Originator of a THESIS on money’s incapacity

[ALB]

Dave BSc wrote:

If work becomes a pleasure then it is not ‘work’  in my opinion and thus has ‘no value’ as labour time value is predicated on it being shit and something you have to do and time lost in the enjoyment of your lifetime  rather than having a fun time.

That's the only part I understood  It's a good point.

[ALB]

Alan, as I can't believe that you have yet had the time to read the articles on your reading this, here's the alternative to commodity production from one of them:

Quote:

What socialism will establish is a practical system of world production operating directly and solely for human needs. Socialism will be concerned solely with the production, distribution and consumption of useful goods and services in response to definite needs. It will integrate social needs with the material means of meeting those needs, that is to say, with active production. Under capitalism what appear to be production decisions are in fact decisions to go for profit in the market. Socialism will make economically-unencumbered production decisions as a direct response to needs. With production for use, then, the starting point will be needs.QUANTITIES OF MATERIAL THINGS Socialism will not depend on calculations of labour-time or the conversion of these into costs since production will not be generating exchange-values for the market. Production for use will generate useful goods and services directly for need, and this will require not economic calculation but the communication of quantities of material things throughout production. This will result from the change in productive relationships. The use of labour in a market system begins with an exchange of labour-power for wages, which is an economic exchange between individual workers and invested capital. This will be replaced by direct co-operation between producers to satisfy social needs in the material form of productive activity.Modern production embraces activity across the world as a network of productive links. It consists of decisions and actions by individuals, small groups and large organisations. Many of these dispersed activities interact with each other and alter the pattern of the whole. Modern production can only operate on the basis of particular production units being self-adjusting to social requirements in response to information being communicated to them.Socialism would take over existing world production which is generally structured on three scales. Socialism could rationalise this world structure on a decentralised basis which could operate in the most efficient way through a world, regional and local structure.Extraction and processing of basic materials such as metals, oil, coal, and some agricultural products, etc., could be organised as world production with distribution to regions and localities.These materials could be taken up by the regions for the production and assembly of component parts of machinery, equipment and goods for distribution to localities within a region. This regional organisation could include the extraction and supply of those materials which could be contained within that region. A regional tractor-producing plant could take its materials from world supply and then distribute tractors down to the localities within that region.On the smallest scale, but nevertheless extremely important, local production units could be producing local goods for local consumption and use.This need not be a rigid arrangement, but an adaptable skeleton structure operating in these three, world, regional and local scales. These would represent the general scales of productive organisation, through which required quantities of materials and goods could be communicated between production units.DIRECT RESPONSES TO NEEDS Production for use could work with the basic structure as outlined above. It would operate in direct response to need. These would arise in local communities expressed as required quantities such as grammes, kilos, tonnes, litres, metres, cubic metres etc., of various materials and quantities of goods. These would then be communicated as required elements of productive activity, as a technical sequence, to different scales of social production, according to necessity.Each particular part of production would be responding to the material requirements communicated to it through the connected ideas of social production. It would be self-regulating, because each element of production would be self-adjusting to the communication of these material requirements. Each part of production would know its position. If requirements are low in relation to a build-up of stock, then this would be an automatic indication to a production unit that its production should be reduced. If requirements are high in relation to stock then this would be an automatic indication that its production should be increased.The register of needs and the communication of every necessary element of those needs to the structure of production would be clear and readily known. The supply of some needs will take place within the local community and in these cases production would not extent beyond this, as for example with local food production for local consumption.Other needs could be communicated as required things to the regional organisation of production. Local food production would require glass, but not every local community could have its own glass works. The requirements for glass could be communicated to a regional glass works. These would be definite quantities of required glass. The glass works has its own suppliers of materials, and the amounts they require for the production of 1 tonne of glass are known in definite quantities. The required quantities of these materials could then be passed by the glass works to the regional suppliers of the materials for glass manufacture. This would be a sequence of communication of local needs to the regional organisation of production, and thus contained within a region.Local food production would also require tractors, and here the communication of required quantities of things could extend further to the world organisation of production. Regional manufacture could produce and assemble the component parts of tractors for distribution to local communities. These would be required in a definite number and, on the basis of this definite number of final products, the definite number of component parts for tractors would also be known. The regional production unit producing tractors would communicate these definite quantities to their own suppliers, and eventually this would extend to world production units extracting and processing the necessary materials.This would be the self-regulating system of production for need, operating on the basis of the communication of need as definite quantities of things throughout the structure of production. Each production unit would convert the requirements communicated to it into its own material requirements and pass these on to its own suppliers. This would be the sequence by which every element of labour required for the production of a final product would be known.This system of self-regulating production for use is achieved through communications. Socialism would make full use of the means of communication which have been developed. These include not only transport such as roads, railways, shipping, etc. They also include the existing system of electronic communications which provide for instant world-wide contact as well as facilities for storing and processing millions of pieces of information. Modern information technology could be used by Socialism to integrate any required combination of different parts of its world structure of production.

