What is economic growth?
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robbo203 wrote:It seems to me that the whole notion of labour time accounting whereby society seeks to establish “how much labour each article of consumption requires for its production”, is so problematic and vulnerable to error as to be more or less useless and thus a waste of time and resources. I really cannot see the point of the exercise.
But it's no more nor less what managers in any enterprise do now: look at how many staff they have, stimate material outputs and work toward their targets (and hire more staff or reduce if they need to). Hands on managers think in task time. We'd always need to know how many hours of X work are required to perform our tasks, or find ways to substitute if a particular skill is in short supply, that doesn't need any statistcial bureaue or anything like it, and an be done at the firm level.
Young Master Smeet wrote:LBird wrote:I would suggest that 'voting' would be an appropriate method for 'measuring'.So, I think we can 'measure socially necessary labour', and indeed will do so within socialism. This social estimation will not, of course, involve 'money'.We couldn't vote on what socially necessary labour is needed, partly because there's a missing term: average …
You don't understand, YMS.'Average' is a product.That's the whole point.'Average' is something we decide on, not an 'absolute'.So, we have two political ideologies at work, here:1. 'Average' is an 'absolute', which pre-exists the social process;2. 'Average' is a 'product', which only exists after the social process.1. is your ideology, gleaned from Engels, whereas 2 is my ideology, gleaned from Marx.The sooner you click on to what I'm saying, the sooner you'll understand our political differences. Then, you'll understand why my ideology insists upon 'democracy', and thus excludes elite power, whilst your ideology doesn't, and thus allows for elite power.These are political discussions, YMS.
Young Master Smeet wrote:robbo203 wrote:It seems to me that the whole notion of labour time accounting whereby society seeks to establish “how much labour each article of consumption requires for its production”, is so problematic and vulnerable to error as to be more or less useless and thus a waste of time and resources. I really cannot see the point of the exercise.But it's no more nor less what managers in any enterprise do now: look at how many staff they have, stimate material outputs and work toward their targets (and hire more staff or reduce if they need to). Hands on managers think in task time. We'd always need to know how many hours of X work are required to perform our tasks, or find ways to substitute if a particular skill is in short supply, that doesn't need any statistcial bureaue or anything like it, and an be done at the firm level.
No I dont think this is same thing YMS. Managers dont calculate “how much labour each article of consumption requires for its production" – not from start to finish at any rate, going right back along the production chain. They dont calculate how much labour is "congealed" in the machinery their employees use, for example, in carrying out their work , which congealed or dead labour would need to be taken into account in assigning labour values to each article of consumption. This is what I take labour time accounting to mean in its proper sense and why I distinguished it from the more narrow production unit-based 0r project-based endeavour to ascertain how much (and what kinds of) labour is required to produce a given output. The latter is certainly feasible but labour time accounting in its full-blown holistic sense as advocated by Marx, is not. It is deeply problematic for the reasons mentioned in my earlier post
Robbo,But each team at each stage of the production process will have calculated the contrbution of themeselves in labour terms, and we could, if we wanted, follow the full labour trail: but, concrete labour types are not commensurate, abstract labour would only ever be a rough and ready reckoning across the whole system.Lbird,just to be clear, I'm saying average doesn't exist, and like the owl of Minnerva, only comes with the dying of the light. You can set a fiat average if you like, but it won't correspond with the actual trends in the system, the actual labour time embodied in any given commodity, nor (except by accident) to the labour time contained in the system as a whole. Labour time is an emergant property of the process of social production, the actions of human beings in social production (and in commodity production, it onl;y comes into being at the moment of exchange).
Young Master Smeet wrote:Lbird,… the actual …the actual …Nope, you're still not getting it, YMS.Let's try again.Ideology 1 (yours) "the actual…the actual…";Ideology 2 (mine) "the social… the social…".
Clearly you're not explaining yourself very well. The actual is social and the social is actual, as Hegel didn't say. I know you're next going to say Zimzalabim and Abbracadabra, sorry, Theory and Practice. But, I'm sorry to say that no vote is going to make a million bricks get laid out in three seconds.I prefer to continue looking at concrete humans in their lived circumstances. They will be able to decide what they need, and design and co-ordinate the work to realise their needs, through co-operation and social practice.
