Proudhon's 'labour money'

Which communist societies are you referring to?

So, in other words, Proudhon proposes reducing all acts of labor to a single homogeneous labour-time, in order to enable the eradication of the equivalence of products of labor?

Did Proudhon have any proposals for squaring circles?

The difference I think is that proudhons labour notes circulate and Karls don’t there was a good discussion on it I thought a while ago made better by several other intelligent contributors who were I think trying to keep a potentially complicated subject simple.

It starts in earnest around post 10 I think.

http://libcom.org/forums/theory/dreaded-labour-notes-02042009

I think the real difference is that Marx's labour notes are socially organised in order to distribute resources; Proudhon's are organised between individuals to facilitate exchange.

~J.

Yes Proudhon.

Proudhon recognised that the problem was that people were forced to work for others that owned the means of production or ‘property’ by which they could exploit them by legalised theft ie surplus value.

The solution was system whereby everybody should own their own means of production facilitated by a ‘peoples bank’ that would offer interest free or near interest free loans to enable each worker to obtain there ‘own means of production’.

After that each worker would sell his own product on the open market at its natural price.

If you were making square wheels or being particularly inefficient you would learn the error of your ways and turn to something else presumably.

The idea was geared up to and attractive to small productive units, artisans in small workshops etc as well as family peasant farms and shopkeepers; the apogee of Proudhonism.

It fell apart a bit with the technical necessities of large scale production eg making steam engines and railways etc as Proudhon admitted.

In which case the problem was solved by breaking the process down into smaller units.

An idea that to some extent reappeared within the capitalist theory of internal markets and competing external markets within large corporations.

As an aside;

So for instance you might have a large retail organisation like Tesco or Wallmart with initially their own food science analytical laboratory. What they do is costed and budgeted for etc.

If it can be done externally for less then they let their own department go and franchise it out.

The same applies to transport and owning your own lorries and even the canteen for that matter.

Ah, yes, this would be the same Proudhon who argued: “M. de Sismondi, like all men of patriarchal ideas, would like the division of labour, with machinery and manufactures, to be abandoned, and each family to return to the system of primitive indivision, – that is, to each one by himself, each one for himself, in the most literal meaning of the words. That would be to retrograde; it is impossible.” The same Proudhon that argued consistently for worker's co-operatives to run workplaces?

I guess that Proudhon did not agree with Marx on what the apogee of his system was... I wonder who was right?

Admitted? Strange way of putting it... more like advocated from the start and continued until his death...

And where does Proudhon advocate that?

I do wish people would recognise that Marx did a hachet-job of epic proportions in Poverty of Philosophy -- as the Proudhon Reader (called "Property is Theft"!) I'm working on will prove (out next year, thanks to AK Press, to mark 170 years of What is Property? and so 170 years of anarchism as a named socialist tendency).

As for Marx's labour notes and Proudhon's, well, Marx stressed that “obviously” [!] “the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed” as “nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption” -- so not that much difference... how the Marx of 1847 would have gnashed his teeth...

In terms of Proudhon, Marx is repeating his arguments -- for Proudhon, a socialist society would be one where capital would be collectively owned and so workers would not be selling their labour to an owning class. They would run their own workplaces -- and as Marx admitted, this was a mode of production which was not capitalist.

But, then, Marx did appropriate most of Proudhon's best ideas...

To summarise: If you advocate a labour-note economy based on federations of co-operatives and socialised credit then you are a petit-bourgeois utopian reactionary; if you advocate a labour-note economy based on co-operatives and socialised credit for a (unspecified but lengthy) transition period then you are a proletarian scientific revolutionary.

I don't know about Proudhon, but Marx certainly never described socialism in terms of "collectively owned" capital. Not to mention that while Proudhon's socialism presupposes commodity production (with the "pious wish", as Marx put it, of no money, i.e. direct exchangeability of all commodities, at the same time, which is nonsense), Marx argued that commodity production itself needs to be replaced by directly social labor.

A bit late, I know...

Yes, indeed, Proudhon was a market socialist -- but he did not wish to get rid of money. Nor did he advocate labour-notes:

Proudhon’s constituted value and the myth of labour notes

That is pure invention by Marx -- along with a lot of other nonsense proclaimed against Proudhon. More here:

Review: The Poverty of Philosophy by Karl Marx

Shame to see Marx's nonsense repeated here... there is a valid critique to be made of Proudhon's market socialism, unfortunately for Marxists, Marx's is not it.

Yeah, Darimon, Proudhon's follower, not Proudhon himself.

Basically labor notes given to a person belong to that person only. You cannot trade labor notes with people like you can money, they are yours alone, and are given to you depending on how much labor you perform, rather than being set like an hourly wage. also upon completion of transaction for goods/resources, the labor note is destroyed immediately.

Kropotkin criticized labor notes, saying "The idea of labor checks, you know, is old. It dates from Robert Owen; Proudhon commended it in 1848; Marxists have made “Scientific Socialism” of it today"

Basically resources should be given to a person based on their need, NOT based on how much labor they have performed.