Life Without Money : Wed 30 May

[SpineyNorman]

I don't even know where to start with that

 

[Jean-Luc]

I don't even know where to start with that

Well, you could start by taking your hands away from your eyes and looking at the facts.

Then, you could produce the evidence to back up your claim that "we're already at the absolute limit in terms of hydrocarbons extraction".

Then, you could produce the evidence to show that we could not use solar energy and nuclear power as non-C02 producing substitutes for the burning hydrocarbons.

Then, you could consider how many resources could be saved to produce what people need if there was no arms production.

Then, you could ponder the dilemma you face from claiming that the Earth cannot provide enough decent food, clothing, housing, health care and education for all its inhabitants:

Do you support the actual position where a majority of people in Western countries have their needs in these fields met to some degree while one-quarter of the world's population suffer from starvation? or
Do you support a sharing out of what limit resources you think there are to satisfy these needs amongst the whole world population, ie. involving a further reduction in living standards in the West?

 

[love detective]

You and Dr Jon are like two sides of the same blinkered coin

Sorry but got no more time to go round in circles with you on the detail of this one - your stock response to anyone who doesn't agree with you that they must then be a supporter of capitalism (or can't see past money) gets a bit tedious after a while. Especially when they bear no relevance to the point that you are supposedly addressing with them

There's nothing wrong with a bit of utopian dreaming to inspire a progressive move forward in humanity's way of organising society, but your extreme utopianism does not help that cause one bit.

I'd suggest you take a step back from this, have a go at reading marx's capital so that you get a better grasp of the various categories that you're currently conflating, and then revisit the topic in light of that. Preferably with a more materialist outlook on the resource, energy and environmental problems that will face any kind of future society, however they may be organised

 

[Jean-Luc]

Retired hurt.

 

[love detective]

 

[SpineyNorman]

Well, you could start by taking your hands away from your eyes and looking at the facts.

No U.

Then, you could produce the evidence to back up your claim that "we're already at the absolute limit in terms of hydrocarbons extraction".

Very long thread with plenty of debate on the subject here: http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/peak-oil-was-petroleum-geolgist-explains-us-war-policy.1506/

Then, you could produce the evidence to show that we could not use solar energy and nuclear power as non-C02 producing substitutes for the burning hydrocarbons.

In addition to the above thread, there's plenty in here: http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/systemic-collapse-the-basics.234281/

Then, you could consider how many resources could be saved to produce what people need if there was no arms production.

Nowhere near enough is the answer to that one.

Then, you could ponder the dilemma you face from claiming that the Earth cannot provide enough decent food, clothing, housing, health care and education for all its inhabitants:

Do you support the actual position where a majority of people in Western countries have their needs in these fields met to some degree while one-quarter of the world's population suffer from starvation? or
Do you support a sharing out of what limit resources you think there are to satisfy these needs amongst the whole world population, ie. involving a further reduction in living standards in the West?

The facts are the facts - seems a bit daft to ignore reality just its consequences get in the way of utopian dreams. Something about looking reality in the face and pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

By the way, the "centuries of coal" ignores the fact that those calculations were made years ago, when consumption was far lower and did not project for increased demand. It also completely ignores carbon emissions.

And the problem with using solar energy etc. is that a complete new infrastructure would need to be built, and this would mean using vast quantities of fossil fuels. Not exactly easy when we're already running at capacity.

You can keep dreaming if you want, I'd rather take reality as it actually is as my starting point and work out what the best steps toward a more progressive society might be in the here and now - with an eye to the long term. You can't legislate against reality Jean-Luc. Sorry but it's true.

 

[Jean-Luc]

If LD would take his head out of the sand and read the reports of the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the WHO lying around him he'd realise he is wrong to claim that the Earth could not provide enough to decently feed, clothe, house, educate, provide healthcare, etc the whole world's population.

In the meantime I've followed his advice and re-read Marx's Grundrisse (I'm a fast reader) and have come across this passage:

The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis.

