Date: Mon, 23 Dec 1996 03:31:45 +0000
From: AM <motant-AT-geocities.com>
Subject: Re: M-I: sect feuding (or defense of marxism)


neil wrote:
> 
> An anecdote was the famous  Q&A at Moscow Univ . in 1949
> between Stalin and a handful of bright (and brave!) Russian economics
> students  who asked Stalin how the USSR could have reached
> "Socialism" and still have commodity production abundant,
> when Marx in Capital clearly points out that  in Socialism,
> Commodity production (as well as money and wage labor)
> is phased out completely. Stalins answer " Well this is true,
> but in capitalism you have capitalist commodity production
> whereas in the USSR we have achieved socialist commodity
> production". And this  was not the only time Stalin and his
> minions used this kind of doubletalk!
> 

Why is this a joke? I mean, I've never understood the exact meaning of
"commodity production" (very hard english limitations). Any society has
to produce goods, right? So there is indeed a capitalist production and
a socialist production. So the difference here lies on the "comodity"
thing. For what I understand, "commodity" are goods produced not to
immediate consuption but else to exhange with another goods? But if this
exchange had not the purpose of getting some surplus value (like it does
in capitalism) but instead the purpose of getting another/equivalent
consuming goods, what's the difference then between a commodity good and
a consuming good?

Or I am wrong and "commodity" means more than this?



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