How do we prioritise production under [hp] communism? [Archive]

Tim Cornelis

9th April 2013, 17:25

Resources -- time, labour, and raw materials -- are scarce. We cannot manufacture an unlimited supply of all goods in a limited time, hence the need to prioritise the production of a particular good over another. In a price system, this can easily be done. Consumers choose what they prefer buy purchasing the good. Under higher-phase communism such a price system does not exist. Yet we still need to prioritise. Insisting bread is more important than yachts and that we ought therefore to prioritise the former over the latter is insufficient as there are thousands if not millions of products.

But even assuming there are just the two, it's insufficient. For the sake of argument, let's ridiculously assume that yachts and bread require the exact same resources and are the only two products in society. We have 100 people who want 200 breads and 50 yachts, but we only have enough resources to manufacture either 200 breads or 50 yachts. We can prioritise bread, and therefore produce 200 breads. However, a price system would have revealed that the general equilibrium of consumer preferences would have been attained if there had been 150 breads produced and 25 yachts. There is a diminishing preference when consuming goods, breads are needed but only to an extent. At a certain level, people prefer a TV over bread. So how do we arrange this under higher-phase communism?

So in a 'discussion' of sorts (more like one way traffic) with Michael Albert, I proposed this:

General Framework of Priority. It would consist of 5 (or 10, or 25, or 17) categories of priority (democratically established). The lowest would first get the resources allocated to it necessary to fulfill consumer demand and then category 2, etc. So in a state of plentiful it may look like this:
Category 1: 100% of requested consumer goods produced
Category 2: 100% of requested consumer goods produced
Category 3: 100% of requested consumer goods produced
Category 4: 85% of requested consumer goods produced
Category 5: 10% of requested consumer goods produced
In such a scenario, the absence of general equilibrium would not be very problematic as most needs are satisfied except the most luxurious. But is such a scenario probable? Let's look at another:
Category 1: 100% of requested consumer goods produced
Category 2: 80% of requested consumer goods produced
Category 3: 60% of requested consumer goods produced
Category 4: 50% of requested consumer goods produced
Category 5: 10% of requested consumer goods produced
In such a scenario the lack of general equilibrium is much more problematic as consumer preferences exponentially suffer from it. Either we adopt rationing through labour points in its place, or is there another way of fixing it while retaining free-access? This is an idea I've been toying with, but has its own problems. Say, consumers submit their needs or requests in advance a week or a month, but also reveal they are willing to give up X amount of Y of a lower category if it means they can have access to one Q of a higher category. On an individual basis this would mean that the same resources used for X amount of Y would need to be used in one Q, which is highly unlikely. But collectively, if many people submit this it is much more likely to coincide. But two problems arise, 1) it is still likely there wont be enough resources for all requested goods of the higher category, so some consumers would then have given up goods of the lower category for nothing in return. Perhaps they will have to wait a week or a month (as even category 5 10% of requested goods are produced which would include them). Problem 2) people will give up as less as possible for as much as possible, e.g. I am willing to give up one loaf of bread of category 1 if it means I get one Mercedez of category 4. If everyone does this, then there will still be an immense lack of resources. So is this fixable? Perhaps the rule would be, you only get an equivalent amount of resources back that you have put in, but given that there is no universal common denominator, i.e. price, how would we calculate this? Perhaps 'shadow prices' could be used. All resources or goods are assigned prices based on the average socially necessary labour time and some means of supply and demand (shortage means increase in shadow price, surplus means it'll be lowered). Then, all consumer goods would have a shadow price. A loaf of bread would be 1 (for instance), a Mercedez 100,000. So I would need to give up 100,000 loafs of bread to consumer a Mercedez instead. These shadow prices would merely serve as an inverted barter market for the regulation of consumer preferences. Consumption would not require actual labour points and the general framework of priority would still be in place, but personal consumer changes between categories could be arranged through shadow prices.
Then there is the problem of time. I can't give up 100,000 loafs of bread in one month, so how is this fixed?
I DON'T KNOW, I'm just spitballing here.

Albert said this was infeasible, and perhaps it is, though he didn't specify why. Would you agree? And more importantly, what other means of prioritising could there be under higher-phase communism?

ckaihatsu

10th April 2013, 18:53

Resources -- time, labour, and raw materials -- are scarce.

Minor point -- how about 'limited', or 'finite', instead of the politically-loaded 'scarce' -- ?

We cannot manufacture an unlimited supply of all goods in a limited time, hence the need to prioritise the production of a particular good over another. In a price system, this can easily be done. Consumers choose what they prefer buy purchasing the good. Under higher-phase communism such a price system does not exist. Yet we still need to prioritise. Insisting bread is more important than yachts and that we ought therefore to prioritise the former over the latter is insufficient as there are thousands if not millions of products.

But even assuming there are just the two, it's insufficient. For the sake of argument, let's ridiculously assume that yachts and bread require the exact same resources and are the only two products in society. We have 100 people who want 200 breads and 50 yachts, but we only have enough resources to manufacture either 200 breads or 50 yachts. We can prioritise bread, and therefore produce 200 breads. However, a price system would have revealed that the general equilibrium of consumer preferences would have been attained if there had been 150 breads produced and 25 yachts. There is a diminishing preference when consuming goods, breads are needed but only to an extent. At a certain level, people prefer a TV over bread. So how do we arrange this under higher-phase communism?

One aspect is that we wouldn't need to be so 'anal' about small portions of surplus produced -- any 'textbook' example is good for practicing but it also encourages us to think in *very* exacting terms, instead of taking a more-sovereign, overarching view of things.

If there's an unclaimed surplus of 50 loaves and 25 yachts it could simply be an administrative matter, to be rolled into the next time period, either for use as-is, or to be used far-later as biomass or spare parts, respectively.

We shouldn't think that our politics straightjackets us into making highly detailed mathematical proofs that would leave economists at a loss for words.

So in a 'discussion' of sorts (more like one way traffic) with Michael Albert, I proposed this:

General Framework of Priority. It would consist of 5 (or 10, or 25, or 17) categories of priority (democratically established). The lowest would first get the resources allocated to it necessary to fulfill consumer demand and then category 2, etc. So in a state of plentiful it may look like this:
Category 1: 100% of requested consumer goods produced
Category 2: 100% of requested consumer goods produced
Category 3: 100% of requested consumer goods produced
Category 4: 85% of requested consumer goods produced
Category 5: 10% of requested consumer goods produced
In such a scenario, the absence of general equilibrium would not be very problematic as most needs are satisfied except the most luxurious. But is such a scenario probable? Let's look at another:
Category 1: 100% of requested consumer goods produced
Category 2: 80% of requested consumer goods produced
Category 3: 60% of requested consumer goods produced
Category 4: 50% of requested consumer goods produced
Category 5: 10% of requested consumer goods produced
In such a scenario the lack of general equilibrium is much more problematic as consumer preferences exponentially suffer from it.

Why wouldn't these resulting distributions be known in advance? With pre-planning there'd be no 'surprises' the way you're indicating here.

If there's a genuine lack of material availability vs. consumer orders / preferences, then it would be tough shit for the moment and pick something else, with the possibility of re-tooling production to go in that direction to satisfy such preferences at a later time.

Either we adopt rationing through labour points in its place, or is there another way of fixing it while retaining free-access? This is an idea I've been toying with, but has its own problems. Say, consumers submit their needs or requests in advance a week or a month, but also reveal they are willing to give up X amount of Y of a lower category if it means they can have access to one Q of a higher category.

This is a purely abstract formulation, one that may not be logistically realistic, unless the same laborers have universal skills and can readily shift from doing one kind of production to another.

(More realistic is to ask if *both* 'Y' and 'Q' can be easily produced, in sufficient quantities. Consider that with automation production becomes far less labor-intensive.)

On an individual basis this would mean that the same resources used for X amount of Y would need to be used in one Q, which is highly unlikely. But collectively, if many people submit this it is much more likely to coincide. But two problems arise, 1) it is still likely there wont be enough resources for all requested goods of the higher category, so some consumers would then have given up goods of the lower category for nothing in return.

Again, is there planning, or isn't there -- ?

Perhaps they will have to wait a week or a month (as even category 5 10% of requested goods are produced which would include them).

There would have to be a way of prioritizing demand among the individual consumers, in the absence of a price system. (Consider that a venue for a music concert is limited in physical size and capacity.)

Problem 2) people will give up as less as possible for as much as possible, e.g. I am willing to give up one loaf of bread of category 1 if it means I get one Mercedez of category 4. If everyone does this, then there will still be an immense lack of resources. So is this fixable? Perhaps the rule would be, you only get an equivalent amount of resources back that you have put in, but given that there is no universal common denominator, i.e. price, how would we calculate this?

Yes, true.

Perhaps 'shadow prices' could be used.

Pricing of *any* kind inherently invites financialization since people will want to hedge against possible future changes in prices, thereby turning whatever 'currency' into a commodity itself.

All resources or goods are assigned prices based on the average socially necessary labour time

This part sounds intriguing -- you may want to develop it further.

and some means of supply and demand (shortage means increase in shadow price, surplus means it'll be lowered). Then, all consumer goods would have a shadow price. A loaf of bread would be 1 (for instance), a Mercedez 100,000. So I would need to give up 100,000 loafs of bread to consumer a Mercedez instead. These shadow prices would merely serve as an inverted barter market for the regulation of consumer preferences. Consumption would not require actual labour points and the general framework of priority would still be in place, but personal consumer changes between categories could be arranged through shadow prices.
Then there is the problem of time. I can't give up 100,000 loafs of bread in one month, so how is this fixed?
I DON'T KNOW, I'm just spitballing here.

Albert said this was infeasible, and perhaps it is, though he didn't specify why. Would you agree?

Negating the market system means we have to have a feasible alternative in mind that can readily supplant it without inherent logistical complications and bother.

If an alternate 'point' system is introduced the question would then be what its unit value would be based on, or mean -- the point system would have to enjoy ongoing solid political support and not be seen as needlessly arbitrary or biased. Generally this kind of economics is associated with a regime of bureaucratic collectivism, or statism, for authority.

And more importantly, what other means of prioritising could there be under higher-phase communism?

I'll return to this. (You may have already seen my position elaborated elsewhere here at RevLeft.)

subcp

11th April 2013, 18:19

Tim Cornelis

11th April 2013, 19:03

Minor point -- how about 'limited', or 'finite', instead of the politically-loaded 'scarce' -- ?

One aspect is that we wouldn't need to be so 'anal' about small portions of surplus produced -- any 'textbook' example is good for practicing but it also encourages us to think in *very* exacting terms, instead of taking a more-sovereign, overarching view of things.

If there's an unclaimed surplus of 50 loaves and 25 yachts it could simply be an administrative matter, to be rolled into the next time period, either for use as-is, or to be used far-later as biomass or spare parts, respectively.

The problem I mentioned concerns the lack of resources to produce enough to satisfy all consumer wants, let alone produce a surplus.

We shouldn't think that our politics straightjackets us into making highly detailed mathematical proofs that would leave economists at a loss for words.

Why wouldn't these resulting distributions be known in advance? With pre-planning there'd be no 'surprises' the way you're indicating here.

What do you mean "pre-planning"? Consumers indicate the number of goods they want, but there is a lack of resources to produce all.

If there's a genuine lack of material availability vs. consumer orders / preferences, then it would be tough shit for the moment and pick something else, with the possibility of re-tooling production to go in that direction to satisfy such preferences at a later time.

"The moment"? This assumes that generally there is enough resources to produce goods of all kinds, at all times. The problem is, such resources are not widely available.

This is a purely abstract formulation, one that may not be logistically realistic, unless the same laborers have universal skills and can readily shift from doing one kind of production to another.

No it's not. It doesn't presuppose workers shifting work. Workers in A produce good Q, workers in B produce good Z. Only the amount of raw materials allocated to A and B will change.

(More realistic is to ask if *both* 'Y' and 'Q' can be easily produced, in sufficient quantities. Consider that with automation production becomes far less labor-intensive.)

Automation does not enhance raw materials.

Again, is there planning, or isn't there -- ?

What do you mean by that?

There would have to be a way of prioritizing demand among the individual consumers, in the absence of a price system. (Consider that a venue for a music concert is limited in physical size and capacity.)

Yes, true.

Pricing of *any* kind inherently invites financialization since people will want to hedge against possible future changes in prices, thereby turning whatever 'currency' into a commodity itself.

No, because these are shadow prices. Consumption does not actually require purchasing, and no currency exists.

This part sounds intriguing -- you may want to develop it further.

Negating the market system means we have to have a feasible alternative in mind that can readily supplant it without inherent logistical complications and bother.

If an alternate 'point' system is introduced the question would then be what its unit value would be based on, or mean -- the point system would have to enjoy ongoing solid political support and not be seen as needlessly arbitrary or biased. Generally this kind of economics is associated with a regime of bureaucratic collectivism, or statism, for authority.

I suppose.

Everything free with no accounting; with free access to all means of production.

It's not a matter of just 'using what capitalism has built'- the ability to create a world of abundance of consumer goods and services for free, but also doing away with the idea that we have to account for every good or service because of an anxiety that it must be put to the right use every time.

People will develop new ways of producing and living and socializing. I don't think we can know what it will look specifically, and attempts to create an accounting system will lead back to capital accumulation before people (free of class society) would have the opportunity to build and form these new ways of living, producing and socializing.

This is beyond utopian. No accounting at all?

Abundance of consumer goods? Do you think we have the resources to manufacture three TVs per person, and a million other goods for each person, including luxurious goods? "Must be put to right use," that isn't the issue at all.

ckaihatsu

11th April 2013, 19:08

ckaihatsu

11th April 2013, 20:46

The problem I mentioned concerns the lack of resources to produce enough to satisfy all consumer wants, let alone produce a surplus.

Yeah -- I'll explicitly note that I have an issue with this conception as a starting point since it's both unrealistic, given a post-capitalist collectivist mass production, and it plays into right-wing scare tactics of an assumed blanket "scarcity" under anything except capitalism.

What do you mean "pre-planning"? Consumers indicate the number of goods they want, but there is a lack of resources to produce all.

Okay, never mind -- that was from my tangential interpretation of your scenario.

If there's a genuine lack of material availability vs. consumer orders / preferences, then it would be tough shit for the moment and pick something else, with the possibility of re-tooling production to go in that direction to satisfy such preferences at a later time.

"The moment"? This assumes that generally there is enough resources to produce goods of all kinds, at all times. The problem is, such resources are not widely available.

Well, you're being vague about which resources and their per-item likelihood of being sufficiently produced, post-capitalism.

I take exception to this topic being brought forth as though all resources are the same in ease of accessibility, or procurement -- obviously, even post-markets, some materials would be easier to get to and/or make, while others would be more difficult, and thus more 'scarce'.

Either we adopt rationing through labour points in its place, or is there another way of fixing it while retaining free-access? This is an idea I've been toying with, but has its own problems. Say, consumers submit their needs or requests in advance a week or a month, but also reveal they are willing to give up X amount of Y of a lower category if it means they can have access to one Q of a higher category.

This is a purely abstract formulation, one that may not be logistically realistic, unless the same laborers have universal skills and can readily shift from doing one kind of production to another.

No it's not. It doesn't presuppose workers shifting work. Workers in A produce good Q, workers in B produce good Z. Only the amount of raw materials allocated to A and B will change.

If you're saying that it's apples-and-oranges regarding the labor for 'Y' or 'Q' (or 'Z'), then the same holds true for the resources required -- would loaves really be competing with yachts for raw materials, for example -- ?

Automation does not enhance raw materials.

Yes it does, in relation to (liberated) labor inputs -- water and chemical flavorings can be turned into soft drinks without the need for workers to handle each individual bottle or can.

On an individual basis this would mean that the same resources used for X amount of Y would need to be used in one Q, which is highly unlikely. But collectively, if many people submit this it is much more likely to coincide. But two problems arise, 1) it is still likely there wont be enough resources for all requested goods of the higher category, so some consumers would then have given up goods of the lower category for nothing in return.

Again, is there planning, or isn't there -- ?

What do you mean by that?

I mean that you're implying that consumers would be taking a gamble in placing their orders -- that there would be some kind of uncertainty in the period between the ordering and the production / fulfillment.

I ask if such logistical matters couldn't be organized and handled properly in advance, so that there's no uncertainty about who receives what -- there would have to be some method for prioritizing consumer demand among those who want to be consumers of a particular item that may not be deliverable to all who order it.

Pricing of *any* kind inherently invites financialization since people will want to hedge against possible future changes in prices, thereby turning whatever 'currency' into a commodity itself.

No, because these are shadow prices. Consumption does not actually require purchasing, and no currency exists.

Negating the market system means we have to have a feasible alternative in mind that can readily supplant it without inherent logistical complications and bother.

If an alternate 'point' system is introduced the question would then be what its unit value would be based on, or mean -- the point system would have to enjoy ongoing solid political support and not be seen as needlessly arbitrary or biased. Generally this kind of economics is associated with a regime of bureaucratic collectivism, or statism, for authority.

I suppose.

Then I have to ask what the 'shadow prices' are based on, and indicate, exactly -- if a society's bulk 'socially necessary labor time' can be arrived-at, and broken-down into individually proportionate portions, would 'shadow prices' be nominal fractions of the 1/1 of the 'average socially necessary labor time' -- ?

Workers-Control-Over-Prod

11th April 2013, 20:54

ckaihatsu

11th April 2013, 21:18

[A]ttempts to create an accounting system will lead back to capital accumulation before people (free of class society) would have the opportunity to build and form these new ways of living, producing and socializing.

I say that I have two minds about this approach because, while I think / know that it's politically and logistically *possible*, I don't think it would be the *best* approach to the topic of a post-capitalist economics.

Here's a formulation that's almost 'number-free':

Rotation system of work roles

http://s6.postimage.org/6pho0fbot/2403306060046342459_Gtc_Sd_P_fs.jpg (http://postimage.org/image/6pho0fbot/)

The downside is that this model is highly locality-specific and would probably depend on consistent physical proximities among the participants. It would necessarily be too communal-like, and wouldn't fulfill the promise of a communism that *supersedes* capitalism, in overall quality.

Tim Cornelis

11th April 2013, 21:33

JPSartre12

11th April 2013, 21:35

Tim Cornelis

11th April 2013, 21:57

Production is orientated under higher-phase communism based upon a need-be basis. Of course, we're also assuming that the means of production are sophisticated enough to overcome scarcity at this point, so the concept of "need" under communism is out-of-place.

Then the question is, is that realistic? No "scarcity," being able to manufacture millions of types of productions for billions of people.

JPSartre12

11th April 2013, 22:36

Then the question is, is that realistic? No "scarcity," being able to manufacture millions of types of productions for billions of people.

Yes, it is realistic. We already have the means to overcome much of the world's scarcity, we just lack the planning system to allocate and distribute production effectively.

Red Nightmare

11th April 2013, 22:41

We don't really know since communism hasn't happened yet but I imagine that production will be prioritized on the basis of need and scientific planning.

ckaihatsu

11th April 2013, 22:41

I forgot about 3D printers.

Without 3D printers though, my question still applies.

While we should be pro-industrialization and pro-technology, we shouldn't fall into the trap of an arbitrary technological determinism -- just because 3D printers come around doesn't mean that the conventional industrial (assembly-line) process will be immediately and entirely supplanted.

We could also add-in the existing issue of armaments production under capitalism -- like energy sourcing -- where conventional methods for production are also the most robust and lucrative.

Production is orientated under higher-phase communism based upon a need-be basis. Of course, we're also assuming that the means of production are sophisticated enough to overcome scarcity at this point, so the concept of "need" under communism is out-of-place.

