just some things to think about.

Yes, that's why the idea of "equal exchange" and "full surplus appropriation" between independent - and thus necessarily competing - co-ops just misses the mark. We do no need "workers-run free market", we need socialized, rationally planned economy.

[NewSocialist]

Yes, that's why the idea of "equal exchange" and "full surplus appropriation" between independent - and thus necessarily competing - co-ops just misses the mark. We do no need "workers-run free market", we need socialized, rationally planned economy.

Of what variety? We know that centralized economic planning basically failed historically, so the only other options that I know of are Parecon or Cockshott's cybernetic planning.

Say what you will about market socialism, but at least it's a viable option. We have no idea how well these new models of planning will work in the real world.

[Kiev Communard]

Of what variety? We know that centralized economic planning failed historically, so the only other options that I know of are Parecon or Cockshott's cybernetic planning.

Say what you will about market socialism, but at least it's a viable option. We have no idea how well these new models of planning will work in the real world.

But so did "market socialism". Just look at Yugoslavia and its fate that was far more dismal than that of Soviet Union. And Michael Albert, for all his shortcomings, did provide brilliant critique of both Soviet-style centralized planning and "market socialism". On the other hand, Cockshott's model, especially its demarchy part, also strikes me as quite promising, so it could be said that the future economic model of new socialist society would be some kind of synthesis of both.

[Armchair War Criminal]

Of what variety? We know that centralized economic planning failed historically, so the only other options that I know of are Parecon or Cockshott's cybernetic planning.

Say what you will about market socialism, but at least it's a viable option. We have no idea how well these new models of planning will work in the real world.
I'm on the pro-market socialism side of this debate, but saying that "economic planning failed historically" isn't accurate - there have been successes and failures, just as with market economics. It would be more accurate to say that planning's successes have been concentrated around making a quick leap through industrialization, and at rapidly raising literacy and lifespan, and that its failures have been in moving beyond that.

By the same token, we don't have the data to say whether market socialism (of certain models) works in the real world or not; all we have to go on is economic theory. On this front I do think certain models of market socialism hold out (although others are vulnerable to Nowherezero's arguments), as does Cockshott's (from what I've seen of it.)

[NewSocialist]

But so did "market socialism". Just look at Yugoslavia and its fate that was far more dismal than that of Soviet Union.

Yugoslavia didn't really practice market socialist, at least not as most advocates of the theory propose it (Horvat, Vanek, Schweickart). The state appointed managers to each enterprise, prevented inefficient firms from going out of business and distributed investment funds in a very lopsided manner which made preexisting ethnic strife in the country worse. But even considering all that, during Yugoslavia's short experiment with socialism, it still outperformed centrally planned economies in the production of consumer goods and it was far less repressive.


And Michael Albert, for all his shortcomings, did provide brilliant critique of both Soviet-style centralized planning and "market socialism".And David Schweickart wrote a devastating critique of Parecon (Nonsense on Stilts (http://www.zcommunications.org/nonsense-on-stilts-by-david-schweickart)) and I don't believe that Michael Albert's replies were at all that persuasive.

Michael Albert's main criticism of market socialism is that, like central planning, a "coordinator" class will emerge. However, the difference is that the coordinator class under market socialism is democratically accountable to labor, unlike with central planning which is far more authoritarian in structure.


On the other hand, Cockshott's model, especially its demarchy part, also strikes me as quite promising, so it could be said that the future economic model of new socialist society would be some kind of synthesis of both.Maybe, but cooperatives have proven themselves to work in practice even when functioning within capitalist economies which shows that market socialism can actually function if implemented. How would a fusion of Parecon and cybernetic planning work in practice? No one can yet say. It might work, but then it might not.

[RedMaterialist]

[QUOTE=ZeroNowhere;1902089]

How about you explain how this socialism of yours would end the falling rate of profit, crises of overproduction and hence the conflict between relations of production and productive forces which Marx identified in capitalism?

The falling rate of profit will continue until it ends up at zero or nowhere. This is a problem for the capitalist, but not for the worker. Crises of overproduction are ended by rational management of production for all members of society based on need, etc. The conflict between the private ownership of products (relations of production) and the capacity to produce what society needs and wants (productive forces) is also ended.


Technically speaking, the product contains exactly as much value as the capitalist paid for.

Technically speaking this is the entire basis of capitalism. The product is worth more than what the capitalist paid for it. That is how he makes a profit.


then would the relations of production be fundamentally changed simply by a change in faces,

If the faces are capitalists on the one hand and workers on the other, yes. The difference, which is pretty fundamental, is that the former makes a profit off the work of the latter.


Certainly, I don't think that you could deny that value's motion, and hence capital and the cycle M - C (L, mp) ... P ... C' - M', continue to exist under your market socialism. How we now have all production involving capital, but not capitalism, is anybody's guess, really.

Certainly, under market socialism the worker owns the capital which his labor has created. It is happening in factories in Argentina right now.


Further, the workers in a given co-operative factory could not appropriate the entire value produced by them.

Why not? That's the whole point.


Firstly, the tendency towards the equalization of the profit rate would mean that prices tend towards prices of production, and hence profits towards the average profit, regardless of the actual work performed in a given industry.

