Thank you for your comment, Ray. It raised the intellectual level of the list.
Harry -----Original Message----- From: Ray Harrell [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2010 12:03 PM To: [email protected]; 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: RE: [Futurework] Socialism is Dead! Long Live Social Accounting! No it's not. REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Harry Pollard Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2010 1:34 AM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] Socialism is Dead! Long Live Social Accounting! Before slavery was ended, you could hire white people in places like West Virginia for less than it cost to own a slave. Further, if the white laborer fell ill, you would send him home and hire someone else to fill his place. If a slave fell ill you would get a doctor quickly, for the slave represented an investment of perhaps $1,500 that you didn't want to lose. One might conjecture that slavery might have fallen under its own economic weight without the cost of 600,000 lives. It's a thought! Harry -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Sandwichman Sent: Saturday, December 04, 2010 11:16 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] Socialism is Dead! Long Live Social Accounting! Werner Sombart described the concept of capital as something that "did not exist before double-entry bookkeeping." "Capital," he wrote, "can be defined as that amount of wealth which is used in making profits and which enters into the accounts." Rob Bryer has written of a capitalist "mentality" that consists of using accounting information to control the labor process "by holding the collective worker accountable for the rate of return on capital." Such control by the bottom line is central, not incidental, to both the domination of the labor process by capital and the evolution of the ways that domination has been implemented through successive forms of technology. Any alternative to that domination requires the development of a counter-mentality that "turns the capitalist development of calculation and accountability to other ends." Bryer referred to that counter-mentality as a "socialist mentality" but I would amend that to a "social accounting mentality" to both enlist and implicate an incumbent social accounting tradition as well as to distance the alternative mentality from advocacy of state socialism. Ownership of the means of production may be beside the point or it may be more eclectic than traditional socialism assumes. It is not private ownership per se that is onerous but the domination over the labor process that a one-dimensional accounting mentality enforces. Social accounting is simply the kind of accounting that has to be done when two or more accounting entities are being aggregated. It differs from the accounting of a single enterprise in the way that transactions between the constituent parts are treated. Great care needs to be taken in defining the boundaries between parties to avoid errors such as "double counting." It is, in effect, the systematic double counting of the returns due to capital that maintains the social domination of capital and obstructs social justice. See "Time on the Ledger: Social Accounting for the Good Society": http://ecologicalheadstand.blogspot.com/p/time-on-ledger-social-accounting-f or.html -- Sandwichman _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