The concept of 'need', or want, would probably be *far more* elastic and subjective in a higher-phase communism, since people would be liberated to live as they like, with egalitarian access to material resources.

Crixus

11th April 2013, 23:21

Graphs and charts or it didnt happen ;) I'd say food, housing and infrastructure first. Leisure and entertainment last. I also think leisure and entertainment would take different form under communism. It would be more community orientated, as in festivals, movies shown in parks at night, pick-nicks, BBQ's etc. Not that these things don't take place now it just seems under capitalism we have a fetish for muti colored nick-knacks, gold plated shoes and arriving at red carpet events in helicopters.

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subcp

14th April 2013, 02:40

This is beyond utopian. No accounting at all?

Abundance of consumer goods? Do you think we have the resources to manufacture three TVs per person, and a million other goods for each person, including luxurious goods? "Must be put to right use," that isn't the issue at all.This is assuming that the type of life led by the average Westerner will be the standard by which production will be oriented so that all the people of Earth can have an SUV and a car, a house big enough for 10 people for every 2 people, etc. If we accept communism as a material necessity and not an ideal, capitalist crisis will force people to find new ways to live and produce.

What do you think needs to be accounted for? Everything? (TV's, all types of automobiles, etc.). The organizations which do the accounting and the social mechanism's that come with accounting (rationing of resources- which requires an expansive organization and authority), which can include currency (and things like labor vouchers), probably also means organs to coerce the order of the accounting- to stop factory workers from 'smuggling', to stop people from informally trading (creating a de facto black market)- sound a lot like what already exists.

ckaihatsu

14th April 2013, 03:14

Everything free with no accounting; with free access to all means of production.

It's not a matter of just 'using what capitalism has built'- the ability to create a world of abundance of consumer goods and services for free, but also doing away with the idea that we have to account for every good or service because of an anxiety that it must be put to the right use every time.

People will develop new ways of producing and living and socializing. I don't think we can know what it will look specifically, and attempts to create an accounting system will lead back to capital accumulation before people (free of class society) would have the opportunity to build and form these new ways of living, producing and socializing.

This is assuming that the type of life led by the average Westerner will be the standard by which production will be oriented so that all the people of Earth can have an SUV and a car, a house big enough for 10 people for every 2 people, etc. If we accept communism as a material necessity and not an ideal, capitalist crisis will force people to find new ways to live and produce.

What do you think needs to be accounted for? Everything? (TV's, all types of automobiles, etc.). The organizations which do the accounting and the social mechanism's that come with accounting (rationing of resources- which requires an expansive organization and authority), which can include currency (and things like labor vouchers), probably also means organs to coerce the order of the accounting- to stop factory workers from 'smuggling', to stop people from informally trading (creating a de facto black market)- sound a lot like what already exists.

If such a society decides to eschew white-collar / administrative / authoritative structures we might have a world very much like primitive communism, but with open-access to the remnants of the capitalist era. Arguably this may even be what many or most people consciously or subconsciously have in mind when struggling for an end to class rule.

If "a world of abundance of consumer goods and services for free" is to be the case, though, then the sheer logistics of the supply chains involved in making complex production possible would definitely necessitate formal record-keeping, and also an administrative accounting of some sort. It wouldn't necessarily have to be authoritarian or even contain the potential for a reversion to capital -- as long as such a civilization had the cohesion and ongoing political support (and participation) for such a society.

Most to the point, I think, is figuring out what the 'economics' of a post-capitalist political economy could feasibly be, at various extents of science, research, innovation, culture, recreation, sophistication, and/or lifestyles.

It's always tempting to just leave off at the (important) defeat of capitalist relations, but I think we'd be better off to make tentative plans as early as possible.

subcp

14th April 2013, 23:33

ckaihatsu

15th April 2013, 00:52

I tend to think of it as: a Russian or Polish peasant in the 18th or early 19th century could probably not fathom the way of life that would supplant what was 'reality' for centuries and would remain so for the foreseeable and distant future in a few short years- far from primitivism or technocracy, it's likely the infrastructure, technology and productive-distributive-consumptive apparatus of capital will develop at a rapid pace away from commodity production in the direction of meeting all human needs and wants (and continue to develop after the higher phase of communism has been realized)- but it'd be such a thorough transformation of everything about human society that it's probably the same as a Roman slave or Polish peasant trying to contemplate 'free labor' and consumerism of post-war Western capitalism- in their own time.

It's always tempting to just leave off at the (important) defeat of capitalist relations, but I think we'd be better off to make tentative plans as early as possible.

It seems reasonable, maybe even especially during the dictatorship of the proletariat or even the lower phase of communism- but in the higher phase, everything is supposed to have been already transformed (and the arguments against even reasonable seeming planning theories like syndicalism, IOPS or 'The Fundamentals of Communist Production and Distribution' are compelling).

I tend to think that a good part of revolutionary politics should speak to the question of how social production *could* be done, beyond the exploitation and oppression of capital-based relations.

[A]ttempts to create an accounting system will lead back to capital accumulation before people (free of class society) would have the opportunity to build and form these new ways of living, producing and socializing.

How do we prioritise production under [hypothetical] communism?

If the question boils down to a humane form of societal organization that can *supersede* capitalism in both productivity for actual human need, and in complexity / sophistication, then those requirements would remain the same during and after a socialist revolution as they do today -- this gives us a foundation for reasoning that can provide explanatory power, at very least.

I noted at another thread that commodity-production relations affect the individual at the social-context level, overlapping-with, and in-addition-to labor-exploitation 'alienation':

[A] personage-centric [formulation] implicitly politically commodifies the individual, bringing the absurdity of elitism (royalty, nobility, celebrity) down to the common-person level.

Instead of democratically characterizing individuals and their 'deserving-ness' we should strive for a *distribution* model that looks to *flood* everyone with automation-produced goods and services so that reaching out for choice tangible objects is as simple as installing free software is today, in the *digital* domain.

This is basically a call for a *production*-centric orientation, away from political or economic representation that's concentrated into individual personages, as we are all-too-familiar with from the pages of history.

ckaihatsu

15th April 2013, 04:55

All resources or goods are assigned prices based on the average socially necessary labour time

[I]f a society's bulk 'socially necessary labor time' can be arrived-at, and broken-down into individually proportionate portions, would 'shadow prices' be nominal fractions of the 1/1 of the 'average socially necessary labor time' -- ?

While noting that I don't agree with the concept or practice of 'shadow prices' -- or any prices for that matter -- the following chapter in the text that subcp referenced contains a good layout of a process based on 'average social production time':

The fact that the individual productive establishments have determined the average labour-time necessary for their product does not mean that the Marxist concept of a social average has been attained. To achieve this, all productive establishments operating in the same sector of production must enter into cooperation with one another. In our example, for instance, all shoe factories must determine the total average out of all the various individual factory averages. Where one factory arrives at an average of 3 hours per pair of shoes, another at 3.25 hours and yet another at 3.5, then the average labour-time would lie at 3.25. (This is, of course, only an approximation; for the accurate formulation, see Chapter 9 of this work).

Thus we can see that the need to calculate the average social labour-time is already leading to a horizontal coordination of productive establishments. This however is not being carried out by a bureaucratic apparatus controlled by the state, but grows out of the factories themselves from below. The whys and wherefores of the system are completely clear and understandable for every worker, whilst at the same time the necessity for open book-keeping brings everything under public control.

What we see here, therefore, is a system of regulation within the production group, and indeed one which has been brought into operation by the productive establishments themselves. It is not a mode of regulation which depends upon "mutual aid" but, on the contrary, is an exact method of calculation. The productivity of a particular productive establishment can be determined accurately, and by this act the limits are exactly fixed within which the losses and surpluses must lie. Productivity thus becomes an exact factor and can be expressed in a single cipher, the Productivity Factor. This factor defines accurately just how large or small the plus or minus figures of a given productive establishment will be.

'The Fundamentals of Communist Production and Distribution'

Group of International Communists

Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution
1930

CHAPTER 4
Average Social Production Time as the Basis of Production

http://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/gik/1930/04.htm

Tim Cornelis

15th April 2013, 09:42

This is assuming that the type of life led by the average Westerner will be the standard by which production will be oriented so that all the people of Earth can have an SUV and a car, a house big enough for 10 people for every 2 people, etc. If we accept communism as a material necessity and not an ideal, capitalist crisis will force people to find new ways to live and produce.

This brings us no inch closer to an answer. We have the technic capability of producing SUVs and a Western mode of life, hence the want (or "need") to have it exists. But you say, you can't have it because we have finite (i.e. scarce) resources and not everyone can have a SUV or two — we simply lack the means to produce it. Hence we need to have some mechanism of allocation that priorities other modes of transportation for which there are plenty of resources over the manufacturing of SUVs. So you actually expose the problem you deem to be able to casually throw over your shoulder.

What do you think needs to be accounted for? Everything? (TV's, all types of automobiles, etc.). The organizations which do the accounting and the social mechanism's that come with accounting (rationing of resources- which requires an expansive organization and authority), which can include currency (and things like labor vouchers), probably also means organs to coerce the order of the accounting- to stop factory workers from 'smuggling', to stop people from informally trading (creating a de facto black market)- sound a lot like what already exists.

It is beyond me how you can even entertain the notion of using no accounting whatsoever — it is delusional. No accounting is randomness, we don't know how many people want what, how much resources we have, our productive potential, we don't know anything so all our activities are reduced to random conglomerations. Mind boggling delusional and ignorant to think we can do away with accounting.

Vladimir Innit Lenin

15th April 2013, 10:15

Accounting does not need to take the formalised form that it does today. In a post-monetary world, there must surely be a mechanism for accounting possible that does not require proxy units of measurement, or large swathes of bureaucracy?

If production is a) for use, b) democratically decided, and c) localised in terms of deciding both a) and b), then accounting will surely be a more simplified process, rather than trying to join up millions of units of 'apples and oranges' measurements.

subcp

15th April 2013, 19:24

This brings us no inch closer to an answer. We have the technic capability of producing SUVs and a Western mode of life, hence the want (or "need") to have it exists. But you say, you can't have it because we have finite (i.e. scarce) resources and not everyone can have a SUV or two — we simply lack the means to produce it. Hence we need to have some mechanism of allocation that priorities other modes of transportation for which there are plenty of resources over the manufacturing of SUVs. So you actually expose the problem you deem to be able to casually throw over your shoulder.

I'm asking you if that is what you think communism is- providing the kind of lifestyle promoted in the post-war West. Scarcity is not the problem in that instance; environmental destruction is.

It is beyond me how you can even entertain the notion of using no accounting whatsoever — it is delusional. No accounting is randomness, we don't know how many people want what, how much resources we have, our productive potential, we don't know anything so all our activities are reduced to random conglomerations. Mind boggling delusional and ignorant to think we can do away with accounting.

It's narrow minded to view communism as simply big screen TV's for everybody; generalizing the 'best' quality of life capitalism is able to offer waged laborers today.

If production is a) for use, b) democratically decided, and c) localised in terms of deciding both a) and b), then accounting will surely be a more simplified process, rather than trying to join up millions of units of 'apples and oranges' measurements.

Organization is different from accounting. Organizing production to meet human needs and desires in common (no private property, no alienation) is different from what T.C. suggests in his original post- which is the absolute accounting of all of Earth's resources and production to be systematically recorded and rationalized- if everything is accounted (factory produces x vehicles), what purpose does it serve? He answers:

Resources -- time, labour, and raw materials -- are scarce. We cannot manufacture an unlimited supply of all goods in a limited time, hence the need to prioritise the production of a particular good over another. In a price system, this can easily be done. Consumers choose what they prefer buy purchasing the good. Under higher-phase communism such a price system does not exist. Yet we still need to prioritise. Insisting bread is more important than yachts and that we ought therefore to prioritise the former over the latter is insufficient as there are thousands if not millions of products.

It suggests there is still a division in human life between 'social' and 'work'- not the abolition of this barrier. If production is accounted for (because 'resources are scarce'), the next step is necessarily rationing- and who decides the rationing? How is it carried out? Who decides what is and isn't worth producing, who delivers goods and services? The fear of 'economic chaos' and the paternal desire to 'take control to give order to the chaos' is counter-revolutionary.

In periods where the state and economy failed, were losing control, workers, farmers and peasants naturally began to form new ways to produce, distribute and consume goods and services. Spontaneous creation of central cooperatives in 1930's USA and 1917 Russia and 1930's Spain are all examples which were created by people to meet their own needs- from chaos, they built with their own hands new ways of surviving and producing. In Russia, this was followed by the same frenzy for order and accounting:

The Spanish CNT's delegates report of what he saw in 1920 after attending a meeting of the Third International, published in 1924 describes how the new state had desperately tried to organize distribution of goods in post-October Russia with a similar zeal of 'scarcity' 'precise accounting' etc.

During the period between March and October the situation got worse; it deteriorated to levels that were almost unprecedented. This grave situation, however, favored the Bolsheviks, and gave them the leeway to carry out their work. Their principle concern was with production.

But if the momentary situation did not pose grave dangers to the Bolsheviks, there was no doubt that they would have to face such dangers in the future.
The total disorganization of trade, the suppression of all the stores that formerly sold consumer goods—both large and small—the confiscation that the Government carried out for its own use of all the wealth produced and hoarded, gave it complete freedom of action on the road it had proposed to follow, and to create as many institutions as it thought would be necessary for the purpose of organizing distribution.
These advantages, that seemed so favorable, were seized upon by the Government, which immediately created the Commissariat of Food Supply, staffing it with tried and true communists and trusted Party members.

The first thing the Commissariat did was to fix the price of food products, since, although it was disorganized and timorous, free trade still existed.

The results of this decree could hardly have been more disastrous. Because the decree fixed the prices of goods far below the prices they were being sold for on the market, and because the decree also threatened anyone who refused to observe the price limits with harsh penalties, all the products disappeared from the market and in a few days their prices rose more than three hundred percent.
Threats, requisitions, imprisonments, and even executions: everything was tried; but always with negative results. The goods did not reappear, and those that were sold on the black market fetched astronomical prices.

In the meantime, the staff at the Commissariat of Food Supply was working feverishly. Reports accumulated. One statistical abstract followed another, and these were succeeded by others and yet more reports; but the situation of the people’s food supply did not improve. Speculation was rampant. You could not have bought a pin for the price fixed by the decree; instead, one could obtain anything for the black market price.
The peasant Soviets in the province of Moscow contacted the Commissariat of Food Supply and requested that it establish some order and normal activity in the relations of buying and selling or the exchange of products, between the city and the countryside.
Among the products that were affected by severe shortages was milk. It could not even be found for hospital patients.

This shortage was all the more striking insofar as Moscow had always enjoyed an abundance of milk, due to the enterprising spirit of an industrialist of the capitalist regime.

A wealthy and ambitious man, a few years before the revolution, had organized the purchase of milk in the neighboring villages.

Agreements were made with the peasants, according to which all the milk that was produced by their cows would be gathered, and then shipped in casks they owned, and distributed in numerous stores established in Moscow for this purpose.
The peasant Soviets requested that the Commissariat of Food Supply should respect this organizational arrangement, due to its good results, even if the entrepreneur who owned the company that operated the service was expropriated, as had indeed taken place already.

They also requested that the Commissariat of Food Supply should appoint one or more individuals to take over the expropriated company with full power to negotiate the price of milk with the peasant Soviets.

The Commissariat considered the request of the peasant Soviets, approved their proposal and promised to quickly comply with their requests.

The peasants went home satisfied, because they believed that the Commissariat would solve the problem.

Weeks and months passed; it was half a year before the Commissariat issued its official response, upholding the previous price decrees for milk products.
The Commissariat of Food Supply ruled in favor of maintaining the price of thirty rubles for a liter of milk, when the price on the free market was two hundred and fifty, and thus, while the Government could not supply the population with milk, the black market was overflowing with this product.

This example, cited as a broadly relevant case that shows how the Bolsheviks proceeded with regard to the problem of food supply, can be repeated for all other food products.
The uniformity, unilateral orders and the rigid mentality adopted for one question was also adopted for all the others. This explains the constant series of rectifications, which bordered on the incredible.

Once the statistics concerning the inhabitants were in the hands of Soviet Russia, it was hoped that there would be products to distribute. The Government’s first requisitions were soon used up, except for those that were rotting in the warehouses, awaiting the compilation of statistics, while the people went hungry.

Now that the State had become the sole purchaser of everything that was produced, it attempted to enforce its requisitions and price fixing, which the peasants evaded by every means at their disposal: leaving the lands untilled or farming only as much as was indispensable for their own families; armed resistance; executing and stoning to death the communists and the soldiers sent to requisition their products.

http://libcom.org/library/part-2-chapter-11-seventy-days-russia-what-i-saw-angel-pesta%C3%B1

The whole text is a monument to the counter-revolutionary nature of accounting.

Tim Cornelis

15th April 2013, 19:49

You don't answer my question how production of X is prioritised over Y, you use a red herring: "It's narrow minded to view communism as simply big screen TV's for everybody; generalizing the 'best' quality of life capitalism is able to offer waged laborers today." That's not what's discussed here.

It suggests there is still a division in human life between 'social' and 'work'- not the abolition of this barrier. If production is accounted for (because 'resources are scarce'), the next step is necessarily rationing- and who decides the rationing? How is it carried out? Who decides what is and isn't worth producing, who delivers goods and services? The fear of 'economic chaos' and the paternal desire to 'take control to give order to the chaos' is counter-revolutionary.

Utterly ridiculous, I can't even begin to explain why. It's so obvious to me, that I can't wrap my mind around how you just throw it out the window. Let's not concern ourselves with feasibility, and instead entertain the unrealistic notion of being able to produce everything at all times for everyone -- which is exactly what you imply, though not so explicitly.

In periods where the state and economy failed, were losing control, workers, farmers and peasants naturally began to form new ways to produce, distribute and consume goods and services.

And used accounting. Information is the oxygen of collective activity. Accounting is no more than the expression of information to facilitate the production process. It's fundamentally necessary, more than that, I'll

Book-keeping, as the control and ideal synthesis of the process, becomes the more necessary the more the process assumes a social scale and loses its purely individual character. It is therefore more necessary in capitalist production than in the scattered production of handicraft and peasant economy, more necessary in collective production than in capitalist production. But the costs of book-keeping drop as production becomes concentrated and book-keeping becomes social.
...
If we conceive society as being not capitalistic but communistic, there will be no money-capital at all in the first place, not the disguises cloaking the transactions arising on account of it. The question then comes down to the need of society to calculate beforehand how much labour, means of production, and means of subsistence it can invest, without detriment, in such lines of business as for instance the building of railways, which do not furnish any means of production or subsistence, nor produce any useful effect for a long time, a year or more, while they extract labour, means of production and means of subsistence from the total annual production.
...
After the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, but still retaining social production, the determination of value continues to prevail in the sense that the regulation of labour-time and the distribution of social labour among the various production groups, ultimately the book-keeping encompassing all this, become more essential than ever
...

A communist society without accounting will collapse within the span of a week, if not a day. I imagine it goes something like this:

"Comrades, we have rid ourselves of the capitalist class, then of capitalist production, and now bourgeois coercive accounting is done away with!"
"So, how much bread do we need to produce?" "I don't know"
"Oh well, how much raw materials and labour do we possess?" "I don't know"
"Oh well, I guess we just start producing at random then..."

- You need to know what to produce for who.
- You need to know which goods should be produced when they are mutually exclusive due to finite resources. (Again, you can't produce everything for everyone at all times)
- You need to know the availability of resources to produce goods
- You need to account for these resources, raw materials, labour, means of production, in order to know how much you can produce of which goods.