And prices of production include surplus value, which is now owned by the worker. As far as actual work performed, see K. Marx on "socially necessary work."


expansion of production, and saved as an insurance and reserve funds.

All a question of management.


as Bordiga pointed out:

In fact, things would stand rather similarly to if a capitalist paid workers wages comprising all of the money not used for expansion of production and buying of constant capital, and made his income instead from donations from friends and delighted 'socialists'.

Perhaps in Bordiga's imagination.


Bill Gates to various causes, so this evidently new mode of production would be sustainable, if outrageously silly.

Now, if Bill Gates would contribute billions to Steve Jobs' income so that Apple could expand production without exploiting workers in China; then I guess you could have Bordiga's sustainable, if outrageously silly, system. You say Bordiga's point is the system is impossible? He's the one who calls it "sustainable."

Market socialism is a type of economy which is intended to transition from capitalism to socialism. Therefore, it has different aspects or "qualities" of both. One type of market socialism is union ownership of factories, what they used to call "syndicalism." Another aspect of market socialism would involve the use of money for exchange. Proudhon, and later, Bordiga, advocated replacing money with labour "vouchers." Marx demolished this idea in The Poverty of Philosophy. Is there one kind of market socialism? is market socialism an essential kind of transition? the only kind of transition from capitalism? one kind of revolution from capitalism? Of course not.

[RedMaterialist]

We do not need "workers-run free market", we need socialized, rationally planned economy.

The days of the free-market are gone anyway, being quickly replaced by a monopoly market. We already have a "socialized, rationally planned economy." The problem is it only exists on the factory floor; the socialized, rationally planned part needs to be extended to the point where the product comes off the factory floor and enters the market.

[Kiev Communard]

Michael Albert's main criticism of market socialism is that, like central planning, a "coordinator" class will emerge. However, the difference is that the coordinator class under market socialism is democratically accountable to labor, unlike with central planning which is far more authoritarian in structure.

How are they "democratically accountable"? Under capitalism managers are also theoretically "accountable to shareholders"...


Maybe, but cooperatives have proven themselves to work in practice even when functioning within capitalist economies which shows that market socialism can actually function if implemented. How would a fusion of Parecon and cybernetic planning work in practice? No one can yet say. It might work, but then it might not.

But you are arguing precisely that "in Yugoslavia market socialism was not really implemented". This leaves us with the fact that your "market socialism" has never "worked in practice" either. Besides, if everybody followed your reasoning, new modes of praxis would never emerge.

[NewSocialist]

How are they "democratically accountable"?

Workers elect a workers' council which is charged with the task of hiring managers, allocating surplus, structuring the work floor and schedules, and so forth. If management is performing in ways labor dislikes, workers have the choice to either have the workers' council fire these managers, or they can recall the council representatives and elect a new council that better fulfills the demands of the workers.


This leaves us with the fact that your "market socialism" has never "worked in practice" either.

Producer cooperatives exist all around the world and they have for a very long time now. Many of them are quite successful, even when having to compete with capitalist firms over investment funds and market shares. Cooperatives are the very foundation of market socialism. Within a socialist state that completely outlaws wage labor and takes charge of finance, cooperatives would be even more successful.


Besides, if everybody followed your reasoning, new modes of praxis would never emerge.I'm not saying we shouldn't experiment with other forms of socialism, I'm just saying that market socialism has the advantage of having evidence to support its feasibility (evidence in the form of worker cooperatives that have been studied), unlike new models of planning.

[RedMaterialist]

[QUOTE]

How are they "democratically accountable"? Under capitalism managers are also theoretically "accountable to shareholders"...

The workers in a factory vote on who the managers are. "Accountable to shareholders" is merely another way of saying "accountable to capital."


QUOTE=Kiev Communard;1902300]


But you are arguing precisely that "in Yugoslavia market socialism was not really implemented". This leaves us with the fact that your "market socialism" has never "worked in practice" either. Besides, if everybody followed your reasoning, new modes of praxis would never emerge.

You say market socialism has never worked in practice. Yet, in your own country Antonov is owned by the state; Ukraine also has its own National Space Agency.

[REVLEFT'S BIEGGST MATSER TROL]

You can't have capitalism without a capitalist; i.e. someone, or a corporation, which does not produce, yet takes or appropriates the value produced by someone else. The cooperative enterprise produces, creates surplus-value (as under capitalism), but then owns their own product. The product is sold on the market for a profit, which the enterprise keeps for itself.

There are many socialists who believe this "transition" type system cannot work and that the entire market-profit-surplus value system has to be dismantled. However, it seems, to me, to be working in Western Europe, esp. in Germany. I'm not saying Germany is a socialist country, only that there is a transition happening there.

At the risk of getting into a semantics war here, do you not find, or are you not aware that the ability to make a profit on captial the very definition of being a captialist? And the fact that this is all done for a profit, is mantaining the fundamental mechanisms of how capitalist society works?

