I feel labor vouchers restrict my choices on what I can get. For example, what if I have to choose between 2 items but I want both, such as food ingredients? What would happen to digital goods? I would expect all videogames and cinema to become public (free). But what if I can only get 1 videogame per month? How would this work?
Since game devs and artists in generals have their needs met, I suppose most content would be freely available? Similar to mods in videogames.
Also this voucher would have to be rather plentiful. What if I want to travel to another city, stay at a hotel a few nights, eat out, etc? This labor voucher sounds rather magical.
I prefer the anarchist-communism described by Kropotkin: labor is based on needs and free association, and access to good and services is based on the willing work of the people. So instead of a voucher, you live according to what people around you produce, with both its prosperity and limitations
>>2364803welcome to /leftypol/, where you can find 1000 people who want to talk about their 1000 different opinions on the russo-ukraine war, and sometimes a few people who want to talk about the economy
anyway the problem with the anarchist-communist method youre suggesting is that production at any sizable scale needs a ton of organization and accounting. thats what the labor-voucher is supposed to provide. with digital its less of an issue, but what about for say the things that make digital possible, like basic energy resources. in this scenario if the local hydroelectric plant agrees amongst themselves to work less hours in the spring because lower energy demands, that can be run up the chain in consultation with other industries relying on the plant and they can figure out whether itll work for them or cause serious production bottlenecks. but on the side of individual use, people using computers/lights/AC/etc etc creates an additional demand that is much harder to account for in the same way as industrial management where you can have select representatives in scaleable meetings reporting on decisions/negotiating terms. what if it rains for a week and everybodys inside on the computer, and theres additional water pumps & sewage machinery running, will that cause an outage? labor vouchers let you track consumption habits so you can predict that kind of thing. maybe most of the year connection to public power grid is totally free (not requiring vouchers), but in circumstances where max power output isnt strictly necessary theres some small cost in labor vouchers for using above a certain average of energy use. you can decide whether or not you want to be home on the computer all day or go out and eat at a nicer kitchen with out of season fruit or get newer fashion of clothes, and how much you do one of those over the others would be tracked by records of labor voucher use. if it turns out in april more people stay in side and spend vouchers on energy than people opt to use them for other things, the production targets can be recalibrated.
thats the reasoning, anyway, and the problem of shortages its supposed to address. obviously there are issues that arise, and there is certainly a sense in which this just functions like money, in that production is oriented towards a presumption of consumer-side cost-benefit analysis. main difference being that labor vouchers eventually expire, cant be inherited, and cant be traded for labor-power outside of the democratic organization of production.
>>2364803>convincebrother I tried "convincing" people, and not petty bourgeoisie or anything like that, but honest to god imperial core workers in shitty dead end jobs, and I got the same shit over and over again
socialism 1 gorillion dead
socialism starves
socialism is the same as natsoc/fascism
socialism is when gubberment duz stuff
socialism is liberal democrats
socialism is idpol
socialism is bandaid on capitalism
people don't get "convinced" by socialism through debate. their life under capitalism becomes so unlivable that they have a revolution and follow a vanguard party whether they're educated enough to know what socialism actually is or not. Do you think most of the orthodox christian peasants who sided with the bolsheviks over the white army understood the questions of proletarian dictatorship? no they just sided with the people who promised to end WW1 and then they sided with those same people again because denikin and kolchak were raping and pillaging the countryside in the name of restoring the bourgeoisie to power.
>>2364784Elon Musk vs Donald Trump is a false dichotomy. Both teams are the same team, they are both friends with eachother, their systems are integrated with eachother, they benefit from the same systems.
If you want improvements you must not pick either side and you must not let these 2 sides diminish the strength of forces which fight for your wellbeing and wealth.
>>2364903>and if my will is to produce nothing at all?Labor camp.
>>2364809>fuckign parasitism then?It would be parasitism if it doesn't have planning.
>For example, what if I have to choose between 2 items but I want both, such as food ingredients?If some item combo exceeds your budget, that's how it is. Whether the budget is cash money or labor vouchers or a whole collection of voucher systems for different consumption categories. We can do without prices, but then some sort of other rationing is necessary like per head and week, rationing by lottery, or by some committee judging who needs something the most. We can't do away with physical limits of the universe.
>Since game devs and artists in generals have their needs met, I suppose most content would be freely available? Similar to mods in videogames. Yes, it's the position of e. g. Paul Cockshott (who is for labor vouchers) that software should be free.
>What if I want to travel to another city, stay at a hotel a few nights, eat out, etc?That's just a repeat of your first question, illustrated with a different example.
