The de-monetisation of society

 Very interesting link Dave B.  These two passages in particular: We know that in practice such contradictions are solved by breaking the vicious circle, by bringing about a radical change in the temper of the people, by the heroic initiative of the individual groups which often plays a decisive role against the background of such a radical change. The unskilled labourers and railway workers of Moscow (of course, we have in mind the majority of them, and not a handful of profiteers, officials and other whiteguards) are working people who are living in desperately hard conditions. They are constantly underfed, and now, before the new harvest is gathered, with the general worsening of the food situation, they are actually starving. And yet these starving workers, surrounded by the malicious counter-revolutionary agitation of the bourgeoisie, the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, are organising “communist subbotniks”, working overtime without any pay, and achieving an enormous increase in the productivity of labour in spite of the fact that they are weary, tormented, and exhausted by malnutrition. Is this not supreme heroism? Is this not the beginning of a change of momentous significance  It would be a good thing to eliminate the word “commune” from common use, to prohibit every Tom, Dick and Harry from grabbing at it, or to allow this title to be borne only by genuine communes, which have really demonstrated in practice (and have proved by the unanimous recognition of the whole of the surrounding population) that they are capable of organising their work in a communist manner. First show that you are capable of working without remuneration in the interests of society, in the interests of all the working people, show that you are capable of “working in a revolutionary way”, that you are capable of raising productivity of labour, of organising the work in an exemplary manner, and then hold out your hand for the honourable title “commune”! Of course "working without remuneration in the interests of society" begs the question as to how then one is supposed to obtain access to the means of living.  In socialism/communism,  the corrollary of "unremunerated work" is free access to goods and services.  You can't have one without the other.  This brings us to the question – if you dont have free access, if you continue to operate an exchange economy, what then does the call to "work without remuneration" – or more specifically to "work overtime without pay" –  really amount  to?  I would suggest it amounts to little more than code on the part of Lenin to signify the desire on the part of the Bolshevik state to step up the rate of exploitation, to increase the volumne of unpaid surplus value extracted from the Russian working class for the purposes of capital accummulation All this talk of the so called "war communism" of the period 1918-21 " is just  sheer bunkum.  Yes Lenin and his associates might have discussed the idea of the abolition of money in relation to the period  we are talking but that doesnt translate into any serious attempt to introduce a communist society which was simply not possible anyway under the circumstances then prevailing,  Talk is one thing ; action is quite another.  Besides, communism signifies far more than just the "absence of money". Money was not abolished though its value was undermined by hyperinflation.  This may have contributed to the practice of paying wages in kind rather than in money and I understand that at the height of the period of "war communism" up to 90% of wages paid to Russian workers were paid in kind.   We also know from Lenin writing in 1918 that the policy of  uravnilovka or income levelling – as a political tactic to gain working class support – had to be discontinued. In an address given in April 1918 (published as "The Soviets at Work") Lenin stated:  “We were forced now to make use of the old bourgeois method and agreed a very high remuneration for the services of the bourgeois specialists. All those who are acquainted with the facts understand this, but not all give sufficient thought to the significance of such a measure on the part of the proletarian state. It is clear that such a measure is a compromise, that it is a departure from the principles of the Paris Commune and of any proletarian rule" With regard to the money component of the wages Russian workers received, it is interesting to note that in the Soviet Union there was a determination on the part of the authorities for this to be paid according to the peice wage form.   This is significant because as Marx had observed: "the piece wage is the form of wage most appropriate to the capitalist mode of production” and that "piece wages become . . . the most fruitful source of reductions in wages, and of frauds committed by the capitalists."(Capital 1 ch 21) By 1933, peice work accounted for 70% of wages according to Peter Petroff  (February 1938, “The Soviet Wages System”, Labour, p.141-2) Payment in kind continued in the Soviet era though it was disproportionately skewed in favour of the political elite.   Some theorists like Howard and King have argued that a substantial proportion of the soviet workers' wages were provided outside of the market, thus providing grist to their mill that the soviet union was not really a capitalist economy.  However, that claim appears to be based on an exaggeration since according to some estmates the “social wage” constituted less than a quarter – 23.4% – of the income of the average soviet worker – though, during the seventies, this figure apparently grew   (Arnot Bob, 1988, Controlling Soviet labour: Experimental Change from Brezhnev to Gorbachev, M R Sharpe p.36)  The greatest irony of all is that since the so called "fall of communism", payment-in-kind has increased.  According to Tore Ellingsen : Recently, we have witnessed massive domestic barter at the firm level in Russia (and in several of the other former Soviet republics). In Russia, barter constituted almost fifty per cent of industrial sales in 1997, up from around five per cent in 1992 (Aukutsionek (1997,1998)). In the same five year period, Russian firms started to pay their workers in kind on a grand scale, sometimes under tragic-comic circumstances. Hungry workers were paid everything from porcelain and kitchen utensils to sex toys and fertilizer, in the form of piles of manure, instead of their ordinary money wage. Likewise, a large fraction of taxes were being paid in kind rather than cash (OECD, 1997) (Tore Ellingsen, "Payments in Kind", Stockholm School of Economics Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance, No 244,  February 10, 2000)