As a more complex point, I don't think it is accurate (speaking from a purely marxian economic point of view) to say that nobody in the cooperative exploits labour. (Given here, that to justify why people who blatantly own captial are not capitalists, you have invoked Marxian economic theory, it will not be appropiate to reject one of its fundmental axioms; that profit can only be created though exploitation) .The cooperative would exploit the labour done, but the surplus value extracted from said exploitation would then be shared out equally. Therefore, as I have been saying, there is nothing fundamentally different in mechanism from captialism - only that it is more eglatarian. The same structural incentives, and mechanisms of exchange/production are still in place.

[REVLEFT'S BIEGGST MATSER TROL]

Of what variety? We know that centralized economic planning basically failed historically

At the risk of seeming totally insane - I don't think it was that economic planning failed historically, I believe the problems of the Soviet Union ran a lot deeper than central planning being inefficient.


Say what you will about market socialism, but at least it's a viable option. We have no idea how well these new models of planning will work in the real world.

It is not a viable option to us if it is not socialist. That is the point of this debate.

[NewSocialist]

It is not a viable option to us if it is not socialist. That is the point of this debate.

It depends on your definition of socialism. If the capitalist class is abolished and the workers come to own the means of production, I don't see how it could be considered anything but socialism. Yeah, the market is preserved but the market isn't the defining feature of capitalism - exploiting wage laborers is. All this shit about "workers exploiting themselves" in market socialism is foolishness to me.

I have to question your definition of socialism if you'd consider central planning to have been socialism. At least under market socialism the workers actually have some kind of authority in the workplace and control the allocation of their surplus, unlike central planning in which everything is in the hands of technocrats.

I understand the desire to abolish the market, I really do, but we do have to ask ourselves if that is a serious option at this stage of human development. I don't think that people are going to be willing to sacrifice their standard of living to implement an inefficient model of planning. The strength of market socialism is that it doesn't demand that much out of people and would likely be at least as efficient as capitalism, while far less exploitative. This is just my opinion, of course.

[RedMaterialist]

At the risk of getting into a semantics war here, do you not find, or are you not aware that the ability to make a profit on captial the very definition of being a captialist? And the fact that this is all done for a profit, is mantaining the fundamental mechanisms of how capitalist society works?

Your definition of a capitalist as one who makes "a profit on capital" is somewhat tautological. Fundamentally, a capitalist is someone who makes a profit on wage-labor.




As a more complex point, I don't think it is accurate (speaking from a purely marxian economic point of view) to say that nobody in the cooperative exploits labour... that profit can only be created though exploitation) .

There is a big difference between owning the product of your own labor and having your labor exploited by someone else.




Therefore, as I have been saying, there is nothing fundamentally different in mechanism from captialism - only that it is more eglatarian. The same structural incentives, and mechanisms of exchange/production are still in place.

Here is Marx on the issue of capital being used by society:

"When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property [i.e., capital] is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property [capital] that is changed. It loses its class character." (My ellipses.) [I]The Communist Manifesto, Section 2[/I.] Thus, capital is an economic category which has a class character. Workers can use capital just as much as capitalists can. After a complete transition to socialism, then even capital would disappear. Using capital doesn't necessarily make you a capitalist, any more than using a gun makes you an army.

[ZeroNowhere]

[QUOTE]The falling rate of profit will continue until it ends up at zero or nowhere. This is a problem for the capitalist, but not for the worker.I quite honestly think you don't know what you are talking about. Have you read the relevant sections of Volume III of Capital? A falling rate of profit means a falling rate of accumulation whether workers or individual capitalists take the role of capitalist. This means that a greater proportion of the gross income would have to be dedicated to accumulation in order to cope, and hence a decreasing amount to revenue, whether this is that of the individual capitalist or the associated workers as capitalist. So in the first place, yes, it would concern them. Now, a decreasing rate of accumulation would mean a fall in the actual mass of profit soon enough, once the rate of accumulation decreased below the level of the fall of the rate of profit, leading to a crisis of over-accumulation once further accumulation simply causes a decrease in profit. Of course, in all likelihood such would not be universal in a given industry, as competition would simply result in the extinction of this co-operative nobly slipping into making no profits. In addition, if it were in fact universal and severe, one would most probably end up with over-production of fixed capital, which relies on accumulation in order to be sold. Similarly, as Ricardo demonstrates, and Marx quotes:


Thus supposing that: with repeated accumulations of £ 100,000, the rate of profit should fall from 20 to 19, to 18, to 17 per cent, a constantly diminishing rate, we should expect that the whole amount of profits received by those successive owners of capital would be always progressive; that it would be greater when the capital was £ 200,000, than when £ 100,000, still greater when £ 300,000; and so on, increasing, though at a diminishing rate, with every increase of capital. This progression however is only true for a certain time: thus 19 per cent on £ 200,000 is more than 20 on £ 100,000; again 18 per cent on £ 300,000 is more than 19 per cent on £ 200,000; but after capital has accumulated to a large amount, and profits have fallen, the further accumulation diminishes the aggregate of profits. Thus suppose the accumulation ‘should he £ 1,000,000, and the profits 7 per cent the whole amount of profits will be £ 70,000; now if an addition of £ 100,000 capital he made to the million, and profits should fall to 6 per cent, £ 66,000 or a diminution of £ 4,000 will be received by the owners of stock, although the whole amount of stock will be increased from £ 1,000,000 to £ 1,100,000.- Emphasis Marx's.


