>Admittedly, we are very far away from
>such a social arrangement. And I have no idea how to
>get there.
>
>
I don't understand. You must be aware that the feasibility of central planning has been the subject of voluminous debate since the 1930's at least. And that in the past 30-40 years, fewer and fewer socialists familiar with the issues have been willing to defend its feasibility. By feasibility, I mean the system's ability to produce all the good stuff you say should be produced in a communist society (laptops, good food, power plants) at a rate and quality at least as high as welfare capitalism.
You say the problem with really existing socialism was not planning but oppression, yet Chris says it was lack of consumer goods that drove the dissatisfaction and disillusion. So given recent history, don't you think it might be more pressing for an advocate of den kommunismus to engage intellectually with the issue of the feasiblity of planning, more so than with the relationship of money to abstract labor?
Lenin never engaged with these issues. His view, famously, was as quoted below. With hindsight this looks like staggering foolishness. One could draw a straight line from this remark to 1989. Isn't this a cautionary tale?
>
> All that is required is that [workers] should work equally, should
> regularly do their share of the work, and should receive equal pay.
> The accounting and control necessary for this have been simplified by
> capitalism to the utmost, till they have become the extraordinarily
> simple operations of watching, recording and issuing receipts, within
> the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four
> rules of arithmetic.
Seth