See earlier exchange dated 27/12/05

As earlier exchange plus responses from Robin, 29/12/05 (‘%%’ at front and indented)

Hi Byron and Robin,

This seems to be a private discussion between you two. I tried to join in and Byron did briefly reply, but then the same discussion continued as if I’d not put in what still seems to me to be a relevant two-pennorth. Here’s that brief exchange again, then my comments (headed by **) on what you two have said to each other.

Byron said: Chris: Maybe that’s why we have such a hell of time convincing others about the need for socialism. They just aren’t ready yet to face the solution to capitalism’s mores. [My apologies to sociologists if I misused that term.] Byron

Which was in reply to my saying:

Hi Robin and Byron,

[Quoting Robin: ‘… I am assuming that people’s appetites in a free access system are not going to be insatiable (contrary to the claims of bourgeois economists); I am assuming a cultural sea-change in attitudes before then.’]

Indeed… Your exchange has been interesting and sensible while you are referring to a period of post-revolution transition from capitalism, where people still have the attitudes and needs of the present day consumer /market-manipulated society, but perhaps it won’t be like that. Perhaps, indeed, the attitude changes will (have to) happen before any revolution can take place, so that ‘come the revolution’ people will already have adapted to engaging in local cooperation with each other and with their bioregion and its capacities. They will have experienced knowing in advance of taking what they need, what they have agreed their needs are going to be, and what their contribution to production will be. There is already much discussion of pockets of experimental local economies starting up in response to the need for ‘energy descent’ in view of Peak Oil, and the best 1/3 of the oil having gone, thus ‘turning a problem into a solution’ in our terms. love, Chris

** Your discussion (below) includes a recognition that attitudes and outlooks will have to have changed prior to ‘revolution’, and yet you discuss mechanisms for imposing rationing on this future society. In my view, if such measures were to be needed, we wouldn’t have got there yet, i.e. to a society capable of living by ‘from each according to her/his means to each according to his/her needs.’

%% (Robin’s reply, 29/12/05)

Though I have put forward a “compensation” model of rationing allowing preferential access to scarce goods to those individuals who are disadvantaged in some way, I don’t assert this is something that will definitely need to be implemented. To be frank I have no idea whether it will be needed. It depends upon so many factors both on the demand and supply side. I do agree that consciousness will need to have changed significantly for free access communism to come into being but I don’t think one can rule out the possibility that specific scarcities may arise from time to time i.e. where the demand for goods is greater than the supply. It is in this context that I put forward the compensation model of rationing as a “fall back” mechanism if nothing else.

** Unless everyone is directly involved in deciding what will be produced – from the available resources, skills, people-time – in order to meet the needs they have identified and agreed, the ‘system’ will descend into a power struggle and classes or fascism will re-emerge.

%%

Yes I agree and that is precisely why I think the local community should be involved in determining who is to get preferential access in the event that certain goods are scarce. I have suggested individuals whose circumstances are somewhat less favourable than others e.g. live in poorer quality housing or who suffer from sort of disability. One can think of other examples. But when push comes to shove I think local communist communities are going to come up with something similar if not the same. It is necessary however that everyone should be involved in deciding this issue on the basis of consensus to minimise the risk of conflict and the likely attendant power struggle you refer to.

** The only way of avoiding delegation of decision making upwards is by basing the society on nodes of community small enough so that everyone is involved, i.e. localisation of the economy, with exceptional production at the least larger scale possible, primarily for durable goods, computers, say.

%%

I would go along with that.

Byron:

Marx’s view and mine are admittedly the same, i.e., we acknowledge that our senses have been altered greatly by capitalism from which we would be emerging. Your point is that prior to our venture we surely must have already conquered the old habits left over from capitalism. This is pure speculation.

** It’s a necessary condition, without which there will be no revolution.

Robin:

Not quite. It follows from the nature of a communist society itself that people need to understand and want it for it to become viable. That in itself implies a sea-change in outlook prior to the establishment of such a society. I wouldn’t want to suggest that every old habit would be jettisoned come the revolution but I question whether it would be the case that such a sea-change in outlook would be insufficient to permit free access to happen virtually straightaway for most goods

** You haven’t said how free access (FA) would be organised. Goods won’t just appear on shelves, people will be engaged in producing them in a conscious, closely involved way – necessarily locally, I believe.

