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

it would take quite a while before something like a debit system could be set up. in the industrialized parts of the world, no, but in the less developed parts, it would take quite some time, because there would have to be the debit machinery put into every store, and the computer data bases set up to track all this. if this was given top priority i suppose it wouldn't take all that long, but i'm sure there will be various other priorities that people have in those regions, like for the first time ever providing everyone with enough to eat, proper housing, healthcare, and other basics. in the mean time, if money was still being used it would have to be physical currency.

when someone uses currency to purchase something, the currency (rather than expiring) transfers to a seller. this allows the seller to accumulate wealth. (unless a method can be created to prevent this transferability.)

even if there class divisions had been abolished and the means of production socialized, capitalism would exist if the currency was transferable. it would be the "market socialism" version of capitalism, but i still consider this a type of capitalism. major wealth inequalities develop in market socialism, there is competition for profits, which pushes workers to ignore environmental effects of production and to develop hierarchical management and alienating production methods.

this creates the risk of full blown capitalism coming back, and if we aren't careful it might even happen before the debit infrastructure (to prevent currency transfer) has been implemented.

i don't need to emphasize all this to you because i know you're not a fan of market socialism. but i'm just trying to make the point of why currency transferability would be a big problem.

so, i ask again, how can this be prevented?

I don't think it can be prevented, and even if it could you could still hoard and transfer products in place of currency, thus allowing for the persistence of things like prostitution. "No scarcity" seems to me to be the only way forward.

pikel: maybe i'm a bit slow, but what do you mean by "hoard and transfer products in place of currency"? are you talking about how sometimes things are used as an unofficial currency, like cigarettes in prison?

Yes, or food, or booze, or other drugs or anything people might want more of than they are getting.

I would also think that education can mitigate the unwillingness to accept scarcity, if we have to have it. Capitalist education (and advertising etc) promotes exactly the opposite!

Yep, that's definitely the option which solves a lot of these problems.

Znet actually has an FAQ which deals with this question, but, in my opinion, it doesn't do so very effectively.

http://www.zcommunications.org/zparecon/qablmark.htm

Another way you could at the very least make a good effort towards solving this whilst still assuming scarcity is by accepting that socialism/communism is fragile. Yes, someone could prostitute him/herself for goods, but people will have to understand that, if they'd like to maintain the values of socialism, then they have to avoid engaging this sort of black market. Essentially they'd have to weigh how much they like the "service" this hypothetical guy/gal is providing vis a vis things like, self-management, egalitarianism, democracy, etc, given that vast inequalities will eventually pile up and threaten some, if not all, of these values.

Frankly, I'd like to be swayed into the "no scarcity/post-scarcity" camp, since, as I mentioned, it solves a lot of problems. But it's hard to believe that in a planet like ours, some things won't eventually run out. (Perhaps this is where I'm mistaken and maybe I need to look at it differently). And yes, it can be said that, resources will last so long that no one should really worry about it, but that's just ignoring the elephant in the room.

Just to be clear, the only point in which I agree with the OP is on the point of scarcity and even on that we're probably coming at it from different angles (mine could be more ignorant). Everything else is, as has been pointed out by others, an obvious dogmatic leap. I decided to post because, as I said, I would honestly like to be convinced on the issue of scarcity.

you're confusing different things. first of all, if consumption entitlement is a physical note of some kind, it's still a consumption entitlement...to things for personal consumption. thus

1. this doesn't imply that there is a market for means of production. if the allotment of means of production is controlled socially, and only alloted to self-managed worker production organizations, then where is the basis for a dominating class?

2. it doesn't imply there is even a market economy. for a market economy to exist, allocation of resources in production must be due to profit-seeking behavior of separate, autonomous firms, who buy means of production in markets for means of production.

neither 1 nor 2 follows from the existence of physical notes of consumption entitlement.

finally you can talk all you like of a "no scarcity" economy. but that's like talking of a world without the law of gravity. it violates the laws of physics to suppose that jack is both at one location building health clinics and across town at the same moment building houses. there is a finite amount of time we want to be working. and thus inevitably only finite social product that can be produced. it is therefore very important to avoid wasting the scarce worktime & inputs to production. "scarcity" doesn't mean "oh we've run out of X". scarcity is everywhere, in production of everything.

syndicalistcat - ok, supposing that the means of production are NOT for sale. and even supposing there is not a market. still, if currency is transferable, then when i go to a restaurant and pay for a meal, the person who works at the restaurant will collect the currency i use to pay. the restaurant with a lot of customers will have more income than the restaurant with few customers, so the people working at the popular restaurant will have more money than the people at the unpopular restaurant.

unless there is some way to prevent the people who collect my currency from being able to use it, then inequalities will develop. there will still be rich and poor. the wealth inequalities won't be as big as they are nowadays, but they will still have the potential to grow very large.

and as if inequalities weren't bad enough, with this set up there will still be competition, and all the bad things that go along with it.

do you see now what i'm saying?

but the idea of a consumption entitlement is that it's used up when some item of consumption is acquired. like a coupon. so in that sense it is not "transferable." people working at a cafeteria would be remunerated (receive consumption entitlement) based on their own work. the restaurant's facilities are socially owned, not private property of people working there. the cafeteria isn't like a business. it does not get "revenue" from "customers".

for example safeway occasionally gives me a $1 coupon. i can use it next time i buy something. then the coupon is "used up". so consumption entitlement isn't like money in capitalism.

i don't see what stops people swapping those coupons, and even if that where possible, how is this better than free access? it just makes unnecessary work and makes it possible for pay differences to emerge for different jobs.