>I prefer the anarchist-communism described by KropotkinGo to the thread
>>>/edu/19860 and ctrl-f for Kropotkin.
>>2364922Spanish anarchists managed an industrial society too. But in a horizontal organization, not authoritarian.
I understand it can’t be exchanged but the voucher must have some limits. These limits are unclear.
>>2364973>Spanish anarchists managed managing is something that gets called authoritarian whenever MLs do it
>an industrial society too. But in a horizontal organization, not authoritarian.I don't hate anarchists but I don't understand the fetishism for the horizontal. the whole point of centralization is that both vertical and horizontal integration of industry (i.e. monopoly, whether owned by the working class or otherwise) scales better and produces more. Decentralization and anti-planning are just a vector for the re-emergence of capitalist competietion
>>2365508there's also the michael "it's those goddamn (((financiers)))" hudson shill and keynes shill, so that's 3
unless they're all the same person
>>2364846This is basically true, during the civil war both the reds and the whites were doing crazy massacres, rapes, forced conscriptions, etc (with the Whites being more into doing pogroms also), but the illiterate farmers did side with the Bolsheviks by and large because they simply had a better program, that benefited the peasants directly. Unlike the Whites who offered basically nothing except lets go back to aristocratic times lmao
It all had little to nothing to do with people outside the vanguard party being convinced of communist theory
>>2364961I was bewildered that nobody else bothered to give a proper answer to OP's question.Thank you anon for this proper response.
I myself was a bit confused by OP's first formulation of his question at least because his hypothetical labour vouchers for a full week's worth of work would surely be able to afford him several different food ingredients for his diet for that same week (Unless there was some kind of severe disaster that required extreme food rationing).
Still it seems you managed to intuit that his problem was that labour vouchers limited his personal consumption to some extent (which as you point out, would be the case in any functioning economy that operates within physical limits).
>>2365528yeah he just says that the problem is not capitalism, but financierism, and upholds based productive industrial capital over bad evil "unproductive" financial capital
what could it possibly mean
>>2365535For training time, there are a few ways to account for it, including having all training be salaried or having the training time added as a fraction on top of each labour hour performed (estimated by dividing training time by typical lifetime work).
For other costs in excess of labour time in different jibs, adjustments can be made on different ways:
For example in physically demanding jobs, extra special rations/vouchers/tokens can be issued for accessing more calories & nutrients, as well as gym & spa treatment tokens.
For mentally taxing jobs, a shorter work week combined to partially paid time off and/or special tokens/vouchers for relaxation/vacation centers can be issued.
These extra specific vouchers could be designed to operate like theatre tickets.
https://www.amazon.com/Americas-Protectionist-Takeoff-1815-1914-Michael/dp/3980846687daily reminder that michael hudson wrote a book about the american system
michael hudson is hamiliton carey clay friedrich list gang
>>2365569>he is not retarded he knows finance follows from capitalhttps://michael-hudson.com/2018/08/life-thought-an-autobiography/apparently he is retarded by your own reckoning because he specifically counterposes industrial capital and financial capital and goes against marx:
>This way of getting the economic surplus is not the way that Marx described it as being obtained under capitalism, by employing labor to produce goods to sell at a profit. It was by debt and taking interest in ultimately foreclosing in land, which was the real objective.
>So I spent the next maybe three years writing the first draft of what became the book that’s being published in a few months, “… and forgive them their debts”: Credit and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year. I submitted it to the University of California Press. They sent it to scholars to referee, who said that it was impossible that debts could be cancelled. Their argument was that if debts were cancelled, who would lend money? That’s what Rabbi Hillel argued in the Judaic tradition.fucking (((Rabbi Hillel))), hate that guy. doesn't hudson also self-id as a roman? rly makes me think
>So I wrote a study that Canada didn’t have to borrow money abroad for the provinces to invest domestically. They could create their own money. Basically, what I wrote was the first example of what’s now called Modern Monetary Theory, that governments can create their own money, their own credit. They don’t need a foreign-currency backing for it, and so all basically the same circular flow analysis that I’d developed from my history of thought. a Physiocratic analysis. Oh, so he's also one of those guys lol
A former CIA spook now peddling reheated proudhonism and presenting an account of history where shadowy spooky elites manipulate da finances and refuse to cancel debts (!!! 😱), no mention of class struggle, decenters the wage relation
and yeah, I bet he doesn't say "I HATE DA JOOOS" anywhere in his written text, but you know, most smart antisemites don't either.
