Spufford brings out the disconnection between the recomendations of the reform economists and the real lives of the people that the reforms would impact on. Food subsidies were the bad conscience of inequality. They were necessary because without them, those on the lower wage rates could scarcely have survived. Marx had advocated that in the first stage of communism everybody would be paid in labour vouchers not money - 1 hour's work getting 1 hour's vouchers. Goods would be directly priced in terms of the labour required to make them and social expenditure would be met out of a tax or time-levy on incomes. Soviet prices deviated considerably from labour values for two reasons:
* The well known subsidies on essential foods and housing.
* The turnover tax was, I think, calculated on the basis of total turnover not just wages, as such it was similar to the fixed percent markup Marx posited for prices of production. Given that due to subsidies, wages underestimated the real value of labour power, this sort of markup would mean that the deviation of prices from labor value would actually have been bigger than under capitalism.
full: http://21stcenturysocialism.com/article/review_red_plenty_by_francis_spufford_01992.html
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Maintaining a wage system, as opposed to implementing a system of SNLT vouchers is what led to the continuous generation of capitalist social relations, IMO. This has been a repeated mistake of all M-L regimes.
Mike B)
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