Originator of a THESIS on money’s incapacity

[Bijou Drains]

Alan Kerr wrote:

@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.  

So Crusoe's is not a private household? You can't have it both ways, Bonny Lad!

[Alan Kerr]

Yes Crusoe's hut is Crusoe's and"… The total product of our community is a social product. One portion serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another portion is consumed by the members as means of subsistence. A distribution of this portion amongst them is consequently necessary…"(Marx)Please revise the whole passage from Marx to make it say what you say it should say. And please share your revision here so that we can comment on it.http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/originator-thesis-moneys-incapacity?page=10#comment-45296

[robbo203]

Alan Kerr wrote:

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.

 Yet again youve lost me. You dont want to attach values to the product but you do want to count the social labour that goes into the product like Crusoe does but with what computers e.g 300 social  hours  to make product A compared to 350 for product B.  But how is that not attaching a value to a product?

[Alan Kerr]

Robbo We could say that Crusoe counts the labour in his product. If you mean exactly the same thing then say that Crusoe attaches a value to his product. But Crusoe gets at the labour in his product by counting. Things like size, weight, taste… attached to his product are rather to do with use-value.

[Bijou Drains]

Alan Kerr wrote:

Robbo We could say that Crusoe counts the labour in his product. If you mean exactly the same thing then say that Crusoe attaches a value to his product. But Crusoe gets at the labour in his product by counting. Things like size, weight, taste… attached to his product are rather to do with use-value.

Is it just me but can I hear the sound of straws being clutched at?

[Alan Kerr]

No Bijou I do not mind which words we use so long as we are clear in what we mean. To attach value to our product is what we must do today. That’s because we do not yet know the average labour-time in our product by counting. But Crusoe knows the average labour-time in his product by counting.We simply need to be clear in what we mean here.I asked you to"Please revise the whole passage from Marx to make it say what you say it should say. And please share your revision here so that we can comment on it.(From my reply #167 to you Bijou)Here's the whole passage from Marxhttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/originator-thesis-moneys-incapacity?page=10#comment-45296Here's another quote for you"… From the moment when society enters into possession of the means of production and uses them in direct association for production, the labour of each individual, however varied its specifically useful character may be, becomes at the start and directly social labour. The quantity of social labour contained in a product need not then be established in a roundabout way; daily experience shows in a direct way how much of it is required on the average. Society can simply calculate how many hours of labour are contained in a steam-engine, a bushel of wheat of the last harvest, or a hundred square yards of cloth of a certain quality. It could therefore never occur to it still to express the quantities of labour put into the products, quantities which it will then know directly and in their absolute amounts, in a third product, in a measure which, besides, is only relative, fluctuating, inadequate, though formerly unavoidable for lack of a better one, rather than express them in their natural, adequate and absolute measure, time. Just as little as it would occur to chemical science still to express atomic weight in a roundabout way, relatively, by means of the hydrogen atom, if it were able to express them absolutely, in their adequate measure, namely in actual weights, in billionths or quadrillionths of a gramme. Hence, on the assumptions we made above, society will not assign values to products. It will not express the simple fact that the hundred square yards of cloth have required for their production, say, a thousand hours of labour in the oblique and meaningless way, stating that they have the value of a thousand hours of labour. It is true that even then it will still be necessary for society to know how much labour each article of consumption requires for its production. It will have to arrange its plan of production in accordance with its means of production, which include, in particular, its labour-powers. The useful effects of the various articles of consumption, compared with one another and with the quantities of labour required for their production, will in the end determine the plan. People will be able to manage everything very simply, without the intervention of much-vaunted “value”. *15"Anti-Dühring by Frederick Engels 1877 Part III: Socialism IV. Distribution (Near end of chapter)http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/originator-thesis-moneys-incapacity?page=9#comment-45275Bijou it would be good if you revise both the passage from Marx and this one from Engels.We should read your revisions and we should discuss them here.

[robbo203]

Alan From the Engels quote: "Society can simply calculate how many hours of labour are contained in a steam-engine, a bushel of wheat of the last harvest, or a hundred square yards of cloth of a certain quality. It could therefore never occur to it still to express the quantities of labour put into the products, quantities which it will then know directly and in their absolute amounts, in a third product, in a measure which, besides, is only relative, fluctuating, inadequate, though formerly unavoidable for lack of a better one, rather than express them in their natural, adequate and absolute measure, time." It is precisely this that I am questioning on the following grounds 1) It is grossly naive  and simplistic to imagine that "society can simply calculate how many hours of labour are contained in a steam-engine". You  have also to take into the labour that went into components out of which the steam engine was assembled, the production of the electricity used, the transport costs involved,   the effort that went into the extraction the relevant minerals from the ground etc  etc.  There is also the question of the level of skill involved and the heterogeneity of labour. Do you treat every unit of labour as the same and if so why? 2)  I just dont see the point of the exercise.   If you want to economise on inputs  including labour a far more effective approach is to act upon their relative availability-cum-scarcity  – which information we can derive from a self regulating system of stock control   Apart from anything what you are suggesting will turn out to be a bureacratic nightmare that will divert a lot of labour from  more useful pursuits.   As I said before, if  the idea  behind this  proposal isthat the products involving a high labour content will be abandoned in favour of those with a low labour content then  this is highly questionable since different products with different labour contents may have completely different use values.  What you are asking for, in effect, is to compare and choose between different use values.  Thats like having to chose between apples and oranges – or chalk and cheese – on the grounds that it takes slightly more labour to prpduce an apple than an orange.  That aside, as has been pointed out, we might want to actually expend MORE labour on certain goods  for reasons such as the intrinsic pleasure of such labour or for environmental/ecological reasons e.g.  more emphasis on labour intensive farming than capital intensive monoculture farming I think quite a lot of the comments that Marx and Engels made on the organisaion of a future  socialist were not very well thought out at all  and should definitely not be taken as gospel

