[lbo-talk] Fidel on dolphins & the Cuban model

Mike Ballard swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au
Thu Sep 16 23:53:29 PDT 2010


CB: But Marx did predict a transitional phase or first phase of communism that was not full communism. It is deep disservice to the Marxist cause to claim that the efforts of Marxist-Leninists, Soviets, etc. in 20th Century did not achieve any of the elements of Marx's first phase of communism. It is basically doing the work of the bourgeoisie to claim no success at socialism was accomplished by the first revolutions. It's utopian , philosophical idealist error as well. Of course, the first efforts to build socialism would be imperfect from the standpoint of an ideal in utopian socialists' heads.

************************* Agreed. I'm not saying that the revolution was a total failure. What I'm trying to understand is why socialism never developed. I think Marx had a clue about how to establish socialism and it was bound up with his critique of political-economy, specifically the social relation of wage-labour. One can argue that the State capitalist course which was embarked on early on in peasant dominated Soviet times was all which could be expected, especially considering the collapse of the revolutionary impulse in more advanced, industrial societies.

Here though, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme (and elsewhere if you look) are indications of what a society which had abolished wage labour might function like. You can see the outline of the transition in that exchange-value still exists in the form of labour vouchers. The difference lies in the fact that these labour vouchers are not based on the market price for labour power as a commodity. Rather, the vouchers are meant to represent the amount of socially necessary hours a worker puts into the total social product of labour. Thus, workers see themselves as the producers of society's wealth, not mere recipients of wages courtesy of their employers. That orientation would have destroyed the reified outlook which the wage system promotes i.e. what Marx wrote about in his section in CAPITAL vol I, known as 'the fetishism of commodities'.

For the works! Mike B)

Marx wrote in the "Critique of the Gotha Programme":

Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning.

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as

much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

Here, 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, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in he exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.

full: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm *********************************************************************** http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/



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