Originator of a THESIS on money’s incapacity

[robbo203]

I agree with ALB on this subject.  I cannot see the  point in either labour time vouchers or labour time accounting (too quite different concepts) in socialism whatever Marx might have said on the matter.   Marx's views on the matter ought not in any case to be treated as holy writ. I see no reaosn why labour cannot be counted in precisely the same way as any other factor input in socialism – that is to say on the basis of calculation in kind.  What we would be interested in is the available supplies of specific types of labour relevant to the specific tasks at hand as determined by consumer demand.  In the same way we would be interested to know the available  suplies of physical components etc.  It is the availability of all these different  inputs that is key here becuase this is what constrains or limits the amount of output of a given good that can be produced..  In fact, this is where Justus von Liebig's famous "law of the minimum" comes into play and its importance for socialist planning cannot be understated.  Essentially what Liebig was saying was that the output of any good is limited by the particular input that is scarcest.  Liebig was an agricultural chemist  and so his theory essentially related to the various  components necessary for plant growth  (although it can be extended to cover the entire prpduction system).   Supplies of organic based fertiliser tended to be the limiting factor in his day until the invention of artificial fertilifer.   As a result some other factor then tended to take the place of fertiliser as the limiting factor e.g. pesticides , irrigation water supplies etc etc.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum For any given output there is always going to be one input that serves as the limiting factor.  Increasing the output of the good in question means either increasing the availability of this input or, alternatively, changing the technque of production itself  and technical  ratios of the inputs to each other to prpduce a given output.  In other words economising most on inputs that are most scarce (which is the rational thing to do).  To enable these kinds of decisions to be made what is needed is some idea of the available stock in the case of each input.   That information is something that would be made available through a self regulating system of stock control  using calcualtion in kind. The point is that this system is already in place in capitalisim today – we  dont need to invent or  introduce it – and operates alongside a system of monetary accounting.  In fact wthout the former capitalism would grind to a halt.   In socialism we would continue to use this system but dispense with monetary accounting altogether. All this talk about the need to calculate how much labour goes into all the various products produced in a socialist society is a complete distraction and an irrelevance.  Even if it were technically feasible to accomplish – which it is not given the socialised nature of modern production  – what use would it serve?  Past labour is not  a particularly useful guide to the future allocation of labour and as has been pointed there is the problem of the heterogeneity of labour  (e.g. skilled labour versus unskilled labour) which makes it near impossible to apply labour time as a universal unit of account. You dont need to do that anyway – quite apart from the enormous bureaucratic costs involved in trying to attach a value expressed  in  abstract labour time to literally millions of different products.  "Socially necessary labour time" is only relevant to a capitalist exchange economy for the purpose of establishing equivalence.  Meaning it only reveals indirectly ad retrospectively  through market prices at the point at which supply and demand in theory  equilibriate.   So it presupposes a system of capitalist commodity exchange .  Or as Marx put it: "Social labour-time exists in these commodities in a latent state, so to speak, and becomes evident only in the course of their exchange…. Universal social labour is consequently not a ready-made prerequisite but an emerging result’ (Critique of Political Economy)

[robbo203]

I have just come across this which is quite a treasure trove of references to the socialist calculation debate.  Very handy to have https://theredand.black/forums/topic/561-the-socialist-calculation-debate-and-the-economic-calculation-problem/ The SPGB's material is mentioned under other biblography

[Anonymous]

robbo203 wrote:

I have just come across this which is quite a treasure trove of references to the socialist calculation debate.  Very handy to havehttps://theredand.black/forums/topic/561-the-socialist-calculation-debate-and-the-economic-calculation-problem/The SPGB's material is mentioned under other biblography

And not forgetting your own indispensable contributions, Robin.https://libcom.org/files/CommonVoice3.pdfhttps://web.archive.org/web/20060110091635/http://www.cvoice.org/cv3cox.htm

[ALB]

Aeiough wrote:

'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.