To quote Gilles Dauvé

Marx states that in communist society there will be a high level of development of the productive forces. This level will make it possible for mankind not to measure with necessary labour time. Yet something will be needed to study the relative importance given to one or another branch. The calculation will not be made according to the social cost of the product, but by confronting the various needs. "To everybody according to his needs," in Marx's view, does not mean that "everything" will exist "in abundance"; the notion of absolute "abundance" is itself an ideological notion and not a scientific concept There will have to be some sort of calculation and choice, not on the basis of exchange value, but on the basis of use value, of the social utility of the considered product. (Thereby the problem of "undeveloped countries" will be seen and treated in a new way.) Marx was quite clear about this in The Poverty of Philosophy:

"In a future society, in which class antagonism will have ceased, in which there will no longer be any classes, use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production; but the time of production devoted to different articles will be determined by the degree of their social utility."

subcp

15th April 2013, 20:01

ckhaihatsu
I tend to think that a good part of revolutionary politics should speak to the question of how social production *could* be done, beyond the exploitation and oppression of capital-based relations.

I agree- but that often turns into blueprints.

If the question boils down to a humane form of societal organization that can *supersede* capitalism in both productivity for actual human need, and in complexity / sophistication, then those requirements would remain the same during and after a socialist revolution as they do today -- this gives us a foundation for reasoning that can provide explanatory power, at very least.

I noted at another thread that commodity-production relations affect the individual at the social-context level, overlapping-with, and in-addition-to labor-exploitation 'alienation':

Right- historically, those tasks end up carried out by workers themselves (cooperatives, bartering centers, joint-strike committees that begin allowing production in struck factories and businesses and distribution of struck goods under control of the working-class). Our task is largely political- convincing workers that communist principles are the answer to capitalist crisis. I don't think we (communists) would have much to do with creating systems of production and distribution-consumption.

This is basically a call for a *production*-centric orientation, away from political or economic representation that's concentrated into individual personages, as we are all-too-familiar with from the pages of history.

It's definitely a position worth discussing- some of the early issues of the Russian journal "Under the Banner of Marxism" have articles discussing SNLT and value-form theory in the context of the revolutionary movement which look interesting (advanced workers-comunists- trying to understand the nature of the changes unfolding).

Trotsky's description of the post-revolutionary individual in Literature and Revolution, a free human being with free access to all property and means of production as part of the 'geimenwesen' ('free human community'), suggests that post-revolutionary production will not appear as anything comparable to what exists today.

How do you picture SNLT factoring in in such a post-capitalist, post-revolutionary society?

cyu

15th April 2013, 20:08

It's narrow minded to view communism as simply big screen TV's for everybody

Yes, in a society where economic, political, and media control is dominated by a small ruling class, not only do they determine how economic resources are allocated, what political issues are discussed, but the media they control also dictate what people "should" want out of life.

From http://everything2.com/title/unlimited+wants+and+limited+resources

I submit that it isn't really logical to assume wants / needs are infinite. I would say wants / needs are often determined by advertising, which often preys on the "irrational" aspects of human behavior.

One of the problems is that once capitalism had set property ownership in stone, then other people are forced to produce more and more useless things in order to make a living.

For example, say some agribusiness owns vast amounts of farmland and is already producing more than enough food for everybody. Maybe there isn't enough farmland left for anybody else to use, or maybe the agribusiness can simply outcompete any other small-scale farmer trying to enter the market. What's left?

Well, there is no other recourse than to find a non-farming related occupation. Maybe it's entering a factory producing plastic toys for people's dashboards. However, as you can see, this job is really pretty useless - nobody really needs plastic toys on their dashboards. So how is the entire sector of useless industries sustained?

Advertising.

But I wouldn't say it's our place to tell people what things they "should" want or need - but rather to advocate systems in which their wants and needs can be better satisfied. From http://cjyu.wordpress.com/article/equal-pay-for-unequal-work/

I would imagine different people would give their support to many different organizations. Each of these organizations would be supporting advertising for different activities. The more people supporting one organization, the more advertising you’d see for the jobs supported by that organization.

If you’re “lazy” and don’t feel like doing anything, nobody forces you to work. You are free to stay at home and watch TV or surf the internet all day. However, instead of being constantly bombarded with ads trying to get you to want more stuff, you are instead bombarded with ads trying to get you to want to go out and do stuff that society thinks needs doing.

As long as people see value in doing something, they are free to support advertising for that kind of activity. Sports, for example, are good for people’s health, and, in cases like swimming, can save lives. However, if some other activity could not only provide exercise, but also help out other people at the same time (for example, building a wheelchair accessible trail along a scenic mountain path), then I could easily see more people gravitating toward promoting that other activity.

ckaihatsu

15th April 2013, 23:08

This example, cited as a broadly relevant case that shows how the Bolsheviks proceeded with regard to the problem of food supply, can be repeated for all other food products.

The uniformity, unilateral orders and the rigid mentality adopted for one question was also adopted for all the others. This explains the constant series of rectifications, which bordered on the incredible.

Once the statistics concerning the inhabitants were in the hands of Soviet Russia, it was hoped that there would be products to distribute. The Government’s first requisitions were soon used up, except for those that were rotting in the warehouses, awaiting the compilation of statistics, while the people went hungry.

The whole text is a monument to the counter-revolutionary nature of accounting.

I get the sense here that the historical context played a large role -- perhaps a tsarist-like authoritarianism was simply reverted to, in the absence of sufficient political and material momentum to sustain the soviets.

Whether accounting methods and other kinds of formalism are *absolutely* necessary would depend mostly on real-world factors of social production, material availability, geography, transportation, etc. -- for example, I could postulate a landscape of productive centers, whether industrial or agricultural, that simply do as they like autonomously and each produce a significant surplus that they then leave on the outskirts of their respective geographic peripheries. Other productive centers would be free to autonomously scout around and procure any surpluses from other centers as they could, for use in adding to their own productive activities, likewise leaving their own surpluses, and so on. Communications could be handled likewise, in parallel.

This model, while obviating the need for use of accounting, would be quite slow, would not tap into any economies of scale or meta-planning, and could not really guarantee a consistent standard of living for all denizens across all productive centers.

And, this ignores any necessary revolutionary transition, with whatever social organization would be required to bring this model into existence in the first place.

Information is the oxygen of collective activity. Accounting is no more than the expression of information to facilitate the production process. It's fundamentally necessary

I tend to agree here, especially since such would be required to facilitate a successful internationalist revolution against capitalist rule to begin with.

---

I tend to think that a good part of revolutionary politics should speak to the question of how social production *could* be done, beyond the exploitation and oppression of capital-based relations.

I agree- but that often turns into blueprints.

I'm pleased to say that I tackled this matter here at RevLeft a few years ago, in a focused way, to produce a *framework* that addresses the various complexities implied by a post-capitalist economics.

It's not a blueprint -- which implies specificity -- but rather an assemblage of structures that allow dynamic elements to take shape within:

communist supply & demand -- Model of Material Factors

http://s6.postimage.org/nwiupxn8t/2526684770046342459_Rh_JMHF_fs.jpg (http://postimage.org/image/nwiupxn8t/)

If the question boils down to a humane form of societal organization that can *supersede* capitalism in both productivity for actual human need, and in complexity / sophistication, then those requirements would remain the same during and after a socialist revolution as they do today -- this gives us a foundation for reasoning that can provide explanatory power, at very least.

I noted at another thread that commodity-production relations affect the individual at the social-context level, overlapping-with, and in-addition-to labor-exploitation 'alienation':

Right- historically, those tasks end up carried out by workers themselves (cooperatives, bartering centers, joint-strike committees that begin allowing production in struck factories and businesses and distribution of struck goods under control of the working-class). Our task is largely political- convincing workers that communist principles are the answer to capitalist crisis. I don't think we (communists) would have much to do with creating systems of production and distribution-consumption.

Possibly it's a chicken-or-the-egg kind of conundrum -- our political task would be boosted by having more-concrete "plans" to proffer, but only the workers themselves can develop such systems of production-distribution-consumption, with political informing and encouragement.

This is basically a call for a *production*-centric orientation, away from political or economic representation that's concentrated into individual personages, as we are all-too-familiar with from the pages of history.

It's definitely a position worth discussing- some of the early issues of the Russian journal "Under the Banner of Marxism" have articles discussing SNLT and value-form theory in the context of the revolutionary movement which look interesting (advanced workers-comunists- trying to understand the nature of the changes unfolding).

Cool. What's SNLT, and can you provide any links / resources here -- ?

Trotsky's description of the post-revolutionary individual in Literature and Revolution, a free human being with free access to all property and means of production as part of the 'geimenwesen' ('free human community'), suggests that post-revolutionary production will not appear as anything comparable to what exists today.

How do you picture SNLT factoring in in such a post-capitalist, post-revolutionary society?

I think it would be productive if you could review the framework I've provided, in this spirit, and note any concerns you have about its context.

subcp

16th April 2013, 00:04

I get the sense here that the historical context played a large role -- perhaps a tsarist-like authoritarianism was simply reverted to, in the absence of sufficient political and material momentum to sustain the soviets.I don't think so- it would seem that a thorough proletarian revolution was successful after October 1917; the degeneration of the revolutionary movement (the recuperation of the forms and content of the most advanced sections of the revolutionary movement in Russia) seemed to have hinged on the success of the geographic expansion of the revolutionary movement; a side effect of the reflux of the international revolutionary wave by 1919-1920. Even then the communist minority was still debating, within and without of the Soviet Republic, Marxist economic theory while the Soviet state was doing all of these things.

Ex. Under The Banner of Marxism issues 7-8:

""145 Cholom Moiseievitch Dvolaitski: About the single 'contradiction' in K. Marx's economic system
154 A. Mendelson (http://www.rujen.ru/index.php/%D0%9C%D0%95%D0%9D%D0%94%D0%95%D0%9B%D0%AC%D0%A1%D 0%9E%D0%9D_%D0%90%D0%B1%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC_%D0%A1%D 0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0% B8%D1%87): The concept of socially-necessary labour as part of Marx's theory of value" "

Whether accounting methods and other kinds of formalism are *absolutely* necessary would depend mostly on real-world factors of social production, material availability, geography, transportation, etc.Whether that's the case in the revolutionary movement (dictatorship of the proletariat) or the initial striving for communism (lower phase) following victory over the bourgeoisie and the state in a big chunk of the globe is debatable.

And, this ignores any necessary revolutionary transition, with whatever social organization would be required to bring this model into existence in the first place.But we're talking about the higher phase of communism- well after the proletarian has been internationally successful and social relations have become communist.

Two things that stuck out to me in your chart is the separation of economics and politics (political economy); a division related to capital; it shouldn't exist in communism.

The other talks about labor vouchers (I guess based on socially necessary labor time SNLT).

Marx's work in Volume III of Capital and the Grundrisse and analyses of them bring up a lot of relevant points on this.

In production resting on capital, the existence of socially necessary labor time is conditional on the creation of superfluous labor time. . . It is a law of capital, as we saw, to create surplus surplus labor, disposable time; it can do this only by setting necessary labor in motion i.e. entering into exchange with the worker. It is its tendency, therefore, to create as much labor as possible; just as it is equally its tendency to reduce necessary labor time to a minimum. It is therefore equally a tendency of capital to increase the laboring population, as well as constantly to posit a part of it as surplus population-population which is useless until such time that capital can utilize it. . . But labor as such is and remains the presupposition, and surplus labor exists only in relation with the necessary, hence only in so far as the latter exists. Capital must therefore posit necessary labor in order to posit surplus labor; it has to multiply it (namely the simultaneous working day) in order to multiply the surplus; but at the same time it must suspend them as necessary, in order to posit them as surplus labor... At the same time, the newly created surplus capital can be realized as such only by being again exchanged for living labor. Hence the tendency of capital simultaneously to increase the laboring population as well as to reduce constantly its necessary part (constantly to posit a part of it as reserve)... Capital, as the positing of surplus labor, is equally and in the same moment the positing and the non-positing of necessary labor; it exists only in so far as necessary exists and does not exist." (Marx, Grundrisse).

So the abolition of capital (the determined non-existence of capital Marx talks about in Vol.III) then requires the abolition of socially necessary labor time (and the accounting thereof) as a unit to measure remuneration in communism.

When it comes to using the apparatus of capitalism (production-distribution-consumption), the course of capitalist development to the point we're at today necessarily means a rising organic composition of capital; even for many luxury items and the various tools and technologies that we equate with late capitalism (post-war capitalism). Meaning that the amount of average labor time to produce mass quantities of consumer goods is highly reduced (a function of OCC- itself a function of capitalism to increase profits while expelling workers from value production). The huge 'surplus population' capital creates (a contradiction of capital)- if the 'reserve army of labor' (unemployed) are socialized into the production process in a post-capitalist (and not yet communist) world, production likely ceases to require the level of organization required by capital in the same industries today (since the new or developing social relations and production processes are directly for human need and desire rather than production for productions sake a la for profits and new capital).

I agree with cyu's point on the re-tooling of the unproductive industries (advertizing, the FIRE- finance, insurance, real estate sector, etc.) and their superfluous nature for communism.

MP5

16th April 2013, 01:01

I don't quite understand this. Under actual Communism there will be no more forms of exchange. US Labor Productivity has increased 90% since 1979 while average worker's wage is in fact less than it was in 1973. With 3D-printing and biorobotic technology the relatively-soon future of material production (and, through the advance of biorobotic technology, even service work) will not have a lot of need for Human Labor. The Production and Distribution of socially produced goods will be run collectively by society itself, today relatively easy through computer technology.

This is one reason why i argue with people that the economic situation now favors a Communist revolution much more then it did say in the early 20th century. People no longer have to break their backs to do about every job, we live in a society where there is more then enough wealth to go around for everyone and noone has to work themselves half to death everyday like years ago as things are becoming more and more automated everyday. So the only obstacle to everyone not having everything they need to atleast live is of course the way the wealth is distributed. But then again that's always been the obstacle it's just that we now we live in a world where it is quite possible to atleast make sure everyone has the basic necessities to live while not having to take away everyones blackberry ;)

As for prioritizing production under Communism one must meet the needs of the people first and foremost. This includes food, housing, clothing, medical care, transportation, etc. Everything must be secondary to that. Once the needs of the people have been taken care of the wants can then be dealt with. Any surplus left over could be used as the commune sees fit.

cyu

16th April 2013, 01:25

So the only obstacle to everyone not having everything they need to atleast live is of course the way the wealth is distributed. But then again that's always been the obstacle

Yep, it's not so much the (possibly intentionally misguided) Luddite claim that machines and automation cause unemployment and suffering to the working class, but it's that the output of machines and automation is grabbed by the capitalist instead of being controlled by the working class.

MP5

16th April 2013, 02:48

Yep, it's not so much the (possibly intentionally misguided) Luddite claim that machines and automation cause unemployment and suffering to the working class, but it's that the output of machines and automation is grabbed by the capitalist instead of being controlled by the working class.

Exactly. When people still had to dig ditches with shovels and elbow grease and everything had to be done by hand we still had the same problem we do today which is a very unequal distribution of wealth. It's not machines that are the problem at all in fact i would argue they are beneficial towards achieving a Communist society as all those hours formerly spent toiling away could be put to use educating people or coming up with new innovative ideas to best serve the Community at large.

So it comes down to who controls the modes of production not what the modes of production actually are. That and the fact that nothing will change until we change the distribution of wealth to be much less concentrated and atleast ensure that everyone has the basic necessities to live.

ckaihatsu

16th April 2013, 03:26

I get the sense here that the historical context played a large role -- perhaps a tsarist-like authoritarianism was simply reverted to, in the absence of sufficient political and material momentum to sustain the soviets.

I don't think so- it would seem that a thorough proletarian revolution was successful after October 1917; the degeneration of the revolutionary movement (the recuperation of the forms and content of the most advanced sections of the revolutionary movement in Russia) seemed to have hinged on the success of the geographic expansion of the revolutionary movement;

Yes -- it appears you're making my case *for* me here, in detail.

a side effect of the reflux of the international revolutionary wave by 1919-1920.

This part doesn't make sense, though -- could you re-word it, perhaps -- ?

Even then the communist minority was still debating, within and without of the Soviet Republic, Marxist economic theory while the Soviet state was doing all of these things.

Ex. Under The Banner of Marxism issues 7-8:

""145 Cholom Moiseievitch Dvolaitski: About the single 'contradiction' in K. Marx's economic system
154 A. Mendelson (http://www.rujen.ru/index.php/%D0%9C%D0%95%D0%9D%D0%94%D0%95%D0%9B%D0%AC%D0%A1%D 0%9E%D0%9D_%D0%90%D0%B1%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC_%D0%A1%D 0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0% B8%D1%87): The concept of socially-necessary labour as part of Marx's theory of value" "

Two things that stuck out to me in your chart is the separation of economics and politics (political economy); a division related to capital; it shouldn't exist in communism.

No, I'll contend this -- there's nothing that resembles capital in the model, and its system provides for a daily prioritized input of listed demands / requests / orders which may be either economic or political in nature:

communist supply & demand -- Model of Material Factors

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

tinyurl.com/ygybheg

Associated material values

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

Determination of material values

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

Material function

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

The other talks about labor vouchers (I guess based on socially necessary labor time SNLT).

Actually, no -- a basic reading will show that it uses labor *credits*, which freely circulate, unlike the orthodox formulation of 'labor vouchers'.

There is no provision made for, or recognition of, socially necessary labor time -- rather it's fundamentally understood that all activity related to such would be a matter of utmost priority for participants.

So the abolition of capital (the determined non-existence of capital Marx talks about in Vol.III) then requires the abolition of socially necessary labor time (and the accounting thereof) as a unit to measure remuneration in communism.

When it comes to using the apparatus of capitalism (production-distribution-consumption), the course of capitalist development to the point we're at today necessarily means a rising organic composition of capital; even for many luxury items and the various tools and technologies that we equate with late capitalism (post-war capitalism). Meaning that the amount of average labor time to produce mass quantities of consumer goods is highly reduced (a function of OCC- itself a function of capitalism to increase profits while expelling workers from value production). The huge 'surplus population' capital creates (a contradiction of capital)- if the 'reserve army of labor' (unemployed) are socialized into the production process in a post-capitalist (and not yet communist) world, production likely ceases to require the level of organization required by capital in the same industries today (since the new or developing social relations and production processes are directly for human need and desire rather than production for productions sake a la for profits and new capital).

Yup.

I agree with cyu's point on the re-tooling of the unproductive industries (advertizing, the FIRE- finance, insurance, real estate sector, etc.) and their superfluous nature for communism.

I came across it in a previous thread -- I take it as a given.

subcp

16th April 2013, 06:00

subcp

16th April 2013, 06:37

A communist society without accounting will collapse within the span of a week, if not a day. I imagine it goes something like this:

"Comrades, we have rid ourselves of the capitalist class, then of capitalist production, and now bourgeois coercive accounting is done away with!"
"So, how much bread do we need to produce?" "I don't know"
"Oh well, how much raw materials and labour do we possess?" "I don't know"
"Oh well, I guess we just start producing at random then..."

- You need to know what to produce for who.
- You need to know which goods should be produced when they are mutually exclusive due to finite resources. (Again, you can't produce everything for everyone at all times)
- You need to know the availability of resources to produce goods
- You need to account for these resources, raw materials, labour, means of production, in order to know how much you can produce of which goods."Having acquired statistical knowledge of the amount of products—a purely approximate, rather than precise knowledge—produced by each province, the Commissariat established in each provincial capital one or more large warehouses for products. The Soviet of each village, town or hamlet of “isbahs” provided statistics reflecting what each cultivator had harvested, and the cumulative product, without leaving any part thereof for the farmer, was sent by the Soviet to the provincial warehouses.

