Originator of a THESIS on money’s incapacity
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As someone who experienced several strikes against Total Quality Management (TQM) i don't think this is what is being saidCost-benefit analysis, surely, will have a part to play in allocating resources, including labour.As first suggested in Buick's and Crump's book, some kind of “points system” might be used to evaluate different projects facing society – cost-benefit analysis which is not dependant upon dollars and cents calculations. Under capitalism ( also read Parecon) the balance sheet of the relevant benefits and costs advantages and disadvantages of a particular scheme or rival schemes is drawn up in money terms, but in socialism a points system for attributing relative importance to the various relevant considerations could be used instead. The points attributed to these considerations would be subjective, in the sense that this would depend on a deliberate social decision rather than on some objective standard. In the sense that one of the aims of socialism is precisely to rescue humankind from the capitalist fixation with production time/money, cost-benefit type analyses, as a means of taking into account other factors, could, therefore, be said to be more appropriate for use in socialism than under capitalism. Using points systems to attribute relative importance in this way would not be to recreate some universal unit of evaluation and calculation, but simply to employ a technique to facilitate decision-making in particular concrete cases. The advantages /disadvantages and even the points attributed to them can, and normally would, differ from case to case. So what we are talking about is not a new abstract universal unit of measurement to replace money and economic value but one technique among others for reaching rational decisions in a society where the criterion of rationality is human welfare.
Spliddit (http://www.spliddit.org/apps/tasks ) has an interesting task allocation algorithm, which rather than abstract labour casts a share of all tasks in terms of the most time consuming task. (if you go to the demo, you see that each person is asked to say which task they perfer over each other, and how many times they'd be prepaired to do the preferred task over the non-preferred). Obviously, this would have to be scaled by survey, but with a few thousand iterations, you'd have a fairly accurate knowledge of what concrete work people would be willing to do, and how many hoursof each task people would be prepared to do in 'unpopular' jobs…
@ALB Newsflash: Out in the society where I live, old obstinate friend, we are buying and selling products as commodities.
No doubt, but that doesn't mean that there'd be the buying and selling of products in socialism just because socialist society doesn't adopt labour-time as a general unit of account in place of money.
iWell there are several points been provided. I have obviously considered the ecology thing but didn’t want to clutter things up to much. Actually people in capitalism are concerned about what goes into producing things and selflessly or socially responsibly want to know about it so they can make socially responsible choices. So you can get stuff like sustainable tuna fishing, free range chickens and eggs and fair trade stuff etc, etc. It is a similar kind of thing. As to skilled and unskilled etc actually the capitalist documents on productivity of labour and labour inputs etc tend to lump skilled and unskilled together in a remarkably ‘Marxist’ fashion. There was some amazing stuff in a standard OECD document that I can try and find later. Thus there is car making data and they have values like 275.357 hours to make a car or whatever and compare it from one car factory to another. And they recommend just homogenising all labour time input. It is true enough that say in car assembly plant there are sort of something like 3000 components being assembled. So it does mushroom or expand out going back. But equally it after a while it starts to condense and collapse as well. So it starts collapsing back into iron, steel, copper, oil or coal etc. As steam engines were mentioned. In fact in the late 19thcentury you did to some extent have these 20,000 people mega factories were it wasn’t to far away from steel and coal coming in at one end and steam engines coming out of the other. Anybody who uses a google search engine and doesn’t think it is possible to calculate this kind of thing is suffering from confirmation bias, to put it as politely as I can. Producing useful things whilst enjoying it is outside of the ‘realm’ of the discussion, albeit interesting. What is proposed as being measured is time taken out of the Karl’s volume three seminal “realm of freedom”; stuff we have to do because it is ‘necessary’. As an aside; The debate re Karl has shifted in the sense that work was something we had to do to reproduce ourselves or just live in a reasonable condition etc. Karl hardly ever talked about working class leasure time. First world workers obviously work or spend a considerable amount of their time working to improve the quality of their leasure time. Eg going to Disneyland etc. That was something relatively new in the late 19thcentury eg going to Blackpool etc. Many workers, probably the majority internationally, just work to keep themselves together. The