Money in Communism - A marginalist approach - a possible critique to Marx

And some people will always be out of money in such systems.

There's enough food produced to make every single person on this planet overweight, yet billions still go hungry and half of that food becomes wasted. Is it scarcity or capitalism?

the idea that money is a sensible way to deal with scarcity is pure ideology.

Hi there. If there's going to be a decent discussion about your ideas, we're going to need a lot more detail than what you gave us, because as it is nobody has enough information to understand what your vision is.

no it is not, no one has ever decided to implement money in order to deal with scarcity, rather scarcity is a post facto justification for money, and a bad one if you consider the results in practice.

Firstly you appear to be assuming a separation between those with the resources and the people.
For things for which demand exceeds production there is rationing, everything else can be taken freely.

it is is fundamentally to communism that production and distribution are arranged "from each according to ability, to each according to need" that is to say people do things they are suited to, and revive from society what they need in the broadest sense. There is no attempt to "distribute according to the effort spent" not only is it impossible to calculate how much effort any one made, but such such attempts hinder peoples creative abilities and discourage innervation.

Hi again. I'm still not quite sure what you're proposing. Is it different from what's usually called market-socialism (sometimes also called mutualism)?

I think what you mean by non-transferable is that the buyer uses the labor-check to purchase something, but the labor-check does not transfer to any seller -- but instead becomes void after being used once to purchase something? Meaning there is no way to make profit? If that's the case, then this is at least one major difference from market-socialism / mutualism. Sounds more like collectivism.

If a society is using these non-transferable labor checks, how can it be ensured that the labor-checks are non-transferable? What's to stop the person who works in a store from taking some (or all) of the labor-checks that people have handed in to buy things, and using those labor-checks again? I know they aren't supposed to do that, but how could it be prevented? (And if it can't be prevented, then profit from sale - and hence capitalism - can't be prevented.)

Apostolis Xekou,

My main issue with these schemes is that they are unimaginative. Basically these schemes assume that work and the rest of life ought be separated. This is most apparent when you speak of labour-vouchers. Basically, such a society must determine what activities receive credit and which don't, this is fucked up and not communism, even if some old beard said it was sometime ago.

Example;

I work two hours producing widgets and receive two labour vouchers, later, when I go home, I end up helping an elderly neighbour with their chickens for three hours and receive none. This is justified by some weird arbitrary idea of what work is and what it isn't.

As a communist, I aim for a society that has no such boundaries between work and life. I call these schemes, Parecon among them, unimaginative as they struggle to see past the fog of capitalism, still stuck in its absurd understanding of what is productive and what is not. To me, such designations have never been clear.

But what is the connection between individualism and money? Surely you can have the former without the latter.

money enforces artificial scarcity and worsens situations of natural scarcity

For a society to be communist their cant be a separation between the people who make decisions and the people who live with them. so the question is how do we share this amongst our selves, not how do we decide who to give this stuff to.

firstly i don't really give a shit what marx defined communism as, i am not a marxist and although he was a significant contribute the communist movement he was also massively wrong about some stuff, he is not some profit dictating the true vision of communism that all communists must follow, and its hilarious for you to appeal to his authority in that way then say (correctly) that political and economic theory shouldn't be treated as religion.

personally i think money hinders individuality and turns it into a superficial commodity, simply a matter of consume choice and wealth

Yup, that's what I think as well. Without money we can actually truly explore our individuality. Money is a straightjacket.

Your obviously making a leap of faith to say that we would be abandoning individualism if we also abandon money. How does money make us any more individualistic? Because it separates us from each other? That's not individualism. That's isolationism. It's a-social. And it's misery.

I think it's pretty obvious by now that what your advocating sounds much like self-managed capitalism. When you say...

...its just completely laughable. We reject our own ideas? You sound like another poster that was here briefly (forgot his/her name) that kept saying the same thing. And we was engaged in the most longest and ridiculous debate that went nowhere. If it was our idea, there would be unanimous agreement, but there isn't. So it's telling a different story from what you imagined. You might perhaps want to re-evaluate what you think is the anarcho-communist idea.

Post it here on Libcom, too, please. About how much longer until it will be ready? (Is it a matter of days, or weeks, or months?)

As much as many of us on Libcom.org might not like it, I think it's naive to assume that post-revolution all communities in the world will decide to abolish money, at least not in the first generation or two. I think we can expect to see a diversity of implementations of classless, egalitarian, non-hierarchical, directly democratic, self-managed systems. A number of those will probably utilize some sort of currency system. It's unlikely we'll be able to, through debate alone, convince each of these societies to go totally moneyless. (That's something that's more likely to happen with time; as the years go by those societies may decide to change if they observe that things are going better in the moneyless societies.) What we have a much better chance of doing is convincing those societies which are firmly decided on using money to at least use it in a way that ensures currency is non-transferable and thus does not allow for profit or accumulation. If someone can figure out a way of doing that, then that's a good thing.