Once all the products of the province were gathered in the provincial warehouse, those that were earmarked for each town or village, in accordance with the number of residents and the quantity, as set forth in the rationing system decreed in Moscow, that was assigned to each individual, were returned to the village or the town from where they originally came.

By means of this brilliant communist innovation, before a peasant can eat a kilo of beans harvested from his own crop, they had to be sent hundreds of kilometers, in accordance with the wise Bolshevik and Leninist decrees.

But since absurdity cannot long prevail, because reason resists its continuation, the protests of all the Russians who were not Commissars, or leaders, or dictators, caused the latter to see the error of their ways and to correct them.

The errors of Bolshevik political economy are legion. When history finally makes an account of them available, humanity will be shocked. If their purpose had been to make the situation worse, they could not have been more successful.

The centralization of all the distribution services produced incalculable damage and even more incalculable losses." -Angel Pestana, What I Saw in Russia

I don't agree with Dauve; and his interpretation of that Marx quote is stretching. Marx is saying that people free of class society and all that goes with it will decide what to produce- what is more important; a flat screen TV or antibiotics. Either way, Marx, like all of us, was conditioned by the material reality we all live with: I think this shows most in occasional determinism and positivism- and he didn't get to live to see a modern capitalism and a world capable of post-scarcity due to the level of development of the productive forces and technology.

You don't give humans any credit; it's not like everything just stops when power structures are removed as if people stop existing without a state like formation doing these things for them- in times of crisis, people do what they have to to survive, they have before many times and will again. Revolutions and crises are messy; but people still eat, drink and find time to be merry, and get by. Not knowing what the global capacity for bread production is doesn't mean there isn't the productive apparatus to harvest enough wheat, enough people who know how to bake to combine raw and refined materials to make bread, and the logistical networks and transportation technologies (including commercial freezing and refrigeration) to ship it anywhere in the world for everybody. Do you think bread is a scarce commodity/good? Does how much of it is destroyed and/or lost to spoilage due to not being purchased make it scarce, or are the raw materials and technical skills to make it scarce?

ckaihatsu

16th April 2013, 07:29

I agree with cyu and MP5's responses as to the higher phase of communism or the 'geimenwesen' or Tao of humanity as being post-scarcity; that there is practically nothing socially necessary or desirable that cannot be equitably distributed to meet human needs and desires. So I'm willing to treat any discussion of accounting or planning or production schema according to their authors view of when they should be applied- since I don't think the planning schema or accounting etc. are necessary or anything short of counter-revolutionary, that the period of time starting on day 1 of the revolutionary wave until the bourgeoisie and all states have been crushed is the DotP, and starting on day 1 begins the movement for communism (higher phase/geimenwesen/classless stateless etc with no accounting).

While I don't disagree with you about the political ('social') aspect of any of this, I can't help but wonder what your conception of the *logistics* of such a higher-phase mode may possibly be like, if it is to eschew any kind of administration over quantities -- as I understand it.

You've deferred this aspect, understandably, but in your blanket arguments against formalism can you possibly posit how a DotP *might* conceivably organize its material affairs, including mass production?

Determination of material values

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

This sounds like an equivalent measure of accounting for value production; value with a different equivalence (in this case labor credits instead of money proper).

I'll maintain that the labor credits formulation is *not* equivalent to monetary values since they are not exchangeable for material goods (as for consumption) of any kind.

Here's from a recent conversation on this issue:

The point of the 'political balance sheet' is to illustrate that labor itself -- even a post-capitalist liberated labor -- is always something of an inherent risk, since one is expending part of their life-limited time and effort for some endeavor.

The difference between today's monetary wages, and my proposed 'labor credits' is that -- since commodity production and abstract monetary valuations would no longer exist -- the labor credits would function as a liberated-labor-*organizing* tool, like shares of liberated-labor brokering power.

While the larger society would set the overall social context of direction and demands, the *logistics* for fulfilling such -- as you've been inquiring about -- would necessarily be within the domain of (liberated) labor. The circulation of labor credits would enable particular "hiring" forever going-forward, but only to the extent that one has put in proportionate labor time -times- effort oneself, for those labor credits in possession.

In other words, in a world of fully collectivized assets and resources, with no private ownership, *everything* of material worth would have to be measured in terms of (liberated) 'service' -- *not* material commodity (monetary) valuations. The liberated laborer would have to individually assess whether or not to participate in available (mass) projects, and, if so, for what rates of future-liberated-labor-brokering power, as realized in earned labor credits -- hence the 'gains' and 'loss' aspect of the 'political balance sheet', since one could either work to *bring in* labor credits, or else *pass along* earned labor credits to facilitate the liberated labor of others.

[5] communist supply & demand -- political balance sheet

http://s6.postimage.org/ro7mf88a5/5_communist_supply_demand_political_balan.jpg (http://postimage.org/image/ro7mf88a5/)

What reason is there to assign remuneration or recognition of work contributed?

This would be the 'accounting' aspect of a post-capitalist societal order, though one not tied to material-item (commodity) valuations of any kind.

This sounds like a roundabout way to get to a recognition of SNLT via a more direct way to find a computation of it (creating a system to assign values to different categories of average labor time).

If you like, though obviously the method doesn't do it directly -- rather it's a framework that could readily be used for such.

Ownership / control

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

But the working-class only exists by nature of its relationship to capital; if capital no longer exists, neither does the proletariat- the proletariat can only exist if capital (rather than just 'capitalists') still exists- it's a dual relationship that presupposes each part, yin & yang type deal. It also forgoes all those who can't work, who don't work enough (according to a central authority) etc.

Yes, agreed, of course, but there's nothing in the framework that indicates anything resembling 'capital', or monetary valuations of any kind. ('Property', 'assets', and 'resources' are meant strictly in the generic sense.)

Ownership / control

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

This is the same anxiety for order that caused the Bolsheviks to seize and seize and seize- to be accounted for to the crumb and stitch while people starve, freeze and go without when warehouses are full of food, clothing, and forests full of wood that could be used for home heating but is verboten to cut down and use without approval and triplicate stamps from the proper authorities.

Well, this is your own *interpretation* -- since it's only a model it can't address potential historical (social) factors that may or may not develop. ('Collectivized communist property' is also meant generically, akin to 'the public domain' or 'the commons'.)

Yes, the model is an effort to posit a kind of post-capitalist social (political) 'order' -- a consequence of the position that some kind of material 'accounting' would be required.

Infrastructure / overhead

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

Still doesn't properly recognize the problem with the remuneration and accounting- if labor credits have social value (the word political in the .jpeg chart could be changed to social), and people without them can still individually choose to engage in production, distribution and consumption according to their own needs and desires and those of the community, why must there be such accounting- if there is enough abundance to supply those who can't work, won't work, are too old or sick to work, isn't there enough resources on the planet for everyone without accounting, recognition of average labor time via labor credits, etc.?

Yes, the labor credits would have social value in being an instrument to organize liberated labor, going forward -- the question could readily be raised of how a post-capitalist order *would* self-organize its liberated labor "internally" -- would it be sheerly political / cooperative, on an ad hoc basis -- ? Would seniority have any bearing -- ? Would demonstrated skill levels be factored-in on a standardized basis -- ? Would accumulated expertise or specialization be recognized -- ? How about sustained work duration, etc.

The labor credits are meant to provide universal flexibility, at all scales, for the provisioning of the source of it all: labor. Instead of monetary valuations and capital everything material could be accounted-for in terms of liberated-labor-hours-times-hazard-or-difficulty -- thus even person-to-person arrangements would necessarily be 'liberated services' and formally accounted-for by the passing-on of appropriate amounts of labor credits.

Propagation

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

Capitalism without capitalists- people will still be alienated and exploited.

No, not at all -- you cannot support this value judgment with any evidence from the context of the model.

A point that gets lost in the communist milieu in general

Arguably.

is that the working-class is not morally superior to the bourgeoisie, or that there is anything good in being a worker- they're the class with revolutionary agency only due to the relationship to the means of production and capital, set in motion by its own internal contradictions which provide the means to liberate humanity from class society, alienation and exploitation- the point isn't to make a world where everyone is a proletarian with no bourgeoisie, but a world without either one where we're all free humans living in common without private property.

Agreed.

The chart suggests that the community, embodied in either a centralized or federated organization, owns the means of production-distribution-consumption and is the sole arbiter of production-distribution-consumption

Excepting any assets or resources that are *not* taken up through the process of mass-prioritized political demands.

(via setting production quotas, allotting resources, deciding how to distribute and who is going to consume goods and services); this sounds like a generous view of a democratic command economy.

If you like, though I would say that that term is roughly synonymous with the higher-phase of communism anyway. (Note that in the 'communist supply & demand' model liberated labor is exactly that -- *liberated*, and under no duress to actually provide labor, outside of overall material realities that may exist.)

Allende had supercomputers imported from the Soviet Union to Chile for something like this.

Edit: Allende didn't import them from the USSR; but still, same idea

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

This was top-down, "blueprint" kind of planning, and is not comparable to the method I propose.

subcp

16th April 2013, 20:52

I appreciate the discussion, and do appreciate the frustration of a specific argument against a blanket argument, and will try to be more specific.

I'll maintain that the labor credits formulation is *not* equivalent to monetary values since they are not exchangeable for material goods (as for consumption) of any kind.

The difference between today's monetary wages, and my proposed 'labor credits' is that -- since commodity production and abstract monetary valuations would no longer exist -- the labor credits would function as a liberated-labor-*organizing* tool, like shares of liberated-labor brokering power.

I still think this fits the definition of exchange- and maintains the law of value as an operation, even in a post-capitalist economy of this type; equivalence is measured in 'labor credits', to either, on the macro level, account for surplus produced (which has consequences for future 'risk-reward' production) and on the micro level, account for the risk level of the kinds of labor engaged in by the individual (rewarding higher risk job categories). I can't imagine this not recreating a social division between 'high risk workers' and communities (which are organized in some fashion as an entity) which choose to push for higher 'risk' projects, and those individuals and communities who do not do what are considered 'high risk' jobs.

You've deferred this aspect, understandably, but in your blanket arguments against formalism can you possibly posit how a DotP *might* conceivably organize its material affairs, including mass production?

I think it'll be a combined and uneven development across a globe being ripped apart by revolutionary transformation; some places may resemble Seattle 1919, where whole communities or cities are peacefully run, starting with a delegated and revocable joint-strike committee and soviet-type-organization making decisions as to what goods and services will be produced or distributed during the mass strike, followed by re-starting production and distribution-consumption according to human needs; while in other places it resembles Spain 1936 (Blake's Baby's mention of states like Bahrain or what we're seeing in Syria right now)- either politically motivated Fascist type vigilantism or armed religious fundamentalists using the proletarian revolutionary movement as a means to exercise their will by force or in the pay of recalcitrant bourgeoisie, some places may resemble the struggles of Bangladesh from 2006-today, with widespread burning of factories, murdering of bosses and owners, or LA riots or Katrina style looting to survive. But in the mix of all of this, measures are taken regionally or locally to survive- but in the context of capitalist crisis and a breakdown of the legitimacy of the state, the only solution to the impasse faced by the proletariat (of a crisis and deligitimized state) is communism- which they have to strive for in their actions from day 1; but that this will look different across the globe.

If you like, though obviously the method doesn't do it directly -- rather it's a framework that could readily be used for such.

My other question regarding this is how you view use-value in such a schema; where does use-value fit?

Yes, agreed, of course, but there's nothing in the framework that indicates anything resembling 'capital', or monetary valuations of any kind. ('Property', 'assets', and 'resources' are meant strictly in the generic sense.)

I may be misunderstanding the use of surplus or 'accumulated labor credits' and their re-entry into the social production process: could you elaborate on how you view labor credits being used, at the community level, for future production processes? Ditto for surplus created in the production process- how does surplus factor into future production?

Yes, the labor credits would have social value in being an instrument to organize liberated labor, going forward -- the question could readily be raised of how a post-capitalist order *would* self-organize its liberated labor "internally" -- would it be sheerly political / cooperative, on an ad hoc basis -- ? Would seniority have any bearing -- ? Would demonstrated skill levels be factored-in on a standardized basis -- ? Would accumulated expertise or specialization be recognized -- ? How about sustained work duration, etc.

The labor credits are meant to provide universal flexibility, at all scales, for the provisioning of the source of it all: labor. Instead of monetary valuations and capital everything material could be accounted-for in terms of liberated-labor-hours-times-hazard-or-difficulty -- thus even person-to-person arrangements would necessarily be 'liberated services' and formally accounted-for by the passing-on of appropriate amounts of labor credits.

This is where I see the root of the disagreement; I think any recognition or accounting for labor (average labor, socially necessary labor time, etc. but particularly the idea of surplus labor in the form of accumulated labor credits) re-creates social divisions rather than liberating labor- I think 'liberating labor' involves the unity between the social and economic; I forget if it was Marx or Trotsky who said the liberated proletarian could be 'a carpenter at breakfast, a plumber at noon, and a composer at night' (or something to that effect). The primary point being the separation of labor from social activity is a side effect of a society divided by classes, and when truly liberated from class, labor becomes integrated into the social, and is not recognized (and thus not accounted for or recognized) as a unique sphere of the individuals life.

(Note that in the 'communist supply & demand' model liberated labor is exactly that -- *liberated*, and under no duress to actually provide labor, outside of overall material realities that may exist.)

I'd argue that the differences between people, created by the system to assign value to different categories of work and labor credits, would result in an alienated society.

Regarding the higher phase of communism, the geimenwesen, I picture individuals who engage in different kinds of work according to their own conscience; organized by a modern equivalent to the guild system or something similar (a way to organize free people who have the knowledge and skills and experience in certain kinds of jobs, whether crafts or manufacturing or agriculture, who then pass that on to other members of the community who desire to learn the trade/craft/skill/manufacturing or agricultural process)- but that individuals would not be tied to one specific craft/trade/skill after learning it or applying it or even mastering it, but may be involved in dozens of trades/crafts/skills- humans are creative, motivated, communal- all of us have many interests and ideas outside of our jobs; I think individuals freed from class society would be able to reach a level of individual potential which is closed to the overwhelming majority of humans under capitalism. There's no reason an individual can't be an accomplished musician, a master carpenter, an artisan mason and a talented farmer, engaged with other members of the community to pass on their knowledge and skills; the organization of which would be necessary.

ckaihatsu

16th April 2013, 23:32

I appreciate the discussion, and do appreciate the frustration of a specific argument against a blanket argument, and will try to be more specific.

No prob -- likewise.

I'll maintain that the labor credits formulation is *not* equivalent to monetary values since they are not exchangeable for material goods (as for consumption) of any kind.

The difference between today's monetary wages, and my proposed 'labor credits' is that -- since commodity production and abstract monetary valuations would no longer exist -- the labor credits would function as a liberated-labor-*organizing* tool, like shares of liberated-labor brokering power.

I still think this fits the definition of exchange- and maintains the law of value as an operation, even in a post-capitalist economy of this type; equivalence is measured in 'labor credits', to either, on the macro level, account for surplus produced (which has consequences for future 'risk-reward' production) and on the micro level, account for the risk level of the kinds of labor engaged in by the individual (rewarding higher risk job categories).

To clarify, there would be no -- or negligible -- surplus produced since everything would be pre-planned, in advance.

I appreciate the analysis you're undertaking here, but would like to point out that it's of a different scope, now -- you're expressing a concern about the different *fundamental* interests at play, or that will *always* be in play, *no matter* the societal context -- those of labor vs. administration vs. consumer (vs. labor).

What's called-for is a system that can match liberated-labor organizing ability, over mass-collectivized assets and resources, to the mass demand from below for collective production. If *liberated-labor* is too empowered it would probably lead to materialistic factionalism -- like a bad syndicalism -- and back into separatist claims of private property.

If *mass demand* is too empowered it would probably lead back to a clever system of exploitation, wherein labor would cease to retain control over the implements of mass production.

And, if the *administration* of it all is too specialized and detached we would have the phenomenon of Stalinism, or bureaucratic elitism and party favoritism.

I'll contend that I have developed a model that addresses all of these concerns in an even-handed way

http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=11269

While you characterize the system of labor credits as 'exchange' and a 'value operation', I'll suggest that *any* formal accounting method, besides that of labor credits, could be characterized this way -- this goes to highlight our difference on this issue. Please note, though, that there is no *exchange value* in the conventional, capital-based sense of it -- exchanging tangible goods for monetary value abstractions (currency). Instead, this model provides open-sourced materials according either to individual initiative, small-group coordination, or more-formal use of labor-credit pooling to fulfill prioritized mass demands.

Since there is nothing that *precludes* a gift economy, the formality of labor credits is in no way mandatory. Rather, the reason for their implementation is to enable the coordination of liberated labor over vast scales and complexities, as for mass works projects, while still retaining popular control over such mass production and preserving labor-sovereignty among those who actually do the work.

You may want to skim through a sample scenario of this, at ‘A world without money,’ tinyurl.com/ylm3gev

I can't imagine this not recreating a social division between 'high risk workers' and communities (which are organized in some fashion as an entity) which choose to push for higher 'risk' projects, and those individuals and communities who do not do what are considered 'high risk' jobs.

Regarding the 'highlands vs. ghettos' scenario that you assert, I would say that that would necessitate a *political* approach, probably *generalizing* production at a higher / broader level across those two localities if such happened to take shape. In the "worst"-case scenario, it may just be that such localities have different attitudes regarding high-risk work, or work in general, and it might not be deleterious to anyone if such conditions remained that way, as long as there were no social antagonisms that arose from it.

You've deferred this aspect, understandably, but in your blanket arguments against formalism can you possibly posit how a DotP *might* conceivably organize its material affairs, including mass production?

I think it'll be a combined and uneven development across a globe being ripped apart by revolutionary transformation; some places may resemble Seattle 1919, where whole communities or cities are peacefully run, starting with a delegated and revocable joint-strike committee and soviet-type-organization making decisions as to what goods and services will be produced or distributed during the mass strike, followed by re-starting production and distribution-consumption according to human needs; while in other places it resembles Spain 1936 (Blake's Baby's mention of states like Bahrain or what we're seeing in Syria right now)- either politically motivated Fascist type vigilantism or armed religious fundamentalists using the proletarian revolutionary movement as a means to exercise their will by force or in the pay of recalcitrant bourgeoisie, some places may resemble the struggles of Bangladesh from 2006-today, with widespread burning of factories, murdering of bosses and owners, or LA riots or Katrina style looting to survive. But in the mix of all of this, measures are taken regionally or locally to survive- but in the context of capitalist crisis and a breakdown of the legitimacy of the state, the only solution to the impasse faced by the proletariat (of a crisis and deligitimized state) is communism- which they have to strive for in their actions from day 1; but that this will look different across the globe.

Certainly -- and then what about the higher-phase?

This sounds like a roundabout way to get to a recognition of SNLT via a more direct way to find a computation of it (creating a system to assign values to different categories of average labor time).

If you like, though obviously the method doesn't do it directly -- rather it's a framework that could readily be used for such.

My other question regarding this is how you view use-value in such a schema; where does use-value fit?

I'll advance the following, and feel free to follow-up....

communist supply & demand -- Model of Material Factors

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

http://tinyurl.com/ygybheg

Ownership / control

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

Determination of material values

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

---

Yes, agreed, of course, but there's nothing in the framework that indicates anything resembling 'capital', or monetary valuations of any kind. ('Property', 'assets', and 'resources' are meant strictly in the generic sense.)

I may be misunderstanding the use of surplus or 'accumulated labor credits' and their re-entry into the social production process: could you elaborate on how you view labor credits being used, at the community level, for future production processes?