It's kinda like if somebody started ranting about the gold standard and raw milk, it just makes you go hm…, you know
>>2365596>A former CIA spook a former employee of chase manhattan yes, but no evidence of him being a CIA spook. this is the same false allegation you made in the other thread
>now peddling reheated proudhonism mischaracterisation
>and presenting an account of history where shadowy spooky elites manipulate da finances mischaracterisation
>and refuse to cancel debts (!!! 😱)so?
>no mention of class strugglehe mentions class war and class struggle regularly. like listen to his 3 hour talk with richard wolff linked above
>decenters the wage relationhe talks about the current historical context of the US where the FIRE sector is more prominent than the industrial sector and even in silicon valley we see a movement away from commodities that are sold once for profit (like software on a compact disc) and towards commodities that are sold several times as a "subscription service" (rent). This is the actual nature of the de-industrialized US economy. the wage relation is still central in places like china but in the US you have shit like the gig economy where people are paid on commission per individual job task, a huge service sector where socially necessary labor time and commodity production aren't happening, and where commodity production is happening, it's often digital commodities that are rented out. Sorry his analysis of capital is contemporary. If analyizing US capitalism as it actually exists today is "antisemitic reheated proudhonism" idk what to tell you.
>>2365548Isn’t this the division of labor Marx talks about? He said, as many others, that this division is what upholds class structure. The reason a doctor earns more and has higher status than a farmer, although growing food is hard and necessary for society.
Regardless of profession everyone must earn the same, otherwise we keep the class system. People will want to be a doctor for extra privileges rather than helping the sick. This may look strange now but can be normalized over time and education.
>>2365535Regarding your question, I think what we need to is to rotate workers in heavily demanding jobs. This means less working days by someone else taking your place. We could also work different jobs regardless of profession. For example, work as doctor for 3 days and as bus driver 1 day. This would reinforce the idea that no job is more important than others.
>>2365512>>2365536>>2365596Slandering Michael Hudson as an antisemite during a time when the term antisemite is already being semantically overloaded and rendered meaningless by Israeli fascists doing genocide in Gaza and slandering anyone against it an antisemite is actually really fucking suspicious behavior. Even more intersectionalist-leaning Marxist websites like Hexbear which literally has a safe space for Jewish users did a board-wide reading of his work
Super-Imperialism and I never once saw him slandered as an anti-semite by anyone anywhere. It's such a strange charge that I can't help but feel that it is in bad faith. You're the one equating finance capitalism with Jews and then equating Hudson's lifelong specialization and focus on the financial aspect of the capitalist mode of production with antisemitism. Do you also think anti-zionism is anti-semitism just because the Tsarist secret police wrote a hoax document called the protocols of the elders of zion?
https://michael-hudson.com/2017/12/he-died-for-our-debt-not-our-sins/>Professor Hudson says Jesus Christ paid the ultimate price for his activism.>The Pharisees, Hillel (the founder of Rabbinical Judaism) and the creditors who backed them decided that Jesus’ growing popularity was a threat to their authority and wealth.> “They said ‘we’ve got to get rid of this guy and rewrite Judaism and make it about sex instead of a class war’, which is really what the whole Old Testament is about,” Professor Hudson said.what the fuck?
https://www.unz.com/author/michael-hudson/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unz_Review>The Unz Review is an American website and blog founded and edited by Ron Unz, an American far-right activist and Holocaust denier. It is known for its publication of far-right, conspiracy theory, white nationalist, and antisemitic writings.[1]Wow, a bit too many (((coincidences))) for me. But i'm sure this guy is just worried about the deep state and financial capital and wants to return to industrial capitalism through collaboration between workers and capitalists… wait, where have I heard this before?
>>2365771They do have some amount of vertical integration if I am not mistaken as far as transport and logistics are concerned.
While these are for internal use, because walmart operates in a broader capitalist economy there does exist markets for them as commodities.
Regardless though, the internal operations of the near entirety of corporations are most definitely highly centralized & planned.
t. From a wealthy industrialist capitalist family. Libertarian ideological masturbation never stood a chance with me as I directly witnessed the elegance & efficiency of the centralized & planned nature of the internal workings of the modern large corporation. Che Guevara was completely right in this regard.
>>2365750>(((the powers that be)))Uh huh.
And the answer is to go back to the glorious age of "productive capitalism", when imperialism still existed btw, as well colonialism, segregation, apartheid, etc. etc.
>>2365627You misunderstand completely.
The extra (good/service specific) vouchers/rations for physically demanding work for example are to compensate for extra real expenditures a person puts into their work (calories, proteins, vitamins, gym training, etc.)
