anarchism n money

[Global_Justice]

dunno alot about anarchism, but do anarchists believe in the abolition of the wage system? read something about collectivist anarchism and it said workers would be paid a wage related to the amount they contribute to production.

[Janus]

but do anarchists believe in the abolition of the wage system?
Anarcho-communists and anarcho-syndicalists do though there are certain types of anarchists out there who don't such as collectivists and mutualists.

[Soterios]

Originally posted by [email protected] 05, 2007 08:05 pm

but do anarchists believe in the abolition of the wage system?
Anarcho-communists and anarcho-syndicalists do though there are certain types of anarchists out there who don't such as collectivists and mutualists.
collectivists vary a lot. many of them believe in abolishing the wage system, but there are a few who oppose this idea. Those who are especially against this abolition are the anarcho-capitalists and libertarians (duh) who are more "right" on the economic scale.

[Janus]

collectivists vary a lot. many of them believe in abolishing the wage system, but there are a few who oppose this idea.
Some believe that they can gradually abolish it and transition into a gift economy but for the most part, they believe in the necessity of a monetary/wage system.

[Dimentio]

I wonder why no one pays much attention to anarchists such as Michael Albert who have proposed alternative economic system without wages? Or for example energy accounting?

[Anarchovampire]

Originally posted by [email protected] 05, 2007 04:54 pm
I wonder why no one pays much attention to anarchists such as Michael Albert who have proposed alternative economic system without wages? Or for example energy accounting?
I am intrigued, care to post a link?

[Dimentio]

Well Michael Albert's website is here on Z-Net (http://www.zmag.org/bios/homepage.cfm?authorID=51).

Then we have had project Cybersyn in Chile, and so of course our own NET, which link you could find below here.

[Raúl Duke]

Well...


dunno alot about anarchism, but do anarchists believe in the abolition of the wage system? read something about collectivist anarchism and it said workers would be paid a wage related to the amount they contribute to production.


[Explanation might be not 100% accurate...Just so you know]

There are many strands of Anarchism...and they are usually marked by different ideas for a future society.

Anarcho-Communists, by principal, should be against wages, money, LTVs, etc since they want a communist economy ASAP. A communist economy, as I think everyone knows, is based on the maxim "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs."

Anarcho-Communist wants things to be organized by communes and local assemblies. These communes might be federated, creating a federation of communes, etc

Some Anarcho-Syndicalists & Anarcho-Collectivists are more like "evolutionary communists"; in the sense they want to use LTVs until the economy can sustain a communist economy. The major difference is that they want things to be organized more at the worker council/syndicate/collective level instead of communal local assemblies.
Others might be almost identical to the anarcho-communists, i.e. prefer communist economy ASAP, but the difference still lies in organizational preferences.

Other (few I suppose) Anarcho-Syndicalists & Anarcho-Collectivists do not want to transition into a communist economy and prefer to stick to LTVs.

I suppose most anarchists are somewhat amorphous between Communist and Syndicalist/Collectivist; meaning, they want a society with both communal local asemblies and worker's councils/syndiates/collectives. For example, I prefer the power to be held by communal local assemblies, the workplaces and industry to be run by councils/collectives/syndicates, and definately prefer a communist economy over LTVs, etc.
As you can see; I'm (alot) more of a anarcho-communist.

Individualists, Mutualists, and Anarcho-Capitalists are oppose to a communist economy and prefer to run the economy to a variation (social or individualist) of Proudhon's mutalism or, in the case of anarcho-capitalists, a capitalist wage economy.

I hope this explanation helped. :)

P.S. LTVs are not exactly like the normal capitalist wage. The collectivists/syndicalists wants workers to be paid "in full" for their labor. The capitalist wage system basically pays you a wage that is not the full value of your work (or more; not the same value as it is sold for) since the capitalist needs to exploit labor to make the profits he lives off.


Michael Albert who have proposed alternative economic system without wages?