But first you have to plough through pages and pages devoted to refuting LD's idea that you can abolish commodity-production ("production based on exchange value") while leaving money intact. What a fuckwit!

 

[love detective]

the quote you post is all about the appropriation of surplus value through the existence of wage labour - which I agree is the main issue that needs to be confronted if a capitalist society is to be overturned (unlike you who believes the crux of the issue to be the existence of money).

why are you quoting something that contradicts what you've been arguing for on this thread?

if you'd actually read the texts you're referring to rather than just desperately googling around trying to get some quote that you think backs up your case, then you'd be able to approach this discussion in a much more productive fashion

 

[SpineyNorman]

If LD would take his head out of the sand and read the reports of the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the WHO lying around him he'd realise he is wrong to claim that the Earth could not provide enough to decently feed, clothe, house, educate, provide healthcare, etc the whole world's population.

In the meantime I've followed his advice and re-read Marx's Grundrisse (I'm a fast reader) and have come across this passage:
But first you have to plough through pages and pages devoted to refuting LD's idea that you can abolish commodity-production ("production based on exchange value") while leaving money intact. What a fuckwit!

Nobody has said there isn't enough food for everyone now Jean-Luc - In fact I explicitly said the opposite.

Although even as it stands now there's not enough luxury food for everyone. Which means rationing of some kind.

LD knows way more about Marxist economics than I do so I'll leave it to him to refute your misrepresentation of the Grundrisse.

 

[Jean-Luc]

the quote you post is all about the appropriation of surplus value through the existence of wage labour - which I agree is the main issue that needs to be confronted if a capitalist society is to be overturned (unlike you who believes the crux of the issue to be the existence of money).

No, that's not what it is "all" about. It's also about the degree of labour productivity eventually, thanks to modern technology, reaching such a high degree that individual commodities would have so small a labour-content as to have a near-zero price. At that point, says Marx, production for sale ("commodity production") no longer makes sense as these products could be given away free. But to realise this the means of production would first have to become the common property of society (the "associated producers").

In any event, to imagine that a circulating currency could survive the abolition of wage-labour is to misunderstand completely Marx's "critique of political economy". Political economy claimed (on the basis of limited resources and infinite needs) that commodity production, money, wage-labour, capital, profit, etc were natural, eternal categories. Marx's critique was that they were only categories peculiar to one particular phase of historical evolution and which would disappear in the next (communism). You are just plain wrong to assume that he would have evisaged some of these categories (commodity production, wage-labour for instance) disappearing while another (money) would continue.

As we have already agreed, in the end it does not really matter what Marx may or may not have said, but historical accuracy and intellectual honesty require recognising that Marx did stand for the abolition of money (as well as of wage-labour and commodity production).

 

[butchersapron]

That passage talks about that situation happening in capitalist conditions, of a sort of communism of capital, not after common ownership of the means of production has been established.

 

[love detective]

No, that's not what it is "all" about. It's also about the degree of labour productivity eventually

It touches on it yes - but as you were quoting in response to you being ridiculed that there would be no shortages and no environment/resource/energy problems in your utopian society, it hardly seemed worth mentioning this as it done nothing to support the point you continually keep asserting

In any event, to imagine that a circulating currency could survive the abolition of wage-labour is to misunderstand completely Marx's "critique of political economy". Political economy claimed (on the basis of limited resources and infinite needs) that commodity production, money, wage-labour, capital, profit, etc were natural, eternal categories. Marx's critique was that they were only categories peculiar to one particular phase of historical evolution and which would disappear in the next (communism). You are just plain wrong to assume that he would have evisaged some of these categories (commodity production, wage-labour for instance) disappearing while another (money) would continue.

you mix up a lot of things here

firstly, i don't think anyone here (you, me or marx) would claim that money did not exist prior to wage-labour/capitalism. So for you to then assert that it is absurd to suggest that money could exist in a non-capitalist society (in the senses that money is joined at the hip with capitalism) is not just rationally/logically incorrect but empirically absurd also. (you also automatically assume that the breakdown of a capitalist society would be followed by something more progressive, which again shows there are no limits to your utopian assumptions, even where there is no basis for those assumptions). Money in various forms has existed for thousands of years in societies based on all kinds of different modes of organisation, so for you to tie it in this tightly to a mode of production that has only existed for a couple of hundres years shows a woeful ignorance of what has went before us - as you suggest further on in your post a certain amount of historical accuracy and intellectual honesty is required here.