Certainly.

No surplus -- more on that below.

Accumulated labor credits are specific to the sub-population of those who have actually done assigned work in the past and have earned those labor credits as a result. The labor credits circulate and remain with individual liberated laborers, or are passed-along, at their individual discretion.

There *are no* labor credits at the "community" level -- (this same issue arose in my recent conversation on this topic) -- the locality (whole population) oversees the administration of everything administrative, which includes the automated routine of mass-prioritizing individually-prioritized demand / request / order lists from every individual in the locality on a daily basis, regardless of their work history or work status.

The routine administrative tasks per my model would not *require* special skills, training, or abilities -- they would mostly be oversight of the fully computerized database functions for the work-role mass exit surveys, the daily mass-demands prioritization lists, and the labor credits in circulation.

[S]pecialization -- especially concerning these routine societal administrative tasks -- should be *avoided*, for the sake of an egalitarian post-capitalist politics.

The population's mass-prioritized demands -- whether more-political, more-economic, or a mixture of both -- serve as the basis for more-specific refinements, as into proposals and policy packages. Successive 'rounds' of refinements in this way can then likewise be mass-prioritized, revealing more-popular, more-decided mass inclinations towards one or another proposal or policy package -- these can contain calls for certain amounts of funding to be provided, from those within that same locality who have those labor credits to provide.

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

Ditto for surplus created in the production process- how does surplus factor into future production?

Since everything is pre-planned there would be no reason for capital-speculation-type overproduction surpluses to arise.

Logistically speaking we might imagine the overall process as being like having a standing daily order at Amazon.com, listed in the order of personal priorities, and automatically submitted on a daily basis. Changes could always be made to any given upcoming day's list, before its actual date of submission and activation.

Combined and sorted at the cumulative scale these mass-prioritized lists would be the actual working political economy, with attendant public discussions around any given matter or issue that arise from it.

As a matter of course all proposals and policy packages would be in line with the *most*-prioritized mass-prioritized items, with political and logistical discussions around the same to nail down specifics, towards finalization and implementation.

Regular-type mass production, as for everyday items, would be routine and there would be no lapses in fulfilling common daily orders almost immediately -- once it got up and running, of course. Any slight surpluses here would either be intentional, as a matter of the industry's internal practices, or would be sheerly incidental to that production. So even if surpluses did arise they could just be handled administratively and rolled into the next round of fulfillment (short-term), or recycled as lesser-quality, raw-material type materials (long-term).

Yes, the labor credits would have social value in being an instrument to organize liberated labor, going forward -- the question could readily be raised of how a post-capitalist order *would* self-organize its liberated labor "internally" -- would it be sheerly political / cooperative, on an ad hoc basis -- ? Would seniority have any bearing -- ? Would demonstrated skill levels be factored-in on a standardized basis -- ? Would accumulated expertise or specialization be recognized -- ? How about sustained work duration, etc.

The labor credits are meant to provide universal flexibility, at all scales, for the provisioning of the source of it all: labor. Instead of monetary valuations and capital everything material could be accounted-for in terms of liberated-labor-hours-times-hazard-or-difficulty -- thus even person-to-person arrangements would necessarily be 'liberated services' and formally accounted-for by the passing-on of appropriate amounts of labor credits.

This is where I see the root of the disagreement; I think any recognition or accounting for labor (average labor, socially necessary labor time, etc. but particularly the idea of surplus labor in the form of accumulated labor credits)

There's no 'surplus labor' or 'surplus labor value' because *any* labor has to be pre-planned and specified in advance. Labor value is never abstracted or otherwise separated from those who are liberated laborers, since those who labor are the *only* ones who control future labor, endlessly -- and *only* in direct proportion to the amounts of liberated labor they have actually performed in the past.

[T]he idea of surplus labor in the form of accumulated labor credits) re-creates social divisions rather than liberating labor- I think 'liberating labor' involves the unity between the social and economic; I forget if it was Marx or Trotsky who said the liberated proletarian could be 'a carpenter at breakfast, a plumber at noon, and a composer at night' (or something to that effect).

Certainly -- that would be *enabled* with the use of labor credits, or the use of labor credits would be optional.

The primary point being the separation of labor from social activity is a side effect of a society divided by classes, and when truly liberated from class, labor becomes integrated into the social, and is not recognized (and thus not accounted for or recognized) as a unique sphere of the individuals life.

Or formalism would just be a formality.

(Note that in the 'communist supply & demand' model liberated labor is exactly that -- *liberated*, and under no duress to actually provide labor, outside of overall material realities that may exist.)

I'd argue that the differences between people, created by the system to assign value to different categories of work and labor credits, would result in an alienated society.

Or, more optimistically, such variations among people, in a non-commodified society, would complement each other and generally add to everyone's growth.

Regarding the higher phase of communism, the geimenwesen, I picture individuals who engage in different kinds of work according to their own conscience; organized by a modern equivalent to the guild system or something similar (a way to organize free people who have the knowledge and skills and experience in certain kinds of jobs, whether crafts or manufacturing or agriculture, who then pass that on to other members of the community who desire to learn the trade/craft/skill/manufacturing or agricultural process)- but that individuals would not be tied to one specific craft/trade/skill after learning it or applying it or even mastering it, but may be involved in dozens of trades/crafts/skills- humans are creative, motivated, communal- all of us have many interests and ideas outside of our jobs; I think individuals freed from class society would be able to reach a level of individual potential which is closed to the overwhelming majority of humans under capitalism. There's no reason an individual can't be an accomplished musician, a master carpenter, an artisan mason and a talented farmer, engaged with other members of the community to pass on their knowledge and skills; the organization of which would be necessary.

Absolutely. Agreed.

subcp

17th April 2013, 02:35

To clarify, there would be no -- or negligible -- surplus produced since everything would be pre-planned, in advance.

I appreciate the analysis you're undertaking here, but would like to point out that it's of a different scope, now -- you're expressing a concern about the different *fundamental* interests at play, or that will *always* be in play, *no matter* the societal context -- those of labor vs. administration vs. consumer (vs. labor).

Not necessarily; it's primarily a concern over the representation of value based on type of work/the production process- and that this will happen regardless of the method of accounting or the form that the representation of labor takes.

While you characterize the system of labor credits as 'exchange' and a 'value operation', I'll suggest that *any* formal accounting method, besides that of labor credits, could be characterized this way -- this goes to highlight our difference on this issue. Please note, though, that there is no *exchange value* in the conventional, capital-based sense of it -- exchanging tangible goods for monetary value abstractions (currency). Instead, this model provides open-sourced materials according either to individual initiative, small-group coordination, or more-formal use of labor-credit pooling to fulfill prioritized mass demands.

Regarding the last statement- I contend that this is possible without accounting; which brings us to the central question of a post-capitalist world: do we live in a world where abundance is possible, or is scarcity not a social construct but rather a reality?

Certainly -- and then what about the higher-phase?

The absence of an economy (the way that primitive communism was pre-economy, the higher phase of communism would be 'post-economy'); social organization into some kind of voluntary association for the purpose of passing on knowledge, expertise or skills in labor processes and crafts/trades/industries to anyone willing and able to learn and thus perpetuate what we recognize as the capacity of capital's productive-distributive-consumptive apparatus fitted to human needs and desires entirely (which would likely mean a free science, a much different kind of education system likewise integrated into social relations just like labor). But it's just speculation; in the period of the DotP and the lower phase of communism, I don't think organizing society based on trade/craft/industry or a guild-esque system would be revolutionary but would likely lead back to capital accumulation.

No surplus -- more on that below.

Accumulated labor credits are specific to the sub-population of those who have actually done assigned work in the past and have earned those labor credits as a result. The labor credits circulate and remain with individual liberated laborers, or are passed-along, at their individual discretion.

There *are no* labor credits at the "community" level -- (this same issue arose in my recent conversation on this topic) -- the locality (whole population) oversees the administration of everything administrative, which includes the automated routine of mass-prioritizing individually-prioritized demand / request / order lists from every individual in the locality on a daily basis, regardless of their work history or work status.

. . .

The population's mass-prioritized demands -- whether more-political, more-economic, or a mixture of both -- serve as the basis for more-specific refinements, as into proposals and policy packages. Successive 'rounds' of refinements in this way can then likewise be mass-prioritized, revealing more-popular, more-decided mass inclinations towards one or another proposal or policy package -- these can contain calls for certain amounts of funding to be provided, from those within that same locality who have those labor credits to provide.

I think the level of community would be much higher- in everything, from raising children, to education throughout ones life, to the labor processes and skills- which would mean the kind of centralized orders for production would be far less formal. The Marx quote from the Grundrisse I posted earlier relates to this- free of SNLT and surplus labor, whats left is simply the amount of labor necessary to immediately realize the production goals of those involved; and technical development has reduced by exponential levels the amount of labor necessary to complete the manufacture-assembly of goods: if labor is no longer a separate sphere of life but is integrated into social life directly, if you wanted new clothes, and there's raw materials and manufacturing tools (means of production) available, the process of learning how to manufacture what you want is a social process utilizing shared knowledge from those that do know; and once the production is complete, that's it- use-value would be immediately expunged. Same process Marx uses to describe seeds in agriculture- tomato seeds sold at market have use-value (to plant to grow tomatos) and exchange-value (recognized by equivalence with other commodities and an equivalent commodity or currency and value rooted in the labor to collect and package them which reflects in its price); but the moment it is planted in the ground, it is devalorized; its use-value has been used up and it exits the production-circulation processes.

I don't know how much of the existing productive apparatus, as it stands now (mass manufacture, assembly lines) will exist in the higher phase; perhaps a widespread diffusion of knowledge, technology and components may mean a kind of modern cottage industry system- small workshops and household manufacture of many items of survival and luxury; open source technology kind of hints at this today (though I'm not saying this is the absolute basis of communism- just a potentiality).

Ownership / control

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

My thinking on this is only that even the personal property, at any time (prior to, during or after the production process- regardless of use or disuse) are never private property, personal or local; that property has been abolished. That would require the kind of change in social values and relations that we've witnessed people are capable of. Since the 1970's, it has become more and more socially unacceptable not to recycle- people are pressured socially to conform to the values of society at that moment which result in conforming to the dominant value that recycling is what you should do with your aluminum can or glass bottle: if there are 2 receptacles in your workplace or in public spaces, the pressure is to put it in the recyclable bin if it is recyclable. I imagine a similar process when it comes to the personalization of property; that a dominant superego shift will develop that people lose the prioritization of what they use or have possession of as 'what they own' rather than 'things they happen to be using or holding onto'. Not that there should be any kind of coercion to give up things that you become attached to for sentimental reasons or that other people are going to use your toothbrush, just the social shift that stops identifying use or possession with ownership.

There's no 'surplus labor' or 'surplus labor value' because *any* labor has to be pre-planned and specified in advance. Labor value is never abstracted or otherwise separated from those who are liberated laborers, since those who labor are the *only* ones who control future labor, endlessly -- and *only* in direct proportion to the amounts of liberated labor they have actually performed in the past.

I think I see your point on this, and largely agree (is the example of someone making clothing for themselves in line with this description? I may be misunderstanding you here).

Or formalism would just be a formality.

Maybe; it's tough to apply historical experience on this point since workers engaged in revolution, even at its deepest, couldn't get to a point where the formal categories of social life could be determined as either formality or rooted in a deeper division of society/people. I'm not really sure whether to leave it open as a possible eventuality (that a system like this may be simply formality and not demonstrating a deeper fissure) or err on the side of history that what appears to be formality (like some of the Bolshevik decree's that had no weight on real events- like the consumer co-ops in 1917-1918 which existed and operated regardless of their approval) often is something else (domination of all economic life by bodies like the Commissariat of Trade/Commissariat of Finance).

Or, more optimistically, such variations among people, in a non-commodified society, would complement each other and generally add to everyone's growth.

I'd like to think that will be the case regardless of the forms of social organization undertaken in a communist world.

ckaihatsu

17th April 2013, 03:47

To clarify, there would be no -- or negligible -- surplus produced since everything would be pre-planned, in advance.

I appreciate the analysis you're undertaking here, but would like to point out that it's of a different scope, now -- you're expressing a concern about the different *fundamental* interests at play, or that will *always* be in play, *no matter* the societal context -- those of labor vs. administration vs. consumer (vs. labor).

Not necessarily; it's primarily a concern over the representation of value based on type of work/the production process- and that this will happen regardless of the method of accounting or the form that the representation of labor takes.

I appreciate your position here and I won't argue the point -- my reservation is that if far-reaching supply chains are utilized for complex industrial-type kinds of production then these "modalities" of labor, administration, and consumption *would* be more-separated since one wouldn't necessarily be so small-scale self-sufficient.

It's apparent that you're more of the mindset of libertarian socialism -- pre-industrial, basically.

While you characterize the system of labor credits as 'exchange' and a 'value operation', I'll suggest that *any* formal accounting method, besides that of labor credits, could be characterized this way -- this goes to highlight our difference on this issue. Please note, though, that there is no *exchange value* in the conventional, capital-based sense of it -- exchanging tangible goods for monetary value abstractions (currency). Instead, this model provides open-sourced materials according either to individual initiative, small-group coordination, or more-formal use of labor-credit pooling to fulfill prioritized mass demands.

Regarding the last statement- I contend that this is possible without accounting;

Doubtlessly, but *my* concern is that such a kind of social organization would probably not be formidable enough against capital, for a revolution, and would forfeit the benefits of industrial mass production regardless of timeframe.

which brings us to the central question of a post-capitalist world: do we live in a world where abundance is possible, or is scarcity not a social construct but rather a reality?

On this vague generalization I'm going to have to hold you to your previous statement, and ask you to rephrase....

I [...] do appreciate the frustration of a specific argument against a blanket argument, and will try to be more specific.

Certainly -- and then what about the higher-phase?

The absence of an economy (the way that primitive communism was pre-economy, the higher phase of communism would be 'post-economy'); social organization into some kind of voluntary association for the purpose of passing on knowledge, expertise or skills in labor processes and crafts/trades/industries to anyone willing and able to learn and thus perpetuate what we recognize as the capacity of capital's productive-distributive-consumptive apparatus fitted to human needs and desires entirely (which would likely mean a free science, a much different kind of education system likewise integrated into social relations just like labor). But it's just speculation; in the period of the DotP and the lower phase of communism, I don't think organizing society based on trade/craft/industry or a guild-esque system would be revolutionary but would likely lead back to capital accumulation.

Okay, understood -- may I ask what involvement mass industrial production might have in this formulation, or do you think humanity would wind up burying it altogether -- ?

No surplus -- more on that below.

Accumulated labor credits are specific to the sub-population of those who have actually done assigned work in the past and have earned those labor credits as a result. The labor credits circulate and remain with individual liberated laborers, or are passed-along, at their individual discretion.

There *are no* labor credits at the "community" level -- (this same issue arose in my recent conversation on this topic) -- the locality (whole population) oversees the administration of everything administrative, which includes the automated routine of mass-prioritizing individually-prioritized demand / request / order lists from every individual in the locality on a daily basis, regardless of their work history or work status.

The population's mass-prioritized demands -- whether more-political, more-economic, or a mixture of both -- serve as the basis for more-specific refinements, as into proposals and policy packages. Successive 'rounds' of refinements in this way can then likewise be mass-prioritized, revealing more-popular, more-decided mass inclinations towards one or another proposal or policy package -- these can contain calls for certain amounts of funding to be provided, from those within that same locality who have those labor credits to provide.

I think the level of community would be much higher- in everything, from raising children, to education throughout ones life, to the labor processes and skills- which would mean the kind of centralized orders for production would be far less formal.

I'll have to take exception here -- the degree of centralization, as over several localities, would be a political matter, with the "outside factor" of the need for a global proletarian revolution being a key requirement, or context.

As far as scale is concerned I'm indifferent otherwise, and this model can be scaled to any extents necessary:

Multi-Tiered System of Productive and Consumptive Zones for a Post-Capitalist Political Economy

http://s6.postimage.org/ccfl07uy5/Multi_Tiered_System_of_Productive_and_Consumptiv.j pg (http://postimage.org/image/ccfl07uy5/)

The Marx quote from the Grundrisse I posted earlier relates to this- free of SNLT and surplus labor, whats left is simply the amount of labor necessary to immediately realize the production goals of those involved; and technical development has reduced by exponential levels the amount of labor necessary to complete the manufacture-assembly of goods: if labor is no longer a separate sphere of life but is integrated into social life directly, if you wanted new clothes, and there's raw materials and manufacturing tools (means of production) available, the process of learning how to manufacture what you want is a social process utilizing shared knowledge from those that do know;

Yes. None of what you've described is precluded by the method of the model I propose.

and once the production is complete, that's it- use-value would be immediately expunged. Same process Marx uses to describe seeds in agriculture- tomato seeds sold at market have use-value (to plant to grow tomatos) and exchange-value (recognized by equivalence with other commodities and an equivalent commodity or currency and value rooted in the labor to collect and package them which reflects in its price); but the moment it is planted in the ground, it is devalorized; its use-value has been used up and it exits the production-circulation processes.

I don't know how much of the existing productive apparatus, as it stands now (mass manufacture, assembly lines) will exist in the higher phase; perhaps a widespread diffusion of knowledge, technology and components may mean a kind of modern cottage industry system- small workshops and household manufacture of many items of survival and luxury; open source technology kind of hints at this today (though I'm not saying this is the absolute basis of communism- just a potentiality).

Sure -- thanks for addressing that.

Ownership / control

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

My thinking on this is only that even the personal property, at any time (prior to, during or after the production process- regardless of use or disuse) are never private property, personal or local; that property has been abolished. That would require the kind of change in social values and relations that we've witnessed people are capable of. Since the 1970's, it has become more and more socially unacceptable not to recycle- people are pressured socially to conform to the values of society at that moment which result in conforming to the dominant value that recycling is what you should do with your aluminum can or glass bottle: if there are 2 receptacles in your workplace or in public spaces, the pressure is to put it in the recyclable bin if it is recyclable. I imagine a similar process when it comes to the personalization of property; that a dominant superego shift will develop that people lose the prioritization of what they use or have possession of as 'what they own' rather than 'things they happen to be using or holding onto'. Not that there should be any kind of coercion to give up things that you become attached to for sentimental reasons or that other people are going to use your toothbrush, just the social shift that stops identifying use or possession with ownership.

Okay -- particularly well-described, too.

There's no 'surplus labor' or 'surplus labor value' because *any* labor has to be pre-planned and specified in advance. Labor value is never abstracted or otherwise separated from those who are liberated laborers, since those who labor are the *only* ones who control future labor, endlessly -- and *only* in direct proportion to the amounts of liberated labor they have actually performed in the past.

I think I see your point on this, and largely agree (is the example of someone making clothing for themselves in line with this description? I may be misunderstanding you here).

Not at all.

Your own framework seems to be quite centered around the individual and individual capabilities -- which is fine -- but the reason for using labor credits at all is to enable the scale and complexities of mass production -- if only for the near-term sake of the revolution -- while precluding labor exploitation.

In other words, the only reason 'surplus labor value' exists at all is because the worker loses control of their own labor power *and* the results of it -- by making labor liberated (non-coercive), part of the larger locality's overall planning process, and keeping labor credits circulating only among those doing actual work, there is no longer any loss of control on the part of the (liberated) laborer and their work product. Labor credits represent the fact that someone has done real labor in proportion to the labor credits they possess. Those personal labor credits confer precise liberated-labor-organizing authority that is effected when they organize liberated labor on that basis, then passing those labor credits forward for the labor done -- once passed, that act closes out that discrete portion of authority derived from that discrete past work done.