Crises of overproduction are ended by rational management of production for all members of society based on need, etc.Except that this doesn't happen on the basis of 'market socialism' any more than it does under capitalism, unless we return to the 'benign worker' argument; of course, the benign workers get thrown out of business, so it doesn't really matter. The factors which lead to over-production remain: on the one hand, the separation between purchase and sale, exacerbated by the role of money as means of payment, and on the other the falling rate of profit.


The conflict between the private ownership of products (relations of production) and the capacity to produce what society needs and wants (productive forces) is also ended.In which case one supposes that joint-stock companies are also essentially non-capitalist. Ultimately, however, the falling rate of profit due to development of the productive forces, as well as over-production, are the most striking realizations of this conflict. You're more or less just acting like Ricardo here, in assuming an essentially capitalist mode of production to be based on conscious social control and planning of production in order to ward off its contradictions, which happen to be the same as that of 'traditional' capitalism. As Ricardo says, and Marx quotes:



“Adam Smith, however, speaks of the carrying trade as one, not of choice, but of necessity; as if the capital engaged in it would be inert if not so employed, as if the capital in the home trade could overflow, if not confined to a limited amount. He says, ‘when the capital stock of any country is increased to such a degree, that it cannot be all employed in supplying the consumption, and supporting the productive labour of that particular country’,” (this passage is printed in italics by Ricardo himself> “ ‘the surplus part of it naturally disgorges itself into the carrying trade, and is employed in performing the same offices to other countries’.


“But could not this portion of the productive labour of Great Britain be employed in preparing some other sort of goods, with which something more in demand at home might be purchased? And if it could not, might we not employ this productive labour, though with less advantage, in making those goods in demand at home, or at least some substitute for them? If we wanted velvets, might we not attempt to make velvets; and if we could not succeed, might we not make more cloth, or some other object desirable to us? With Marx observing:



The apologetic phrases used to deny crises are important in so far as they always prove the opposite of what they are meant to prove. In order to deny crises, they assert unity where there is conflict and contradiction. They are therefore important in so far as one can say they prove that there would be no crises if the contradictions which they have erased in their imagination, did not exist in fact. But in reality crises exist because these contradictions exist. Every reason which they put forward against crisis is an exorcised contradiction, and, therefore, a real contradiction, which can cause crises. The desire to convince oneself of the non-existence of contradictions, is at the same time the expression of a pious wish that the contradictions, which are really present, should not exist.
Technically speaking this is the entire basis of capitalism. The product is worth more than what the capitalist paid for it. That is how he makes a profit.Sure, but the product is exactly what the capitalist paid for.


If the faces are capitalists on the one hand and workers on the other, yes. The difference, which is pretty fundamental, is that the former makes a profit off the work of the latter.The capitalist is merely a functionary of capital, of value in motion. The workers, through their labour, must valorize value either way (otherwise, as Bordiga pointed out, they fall by the wayside). All that is changed is the faces in which capital is personified, but the underlying relation remains the same.


Certainly, under market socialism the worker owns the capital which his labor has created. It is happening in factories in Argentina right now.I shall simply echo you here, and say, "See K. Marx on "capital"." Reading 'Capital' would be a start.


Why not? That's the whole point.The reasons given.


And prices of production include surplus value, which is now owned by the worker. As far as actual work performed, see K. Marx on "socially necessary work."No, prices of production include the average rate of profit. Thus, not the socially necessary surplus labour either, or the entire value product of the workers in a given factory or branch of production. Thank you for the correction, however.


All a question of managementNo, it's a question of surplus-value being converted into funds for insurance and


Perhaps in Bordiga's imagination.Yes, as opposed to in reality, where competition would not be actual competition, and, like a primary school game, everyone would be the winner.


Now, if Bill Gates would contribute billions to Steve Jobs' income so that Apple could expand production without exploiting workers in China; then I guess you could have Bordiga's sustainable, if outrageously silly, system. You say Bordiga's point is the system is impossible? He's the one who calls it "sustainable."Bordiga did not say that. Nor was the system impossible, it is simply a convoluted system of capitalism.

Incidentally, when it comes to expanding production, do you imagine that workers under a market socialist society who just neglected accumulation and took the whole product as revenue would survive long in the market?


Market socialism is a type of economy which is intended to transition from capitalism to socialism."No, guys, don't abolish capitalism yet, we're got to set up a society of co-operatives first for a while! What do you mean people are dying? Well, we'll just solve that with our social control of production... No, wait, that doesn't exist yet. Oh well, this is a transitional stage, guys, be patient a while. What do you mean we could have just abolished capitalism by now?"


