RedSunsZenith
10th October 2011, 00:49
Did Marx ever actually write anything in support of gift economies or "labor vouchers?" I've read Capital and the Communist Manifesto and am currently reading the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, and so far I haven't found it anywhere. And if he never did write in support of this, why do so many Revleft members advocate it?
Die Neue Zeit
10th October 2011, 19:05
IIRC Engels demolishes that "labor vouchers" stuff in his Anti-Duhring...
No he didn't.
Did Marx ever actually write anything in support of gift economies or "labor vouchers?" I've read Capital and the Communist Manifesto and am currently reading the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, and so far I haven't found it anywhere. And if he never did write in support of this, why do so many Revleft members advocate it?
Read Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/
Marx didn't really support free access gift economies in that one until society met certain conditions.
Labour vouchers, OTOH, were supported in that document as well as in Capital, Volume II. It was also supported even in Anti-Duhring, and what our Hoxhaist poster here misinterpreted was in reference to decentralized economies trading with one another.
Thirsty Crow
10th October 2011, 19:26
I don't remember really and i don't have the book at hand.
Just a reading suggestion for the OP...
And a totally misplaced one, at that. Or is it that you don't know that much about either the topic at hand or about the issue of labour vouchers ("stuff")?
Also, to get back to OP, I am forced to agree with DNZ here, and consequently with Marx: free access might be considered a viable option only insofar as society (in fact - all of the interconnected societies of the world) have reached certain conditions, most conspiculously a very high degree of automation and labour productivity, as well as the more tangential issue of the breakdown of the social division of labour. So, in my opinion, the issue of "higher stage" of communism is more or less a purely theoretical point for militants in the contemporary historical period (as opposed to the idea and possibility of labour vouchers as the basis for the first "stage").
Tablo
10th October 2011, 23:52
No he didn't.
Marx didn't really support free access gift economies in that one until society met certain conditions.
Labour vouchers, OTOH, were supported in that document as well as in Capital, Volume II. It was also supported even in Anti-Duhring, and what our Hoxhaist poster here misinterpreted was in reference to decentralized economies trading with one another.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what most all communists believe. We can't have a gift-economy on day one. He supports labor-vouchers for transition. Not as the end goal.
Dave B
11th October 2011, 19:15
Marx did a fairly comprehensive critique of the labour voucher system in Grundrisse, starting with;
Now, it might be thought that the issue of time-chits overcomes all these difficulties. (The existence of the time-chit naturally already presupposes conditions which are not directly given in the examination of the relations of exchange value and money, and which can and do exist without the time-chit: public credit, bank etc.;
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch03.htm
This notion of a ‘Bank’ can of course a bit of difficulty, it is a sort metaphorical bank rather a financial bank of any kind.
It is best thought as a giant one stop shop, which ‘sells’ and ‘buys’ everything, with labour vouchers, as a sort of clearing house for all the individual productive units of a communist society.
It is related to the ideas of John Gray who, whilst his ideas may look a bit unrefined, he can be credited with having been one of the first to put this kind of idea on non utopian, theoretical and practical ground.
Karl had criticised John Gray elsewhere as well; and Gray’s ideas do whiff of nationalisation and state capitalism; or state socialism as some others were enthusiastically endorsing up until and around 1900.
Karl famously made an apparent passing endorsement of labour vouchers in Volume two of capital
On the basis of socialised production the scale must be ascertained on which those operations — which withdraw labour-power and means of production for a long time without supplying any product as a useful effect in the interim — can be carried on without injuring branches of production which not only withdraw labour-power and means of production continually, or several times a year, but also supply means of subsistence and of production.
Under socialised as well as capitalist production, the labourers in branches of business with shorter working periods will as before withdraw products only for a short time without giving any products in return; while branches of business with long working periods continually withdraw products for a longer time before they return anything. This circumstance, then, arises from the material character of the particular labour-process, not from its social form. 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.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch18.htm#2
The notion of a gift economy as the final objective was almost universal amongst the left a hundred years ago and I can and have on this site provided a long list of quotes to support that claim from all the major players eg Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky and Kautsky.
It is probably therefore no coincidence that the only party that has remained intact from that period are the only one that continue to put it forward, the last of the communist Mohicans, the SPGB and WSM.
eg
V. I. Lenin, From the Destruction of the Old Social System, To the Creation of the New
Communist labour in the narrower and stricter sense of the term is labour performed gratis for the benefit of society, labour performed not as a definite duty, not for the purpose of obtaining a right to certain products, not according to previously established and legally fixed quotas, but voluntary labour, irrespective of quotas;
it is labour performed without expectation of reward, without reward as a condition, labour performed because it has become a habit to work for the common good, and because of a conscious realisation (that has become a habit) of the necessity of working for the common good—labour as the requirement of a healthy organism.
It must be clear to everybody that we, i.e., our society, our social system, are still a very long way from the application of this form of labour on a broad, really mass scale.
But the very fact that this question has been raised, and raised both by the whole of the advanced proletariat (the Communist Party and the trade unions) and by the state authorities, is a step in this direction.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/apr/11.htm
Actually during the early phase of the Russian revolution even Lenin (spit) seemed to advocate the introduction of the gift economy with his encouragement of the subbotnik movement.