Young Master Smeet wrote:I prefer to continue looking at concrete humans in their lived circumstances.Good statement of your ideology, YMS!Individualist, passive, materialist, elite, conservative.As opposed to mine:'We prefer to begin creating our society with our new aspirations'.Social, active, productivist, democratic, revolutionary.
As, again, I think Engels wrote:
Quote:Individuals producing in society – hence socially determined individual production – is, of course, the point of departure.To try and return to the theme of the thread, he also, IIRC wrote:
Quote:The obvious, trite notion: in production the members of society appropriate (create, shape) the products of nature in accord with human needs; distribution determines the proportion in which the individual shares in the product; exchange delivers the particular products into which the individual desires to convert the portion which distribution has assigned to him; and finally, in consumption, the products become objects of gratification, of individual appropriation. Production creates the objects which correspond to the given needs; distribution divides them up according to social laws; exchange further parcels out the already divided shares in accord with individual needs; and finally, in consumption, the product steps outside this social movement and becomes a direct object and servant of individual need, and satisfies it in being consumed. Thus production appears as the point of departure, consumption as the conclusion, distribution and exchange as the middle, which is however itself twofold, since distribution is determined by society and exchange by individuals. The person objectifies himself in production, the thing subjectifies itself in the person; [9] in distribution, society mediates between production and consumption in the form of general, dominant determinants; in exchange the two are mediated by the chance characteristics of the individual.But Marx makes this interesting point:
Marx wrote:The concept of national wealth creeps into the work of the economists of the seventeenth century – continuing partly with those of the eighteenth – in the form of the notion that wealth is created only to enrich the state, and that its power is proportionate to this wealth. This was the still unconsciously hypocritical form in which wealth and the production of wealth proclaimed themselves as the purpose of modern states, and regarded these states henceforth only as means for the production of wealth.GDP as an abstraction ignoresd the state of various classes, and the conditions of life within society, but it is a measure of the only measure of success for capital, the increase in the nominal amounts of money accumulated.The point for socialists, is to get away from such asbtractions, but to get to the real people beneath.
Young Master Smeet wrote:Robbo,But each team at each stage of the production process will have calculated the contrbution of themeselves in labour terms, and we could, if we wanted, follow the full labour trail: but, concrete labour types are not commensurate, abstract labour would only ever be a rough and ready reckoning across the whole system.YMSEven if you could "follow the labour trial" – I think you seriously underestimate the scale of the task given the thoroughly integrated and socialised character of modern production – to what end would you do this?. What is the point of the exercise? Past labour is past labour. Also how would you weight different kinds of labour anyway? Is one hours labour by a neurosurgeon equivalent to one hours labour by a janitor, say? If not what is the ratio you recommend – and why?
Reply to robbo’s post 25 Contrary to what people might think science often isn’t that interested or demands to measure anything accurately in order for the measurement to be useful. Providing you have a rough idea of the potential errors of the calculation. We call it Fit For Purpose; I did one this afternoon. Thus nuclear energy was discovered in a classic experiment by leaving a black bucket full of water in the sun and measuring the temperature increase. Which led to the conclusion that the energy the sun was producing couldn’t be being produced by chemical reactions unless it was less than 40 million years old +/- 20 million. Which it clearly wasn’t. Most factories like where I work produce one kind of thing. We add about 5 seconds of labour time to each litre of juice; something that can be calculated in about 10 minutes. I asked a friend who worked milk and it was a very similar figure, for milk and it took him about 10 minutes to work that out, when he got to work and looked at the spread sheets for the production. In moneyless socialism/ communism there should be an interest in reducing the amount of time, and effort, in producing things. Either things that already being produced or in new projects like building a bridge. In capitalism re a bridge often it will get designed, then usually structural engineers will work out what it would take to make it, then it will get costed. Then it might go through the process again until something satisfactory is obtained. In communism we will be costing it according to the amount of labour time. Labour time is a flawed measure of effort and thus value because it doesn’t take into account things like intensity of the labour concerned or for that matter how crap it is or isn’t. Abstract labour is effort. As well as ecological concerns and even being nice to animals etc That kind of stuff can even emerge in capitalism when people choose to consume fair trade material etc I will be concerned or interested in communism how much of other peoples effort I am consuming; I think that is part of the culture of the producing working class. When I was a child I was a bit fuzzy about economics and money but even as a five year old I understood better the ‘moral’ concept appreciating something according to amount of work that had gone into it. so i was first taught the value of everything and the price of nothing,But both my parents worked in factories; my father making tin cans for beans and mushy peas etc and my mother spark plugs.