Secondly, while you're on the whole correct about Marx's critique in regards to the categories of wage-labour and capital. You misread him in regards to other categories such as money and commodity production. A commodity producing society is not the same thing as a capitalist society. A society with markets is not the same thing as a market society. And a society with money is not the same things as a capitalist society. So while you were correct in general about Marx's approach - you've either dishonestly brought in a few other categories to which it did not apply in the sense that you assert it applies, or you've just genuinely misunderstood him. Either way, getting it wrong (either intentionally or mistakenly) doesn't do much to progress your case here

Thirdly, I've not even been using Marx to support any of the arguments i've been making here about how use values would be distributed in a progressive non-capitalist society. I've used him to the extent that I see the productions of use values as commodities by wage labour as the fundamental/critical thing to overcome if society is to ever progress beyond capitalism (the reason i urged you to understand his work more coherently so you would get off this focus on surface money as the problem). A lot of my ideas about how things could work are informed from my reading of Marx, but as you should know if you have read his work in any detail - he largely focuses on a critical analysis of existing capitalism and gives little time or attention (in the scientific sense) to creating blueprints as to how some future society might function. In a sense, he's the exact opposite of you. He concentrated on trying to understand the society we are living in, in order to be better placed to try and change it - you concentrate on imagining a society you'd like to live in with no consideration given to either how it woud work or how you would get there. Idealism personified.

As we have already agreed, in the end it does not really matter what Marx may or may not have said, but historical accuracy and intellectual honesty require recognising that Marx did stand for the abolition of money (as well as of wage-labour and commodity production).

see above

 

[Jean-Luc]

Although this discussion is becoming a bit more civilized, it is also becoming more esoteric and marxologist, but the fact is, LD, that you are just plain wrong about Marx and money.

In his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (which was published in his lifetime and is in fact largely devoted to an analysis of money) he says that "money, though a physical object with distinct properties, represents a social relation of production", ie a relation "of people to the productive activities of one another". Later he refers to "money, the universal form of labour in bourgeois society". From this it is clear that he regarded money as an expression of the same social relation of production as commodity-production and wage-labour.

In a draft published after his death he deals with the specific point you raise:

Money may exist and has existed in historical time before capital, banks, wage-labour, etc. came into being. In this respect it can be said, therefore, that the simpler category expresses relations predominating in an immature entity or subordinate relations in a more advanced entity; relations which already existed historically before the entity had developed the aspects expressed in a more concrete category. The procedure of abstract reasoning which advances from the simplest to more complex concepts to that extent conforms to actual historical development.

From which I take his point to be that in pre-capitalist societies money (as a social relation) existed only in an immature form which only becomes fully developed in capitalism.

In any event, your argument that because commodity production and money existed before capitalism this means that they are not specifically capitalist economic categories and so could exist in a post-capitalist society is a two-edged sword. (Incidentally, this was the standard argument of defenders of the old USSR being socialist despite the continued existence there of production for sale and of money.) It's that wage-labour too existed before capitalism.

In his classic The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World G.E.M de Ste. Croix devoted a 25-page section to discussing "hired labour" in Ancient and Hellenistic times, showing that, though marginal, wage-labour did exist. So, on your logic, a case could be made out for saying that wage-labour too could survive capitalism .....

