Marxist society: Is it need or is it reward?

[Oswy]

Others might disagree but there seems to be two different ideas in Marxism on the issue of how the worker's material life is sustained:

(i) that the worker should receive the full rewards of her actual labour.

(ii) that the worker should receive that which satisfies her needs.

These are, in my view, two substantively different things as the latter is not directly interested in whether the worker is productive, or at least to what extent she is productive in relation to others.

While (i) suggests that a worker might find herself accumulating reward beyond her need (ii) suggests that no matter how productive, or how hard she works, a worker should not be expecting anything beyond her needs to be satsified.

I may well be overlooking something but is this duality of approach in Marxist thinking correct? Is it problematic?

Any and all views much appreciated - though I have no technical knowledge in economics so please keep it simple.

[Zanthorus]

(i) that the worker should receive the full rewards of her actual labour.

I don't think there are any Marxists who believe this. If they do, they probably weren't paying close enough attention to the part in the Critique of the Gotha Program where Marx points out that society will have to set aside a certain amount of resources each production period for accumulation, helping out the disadvantaged and needy etc.

What is advocated as the 'lower stage of communism' is not workers' recieving the entirety of what they produce. Rather the collective product of society is taken together and divided out into resources to be used next time around and resources to be immediately consumed. The resources to be consumed are then apportioned out in proportion to the labour time performed by each producer.

The two principles you mention are not in conflict with each other, because they are not meant to be moral principles. Marx puts them forward as distribution principles corresponding to a certain material development of societies productive forces. The only time he mentions the principle "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" in the GothaKritik, he is speculating on what preconditions need to be realised before this principle can be followed through. He states that this is when the spring of co-operative wealth flows more abundantly, and after we have escaped the point of communist society which is still intellectually and morally scarred by class society. This doesn't preclude a gradual phasing in of needs-based distribution, which in fact seems implicit in Marx's arguments against the 'full product of labour'. It would be stupid, for example, to not provide services like healthcare for free, something which is already done by the capitalist state.

[ZeroNowhere]

It is also worth noting that 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs', was actually coined by Louis Blanc; far from raising it to the principle of communism, Marx was rather saying that it would not be the case immediately in a communist society, but rather only "after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly".

[mikelepore]

I have no use for the concept "to each according to his needs" except in terms of maintaining people with free education, medicine, etc. I'm sure it cannot apply to luxury goods and services. Something has to be held back and distributed only when the individual earns it through personal labor. If nothing is held back, I have no reason to work, and I might as let others have the full honor of doing the work. But those others have no reason to work either, and so down spirals the productivity. To me, Marx's condition "after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want" says "as far as we can know, perhaps never".

[Jimmie Higgins]

(i) that the worker should receive the full rewards of her actual labour.Since capitalism allows people to produce much more than they could use individually, and since industrial labor is a collective process, there isn't really any way or any practical benefit for individuals to do things this way.

I think my view is that people should have full control over their production - so while people might produce the equivalent of 10 widgets/day in labor, they only ever need/want 2 or 3 widgets worth, and so then it would be up to them


(ii) that the worker should receive that which satisfies her needs.

These are, in my view, two substantively different things as the latter is not directly interested in whether the worker is productive, or at least to what extent she is productive in relation to others.

While (i) suggests that a worker might find herself accumulating reward beyond her need (ii) suggests that no matter how productive, or how hard she works, a worker should not be expecting anything beyond her needs to be satsified.

I may well be overlooking something but is this duality of approach in Marxist thinking correct? Is it problematic?

Any and all views much appreciated - though I have no technical knowledge in economics so please keep it simple.For the second point, I think this works assuming that there is real democratic (or collective in some other real direct way) and responsive system in place for workers to make decisions. "Needs" in this sense is not fixed (as in food and shelter) but flexible: if housing needs are met, then it is no longer a social "need" and so the new social need is not just basic shelter, but better designed communities. If that is met, then the need might become for more specialized kinds of housing or whatnot.

The incentive under this kind of arrangement is to satisfy all basic needs and reduce labor needs so we can tackle more wants.