I think that translaion is a bit too prescriptive. The Moscow Foreign Language Pubishing House translation has "for all it matters". The French translation has "si l'on veut", i.e if you like. The original German word is "meinetwegen" which my German dctionary says means "so far as I am concerned" or "for all I care". Othe translations say it means  "I don't mind", even "whatever" (though I doubt that usage was current in Engels's day as the one who edited Marx's notes!).  In any event, David Fernbach who translated the Penguin edition doesn't seem to have taken enough care over this passage. "As far as I'm concerned the producers could" seems a more accurate translation than "there is no reason why the producers should not". In other words, Marx was saying that labour-time vouchers were just one way amongst others of distributing consumer goods in the early stages of socialism, not the (only) way.I know this is getting a bit Talmudic, but is here any native German-speaker (or professional translator) out there who can help? The passage occurs at the end of Chapter 18 here:http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me24/me24_351.htm#Kap_18_II

[Alan Kerr]

But we also have another way to take care. The way is not and can never be complete as we improve our way all the time like a machine. But do we have a way. And our way serves us well. How does this work?Yes, it's true, our way to take care may involve pure guesswork. We may guess, that this x seems true to us. And we may find that other people also guess or say the same. But did we check yet? No.So next, at the right place and time, we take care to measure; count, compare and check as best we can. Most times our first guess is not true. That’s unless we already measured; counted, compared and checked enough to narrow down to just 2 likely possibilities. In that case, our first guesses may be partly true perhaps just 50 per cent of the time.Just about everyone, especially if they went to school, gets this plain need to check with care. That’s until we find this forum,–and here we try to discuss this issue of the alternative to a market.Here we find three or so writers demand some whole different way to check.What different way is this?We might call it guess-ology.1) You just hazard a guess at what seems to you to be true. And, to you, (with a straight face?) that's proof enough.2) You become all religious, sorry, I mean "Talmudic" over your guess.ALB finds that x seems to be true to ALB since x seemed to be true to Pieter Lawrence. Pieter Lawrence, on the other hand, finds that x seems to be true to Pieter Lawrence since x seemed to be true to ALB.If you repeat this crude guess-ology over enough, I hope you will see why you fail to convince. Please try to convince Dave b to use your guess-ology in his work, as analytical chemist, in the food industry. You will fail as you are also failing right now to convince Aeiough. Or please try to convince the schools that guess-ology is the more exact way to prove truth in maths and science. Or please try to convince all industry that guess-ology is the more exact way to prove key facts. First, convince everyone to trust in guess-ology, in all problems of life. And if guess-ology is workable in practice then, yes, I'll push my copy of Marx' Capital aside and trust in guess-ology too.But until then, why should we bother with your guess-ology? What has your guess-ology to do with changing from one whole economic system to another? Why should we trust in your way to prove as we switch to Crusoe's way to labour,–full scale?You would have no right to risk your unworkable way in practice without checking, as Crusoe does, by counting our labour-time too.Please see the Socialist Standard for Sep. 2017.

[robbo203]

Alan Kerr wrote:

 If you repeat this crude guess-ology over enough, I hope you will see why you fail to convince. Please try to convince Dave b to use your guess-ology in his work, as analytical chemist, in the food industry. You will fail as you are also failing right now to convince Aeiough. Or please try to convince the schools that guess-ology is the more exact way to prove truth in maths and science. Or please try to convince all industry that guess-ology is the more exact way to prove key facts. First, convince everyone to trust in guess-ology, in all problems of life. And if guess-ology is workable in practice then, yes, I'll push my copy of Marx' Capital aside and trust in guess-ology too.But until then, why should we bother with your guess-ology? What has your guess-ology to do with changing from one whole economic system to another? Why should we trust in your way to prove as we switch to Crusoe's way to labour,–full scale?You would have no right to risk your unworkable way in practice without checking, as Crusoe does, by counting our labour-time too.Please see the Socialist Standard for Sep. 2017.