gentleman middleclass scientists were obviously just having fun doing what they did in the 19thcentury as to some extant they do now even though it was useful. I don’t think that counts in my measure of things. There was a quite popular computer game based on organising trains in and out of Manchester Piccadilly railway station. People really enjoyed playing it even though it was precisely based on somebody’s jobs. I think Dick Donnelly who used to work for British Rail go on about trainspotters basically doing a job that people hated. I know rock climbers who have landed jobs window cleaning high rise buildings and doing tree surgeon stuff; it is work it is enjoying stuff and getting paid for it. There is currently a sub-culture of these kind of people breaking into premises and climbing cranes and buidings etc and trying to avoid arrest. Like flying planes, for which people pay good money to play computer simulation games, isn’t fun. The capitalist class or capitalism catches onto this kind of thing and realises that it is less trouble and should be paid less for. I know personally of people who have deliberately gone from £50K in the finance sector to £30K in the NHS because one is load of shit and the other feels better. Working down platinum mine might be a bit different; pot-holer’s aside; they are mad as well. Oranges and apples etc? Well then Canadian Ice wine, or £10 a bottle stuff and cheap plonk made from glucose syrups made from wheat starch coloured with anthocyanins from take your pick. As far as I am concerned both taste equally good and the use value of getting me pissed is the same. I am inclined to take a dim view on wine snobbery etc but if some people can tell the difference, and the use-value, well ok then. And we will still have labour intensively produced French wines in money less communism and smoked cured parmesan ham blah blah. But if I go to the communist store and I see all these bottles of wine on the shelves I want to make sure I select the correct one for my unsophisticated needs based on what matters. I think all this ‘working class’ Gordon Ramsey restaurateur shit about fine foods is well shit. It is all on the TV isn’t it. But I am not a fascist about it; I mean having a load of chefs prating about cooking a perfect ‘filet mignon’ , remember that one from the Deleonist Bryon ? And then pouring a load of Hienz tomato ketchup over it to make it taste acceptable. Each to their own. I have biker friends and they want flashy stuff in the sense of £20,000 1200CC Kawasaki shit. Which might look like an indulgence; but they are quite happy living on baked beans on toast, fish and chips as a luxury and bottles of Newcastle Brown which probably costs 20 seconds to produce. In fact returning to the leasure time thing there used to be a culture in the biker community of taking them apart and putting them back together again for fun. My father was an engineer who worked in a factory fixing machines, he spent every other Sunday stripping his car down an putting it back together again; it wasn’t necessary. I suspect that Newcastle Brown must be a cultural icon and part of identity politics and inverse conspicuous consumption as it tastes worse than salmon, raw oysters and caviar in my opinion. The first recorded industrial strike, apprentice boys in London, was in protest at force fed salmon. I know and understand that our Newcastle friends think all this is bourgeois shit but as far as I am concerned I am rooted in my own working class heritage.
@ALB Well, for a start, we are already counting labour-time and our computing power to count labour-time is growing with each day. First it's a supply chain that we are talking about next a network of connections that radiates outwards ultimately embraces the totality of production. No one can stop us not even Baron Ludwig von Mises. It is ridiculous to try to stop us. This information is good for the working class. It is the one way to make the production of commodities impossible by putting something better in place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_Marxian_EconomicsA different Robinson, but she makes an intersting point, concerning land.To illustrate my own way: young Billy was the luckiest boy in all of Fulchester, for he had three patches of socialist land, which grew potatoes. On Plot A you could harvest 30 kilos of [potatoes per hour. Open Plot B you could gather 20 kilos of potatoes per hour, and on Plot C 1 kilo per hour.So, the labour value of spuds from plot A is one third of those from plot C. So, we have two choices, either we average out the values, and say that all potatoes have a labour value of 20 kilos per hour, which would have the ffect of misallocating labour among the plots, or, we price the potatoes from each plot at theoir exact rate, which will lead to market distortions as people will prefer plot A spuds, and will only buy B & C when A run out. Also, what do we do when the tatties make it to the chippy, and become intermediate goods, how would we know which spud came from which plot?Further, we would need to address unproductive tasks, such as teaching, that do not create a transferable object. teachers need to consume, and so we would have to include a portion of goods produced for them, which would mean that "productive" workers would only get a portion of their labour vouchers allocated to them.