Proudhon, and later, Bordiga, advocated replacing money with labour "vouchers." Marx demolished this idea in The Poverty of Philosophy.No, Marx demolished the idea of 'labour-money', on the grounds that it, being a form of money, presupposed generalized commodity production. He attacked, "the Utopian idea of “labour-money” in a society founded on the production of commodities." How you get from 'Labour-money is bad because it is money and presupposes commodity production' to 'We ought to retain ordinary money and commodity production' is something of a mystery. On the other hand, as regards labour vouchers:


In the case of socialised production the money-capital is eliminated. Society distributes labour-power and means of production to the different branches of production. The producers may, for all it matters, receive paper vouchers entitling them to withdraw from the social supplies of consumer goods a quantity corresponding to their labour-time. These vouchers are not money. They do not circulate.- Capital, Volume II.

Now, you don't seem to have finished volume I of Capital yet, so perhaps that was unfair. However, you've surely read the Critique of the Gotha Programme:


What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.This, of course, being after Marx has specified that value-production no longer exists due to labour being directly social. Incidentally, I'm not sure that there's any real basis for comparing Proudhon, who supported 'market socialism' and was attacked by Marx for trying to abolish capitalism by applying its own laws, and Bordiga, who was opposed to such mutualist schemes.


Is there one kind of market socialism? is market socialism an essential kind of transition? the only kind of transition from capitalism? one kind of revolution from capitalism? Of course not.It's not relevant. What is relevant is whether it is a new mode of production.


The strength of market socialism is that it doesn't demand that much out of people and would likely be at least as efficient as capitalism, while far less exploitative.As efficient, perhaps (http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=29897&Cr=financial&Cr1=crisis).


"When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property [i.e., capital] is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property [capital] that is changed. It loses its class character."You've completely ripped that out of context. What Marx is saying is that when capital is converted into common property, hence ceasing to be capital, personal property, that is means of consumption (not capital), is not thereby made into common property as well. The means of production cease to retain a class character. The preceding passage in, in fact, simply to emphasize that capitalism is not equivalent to 'personal property', but is a social power. In other words, "Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations."

Now, if we're looking at the Communist Manifesto, here are some quotes from the same section:

"[Wage-labour] creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation." Now, how that kind of property is class-neutral is anyone's guess.

"To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production." This social status under 'market socialism' is simply transferred unto other people.

"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. "

"But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave words” of our bourgeois about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself." The 'abolition of buying and selling', you say?

"From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes." Note that bourgeois property is here equivalent to capital.

And you'll note that I'm not even bothering to cite the chapter on 'The Trinity Formula' from Capital. However, perhaps Volume I is fair game:

"Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks."

Ultimately, though, it comes down to this: what is capital? How would you answer this?

[RedMaterialist]

Sure, but the product is exactly what the capitalist paid for.

The capitalist gets more than what he paid for. "Our friend, Moneybags, who as yet is only an embryo capitalist, must buy his commodities at their value, must sell them at their value, and yet at the end of the process must withdraw more value from circulation than he threw into it at starting... Hic Rhodus, hic salta!25] Capital, Vol I, Chap. 5. He buys at value (labor), sells at value, and withdraws more value than he started with.

You need to start with Vol I.



On the other hand, as regards labour vouchers:

In the case of socialised production the money-capital is eliminated.

- Capital, Volume II.

Note that Marx said in "socialized production." (You need to check your spelling.) What market-socialism wants to do is go from capitalism to socialism in an intermediate stage.

Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, yeah, that one...said workers would begin to form trade unions (OMG!!! the dreaded union), fight for wages (!!! wages)...thus, the 10 Hours Bill in England was passed ((double OMG!!! limiting work hours by parliament.)

But, of course, you want to go from CAPITALISM TO SOCIALISM with no unions, no fight for fair wages, no use for legislation. If you can get a revolution going, everybody will be there; until then some people have to work for a living.


Now, you don't seem to have finished volume I of Capital yet, so perhaps that was unfair. However, you've surely read the Critique of the Gotha Programme:

I said you can start with Vol I; actually, you need to start with the Communist Manifesto.

[ZeroNowhere]

Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, yeah, that one...said workers would begin to form trade unions (OMG!!! the dreaded union), fight for wages (!!! wages)...thus, the 10 Hours Bill in England was passed ((double OMG!!! limiting work hours by parliament.)

But, of course, you want to go from CAPITALISM TO SOCIALISM with no unions, no fight for fair wages, no use for legislation. If you can get a revolution going, everybody will be there; until then some people have to work for a living.Yes, I'm an anti-union De Leonite; one of a kind, truly. Down with the Socialist Industrial Union! Anyhow, as I said, I'm not saying anything about how to get to communism, I am specifically disputing your assertion that 'market socialism' is a new, non-capitalist mode of production.


The capitalist gets more than what he paid for.No, he gets more than what he paid. What he pays is the value of the commodity labour-power. The point of capitalist production is that he gets exactly what he paid for, namely the use-value of the workers' labour-power, labour-power in its fluid state, value-creating labour over and above the cost-price of the product. Of course, he doesn't necessarily get the entire surplus-value produced by his labourers, due to the tendency towards equalization of the rate of profit, as well as the fact that ultimately not all surplus-value produced may be realized (as Marx comments in vol. III, it generally isn't, due to depreciation of the value of products). However, he does get the use-value of the commodity labour-power, which is precisely what he paid for.


Note that Marx said in "socialized production." (You need to check your spelling.)I'm beginning to suspect that I'm being trolled here.

