Re: Market and Capitalist Socialism

["Chris, London" <100423.2040@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris B:
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> My difficulty with this debate, is that if you go back one step, to talk just
> about commodity exchange, any political system, capitalist or socialist
> will have to deal with the inevitably unequal accumulation of surplus
> between different enterprises, whatever the subtleties of their legal
> status.

Justin:
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Sure, there will be inequality among enterprises. Unless you think
socialism requires that everyone receive the same income, why is this in
itself a problem?

Chris:
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Thanks for engaging with this problem, but my concern was not with
inequality, but, as stated,

 unequal accumulation of surplus.

Remember that capitalism grew out of commodity exchange, even out of
some communistic type trading and mining organisations (see Engels on the
Law of Value). It happens independent of the will of any individual,
however nasty.

If in a socialist society, each enterprise is allowed say to have 10% of
its turnover as capital, (no doubt this would vary between sectors) and
all enterprises start on square one, they will compete in providing goods
for the market by trying to achieve some degree of relative surplus
value, by reducing the actual labour content of the commodity below
the price equivalent of the value of the commodity under the prevailing
methods of production. Good management as well as other subjective
factors such as good staff motivation may help this, as perhaps it
did in Mondragon.

If technical innovations or economies of scale are possible, at the end
of the year the enterprise will have more surplus to invest perhaps on
further economies of scale or innovation. A process of concentration of
surplus will occur, even if it is not a concentration of capital.

Then by a merger, a process of centralisation of surplus can occur, even
if it not a centralisation of capital.

So long as the workers in a socialist society wish to compete to sell
their labour, they are likely to compete to work in the more
prosperous enterprise which may be able to afford better benefits, and
greater security of employment. Less competitive enterprises can be
subsidised for a long time by the state/community, but may have to be
"reorganised" even if not taken over by a more successful enterprise.


It is not a question of ironing out luck or controlling political
misbehaviour though all this can happen. That is not the central
difficulty.

It is that in a commodity economy "not-for-profit" organisations
accumulate surplus too and do so unevenly and as we have discussed on this list
their workers also may feel they have nothing to sell but their labour
power.

This is not a question about egalitarianism. It is about the
dynamic of the unequal accumulation of surpluses in a commodity exchange
economy, whether it is socialist or capitalist, or a muddle between the two,
as Paul, interestingly suggested may sometimes occur.

Or is it sufficient just to prevent any enterprise from raising capital
on a capital market, for the whole thing to be "socialist"? Inequalities
in how it accumulates surplus are OK?

Chris B
London.




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