The same goes for mentally strenuous activity: Working in a hospital is extremely mentally taxing: You witness excessive suffering & death on a regular basis. Some extra recovery time/services for this is exceptionally necessary.
Not doing this implies not compensating a worker for inputs above and beyond labour time they put into production.
>>2365649…. ?
Invalidated me… as a person? Because I know the tsarist secret police made up a fake book in order to encourage pogroms? Whatever. Figure out what you mean and type something sensible.
>>2365903>>2365919the only reason you're surprised is because you still haven't internalized the fact that liberals, fascists, trotskyists, social-democrats, "conservatives", libertarians, keynesyans, ultra-leftists, anarchists, nazis, MMTers, zionists, leftcoms, "maoists", etc. etc., are all the same thing
There are only two positions: marxism-leninism and everything else.
>>2365627>division of laborcan a construction worker share labor with a rocket scientist?
>skilled labormarx defends the idea of skilled labor in capital vol. 1 and critique of the gotha program, and says that in the "cooperative society" there will be a necessary inequality of labor powers, under an equal right:
>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.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm >>2364784> I feel labor vouchers restrict my choices on what I can getThey’re supposed to
Labor vouchers specifically exist to change the relations of societal production from those centered around exchange to those centered on need accounted for by labor time
>>2365570The concept of deindustrialization is something of a misnomer and red meat for the manufacturing bourgeoisie to get masses of the proletariat behind their program, on a deeper level the capitalistically advanced countries are still highly industrialized, they just have the world’s most advanced productive technologies and technics, which require a far lower share of society’s labor plugged into their productive cycle to meet the needs of profit; not only that, but the globalization of production has always been a fact of capital’s historical development, the “deindustrialization” of one region is the development of another
>>2365635I don’t think Hudson is an antisemite, I do believe he’s another retarded cunt desperately trying to save the volksgemeinschaft and the national bourgeoisie while pretending to be a socialist; it’s okay though, since 95% of self-described “Marxists” are more like socdems using the Marxist label for clout
NTA but I hate capitalist apologists that pretend to be Marxists like Hudson
>>2366039>There are only two options, enslaving proletarians (liberalism) or enslaving proletarians (liberalism)Actual ML discourse
I’m surprised MLs call themselves Marxists at all considering he was an internationalist jew disloyal to his nation and volk
>>2366039absolutely delusional. this is the same kind of thick skulled idealism insist that has christians insist that their particular sect is the TRUE church of saint peter
at least try to pretend like its a dispute over efficacy of strategy & soundness of analysis instead of a question of which doctrine marks you as one of the saved
>>2364823>Socialism is when you’re a wage slave, nah, actual slave worked at gun point on the national volk’s Fatherland’s people’s rice paddy for the crime of wanting to play a shitty game instead of uhhh killing yourself for being white or something Lmao MLs are legit just Nazis that hate
white people “westerners” at this point 😂😂😂
Pathetic cope ideology if you’re a westoid
>>2366551>The concept of deindustrialization is something of a misnomer and red meat for the manufacturing bourgeoisie to get masses of the proletariat behind their program, it really isn't. 1960 a lot of people worked unionized commodity production jobs in factories. now most people work service sector jobs that aren't unionized. The unionization rate is a fraction of what it ws before and so are the commodity production jobs.
> on a deeper level the capitalistically advanced countries are still highly industrializedAmerica doesn't even produce chips anymore. What is this cope?
> they just have the world’s most advanced productive technologies and technics, which require a far lower share of society’s labor plugged into their productive cycle to meet the needs of profitOh OK then why have we been de-proletarianized and shuffled off into service sector and office jobs? Why are so many people relying on petty bourgeois aspirations and side husttles? The whole imperial core is so declassed it's crazy.