[Lyev]

It is also worth noting that 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs', was actually coined by Louis Blanc; far from raising it to the principle of communism, Marx was rather saying that it would not be the case immediately in a communist society, but rather only "after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly".Actually, what I find more interesting is that Blanc originally got it from the Bible, or was at least certainly inspired by Christian teachings when he formulated the phrase. I quite object to using it (not that it was ever posed by anyone here, apart from maybe the OP) as a catch-all, quick & tidy definition for "socialism". It's sometimes used by semi-literate Marxists, often to avoid going into a much more thorough exposition and discussion of what distribution will be in a post-capitalist society. But, as a (weak) definition for socialism, it over-emphasizes distribution anyway; we should really be discussing ownership and control. And once we've really got this nailed on how ownership will be administrated, especially as regards accountability, rotation, bureaucracy, democracy, day-to-day decision making, [de]centralization, elections etc. etc., then we can really get down to the nitty-gritty of distribution (which, for me, is secondary, or at least a reflection of ownership and of the property relations prevalent in one epoch or another). And actually I sometimes feel as though Marx and Engels were often a bit vague about all this. Although, I did talk about semi-literate Marxists earlier, so I might be embarassing myself here because I haven't read enough of the details concerning distribution, control and ownership under classless communism.

Edit: I forgot add something that originally drew me to this thread -- I don't think there ever has been, will be, or is a "Marxist" society in theory or practise or otherwise. Marxism is really more a toolkit of analysis for me.

[ckaihatsu]

Since capitalism allows people to produce much more than they could use individually, and since industrial labor is a collective process, there isn't really any way or any practical benefit for individuals to do things this way.

I think my view is that people should have full control over their production - so while people might produce the equivalent of 10 widgets/day in labor, they only ever need/want 2 or 3 widgets worth, and so then it would be up to them





we should really be discussing ownership and control. And once we've really got this nailed on how ownership will be administrated, especially as regards accountability, rotation, bureaucracy, democracy, day-to-day decision making, [de]centralization, elections etc. etc., then we can really get down to the nitty-gritty of distribution (which, for me, is secondary, or at least a reflection of ownership and of the property relations prevalent in one epoch or another).





What is advocated as the 'lower stage of communism' is not workers' recieving the entirety of what they produce. Rather the collective product of society is taken together and divided out into resources to be used next time around and resources to be immediately consumed. The resources to be consumed are then apportioned out in proportion to the labour time performed by each producer.


I created a simple diagram almost two years ago now, for RevLeft, that shows how basic this could be: (also attached at the end of this post)


communist economy diagram

http://i48.tinypic.com/2iiitma.jpg


The wrinkle in all of this is that, for more-discretionary products (and mass-labor services), there would have to be some large-scale political process for determining how far-flung supplies of liberated labor might be mobilized to *implement* the productive force needed for these higher-quality / larger-scale projects and products. And, the complement to this is how more-discretionary liberated labor might be brought on board and properly compensated for its cooperation. Will all who contribute their liberated labor do so because they are also in political agreement with the project, or will there be some kind of "division of labor" wherein liberated labor can freely contribute their labor power *without* subscribing to the goals of the mass project, and receive some kind of material consideration / compensation instead?

This entirely realistic scenario is in response to those who -- either politically or unconsciously -- implicitly advance a vision of post-capitalist society as being somehow *static*, limited in production to just covering the basics of a contemporary humane living, with *no* conception for a planet full of liberated laborers.





I have no use for the concept "to each according to his needs" except in terms of maintaining people with free education, medicine, etc. I'm sure it cannot apply to luxury goods and services. Something has to be held back and distributed only when the individual earns it through personal labor. If nothing is held back, I have no reason to work, and I might as let others have the full honor of doing the work. But those others have no reason to work either, and so down spirals the productivity. To me, Marx's condition "after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want" says "as far as we can know, perhaps never".


Mike brings up a good point here in that we could very well see a "Jetsons" or "post-Jetsons" kind of future in which some mere button-pressing, or voice commands, would be enough for an individual to start up an automated industrial productive process that then delivers a final product or products to their doorstep, for *zero* labor effort.

But then this raises the 'static' issue again -- will this be *enough* (automated) productivity for a post-capitalist society, or will that society want to *change* its industrial base so as to develop and advance the *quality* of its productivity? If the answer is 'yes', then we're faced with the labor issue that Mike raises -- *who* will have the "full honor" of doing the work that the rest of society can then freely benefit from, as with the upgrading of machinery -- ?