[Alan Kerr]

RobboTotal labourers = 1 CrusoeMaterials = 4 hoursAdd to materials = 7 hoursResult 1 wicker fish-trapEstimated average life of fish-trap = 5 tides.Check trap at low-tides = 0.5 hours(1 tide) result = 2 fishCost of 2 fish =11 hours/5 = 2.2 hours + 0.5 hours = 2.7 hoursNow check it2.7 – 0.5 = 2.2 x 5 = 11 hours – 7 = 4 hours materials (this seems right)I do not say that this is right. Please go ahead and double check. I was hopeless at sums.Crusoe found counting in his head hard at first. But since Crusoe found pens and stationery, it is child's play for him.Crusoe treats 1 hour skilled as = to 1 hour simple labour as this suits his purpose small-scale. And it also suits our purpose full-scale.How do you know that what may seem hard today may not be child's play tomorrow with computers?If you like to gamble then please buy raffle tickets.Production is far too important.

[Dave B]

i I have done this with them before Alan They are prejudiced about the subject. I pointed out to them an actual real example of how extremely easy it was to calculate the amount added of labour time in a factory. In my case it something like 7 seconds of labour time was added to the raw materials in the production of a litre of juice. It took less than 15 minutes to do that from the start as the amount of stuff that was produced in a week was available and you just need to divide that by number of employees and time worked etc. To demonstrate it was universally simple I asked someone working in the production of milk came up with a very similar figure. Iteration going back through the supply chain is a straightforward process especially with computers. In fact in software development and big engineering projects people familiar with the components required to produce something will be asked to ‘cost’ it in terms of labour time etc. I was talking to some people about that incidentally just last week. The bean counters will price it later.  The stuff about accurate measurement is also a straw man argument as it is not being suggested will have to be. The stuff about inputs? The only inputs are human effort; as products are labour. The objective or purpose is twofold. To provide objective measurements to reduce labour time and maximise productivity etc. And to give consumers and indication of how much of other peoples labour they are consuming so they can make socially responsible decisions about what to consume. I was taught in childhood to appreciate how much work had gone into something. The Crusoe thing was supposed to be in part a kind of analogy, metaphor or allegory or whatever. So a socialist society would take into consideration the same kind of things as Crusoe did even though Crusoe was no communist. There was an element of sarcasm in it in the sense that if was a favourite example for the classic bourgeois economists.  The Crusoe thing is also one of several inserts into the text to make sure that you have got or understood the core ideas of what went before. If it doesn’t make sense then you haven’t. Two other examples are they sugar and iron thing and the butyric acid and propyl formate. The second one is a bit more clever than it looks like as one ‘tastes’ horrid and other is pleasant.   What do you do by the way and what are you etc

[Alan Kerr]

Thanks Dave, I do not get ALB's fear that where we know the number of labour-hour's result is commodities. Where we already know the number of labour hours (inside the firm) result is not commodities. Where we do not yet know the number of labour hours (out in society) result is commodities.a.alan.alan2@gmail.com

[ALB]

Dave B wrote:

I pointed out to them an actual real example of how extremely easy it was to calculate the amount added of labour time in a factory.In my case it something like 7 seconds of labour time was added to the raw materials in the production of a litre of juice.It took less than 15 minutes to do that from the start as the amount of stuff that was produced in a week was available and you just need to divide that by number of employees and time worked etc.

But that's a calculation that woud be useful in socialism as part of general calculation in kind, in this case of the amount of labour needed alongside the raw materials, energy, etc to produce something (though you'd have to specify the types of work skills required too). Nobody's objecting to that. The objection is to the need to give a labour-time "value" to the materials, etc rather than counting them too in kind, some much weight of this, so man of that, etc.

[ALB]

Alan Kerr wrote:

Where we do not yet know the number of labour hours (out in society) result is commodities.

That's a rather eccentric definition of a commodity. I always thought a commodity was an item of wealth produced with a view to being bought and sold. It's also faulty logic as the conclusion doesn't follow from the (single) premise.  I don't think your new-found friend, Dave Bsc, would agree either.