> not only that, but the globalization of production has always been a fact of capital’s historical development, the “deindustrialization” of one region is the development of anotherOK well it's still imperialism and it postpones revolution in the core by declassing the core and shuffling them off into service industries. the only industries left are WAR industries which are used to maintain hegemonic status. This makes everyone complicit and counter revolutionary. I want this to stop. I don't want to be seen as the 21st century wehrmacht out of guilt by association. I want the jobs to come back and I want the exploitation to end. But I'm not le real marxist. Hudson is le antisemite (lazy shibboleth uttered while US-backed israelis slaughter starving palestinians gathered to pick up crumbs scattered by fake aid orgs staffed with burger mercenaries)
>>2367771> it really isn't. 1960 a lot of people worked unionized commodity production jobs in factories. now most people work service sector jobs that aren't unionized. The unionization rate is a fraction of what it ws before and so are the commodity production jobs. This was covered when I discussed the advancement of the productive forces of society, we do not need everyone working factory jobs to produce
>America doesn't even produce chips anymore. What is this cope?American industries absolutely produce chips, but they do so outside of the US, and what production occurs within the country is highly automated, we don’t have 1920s factories anymore because it isn’t 1925, we can have robotic arms produce things, we don’t need line workers for that. America has factories, but they cannot employ most of the population while remaining profitable, and they do not need a large workforce to function. Increasingly even warehouses are being highly automated, Amazon employs as many automated robotic tools as humans now, and they just run warehouses. The great struggle of the modern communist is his immense backwards facing fascination with past eras of capitalism, the future isn’t to return to the line factory.
> Oh OK then why have we been de-proletarianized and shuffled off into service sector and office jobs? Why are so many people relying on petty bourgeois aspirations and side husttles? The whole imperial core is so declassed it's crazy.The systemic production of surplus populations and wasted labor power (from the standpoint of profit) are necessary outcomes of the need to maintain profits. Efficient use of labor time =/= profitable use of labor time; capital requires a means to control the populations that cannot be plugged into profitable endeavors, besides which, the great mass of potential labor power must also be utilized (wasted) to manage itself
Capitalism is a system riven with contradiction, this is basic marxism at that point
> OK well it's still imperialism and it postpones revolution in the core by declassing the core and shuffling them off into service industries. the only industries left are WAR industries which are used to maintain hegemonic status. This makes everyone complicit and counter revolutionary. I want this to stop. I don't want to be seen as the 21st century wehrmacht out of guilt by association. I want the jobs to come back and I want the exploitation to end. But I'm not le real marxist. Hudson is le antisemite (lazy shibboleth uttered while US-backed israelis slaughter starving palestinians gathered to pick up crumbs scattered by fake aid orgs staffed with burger mercenaries)Lmao you chose to funnel yourself into the retarded conclusion that most of the proletariat of your nation are your enemy simply because much of that population is now surplus, it isn’t a rational analysis of the situation. You should abandon your dual pity for workers outside the imperial core and sympathy for the capitalist past if you want to consider a truly revolutionary future.
>>2368036I mean a communist society may not really have people relying on escapism to feel good, because life would no longer be so awful that visually and virtually interacting with an entirely false “grand adventure” is no longer necessary for “leisure”, which will no longer be a cordoned off part of life held against a drudgery known as work
The problem is thinking life will necessarily be shit the way life under capitalism is shit and palliatives like alcohol and escapism will still be sought after; which isn’t to say such things will be banned like MLoids (anti-worker red moralists essentially) would claim, but rather, they may not be produced because people may no longer desire them. Regardless, I wouldn’t be surprised if the labor time necessary to produce either product is much lower with more advanced productive forces and a more efficient usage of labor time; but even then, that is dependent on if a substantial amount of people desire such things
>>2368050>This is a hypothetical about the early days of JDPON or DOTP, one in which we still need people working 12 hours a day hard agricultural labor.Nonsensical proposition that emerges out of the MLoid belief that semi-feudal countries still predominantly exist, that the proletarian revolution will actually be a series of nationalist revolutions that form an international alliance of national states (rather than an international offense by the proletarian party itself), and that a key moment of the revolutionary struggle is “revenge” not only against the capitalists, but also the proletarians that dared to be born in the capitalistically advanced nations rather than neocolonies.
The DOTP =/= a fascistic dictatorship over the proletariat; you can feel free to ignore MLs
>Also your critique of video games applies to all fiction, indeed all art in general.It isn’t a critique, it’s an observation from which I built a hypothetical, namely, that people may no longer feel encouraged to produce and play video games if life is no longer encountered as an alienated endeavor beset by “necessity”. I also wouldn’t say all art is escapist in nature, I wouldn’t even say fantastical, imaginative art is inherently escapist, I would contend a lot of capitalist art is specifically designed to allow people to mentally escape the general conditions of subjection that define their day to day lives, that doesn’t mean all art must necessarily produced for such a purpose. Consider the fact that capitalist society specifically cordoned off products made specifically to be “artistic” yet strips from the majority of mankind’s products the notion that they in anyway represent people’s creative capacities
Part of it involves the immense challenge even communists face in genuinely imagining a society that is different from the existing one
>>2368062The Soviet Union chose to destroy itself to gain full access to western markets and contemporary MLs vacillate between doing nothing, opportunistically tailing protest movements, and trying to feel vicarious power through the wealth and prominence of capitalist states such as China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, etc.