I have two responses to this issue:

- One is that there could very well be a "core" of hobbyist-like liberated laborers who wind up plotting society's technical and artistic trajectory from their own interests and inclinations, as long as they have a sufficient political base by which to do so, for using society's collectivized implements. These would be the liberated scientists and artists of a post-capitalist society, free to pursue their large-scale-enabled visions as long as there were no legitimate political grounds for denying them their proportionate access to collectivized implements.

- A second would be that there *could* be a "division of labor" in a post-commodity economic context, by which *mass demands* could be fulfilled by *mass liberated labor*, and *not* dependent on a perpetual avant garde sector of society for forward progress. In this way liberated labor would *not* be tied into being one and the same as those who politically *support* a project, and, likewise, those who *are* political and provide proposed plans for the use of society's collectivized machinery would not be constrained to their own ranks for the subsequent *implementation* of those (mass-approved) plans, as with their own liberated labor alone.

I have a model that provides for the enactment of this second, more flexible, option, enabling a truly mass-based post-commodity political economy -- it's at my blog entry, and one excerpt is here:





Infrastructure / overhead

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

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

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

http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?u=16162

[anarkostalinist]

Others might disagree but there seems to be two different ideas in Marxism on the issue of how the worker's material life is sustained:

(i) that the worker should receive the full rewards of her actual labour.

(ii) that the worker should receive that which satisfies her needs.

These are, in my view, two substantively different things as the latter is not directly interested in whether the worker is productive, or at least to what extent she is productive in relation to others.

While (i) suggests that a worker might find herself accumulating reward beyond her need (ii) suggests that no matter how productive, or how hard she works, a worker should not be expecting anything beyond her needs to be satsified.

I may well be overlooking something but is this duality of approach in Marxist thinking correct? Is it problematic?

Most communist countries allocated resources for personal consumption based on demonstrable political allegiance to the state (i.e. party membership) or superior productivity (i.e. soviet stakhanovites). Because these revolutions all occurred in underdeveloped countries, which were embargoed by hostile countries, they put most of their resources into industrialization and militarization. This never left much for meeting consumers' needs, let alone wants. But all the communist countries attempted socialized healthcare/education/retirement with some degree of success, investing in social programs before individual consumerism. They all intended to upgrade the overall standard of living over time, but their options were limited; and although there was a privileged class in every communist country, they were not "rich" by capitalist standards, only relative to the poor of their own country. So I suppose you are right there is a duality between ending exploitation of the working class (giving the worker the full value of their productivity) and meeting their needs (whether or not they're productive). In practice, a communist state with full social welfare programs and worker participation in enterprise management (as well as in national economic policy) is the closest thing to a non-exploitative, needs-satisfying system. The key is to retain motivation for productivity by a system of rewarding above-normal achievement, but which does not result in significant inequality and a resulting class difference in social power.

[mikelepore]

Reply to ckaihatsu:

In the past, our theory has expected too much of automation. Now there is evidence that automation will not replace labor time the way we had thought. Instead of doing a day's manual labor, we tell the robot to do it. But then we usually have to work half a day repairing the robot, or performing preventive maintenance on it. Then we have to work the other half of the day because we keep changing our minds about what steps we want the robot to take, and so we have to continuously reprogram it, or we keep changing our minds about what features we want to have built into the physical hardware, and so we have to keep redesigning it. We still end up requiring nearly the same workday.

For this reason, I reject the Jetsons button-pushing economy as something that's centuries away -- it's too remote to consider as part of the plan. Everyone has to be compelled to go to work. You can either pay people to work, or you can horsewhip them, but, one way or another, people have to be compelled. I believe that there will be no voluntary labor system for the next 500 years. Either we modify socialist theory to accept that fact, or else we will have no revolutionary change at all.

[ckaihatsu]

I'm sorry, Mike, but this entire line is simply defeatism, pure and simple.

You're referencing some implementation of technology which is downright worker-dystopian and is not at all reflective of current realities, much less those of a potential post-wage-slavery future.

I'll just note that, currently, full automation is impossible because the capitalist productive process *requires* human labor time as the main component for the extraction of surplus labor value. Once we've gotten past this exploitative method of material accounting we would be able to command machinery en masse the way we do today on micro scales as consumers.