[robbo203]

Dave B wrote:

 I have done this with them before Alan They are prejudiced about the subject. I pointed out to them an actual real example of how extremely easy it was to calculate the amount added of labour time in a factory. In my case it something like 7 seconds of labour time was added to the raw materials in the production of a litre of juice. It took less than 15 minutes to do that from the start as the amount of stuff that was produced in a week was available and you just need to divide that by number of employees and time worked etc. To demonstrate it was universally simple I asked someone working in the production of milk came up with a very similar figure. Iteration going back through the supply chain is a straightforward process especially with computers. In fact in software development and big engineering projects people familiar with the components required to produce something will be asked to ‘cost’ it in terms of labour time etc. I was talking to some people about that incidentally just last week. The bean counters will price it later.  The stuff about accurate measurement is also a straw man argument as it is not being suggested will have to be. The stuff about inputs? The only inputs are human effort; as products are labour. The objective or purpose is twofold. To provide objective measurements to reduce labour time and maximise productivity etc. And to give consumers and indication of how much of other peoples labour they are consuming so they can make socially responsible decisions about what to consume. I was taught in childhood to appreciate how much work had gone into something. The Crusoe thing was supposed to be in part a kind of analogy, metaphor or allegory or whatever. So a socialist society would take into consideration the same kind of things as Crusoe did even though Crusoe was no communist. 

Dave Sorry but this simply will not do as a defence of full scale labour time accounting.  By that I mean assigning a value to all the products of labour, expressed in units of labour time.  I have no objection to calculating how many units of labour (under the different headings of different types of labour) are required to produce a given output in response to the demand for a given product  but that is quite a different proposition to the one you are putting forward. That alternative approach involves treating labour as one would any other kind of input on the basis of calculation in kind.  You are advocating not calculation in kind but a single universal metric expressed in labour time units You make the calculation of labour time inputs sound easy peasy. You say In my case it something like 7 seconds of labour time was added to the raw materials in the production of a litre of juice.Needless to say it would be misleading to suggest that the cost of producing a litre of juice was 7 seconds – as you seem to acknowledge – because you have also to take into account the labour costs in providing the raw materials or the machinery involved in processing them However, you then go on to assert that these indirect costs can also be taken into account using labour time accounting: Iteration going back through the supply chain is a straightforward process especially with computers.  This idea of a “supply chain” suggests a single linear path along which you can trace the transformation of the product from raw material into finished good.  But that is wrong.  It is not so much a supply chain that we are talking about a network of connections that radiates outwards ultimately embraces the totality of production  You justify your approach in these terms.  Labour time accounting enables us"To provide objective measurements to reduce labour time and maximise productivity etc. And to give consumers and indication of how much of other peoples labour they are consuming so they can make socially responsible decisions about what to consume." On this last point we also need to make socially responsible decisions about what to consume with respect to non-labour inputs as well not least because of the environmental repercussions of using them.  So why focus solely on labour units? As far as providingobjective measurements to reduce labour time and maximise productivity etc. again I make the point I made earlier to Alanif the idea  behind this  proposal is that the products involving a high labour content will be abandoned in favour of those with a low labour content then  this is highly questionable since different products with different labour contents may have completely different use values.  What you are asking for, in effect, is to compare and choose between different use values.  That’s like having to choose between apples and oranges – or chalk and cheese – on the grounds that it takes slightly more labour to produce an apple than an orange.  That aside, as has been pointed out, we might want to actually expend MORE labour on certain goods for reasons such as the intrinsic pleasure of such labour or for environmental/ecological reasons e.g.  more emphasis on labour intensive farming than capital intensive monoculture farming As for “raising productivity” I find it odd that you should cite this as a reason for instituting a system of full-scale labour time accounting when you offer no way of weighting different kinds of labour in terms of skill and productivity.  I presume, as with Alan, you propose to treat all labour time units as equivalent.  So one hour of labour performed by a structural engineer or a neurosurgeon is worth exactly the same as one hour of labour performed by a street cleaner.  There might be a moral argument in favour of such approach and very clearly maintaining clean streets is a vitally important task that needs to be done but it seems a bit arbitrary to say the productivity of a street cleaner and a neurosurgeon is exactly the same.  The labour time accounting approach needs to assume this however in order to ensure commensurability and even substitutability right across the board.  In that respect it is highly misleading Incidentally, I don’t assume as Alan seems to suggest that labour time accounting implies commodity production according to its critics.  The case against full-scale labour time accounting is simply that it is impractical and will involve divert a large amount of administrative effort into doing something that will be of little worth to a socialist society 

[Anonymous]

Please forgive me for not reading the entire thread but am I correct in believing that it is being suggested that socialist society will by guided by 'time and motion' studies. This reminds me of what we used to call  Taylorism and it horrified workers. My apologies if I have completely missed the point and just ignore meHere is a summary of Taylor's suggestionshttp://www.netmba.com/mgmt/scientific/

[Bijou Drains]

Vin wrote:

Please forgive me for not reading the entire thread but am I correct in believing that it is being suggested that socialist society will by guided by 'time and motion' studies. This reminds me of what we used to call  Taylorism and it horrified workers. My apologies if I have completely missed the point and just ignore meHere is a summary of Taylor's suggestionshttp://www.netmba.com/mgmt/scientific/

Socialist Christmas, perhaps?http://non-carborundum.tumblr.com/image/105344661344

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