%%

Sure but part of that consciousness is the awareness of what is happening at the point of distribution. A self regulating system of stock control allows us to monitor people’s actual level of consumption and respond accordingly.

My belief is that people become revolutionary after anger sets in. If in fact we ever have socialism, I believe our desire to replace capitalism will happen long before a full-blown awareness of social consciousness has occurred. I admit I don’t know this for sure. It is just a feeling I get when contemplating other social upheavals. It seems to me that people get angry first and want things to change long before they contemplate all of the fine details of how things will be after the change.

** The problem with this idea is that although we have a globalised capitalist economy, the world is not cleanly divided into an owning and benefiting class and an exploited, deprived and potentially angry proletariat. Not everyone is even included in that system. The economist Susan George talked years ago about 80% of people in the West included in capitalism (as owners or workers) and 20% excluded (surviving through alternative means), and in the Third World the spit is reversed. In India, for example, it’s on record that despite ‘development’ and ‘growth’ whereby a minority are thriving in the urban economy in Bangalore etc., 70% of people still live in villages, insecurely reliant on what they grow themselves. These balances are shifting, mainly because capital moves to where labour is cheap, as in China (which still has a huge peasant class), but there must be a question mark over the assumption that those with most reason to be angry are actually going to be able to or inclined to voice that anger and rise up.

%%

This is an important point you raise. Capitalism may be the dominant hegemonic system globally today but pre-capitalist relations of production are still highly significant in some parts of the world. In fact , in Africa the relative weight of self-provisioning agriculture vis-à-vis commercial agriculture has, if anything, shifted in recent decades in favour of the former largely because of the problems associated with the latter and the commercial squeeze on small producers. I have long argued that as the communist movement grows in strength, this growth is most likely to be reflected in the expansion of non-capitalist economic activities – particularly in the west – which may then find common cause with the large “production for use” sector in the so called Third World. Didn’t Marx say something similar about the Russian commune?

Robin:

Yes but even old Charlie Marx made the point that you cannot compare past social upheavals with the communist revolution; there is a qualitative difference which involves a new kind of consciousness

** Indeed, things were simpler in his day. Britain, for example, had lost its peasantry long before, and the owners and workers spit was clear. Marx may have anticipated many of the changes to capitalism we have seen, but he was perplexed, wasn’t he?, about India. (New York Daily Tribune stuff 1852-3)

Earlier exchange:

ROBIN: I would suggest that most of our basic needs could be met and that free access would be appropriate in these instances.

BYRON: Public utilities and normal food staples need not be subjected to LVs. They still must be accounted for however, including the amount of human effort that went into their production.

Robin:

Why? I cant see the point in it. Labour time accounting is rather problematic anyway on several grounds e.g. how do you evaluate different kinds of labour. But if it is a question of ensuring efficient allocation you don’t need to go down this route anyway.

** It’s surely going to be planning and progress monitoring we’ll need, not accounting as we understand that now. Less about numbers, more about real earth, seeds, harvest, crafts, people, pleasure and satisfaction in achievement, problem solving, community, and so on.

%%

True, but calculation in kind will still be indispensable in the new society; indeed it is indispensable to any kind of system of organised production, including capitalism. You can’t talk about seeds for example without specifying how many bags of seeds you may need from your local store.

ROBIN: I think the system would be massively unwieldy and use up huge amounts of resources and labour to monitor. Why not have something much more administratively simpler and direct – a preferential system.

BYRON: Adding labor time to what we already need doesn’t make it “unwieldy.” After all, if I add only one other variable to a list that is already thousands of items long, why does this suddenly become unwieldy? In fact we must know the labor time expended if we are ever to increase efficiency.

