Rationing and Commodity Production

[Tim Cornelis]

In many countries facing economic difficulties, something like rationing schemes have been implemented. The most comprehensive system was probably in Israel, followed by North Korea. The USSR from 1929 till 1935 and again in 1990 till 1991 had rationing implemented, North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s mostly, Cuba as emergency measure but it's lasted since 1962; and China had something similar with its work-point system.

To some, this shows that there was non-capitalism or socialism in those Stalinist regimes. Rationing is distinct from buying and selling, and without buying and selling, there is no commodity production, and therefore no capitalism. I don't have a very pronounced opinion, but I'm tending towards thinking that, like labour-money, rationing is established on the basis of commodity production.

What are some other people's opinions on this matter?

[Sewer Socialist]

That would be defining socialism by the mode of distribution, rather than that of production, as it usually is. I don't really have a decisive answer, though, other than to note that many nations usually called capitalist have rationed as well, ie, the United States in World War II.

[Blake's Baby]

All systems of distribution are 'rationing' though, because rationing means 'determining what proportion of the social product'. Buying & selling is 'rationing by price', labour-time vouchers are 'rationing by work', what we call 'rationing' is 'rationing by need'.

I think rationing by need will have to exist until we get to a stage of free-access communism. I think we should institute it for as many things as we can during the revolutionary dictatorship. Needs are to be socially-determined rather than individually-determined (in so far as these are in conflict).

I expect some of our technocrats to be along shortly to tell me why I'm completely wrong.

As to 'defining socialism by the mode of distribution...', we already have socialised production (the working class associates to produce for the capitalists), the problem is the private consumption of social product (because the owners of capital derive the benefits).

So the problem of capitalism isn't that we don't work together, it's that we don't benefit together. That's the essence of the class system.

[Tim Cornelis]

My question is, essentially, do people here think rationing as it is commonly understood negates commodity production? So rationing using tickets, vouchers, booklets.

[Blake's Baby]

Not really. It's still, in all likelihood, going to be production for a form of market, just a very limited one. If people want to trade things on the black market they probably will. Maybe, just maybe, if people don't want their tin of peas and they want another tin of beans instead they'll be able to find someone to swap with. I wouldn't shoot anyone for that.

What will mitigate against that is the progressive production for need - really for need; if we know that our community is going to need 400 tins of peas and 400 tins of beans (give or take) in a month, then, we should get them, thereby achieving a pretty high satisfaction rate with providing tinned goods. So there would be no reason for a market in such things to develop.

[Creative Destruction]

Those regimes, as state capitalist organizations, still organized production for profit on the world market, even in those emergency rationing periods. Their exporting didn't stop, so based on that, purely, I can't see a coherent argument being made for any "socialism" in those states. The rationing scheme has been used by capitalist countries in times of crisis, as well. I mean, my grandparents never hazard to show me their rationing booklets from the US government during WWII, as a way to show how great us kids have it today. I don't think that implies, in the least, that the United States stopped being capitalist during the war.

[Blake's Baby]

But to be fair, I think Tim was more thinking, in cases where the working class is actually trying to re-organise production does the introduction of rationing necessarily negate commodity production, rather than 'can capitalism utilise rationing?', to which the answer is obviously 'yes it can'.

[ckaihatsu]

My question is, essentially, do people here think rationing as it is commonly understood negates commodity production? So rationing using tickets, vouchers, booklets.


I'd say that this question could be *rephrased* -- as it is, with its use of the term 'rationing', it brings about a conception of 'not-enough-food', which is an anachronism for much of the world now.





The Green Revolution refers to a series of research, and development, and technology transfer initiatives, occurring between the 1940s and the late 1960s, that increased agricultural production worldwide, particularly in the developing world, beginning most markedly in the late 1960s.[1] The initiatives, led by Norman Borlaug, the "Father of the Green Revolution" credited with saving over a billion people from starvation, involved the development of high-yielding varieties of cereal grains, expansion of irrigation infrastructure, modernization of management techniques, distribution of hybridized seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides to farmers.




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


As revolutionaries in the 21st century we should be thinking in terms of what a liberated-labor, free-access, direct-distribution gift economy could accomplish for the world's basic humane needs, with 'rationing' as a distinctly *secondary* concern, for more-peripheral material concerns (a concern that I've taken to addressing in detail with my 'labor credits' framework).