MLs fedjacketing their critics to ensure “Marxism” remains a backwards facing, navel gazing pseudo-movement accomplishes more for Washington than Langley could ever hope to, keep your copes to yourself
>>2368071It’s true that nobody chooses to be a wage slave; the point of communism is to abolish the “necessity” that produces subjection
Of course “communists” will never get anywhere so long as they openly and flagrantly tell their fellow proletarians they fully intend to force them to mine unsustainable materials and labor for 16 hours at the barrel of a gun. I genuinely think most MLs will gain more of what they personally desire (power) if they simply join up with fascist or social democratic movements that currently stand a better chance at acquiring power in most countries than communists do and who ultimately promote a political regime that looks identical to what most self-described “socialists” mistakenly believe Communism to be.
>>2368081In capitalism, labor is suffering
But ask yourself, what is
inherently miserable about mining a rock, or doing labor on a production line?
>>2368103 (Me)
The biggest reason for this sort of misconception were the underdeveloped postrevolutionary societies of the 20th Century, which called themselves socialist, and are worshipped by many contemporary (largely ineffectual and inactive) self-described socialists, but whose economies were centered around production for exchange, the accumulation of surplus value, and the necessary extraction of said surplus from politically dominated waged laborers
>>2368118I’ve done both those things, have you? For real? Hard work isn’t inherently suffering. That’s the problem with red liberals. They have no vision. They consistently remind you “Labor under capitalism is suffering!” and then, if they are especially intelligent, will reference previous modes of production. They cannot adequately explain the horrors of hard (as in, physically taxing) labor if it were to be parceled out efficient solely to meet people’s desires and needs, rather than the requirements of self-expanding value; what they mean is, “I don’t want to work a 16 hour shift in the people’s mine to receive my compensation in the form of the people’s wage in a job I do not control and have commanded down to me by higherups in the social division of labor”; but at that point they’re actually stating “I don’t want to live in capitalism” and refusing to understand that what they are describing, is capitalism
Even in capitalism, compared to other jobs I have done, physical labor was the most tolerable despite being the lowest paid; but not all people are identical either, people like me enjoy seeing the direct products of our labor in the form of an actual physically changed product, I hated jobs where I couldn’t even comprehend what I was doing aside from increasing shareholder value by shuffling products around or indoctrinating kids to the state (I have done many jobs)
Why do red liberals typically assume, if you do not see labor as an evil, that you haven’t worked?
>>2368170>Its a really shitty idea but classical economists couldn't understand thisclassical economists didnt propose the notion of labor vouchers. they began from the ideas of the early communists josiah warren and robert owen, as a way to quantify exchange in an ethical manner. marx later suggests labor "certificates" as a medium of exchange in a future cooperative society during the first phases of communism, where each man will receive what he gives toward the public wealth fund. many technocrats later on conceived of a similar idea, where energy expended in production should be measured according to one's input of the economy. paul cockshott also holds to this view, i believe.
the alternative vision of the classical economists is simply market equilibrium, where labor values will meet each other in exchange by the balancing of effectual demand to supply (a process which smith says is inevitable, but hastened by "liberty" in the market). marx's issue is that he sees the ways in which capital accumulation sustains indefinite cycles of disequilibrium, leading to general crises. keynes then attempts to resolve this in his own terms, by correcting the internal errors of capital's marginal disutility.
>>2369445I think your missing the point
Why would anyone care?
That’s why I said, why would you take more than you immediately need, if no one will stop you from acquiring more when you need it?
Hoarding will only inconvenience you as an individual, not the collective
we already have a contemporary analog of labor vouchers in today's markets; namely, store coupons. these are tokens which limit our consumption and have a time-frame which render them necessarily superfluous media of exchange. this can be likened to a form of barter, since we are staking a claim for a specific product, rather than having access to the body of social wealth. some stores also offer alternative options like store credit or point systems based on past consumption.
now, a question i always consider is this one. would you rather be paid in wages, or double the amount of your wages in store coupons? if a capitalist was paying people in coupons, they would be arrested, even if it was double the value of cash. this says something about the justice we place on money as a property rightfully earned. in gamestop for example, they always offer more store credit than cash, showing how credit is less valuable, even if it has a greater claim to stocked goods. the very access to social wealth thus entails a value of its own, as mediated universality.
again, vouchers are a form of regulated barter, since they cannot overcome the double coincidence of wants except by a conditional time-frame, which represents the holding of perishable goods (rather than preserving value in imperishable material). it is a pre-metallic strategy which leads to pre-metallic results. the frustration of vouchers then reveals itself as an artificial inefficiency in exchange.