 

[love detective]

so your Marx quote basically back up what i'm saying (once again) - money has existed both prior to and therefore has the ability to exist after a capitalist society - i.e. they are not joined at the hip - and that money in any particular mode of production takes on the characteristics of that underlying mode of production

no one is saying that money does not take on a different form (to that which it has in other types of society) when it manifests itself as a specific form from within capitalist social relations - in fact that has been my argument since the very first post on this thread - that money as we know it under capitalism is nothing but an expression of those social underlying social relations - and therefore what needs to be attacked & destroyed is the underlying social relations that produce it, not the expression in and off itself (which is what you advocate in your world without money)

you seem to think that this thing money (which under capitalism is an expression of capitalist social relations) has the capacity to retain the same characteristics even though the underlying social relations which give life to those characteristics no longer exists - that is why you are so anti-money in a non-capitalist society. I can't see why you think this, but I can see why if you did think this you would be wary of money existing in a post-capitalist society, but the simple fact is that you are wrong, completely and utterly wrong to think that something that is but an expression of something else will exist in the same way if the underlying social relations which gave rise to it no longer exist. I may have to have someone send for a five year old child as this is so blatantly obvious

I'll say it once again, you really should take the time to properly read, in context & methodically,the things you're trying to use to back up your points - then you might be able to actually back up your points with them, instead of backing up the points of those you are arguing against

edit: also re your quote from the critique - of course he was talking about money under capitalism so it's no surprise that he sees it as a manifestation of underlying wage-labour social relations - as to how you get from this to posit that money represents these things independently of the social relations that produce it is really beyond me - i can't believe you actually put that quote forward thinking it backed up your point - you numpty

 

[Random]

on your logic, a case could be made out for saying that wage-labour too could survive capitalism .....

Surely this must be true in theory. Unless you think ancient Greece and Rome were capitalist societies?

A society dominated by wage labour, commodity production and blah de blah all the rest is what we loosely call a "capitalist" one. A society dominated by from each according to ability, to each according to need could still involve some wage labour or even use of money, but it would be marginal to how society would be reproduced.

 

[Jean-Luc]

This is turning from a discussion as to whether or not there can be money in a post-capitalist communist society based on the common ownership of the means of production into whether or not Marx stood for the end/disappearance of money.

LD may or may not be right in thinking that money could/should survive capitalism (I think he's wrong) but his case rests on its merits (or demerits) and not on what Marx said. It so happens, though, that he is wrong about Marx.

If Marx was not "against" money, how explain:

1. His passionate denunciations in his early writings of the corrosive effect of money on human relations and his characterisation of it as one of the main incarnations of the alienation of the species-being?

2. The pages and pages in the Grundrisse (and passing references elsewhere) criticising those who wanted to abolish money but retain commodity production (production for sale on a market) if he didn't himself agree with the abolition of money and was making the point that to do this you'd have to end commodity-production too.

3. As is well known, Marx mentioned "labour-time vouchers" as the way to overcome shortages in the earlier days of communism pending it becoming possible to go over to "from each according to their ability, to each according to the needs". But he made it clear that such vouchers were not money. Why would he say they weren't money if he thought that money could exist in a communist post-capitalist society?

I have elsewhere examined thoroughly the Utopian idea of “labour-money” in a society founded on the production of commodities. On this point I will only say further, that Owen’s “labour-money,” for instance, is no more “money” than a ticket for the theatre. Owen presupposes directly associated labour, a form of production that is entirely in consistent with the production of commodities. The certificate of labour is merely evidence of the part taken by the individual in the common labour, and of his right to a certain portion of the common produce destined for consumption. But it never enters into Owen’s head to presuppose the production of commodities, and at the same time, by juggling with money, to try to evade the necessary conditions of that production.(Capital, Volume 1, chapter 3)

In the case of socialised production the money-capital is eliminated. Society distributes labour-power and means of production to the different branches of production. The producers may, for all it matters, receive paper vouchers entitling them to withdraw from the social supplies of consumer goods a quantity corresponding to their labour-time. These vouchers are not money. They do not circulate.(Capital, Volume 2, chapter 18).