So just because people disagree with you we "don't respect basic human rights?" You are a bit full of yourself; have you considered that people might have considered this quite a bit, discussed it several times already on this very site? Your view is something that I see from the right; if you disagree you are oppressing them, an authoritarian for pointing out problems and logical inconsistencies. There are plenty of discussions here about communist society with people disagreeing quite considerably. But nah, don't try to read anything, just call everyone closeted Stalinists.

"The fact that the means of production are owned by capitalists is because they have a lot of money."

lol. no, its because the means of production are capital that capitalists have a lot of money.

So confused here. . .

It would seem people have engaged with you, most of us quite respectfully and calmly. Its obvious that your ideas are out of step with a lot of folks here, but no one is asking you to leave or stop engaging in the conversation, rather, you continue to be offered important critiques to your ideas. Critiques, when delivered calmly and respectfully, should only strengthen an argument that has merit.

If those critiques continually weaken it, and the defence of those ideas begins to fall-back on personal attacks, then this is a great sign that you need to at least go back and do some reconsidering of your original argument.

To be clear, your personal attacks so far are;
-The opposing posters don't even understand their own viewpoint so their arguments are invalid
-The opposing posters are authoritarians with no respect for humanity

The former personal attack was trotted out by yourself almost immediately and it is indeed, offensive. Its somewhat surprising that me, or anyone else cares to continue this unpleasant interaction.

I for one will have to withhold responding to the counterpoint (the one that wasn't a personal attack) until you publicly consider your own part in derailing the shit out of your own thread with your personal-attack crutch.

I think that in society that emerges from capitalism through a proletarian social revolution, i think there would be certain things that would likely be high priorities of the movement. to begin with, an expansion of systems of social provision, such as comprehensive free health care, child care, a richer system of education to provide better prospects of development of personal potential, and a variety of other things. on the other hand human culture has developed to the point that people want a wide variety of things, and there are variations from person to person, community to community, what people want. So the idea is in part to eliminate deprivation & insecurity, & to expand positive freedom.

That said, I agree that scarcity is inevitable. We don't want to do any more work than we have to. So there is going to be a finite pool of work hours & a finite pool of various skills available. So we want to ensure that the work we do is not wasted but accurately reflects the desires of the people. I do think this would require some system of prices to encapsulate actual social opportunity costs, which depend on what the real preferences of people are.

But I don't see why this has to be a market system. Apostolis, have you read work on participatory planning, such as The Political Economy of Participatory Economics, by Albert & Hahnel? They propose a way to obtain accurate social opportunity costs without market exchange. Their full proposal would also have roughly equal remuneration (share of the social product) per hour of work, for that portion of production distributed to workers for their effort, akin to Marx's labor time proposal in Critique of the Gotha Program.

In their proposal we can think of the social product as being divided into sections, a section that is provided as a free public good via systems of social provision, and additional output distributed based on personal consumption entitlements, where these are acquired in various ways, such as direct public allotment for children, for work effort, etc. But their proposal is for a planned economy, not a market economy.

hi syndicalistcat. my question for you is the same as it was for apostolis. how to ensure the currency (or labor-cheques or whatever you want to call it) is non-transferable? i.e. that the currency used to purchase something cannot be used again by the whoever collects the currency after purchase.

if this can't be prevented, then there will be profit, and capitalism.

there doesn't really need to be currency. you could have something like debit cards. anyway, the key issue is really how production orgs gain control over means of production. for a new dominating class to emerge they'd need to have some way to gain control of means of production. if the social planning process allocates these only to self-managing worker production organizations in the context of a socialized economy, well, how can some new dominating class emerge?

to put this another way, profit can only emerge if there is already a class division in control over means of production. that's because profit assumes that someone other than the workers or the masses own the means of production, that there is a minority class who have a class monopoly over the means of production & can thus force workers to agree to only receive part of the revenue from sale, wages, and the difference between money costs & revenue is where profits lie.

In a self-managed market cooperative society, there is not profit in this sense but there is the problem that worker owned firms will be driven to seek surpluses to survive. the worker firm receives the surplus but is forced thru competition to re-invest & thus to seek surpluses, and inequality will emerge between more and less successful competitors. If the means of production are not collective private property of workers but of the society, and there is no such competitive dynamic, then the situation is different.

i think in the early phases of the revolutionary transformation there is likely still to be currency, and probably also still elements of market exchange. that's because the masses will deal with those things first that seem to people to be the main evils of the present society. so this means replacing the state with some new more direct form of governance, worker takeover & collective management & re-organization of industries, dealing with pollution, ensuring people's needs are met, and so on. it's necessary to keep in mind the mass struggle context of this transformative process.

in the Spanish revolution of 1936, we know that the CNT unions during the summer of 1936 began moving to end market competition and merge the various firms, driving towards a planned economy as a goal. A goal that was thwarted by the Popular Front collaboration.

but if you want to not have any price system, well, I think there's no way to have an effective economy on that basis. the society will need a measure of social opportunity costs to be able to distribute resources for effective outcome.