 Alan, I am having difficulty trying to figure out what exactly your criticism is.  Nobody is suggesting not to "count labour".  The question is – in what way?  Are we talking about fullscale labour time accounting, using labour time as a universal unit of account, to attach a value to all the products of labour? Or we talking about monitoring supplies of particular kinds of labour required for particular purposes in precisely the same way as we might treat any other factor input?   I would favour the latter approach and reject the former. If your are talking about "guess-ology" then fullscale labour time accounting is a very good example of precisely that.   How can you possibly calculate how much labour went into manufacturing a fridge or ballpoint pen or a laptop computer?  And what use would such information be to you anyway? Are you going to abandon the production of fridges becuase it absorbs more labour than the production of laptops?   Of course not.   Past labour is also not necessarily a useful guide to the future allocation of labour given the fact that technologies are constantly changing. There is also the formidable problem of weighting different kinds of labour.  I have yet to hear a convincing explnanation of how this problem of the heterogeneity of labour can be overcome in socialism.   I keep on making this point that the fundamental thing we need to know about all factor inputs, including different kinds of labour units, in a socialist system of production is their  relative scarcity, not their labour content.   Relative scarcity  is something we can determine with reasonable accuracy via a self regulating system of stock control.   Look up the literature on Justus von Liebig's "Law of the Minimum" This is the way ahead for efficient and effective resource allocation in a socialist system, not fullscale labour time accounting

[ALB]

We are discussing two different things here. First, whether or not Marx advocated labour-time vouchers (a matter of historical fact, some would say nothing more than that on the grounds that it's not really important for deciding what to do on the basis of what Marx may or may not have said). Second, the merits and demerits of such a scheme.As regards the first, we don't have to guess Marx's view. It is clearly stated in the passage from the first volume of Capital (incidentally, the only view on this in a writing he himself saw to publication) that we've discussed here (from section 4 of Chapter 1, on the fetishism of commodities). Talking about socialism as

Quote:

an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force

Marx goes on to say that a part of what is produced

Quote:

is consumed by the members of the association as means of subsistence. This part must therefore be divided among them. The way this division is made will vary with the particular kind of social organization of production and the corresponding level of social development attained by the producers. We will assume, but only for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour-time.

In other words, he was leaving the question open, with the exact method of distribution being left to socialist society to decide in the light of social and technological conditions. He was certainly not advocating that it should seek to parallel what happens when there is production for sale. Not even Robinson Crusoe tried to do that: he simply produced what he needed and took from the part set aside for his immediate personal consumption what he needed as and when he needed it.Incidentally, nobody here is advocating that the organisatin of the production and distribution without money should be based on guesswork so I don't know why you keep going on about this. What we are discussing are two, different but both science-based ways of calculating what resources to use and how. You are making the same mistake as Baron von Mises of assuming that there is only one "rational", scientific way of doing this — the one you advocate — but this is begging the question, i.e assuming what has to be proved, by defining it as "rational" so that any other way is by definition irrational.

[Alan Kerr]

Thank you Robbo, Then let's be clear. There is no question of attaching a value to the product. Total social product already contains social labour. It was inevitable that we lost count of how many social labour hours our products cost. This is why we must now make things for exchange as commodities. Only in a commodity producing society does it seem as if value in exchange is attaching to the product. That is illusion. Really, value is social labour-time that it takes to produce, or to reproduce the product. In a society, that knows what its products cost in labour-time (and such knowledge is now un-stoppable) that illusion is impossible. In a society, that knows what its products cost in labour-time the production of commodities and the market are impossible. See above and Crusoe solves all of your unsolvable labour counting problems. ALB, see my comment #136. I already assume the whole distribution question open. You guess everything. It is without counting at the time that you are guessing that your unworkable production will work. 