Robin:

No you don’t need to. Efficiency comes from economising most on what is most scarce (including labour) and for any bundles of factors we can precisely rank factors in terms of their relative scarcity. Labour time accounting is employing a similar argument made by proponents of the market against calculation in kind in arguing the need for some general unit of accounting – in your case labour time. But it is totally unnecessary.

** ‘Efficiency’ seems like an inappropriate word. It assumes that work is unpleasant and has to be minimised. As for other things which are ‘scarce’, maybe they’ll be different measures of value. A more craft based society would produce beautiful and durable goods produced inefficiently, i.e. laboriously, but enjoyed by producers and users alike.

%%

I am with you completely on the need to make work pleasurable and a craft approach to work would seem to be most conducive to this. But I don’t think efficiency per se is incompatible with this. On the contrary, a skilled craftsman or woman is often very adept at making efficient use of his/her time and materials in producing wonderful and long lasting artefacts. Indeed the very durability of such artefacts is precisely an indication of such efficiency. We still need to address the opportunity costs of production decisions in a communist economy because using resources efficiently to produce a given good means there is more available to produce other goods. If you don’t then the likelihood of particular scarcities materialising is going to increase and the attendant problems this brings to which we referred earlier.

Byron:

In fact I see no more resources expended for this one extra variable than the obvious thousands of tangible ones. Besides, we are not back in the days of hand printed ledgers. Computers can do this work without our even attending to it. The oft repeated charge of excessive “amounts of resources and labour” to keep track of socially necessary labor time usually comes from individuals that have never written a computer program. Factually, it takes only a handful of programmers to solve prodigious data problems, but SNLT is only one variable. Raw material inventories are far more extensive.

Robin:

Yes but don’t forget we are not just talking about keeping track of socially necessary labour time; we are also talking about setting up – necessarily – a huge bureaucratic apparatus for the distribution and monitoring of labour vouchers and working out individuals entitlement to labour vouchers based on their individual labour time. By any stretch of the imagination this is a mammoth undertaking.

** and runs the risk of leading to a minority assuming power.

%%

This is a possibility unless you can devise a way of localising this whole process as far as possible. I am not too familiar with the literature on labour vouchers but maybe Byron can fill us in on this.

ROBIN: How in any case are people ever going to learn to be behave appropriately in a FA system if they don’t actually experience free access first hand? The logic of your argument suggests that people should never have free access because they haven’t experienced it. This is a circular logic: on this basis they never will have free access.

BYRON: I never intimated that FA wasn’t viable because people hadn’t experienced it. My reason was that FA makes it possible to clear the shelves leading to an imbalance of production and consumption.

Robin:

No not at all. This is why I have emphasised the self regulating nature of a system of stock or inventory control. As shelves are cleared this automatically transmits a signal to production units to replenish the goods in question

** I am suspicious of automaticity. At the SPGB, comrades used to get excited about automatic stock control systems at supermarkets, thinking they’re just the thing for a FA society. It assumes the old idea of ‘potential abundance’ made possible by capitalist technology, but we’re already in a world of rapidly depleting resources, especially the best oil. I believe the only way FA would work is if it’s access to what one has agreed in advance one will need, and been involved in some way in producing – but not in a direct ‘earning’ entitlement way – more like in LETS.

%%

I don’t know about this, Chris. You see, I don’t myself see that the automaticity of a stock control system in itself implies potential abundance; I see it simply as a mechanism for linking supply and demand. Whether supply and demand are in balance – i.e. enough is produced to satisfy people’s wants and, ipso facto, there is a state of abundance – is another matter entirely. Resource depletion can impact adversely on the supply side – another reason for the importance of efficiency – but demand too is flexible and I strongly feel that we are likely to see a significant moderating influence on the demand side in a communist economy for reasons I have already touched on – e.g. the pointlessness of conspicuous consumption as a route to status in a free access system. I think demand will fluctuate to largely accommodate – i.e. accept – changes in supply and this will be driven by a strong sense of communist morality and the recognition that we all depend upon each other. I don’t see that it is necessary to agree in advance to what one needs. In fact I am highly dubious of this not least because I think this leads us down the slippery slope to a more centralised economy. If everyone agrees that we shall have one bicycle each then the components of bicycles will have to accommodated and planned for within a steadily expanding input-output matrix. Not only the components of bicycles but also the raw materials from which these components are manufactured. And so on and so forth.

