> > Even if you don't sell things, you have to trade them. To administer
> > the fair distribution of goods and services you have to make them
> > comparable. That means judging their relative value and coming up with
> > a barter scheme. It's simply inevitable.
>
> Boddi satva assumes the continuance of private property within socialism.
> Alas, if his producers were not private producers, why would they trade with
> each other (at a price for their goods, I assume, else how are we to compare
> the goods made for sale in the market?) In fact I don't understand how the
> producers of the kind of things that are made could exist except as
> institutions, as firms. The producers of JCBs presumably cannot directly
> barter their products for jam and Champagne, for units of electricity for
> their workers' homes, water for use at home, children's clothing, shoe
> polish, Christmas presents, something for Aunt Ethel's birthday. Bs's model
> must assume intermediate expressions of value - something given in exchange
> for the JCB; some of that given to the workers. Modern production is based
> in institutions. Institutions are not the stuff of boddi satva's barter
> model.
Your conclusion is untrue. Any rational distribution scheme will have in it barter trade ( simple scenario: "okay, so I'll give your social productive unit five pallets of X and we'll take three pallets of Y because people around here like Y better than X anyway - sound fair?"). Fairness requires barter trade or at least something that is so analogous to barter trade we might as well admit what it is. The instution in charge of distribution will HAVE to participate in exchange based on relative value - trade. There is simply no rational alternative.
> The reality of isolated decision making and, presumably, each firm's command
> of its products is the foundation of private property, according to the
> Paris Manuscripts. Social production constituted in the exchange of
> commodity goods is the heart of the concept of value, isn't it? The
> regulation of social labour will be orchestrated by this process. The
> products express the social worth of that labour.
This is a misapprehension of capitalism. Firms are not isolated and private ownership of capital is what dictates the private ownership of the firm's products. What the rest of this paragraph means, I'm not sure.
> Is there the production of surplus value in this model? Can workers move
> between 'jobs' and be rewarded with different baskets of goods, different
> wages? It seems to me that to ask these questions is to answer them. This
> is why it seems to me that the identification of a capitalist class is not a
> sure test for the identification of a capitalist society. When it comes to
> class, the controlling idea is still is the 18th century idea of the
> owner-manager of a manufactory, not the reality of mass production in the
> modern world. We now have myriad masses who have an amazing range of claims
> that entitle them to live off of the social surplus: executive wages and
> bonuses; 'wages' paid to senior state officials and many junior ones;
> payments on paper claims (interest, debentures, shares - there is a massive
> range of these things, payments frequently made to institutions, not
> directly to rentier capitalists - even institutions such as pension funds);
> corporate rents; fees to business consultants - i.e. to all those who live
> on the surplus produced by productive labourers. It might be a group with
> fuzzy boundaries, but an identifiable group it is.
You don't have to identify the group. The question is whether the work serves the consumer or serves the rights and interests of the owner. Workers serve consumers and the capitalist class and its hangers-on serve the ownership interests of the captialist class.
> Mike B gave an example from family life to show that goods can be moved
> between users without selling or accounting. The same non-fiscal
> relationships are seen in many human groups that are voluntary associations:
> In a small town music society, A mends the roof of the practice hall, B
> makes posters, C cooks lunch for those attending a rehearsal, D E & F play
> the cello and other things, G updates the data base, H cleans, I is the
> conductor, J chairs the board. These tasks are incommensurable. They are
> different forms of human endeavour. That, it seems to be, is why Marx in
> ch.1 of Capital calls capitalist production verrückte - insane. The world
> of generalised commodity production does say that one wheel hub = fifteen
> minutes dentistry = seventeen towels = one day's work from a crew member at
> McD.
These tasks are, in fact, perfectly commensurable. They are all necessary to create the end product and the end-product has value. We know the value because people are willing to pay for it. We know music societies produce real value because people are willing to give hours, show up for shows and we also know that music has a commercial value.
Capitalists value commodities to make sure they aren't being cheated by other capitalists. Socialists can value commodities in the interest of broader fairness. Indeed, they must.
> This is a set of social relationships, not natural ones.
But there is a "natural" relationship among people who have a surplus of one thing and are trying to trade it fairly for someone else's surplus. It happens in school lunch rooms every day. Only Marxist cower in fear at it.
> "Although formulated as theories of social structure, political economy,
> sociology and historicism shared a liberal social and political orientation,
> seeing capitalist society as an expression of the needs and aspirations of
> rational individuals, and evaluated the institutions of capitalist society
> in relation to individual rationality. This did not mean that these theories
> were formulated on the basis of a rationalistic theory of action, whether
> positivistic or idealistic, for the theories were not formulated at the
> level of the theory of action. The rational individual who underpinned and
> legitimated the social structure characterised by the theory was not a real
> but an ideal individual.
***Capitalists*** argue that their system arises naturally out of free trade. That's is complete bullshit. The "ideal individual" cited here never existed.
The conformity of the social structure with
> individual needs and aspirations was not conceptualised directly, by
> revealing the origins of social institutions in the actions of real
> individuals, and establishing the adequacy of those institutions to the
> individuals' needs and aspirations. Rather the rationality of the social
> structure in question was explained in terms of its results, by showing that
> those results conformed objectively to the abstractly defined needs and
> aspirations of the ideal rational individual.
The "ideal rational individual" cited here is a cartoon character in a capitalist propoganda. Capitalism serves capitalists. That is written in to the charter of every corporation.
The achievement of the ideal
> society could not be entrusted to the spontaneous advance of individual
> reason, for the existence of ignorance, vanity, prejudice, superstition and
> the abuse of power were barriers to its realisation. Thus the progressive
> development of society depended on the subordination of the action of
> individuals to the reproduction of the social structure within which they
> were inserted. For classical political economy this implied the
> subordination of the individual, the State and civil society to the market
> through which the classical economic laws would spontaneously impose a
> harmonious social order. For sociology and historicism the market alone was
> not an adequate basis for the realisation of a rational and harmonious
> social order, and the operation of the market had to be confined within
> limits set by morality and by the State.
Never, ever, was there a free market. Never. Ever. The market system has been dominated by monied and political interests from the first. Capitalism does not derive from primitive accumulation. That's just a fairy story.
In each case, however, the social
> structure to whose reproduction individuals were subordinated was defined by
> the social relations of capitalist production, and the ideal rationality of
> society was an expression of the naturalistic rationality of capitalist
> relations of production as the necessary expression of the division of
> labour. It is this common naturalisation of capitalist social relations that
> defines the common ideological foundations of all these theories of
> capitalist society...
>
> The distinction between economy and society is not an empirical distinction,
> but a conceptual one, resting on the conceptual distinction between the
> essential rationality of capitalism and its social reality, a distinction
> that in turn rests on the definition of economic relations as essentially
> asocial, concerning not relations between people, but relations of
> subjective evaluation of things by abstract individuals, mediated by the
> technical relations of production and the formal relations of exchange. "
When, under socialism, economy and society are the same thing, it does not mean that economy simply vanishes. The inescapable logic of economic behavior still applies, just without the yoke of capital. Therefore trade will continue, but wage-slavery will not.
Why do Marxists believe the myth that wage-slavery is an inevitable result of trade?
There was trade under Primitive Communism, there will be trade under socialism.
boddi