>>2369332luckily, with money, individual consumption is inherently limited on a time-scale by one's purchasing power, leading to a priority of demands in the market, rather than needless waste due to "abundance".
>>2369471in markets, highly valuable goods are regulated in consumption by high prices, which make access limited to higher earners and savers. the principle of saving for a future investment is called "time preference" and this underlies much sociological phenomena.
>>2369594if the social wealth fund is untouched by individual hoarding, then hoarding clearly mitigates an inherent waste at the heart of this mode of production. this waste can only lead to harmful effects like pollution, which seems counterproductive for social concerns (as marx would say, this creates a contradiction between man and nature). why not just limit consumption to limit waste, instead? at least the labor voucher aims to do this task by limiting individual consumption by a person's individual production.
>>2369751Indeed one can view capitalism as an antagonism/conflict of an arbitrarily large number of petty plans.
The resulting dysfunctions, crises and waste are the very obvious logical consequences (and in this sense parallel the destruction due to wars that emerge between feudal lords).
>>2369771many planners are better than a few, especially when bad planners are the ones who face the consequences for their mistakes, rather than everyone else. some say that the current system privatizes gains and socializes losses; this is true to a certain extent, but in a system which equally socializes gains and losses, i fear that no one would win at all.
>>2369751>Under communism, products are made for use, not exchangeyes, but how do you measure social use if exchange cant be quantified in something like a price system? just the rate of consumption?
>cyclical waste cannot occur because products are not being restricted from the publicwouldnt a definition of waste be a form of unrestricted production/distribution (overproduction)? in markets, this becomes insoluble because profits fall. do you imagine that there will be periodic failures in supply dynamics under communism also?
>the major reason for endemic waste in capitalist economies is the separation of control over distribution for consumption from labor, this leads to a strategy of hoarding by those with power over distribution, because items are only given away in exchange for money, and destroyed or discarded if it is impossible to exchange them for moneywell, 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. this is a failure of the price system, i agree, and it can be done to boost profits through a form of artificial scarcity (like how mcdonalds puts its unused stock in private trash lockers, or how restaurants put poison on their leftover food). it would definitely be better if companies had mass discounts for items to increase sales. some businesses do actually deliver leftover items to charities though. i think a more robust form of distribution should be striven for then.
>in anticipation of future demand, items are still produced at a rate exceeding current demandyes, i agree. overproduction seems to be part of the logic of profit, which can be corrected by redistribution.
>Capitalism is a desperately failed attempt at planning.i certainly wouldnt go that far. having excess is at least better than having a deficit.
>>2369795"many planners are better than a few, especially when bad planners are the ones who face the consequences for their mistakes, rather than everyone else"
This where are our disagreement is categorical, & irreconcilable, my libertarian enemy. The great irony is precisely by having a background in large scale industry that made your position completely untenable to me, both in theory and in practice.
It is not simply that there are many people involved in making plans (which was the case in gosplan itself, as it had thousands of employees).
The "many planners" of capitalism are in conflict with one another, and hence their plans against each other. They are not even all strictly just people that are in conflict, but entities like firms as well. It is a war of all against all, primarily in the economic sphere.
Ergo the emergence of dysfunction & waste, because it is always possible to gain at the expense of competitors & third parties.
Under single unitary planning body, there is no external sources to profit at the expense of, to destroy, weaken or simply not cooperate with in order to advance the relative position of organization (usually a firm).
t. Sincerely, your totalitarian enemy, wishing you death.
>>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.
>>2369847>The "many planners" of capitalism are in conflict with one another, and hence their plans against each other.this is entirely relative to a division of labor and capital in the market. not all workers or capitalists compete with each other, because there is no benefit. a steel company has no antagonism with a lumber company for example, so competition only occurs from within the same market, such as many people applying for the same job, or many businesses competing for consumers. competition ideally produces the best results and distributes non-competitive capital in an area where it may achieve greater opportunities as a benefit to the particular loss.
>Under single unitary planning body, there is no external sources to profit at the expense of, to destroy, weaken or simply not cooperate with in order to advance the relative position of organization (usually a firm).if there is not even internal competition (or lets say, "incentives" for innovation), then what gives the possibility of progress?
>>2369861>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.right, so its a calculation of supply and demand, which creates a price system. my position is simply in saying that setting prices for commodities themselves automates the process more efficiently. an issue is what someone else brought up though. certain electronics will necessarily have the highest demand but the lowest supply, which should lead to high prices, but if you dont regulate consumption, you just create indefinite scarcity.