But, as I said, the case against LD's scheme is not that it's not what Marx envisaged, but that it doesn't make sense. Money arises from exchange (the buying and selling of commodities) and implies exchange; exchange implies separate owners; communism means that production is organised socially so there are no private producers producing goods to be exchanged; communism means that what is produced is socially owned; so the problem is not how to sell what has been produced, but how to share it out amongst the members of society. One method of doing this could be consumption vouchers (whether based on work done or general entitlement), but not money because money implies exchange and "within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products".

 

[love detective]

you could have saved yourself a lot of time and paid attention to my post 102 which said:-

I've not even been using Marx to support any of the arguments i've been making here about how use values would be distributed in a progressive non-capitalist society.

You still clearly have no idea what you're talking about though - the fact that you now talk about the fact that you would be 'ok' with consumption vouchers which pretty much describe what I have been talking about all along (i.e. tokens that are issued to people to allow them access to the use values they need, and by extension restrict free & unlimited access to society's output - and i have no problems with the fact that these would 'circulate' as they would help to efficiently redistribute use values already produced) - yet you are still wedded to this idea that the charactersitics of money under capitalism would remain the same when the social relations that give rise to those characteristics are no longer present. You really should try and understand Marx in context, not take what he says about money (or any other aspect of life )under capitalism and project that meaning onto a non-capitalist society

Notwithstanding the above, once again your quotes from Marx do more to back up my point than make yours - for example the quote from vol1 is in relation to the idea of labour money - something I have not argued for here, in fact I have argued the opposite of it. Can you show me anywhere on here where I have said that the issuance of these money like tokens would be linked to labour? No you can't. And the quote from volume 2 pretty much shows that Marx is in agreement with me that some kind of token would be used to both restrict and allow access to the fruits of society's labour - something you were shitting your pants with rage about earlier when i mentioned the necessity of such a thing. You should also note that this quote talks about money-capital being eliminated when production is socialised, which is something I have also been saying all along, i.e. the ability for money to function as capital will not exist in a progressive non capitalist society, leaving any kind of money that did exist as a benign thing, something subordinate to humanity's needs, not the other way around as it is now. So once again your quickly googled and poorly understood Marx quotes that you haven't read in context actually sit more comfortably with my arguments than yours. You haven't read any of these books (vol1, vol2 etc..) that you are randomly mining for quotes have you?

The pages and pages in the Grundrisse (and passing references elsewhere) criticising those who wanted to abolish money but retain commodity production (production for sale on a market) if he didn't himself agree with the abolition of money and was making the point that to do this you'd have to end commodity-production too.

You've got this upside down as well - his point about criticising those who wanted to abolish money but retain commodity production is exactly the very first point I made on this thread about the pointlessness of getting rid of the pope and retaining the system of catholicism - once again your hastily scrambled together points about Marx, support my arguments against you. Marx agree with me that the crux of the problem is the production of use values for sale by wage labour. Thereby to focus on the problem as being one that requires the abolishment of money as the main objective (which the OP does in this thread), entirely misses the point about what makes capitalist society exploitative

His passionate denunciations in his early writings of the corrosive effect of money on human relations and his characterisation of it as one of the main incarnations of the alienation of the species-being?

again you're projecting an ahistorical view on what marx says about a historically specific set of social relations and the expressions of those relations (i.e. the use of money under capitalism)

 

[Jean-Luc]

the fact that you now talk about the fact that you would be 'ok' with consumption vouchers which pretty much describe what I have been talking about all along (i.e. tokens that are issued to people to allow them access to the use values they need, and by extension restrict free & unlimited access to society's output)

Actually, I'm not really ok with consumption vouchers (except under temporary and exceptional circumstances) but my point was that Marx did not regard them as money. I gave you a chance to say that your "money like tokens" were consumption vouchers (that would be cancelled on use and so would not circulate any more than a ticket for the theatre after it's been used) and not money, but you didn't take it. You said your "money-like tokens" would circulate, ie would be money not a mere consumption voucher. If you want a second chance to correct yourself on this I'll give it you. Then we can discuss whether, under what circumstances and for how long consumption vouchers might be needed (a different debate as to whether money could exist in a society based on the common ownership of the means of production). Or you can dig yourself deeper into the hole by insisting that they will circulate and explain how (presumably through the stores and then on to their suppliers, etc?).