V. I. Lenin, SPEECH DELIVERED AT, THE FIRST CONGRESS OF AGRICULTURAL COMMUNES AND AGRICULTURAL ARTELS DECEMBER 4, 1919
To bear this out, I would refer to what in our cities has been called subbotniks. This is the name given to the several hours' unpaid voluntary work done by city workers over and above the usual working day and devoted to some public need………….. that they may set an example of real communist labour, i.e., labour performed gratis.
http://www.marx2mao.net/Lenin/FCAC19.html
I suspect that link doesn’t work any more.
I think it is reasonable to surmise that Engels was also critical of labour vouchers in Ante Duhring.
Karl and Fred had dug themselves into an intellectual theoretical hole concerning their position on idealism and setting up crystal ball visions about immaterial what might be possible in the future but wasn’t then.
Dave B
11th October 2011, 19:22
1844 Letter from Engels to Marx in Paris
The Teutons are all still very muddled about the practicability of communism; to dispose of this absurdity I intend to write a short pamphlet showing that communism has already been put into practice and describing in popular terms how this is at present being done in England and America. [12] The thing will take me three days or so, and should prove very enlightening for these fellows. I’ve already observed this when talking to people here.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/letters/44_10_01.htm#n12
Eg.
Frederick Engels Description of Recently Founded Communist Colonies Still in Existence; Written: in mid-October 1844
Amongst these people no one is obliged to work against his will, and no one seeks work in vain. They have no poor-houses and infirmaries, having not a single person poor and destitute, nor any abandoned widows and orphans; all their needs are met and they need fear no want. In their ten towns there is not a single gendarme or police officer, no judge, lawyer or soldier, no prison or penitentiary; and yet there is proper order in all their affairs. The laws of the land are not for them and as far as they are concerned could just as well be abolished and nobody would notice any difference for they are the most peaceable citizens and have never yielded a single criminal for the prisons. They enjoy, as we said, the most absolute community of goods and have no trade and no money among themselves.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/10/15.htm
And from Lenin;
V. I. Lenin, From the Destruction of the Old Social System, To the Creation of the New
Communist labour in the narrower and stricter sense of the term is labour performed gratis for the benefit of society, labour performed not as a definite duty, not for the purpose of obtaining a right to certain products, not according to previously established and legally fixed quotas, but voluntary labour, irrespective of quotas;
it is labour performed without expectation of reward, without reward as a condition, labour performed because it has become a habit to work for the common good, and because of a conscious realisation (that has become a habit) of the necessity of working for the common good—labour as the requirement of a healthy organism.
It must be clear to everybody that we, i.e., our society, our social system, are still a very long way from the application of this form of labour on a broad, really mass scale.
But the very fact that this question has been raised, and raised both by the whole of the advanced proletariat (the Communist Party and the trade unions) and by the state authorities, is a step in this direction.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/apr/11.htm
Trotsky;
Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, Chapter 3, Socialism and the State
The material premise of communism should be so high a development of the economic powers of man that productive labor, having ceased to be a burden, will not require any goad, and the distribution of life’s goods, existing in continual abundance, will not demand – as it does not now in any well-off family or “decent” boarding-house – any control except that of education, habit and social opinion. Speaking frankly, I think it would be pretty dull-witted to consider such a really modest perspective “utopian.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch03.htm
Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism
The Mensheviks are against this. This is quite comprehensible, because in reality they are against the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is to this, in the long run, that the whole question is reduced. The Kautskians are against the dictatorship of the proletariat, and are thereby against all its consequences.
Both economic and political compulsion are only forms of the expression of the dictatorship of the working class in two closely connected regions. True, Abramovich demonstrated to us most learnedly that under Socialism there will be no compulsion, that the principle of compulsion contradicts Socialism, that under Socialism we shall be moved by the feeling of duty, the habit of working, the attractiveness of labor, etc., etc. This is unquestionable.
Only this unquestionable truth must be a little extended. In point of fact, under Socialism there will not exist the apparatus of compulsion itself, namely, the State: for it will have melted away entirely into a producing and consuming commune. None the less, the road to Socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the State. And you and I are just passing through that period. Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the State, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the most ruthless form of State, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction. Now just that insignificant little fact – that historical step of the State dictatorship – Abramovich, and in his person the whole of Menshevism, did not notice; and consequently, he has fallen over it.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/terrcomm/ch08.htm
Kuatsky;
Karl Kautsky The Labour Revolution
III. The Economic Revolution X. MONEY
Besides this rigid allocation of an equal measure of the necessaries and enjoyments of life to each individual, another form of Socialism without money is conceivable, the Leninite interpretation of what Marx described as the second phase of communism: each to produce of his own accord as much as he can, the productivity of labour being so high and the quantity and variety of products so immense that everyone may be trusted to take what he needs. For this purpose money would not be needed.