Still debating a hundred year old suggestion?

I don't think 'no scarcity' means 'infinite supply'. I've got all I need, materially, and it's not a lot, the only ones that seem to need obscene quantities are the you-know-who class.

You mean the coordinator class?

Pareconomy is what you need, especially if you believe in value.

You want some integrity with that WORK, then get some pareconomics.

You haven't given any argument for the claim that pay differences would emerge. With a socially owned and worker managed economy, governed by some system of grassroots democratic planning, social product would presumably be divided into, say, two parts: 1. systems of social provision of free goods (health care, education, etc), and 2. production of things distributed on the basis of individual consumption entitlement, such as retirement allotments, child allotments, and remuneration for work. The remuneration for work is from the society since it is the society that owns the means of production & the product. This may be done to provide incentives to work & as a way of sharing out the product. Why would pay differences arise in such an arrangement?

"Free access" has many problems.

1. It would encourage individualistic & aggressively egoistic mindset because people who are more aggressive in taking things will win, will have more than others. For any given individual there is in principle no limit to how much they might want of the social product. This lack of limits would also expand greatly the "demand" for products, whereas we want to limit how much we work.

2. There needs to be a principle (or principles) that determine the sharing out of the socially owned product in a socialized economy, a principle that will be broadly acceptable by the working class who are creating this system. "Take whatever you want" is not a viable principle.

3. As I said before, we only want to work for a finite number of hours. Any given person's time could be used to do any number of different things. So the society needs to have a way of deciding what sorts of work we want people to be doing to ensure that what is produced meets the expectations & desires of the population, including their desire to reduce work. If Jack cannot be at one and the same moment building a health clinic & across town building a house, which should he be doing?

4. Free access has no way to measure the social opportunity costs of different things we might produce, or any of the infinite sets of product outcomes that we might produce. It thus has no way to be an effective economy for people.

Ah, so 'no scarcity' in this sense is just welfare.

If I may point out something here: from what I gather, radicalgraffiti isn't arguing the "why" this would happen, s/he's just pointing out that Parecon (apparently) has no safety against this behaviour other than disincentive. So that, presumably, if someone wants to fuck everything up (say, because they'd like to see more inequality) all they have to do is swindle people into giving up their coupons.

there doesn't appear to be plaything to stop it should people decided to pay one individual more they other, maybe they have unusual skilled, are popular, doesn't matter the exact reason, the idea of paying people at different rates is currently popular, if people hae the same incentives to work would they not make similar decision about how much people should be paid, this has actual happened in revolutionary situation and other cases where workplaces where expropriated by workers. without a rejection remuneration in proportion to work i don't see how your going to stop it again.

this is inaccurate, it ignores how people actual act in situations where they have free access or where there access is not linked to how much they pay. Eg. healthcare, libraries, water (lost of places its not metered) roads, etc.
you also ignore that fact that free access is us here to mean not charged for, not in unlimited quantity.
I feel this suggests the a greater concern about stopping people getting more than you think they deserve than about making a system that works effective on a society wide level.

I also don't see what labour vouchers would do to stop someone buying say the entire stock of chocolate in a particular area then reselling it at a higher price.

this is an assertion, not an argument

if he gets paid the same in labour vouchers why should it matter to him so long as he gets paid? explain how non transferable labour vouchers tell us what needs to be built first, and which i more useful

labour vouchers don't measure the relative usefulness of things produced, so this doesn't support your argument

Of course, Pareconistas aren't the only bunch who deny the possibility of free access. We also have adherents of Takis Fotopulos's Inclusive Democracy who shy away from the concept, also. As Syndicalistcat writes "as i said before..." , so have i said it all before,in fact. See my contribution to this thread addressing the red-herring issue of scarcity.

http://libcom.org/forums/theory/libertarian-communist-critique-takis-fotopuloss-inclusive-democracy-23042012?page=1

I suggest Takis and Michael Albert fight it out over who is the more "revolutionary conservative" (or should that be "the more conservative revolutionary") with their respective lazy greedy individualist critiques of human behaviour and their creations of complex, convoluted constructs because they lack confidence that there are sufficient resources on the planet to provide for all, or that human beings can work voluntarily, and co-operate to organise production and distribution of wealth without chaos, and consume wealth responsibly without some form of artificial imposed rationing .