Can you show me anywhere on here where I have said that the issuance of these money like tokens would be linked to labour? No you can't.

No, I can't. And I never suggested you did since I guessed that you didn't. I was more concerned with the second part of those two Marx quotes: that the vouchers Marx mentioned would give the holder of them a "right to a certain portion of the common produce destined for consumption", entitling them "to withdraw from the social supplies of consumer goods", which Marx specifically said were not money.

again you're projecting an ahistorical view on what marx says about a historically specific set of social relations and the expressions of those relations (i.e. the use of money under capitalism)

I don't many people who have read Marx's passionate denunciations in his early writings of money and its effects on human relationships will agree with you that he was just objecting to money under capitalism.

I think your basic difference with Marx is that you regard money as a sort of neutral tool while he regarded it as a social relation of production.

 

[love detective]

em - my quote in full for the first point was

the fact that you now talk about the fact that you would be 'ok' with consumption vouchers which pretty much describe what I have been talking about all along (i.e. tokens that are issued to people to allow them access to the use values they need, and by extension restrict free & unlimited access to society's output - and i have no problems with the fact that these would 'circulate' as they would help to efficiently redistribute use values already produced)

I edited this shortly after posting it to include the bit about circulating but that was a long time before your reply above

so i specifcally address the point that i have no problems with them circulating to help in the efficient distribution of use values to those who need them

As for the rest I really can't be arsed with your fuckwittery - you continually conflate marx's analysis of a set of historically specific social relations with an ahistorical universal determination of things

you're really tying yourself in knots here - any kind of society will have an underlying set of social relations which the reproduction of that society is based on - these can also be looked at as the relations of production. You seem to think that relations of production is a specifically capitalist thing, and point towards money being an expression of those relations of production and therefore a bad thing. You don't seem to get it that the relations of production is a general phrase, and relations of production could be capitalistic or socialised/progressive. So devoid of any consideration of underlying social relations and relations of production, these money like tokens to which I refer cannot be anything other than neutral, because until you bring into consideration a specific set of social relations/production relations, you cannot pass judgment as to what this society would be like. yet you continually conflate and prioritise the expressions/phenomenal manifestastions of those underlying social relations with the actual social relations that produce them. You adopt exactly the kind of upside down approach to political economy that Marx detested - which is why your attempts to use him to back up your points always leaves you on your arse

It might be useful here to draw on another category and look at Marx's comments about it to demonstrate how poorly you are using him here. Take the act of labour for example, work. Now throughout Capital there are countless passages where Marx demonstrates how labour/work under capital is the antithesis of humanity, it is debilitating exploitative etc. Does this mean we can take Marx's comments about labour under capitalist social relations and say that labour in any society will have these characteristics? of course we can't, that would be absurd. Because Marx's critique was a critique of these things as they are under capitalist social relations. You cannot take these things out of the social relations which condition them and say those things would apply under a completely different set of social relations (while we're here, and given your misunderstanding of Marx's critique - I bet you would even argue that there won't be any need for surplus labour in your great new society - again because you think because Marx critiques surplus labour under capitalism you think that it won't or shouldn't exist in a progressive/non-capitalist society. But it will, the existence of surplus labour in a society tells us nothing about the nature of that society - what tells about the nature of that society is the way in which the surplus labour is extracted, the form in which it takes and the manner in which it is distributed)

In short, you don't understand the topic matter your attempting to use - you haven't read any of it in context or as part of a methodological attempt to understand it. This is apparent both from your initial contributions on this thread and latterly your increasingly poor use of Marx to contradict the points that you're trying to make

I'm going to leave you to it now - you money first clown