We have not yet progressed so far as this. At present we are unable to divine whether we shall ever reach this state. But that Socialism with which we are alone concerned to-day, whose features we can discern with some precision from the indications that already exist, will unfortunately not have this enviable freedom and abundance at its disposal, and will therefore not be able to do without money.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1924/labour/ch03_j.htm#sb
Hyndman;
Henry Mayers Hyndman The Record of an Adventurous Life
Chapter XV Start of Social Democracy
“A much more serious objection to Kropotkin and other Anarchists is their wholly unscrupulous habit of reiterating statements that have been repeatedly proved to be incorrect, and even outrageous, by the men and women to whom they are attributed. Time after time I have told Kropotkin, time after time has he read it in print, that Social-Democrats work for the complete overthrow of the wages system. He has admitted this to be so. But a month or so afterwards the same old oft-refuted misrepresentation appears in the same old authoritative fashion, as if no refutation of the calumny, that we wish to maintain wage-slavery, had ever been made.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/hyndman/1911/adventure/chap15.html
Peter Kropotkin 1920
The Wage System
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/kropotkin-peter/1920/wage.htm
J. V. Stalin ANARCHISM or SOCIALISM? 1906
Future society will be socialist society. This means also that, with the abolition of exploitation commodity production and buying and selling will also be abolished and, therefore, there will be no room for buyers and sellers of labour power, for employers and employed -- there will be only free workers.
Future society will be socialist society. This means, lastly, that in that society the abolition of wage-labour will be accompanied by the complete abolition of the private ownership of the instruments and means of production; there will be neither poor proletarians nor rich capitalists -- there will be only workers who collectively own all the land and minerals, all the forests, all the factories and mills, all the railways, etc.
As you see, the main purpose of production in the future will be to satisfy the needs of society and not to produce goods for sale in order to increase the profits of the capitalists. Where there will be no room for commodity production, struggle for profits, etc.
It is also clear that future production will be socialistically organised, highly developed production, which will take into account the needs of society and will produce as much as society needs. Here there will be no room whether for scattered production, competition, crises, or unemployment.
Where there are no classes, where there are neither rich nor poor, there is no need for a state, there is no
page 337
need either for political power, which oppresses the poor and protects the rich. Consequently, in socialist society there will be no need for the existence of political power.
That is why Karl Marx said as far back as 1846:
"The working class in the course of its development Will substitute for the old bourgeois society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called . . . " (see The Poverty of Philosophy).[89]
That is why Engels said in 1884:
"The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no conception of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity. . . . We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. The society that will organise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the Museum of Antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe"
(see The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State).[
At the same time, it is self-evident that for the purpose of administering public affairs there will have to be in socialist society, in addition to local offices which
page 338
will collect all sorts of information, a central statistical bureau, which will collect information about the needs of the whole of society, and then distribute the various kinds of work among the working people accordingly. It will also be necessary to hold conferences, and particularly congresses, the decisions of which will certainly be binding upon the comrades in the minority until the next congress is held.
Lastly, it is obvious that free and comradely labour should result in an equally comradely, and complete, satisfaction of all needs in the future socialist society This means that if future society demands from each of its members as much labour as he can perform, it, in its turn, must provide each member with all the products he needs. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! -- such is the basis upon which the future collectivist system must be created. It goes without saying that in the first stage of socialism, when elements who have not yet grown accustomed to work are being drawn into the new way of life, when the productive forces also will not yet have been sufficiently developed and there will still be "dirty" and "clean" work to do, the application of the principle: "to each according to his needs," will undoubtelly be greatly hindered and, as a consequence, society will be obliged temporarily to take some other path, a middle path. But it is also clear that when future society runs into its groove, when the survivals of capitalism will have been eradicated, the only principle that will conform to socialist society will be the one pointed out above.
That is why Marx said in 1875:
page 339
"In a higher phase of communist (i.e., socialist) society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of livelihood but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual . . . only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois law be crossed in iis entirety and society inscribe on its banners: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs'" (see Critique of the Gotha Programme).[91].
Such, in general, is the picture of future socialist society according to the theory of Marx.
This is all very well. But is the achievement of socialism conceivable? Can we assume that man will rid himself of his "savage habits"?
Or again: if everybody receives according to his needs, can we assume that the level of the productive forces of socialist society will be adequate for this?
Socialist society presupposes an adequate development of productive forces and socialist consciousness among men, their socialist enlightenment. At the present time the development of productive forces is hindered by the existence of capitalist property, but if we bear in mind that this capitalist property will not exist in future society, it is self-evident that the productive forces will increase tenfold. Nor must it be forgotten that in future society the hundreds of thousands of present-day parasites, and also the unemployed, will set to work and augment the ranks of the working people; and this will greatly stimulate the development of the
page 340
productive forces. As regards men's "savage" sentiments and opinions, these are not as eternal as some people imagine; there was a time, under primitive communism, when man did not recognise private property; there came a time, the time of individualistic production, when private property dominated the hearts and minds of men; a new time is coming, the time of socialist production -- will it be surprising if the hearts and minds of men become imbued with socialist strivings? Does not being determine the "sentiments" and opinions of men?
http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/AS07.html#c3
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