>what is produced is what the laborers desire to producei would say that the market is a democracy and we vote with our dollars.
>it occurs because products are not being made so that people can use themso would you characterize overproduction as underconsumption? to me, there is always a limit to marginal utility, so a certain gradient of waste. for example, even if you gave out free stuff, eventually, there would be a limit to consumption. i suppose you imagine that limit is more "rational" than i do.
>the capitalist economic system is the first and thus far only economic system wherein production is for exchange rather than use.every exchange value has a use value
>products are made to be sold for money rather than to be used by a consumer?its twofold, again. the barrier of consumption to me is the inflexibility of prices, especially at scale. for example, haggling may be employed in smaller, local markets, but never in corporations. this leads to an inherent waste. sometimes discounts are set to encourage consumption, but this doesnt resolve all cases. if the product is going to expire anyway, then you might as well sell it for anything. the only question then is, is profit necessitated upon NOT selling commodities at a certain rate, by a monopoly on waste?
>redistribution is merely an added cost to the capitalist for no gain whatsoever. Redistributing that which goes unsold is directly antagonistic to profits.my idea isnt that businesses redistribute directly, but that licensed redistributors (charities, et al) come in and take the stock off of the businesses' hands. some extraction companies in the third world even pay for waste, so they can find material in electronics, and the like. so i imagine this comprising a waste market.
>which can only be achievable by granting labor control over its own powers of production, distribution, and consumption.as i say, cooperation is fine, as long as you permit markets, money and a division of labor. i understand the workers' struggle for whatever its worth, but why does this then turn into a global state controlling human behavior? a leap in logic is made, i feel. okay, you dont want to prioritize exchange value over use value, but to me, use-values are most effectively sought after by a corresponding exchange value, or price mechanism, which calculates demand. i know market socialism is "cringe" or whatever, but it at least makes some sense. to me, at least - and not just as a "stepping stone" either.
>>2369795>many planners are better than a fewexcellent, because in communism
everyone plans, not just Porky
>>23735371. because businesses are dictatorships, duh
2. you have liberalism-brain, there's many more and better ways to democratize planning than by directly vooooooooooting on issues
>>2373556so they directly plan for the research and manufacture of goods, interesting.
and why does this particular group of people get to be in a position to command the productive forces for this or that end, and not some other group of people? On what basis are they selected?
>>2373537Wolff is a market "socialist", so it's no wonder he has issues separating production from distribution since in the market they're handled the same way
>its a mystery why we dont have a vote on every executive decisioncompanies literally hold votes on what to do. you vote with your wallet (shares) but there's ultimately a vote. not that I think we should vote over whether this or that person should have a PS5. instead what might be up for political contestation is what kind of specs the Workers' Playstation should have. it would likely be Open Hardware and run entirely Free Software
>>2373544voting is a last resort
>>2373549>hierarchical>horizontalmeaningless buzzwords
>>2373558>so they directly plan for the research and manufacture of goods, interesting.well, at certain scales, management can have relative controls; like how some mcdonald's menus are local.
>On what basis are they selected?they provide the capital. a majority shareholder pays to be in power over a company. if instead of wages, you offered workers shares in companies, there could be bargaining, but in that case, most shares would be willingly bought up anyway.
>>2373562>companies literally hold votes on what to do. you vote with your wallet (shares) but there's ultimately a vote.yes, but it is a plutocracy of sorts, like the early american system. whats beneficial about private plutocracies however is that they utterly depend on a public democracy in the market, so its not top-down rule, but a form of cooperation between spheres.
>it would likely be Open Hardware and run entirely Free Softwareif we got rid of IP, we could have much more innovation, since it would force companies to be competitive against the public. in digital media like videogames, we easily see how taking the source code of properties creates endless modification. it allows people to make games from existing games. this is also just a natural consequence of digital media in general, like how PDFs allow us to read books without paying for it. the internet is pure free association.
>>2368078>now, show me an anarchist society producing vidya. or beerI, individually, have produced both.
How fucking alienated are you?
>>2373654>one individual is a society>my individual petty artisanship within capitslism = its own mode of production, other peoples' labor be damnedOh, you're an anarchist alright
Ironic of you to be accusing anyone else of alienation when you're this deep in the individualism sauce
>>2373886yeah, but an anarchist society still hasn't produced neither beer nor video games
that's largely due to the fact that anarchist societies historically had a hard time materially existing at all, but my charge still stands
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