"As he said before" on social opportunity costs, an extensive debate between sydicalistcat (aka
gatorojinegro) from a few years back. Decide for yourselves if Robbo answered the issue.

http://libcom.org/forums/thought/economic-calculation-argument

The Robbo/ Syndicat had a return bout a few years later on RevLeft starting about page 17

www.revleft.com/vb/socialism-and-its-t157035/index17.html

Again worth the read although this thread has more participants so they are sometimes replying to different people distracting sometimes from what Robin and Tom are saying to one another . Again readers themselves can judge who had the most convincing arguments. (my personal view of both these debates was that they eventually fizzled out at the the point of greed and laziness (point 1 in the above) in a free access society and the protagonists opposing views on it likelihood)

this is way too ahistorical. you don't seem to grasp that a revolution is made by a mass movement, by people. it depends on what the movement that is the driving force is committed to, but also the elimination of pay differentials depends on the process of re-training & skill development. in the Spanish revolution the CNT's immediate goal in the revolution was the sueldo unico, a single pay rate for everyone. This was in addition to things like child allotments, since there is no reason a child's life should be dependent on the circumstances of the parents, no reason a child in a family with five children should have less in childhood than one who is an only child. but the CNT ran into problems related to the social power of those with scarce skills. the railway federation initiallly introduced equal pay but needed to hire a civil engineer to design a new line. they paid him 3 times the rate of the other workers. as long as this was a scarce skill those who have it would have social leverage to demand this. so these kinds of skills need to be made more common through training more people to an engineering level of knowledge.

but this breaking down of the hierarchy of work would need to be a concsious aim of the workers movement. so the movement for equalizing pay rates needs to be backed by the mass movement. and in a socially planned economy, when work hours are allocated to a production group to produce something, this includes the allocation of consumption entitlement at that equal rate, because this is one of the resources allocated to that production organization, along with its buildings, equipment, electrical consumption.

Read what I said. Tendencies in behavior depend on the social institutions, the way the society is put together. If you have a social structure that encourages individualistic, asocial behavior, that behavior will come to the fore. And that is what "free access" would in fact encourage. Not solidarity.

One of the reasons that it is fine to have a system of free social provision for health care, for example, is that there is a natural limit to what people are likely to want here. But this is not true for share of the totality of the social product.

I'm not advocating "labor vouchers". There is no reason for the social accounting unit (in which prices are stated) to be defined in terms of work hours. It may be that the value of an hour of a heart surgeon's time is greater (to people) than an hour of a shoe-maker's time. So what? That should have nothing to do with the share of the social product they receive.

Value depends on valuation by people, on their relative desire for things. And thus there needs to be a way for their desires to be effective in determining the allocation of resources (including human labor time) in production. This means there needs to be a scale on which things can be measured in terms of their social opportunity costs. The social opportunity cost of producing a health clinic consists of all the things we can't have because of our commitment of worker time & resources to the building of that clinic. Given the desires of the population, if the economy is effective, the cost is worth it, that is, people wanted the health clinic more than those things. They were willing to pay that cost.

This is completely unnecessary. I don't think you or any other pareconomists have justified the need for money currency. You can debate how it will work all you want (which is proven impossible already), but you still have to provide a reason for it.

The original poster's intent was to discuss his ideal of a self-managed capitalism; how in the world did we get stranded into parecon?

bullshit. the title of the thread is "money in communism"

Yeah, you see "money" in the title of a forum thread and saw an opportunity to propound your own views. But if you had bothered to read the content of the original poster's posts (despite his use of the word 'communism'), you would have known that what he was advocating was essentially what some of us called market socialism, mutualism, or self-managed capitalism. The concern somehow became about "non-transferable" labor notes, even though that wasn't the OP's intent. In his earlier posts, he expressed belief in the use of markets to determine prices.

Sure, this is "the idea of consumption entitlement", but how can you ensure the idea is the reality. The coupon example doesn't work. Coupons are not supposed to be transferable, and these rules are followed because (1) cashiers have to make their cash registers balance, and without handing in the coupons they won't; and (2) there isn't much incentive to steal coupons, since all you'll be getting is 50 cents off on cereal or something like that. But if someone was motivated to, they could re-use used coupons.

If money is used, what's to stop the workers in a store or restaurant that collect the money from customers keeping some of that money for themselves before handing it in to whatever organization collects and distributes the money for the community? And what's to stop the workers in that money collection/distribution organization from skimming some off, too?

and of course you don't take the opportunity to propound your own views. to say that he was advocating capitalism is obviously sectarian, a smear, since he took himself to be advocating a form of socialism. that's a dishonest debate tactic on your part.

and this seems to be the way it always ends up here on libcom when this topic is raised.

Well, I try to stay relevant to the original topic whilst propounding my views. If I have ever done otherwise, than I do apologize. But that's not the case here.

As for the "dishonest debate tactic", there's nothing more honest than calling it what it is. Plus, that's not the reason why the OP left, as he doesn't seem to like this thread anymore. I wonder why.