Money and Communism
The idea is that once we've become a communist state, we'd have no need for money anymore and it would be abolished.
My question is: Would this have to be the case?
Is it essential to the communist society that money is abolished?
Certainly, everyone is equal and should be treated as such, but there are certain "unskilled" jobs that would be more desirable than others.
What if job A(more desirable) has no vacancies. So you have to get job B (less desirable). Would there be any sort of compensation for the person who has to work a more maual, strenuous, dangerous ect. job that someone who doesn't?
Excuse my ignorance. Please be patient. :)
Thanks
Well, the idea is that even economy is democratic in communism. So the local council/soviet/whatevah would make a democratic decision on which wy to occupy vital jobs. There are many ways to fill those places, for example, one might want to circulate workers through those jobs, so that one worker would not have to do that job for too long. It is also possible to use the minority that actually volunteers for these "unwanted" jobs. In the end, the simple necessity would drive some people to volunteer for crucial "unwanted" jobs. Meaning that when the streets start to fill with rubbish, the prestige of becoming a cleaner would increase.
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Is it essential to the communist society that money is abolished?
Yes, because money is not a good way of measuring labour or value. When we start seeking values in products that exist only in our heads, problems are bound to occur. Meaning that when we have a house, it only should have value as a house, and not as a means of exploitation.
These are just few solutions.
You could have labour credits, as Marx thought would be necessary, but you couldn't have money because money leads to exchange-value, and value and the profit motive sneak back in. In which case all you'd have is capitalism with worker-owned corporations, in which case why the hell this situation would be perpetuated would be something of a mystery.
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The idea is that once we've become a communist state, we'd have no need for money anymore and it would be abolished.
My question is: Would this have to be the case?
Is it essential to the communist society that money is abolished?
Yes, it is absolutely essential to communism that money disappears. Money is a social relationship. It links buyers and sellers in a market and therefore presupposes these things. But communism implies common ownership of the means of production. Where everybody owns the means of production it is not logically possible to have economic exchange. Exchange implies owners and non owners. When I exchange something with you I am exchanging property title to this thing for some other thing. If you own a factory producing widgets you can sell these widgets on because you own them by virtue of owning the factory that produced them. It follows that if everyone in society owned the factory there would be no one to whom these widgets could be sold or exchanged.
If there is no economic exchange then there is no reason to have a means of exchange - money
Thanks to each of you for your imput. :)
Did any of you struggle to get your head around these things at first?
Growing up in a capitalist western society, it's become all I know.
I understand what you guys are saying and I agree with it, it just seems like such a foreign concept, partly because i'm on just starting to think of these things
Definitely, at least on my part. Reading Marx helped a lot, but that is quite a bit to get one's head around at first as well (especially due to the first part of Capital, I've heard it lead to quite a few people giving up on it, at least for a while. I suppose that it would perhaps be wiser to just browse through those chapters at first, and then read through them in detail after finishing the rest of the book). But then, "There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits."
And yeah, there's a lot to unlearn as well, in my case most things I had learnt on economics, and a large part of high school history.
Sure it was hard for me to understand it at first, but that's completely because there are very few concrete examples when talking this stuff, so alot of the conversation is abstract to the extreme.
I would have to say though that even with the concrete examples, or should I say because of the concrete examples, it was even harder for me to swallow capitalism and nationalism. Let alone social democracy. (which is considered "the rigt theory" over here)
Dave B - Thank you for that. The ABC explained it in a very clear manner and made it very easy to understand the whole development process. :)
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[FONT=Arial]It all hinges around a very common miss-understanding of the meaning of value. Value is a property or almost ‘physical’ characteristic of a ‘thing’.[/FONT]
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"As values, commodities are social magnitudes, that is to say, something absolutely different from their “properties” as “things”. As values, they constitute only relations of men in their productive activity. Value indeed “implies exchanges”, but exchanges are exchanges of things between men, exchanges which in no way affect the things as such. A thing retains the same “properties” whether it be owned by A or by B. In actual fact, the concept “value” presupposes “exchanges” of the products. Where labour is communal, the relations of men in their social production do not manifest themselves as “values” of “things”. Exchange of products as commodities is a method of exchanging labour, [it demonstrates] the dependence of the labour of each upon the labour of the others [and corresponds to] a certain mode of social labour or social production.
"In the first part of my book, I mentioned that it is characteristic of labour based on private exchange that the social character of labour “manifests” itself in a perverted form—as the “property” of things; that a social relation appears as a relation between things (between products, values in use, commodities). This appearance is accepted as something real by our fetish-worshipper, and he actually believes that the exchange-value of things is determined by their properties as things, and is altogether a natural property of things. No scientist to date has yet discovered what natural qualities make definite proportions of snuff tobacco and paintings “equivalents” for one another."
But I can't really be bothered, this has already been
gone over, I believe.
When using ‘property’ I suppose I should have used the full expression from Marx of ‘a non-natural property’
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Here, however, the analogy ceases. The iron, in the expression of
the weight of the sugar-loaf, represents a natural property common
to both bodies, namely their weight; but the coat, in the expression
of value of the linen, represents a non-natural property of both,
something purely social, namely, their value."
[FONT=Arial][FONT=Arial]http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm[/FONT][/FONT]Alright, though you still seem to be presenting value as a transhistorical property, a property of all products of human labour, contra Marx.
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[FONT=Arial]Hi Robbo[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]I wasn’t endorsing anything, I quoted just to throw them into the pot as regards different ideas that were circulating around at the time. And, as far as Bukharin was concerned, the kind of thinking from the left side of the bolsheviks at the time of 1922.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]What was interesting for me as regards that, was that it is yet another example of what ‘communism’ or the final objective was thought to be; ie a money-less society and voluntary labour etc, which seems to be a bit of an outfield or ‘far left’ idea today, apart from ourselves of course.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]I think we are fairly close when it comes to our perspectives on decentralisation and the bottom up way of doing things.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Undoubtedly the bolsheviks in 1922, despite everything else, were transferring their top down notion of organising the party onto the organisation of economic production. And in fact the organisation of political parties is indeed a microcosm and reflection of the organisation of society, should they get into power. So the dictatorship over the proletariat starts at home or in the party with a professional elite (or elitism as a profession) and living off the members.[/FONT][FONT=Arial]/[/FONT]
Good point. Particularly bearing in mind Lenin's comments (with shades of 1984) about democracy being compatible with dictatorship of single individuals. However, I think this fetish for central planning arises more from a preococupation with, or as a reaction to, the perception of capitalism operating according to blind economic forces or economic anarchy. What is objectionable is that we live in a society which is not consciously regulated or controlled but driven by these impersonal forces. Its a short step from that to argue that we then need a single conscious will to control society and from this comes the whole batty idea of a "single central plan" - society wide planning. I cant make up my mind whether this idea is merely a metaphor or a literal prescription. Bukharin seesm to be using it in the latter sense. But you dont need the idea of central planning for society to be a in control of its affairs and not at the mercy of capitalism's economic laws