Oddly enough you're actually *upholding* the mentality that human labor is required for the realization of raw productivity. I'll advance, for your consideration, that we can experience *increasing returns* through the use of technologies of all kinds, from fuel power in cars to miniturization in electronics. The extent to which we can make 'hands-off' technological productivity a reality for all the peoples of the world is the capacity to which we've *liberated* humanity from unnecessary labor.

[mikelepore]

C.K. -- It's not because of capitalism. We don't see "full automation" or "hands-off productivity" because that's not how automation operates. Automation only performs specific (algorithmically defined) and repetitive tasks. It only performs tasks that don't require any judgments other than binary branching, and don't require any pattern recognition. It constantly breaks, jams and crashes. It keeps running as long as you have lot of people babysitting the process. It shortens the length of the necessary workweek, but it doesn't make mandatory human labor less necessary. If this isn't so, what "current realities" did I fail to notice?

My "defeatism" is that I reported to you what seems to be bad news. An ancient wish is now observed to be unrealistic. In chapter 15 of 'Capital' Marx quotes Aristotle's "Politics" regarding the observation that, if the shuttles would weave by themselves, then there would be no need for slaves. We want to see the machines take over the work, and this desire has been clouding our perception.

My conclusion is this: Industry in any classless society must always obtain labor by paying workers to work. If this payment stops, the size of the available workforce would instantly drop to zero, the rate of production would instantly drop to zero, and within a few hours we would be back in the stone age.

This truth may change about 500 years in the future, and then, perhaps in the 26th century, it may be possible to implement the concept, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." But, tentatively, that goal remains as remote as the alchemists' wish for the immortality elixer.

[ckaihatsu]

C.K. -- It's not because of capitalism. We don't see "full automation" or "hands-off productivity" because that's not how automation operates.


Actually, Mike, that's *exactly* how automation operates -- hence mass production. Without automation we'd still have a world condition of *colonized* labor (workers limited to one place, quite possibly their own homes, for manufacturing), instead of the "free" (wage-slavery) labor that we have today.





Automation only performs specific (algorithmically defined) and repetitive tasks. It only performs tasks that don't require any judgments other than binary branching, and don't require any pattern recognition.


This statement isn't factually correct, either -- advancements in computing have yielded the automation of more-complex tasks that *do* involve pattern recognition.





It constantly breaks, jams and crashes. It keeps running as long as you have lot of people babysitting the process. It shortens the length of the necessary workweek, but it doesn't make mandatory human labor less necessary. If this isn't so, what "current realities" did I fail to notice?


Automation *leverages* human labor -- under capitalism it doesn't *obviate* it, nor does it depend on any *particular* individuals for it.





My "defeatism" is that I reported to you what seems to be bad news. An ancient wish is now observed to be unrealistic. In chapter 15 of 'Capital' Marx quotes Aristotle's "Politics" regarding the observation that, if the shuttles would weave by themselves, then there would be no need for slaves. We want to see the machines take over the work, and this desire has been clouding our perception.





Decline and reinvention

Originally, power looms used a shuttle to throw the weft across, but in 1927 the faster and more efficient shuttleless loom came into use. Sulzer Brothers, a Swiss company had the exclusive rights to manufacture shuttleless looms in 1942, and licensed the American production to Warner & Swasey. Draper licensed the slower rapier loom. Today, advances in technology have produced a variety of looms designed to maximise production for specific types of material. The most common of these are Sulzer shuttleless weaving machines, rapier looms, air-jet looms and water-jet looms.[13]


Social and economic implications

The power loom reduced demand for skilled handweavers, initially causing reduced wages and unemployment. Protests followed its introduction. For example, in 1816 two thousand rioting Calton weavers tried to destroy power loom mills and stoned the workers.[14] In the longer term, by making cloth more affordable the power loom increased demand and stimulated exports, causing a growth in industrial employment, albeit low-paid.[15] The power loom also opened up opportunities for women mill workers.[16] A darker side of the power loom's impact was the growth of employment of children in power loom mills.[17]

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





My conclusion is this: Industry in any classless society must always obtain labor by paying workers to work. If this payment stops, the size of the available workforce would instantly drop to zero, the rate of production would instantly drop to zero, and within a few hours we would be back in the stone age.

