> Paul: > The key difference is that we assume that labour credits are non > transferable and can only be held by workers, not by any other > institutions, and the credits are cancelled when they are redeemed for > goods from the state retail network. Joseph: The other institutions have accounting entries which are measured in labor values. That's clearly pointed out in your book. Therefore it is an evasion to say that other institutions don't have labor credits. They have labor credits, only they call it by another name: accounting entries.
> Since the labour credits do not circulate they are not money, and > without money circulating there would be no commodity circulation. Joseph: The enterprises or projects have a budget denominated in labor values. The amount of their labor credits is recorded as an accounting entry in a bank-like institution. Any time the enterprises or projects employ labor or obtain raw materials or machinery, the appropriate labor value is deducted from their account. If the enterprises exceeds its budget, it may be terminated. ------------------------------ Paul: Let us first consider as an example a district health authority that runs several hospitals under the National Health System, after a changeover to a labour accounting economy. Do you dispute that such a health authority needs some definite allocation of social resources that it can use for the health of the population? How other than in labour time or money are you going to measure the allocation of resources that it will be given? How, other than as quantities of their working year do you propose that decisions about overall health provision be made by the citizens? You can not ask everyone to vote on how many x-ray machines, how many intravenous drips, how many staff nurses, how many paediatricians, how many dental assistants etc, are to be provided for the West of Scotland. The level of detail in kind is far greater than can possibly be submitted to democratic decision making. There is thus a need for the people to be able to decide in a comprehensible way on aggregate levels of resource use, labour time taxes are a feasible way to do this. It then allows the Health Authority to decide how to use, let us say 80,000 person years of effort - how much of this will go in nursing staff, how much in doctors, how much in speech therapists, etc, and how much will go in indirect labour performed elsewhere in the economy: drugs, medical equipment, medical consumables, new buildings etc. Since we are talking about a future planned economy, we can assume that the long term employment plans for medical staff will be more tightly coordinated with the education sector offering places in nurse and doctor training degree courses to meet these needs than they are at present. If the health board wanted to advertise additional posts for, say, dentists, the total number of dental posts being advertised would have to be approved by the labour power planning section of the planning authority subject to the constraint that the a) total labour usage proposed was within the constraints set for the health board and b) the number of dentists requested was within the constraints set by the total number of newly trained dentists, less those retiring. The scenario you suggest of entire health board going bankrupt could not occur in a state run system. What could occur, and what does occur in the NHS at present, is that it may be decided to close certain hospitals and concentrate treatment in a smaller number of more specialist centres where better use of resources could be made. ----------------------- > The projects we propose are not able to hold credits, > and have no account into which > credits are transfered when goods are produced. Really? Let's see. According to "Towards a New Socialism", the accounting agency checks whether these projects are "cost-effective" ( p. 182) Doesn't it do this by comparing the labor values of the goods and services produced with the amount of labor values expended during production? It uses "a rational system of economic calculation" in which the national budget is balanced in terms of labor values. (p.182) That means that it may decide to subsidize an important project which is losing labor values (using up more labor values than it produces). But overall, the basic criterion is that the total expended labor values should equal the total produced labor values. ----------------------- Paul C: Not precisely. Let us take the example I gave above, of a health board. It may calculate, for instance, what the labour required per baby delivered in the different maternity hospitals, and compare this with the labour that would be required were two hospitals to be merged, and on that basis decide to merge two hospitals. But I would not use the term 'labour value expended', it is not labour value that is being expended, what one is measuring is labour performed or expended. One can not meaningfully speak of labour value expended versus labour value produced. One can talk of the difference between the labour cost of performing a task one way as against the labour cost of producing it another way. Labour value is not produced. It is better to say that products are produced and these have a labour cost. One can measure whether too much labour is being devoted to the production of one type of privately consumed good versus another if these are being sold in state shops to consumers in return to labour credits. If people are not willing to give up sufficient credits to purchase all the goods on sale, the plan is probably wrong and the scale of production of that product should be scaled back. ---------------- Jacob What all this works out to is -- the enterprise actually is credited with the labor values of its outputs. It is this which is compared to all the deductions that are made from its budget for the various inputs used in producing the product. This compares the socially-necessary labor content with the actual labor used in the particular enterprise. So, in a somewhat indirect way, the