They also claim that Marx supported this method of calculation. To prove this, they refer to Marx's well-known discussion in "Critique of the Gotha Program" of labor certificates or vouchers. (See Section 1. Introduction) They ignore the facts that
* labor certificates were not intended to be used as a means of buying and selling between factories; * that they were intended only as a way of distributing goods among the working population; * that Marx referred to distribution on this basis as distribution according to "bourgeois right"; * that Marx had held that reducing things to how they measured on a quantitative scale meant ignoring their qualitative differences; * and that Marx held that planning had to deal consciously with preserving environmental properties, while the labor content would give a value of zero to what used to be called the gifts of nature. ------------- Paul In 'Towards a New Socialism', we make it clear that in a planned socialist economy there is no buying and selling between factories. We are quite clear that labour certificates are just a means of distributing consumer goods. We also say that environmental constraints have to be imposed from the outside by politics and can not be encoded in a system of prices or valuations. But this does not mean that you can get away without some index of social cost to guide choices of technologies. We advocate that labour time be the basic mechanism for this, but say that any proposal by a particular plant or industry to use a particular technology be subject to the over-riding imperative of the plan, since the planning system has additional information that can not be effectively encoded into prices or values. The planning algorithms can run a constraint satisfaction system when selecting a feasible combination of technologies. These constraints can include environmental ones. I give an example of how to do this for different forms of power production ( hydro and wind) using Kantorovich's technique in (Cockshott, W.P.C. (2010) Von Mises, Kantorovich and in-natura calculation. Intervention : European Journal of Economics and Economic Policies, 7 (1). pp. 167-200. ISSN 1613-0960). A shortened account is given in http://mltoday.com/images/pdf/cockshott.pdf. But unless local units of production have some sort of indicator, then their search for techniques will be unguided. Concievably one might argue that Kantorovich's ODV's might be a better indicator, but I suspect that for most purposes, when attempting to rank the efficiency of production, ODV's are not going to deviate far from labour values. Labour values have also a good intuitive and character - people can understand them, ODV's are only intelligible to experts in linear algebra. ------------------- -- Joseph Green [email protected] _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l The University of Glasgow, charity number SC004401 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