This truth may change about 500 years in the future, and then, perhaps in the 26th century, it may be possible to implement the concept, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." But, tentatively, that goal remains as remote as the alchemists' wish for the immortality elixer.


This is both an exaggeration and a defining example of defeatism. You're not at all accounting for the positive, constructive collective agency of liberated laborers -- you're making a post-capitalist society sound like a population of depressives.

I, on the other hand, am of the position that such a liberated world would be more than capable of a collective self-administration of their own labor power, including the mass planning and execution of a fully conscious societal development.

[mikelepore]

CK, I don't know what you last paragraph has to do with it. I wasn't talking about self-administration and planning. I'm talking about the inability of machinery to operate without a great amount of human intervention. A reliance on voluntary labor would generate a free-rider problem that deprives production of the human operators.

You're right, the machine doesn't require *particular* individuals, but does requires a quantum of labor time. For example, automobile production in the U.S. now requires about twenty million labor hours per week.

"Defeatism" is a comment about a writer's motives, and we are not here to talk about my mental pathology. That word also implies that a defeat in fact occurs, and I see no defeat in the very thing that I view as the ultimate human emancipation, that is, a crediting system that will compensate labor according to time.

In what I have written, the participants here can see how I differ from most other socialists. Upon hearing the capitalist propaganda "socialism is against human nature", most socialists return a case that it isn't. I respond differently. I respond that it's true that many conceptions of the workings of socialism are against human nature, and socialists have a responsibility to choose among the proposed socialist mechanisms that correspond to human nature, just as the designer of the machine has to assemble the parts in one of few functional ways, while avoiding a larger number of nonfunctional combinations.

[ckaihatsu]

CK, I don't know what you last paragraph has to do with it. I wasn't talking about self-administration and planning. I'm talking about the inability of machinery to operate without a great amount of human intervention.


Okay, understood. I think we're missing an element of valuation here of consumer-consumption material *benefits*, in relation to labor-leveraged automated production. It's understandable, I'd say, considering that Marxism doesn't really tend to address the aspect of consumption (which is understandable).

So in the extrapolating that we're doing we're going well beyond what Marxism has conventionally addressed.





A reliance on voluntary labor would generate a free-rider problem that deprives production of the human operators.


I know you're far more concerned with the "free-rider problem" than I am -- I've already addressed this issue:





I have two responses to this issue:

- One is that there could very well be a "core" of hobbyist-like liberated laborers who wind up plotting society's technical and artistic trajectory from their own interests and inclinations, as long as they have a sufficient political base by which to do so, for using society's collectivized implements. These would be the liberated scientists and artists of a post-capitalist society, free to pursue their large-scale-enabled visions as long as there were no legitimate political grounds for denying them their proportionate access to collectivized implements.

- A second would be that there *could* be a "division of labor" in a post-commodity economic context, by which *mass demands* could be fulfilled by *mass liberated labor*, and *not* dependent on a perpetual avant garde sector of society for forward progress. In this way liberated labor would *not* be tied into being one and the same as those who politically *support* a project, and, likewise, those who *are* political and provide proposed plans for the use of society's collectivized machinery would not be constrained to their own ranks for the subsequent *implementation* of those (mass-approved) plans, as with their own liberated labor alone.

I have a model that provides for the enactment of this second, more flexible, option, enabling a truly mass-based post-commodity political economy -- it's at my blog entry, and one excerpt is here:





You're right, the machine doesn't require *particular* individuals, but does requires a quantum of labor time. For example, automobile production in the U.S. now requires about twenty million labor hours per week.


I'd welcome any input on your part that speaks to the *benefits* enjoyed -- as quantified as possible -- from the products of that 20 million labor hours per week.





"Defeatism" is a comment about a writer's motives, and we are not here to talk about my mental pathology. That word also implies that a defeat in fact occurs, and I see no defeat in the very thing that I view as the ultimate human emancipation, that is, a crediting system that will compensate labor according to time.


I mean no insult -- allow me to alter my characterization to one of 'extreme pessimism' on your part.

I maintain that a liberated automated industrial production would free humanity from commodity production *and* provide full materials for all people to be entirely free from duress over basic material needs and wants.