Economics of Communist Society

[graemi2006@xxxxxxxxxxx (graeme imray)]

I am somewhat disappointed at the turn this thread has taken in so far as
it has retreated slightly from an attempt to confront the of question the
nature and form of a communist economy and turned into a somewhat sterile
discussion of what we all acknowledge was a FAILED attempt by the working
class to socialise the economy in the post First World War period. I
suppose I should have expected this, since it is exactly what happened here
in Liverpool when we attempted to approach this question. The only
difference is that here we have a host of different Trotskyist groups each
defending their own version of the 'holy grail'.

I sent the texts on the German Left to Bob at Subversion and he was kind
enough to recognise their importance by giving them space on Subversion's
web site. I did this for two reasons primarily.

1 to show that an authentic working class anti-Bolshevik communist
tradition had existed in a West European working class. Its amazing that so
many working class people have so little confidence in their own class and
its abilities to find solutions to problems 'exclusively through its own
efforts'. When I say 'look at what we did, even if it was defeated,' I'm
trying to say that real change is possible and we don't have to put up with
this shit.

2 I also want to show how a simple attitude of 'for' or 'against' the the
Third International [whether of 1919, 1921, 1924 or whenever does not
matter] is not an adequate basis for an approach to the problems we face
today.

If we continue to view today's reality through the prism of the
understanding and conceptions of that earlier movement, we are fore doomed
to fail just as they did. However some questions have I believe been
settled by the intervening years. One of them is that we cannot socialise
the economy through the creation of a 'workers state'. To that extent and
if it is the same argument, Marx was wrong and Bakunin was right. I look
forward to the time when anarchists and communists can recognise their
'commonality'.

[As an aside I must tell you this - the 'Reclaim the Streets' involved in
the Liverpool Dockers Dispute people have recently been accused in the
'popular' press of being anarchists. Jumping to their defence, Jimmy Nolan,
chair of the dispute committee and self confessed Stalinist, treated us to
a half hour spirited defence of the role of the anarchists in the Spanish
Civil War, much to the amusement / bewilderment of the mass of dockers,
their partners and supporters at one of the Friday mass meetings. So if
Jimmy can do it . . . . . ]

So, to bring the discussion to its present point, there appear to be no
'takers' for Mauro and Jock's [CWO/ICP] view that it will be necessary
during a period of transition of indeterminate length for the economy to
work according to the principle of 'from each according to his abilities to
each according to his work'.

Laura commented in her posting that such a view could get no resonance
during the 70s in Italy and I have to say that here in Liverpool in the old
Workers Voice group we would certainly have come to the same conclusions as
our Italian brothers and sisters. And I believe this is not merely a
subjective impression. Already the working class was making a judgment
about the possibilities for a communist economy - that is an economy that
answers directly to our needs. By what criteria should we judge the
'ripeness' or 'maturity' of the economy for such a project ?

Well in an earlier posting I remarked on the post First World War IWW's
claim that the current level of [pretty miserable] consumption by the
working class could be met with a much reduced standard working week / day.
I still think such a project is worth tackling, and I should like to leave
such a proposal 'on the table' as we say here. This seems to me to a
concrete question which an 'Inquiry' might devote itself to.

As to the question of whether we are paid in money or labour vouchers, it
makes no difference. If our 'work' is a measure of our consumption, it
still confirms our status as wage labourers, separated from the means of
production and the product of our labour. That is we are still alienated
from it and therefore we are forced to conclude that, despite outward
changes in the state form - nothing in its essentials has changed for us.
The GIK recognised this and thought that in and of itself, the purely
technical unit of average social labour hour, could overcome such a
problem, because the unit, they argued flowed from and was an expression
of, the social control of the working class. That is they were looking for
a purely technical solution to what is in my view an overwhelmingly
political question. So the GIK asked the right questions but still did not
come up with an answer that would satisfy us today, by re-inventing the
role of the market.

Either way, the correct way to look at this problem is to look at the
current reality of working class experience and see if we can condense that
into some ready answers. Right at the moment I do not have a concrete
answer, but neither I am sure, do the CWO/ICP. They prefer to rely on a
highly abstract analysis, which of course they are perfectly entitled to do
- but they cannot be surprised if others are not persuaded by the results
of their efforts.

How else might we settle this question then ?

Well we might try and look at the political consequences of a policy based
on the principle of 'from each according to his abilities to each according
to his work'. If we can see some of the contradictions this would lead to,
we might be led to the conclusion that such a policy is best avoided.

In the so called 'advanced' capitalist countries of the west, the majority
of the working class, works in the service sector and in this sector while
many jobs might remain, such as health or education [although personally, I
am increasingly driven to the view that schools as we know them should be
utterly destroyed so that we can start afresh], many more would disappear
entirely with the abolition of a commodity economy. Think for instance of
those working in banking or finance, that is for the circulation of
capital. Is it seriously to be proposed that these people [and there are
over a million of them in the UK] are to be 'socialised' into the economy
by the simple expedient of giving the choice between working or starving ?

Either the bulk of individual consumption is free from day one [or as free
as we can make it, for example we might be forced to ration certain things]
or there is no material basis for the 'free and equal association of the
producers' - and we should stop kidding ourselves. There is no either/or
'transitional' stage [to be fair I do not think the CWO/ICP are advocating
such a beastie].

Now although I reject individual remuneration as defined above [and I am
not impressed by the assertion that labour vouchers 'do not circulate' -
almost anything will be used as a store of value, if peoples consumption is
not 'free'], I do still think that we need a unit of calculation for a
communist economy. This is because initially, at any rate we need to avoid
the massive waste of resources which would flow from a rejection of any
attempt to co-ordinate our activities. But this unit of calculation only
needs to operate at an aggregate level - individual enterprise to whole
society. That is it will tell us how much of whatever type of product, our
present level of technology will deliver, and on that basis we can choose
the aggregate level of consumption.

Looking further ahead [or if you like from a lower stage to a higher stage
of communism, and doing away entirely with any notion of transitional state
and any intermediary economic forms] we know that technological development
in a capitalist society is not neutral, but that it is a function of the
capitalists need to re-assert their control over us. As early as possible
therefore, we would need to make decisions on which technologies to
dispense with for whatever reason, which we might retain and which we might
need to develop. In the parlance of modern economists, we will be faced
with 'opportunity costs' which may restrict present consumption for a
projected future social gain. A single, simple unit of calculation will
enable such a choice to become transparent. Above all it will reveal the
unity of a fully socialised productive process, so that any centrifugal
tendencies can be 'costed' and if required resisted. This is not an
'automatic' process, merely a tool, whose results can be ignored if we
wish, but the costs of such ignorance can be predicted in advance.

I'll stop here as I've just seen Harald's posting. I always find his
contributions are worth the effort.

ATB

Gra




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