Dave B wrote:Most factories like where I work produce one kind of thing. We add about 5 seconds of labour time to each litre of juice; something that can be calculated in about 10 minutes. I asked a friend who worked milk and it was a very similar figure, for milk and it took him about 10 minutes to work that out, when he got to work and looked at the spread sheets for the production. In moneyless socialism/ communism there should be an interest in reducing the amount of time, and effort, in producing things.Dave I dont disagree with the contention that in a socialist society there should be an interest in reducing the amount of time spent on producing things Depending on the thing, of course – is time an active consideration when you are painting an oil painting? Do you say to yourself "I better hurry up and finish my masterpiece so how can I cut corners and leave out some those interesting details I had intended to put in the painting…." Hmmm But such quibbles aside I go along with your point. But here’s the thing – its not just labour time or human effort we would want to reduce in producing things. What about raw materials? What about energy? All of these things have cost implications. This is what costing is about – opportunity costs. Making more efficient use of a given factor of production – economising or making less use of it to achieve a given output of one thing so that you can free up more of this factor to produce more of a given output of some other thing. In other words I am arguing for a system of calculation-in-kind where “relative scarcity” is the criterion upon which you economise – not just on human labour but also on titanium and nitrogen fertiliser and a thousand and one other things. You dont need a system of monetary pricing to ascertain the relative scarcity of all these factors. All you need is a fully functioning self-regulating system of stock control and a distributed computerised network of telecommunications. We already have that today. The infrastructure of a potential socialist society exists right under our very noses Labour time can be economised on in this society in precisely the same way as we might economise on the use of a rare mineral ore such as titanium Now, you can call this process “labour time accounting” if you so wish but if you are concerned or interested, as you say, in “how much of other people’s effort I am consuming” in a socialist society then this information is going to be very difficult is not impossible to come by in a literal sense. That being so I question the purpose or usefulness of you even trying to do ascertain such information (and trying to do it involves effort that could be more usefully applied elsewhere) You mention that in the factory in which you work you add "about 5 seconds of labour time to each litre of juice; something that can be calculated in about 10 minutes". Fine. But it’s not just your effort that should be factored into a calculation about the about the amount of human effort that went into a producing a litre of juice, is it? What about the effort that went into building the machine you are using? What about the effort that went into producing the electricity that runs the machine? What about the effort that went into constructing the power station that produces the electricity that runs the machine? What about the effort that went into manufacturing the cement and the blocks to build the power station that produces the electricity that runs the machine you are using? What about the ….and so on Point is that the production system is a totally joined up phenomenon and trying to track the amount human effort down a bewildering maze of production chains is a matter of infinite regression. It can’t be done so there is really no point in even trying What we need to go for is something much more modest and achievable. We need to abandon completely the kind of argument put forward by Engels thus: 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 (Anti-Duhring) What Engels is asking for is impossible. There is no way we can literally know how many hours of labour are contained in a steam engine. Each component part of a steam engine – and I guess there are many thousands of these components – has its own production chain history and at every stage in this production chain other production chains branch off. Knowing how much effort goes into anything in this holistic concept of labour time accounting is an impossibility since ultimately everything is interconnected. My suspicion is that this kind of thinking that Engels demonstrates here goes hand in hand with an endorsement of society wide central planning – which is a complete absurdity – with labour time accounting being proposed as the tool to administer such a system It is that fully fledged holistic concept of labour time accounting that I reject. But I don’t reject labour time accounting in the much more pragmatic limited and ad hoc sense of the term that I tried to elaborate upon earlier. It is important that we keep this distinction in mind in talking about labour time accounting