projects really are credited with the labor values for what they produce. Now, suppose the project uses up its budget and goes into debt. You write that "Since the project is in no sense an economic subject (i.e. a subject of proeprty right), the issue of bankruptcy cannot arise." But you then go on to describe that the project may be closed down, unless of course the planning agency decides in effect to subsidize it. You don't use the word "bankruptcy", but you describe bankruptcy. You don't use the word "subsidize", but you describe subsidizing the project. --------------------- Paul Closing something down is not the same thing as bankruptcy. If the army decides that a particular fort is surplus to requirements and closes it down, or the navy decommissions a ship, this is not bankruptcy, the soldiers and sailors are just redeployed to other duties and the ship is melted down, the houses on the base converted to civilian housing. In a socialist economy where everyone is employed by the state, the closure of a particular plant would be analogous. If one were to use Bellamy's term, those in that section of the 'Labour army' are redeployed to other duties. ----------------- Joseph Moreover, "Towards a New Socialism" continually reverts to the usual financial measurements and financial methods. When one uses aggregate financial terms in input-output tables, these are not measurements in kind. Even the late Professor Leontief noted that. These terms are the usual financial way of aggregating together two things that differ in kind, such as wheat and steel, by adding together their financial value. If one adds together their labor values, it's also basically a financial measure. The abstract labor hour, which is what the labor values of products is measured in, is not a measure in kind. It combines together qualitatively different things, just as money does, rather than keeping track of them in kind. And the labor theory of value shows that measurement in abstract labor hours and pricing things in dollars are, at bottom, the same. And if anything, you have been arguing that the labor value and ordinary financial prices are even closer than what others say. ---------------- Paul C I disagree, money performs several functions, it, like labour hours, can serve as a measure of value, but when it does so we are using the unit of money the £ or Euro as the measure, not an actual sum of money. A sum of money is a data structure, largely held in the computers or legers of the banks which is a stock of claims to future labour services. It is also a means of payment of debt. It is also a general means of purchase. Labour in a socialist economy serves the function of measurement, but it is not money. We can illustrate this by looking at the way money functions for private agents and for the Crown in today's society. Consider an account in a bank for say £1,000,000 this represents a claim on about 50,000 hours of labour. It gives rise to the illusion that money can be a store of value, this illusion arises specifically from the competition between private agents, since money, for the individual bank depositor, does appear to be a claim on value that endures over time. The Crown on the other hand, as symbolic personification of society, does not suffer from this illusion. When it creates budgets for its departments, subdepartements, and other public institutions, these budgets are not stocks of money, they are flows : so many £Million per annum. If the department has not spent its budget by the end of the year the remainder in the account vanishes. Thus for Crown agencies with a budget, money already serves as a means of purchase and unit of account but not as a store of value. Money originates in the aboriginal claim that the Crown has over the life and labour of its subjects. In the past it levied these claims in kind as labour services or military service. This right to levy such services persists and is invoked in time of war, but more generally the Crown commutes labour services into monetary taxes - separating in that way the direct performance of labour services by one group of subjects ( public servants and soldiers ) and imposing on other subjects the duty of supporting those who perform direct labour services. A wheat farmer has to pay monetary taxes, in the Crown's currency, which can in the end only be obtained by selling food to those who directly serve the Crown. Money is created by the Crown as a certificate issued to those who perform public services, and these certificates can then be used to redeem tax debts. In the process this indirect method of taxation gave rise to a commodity producing economy and a capitalist division of labour. For the Crown, money has always been a form of indirect labour certificate, something that it issues to simplify its claims over social labour. But the fact that these certificates can circulate between private agents allowed the private delegation of the sovereign power acting as portable and transferable patents of nobility to the new class of capitalists. For these private agents, the illusion is created that money is a store of value. But value is ultimately labour, the value of money is ultimately the Crown's claim over social labour. The illusion that value can be stored is one that only makes sense to a private agent. Behind the illusory storage of value, is the reality that the Crown will accept a £ issued in 2008 for a tax debt in 2011. If a socialist society comes to be established the mystified and alienated representation of labour duties as money can be discarded, and accounting go back to an accounting directly in time. At this point the socialist state as the inheritor of the sovereign power no longer allows the private circulation of these certificates. It was this private circulation that allowed the rise of capitalist social relations, and with the elimination of such circulation, capitalist economic relations cease. The University of Glasgow, charity number SC004401 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