[Alan Kerr]

ALBI did not mean to give the impression that you wanted commodity production. I said that you must have workable alternative or commodity production is where you must end up.Were you just saying that the labour-time voucher scheme would not last for long? Then let's assume that we have no need for what you call the labour-time voucher scheme at all.But now which Crusoe system is workable? Is it Robinson Crusoe? Or is it ALB Crusoe?See question from my comment #133

[Alan Kerr]

ALB thank you hopefully your answers to my questions above will inspire me to read all of that long-long quote.

[Alan Kerr]

There's something wrong here DaveYou wrote:"If work becomes a pleasure then it is not ‘work’  in my opinion and thus has ‘no value’ as labour time value is predicated on it being shit and something you have to do and time lost in the enjoyment of your lifetime  rather than having a fun time."(From your comment #135)See ALB reply's to you"That's the only part I understood smiley It's a good point."(ALB comment #137)Ordinary economists notice private point of view. We need to see past that to social point of view."… From the subjectivist standpoint, therefore, the standpoint from which Böhm-Bawerk levels his criticism, the labor theory of value appears untenable from the very outset. And it is because he adopts this standpoint that Böhm-Bawerk is unable to perceive that Marx's concept of labor is totally opposed to his own. Already in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Marx had emphasized his opposition to Adam Smith's subjectivist outlook by writing "[Smith] fails to see the objective equalization of different kinds of labor which the social process forcibly carries out, mistaking it for the subjective equality of the labors of individuals." [2] In truth, Marx is entirely unconcerned with the individual motivation of the estimate of value. In capitalist society it would be absurd to make "trouble" the measure of value, for speaking generally the owners of the products have taken no trouble at all, whereas the trouble has been taken by those who have produced but do not own them. With Marx, in fact, every individual relationship is excluded from the conception of value-creating labor; labor is regarded, not as something which arouses feelings of pleasure or its opposite, but as an objective magnitude, inherent in the commodities, and determined by the degree of development of social productivity. Whereas for Böhm-Bawerk, labor seems merely one of the determinants in personal estimates of value, in Marx's view labor is the basis and connective tissue of human society, and in Marx's view the degree of productivity of labor and the method of organization of labor determine the character of social life. Since labor, viewed in its social function as the total labor of society of which each individual labor forms merely an aliquot part, is made the principle of value, economic phenomena are subordinated to objective laws independent of the individual will and controlled by social relationships…"From Rudolf Hilferding: Böhm-Bawerk's Criticism of Marx(Near start of Chapter Three THE SUBJECTIVIST OUTLOOK)https://www.marxists.org/archive/hilferding/1904/criticism/ch03.htmThat's the private point of view and the social point of view.Crusoe can see it.That’s Robinson Crusoe, but not ALB Crusoe.Note to ALB please see my question #133

[ALB]

Once again you've got the wrong end of the stick. Dave Bsc and me were talking about work in socialism not about labour under capitalism and making the point that socialist society would not have to pursue your obsession of trying to replicate what the law of value is supposed to bring about under capitalism (minimising labour time). Why minimise work that is enjoyable? Pieter Lawrence gives other examples of why we won't want to minimise labour time in socialism in this article (shorter this time so you can read to the end):

Quote:

With socialism, on the basis of common ownership, the producers are elevated to a social existence which is formed by direct relationships of co-operative activity about mutual needs. In breaking out of the capitalist relationships of value, labour will express a direct productive relationship between people, and will be released for human need. Socialism will abolish all economic relationships of exchange. With production for human need no significant economic relationship will exist between items of wealth, and there will therefore be no need to compare or measure their methods of production in terms of any common factor such as labour time.The capitalist exchange relationships between commodities themselves, including the human commodity, labour power, will be replaced by a direct relationship in the line of productive activity; items of wealth, and human need. This direct relationship of wealth to need replaces the capitalist relationship between things. The price mechanism which transmits an economic message throughout capitalist production, to do with cheapness and competitive, profit-making success, will be replaced in socialism with a direct relationship of production to human needs.Production of use will be the organisation of necessary production in line with consciously chosen levels of consumption with no intervening economic factors between the two activities. The organisation of production therefore will resolve itself as a problem of quantity analysis. These will be absolute quantities of things in relation to need, not relative quantities of labour time in the things themselves. Socialism will quantify its needs and then organise production in direct response.The choice of production methods would not resolve itself simply as the selection of the most efficient method of production, that is, the method which embodies the least amount of labour time.The capitalist market pressure to embody the least amount of labour time in production will be replaced in socialism by all the requirements of need. These will include material necessity, work itself as a human need, social safety, care of the environment, conservation, animal welfare, and so on.