robbo203 wrote:Even if you could "follow the labour trial" – I think you seriously underestimate the scale of the task given the thoroughly integrated and socialised character of modern production – to what end would you do this?. What is the point of the exercise? Past labour is past labour. Also how would you weight different kinds of labour anyway? Is one hours labour by a neurosurgeon equivalent to one hours labour by a janitor, say? If not what is the ratio you recommend – and why?No ratio, like I said, rough reckoning which would show what share each sector/enetrprise was taking of the total available workforce: bnut we'd also need specific records of specific types of labour, just as we would any other inventory item. We wouldn't compare dentist and mortician, we just need to know how many hours of each and by how many people. We might also have a commonly agreed working week, where everyone works a certain number of hours within a restricted range of industries (e.g. 20 hours a week on farming, say)…
Young Master Smeet wrote:robbo203 wrote:Even if you could "follow the labour trial" – I think you seriously underestimate the scale of the task given the thoroughly integrated and socialised character of modern production – to what end would you do this?. What is the point of the exercise? Past labour is past labour. Also how would you weight different kinds of labour anyway? Is one hours labour by a neurosurgeon equivalent to one hours labour by a janitor, say? If not what is the ratio you recommend – and why?No ratio, like I said, rough reckoning which would show what share each sector/enetrprise was taking of the total available workforce: bnut we'd also need specific records of specific types of labour, just as we would any other inventory item. We wouldn't compare dentist and mortician, we just need to know how many hours of each and by how many people. We might also have a commonly agreed working week, where everyone works a certain number of hours within a restricted range of industries (e.g. 20 hours a week on farming, say)…
Im trying to think this through but this could very well be an example of the kind of acceptable or practical model of labour time accounting as opposed to the impractical holistic model I outlined in post no 45. The key phrase in your post is that labour availaibility would be treated just as we would any other inventory item Exactly! The point being that it is not just labour we need to economise on, We also need to economise on things like energy and raw materials, And we need calculation in kind to do this whch is precisely what a holistic system of labour accounting militates against.. What the latter proposes is to introduce a single universal universal unit of accounting – namely labour time – governing the entire economy and as such is grounded in the same mindset that rationalises the need for money as a universal unit of account I think the labour time accounting system proposed by Marx and Engels is an unwarranted and inadvertent extension of the labour theory of value into a post capitalist society and as such must be repudiated in favour of a model of labour accounting that falls under the general rubric of calculation in kind
Imagine we made tools out of lego bricks (just go with me on this):n each tool would need to be accounted for in its own right, but, theoretically, they would be broken down into their basic bricks,a dn those bricks could be re-purposed: it would be useful to track the stocks of each type of tool, and by extrapolation, the number of available bricks that could be re-purposed. Also, assuming bricks can be made into intermediate and end products, it's worth watching the balance between the two. As per my quote from Marx, to keep us on track, it's about going beyond abstract global figures, to get into the guts of production, and open out all the processes and inventories.
robbo203 wrote:What the latter proposes is to introduce a single universal universal unit of accounting – namely labour time – governing the entire economy and as such is grounded in the same mindset that rationalises the need for money as a universal unit of account[my bold]I agree with you, robbo. Another name for this is 'absolute'.It is opposed by 'social'.The political reason for an 'absolute' is so that a minority can 'know' this supposed 'absolute', outside of any social (and thus, democratic) input.Any mention of 'universal' or 'absolute' (and many other synonyms, that you already know that I'd use) is only made to prevent the political appeal to democracy (ie. the appeal to the majority).This is to allow a minority to (supposedly) 'objectively calculate' what the majority (supposedly) require, without the majority having any say in their own 'requirements'.Marx warns against this, in his Theses on Feuerbach.[edit] the 'mind set' that you mention is 'ruling class ideas'.
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