[Kiev Communard]

You say market socialism has never worked in practice. Yet, in your own country Antonov is owned by the state; Ukraine also has its own National Space Agency.

So, Ukraine is a socialist country? I am sorry, but such kind of argument borders on ridiculous. What is "socialist" about state-capitalist enterprises, anyway?

[NewSocialist]

*Marx & Engels on Cooperatives*

“But there was in store a still greater victory of the political economy of labor over the political economy of property. We speak of the co-operative movement, especially the co-operative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold hands. The value of these great social experiments cannot be over-rated. By deed, instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labor need not be monopolized as a means of domination over, and of extortion against, the laboring man himself; and that, like slave labor, like serf labor, hired labor is but a transitory and inferior form destined to disappear before associated labor plying its toil with a willing hand, ready mind, and a joyous heart. . . . At the same time, the experience of the period. . . . has proved beyond doubt that, however excellent in principle, and however useful in practice, co-operative labor, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries. . . . To save the industrious masses, co-operative labor ought to be developed to national dimensions, and consequently, to be fostered by national means. Yet, the lords of land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defense and perpetuation of their economic monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labor. . . . To conquer political power has therefore become the duty of the working classes.”
(Marx's Inaugural Address of the Working Men's Association 1864)

“The matter has nothing to do with either Sch-Delitzsch or with Lassalle. Both propagated small cooperatives, the one with, the other without state help; however, in both cases the cooperatives were not meant to come under the ownership of already existing means of production, but create alongside the existing capitalist production a new cooperative one. My suggestion requires the entry of the cooperatives into the existing production. One should give them land which otherwise would be exploited by capitalist means: as demanded by the Paris Commune, [U]the workers should operate the factories shut down by the factory-owners on a cooperative basis. That is the great difference. And Marx and I never doubted that in the transition to the full communist economy we will have to use the cooperative system as an intermediate stage on a large scale.”
(Engels' letter to Bebel January 20th, 1886)

“That the workers desire to establish the conditions for co-operative production on a social scale, and first of all on a national scale, in their own country, only means that they are working to revolutionize the present conditions of production, and it has nothing in common with the foundation of co-operative societies with state aid. But as far as the present co-operative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés either of the governments or of the bourgeois.”
(Critique of the Gotha Programme p. 23)

“Let us suppose the workers are themselves in possession of their respective means of production and exchange their commodities with one another. These commodities would not be products of capital.” (Capital vol. 3 p. 276)

“The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage. Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises, into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale. The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.”
(Capital vol. 3 pp. 441-2)

[ZeroNowhere]

I have already dealt with all of those, including bringing a couple up. It's worth mentioning that the second last was not a quote involving co-operatives at all, however, but rather is ripped out of context. I've already said this, though, and see no need for repetition.

Again, what I am arguing is not that co-operatives are useless as a form of class struggle ("But as far as the present co-operative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés either of the governments or of the bourgeois"), nor against any worth which they may have in a revolutionary situation (ultimately, "If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production – what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, “possible” communism?" Hence, establishment of co-operatives in a revolutionary situation is essentially going to be a part of the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, but does not in itself change the mode of production, and is not meant as a long-term solution, but rather "The political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the perpetuation of his social slavery"; ultimately, it still wouldn't make much sense to establish an economy of capitalist co-operatives, however), but rather simply that a 'market socialist' economy would not be a non-capitalist mode of production.

[NewSocialist]

ultimately, it still wouldn't make much sense to establish an economy of capitalist co-operatives, however), but rather simply that a 'market socialist' economy would not be a non-capitalist mode of production.

You have a peculiar definition of capitalism. To me, it sounds as if you're saying the market itself, even devoid of wage labor and finance capital, is synonymous with capitalism - but if that were the case, than capitalism existed far longer than anyone would have imagined, since people have been selling commodities on a market for thousands of years. Again, “Let us suppose the workers are themselves in possession of their respective means of production and exchange their commodities with one another. These commodities would not be products of capital.” (Capital vol. 3 p. 276)

To market socialists, if you eliminate wage labor and private finance then the system fails to be capitalist and the market becomes relatively benign - I agree with them on this count. Is it perfect? No, but it's a feasible step in the right direction. Mind you, I'm not a mutualist either, so hopefully you're not confusing me as such.

[ZeroNowhere]

You don't eliminate wage-labour in market socialism, the workers still exchange their labour-power for wages, and produce surplus-value. Still, you can define capitalism as you wish, I simply find it convenient to refer to the capitalist conflict between relations of production and productive forces as being capitalist rather than also belonging to that other mode of production which shares all of capitalism's laws of motion, and is also based on value's motion, hence capital, but isn't actually capitalism.

Anyhow, as I said, that quote was taken out of context (which makes one wonder why you repeated it, this making it the third time it's been repeated in the thread), and was rather talking about petty commodity production, a lower mode of production, in which production was individual rather than collective, and commodity production was not generalized... But then, I've gone over all of this, too.

[RedMaterialist]

However, he does get the use-value of the commodity labour-power, which is precisely what he paid for.



