File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-03-28.125, message 11


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



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