>>2369795> yes, but how do you measure social use if exchange cant be quantified in something like a price system? just the rate of consumption?Production under communism is not for the purposes of exchange, but for use. Exchange is not being quantified. Rate of consumption is indeed what would be measured, and it would be measured against the labor time necessary to make any product to be consumed as well. A lot of communism is also centered around the sphere of production rather than distribution; the main point is to give control over labor back to labor, ergo, what is produced is what the laborers desire to produce, which is determined by what people want in general.
> wouldnt a definition of waste be a form of unrestricted production/distribution (overproduction)?That’s not what overproduction is. Overproduction has thus far only emerged in economies centered around exchange, and it occurs because products are not being made so that people can use them, their use is irrelevant to those who command production, they are being made so they can be exchanged; what capitalists may call not getting “something” for “nothing”. Production itself is not unrestricted, it is restricted by people’s own wants, consumption itself is unrestricted, but this solves the problem of overproduction, as things no longer exist to collect dust and ultimately be discarded if they cannot be sold for money.
> do you imagine that there will be periodic failures in supply dynamics under communism also?Perhaps there could be, an asteroid could still strike the Earth after all, perhaps the climate changes significantly in a way humans cannot control on a societal level. Would the specific crisis of producing more than is even needed, alongside the production of entirely artificial wants and needs that the most advanced economies turn on, and the necessity of waste (to meet the demand of profit, that thinks be made as cheaply as possible, and discarded if they cannot be sold; which includes ultimately even things that ARE successfully sold) continue to exist? Almost certainly not, provided we are discussing a communist society with an economy built around the creation of use-values rather than the production and accumulation of exchange value under the needs and imperatives of self-expanding value known as Capital. It is perplexing to me that this so boggles the mind of people sympathetic to bourgeois economics, when the capitalist economic system is the first and thus far only economic system wherein production is for exchange rather than use.
> well, its twofold. there is waste in the market due to a lack of consumer demand. for example, so much is thrown away because no one actually wants it, but at the same time, people might take it if it was freely offered, and so it has a marginal utility which doesnt reach its market price.So then we are in agreement that one of the general contradictions of capitalist economies that directly necessitates and contributes to waste is the fact that products are made to be sold for money rather than to be used by a consumer?
> yes, i agree. overproduction seems to be part of the logic of profit, which can be corrected by redistribution.This misses the another key contradiction induced by the need to secure profits, which emerges in capitalist economies as a necessary imperative rather than a chosen endeavor, namely, redistribution is merely an added cost to the capitalist for no gain whatsoever. Redistributing that which goes unsold is directly antagonistic to profits. You can say, then, the state should do this, it should buy up the waste products and give them away for free, but this ignores that the state itself is reliant on the profits of capitalists to function, this circular motion would only serve to drain the coffers of the state until they must turn back to the capitalist, hat in hand, for assistance. It is infeasible, hence why waste and at best trying to sell waste to other, less advanced economies, so that they can scrap them into even more wretched products to hopefully sell like in a more primitive state of capitalism, or otherwise let gather in the junk heap, is what states have ultimately done in response.
> i certainly wouldnt go that far. having excess is at least better than having a deficit.This is true, and is why Capitalist apologetics relies either on comparing itself to prior modes of production, or to the eastern, post-revolutionary form of capital accumulation. However, the obvious outcome of this cycle, other than the systemic production of poverty and famine, now done without any material justification whatsoever but treated nonetheless as a product of necessity, is the accelerating impoverishment of the world’s own ability to sustain complex ecosystems and therefore a complex civilization as well. The resolution of the communist is to break-even production. Utilize the advanced means of production, the demonstrable interchange all of mankind is forced into by historical change itself (the emergence of capitalism itself), and the capacity due to these developments to organize human labor on a planetary scale that is already demonstrated by capitalism, to produce the exact amounts people want and need, which can only be achievable by granting labor control over its own powers of production, distribution, and consumption.