[Anonymous]

Nice quote from Pieter. Sould be used more often to seperate employment and work. One is slavery the other creative freedom. 

[Alan Kerr]

  "… That future society will find in detail (counting properly with computers) what works best at the time."(From my comment #86)

[Alan Kerr]

You would have no right to test your unworkable way in practice without testing, as best we can, by counting.

[Young Master Smeet]

Apologies for long quote, but worth it, I think.

Marx wrote:

The value (the real exchange value) of all commodities (labour included) is determined by their cost of production, in other words by the labour time required to produce them. Their price is this exchange value of theirs, expressed in money. The replacement of metal money (and of paper or fiat money denominated in metal money) by labour money denominated in labour time would therefore equate the real value (exchange value) of commodities with their nominal value, price, money value.Equation of real value and nominal value, of value and price. But such is by no means the case. The value of commodities as determined by labour time is only their average value. This average appears as an external abstraction if it is calculated out as the average figure of an epoch, e.g. 1 lb. of coffee = 1s. if the average price of coffee is taken over 25 years; but it is very real if it is at the same time recognized as the driving force and the moving principle of the oscillations which commodity prices run through during a given epoch. This reality is not merely of theoretical importance: it forms the basis of mercantile speculation, whose calculus of probabilities depends both on the median price averages which figure as the centre of oscillation, and on the average peaks and average troughs of oscillation above or below this centre. The market value is always different, is always below or above this average value of a commodity. Market value equates itself with real value by means of its constant oscillations, never by means of an equation with real value as if the latter were a third party, but rather by means of constant non-equation of itself (as Hegel would say, not by way of abstract identity, but by constant negation of the negation, i.e. of itself as negation of real value).[15] In my pamphlet against Proudhon I showed that real value itself – independently of its rule over the oscillations of the market price (seen apart from its role as the law of these oscillations) – in turn negates itself and constantly posits the real value of commodities in contradiction with its own character, that it constantly depreciates or appreciates the real value of already produced commodities; this is not the place to discuss it in greater detail. [16] Price therefore is distinguished from value not only as the nominal from the real; not only by way of the denomination in gold and silver, but because the latter appears as the law of the motions which the former runs through. But the two are constantly different and never balance out, or balance only coincidentally and exceptionally. The price of a commodity constantly stands above or below the value of the commodity, and the value of the commodity itself exists only in this up-and-down movement of commodity prices. Supply and demand constantly determine the prices of commodities; never balance, or only coincidentally; but the cost of production, for its part, determines the oscillations of supply and demand. The gold or silver in which the price of a commodity, its market value, is expressed is itself a certain quantity of accumulated labour, a certain measure of materialized labour time. On the assumption that the production costs of a commodity and the production costs of gold and silver remain constant, the rise or fall of its market price means nothing more than that a commodity, = x labour time, constantly commands > or < x labour time on the market, that it stands above or beneath its average value as determined by labour time. The first basic illusion of the time-chitters consists in this, that by annulling thenominal difference between real value and market value, between exchange value and price – that is, by expressing value in units of labour time itself instead of in a given objectification of labour time, say gold and silver – that in so doing they also remove the real difference and contradiction between price and value. Given this illusory assumption it is self-evident that the mere introduction of the time-chit does away with all crises, all faults of bourgeois production. The money price of commodities = their real value; demand = supply; production = consumption; money is simultaneously abolished and preserved; the labour time of which the commodity is the product, which is materialized in the commodity, would need only to be measured in order to create a corresponding mirror-image in the form of a value-symbol, money, time-chits. In this way every commodity would be directly transformed into money; and gold and silver, for their part, would be demoted to the rank of all other commodities.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch02.htm

[ALB]

This brings out something that not a lot of people know — that despite mentioning "labour-tme vouchers" for illustrative purposes two or three times, Marx spent much more time demolishing the idea of "labour money" or what in the quote is translated as "time-chits".  While it is true that in the labour-time voucher scheme mentioned by Marx the vouchers were not supposed to circulate but to be cancelled on use (like a ticket to the theatre), there would be a tendency for them to ciculate, i.e for the scheme to degenerate into the sort of labour-money scheme Marx critiised as unworkable. In the same chapter of the Grundrisse that YMS has quoted from, Marx also wrote:

Quote:

The time-chit, representing average labour time, would never correspond to or be convertible into actual labour time; i.e. the amount of labour time objectified in a commodity would never command a quantity of labour time equal to itself, and vice versa, but would command, rather, either more or less, just as at present every oscillation of market values expresses itself in a rise or fall of the gold or silver prices of commodities.The constant depreciation of commodities – over longer periods – in relation to time-chits, which we mentioned earlier, arises out of the law of the rising productivity of labour time, out of the disturbances within relative value itself which are created by its own inherent principle, namely labour time. This inconvertibility of the time-chits which we are now discussing is nothing more than another expression for the inconvertibility between real value and market value, between exchange value and price. In contrast to all other commodities, the time-chit would represent an ideal labour time which would be exchanged sometimes against more and sometimes against less of the actual variety, and which would achieve a separate existence of its own in the time-chit, an existence corresponding to this non-equivalence. The general equivalent, medium of circulation and measure of commodities would again confront the commodities in an individual form, following its own laws, alienated, i.e. equipped with all the properties of money as it exists at present but unable to perform the same services. The medium with which commodities – these objectified quantities of labour time – are compared would not be a third commodity but would be rather their own measure of value, labour time itself; as a result, the confusion would reach a new height altogether. Commodity A, the objectification of 3 hours’ labour time, is = 2 labour-hour-chits; commodity B, the objectification, similarly, of 3 hours’ labour, is = 4 labour-hour-chits. This contradiction is in practice expressed in money prices, but in a veiled form. The difference between price and value, between the commodity measured by the labour time whose product it is, and the product of the labour time against which it is exchanged, this difference calls for a third commodity to act as a measure in which the real exchange value of commodities is expressed. Because price is not equal to value, therefore the value-determining element – labour time – cannot be the element in which prices are expressed, because labour time would then have to express itself simultaneously as the determining and the non-determining element, as the equivalent and non-equivalent of itself. Because labour time as the measure of value exists only as an ideal, it cannot serve as the matter of price-comparisons.

Incidentally, even if labour-time vouchers did not end up circulating, the problem mentioned by Marx here of increasing productivity meaning that newer vouchers would be less "valuable" (exchangeable for less products) than older ones would still exist, meaning that it would be advantageous to hoard older vouchers so as to be able to redeem more goods. There are ways round this — to place a date limit by which the vouchers have to be used or to have them reduce in "value" the longer they are not used — but this just adds complications to the scheme, another reason why it's not workable except for a short while. 

[Alan Kerr]

Young Master Smeet and ALB,A red-herring is something that misleads or distracts from an issue. Do you realize that you have just brought us a red-herring here? Here we were discussing the Marx quotes above about Robinson Crusoe. See also the Socialist Standard for September 2017.There in Crusoe's way, to organize production, either small or full-scale, can you point to a commodity as in your present Marx quotes? I read Marx quotes about Crusoe. I read the article in the September 2017 Socialist Standard. There I see the alternative to a market. I still cannot see any commodities there in that alternative to a market.Now you need to show us the market with commodities – in Crusoe's way. Otherwise, your present stuff about market and Proudhon's labour-chits are just red-herring here. I do not mind discussing that but, to be clear, let's not get things mixed-up!

[Alan Kerr]

@ ALBLet's say that Crusoe notes, from his books, that it takes him 3 average hours to fetch a dozen oysters at low-tide. Next Crusoe finds new oyster-beds so 3 average hours will now get him not just one but two dozen oysters. So now, Crusoe can eat more oysters and fewer nuts. What's wrong with the practice of counting labour hours so far? I do not get your point here.Or look at it the other way. Oyster-beds get run-down so 3 average hours will only get Crusoe 6 oysters. For now Crusoe will eat fewer oysters and more nuts. What's wrong with that?

[Anonymous]

Alan Kerr wrote:

Young Master Smeet and ALB,A red-herring is something that misleads or distracts from an issue. Do you realize that you have just brought us a red-herring here? Here we were discussing the Marx quotes above about Robinson Crusoe. See also the Socialist Standard for September 2017.There in Crusoe's way, to organize production, either small or full-scale, can you point to a commodity as in your present Marx quotes? I read Marx quotes about Crusoe. I read the article in the September 2017 Socialist Standard. There I see the alternative to a market. I still cannot see any commodities there in that alternative to a market.Now you need to show us the market with commodities – in Crusoe's way. Otherwise, your present stuff about market and Proudhon's labour-chits are just red-herring here. I do not mind discussing that but, to be clear, let's not get things mixed-up!

The whole thing is a red herring and a wasting of time.  I do not know why some  members of the Socialist Party sometimes fall into the trap of this so-called innovators and discoverers

[Aeiough]

'With collective production…There is no reason why the producers should not recieve paper tokens permitting them to withdraw an amount corresponding to their labour time from the social consumption stocks.'Capital, Vol 2, the Penguin edition, page 434.

[Author]

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