True, he gets the use-value of the labor. The worker adds surplus value. The capitalist does not pay for that. When the product is sold the capitalist gets the full value: use-value of labor (which he paid for) and surplus-value which he did not pay for.

[Armchair War Criminal]

True, he gets the use-value of the labor. The worker adds surplus value. The capitalist does not pay for that. When the product is sold the capitalist gets the full value: use-value of labor (which he paid for) and surplus-value which he did not pay for.
You're saying the same thing, just using different definitions of "paid for." The capitalist pays the value of labor power in order to get the value of the commodities it creates, which are greater.

[ZeroNowhere]

True, he gets the use-value of the labor. The worker adds surplus value. The capitalist does not pay for that. When the product is sold the capitalist gets the full value: use-value of labor (which he paid for) and surplus-value which he did not pay for.
The use-value of labour-power includes the surplus-labour, which produces surplus-value. Still, I don't think that we actually disagree on anything here, it's more or less just a quibble, which is why I had used the word 'technically'.

[RedMaterialist]

So, Ukraine is a socialist country? I am sorry, but such kind of argument borders on ridiculous. What is "socialist" about state-capitalist enterprises, anyway?

This is the theory: Capitalism-->State Capitalism-->Market Socialism-->Socialism-->???-->Communism. You can get there in gradual stages or in revolution.

"The proletariat will...centralize all means of production in the hands of the state..." Marx, The Communist Manifesto. Lenin believed that only the "commanding heights" of the economy (such as Antonov) should be state owned. Stalin thought everything should be centralized immediately. Marx thought it could be achieved either gradually or by revolution, depending on the conditions in each country.

You may not think that Ukraine is socialist; do you think it is capitalist?

[RedMaterialist]

The use-value of labour-power includes the surplus-labour, which produces surplus-value. Still, I don't think that we actually disagree on anything here, it's more or less just a quibble, which is why I had used the word 'technically'.

I agree.

[RedMaterialist]

Marx & Engels on Cooperatives by NewSocialist

Excellent post.

[Kiev Communard]

This is the theory: Capitalism-->State Capitalism-->Market Socialism-->Socialism-->???-->Communism. You can get there in gradual stages or in revolution.

"The proletariat will...centralize all means of production in the hands of the state..." Marx, The Communist Manifesto. Lenin believed that only the "commanding heights" of the economy (such as Antonov) should be state owned. Stalin thought everything should be centralized immediately. Marx thought it could be achieved either gradually or by revolution, depending on the conditions in each country.

You may not think that Ukraine is socialist; do you think it is capitalist?

Such a theory of "revolutionary stages" is ... extremely doubtful, to say the least. And I do not think that Ukraine is capitalist, I know it from my first-hand experience.

[RedMaterialist]

And I do not think that Ukraine is capitalist, I know it from my first-hand experience.

Well, how do you explain that the biggest industries, e.g. Antonov, are state owned?

[RedMaterialist]

Such a theory of "revolutionary stages" is ... extremely doubtful, to say the least.

Gradual change happens in stages, revolution happens in one big, violent event (in capitalism directly to communism.)

[Thirsty Crow]

Well, how do you explain that the biggest industries, e.g. Antonov, are state owned?

But does state ownership means getting close to socialism?
This industries are still parts of the capitalist system, they operate as capitalist enterprise.

[RedMaterialist]

But does state ownership means getting close to socialism?

This industries are still parts of the capitalist system, they operate as capitalist enterprise.

I think state ownership is somewhere in between capitalism and socialism.

The state industry probably operates as a capitalist enterprise, but I assume most of the profits go to the state. If the state uses some of the profits for maintaining employment at the industry or for social programs like health care, pensions, etc., then the industry is operated as a capitalist enterprise for social benefits. Thus, somewhere between capitalism and socialism.

The whole system can be changed, of course, if the capitalists bring in an army and take over the industry and run it as a pure capitalist enterprise.

[Thirsty Crow]

I think state ownership is somewhere in between capitalism and socialism.

The state industry probably operates as a capitalist enterprise, but I assume most of the profits go to the state. If the state uses some of the profits for maintaining employment at the industry or for social programs like health care, pensions, etc., then the industry is operated as a capitalist enterprise for social benefits. Thus, somewhere between capitalism and socialism.

The whole system can be changed, of course, if the capitalists bring in an army and take over the industry and run it as a pure capitalist enterprise.

But the phenomenon you are describing, i.e. welfare state, was historically the last line of defence for the bourgeoisie, and the political implications are quite clear (political in the sense of policies of this kind being a "step towards socialism"; historically, they haven't been, and the relation between the opportunities arising from better labour legislation and better wages, on one hand, and potentials for a revolutionary transformation of entire society, on the other hand, are ambiguous, at best). Moreover, you are neglecting the fact that profits are channelled not only into social programs, but also into the military, for instance (so, a one-sided approach, which you seem to take, is not valid).

So, in fact, I fail to see how relevant you're opinion on nationalization (that it is "in between") is regarding the intensification of class struggle. And it seems to me that there is a potential danger in this kind of reasoning: assuring everyone that we are on the right track, and that all we have to do is to keep nationalizing sector by sector and voila - socialism.