Is this the parecon anarchist? I heard some criticisms of parecon from anarchists/libertarian or autonomist marxists.

Sometimes it is compared as some form of mutualism...

I have my doubts about parecon....

P.S. That doesn't mean I reject an economy in which people participate in, after all most examples of anarchist economy feature the participation of workers, communal citizens, etc. Parecon, as detailed by its theorist, features somethings however that are somewhat questionable.


Or for example energy accounting?

There's an anarchist on this forum who considers himself to be a Anarcho-Technocrat called Haraldur.

[syndicat]

Is this the parecon anarchist? I heard some criticisms of parecon from anarchists/libertarian or autonomist marxists.

Sometimes it is compared as some form of mutualism...

That's a common misconception. Participatory economics is for the abolition of the market whereas mutualism is a form of market collectivism, so they are incompatible. The reason for the confusion is that some advocates of participatory economics also favor the tactic of forming alternative institutions for self-management of work within the context of existing capitalist society.

But participatory economics proposes that the land and all means of production be owned in common by everyone whereas mutualism supports collective private property.

Participatory economics is better understood as an evolution out of earlier libertarian communism, to solve certain of the problems in the concept as it was developed earlier on.

Like the CNT's libertarian communist program of 1936, participatory economics is based on a dual governance structure of workplace and neighborhood assemblies. This derives from the fact that there are many types of decisions that affect people, and some affect some people more than others. Some decisions affect people mainly as residents of communities, as consumers of goods and services, and others affect people as workers in a particular industry. Thus what's needed is both community and industrial self-management.

Not all "communists" have advocated the abolition of money. In the CNT in the '30s there were different views on this subject. The problem with the abolition of money is that you need to have a social accounting system, to be able to compare the costs and benefits of different methods and products in production.
If the economy is to be effective for people, we need a way of measuring how important different options or priorities for production are for people. A social accounting unit can be used to measure this, by looking at what people would give up to get certain things that they want. That's because we can't in fact produce everything that people might want. There are always limits to our productive capacity, if only because there are only 24 hours in the day, and any time we spend producing one thing is time not spent producing something else.

In regard to "abolition of the wage system," what does this mean exactly? What is the "wage system"? Let's suppose we understand this to mean that some people, an economic elite, control access to the means of production, and they use this control to hire people to work for their aims, to benefit them, not to do what workers and the communities they are a part of, want. If that's the definition, then there is no "wage system" under participatory economy.

But, note, this doesn't mean there is not a consumption entitlement earned through work effort. If the working class controls the entire economy, it may want to ensure against "free riders", living off our labor, by requiring able-bodied adults to engage in work effort to earn their consumption entitlement. That is the participatory economics view.

The problem with using labor time vouchers as the social accounting unit is that it will be economically inefficient. That's because labor hours don't actually provide an accurate measure of the social cost associated with producing something. That's because some types of labor are more expensive for society to produce than others, due to the length of time needed to develop the skills and knowledge that form of labor uses. Thus the use of labor time vouchers as the social accounting unit will lead to excessive demand for expensive forms of labor, because they will be under-priced.

Participatory economics proposes splitting the social accounting of costs from renuneration. People would be remunerated by work effort but in calculating allocation of resources to production groups to produce things, we'd take account of the value of different types of labor.

Participatory economics also has an analysis of the emergence of the class of top professionals and managers -- the coordinator class -- as a new main class in mature corporate capitalism, a class not based on ownership, and believes that the liberation of the working class thus requires more than just changing ownership of the means of production, but must also include a program for dissolving the power of the coordinator class. This involves training workers and sharing out expertise, conceptual and decision-making work, as well as the power of the direct democracy of the assemblies.

In "History and Class Theory" Reznick and Wolf define a "communist mode of production" as any social formation where the people who produce the social surplus also appropriate it. On that definition, participatory economics is a form of libertarian communism.