Or formalism would just be a formality.

Maybe; it's tough to apply historical experience on this point since workers engaged in revolution, even at its deepest, couldn't get to a point where the formal categories of social life could be determined as either formality or rooted in a deeper division of society/people. I'm not really sure whether to leave it open as a possible eventuality (that a system like this may be simply formality and not demonstrating a deeper fissure) or err on the side of history that what appears to be formality (like some of the Bolshevik decree's that had no weight on real events- like the consumer co-ops in 1917-1918 which existed and operated regardless of their approval) often is something else (domination of all economic life by bodies like the Commissariat of Trade/Commissariat of Finance).

Your caution is understandable.

Or, more optimistically, such variations among people, in a non-commodified society, would complement each other and generally add to everyone's growth.

I'd like to think that will be the case regardless of the forms of social organization undertaken in a communist world.

Yup.

subcp

17th April 2013, 17:34

Okay, understood -- may I ask what involvement mass industrial production might have in this formulation, or do you think humanity would wind up burying it altogether -- ?

You're absolutely right that the model I put forward in the last thread is reminiscent of pre-industrial production; however, I completely agree with you that even if such a model were what people free of classes choose to utilize to organize production in the higher phase of communism, probably generations after the success of a worldwide proletarian revolution, it would be completely inappropriate and counter-revolutionary during the DotP.

The use of mass manufacture as it stands today, with a very high OCC in some of the most advanced manufacturing in the world (auto, energy, etc.), will probably continue for some time during and after the revolution, just with massively reduced work hours and a diffusion of technical knowledge.

As far as a post-capitalist, communist world, I have a hard time imagining people willing to work in conditions which were developed for modern capitalism (Taylorist, Fordist, Six Sigma, Lean, Toyotaism, etc.). I think the technical advances would continue to be used and will flourish following a successful global revolution- but without the constraints of profitability and extracting surplus (labor, value and overaccumulation) which would make what we think of as modern manufacture diffuse.

Sort of like Marx's defense of the Paris Commune as not a modern version of the medieval commune, but something which has sublimated such a model and become something higher; that's how it would seem a modern version of a guild or 'One Big Union' type social organization would be: rather than going back to a pre-industrial era or trying to re-do radical trade unionism in a world without classes, instead society absorbs the technical capacities, technology and science of capital, sublimating these methods and experiences, and developing the productive forces in a way that is beyond the capabilities of modern capitalism. Hopefully that would mean a diffusion of knowledge and expertise while keeping the international scale of the human community made possible by communications, logistics, etc. developments under capitalism.

But strictly speaking of 'higher phase' communism; when it comes to the DotP and initial striving for communism (lower phase), I don't have anywhere near as libertarian a view. Higher phase communism still seems like a topic to be more or less agnostic about: that we believe it will happen, that an international human community will use modern technologies and the productive capacities of capital to provide for all human needs and desires, but don't know the nuts and bolts of what it may look like.

Your own framework seems to be quite centered around the individual and individual capabilities -- which is fine -- but the reason for using labor credits at all is to enable the scale and complexities of mass production -- if only for the near-term sake of the revolution -- while precluding labor exploitation.

That's a good point. It would seem that the bigger disagreement here is over whether mass social reorganization happens before or during the higher phase of communism. I tend to see the kind of macro-cooperation at restarting production outside the control of the bourgeoisie and normal capitalist conditions as something that goes on during the DotP and bleeds into the lower phase, which is completed by the time the higher phase is an international reality (at which time the renaissance of human development under new social relations and productive conditions allows greater potential at the individual level for everyone in Earth).

Multi-Tiered System of Productive and Consumptive Zones for a Post-Capitalist Political Economy

I agree with parts of the chart, but wanted to ask you to expand on the concept of production-distribution-consumption overlap between household/local/regional/macro processes; I'd agree that the example of logging is straightforward, but assuming existing superfluous production factories are re-tooled (say for holiday decorations factories, cheap cadmium jewelery factories, etc.), it would make sense that consumer products would overlap (since capital has, especially since the 1970's, restructured itself into zones; one of which are hyper-concentrated manufacturing zones in South and East Asia) at every level (household to regional) if we largely leave the industrial productive capacity of the world zoned as it is under capital.

How much of a change do you imagine in the industrial-productive apparatus in the transition between capitalism and (higher phase) communism? Even if existing factories and workshops are re-tooled for human needs and desires (goods and services instead of commodities), this would leave the zones capital has created largely in place: will we still have a majority of consumer goods manufactured from existing factories, world agriculture zoned in specific places on Earth, and zones devoted to delivering services and consumption?

Or do you think that the re-tooling process (abolishing advertizing, FIRE sector, useless or undesirable goods production) also involves dispersing the productive apparatus of the world to more or less 'equalize' the globe in terms of productive capacity?

This is a point that I think shows in texts like W.Z. Fosters "Syndicalism", Wobblyism, IOPS, etc.- a vision of the world as it is, but without capitalists, more democracy, and no ownership. That workers simply take over what we have worldwide, without a significant reorganization of the production process.

Concerning scarcity:

This came up earlier in the thread; that resources on Earth are not just finite, but scarce. So the 2 views are that scarcity is real and not just a construct of capitalism (artificial scarcity being a function of capital, but that resources in general are scarce) and thus it is not possible to have free production and free access, or else resources will not be equitably distributed and will run out.

The other view is that capital has built the productive capacities in all things that is capable of delivering all human needs and nearly all desires, that the productive capacities are one of abundance which is artificially made scarce by capital for profitability reasons. If the resources on Earth are finite, but not truly scarce, and the productive capacities are capable of producing in abundance, there is no reason to account for and ration goods and services.

I subscribe to the latter view, just curious where you stand on that. No one is suggesting everyone gets nuclear reactors and submarines under communism; but reasonable and normal day to day needs and desires (including leisure goods and services). Felt the need to add that disclaimer.

ckaihatsu

17th April 2013, 20:52

You're absolutely right that the model I put forward in the last thread is reminiscent of pre-industrial production; however, I completely agree with you that even if such a model were what people free of classes choose to utilize to organize production in the higher phase of communism, probably generations after the success of a worldwide proletarian revolution, it would be completely inappropriate and counter-revolutionary during the DotP.

The use of mass manufacture as it stands today, with a very high OCC in some of the most advanced manufacturing in the world (auto, energy, etc.), will probably continue for some time during and after the revolution, just with massively reduced work hours and a diffusion of technical knowledge.

As far as a post-capitalist, communist world, I have a hard time imagining people willing to work in conditions which were developed for modern capitalism (Taylorist, Fordist, Six Sigma, Lean, Toyotaism, etc.). I think the technical advances would continue to be used and will flourish following a successful global revolution- but without the constraints of profitability and extracting surplus (labor, value and overaccumulation) which would make what we think of as modern manufacture diffuse.

Sort of like Marx's defense of the Paris Commune as not a modern version of the medieval commune, but something which has sublimated such a model and become something higher; that's how it would seem a modern version of a guild or 'One Big Union' type social organization would be: rather than going back to a pre-industrial era or trying to re-do radical trade unionism in a world without classes, instead society absorbs the technical capacities, technology and science of capital, sublimating these methods and experiences, and developing the productive forces in a way that is beyond the capabilities of modern capitalism. Hopefully that would mean a diffusion of knowledge and expertise while keeping the international scale of the human community made possible by communications, logistics, etc. developments under capitalism.

But strictly speaking of 'higher phase' communism; when it comes to the DotP and initial striving for communism (lower phase), I don't have anywhere near as libertarian a view. Higher phase communism still seems like a topic to be more or less agnostic about: that we believe it will happen, that an international human community will use modern technologies and the productive capacities of capital to provide for all human needs and desires, but don't know the nuts and bolts of what it may look like.

Yes, certainly -- as an aside I'll include a recent surmising about *present* conditions that could readily flow into a conception of the higher-phase:

My pet theory right now is that current conditions are similar to those of the 'Dark Ages', in that both are about endless stagnation with nothing but uncertainty on the horizon of civilization. The *upside*, though, as the text notes, is that better techniques, introduced from the outside -- computers, especially, for today -- became commonly available and increased the amount of utility for the average person.

Your own framework seems to be quite centered around the individual and individual capabilities -- which is fine -- but the reason for using labor credits at all is to enable the scale and complexities of mass production -- if only for the near-term sake of the revolution -- while precluding labor exploitation.

That's a good point. It would seem that the bigger disagreement here is over whether mass social reorganization happens before or during the higher phase of communism. I tend to see the kind of macro-cooperation at restarting production outside the control of the bourgeoisie and normal capitalist conditions as something that goes on during the DotP and bleeds into the lower phase, which is completed by the time the higher phase is an international reality (at which time the renaissance of human development under new social relations and productive conditions allows greater potential at the individual level for everyone in Earth).

I suppose we're *both* at the fringes of what our knowledge can provide, on this point, and can only speculate here -- the conventional conception of this, as you've described, *could* be considered 'stagist' of a sort.

Multi-Tiered System of Productive and Consumptive Zones for a Post-Capitalist Political Economy

I agree with parts of the chart, but wanted to ask you to expand on the concept of production-distribution-consumption overlap between household/local/regional/macro processes; I'd agree that the example of logging is straightforward, but assuming existing superfluous production factories are re-tooled (say for holiday decorations factories, cheap cadmium jewelery factories, etc.), it would make sense that consumer products would overlap (since capital has, especially since the 1970's, restructured itself into zones; one of which are hyper-concentrated manufacturing zones in South and East Asia) at every level (household to regional) if we largely leave the industrial productive capacity of the world zoned as it is under capital.

I'm not quite sure what you may or may not be suggesting with this -- would 'consumer products overlapping at all levels' be "okay" (by the existing geographical layout) -- ?

How much of a change do you imagine in the industrial-productive apparatus in the transition between capitalism and (higher phase) communism? Even if existing factories and workshops are re-tooled for human needs and desires (goods and services instead of commodities), this would leave the zones capital has created largely in place: will we still have a majority of consumer goods manufactured from existing factories, world agriculture zoned in specific places on Earth, and zones devoted to delivering services and consumption?

Or do you think that the re-tooling process (abolishing advertizing, FIRE sector, useless or undesirable goods production) also involves dispersing the productive apparatus of the world to more or less 'equalize' the globe in terms of productive capacity?

I suppose it would be a matter of how "ambitious" a post-revolution world population would be. Undoubtedly there would have to be some kind of Facebook-scale societal initiative to "inventory" everything in the world and see discussions form as to what humanity would happen to want most at that point.

This is a point that I think shows in texts like W.Z. Fosters "Syndicalism", Wobblyism, IOPS, etc.- a vision of the world as it is, but without capitalists, more democracy, and no ownership. That workers simply take over what we have worldwide, without a significant reorganization of the production process.

I'll remind the reader that Wikipedia has now documented almost every commonly known entity of information -- the same could certainly be done for the means of mass production, meaning individual factories. Every workplace could have its own wiki page, with basic information and ongoing discussions over its respective productive capacities and scheduling.

Concerning scarcity:

This came up earlier in the thread; that resources on Earth are not just finite, but scarce. So the 2 views are that scarcity is real and not just a construct of capitalism (artificial scarcity being a function of capital, but that resources in general are scarce) and thus it is not possible to have free production and free access, or else resources will not be equitably distributed and will run out.

The other view is that capital has built the productive capacities in all things that is capable of delivering all human needs and nearly all desires, that the productive capacities are one of abundance which is artificially made scarce by capital for profitability reasons. If the resources on Earth are finite, but not truly scarce, and the productive capacities are capable of producing in abundance, there is no reason to account for and ration goods and services.

I subscribe to the latter view, just curious where you stand on that. No one is suggesting everyone gets nuclear reactors and submarines under communism; but reasonable and normal day to day needs and desires (including leisure goods and services). Felt the need to add that disclaimer.

Well, *I* signed onto socialism specifically *for* the nuclear submarines, myself -- that's what the guy promised, anyway.... (grin)

I generally hesitate to try to tackle such an unwieldy topic and supposition -- you earlier pointed out the social constraint / more of people now recycling as the norm. Likewise, there would undoubtedly be social mores in a post-capitalist context that kept humanity "together" and wouldn't allow crazy excesses on the parts of individuals and small groups.

So while I tend to agree with you, on the feasible construction of 'abundance', I still find the subject far too complicated to give a definitive answer to. My only reason for supporting any kind of 'accounting', as with the use of labor credits, would be for the purposes of accuracy, coordination, record-keeping, and posterity in such an environment.

Not too long ago I introduced a thought experiment for just such a context:

My favorite illustrative scenario for this -- if you'll entertain it -- is that of a landscape artist in such a post-commodity world.

They make public their artistic endeavor to drape a prominent extended length of cliffs with their creation, and they'll require a custom-made fabric that is enormous and must be made with a blending of precious and rare metals formed as long threads.

Who is to deny them? (Or, how exactly would be this treated, politically?)

subcp

18th April 2013, 19:22

I suppose we're *both* at the fringes of what our knowledge can provide, on this point, and can only speculate here -- the conventional conception of this, as you've described, *could* be considered 'stagist' of a sort.

Indeed. Some manufacturing processes (mass manufacture of medication for example) likely won't change much- from the drug companies that are local to me, they appear to be relatively small manufacturing operations utilizing highly technical equipment and processes to produce consumer ready dosage units.

Others, like manufacture of consumer products in general, I have a hard time picturing as a part of the capitalist production base that will exist in higher-phase communism (textiles/clothing and shoes, consumer automotive manufacture, etc.).

But in the real experience of revolutionary movement, it's hard to tell where one stage will definitively end and the next will begin- another instance of combined and uneven development.

I'm not quite sure what you may or may not be suggesting with this -- would 'consumer products overlapping at all levels' be "okay" (by the existing geographical layout) -- ?

What I mean is how important do you think efficiency in the production process will be? As in, cottage industry style household manufacture of clothing taking place a quarter mile from a large clothing-textiles factory; or multiple levels (household, small workshop, large factory) of production of the same goods in a small geographic area. Is efficiency important, or does it no longer matter in a communist society? Can different levels of manufacture inhabit the same geographic area even if they are producing the same things in different ways? This is kind of related to the questions of waste and surplus.

I'll remind the reader that Wikipedia has now documented almost every commonly known entity of information -- the same could certainly be done for the means of mass production, meaning individual factories. Every workplace could have its own wiki page, with basic information and ongoing discussions over its respective productive capacities and scheduling.

That's a good point, and largely in line with a vision of diffused technology and information that would end the practice of an individual only 'being' one type of producer, but instead a community of 'jacks of all trades'.

Well, *I* signed onto socialism specifically *for* the nuclear submarines, myself -- that's what the guy promised, anyway.... (grin)

I generally hesitate to try to tackle such an unwieldy topic and supposition -- you earlier pointed out the social constraint / more of people now recycling as the norm. Likewise, there would undoubtedly be social mores in a post-capitalist context that kept humanity "together" and wouldn't allow crazy excesses on the parts of individuals and small groups.

So while I tend to agree with you, on the feasible construction of 'abundance', I still find the subject far too complicated to give a definitive answer to. My only reason for supporting any kind of 'accounting', as with the use of labor credits, would be for the purposes of accuracy, coordination, record-keeping, and posterity in such an environment.

Who's to say people won't want to build a Sealab 2021 style underwater city; communism confined to land leaves a literal sea of capitalism.

It may be more difficult to pin down certain industries; food production seems like a definite possibility of abundance (due to subsidized non-production and the extreme levels of spoilage, market forces like NAFTA pushing regional agriculture prices down- so it would be cheaper to buy an agri-conglomerates corn in a village in Mexico than corn grown down the street, etc.), I'm inclined to view housing as the same (due to the size of construction industries, the mass numbers of construction workers, the level of development on an annual basis and number of housing complexes and suburbs that remain vacant or foreclosed). Medication production as a whole seems to fall into this as well, possibly aside from specialty medications (though I don't know how much of that is due to the unprofitability of manufacturing them)- I mean, US pharmaceutical companies made enough amphetamines in the 1960's to supply every living person a month's supply (part of the reason the DEA was formed and created a cap for production and importation of scheduled drugs).

My favorite illustrative scenario for this -- if you'll entertain it -- is that of a landscape artist in such a post-commodity world.

They make public their artistic endeavor to drape a prominent extended length of cliffs with their creation, and they'll require a custom-made fabric that is enormous and must be made with a blending of precious and rare metals formed as long threads.

Who is to deny them? (Or, how exactly would be this treated, politically?)

That's a good example; and something I've been thinking about generally. There's a movie about the 'socialist cities' constructed in the 1920's RSFSR, where communists from all over the world (who were architects and other technicians) came to design cities on a 'Marxist' basis.

Siberia long served Russian Tsars only as a brutal wasteland to which to exile their enemies. But after the Revolution, the desolate steppes' abundant coal and iron became crucial in the Communist plan to finance a new utopia. Suddenly, huge cities had to be built to house hundreds of thousands of workers. Contemporary Soviet architects could not design such cities: the old guard was politically suspect while young designers fantasized about flying cities. So, in the late 1920s and early 30s, well-known Western European architects were invited to create the workers' paradises. Leaving their good names in the West, the pioneers enthusiastically boarded trains bound for an uncertain future.
SOTSGOROD tells their stories in the architects' own words. Some of the last survivors are interviewed: Jan Rutgers (of the Autonomous International Colony Kuzbass), Magarete Schutte-Lihotzky (of the Ernst May group, famous for the "Frankfurter Kuche" or super efficient kitchen), and Phillipp Tolziner ("Bauhaus Brigade"). Those who have passed away speak through their letters, articles and lectures, including Hannes Meyer, Hans Schmidt and Ernst May. Some believed they were making an essential contribution to the workers' struggle; others were seizing an unheard of opportunity to apply their design philosophies and spatial theories to entire cities.
But in 1932, the Party decided it trusted no one, and certainly not foreign professionals. A cloak and dagger atmosphere dominated the next five years, as blueprints were stolen and the architects came under surveillance. In 1937 the Westerners were presented with a choice: become citizens or leave the Soviet Union. For the first time, this film reveals the fate of the architects who stayed, as well as those who left and kept silent for six decades.
SOTSGOROD also visits four of the cities that were built: Magnitogorsk, Orsk, Novokuznetsk and Kemerov. The success of these Sotsgorods ("Socialist Cities") is examined by following a resident in each city as he goes to work, shops, eats dinner. Nothing spectacular, but by looking at the quality of day-to-day lives, the film trys to measure the success of the once robust ideals of the architects.
SOTSGOROD: CITIES FOR UTOPIA investigates the interactions between East and West, idealism and reality.

It seems like a fascinating movie (costs like $300) that relates to this topic. An example that came to me the other day was similar to yours- if people who worked in an office building in a city wanted to have large paintings constructed onto the side of the building in an effort toward re-tooling urban environments in the context of the human community, how would this be undertaken.

I'd imagine that people who were inclined or talented in different arts would organize similar to how they do now- in collectives based on type of art style or geography; and that this would be the link between a geographic commune-type organization and producing or acquiring necessary equipment and materials.

ckaihatsu

18th April 2013, 21:32

Indeed. Some manufacturing processes (mass manufacture of medication for example) likely won't change much- from the drug companies that are local to me, they appear to be relatively small manufacturing operations utilizing highly technical equipment and processes to produce consumer ready dosage units.

Others, like manufacture of consumer products in general, I have a hard time picturing as a part of the capitalist production base that will exist in higher-phase communism (textiles/clothing and shoes, consumer automotive manufacture, etc.).

But in the real experience of revolutionary movement, it's hard to tell where one stage will definitively end and the next will begin- another instance of combined and uneven development.