Such a globalized gift economy *would* negate commodity production, decidedly, for everything of importance, *without* resorting to 'rationing' of any kind, since current technologies allow us to produce goods of critical importance in abundance.

[cyu]

it brings about a conception of 'not-enough-food', which is an anachronism for much of the world now.


Agreed - there's plenty of labor and raw materials to feed the world. The only times there are shortages is when the ruling class orders the labor and raw materials to be used to produce other things, like mansions, yachts, bullet-proof limousines, bodyguards, lawyers, think tanks, private security, etc.

[Tim Cornelis]

My question isn't about rationing in the transition to socialism or socialism. It's simply is rationing compatible with the notion of commodity production, and if not, does this mean that the USSR was a non-mode of production, a socially non-viable formation, or Israel during its austerity period?

[Die Neue Zeit]

I think rationing is compatible with any form of commodity production.

I'm thinking about left proposals at the moment for universal food cards or universal food "stamps" (really the former but just called "stamps" to evoke earlier, literal food stamp systems in the US), for example. This is mainly a pre-distributionist, pro-jobs attempt to blunt arguments in favour of unconditional basic income.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Rationing does not interfere with the market mechanism of buying and selling. It is merely a supply-side tool that limits the supply of certain, essential goods, in order to re-balance an economy towards a particular aim, i.e. in North Korea rationing is used to help maintain extravagant military spending, in Cuba rationing was historically used as a distribution aid in the face of economic embargo.

It is not dissimilar to the monetarist position of supply-side economics, only that monetarism used supply-side monetary policy to limit the money supply, rather than goods in the real economy.

[ckaihatsu]

I think rationing is compatible with any form of commodity production.

I'm thinking about left proposals at the moment for universal food cards or universal food "stamps" (really the former but just called "stamps" to evoke earlier, literal food stamp systems in the US), for example. This is mainly a pre-distributionist, pro-jobs attempt to blunt arguments in favour of unconditional basic income.


On something of a tangent here, a fairly recent post had mentioned the dotp and its control of the wages economy in the transitional period. I recalled at a later point this whole 'unconditional basic income' thing -- wouldn't this be all that's required, as a radical reformist / revolutionary step, to insure the provision of humane goods and services as the core functioning of the dotp economy -- ? (Or would there really have to be more of a scrutinizing, hands-on administrative component, as is conventionally conceived -- ?)

[Zhi]

Rationing exists now in a very deformed sense now. Consider this: Apart from credit which isn't unlimited wage acts as a restraint to consumption hence a means to ration people. One of the critiques of capitalism using this idea is that the ration simply isn't even enough to satisfy basic human need. Rationing is axiomatic in ny centrally planned economy.

[cyu]

Rationing under capitalism:

If you are powerful, your daily rations consist of enough jet fuel to fly you to anywhere you please, the labor of an entire kitchen staff to wait on you and you alone, body guards and security detail to ensure you don't get spit on by angry peasants, and intellectual prostitutes to make you feel morally superior and justify your power to the powerless.

If you are powerless, your daily rations include just enough food to keep you working for the powerful, just enough health care to ensure you can continue your life's purpose of serving the powerful, and daily propaganda to remind you to be thankful that your employer feeds you rather than the other way around.

[contracycle]

In the sense that commodity production is production for exchange, while rationing suggests production for use, then I would sort of agree that this amounts to a suspension of commodity production, but not to such a degree that I think it implies much, in itself, about the society as a whole.

I think the point about rationing in WW2 above was well made. That showed that even highly capitalist societies were both willing and able to drop pure commodity production for the sake of more pressing needs. It didn't amount to a fundamental change in property relations, or the class character of the society, it was merely a temporary expedient. The Land Girls who went out to "dig for victory" did not change in their economic relations with employers once the emergency was over; the land-owners who might, in other circumstances, have preferred to plant commercial crops were not dispossessed.

It's conceivable that were rationing has been in place for a long time, even decades as in Cuba, it may suggest that there is something significant that has changed. Whether or not that something significant amounts to socialism is not so apparent.

[Blake's Baby]

It does seem that the argument that rationing implies suspension of commodity production is a bit close to the Right's argument that 'if the government tells me to do it, that's socialism'.