Actually, Marx himself brings out a similar defect in the labour-time voucher scheme in his famous discussion of it in his Critique of the Gotha Programme:
Quote:The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.He went on to add:
Quote:But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!Our point is, isn't it, that now, over 140 years later (140 years is a long time, what?, 4 generations) both the "economic structure of society and its cultural development" mean that socialist society could go over to "to each according to needs" fairly quickly. Whether or not the scheme Marx described would have worked in his day is another matter, but is only of academic or historical interest now.
@YMS you say "To illustrate my own way: young Billy was the luckiest boy in all of Fulchester, for he had three patches of socialist land, which grew potatoes. On Plot A you could harvest 30 kilos of [potatoes per hour. Open Plot B you could gather 20 kilos of potatoes per hour, and on Plot C 1 kilo per hour. "So, the labour value of spuds from plot A is one third of those from plot C. So, we have two choices, either we average out the values, and say that all potatoes have a labour value of 20 kilos per hour, which would have the ffect of misallocating labour among the plots, or, we price the potatoes from each plot at theoir exact rate, which will lead to market distortions as people will prefer plot A spuds, and will only buy B & C when A run out. Also, what do we do when the tatties make it to the chippy, and become intermediate goods, how would we know which spud came from which plot?"(From YMS comment #187))Oh, you want to know how to know which spud comes from which plot?I promise to try to answer your question properly. But first please let me answer your question with a question. The question is this. If you did not know, which plots save labour or which plots waste labour, how then could you know which spud comes from which plot?Next, you say"Further, we would need to address unproductive tasks, such as teaching, that do not create a transferable object. teachers need to consume, and so we would have to include a portion of goods produced for them, which would mean that "productive" workers would only get a portion of their labour vouchers allocated to them."(From YMS comment #187)Of course, where school belongs to a capitalist employer the teacher is productive. Otherwise, how do we explain profits received now by owners of pay-schools?I promise to try to address education of the future where we all own the means to work.But next tell me. Are you saying that (for that future society) if you fail to count labour hours then you will get your full-labour product all as means of subsistence? Either with vouchers or no vouchers,–how will that work for everyone? How do you address that?
@ALB So long as now is not the future, where is your comment #188 not as I am saying all along? I want a clear target to attack
iThe thing about the potato’s was actually done by Karl, in an analysis of capitalism and value of potato’s therein , in his section on differential ground rent. It is a little bit complicated but really interesting; I think is was one of my favourites bits as an analytical exercise and stress testing the theory. It stood up of course! The same applies to extraction of minerals and oil for that matter. Thus as an example not paying to much attention to the accuracy of the details. It costs about £25 to extract a barrel of oil from some places in Iraq and Saudi. £60 or something like that in Venezuela and a lot of the Russian oil fields. The assumption is that the price connected to some extant to the labour required. Although the data provided can be squewed by fixed capital requirements and interest payments on loaned capital etc etc. Crashing the oil price to below cost of production was probably done to stuff and punish the chavez Venezuelans and Putin’s gang. The labour time value of such things which will be free and not requiring labour vouchers is up for debate really. I don’t think Karl liked the idea of remuneration according to work done etc , it just were the workers were at at the time and they liked that idea to start of with. I think came it comes skill etc in Karl’s analysis who was really talking about a skilled bricklayer being able to build a was twice as fast as an unskilled one etc. And not comparing bricklayers and walls to brain surgeons and brain surgery. So in our day it would be a bit like driving Microsoft word which as a skilled chemist I am crap at. Labour power is commodity in capitalism and its price is highly dependent on supply and demand or how much is available and how much is needed. If it is short supply its price goes up which is reflected in the price of what it produces. As the capitalist insist on an average rate of profit. The price of ‘skilled’ labour like computer programming is crashing as ‘Indian’ learn the game. So people like Price Waterhouse cooper are outsourcing it to places like Calcutta etc. Or bringing them over here on £30K, all this stuff about keeping Johnny foreigners out is a load of bollocks when we are looking at that kind of labour power. Anybody can come into the country if they can land jobs in that bracket. Stick it out for seven years? and you can get a passport. They are less ‘interested’ in pulling in cheap unskilled labour as it has little affect on price of labour time because there is a minimum. And macro economically it only displace indigenous worker back onto the welfare system. Although it has an impact on the general intensity of labour expected from £7 an hour. The unskilled non racist brexiteers understand that very well even if ‘we’ don’t or don’t mix and talk to these deplorables. The middleclass skilled intellectual left abandoning these people as cryto xenophobes and not listening to them and leaving them to the racists isn’t helpful. I think when Karl was talking about more work more remuneration it was often more about coal miners needing more mars bars and potato’s than office clerks? Adam is quite correct in that things have moved on , in the first world, as many of us aren’t in the sustainability paradigm. We are into the bling now and the Nike underpants.
Dave, of course, Chuck was discussinghow Labour Value works in a market economy, and how rent is derived. For planning purposes you could look at the global amount of demand/planned production for spuds, and how many hours it would take to achieve that in the aggregate, but it would only produce an average value per spud, and you'd have to rely on technical reports on the productivity of land to decide how to allocate labour among plots: put another way, the labour value would be a second order at best tool, behind knowledge of how many tatty pickers were available, how many spuds were needed, and the productivity of land: i.e. technical/concrete planning.
1) Now, to reveal properly how to know under Crusoe's labour-time system (small or full-scale) which spud comes from which plot. The answer is that on each spud sack you have a label. 2) And now, under Crusoe's labour-time system (small or full-scale) how does teacher stay alive? Yes, the teacher must stay alive by eating food, wearing clothes… and who will produce the food and clothes? It is the worker who will do that. And let's note here that teacher is worker too. Teacher helps to train the student to produce food and clothes. Not just this but, from a young age, as training, with practice and health and safety the student also produces food and clothes (part time). Student is part time worker and worker is part time student. Not just this but teacher will also produce food and clothes as well as teaching (part time). Under Crusoe's labour-time system (if full-scale at least) over a time when anyone is producing nothing, they can still eat fresh food. How is this so? The answer is then that other workers are still growing food. And other workers are still making clothes and building schools etc. If you followed this thread, then you should already know how Crusoe's way works full-scale. That future society will find in detail (counting labour-time properly with computers) what works best at the time. And you should know how same will not work if you do not bother to count labour hours properly, or to make best use of the numbers, then cash market and the mess we have now will go on. If you 1) fail to count labour hours properly plus 2) try to suppress £s then you will have to issue your crisis SPGB ration-voucher scheme. And your ration-vouchers, or something else, will circulate as cash. Again, if you followed this thread then you should see it. In that case, even if SPGB could suppress continuation of cash, SPGB would in that case have achieved nightmare SPGB Commissar's Death Camp Society. Please say if anything is still not quite clear. And please note that I also put some questions for you to answer. Please see my comment #189
Alan, I answered your question. We wouldn't be able to treat each plot as a discrete unit, and would have to aggregate total spud production.Labelling each bag would be not worthwhile when entering into intermediate goods, since the spuds would all mix together.Your way would mean that a worker on plot 1 is three times as productive as one on plot 3…The point about teachers was that you would have to nominally give vouchers to directly productive workers of less than the value they produce, and you would have to find some way of giving teachers labour vouchers from that pot re-directed from that deduction.Rationing would actuially be better than labour time vouchers, and make more sense (and actually be easier to administer); better yet would be productive abundance so it's too much trouble to measure…
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