Well, you're mixing timeframes and modes of production here -- we *would* know exactly what's going on with the revolution because there would no longer be 'business as usual'. Revolution is an *intentional* act on the part of millions and billions, so even if much of the *physical* operations remained unchanged during such a transition, the *social* aspect would consistently be big news.

The "stagism" I was indicating as a possibility would be

whether mass social reorganization happens before or during the higher phase of communism.

I'm not even arguing 'stagism', exactly, because of future unknowns -- but the political organization required for revolution could very well be a concomitant *social* reorganization at the same time, even over aspects or areas of mass production.

What I mean is how important do you think efficiency in the production process will be? As in, cottage industry style household manufacture of clothing taking place a quarter mile from a large clothing-textiles factory; or multiple levels (household, small workshop, large factory) of production of the same goods in a small geographic area. Is efficiency important, or does it no longer matter in a communist society? Can different levels of manufacture inhabit the same geographic area even if they are producing the same things in different ways? This is kind of related to the questions of waste and surplus.

Okay -- sure. I guess it would all depend on what people are willing to do or not-do. I would think that the revolutionary spirit -- one strong enough to bring people into the streets, etc. -- would also express mass dissatisfaction with routine, banal roles and exploitation.

Maybe much of the revolution would be a *negation* of conventional productive (and "productive") tasks, wanting to move away from such, and then to automate the bare essentials, under popular / proletarian control.

This would actually be a crucial *logistical* (and social) issue at first, since a revolutionary organization wouldn't want to waste its energies on needless tasks. Maybe later on, post-capitalism, people would have the breathing room to do certain kinds of production "redundantly", at smaller scales, by sheer choice.

I'll remind the reader that Wikipedia has now documented almost every commonly known entity of information -- the same could certainly be done for the means of mass production, meaning individual factories. Every workplace could have its own wiki page, with basic information and ongoing discussions over its respective productive capacities and scheduling.

That's a good point, and largely in line with a vision of diffused technology and information that would end the practice of an individual only 'being' one type of producer, but instead a community of 'jacks of all trades'.

Certainly. I'll add / point out that the system of labor credits is meant to complement this, too, since even the "community" / locality would not have to remain fixed and intact -- its population could inter-diffuse with others, with liberated laborers readily roaming to any given (industrial) workplace, to incorporate themselves appropriately, both earning labor credits and using them to determine the composition of labor wherever they may happen to be.

Who's to say people won't want to build a Sealab 2021 style underwater city; communism confined to land leaves a literal sea of capitalism.

I hope you're being tongue-in-cheek here, since anything so exploratory as what you're suggesting would definitely have to wait until the bourgeoisie is thoroughly defeated.

It may be more difficult to pin down certain industries; food production seems like a definite possibility of abundance (due to subsidized non-production and the extreme levels of spoilage, market forces like NAFTA pushing regional agriculture prices down- so it would be cheaper to buy an agri-conglomerates corn in a village in Mexico than corn grown down the street, etc.), I'm inclined to view housing as the same (due to the size of construction industries, the mass numbers of construction workers, the level of development on an annual basis and number of housing complexes and suburbs that remain vacant or foreclosed). Medication production as a whole seems to fall into this as well, possibly aside from specialty medications (though I don't know how much of that is due to the unprofitability of manufacturing them)- I mean, US pharmaceutical companies made enough amphetamines in the 1960's to supply every living person a month's supply (part of the reason the DEA was formed and created a cap for production and importation of scheduled drugs).

Yes -- I think the point is to concentrate on fundamentals of life and living. This implies using existing technologies very efficiently, at large scales, without the drain of profit extraction.

If we as proletarians take our own labor seriously we wouldn't want to have labor redundancy over tasks that could be automated or otherwise efficiently dispatched.

I'll even go so far as to throw entire *industries* into question, and note that in the here-and-now there are ready, working alternatives to a default participation in the machinations of capitalism:

Ubuntu (Linux distro OS) Discussion

http://www.revleft.com/vb/ubuntu-linux-distro-t179002/index.html

Energized Water - Welcome to Good Health

http://www.revleft.com/vb/energized-water-welcome-t180049/index.html

That's a good example; and something I've been thinking about generally. There's a movie about the 'socialist cities' constructed in the 1920's RSFSR, where communists from all over the world (who were architects and other technicians) came to design cities on a 'Marxist' basis.

Siberia long served Russian Tsars only as a brutal wasteland to which to exile their enemies. But after the Revolution, the desolate steppes' abundant coal and iron became crucial in the Communist plan to finance a new utopia. Suddenly, huge cities had to be built to house hundreds of thousands of workers. Contemporary Soviet architects could not design such cities: the old guard was politically suspect while young designers fantasized about flying cities. So, in the late 1920s and early 30s, well-known Western European architects were invited to create the workers' paradises. Leaving their good names in the West, the pioneers enthusiastically boarded trains bound for an uncertain future.
SOTSGOROD tells their stories in the architects' own words. Some of the last survivors are interviewed: Jan Rutgers (of the Autonomous International Colony Kuzbass), Magarete Schutte-Lihotzky (of the Ernst May group, famous for the "Frankfurter Kuche" or super efficient kitchen), and Phillipp Tolziner ("Bauhaus Brigade"). Those who have passed away speak through their letters, articles and lectures, including Hannes Meyer, Hans Schmidt and Ernst May. Some believed they were making an essential contribution to the workers' struggle; others were seizing an unheard of opportunity to apply their design philosophies and spatial theories to entire cities.
But in 1932, the Party decided it trusted no one, and certainly not foreign professionals. A cloak and dagger atmosphere dominated the next five years, as blueprints were stolen and the architects came under surveillance. In 1937 the Westerners were presented with a choice: become citizens or leave the Soviet Union. For the first time, this film reveals the fate of the architects who stayed, as well as those who left and kept silent for six decades.
SOTSGOROD also visits four of the cities that were built: Magnitogorsk, Orsk, Novokuznetsk and Kemerov. The success of these Sotsgorods ("Socialist Cities") is examined by following a resident in each city as he goes to work, shops, eats dinner. Nothing spectacular, but by looking at the quality of day-to-day lives, the film trys to measure the success of the once robust ideals of the architects.
SOTSGOROD: CITIES FOR UTOPIA investigates the interactions between East and West, idealism and reality.

It seems like a fascinating movie (costs like $300) that relates to this topic.

Yes -- I'll be on the lookout for it.

An example that came to me the other day was similar to yours- if people who worked in an office building in a city wanted to have large paintings constructed onto the side of the building in an effort toward re-tooling urban environments in the context of the human community, how would this be undertaken.

Right -- you're implying a city-wide political / social process for reaching a consensus on what should or shouldn't go somewhere.

Practically speaking it would be good to have several proponents putting forth their own 'layouts', from inputs from all over the city (many buildings), to then be mass-prioritized according to favored layouts.

I'd imagine that people who were inclined or talented in different arts would organize similar to how they do now- in collectives based on type of art style or geography; and that this would be the link between a geographic commune-type organization and producing or acquiring necessary equipment and materials.

Absolutely. In this way all major artistic endeavors would be socialized, and thus politicized.

Not to belabor the scenario, but I also meant it in a way to point out the relation of the *individual* artist to the larger society and whatever method / process is adopted for approving projects of mass production.

Would the landscape artist *have* to be part of an established artistic communal collective -- ? Would their vision for a creation have to be somehow 'approved' by an established school of style -- ? Would the possibility of receiving access to formal mass production (beyond themselves as an individual materials-producer) be in any way predicated on the "merits" of their vision -- ? (Etc.)

ckaihatsu

19th April 2013, 05:22

[T]he "community" / locality would not have to remain fixed and intact -- its population could inter-diffuse with others, with liberated laborers readily roaming to any given (industrial) workplace, to incorporate themselves appropriately, both earning labor credits and using them to determine the composition of labor wherever they may happen to be.

Based on the above, I'd like to add / clarify an additional aspect of the 'communist supply & demand' model....

Given that a locality is treated as a cohesive entity for the purposes of political and economic needs and demands, and that a locality may not actually *remain* cohesive, as per the above, the question may arise how a locality's accumulated debt of labor credits would then be handled if its own population is continually dispersing and re-forming.

communist supply & demand -- Model of Material Factors

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

http://tinyurl.com/ygybheg

Associated material values

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

Propagation

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

So one could argue that a locality could just announce all kinds of local projects and production runs, run up a sizeable debt of labor credits to pay the liberated laborers, and then after enjoying the benefits of that labor its residents would simply disperse from the locality, leaving it uninhabited and in debt.

To address this potential scenario there could be a regulation that ties all individuals, by name, to any given locality -- any individual who would want to leave the locality would have to either pay their individually-proportionate share of the locality's outstanding debt of labor credits, or else -- for exceptional circumstances -- that same portion of debt would be assigned to that individual for wherever they happened to be after leaving.

On the converse, if someone wanted to move *to* a locality that had a debt, they would implicitly be assuming their individually-proportionate share of that locality's total debt of labor credits.

Localities would only be able to *issue* and *work off* debts in their locality's name -- liberated laborers holding labor credits of their own in a locality that has no debt are considered as individuals with their own personal labor credits, with none of those labor credits seen as being with the locality as a whole, as might be imagined.

Strannik

19th April 2013, 06:50

I think speculating about higher stage of communism must begin with the understanding that labour is not a resource in communism. It is a property of human beings and is never separated from them and exchanged. Other than that, communism can have "accounting" - inventory of resources. But not when it comes to labour.

Secondly, one can never assume just one particular change (say, money to labour credits) considering the higher social order. Besides not treating labour as resource, communism does not produce commodities. It is closer to reality to think that communars produce "services" - not "loafs of bread", but being fed; not SUV-s, but being able to move. It's never just what consumer demands, its also how much or how little others are willing and able to give. There is no separation between producers and consumers.

These, I think, are the basic proceeding points of high communism. Generally, whenever one assumes a permanent "separation" or "cathegorization" in communist society, one has to become careful - it may be our bourgeois outlook talking. :)

ckaihatsu

19th April 2013, 10:18

I think speculating about higher stage of communism must begin with the understanding that labour is not a resource in communism.

I appreciate your humanistic and humane emphasis here, but I also have to remind that, materially speaking, labor *is* a resource, and always will be as long as humanity refuses to remain at a standstill.

It is a property of human beings and is never separated from them and exchanged.

Under capitalism it is, obviously, but in discussing alternative, socialist- and communist-type ways of socializing labor, I think it's fair to posit a formal method that *does* treat labor as a resource, but only with (liberated) labor's own cooperation, without duress, and without exploitation.

Other than that, communism can have "accounting" - inventory of resources. But not when it comes to labour.

Secondly, one can never assume just one particular change (say, money to labour credits) considering the higher social order. Besides not treating labour as resource, communism does not produce commodities. It is closer to reality to think that communars produce "services" - not "loafs of bread", but being fed; not SUV-s, but being able to move. It's never just what consumer demands, its also how much or how little others are willing and able to give. There is no separation between producers and consumers.

I *generally* agree, of course, but will also note that this (orthodox) conception smacks of outright charity -- even clientelism -- and is a rather *parochial* take on the idea of communism.

It's easy to *say* that 'there is no separation between producers and consumers', but the material reality is -- and always will be -- that these two roles will not necessarily collapse into one and the same at any given point in time.

For example, if someone is making a chair for themselves, then, yes, this axiom would hold true -- but how *realistic* is this example, or *should* it be -- ?

Obviously my own conception differs from the conventional one, in that I'd prefer to see complex and sophisticated interdependent kinds of liberated production taking place -- something that can only occur if the role of labor *doesn't* have to be for oneself necessarily.

So, in allowing the flexibility for work roles to vary away from consumption-type modes of living, there then has to be some "accounting" method used to ensure a kind of interchangeable equivalence from one work role to the next -- hence the 'labor credits' formulation.

These, I think, are the basic proceeding points of high communism. Generally, whenever one assumes a permanent "separation" or "cathegorization" in communist society, one has to become careful - it may be our bourgeois outlook talking. :)

There's *bourgeois* idealism, which we're painfully aware of as revolutionaries, but, in our aspiring to a better world society, it's possible to arrive at idealism-type conceptions of our own, such as an inflexible sense of the producer and consumer roles *always* being one-and-the-same, always at the same moment in time.

subcp

19th April 2013, 17:30

I'm not even arguing 'stagism', exactly, because of future unknowns -- but the political organization required for revolution could very well be a concomitant *social* reorganization at the same time, even over aspects or areas of mass production.

That's an aspect that troubles me; is mass production inherently counter-revolutionary?

Yes -- I think the point is to concentrate on fundamentals of life and living. This implies using existing technologies very efficiently, at large scales, without the drain of profit extraction.

If we as proletarians take our own labor seriously we wouldn't want to have labor redundancy over tasks that could be automated or otherwise efficiently dispatched.

I'll even go so far as to throw entire *industries* into question, and note that in the here-and-now there are ready, working alternatives to a default participation in the machinations of capitalism

I agree that the profit motive and problems inherent to capitalism stunt growth and change in favor of environmentally destructive or otherwise outmoded forms of production/survival. But the proletariat would no longer exist by the higher phase; I don't think it'll continue to exist long after day 1 of an international, generalized ferment begins (DotP as very short).

Based on the above, I'd like to add / clarify an additional aspect of the 'communist supply & demand' model....

Unity of supply and demand is presupposed in the change in social relations and ways of producing-

So one could argue that a locality could just announce all kinds of local projects and production runs, run up a sizeable debt of labor credits to pay the liberated laborers, and then after enjoying the benefits of that labor its residents would simply disperse from the locality, leaving it uninhabited and in debt.

To address this potential scenario there could be a regulation that ties all individuals, by name, to any given locality -- any individual who would want to leave the locality would have to either pay their individually-proportionate share of the locality's outstanding debt of labor credits, or else -- for exceptional circumstances -- that same portion of debt would be assigned to that individual for wherever they happened to be after leaving.

I'm still not seeing the way that a system of labor credits, by acting as equivalence to 'dead labor' (labor already performed and embodied in projects, services or goods), which are accounted for and act as a guide for future production and recognition of past production, does not recreate the operation of the law of value. Questions of 'debt' suggest that accounting binds people based on the kinds of work they undertake, even if that work were 'liberated', under their own terms, etc.

Which gets back to 2 questions I have in this thread:

-Is mass manufacture inherently counter-revolutionary?
-Doesn't communism involve the abolition of the law of value?

The risk of re-creating a society divided by classes under a different set of conditions from the capital accumulation as we know it today is high; things like 'workers self-management' and 'radical autonomy' both have and will again lead to recuperation.

‘[T]he formulae ‘workers’ control’ and ‘workers’ management’ are lacking in any content. … The ‘content’ [of socialism] won't be proletarian autonomy, control, and management of production, but the disappearance of the proletarian class; of the wage system; of exchange — even in its last surviving form as the exchange of money for labour-power; and, finally, the individual enterprise will disappear as well. There will be nothing to control and manage, and nobody to demand autonomy from.’ Amadeo Bordiga, The Fundamentals of Revolutionary Communism (1957) (ICP, 1972).

ckaihatsu

19th April 2013, 19:26

That's an aspect that troubles me; is mass production inherently counter-revolutionary?

I would say 'no' -- it looks like you're leaning towards 'yes'.

I agree that the profit motive and problems inherent to capitalism stunt growth and change in favor of environmentally destructive or otherwise outmoded forms of production/survival. But the proletariat would no longer exist by the higher phase; I don't think it'll continue to exist long after day 1 of an international, generalized ferment begins (DotP as very short).

I guess I find the conventional conception of post-revolution social relations to be rather *vague* -- while we can't make precise predictions from the vantage point of today, we *can* look at certain social material realities, like labor, administration, and consumption, in *timeless* terms and talk about such, free from the exploitation of capital.

Unity of supply and demand is presupposed in the change in social relations and ways of producing-

This would be another example of that 'vagueness' -- the only reason I even *used* the term 'supply and demand' in the title of the model is to indicate that as a matter of physical activity, some will be *supplying* while others will be *demanding*, or a mixture of both, even in a post-capitalist world.

If we as revolutionaries can't sufficiently explain and clarify the nature of the trajectory we advocate, it only constrains our politics and leaves us open to charges of being like a religion.

I'm still not seeing the way that a system of labor credits, by acting as equivalence to 'dead labor' (labor already performed and embodied in projects, services or goods), which are accounted for and act as a guide for future production and recognition of past production, does not recreate the operation of the law of value.

Well perhaps you're hung-up on the formalism of 'value' -- you've already stated that your position does not include any kind of formal 'accounting', and now you're even questioning mass production itself.

I'm sorry there's a divergence here, but there is.

Questions of 'debt' suggest that accounting binds people based on the kinds of work they undertake, even if that work were 'liberated', under their own terms, etc.

No, this is a misinterpretation -- again:

[U]nderfunded projects and production runs are debt-based and will be noted as such against the issuing locality

And:

Localities would only be able to *issue* and *work off* debts in their locality's name -- liberated laborers holding labor credits of their own in a locality that has no debt are considered as individuals with their own personal labor credits, with none of those labor credits seen as being with the locality as a whole, as might be imagined.

The only occasion in which 'debt' comes into play is if the locality as a whole *formally* needs the benefits of liberated labor but has not completed enough labor from within its ranks to reciprocate that request. (If it had then its own denizens would have enough labor credits among themselves to provide proof of commensurate work done, for the liberated labor being requested.)

So, contrary to your assertion, work itself does *not* incur debt -- rather, it's the *requisitioning* of *others'* liberated labor, without having done proportionate labor to 'earn' such an authority over people's labor.

Which gets back to 2 questions I have in this thread:

-Is mass manufacture inherently counter-revolutionary?
-Doesn't communism involve the abolition of the law of value?

The risk of re-creating a society divided by classes under a different set of conditions from the capital accumulation as we know it today is high; things like 'workers self-management' and 'radical autonomy' both have and will again lead to recuperation.

Your concerns are valid, of course, and can't be repeated enough.

I only question the way in which we present the *scope* of our revolutionary politics, and look to ensure that we don't leave off at some kind of a "material hereafter" as a sloppy placeholder for what *should* be the results of a keener, material analysis.

Strannik

20th April 2013, 09:03

... in discussing alternative, socialist- and communist-type ways of socializing labor, I think it's fair to posit a formal method that *does* treat labor as a resource, but only with (liberated) labor's own cooperation, without duress, and without exploitation.

I wouldn't criticize labour credits, social utility or any other system, if we would speak about immediate postrevolutionary society. But I understood we are specifically talking about higher communism here.

It is not an easy thing to express in few short words the kind of massive social change this means, but it seems to me currently, that elimination of difference of "me and my labour" is the ultimate aim and difference from current situation.

People who begin to live in developed communism do not come from our current society. They come from socialism - from a society, where socialized labour has become commonplace, capital is accessible to everyone and labour is immensely productive thanks to developed labour practices and technologies.

Consider a situation where daily work of a single person could support hundreds and thousands of people and everyone is a worker with access to means of production. This means that society possesses a superabundance of labour (as resource) and generally societies do not count abundant resources. In a sense, possibilities to perform socially valued labour would be (relatively) more scarce and more valuable than any result of labour?

Perhaps I'm not correct, but my basic idea is this: when we want to speculate about higher communism, we cannot proceed from today's situation and today's people. We have to proceed from developed socialism.

ckaihatsu

20th April 2013, 13:34

I wouldn't criticize labour credits, social utility or any other system, if we would speak about immediate postrevolutionary society. But I understood we are specifically talking about higher communism here.