[Alan Kerr]

Robbo203 and ALB,By Justus von Liebig's "Law of the Minimum" we may learn 2 ways to grow a tonne of corn.By the same law we may learn that we use a different size land area to get a tonne of corn for each way.Now which way saves and which way wastes labour?I see three ways to count labour 1) price or 2) count social labour itself or 3) guess it.

[Bijou Drains]

Alan Kerr wrote:

Robbo203 and ALB,By Justus von Liebig's "Law of the Minimum" we may learn 2 ways to grow a tonne of corn.By the same law we may learn that we use a different size land area to get a tonne of corn for each way.Now which way saves and which way wastes labour?I see three ways to count labour 1) price or 2) count social labour itself or 3) guess it.

You assume that we want to save labour, this is based on considering labour a commodity. If I want to make my garden as labour free as I can I may consider using plastic turf, paving stones or concrete. However I may enjoy gardening and consider every hour spent in the garden a bonus. Similarly in a Socialist society withthe proper use of labour saving machinary there is likely to be an abundance of labour and the things we may wish to count (such as water use, impact on the environment, land use, etc.) may be far more important and counting the socially useful labour is likely to be relatively unimportant.

[robbo203]

Alan Kerr wrote:

Thank you Robbo, Then let's be clear. There is no question of attaching a value to the product. Total social product already contains social labour. It was inevitable that we lost count of how many social labour hours our products cost. This is why we must now make things for exchange as commodities. Only in a commodity producing society does it seem as if value in exchange is attaching to the product. That is illusion. Really, value is social labour-time that it takes to produce, or to reproduce the product. In a society, that knows what its products cost in labour-time (and such knowledge is now un-stoppable) that illusion is impossible. In a society, that knows what its products cost in labour-time the production of commodities and the market are impossible. See above and Crusoe solves all of your unsolvable labour counting problems.. 

 Alan, Im still no clearer on what you are saying.  You say on the one hand "There is no question of attaching a value to the product" presumably referring to a socialist society.   On the other hand, you say also "In a society, that knows what its products cost in labour-time the production of commodities and the market are impossible." But knowing what a product cost in labour time IS attaching a value to it measured in labour time units! Incidentally I still want to know HOW you think a society can "know" what it products cost in labour time, without guess work.  There is no way of reliably knowing this in a system of socialised productiom in my view – whether in capitalism , socialism or any other system.  And even if you could know what use would such informaton be to you, anyway?  You dont explain You seem to be saying – though I may be wrong in interepreting you – that unless socialism engages in fullscale labout time accounting it will not work and we will be stuck with a market economy.  If so, I emphatically reject such a claim I also reject your suggestion that the Crusoe approach "solves all of your unsolvable labour counting problems"  Crusoe by defintion did not have to deal with the problem of heterogeneity of labour 

[Alan Kerr]

@Bijou Drains buy some raffle tickets from me and you will be likely to win a prize.Solving workers' problems is too important to leave to guess, and more so since guess will not work. By counting, we do not need likelihood. We get security.

[Alan Kerr]

Thank you Robbo, yes I said "There is no question of attaching a value to the product. Total social product already contains social labour." Crusoe does count his labour better than the market. For Crusoe one hour of skilled = 1 hour of simple labour. We need to do as Crusoe does but counting with computers.It's true that Crusoe can miscount and mishap is possible. In practice, builders expect 10 per cent waste on materials. Crusoe must likewise work out probabilities and keep a reserve to cover for this.The answer is please compare what Crusoe does with a market and with what you want.

[Bijou Drains]

Alan Kerr wrote:

@Bijou Drains buy some raffle tickets from me and you will be likely to win a prize.Solving workers' problems is too important to leave to guess, and more so since guess will not work. By counting, we do not need likelihood. We get security.

So presumably you count up the hours you spend undertaking household tasks and undertake time and motion studies when you wash the dishes?

[Alan Kerr]

@Bijou Drains The means to work have now grown too big for the household. We can use big means only in common. We need to both own and to control big means in common. This does not refer to the private household.  

[Author]

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