[Armchair War Criminal]

But the phenomenon you are describing, i.e. welfare state, was historically the last line of defence for the bourgeoisie, and the political implications are quite clear (political in the sense of policies of this kind being a "step towards socialism"; historically, they haven't been, and the relation between the opportunities arising from better labour legislation and better wages, on one hand, and potentials for a revolutionary transformation of entire society, on the other hand, are ambiguous, at best). Moreover, you are neglecting the fact that profits are channelled not only into social programs, but also into the military, for instance (so, a one-sided approach, which you seem to take, is not valid).

So, in fact, I fail to see how relevant you're opinion on nationalization (that it is "in between") is regarding the intensification of class struggle. And it seems to me that there is a potential danger in this kind of reasoning: assuring everyone that we are on the right track, and that all we have to do is to keep nationalizing sector by sector and voila - socialism.
This isn't necessarily my position, but how do you know what the ultimate consequences of the rise of the welfare state will be? Wasn't the germ of capitalism the growth of commerce and towns? Haven't all changes in the economic base (as opposed to, say, state forms) consisted in the gradual replacement of one mode of production with another?

[RedMaterialist]

But the phenomenon you are describing, i.e. welfare state, was historically the last line of defence for the bourgeoisie, and the political implications are quite clear (political in the sense of policies of this kind being a "step towards socialism";

I'm not sure it is "historically the last line of defense." It is certainly the most current stage of economic development. The bourgeoisie is fighting constantly to weaken the welfare state. And the welfare state was not created, voila, overnight. It took decades of struggle by unions, civil rights activists, etc. to get to where we are in the West.


historically, they haven't been, and the relation between the opportunities arising from better labour legislation and better wages, on one hand, and potentials for a revolutionary transformation of entire society, on the other hand, are ambiguous, at best).

Ambiguous? Child labor eliminated; union representation; 8 hr work day; retirement pensions; health care; racial and sexual discrimination mostly eliminated. These things are real achievements.


Moreover, you are neglecting the fact that profits are channelled not only into social programs, but also into the military, for instance (so, a one-sided approach, which you seem to take, is not valid).

I'm not saying it's perfect. It seems to be more two-sided than one-sided.


So, in fact, I fail to see how relevant you're opinion on nationalization (that it is "in between") is regarding the intensification of class struggle. And it seems to me that there is a potential danger in this kind of reasoning: assuring everyone that we are on the right track, and that all we have to do is to keep nationalizing sector by sector and voila - socialism.

No one is saying it is just going to happen. The people in France now realize this. However, if all sectors are finally nationalized, and there is only the "administration of things" left, isn't that where we are supposed to be going? Is capitalism going to fight back. Of course. Will there be a revolution? Maybe. Until then why fight social progress?

Marx spent much of his life speaking to workers' movements, trade unions, etc., advocating for limiting work days, raising wages, eliminating child labor. Why be more royal than the king?

[Revolution starts with U]

The welfare state is bread and carnival. It will not empower the people in any way. It is a red herring thrown out there for the bums to fight over and feel like they accomplished something while the status quo marches on. Rather than democratize capital, or give workers any meaningful control over their workplace, it has created an amazingly false, devoid of history culture that says "socialism = statism."
In fact, socialism never meant statism, and any part of it that even utilized it was the people siezing the state to remove the state.
The welfare state is the shifting around of worthless paper with slave owners and mass murderers on it. If we want real change, it's time workers started siezing capital.
The only state I would support is one that redistributed ownership and then disbanded itself.

[Kiev Communard]

Well, how do you explain that the biggest industries, e.g. Antonov, are state owned?

Actually, the biggest industries are owned by transnational corporations. The level of public ownership in Ukraine does not exceed 10%.

[RedMaterialist]

Actually, the biggest industries are owned by transnational corporations. The level of public ownership in Ukraine does not exceed 10%.

Do you have a source on the Antonov ownership?

[MarxSchmarx]

The welfare state is bread and carnival. It will not empower the people in any way. It is a red herring thrown out there for the bums to fight over and feel like they accomplished something while the status quo marches on. Rather than democratize capital, or give workers any meaningful control over their workplace, it has created an amazingly false, devoid of history culture that says "socialism = statism."
In fact, socialism never meant statism, and any part of it that even utilized it was the people siezing the state to remove the state.
The welfare state is the shifting around of worthless paper with slave owners and mass murderers on it. If we want real change, it's time workers started siezing capital.
The only state I would support is one that redistributed ownership and then disbanded itself.

The criticism you raise is really tied up to the question of reformism. We shouldn't be opposing reforms as such - it's only when reforms are seen as the final goal that we should object.

The welfare state represents an amalgamation of half-victories and aborted opportunities. They are concessions that are a result of workers taking action. Look at how things were before the welfare state came around - much of Scandinavia for example was a real dump in the early 1900s, now it is the envy of the world, or how they are in places where nothing of the sort exists (e.g., Haiti).

When the welfare state is seen as an end in itself it is problematic. But in addition to concrete improvements in the material conditions of people, it really is a testament to what cocnerted working class movements can accomplish.