It is not an easy thing to express in few short words the kind of massive social change this means, but it seems to me currently, that elimination of difference of "me and my labour" is the ultimate aim and difference from current situation.

People who begin to live in developed communism do not come from our current society. They come from socialism - from a society, where socialized labour has become commonplace, capital is accessible to everyone and labour is immensely productive thanks to developed labour practices and technologies.

Consider a situation where daily work of a single person could support hundreds and thousands of people and everyone is a worker with access to means of production. This means that society possesses a superabundance of labour (as resource) and generally societies do not count abundant resources.

In a sense, possibilities to perform socially valued labour would be (relatively) more scarce and more valuable than any result of labour?

Perhaps I'm not correct, but my basic idea is this: when we want to speculate about higher communism, we cannot proceed from today's situation and today's people. We have to proceed from developed socialism.

Yes, and it's an interesting idea -- would possibilities to perform socially valuable labor be *scarcer* as a result of socialism's 'superabundance' -- ?

Some would say that increases in technology and capabilities -- and therefore resources -- simply leads to *new kinds* of needs, as for services that are specific to the new technologies.

If we see social organization as similar to, or a kind of new 'technology', then the same may hold true -- while people would be free of duress and basic wants, the nature of social utility might actually not change much, since humanity's aspirations would merely be 'taken up a level' and not altered in *form* in any way.

I suppose there *would* be a paradigm shift at some point -- punctuated equilibrium -- wherein (liberated) labor would be *so* highly leveraged that social organization would resemble more of a mass co-administration over powerful and sophisticated technologies, than 'labor' in the sense of 'work'.

[NOTE: 'Level' not meant in the same way as in the diagram.]

[1] History, Macro Micro -- Precision

http://s6.postimage.org/zbpxjshkd/1_History_Macro_Micro_Precision.jpg (http://postimage.org/image/zbpxjshkd/)

subcp

22nd April 2013, 04:26

Regarding mass production- I don't have a strong enough grasp of all the implications to give a concrete answer; but can see ways that it could be inherently counter0revolutionary.

This would be another example of that 'vagueness' -- the only reason I even *used* the term 'supply and demand' in the title of the model is to indicate that as a matter of physical activity, some will be *supplying* while others will be *demanding*, or a mixture of both, even in a post-capitalist world.

If we as revolutionaries can't sufficiently explain and clarify the nature of the trajectory we advocate, it only constrains our politics and leaves us open to charges of being like a religion.

The issue then is the term itself- which is rooted in a division of labor specific to capitalism (socialization of labor- product of capitalist development).

Basing the communist perspective on the science of Marxism is what separates that perspective from religion (and idealism in general). But basing certain aspects of the higher phase of communism on certain foundations (abolition of property, law of value, etc.) may be the only certainty that can be precise. I do wonder if any further speculation can be more than speculation when it leaves the aspects of communism that are scientifically determined (by the analysis and critique of political economy and the subjective force of the class struggle as the medium for historic changes).

Well perhaps you're hung-up on the formalism of 'value' -- you've already stated that your position does not include any kind of formal 'accounting', and now you're even questioning mass production itself.

I'm sorry there's a divergence here, but there is.

I don't know how that's divergence?

The only occasion in which 'debt' comes into play is if the locality as a whole *formally* needs the benefits of liberated labor but has not completed enough labor from within its ranks to reciprocate that request. (If it had then its own denizens would have enough labor credits among themselves to provide proof of commensurate work done, for the liberated labor being requested.)

So, contrary to your assertion, work itself does *not* incur debt -- rather, it's the *requisitioning* of *others'* liberated labor, without having done proportionate labor to 'earn' such an authority over people's labor.

Your explanation confirms what I was getting at; according to the original schema, work is categorized for the purpose of assigning appropriate labor credits; what you're saying is that 'debt' exists when a community receives goods and services beyond what that community is producing/servicing (the capacities or output of the community):

I'm saying that this is re-creating value operation under a different guise- and why accounting (analysis and management of production flow information) necessarily leads back to value production (which is what a 'community' or 'locality' would be doing- by producing for labor credits to use those labor credits- either for material/social advantages over other communities).

I only question the way in which we present the *scope* of our revolutionary politics, and look to ensure that we don't leave off at some kind of a "material hereafter" as a sloppy placeholder for what *should* be the results of a keener, material analysis.

Though there are points where things we think we should know or be able to theorize are truly not a hole, but a place where theory doesn't come before practice:

Both the Paris Commune and the Soviet forms were not planned in advance, but were the creation of workers engaged in revolutionary crisis activity: the theory of the movement of the working-class came after the organizational forms had been created by the proletariat. That's also an area that one would think communists should have an answer for (the form of the DotP)- but in practice this 'hole' was filled by the creative activity of the class.

That seems like an apt comparison to post-capitalist, communist production.

ckaihatsu

22nd April 2013, 06:06

ckaihatsu

22nd April 2013, 06:27

Your explanation confirms what I was getting at; according to the original schema, work is categorized for the purpose of assigning appropriate labor credits; what you're saying is that 'debt' exists when a community receives goods and services beyond what that community is producing/servicing (the capacities or output of the community):

I need to further clarify one point -- this portion is incorrect:

'debt' exists when a community receives goods and services

beyond what that community is producing/servicing

Please note that there is *no* exchangeability between labor credits and *goods* / production.

This is because the production of any goods / resources is primarily a *political* act, one that has to go through a mass-political process to be decided-on and for liberated labor to be requisitioned for it.

communist supply & demand -- Model of Material Factors

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

http://tinyurl.com/ygybheg

Associated material values

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

Anyone's hypothetical offering of labor credits directly for material goods could only be seen as a *political* failing as a whole, since those goods *should* already be readily available, hopefully from already-completed production (for common items).

It would be in the interests of the post-capitalist locality to make the political-demand process work, as through a smooth administration of the model's routines, with more-than-sufficient production to ensure abundance.

subcp

22nd April 2013, 22:03

Well, if you're going to make such a towering assertion you really *should* have an argument to back it up.

I see it as a prevailing material reality -- those who may wish to dominate an aspect of social life, as through private ownership of the means of mass production, will undoubtedly do so unless the social relations to that mass production can be revolutionized.I asked the question- there was no 'towering assertion'.

The transition from workplace committees to One-Man-Management in revolutionary Russia is an example of attempting to use industry, in the form it takes under the real domination of capital (mass manufacture), as it stands. Questions of efficiency and productive capacities were to override the social transformations underway in the factories.

No, once more this is only *your own* interpretation -- there's nothing in the model that suggests any kind of primacy of value, like the profit motive under capitalism.The question isn't whether a schema utilizing labor credits (or any other form of recognition, remuneration or accounting of labor power or labor time or production) is directly analogous to the what underlies the profit motive; but whether or not the law of value is still in operation in some form.

LABOR CREDITS ARE PAID PER HOUR OF WORK AT A MULTIPLIER RATE BASED ON DIFFICULTY OR HAZARD — MULTIPLIERS ARE SURVEY-DERIVEDI'm sorry, but asserting that this does not describe assigning a value-form for average time does not eliminate value production in your schema: regardless of accumulation of labor credits, regardless of the management of labor credits; similar to the operation of capital in that it does not matter whether capital is accumulated by an individual, a state or is rationed on a more or less equitable basis in a democratic manner- the accumulation of value, the heart of that matter at the point of production, is what matters- not the social division of accumulated value- and is what makes such a system counter to communism.

The only motive respected in the model is that of *demand* since it's tallied on a daily basis, universally, and provides the impetus for projects for liberated labor and its own self-organizing.Capitalism has co-op enterprises and worker-owned and run businesses (sometimes with rank and file, democratic labor unions representing the worker-owners/managers: all of the IWW co-ops and UE worker run businesses). This does not mean that value production has ceased- motive is irrelevant to that basic question.

If the people of a locality decided they wanted to amass a vast number of labor credits they could only do so by supplying their own liberated labor to *other* localities, according to the opportunities / requests for liberated labor decided-on by the people of any other given locality. (The only other way to amass labor credits would be for the locality to issue its own debt, which would be shown publicly, as already covered.)

So it can be seen that the earning of labor credits is implicitly a purely *social* relation, and causes no separation of "value" outside of the self-organization of liberated labor. There is no value production because the *use* of earned labor credits only *negates*, or annihilates, the "value" of the past work completed that those labor credits represent -- it is entirely a 'paying-it-forward' operation, strictly for liberated labor.That sounds like a roundabout way to describe enlarged reproduction: capital which is value-in-process that becomes invested in a larger production run, in hiring more workers, in new machinery and technology and technical processes, also 'pays it forward': the use-value inherent to commodities is also devalorized when they are 'used'- we're back to the tomato seeds planted into the Earth. Producing for human needs is not directly a communist trait; it is the trait of all modes of production.

Every major use of labor credits would require a *political* initiative and a specific policy for those pooled personal collections -- they would either be used on a small-scale, individual basis, or would necessarily have to be *politicized* for larger-scale use, since no exploitation or value-robbing would be possible.Again, political power cannot exist in a communist society.

Value-robbing is not the same as value-production: recognizing labor power/labor time in a universal equivalent is value production.

LABOR SUPPLY IS SELECTED AND PAID FOR WITH EXISTING (OR DEBT-BASED) LABOR CREDITSAlienated labor; if labor time has a recognized value, and there is a political process to decide production, we are talking about alienated labor.

"Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general. This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer." - Marx, Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts

If the economic basis for society is

ALL ASSETS AND RESOURCES WILL BE COLLECTIVIZED AS COMMUNIST PROPERTY IN COMMON — THEIR USE MUST BE DETERMINED THROUGH A REGULAR POLITICAL PROCESS OF PRIORITIZED DEMANDS FROM A LOCALITY OR LARGER POPULATION — ANY UNUSED ASSETS OR RESOURCES MAY BE USED BY INDIVIDUALS IN A PERSONAL CAPACITY ONLY
ONLY ACTIVE WORKERS MAY CONTROL COMMUNIST PROPERTY — NO PRIVATE ACCUMULATIONS ARE ALLOWED AND ANY PROCEEDS FROM WORK THAT CANNOT BE USED OR CONSUMED BY PERSONS THEMSELVES WILL REVERT TO COLLECTIVIZED COMMUNIST PROPERTYAnd the political expression of this economic basis is

WORK POSITIONS ARE CREATED ACCORDING TO REQUIREMENTS OF PRODUCTION RUNS AND PROJECTS, BY MASS POLITICAL PRIORITIZATION
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

Labor is still alienated the way that 'free labor' under capital is still alienated; even in worker-owned unionized co-ops. The work environment may be 'freer', but the relationship between the 'worker' and product are the same; if the decisions regarding what to do with what is produced are made by a political body the producer is estranged from the product of their labor.

ckaihatsu

22nd April 2013, 23:44

Regarding mass production- I don't have a strong enough grasp of all the implications to give a concrete answer; but can see ways that it could be inherently counter0revolutionary.

Well, if you're going to make such a towering assertion you really *should* have an argument to back it up.

I asked the question- there was no 'towering assertion'.

No, you made an assertion.

The transition from workplace committees to One-Man-Management in revolutionary Russia is an example of attempting to use industry, in the form it takes under the real domination of capital (mass manufacture), as it stands. Questions of efficiency and productive capacities were to override the social transformations underway in the factories.

Yes, the backsliding from the soviets to war communism and then Stalinism was unfortunate -- it was due to historical realities.

Nothing in our politics would *recommend* such a top-down command structure, if it can be avoided.

No, once more this is only *your own* interpretation -- there's nothing in the model that suggests any kind of primacy of value, like the profit motive under capitalism.

The question isn't whether a schema utilizing labor credits (or any other form of recognition, remuneration or accounting of labor power or labor time or production) is directly analogous to the what underlies the profit motive; but whether or not the law of value is still in operation in some form.

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

I'm sorry, but asserting that this does not describe assigning a value-form for average time does not eliminate value production in your schema:

But it's not *commodity* production. (And, again, the "value" of liberated labor is never outside the control of the liberated laborers themselves.)

regardless of accumulation of labor credits, regardless of the management of labor credits;

You're blithely dismissing the substantial, significant parameters that make labor credits what they are -- non-commodity -- and you're inaccurately conflating them with the primitive accumulation of capital.

similar to the operation of capital in that it does not matter whether capital is accumulated by an individual, a state or is rationed on a more or less equitable basis in a democratic manner- the accumulation of value, the heart of that matter at the point of production, is what matters- not the social division of accumulated value- and is what makes such a system counter to communism.

I'll politely but firmly disagree, since there's nothing in the framework itself that would predispose it to such a skewing, regardless of its functional use of "value" -- political conditions would be overriding and determining here.

The only motive respected in the model is that of *demand* since it's tallied on a daily basis, universally, and provides the impetus for projects for liberated labor and its own self-organizing.

Capitalism has co-op enterprises and worker-owned and run businesses (sometimes with rank and file, democratic labor unions representing the worker-owners/managers: all of the IWW co-ops and UE worker run businesses). This does not mean that value production has ceased- motive is irrelevant to that basic question.

This is apples-and-oranges -- now you're conflating capitalism-surrounded cooperative entities with that of a worldwide *post*-capitalist context.

If the people of a locality decided they wanted to amass a vast number of labor credits they could only do so by supplying their own liberated labor to *other* localities, according to the opportunities / requests for liberated labor decided-on by the people of any other given locality. (The only other way to amass labor credits would be for the locality to issue its own debt, which would be shown publicly, as already covered.)

So it can be seen that the earning of labor credits is implicitly a purely *social* relation, and causes no separation of "value" outside of the self-organization of liberated labor. There is no value production because the *use* of earned labor credits only *negates*, or annihilates, the "value" of the past work completed that those labor credits represent -- it is entirely a 'paying-it-forward' operation, strictly for liberated labor.

That sounds like a roundabout way to describe enlarged reproduction:

What's wrong with enlarged reproduction in a post-capitalist context? I would call it a *feature* in such an environment.

capital which is value-in-process that becomes invested in a larger production run, in hiring more workers, in new machinery and technology and technical processes, also 'pays it forward': the use-value inherent to commodities is also devalorized when they are 'used'- we're back to the tomato seeds planted into the Earth. Producing for human needs is not directly a communist trait; it is the trait of all modes of production.

Sure, but again you're blithely conflating across two different modes of production and treating 'value' as though it were identical in both contexts -- you're ignoring the overarching *political* determinism.

Every major use of labor credits would require a *political* initiative and a specific policy for those pooled personal collections -- they would either be used on a small-scale, individual basis, or would necessarily have to be *politicized* for larger-scale use, since no exploitation or value-robbing would be possible.

Again, political power cannot exist in a communist society.

Value-robbing is not the same as value-production: recognizing labor power/labor time in a universal equivalent is value production.

It's not *capital*-type value production because the value is never *expropriated* from (liberated) labor.

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

Alienated labor; if labor time has a recognized value, and there is a political process to decide production, we are talking about alienated labor.

No, liberated labor would not be alienated because it is entirely represented within that political process -- liberated laborers have an equitable 'say' across all matters through their daily individual prioritization list, just like anyone else.

Moreover, only those who have worked and have labor credits to their name can be part of the 'finalization' portion, in which incoming liberated laborers are selected for the mass-approved policy package (project) at hand. (Otherwise how else could those incoming liberated laborers be paid -- ?)

"Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general. This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer." - Marx, Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts

Yes, but you still haven't proven that this model gives rise to commodity production, nor that it causes primitive accumulation of capital, nor that it alienates labor 'value' from the liberated laborers.

If the economic basis for society is

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

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

And the political expression of this economic basis is

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

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

Labor is still alienated the way that 'free labor' under capital is still alienated; even in worker-owned unionized co-ops. The work environment may be 'freer', but the relationship between the 'worker' and product are the same; if the decisions regarding what to do with what is produced are made by a political body the producer is estranged from the product of their labor.

Again, to clarify, the liberated laborers -- those who are self-selected to provide labor -- are a subset of the larger locality's population, but they are not *separate* from it, except for the fact, by definition, of possessing personal labor credits from their own past work completed.

So, for example, if a locality had 99% of its people actively working and participating in the liberated-labor-provisioning process (through possession and passing-on of labor credits), then the overwhelming majority of that locality's population would happen to be liberated labor. Nothing would vary in terms of the political process, no matter *what* that percentage happened to be.

A locality with a far lower percentage of their population being liberated laborers would probably just have a much slower economics, that's all.

subcp

23rd April 2013, 02:49

Wanted to add two references to the discussion of communist production;

This article from that group that publishes N + 1 'Detail Labourer and Production Plan':

Detail labourer and production plan

"But what is it that forms the bond between the independent labours of the cattle-breeder, the tanner, and the shoemaker? It is the fact that their respective products are commodities. What, on the other hand, characterises division of labour in manufactures? The fact that the detail labourer produces no commodities. It is only the common product of all the detail labourers that becomes a commodity" (K. Marx, The Capital, Book I, Chapter XIV)

Knowing what to look for

The peculiarity of the capitalist society is the commoditization of every one of its aspects: each object, activity, even “thought”, has a relation with money and is, therefore, a commodity. If “the detail labourer produces no commodities” and if “only the common product of all the detail labourers becomes a commodity” (objects become commodities only outside factories, on the market), there’s a powerful contradiction within the production and circulation of commodities which, indeed, stands as a breakdown element, as an element of negation of the prevailing current society, a threat about the presumed eternity and immanence of capitalism.

As previously often specified, we do rely on Marx’s reading to produce our work, especially within those pages examining the dynamic succession of social forms, the extinction of old categories and the metamorphosis of the invariant ones. Thus we base ourselves on the certainty of the fact that the extinction of the present society and the consequential rise of the new society have to already be inscribed within the current one, no matter whether humans are aware of this process or not, as it was when they began to produce handicrafts, distinguishing themselves from the animal kingdom. Within this prospect, the peculiar task of communists is either to identify problems and contradictions of the capitalist mode of production and to harmonize with the material movement which, by definition, a constant surmounting of the present. Indeed there is no utopian creation of new categories from scratch.

http://www.quinterna.org/lingue/english/articles_en/detail_labourer.htm

and a comrade from another forum posted this a short time ago which articulates part of my objection better than I've been able to do:

**** maintains that "power" is an "emergent property of all social structures", but is this really the case? Can it be shown to be the case? This would be very difficult to say the least - even the example of primitive communism does not help us very much here, since a fully developed communist society would be (will be, I hope) a very different proposition.

Marx in the German Ideology poses the question of power in terms of the division of labour. First of all, the emergence of the division of labour makes man's social power into something separate from him.

The social power, i.e., the multiplied productive force, which arises through the co-operation of different individuals as it is determined by the division of labour, appears to these individuals, since their co-operation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they thus cannot control, which on the contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages independent of the will and the action of man, nay even being the prime governor of these.

This "social power", in a society based on the division of labour, is the power of ruling classes which direct social labour to their own benefit. Hence the disappearance of social classes in communism, based on the end of the social division of labour, also implies the disappearance of what you might call "alienated power".

...with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and, implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again?

I'm inclined to think there is a good deal of confusion in the way ***** poses the question, which is indicated by the fact that he tends to talk about "the proletariat", "democracy", "workers' councils", indistinguishably in both what is generally called the period of transition (anarchists don't believe in such a thing of course and think you can go directly from capitalism to communism overnight) and communist society. By definition, in communist society none of these things will exist. Not even democracy will exist, since even democracy has never existed as anything but a class power, whether it be the rule of the Greek demos over other fractions of society, or the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie dressed up as an impersonal power exercised on behalf of society as a whole. How the unalienated social power will be exercised is a very difficult question, and indeed may even be unanswerable from our present standpoint.