Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 00:26:00 -0800 (PST) From: Carl Davidson <cdavidson-AT-igc.apc.org> Subject: Re: M-I: Law of value and state capitalism Thanks for the reasonable reply. But here's what I'm getting at: most people I know who bring up labor-time vouchers are trying to argue for a non-market socialism rather than a market socialism. Vouchers are like money because you get them for a certain amount of work and you can take them to a store and trade them in for goods. Vouchers aren't like money because you supposedly can't use them to hire someone to do some work for you, or you can't use them to buy an oversupply of goods that you could then sell to someone else at a profit. Vouchers are precisely like ration coupons. But anyone who lived in times of ration coupons can tell you that they still got used to hire people and buy goods for resale. It just happened as a black market and thus required more police and prisons to supress it, if it was suppressed. And it usually wasn't the worse offenders who got suppressed. Except in emergencies, in times of scarcity I generally would favor an open market over a black market. Open markets can be guided, shaped and, most importantly, taxed. That's a much less repressive way for the worker's state trying to make a transition to an economy of abundance and deal with the problems of income inequality and profit gouging. I think the market preceded capitalism and will linger on quite a while afterwards. And in broad historical terms, markets were an achievement of human civilization over their predecessor, which was pillage and plunder as a method of obtaining scarce resources. Carl Davidson, Chicago. At 09:12 PM 3/25/97 +0000, Lew wrote: >I agree with most of what you say. We were discussing Marx's ideas on >the early stage of communism. Marx believed that, because of the low >level of the productive forces (in the 1870s) consumption would have to >be rationed, possibly by the use of labour-time vouchers similar to >those advocated by Robert Owen. These would not function as money, and >they would have the disadvantages you attribute to them. But as you say, >we need to develop a society of abundance, and for that we do need >socialism. >-- >Lew > > > --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- > > Keep On Keepin' On --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005