Rather than “agree in advance” what has to be produced which I think is unworkable accept as a very vague and generalised wish list, I think it would be preferable to determine instead a hierarchy of production goals. What should be the production priorities of a communist society and how would these be ranked? Implicit in this is the notion that we may need to curb our consumption of less important goods in order to ensure the availability of more important goods. This is a moral judgement and as such enjoins those who are party to it to follow through with it. Which is why it is necessary that the whole community should be involved at the local level in determining these priorities.

Saying free access would only work if one agreed in advance to what one should have free access to likewise implies a moral commitment – to stick by what one has agreed to – but I think that the problem with this is that invites a free rider approach in a way that a flexible open-ended model of free access does not; it also then raises the sticky problem of how to monitor people’s individual consumption and there is the risk that this might develop into a more formal intrusive structure for policing consumption to make sure that everybody sticks to what was agreed in advance. I am not opposed to monitoring other people’s consumption per se but I would rather this would be done informally and that the hypothetical problem of individual over-consumption (the greedy person) be dealt with through moral persuasion and making people aware of the implications of excessive self-indulgence, so to speak, in a face to face fashion.

Byron: Your model is akin to ‘Just get in the car and drive. Sooner or later you will learn how its done.’ I feel that driving lessons are essential BEFORE we get behind the wheel. LVs provide the lesson that there is a connection between production and consumption. The logic here is not “circular” as you have suggested. If this were true education would be senseless.

Robin:

But to continue with your analogy at what point would it be acceptable to “get behind the wheel” as opposed to taking driving lessons. I presume by “driving lessons” you are talking about the theory side of driving e.g learning the highway code & the basics of how a car works. But in terms of the communist revolution surely the lesson to be learnt about the link between production and consumption is something that would have already been understood well enough in advanced of the revolution and that to that end the movement would have already established production priorities which imply an awareness that we might have reduce our consumption of some things (e.g. luxuries) in order to increase the output of necessities...

ROBIN: Yes but you are still rationed in the sense that you cannot take more than the value of the labour vouchers in your possession; what you can take is restricted to this.

BYRON: You have conveniently redefined the word “rationed” to mean anything with restrictions. This is not the usual definition of this word. Rationing is usually accompanied with an arbitrary allotting of goods. There is nothing arbitrary about the time crystallized in LVs. It reflects the actual amount of time spent being productive. LVs certainly indicate that you can’t take however much you please. You are restricted only by your own productive efforts.

Robin:

Well I was thinking of rationing in terms of some kind of institutional or external/objective mechanism that mediates between your wants and the appropriation of goods that satisfy these wants. For example the wages system is in my book a form of rationing. So are labour vouchers in my view. And it is not true that there is nothing arbitrary about the time crystallised in LVs. For example, what if the community decided to increase production capacity by curtailing consumption. The value of LVs would surely be arbitrarily affected in this event

ROBIN: This seems to me to be a much more flexible and sensible way to go about it rather postponing the introduction of FA pending a change in attitudes which should have happened anyway if communism was to be established in the first place.

BYRON: As already alluded: you don’t know this to be the case! What “should have happened anyway” is something on your wish list. Since you don’t know how the future will be played out you can’t pontificate on this matter. I want to eliminate possible problems rather than trusting to a seer-like foreknowledge of the future.

Robin:

Sure I understand what you are saying here, Byron – that you want to provide a kind of safety net in the event that things go wrong. All I am suggesting to you is that this is not necessarily the most effective kind of safety net on offer. I still consider free access with a backup system of direct rationing for scarce goods is preferable

** I lost track of who said what in the end, sorry. What interests me is how people will/are discover/ing new ways of living together cooperatively ‘despite’ capitalism, and how seeds of new attitudes and values might spread, also what obstacles might be put in their path when these trends become visible and potentially de-stabilising towards capitalism. (Another topic that’s come to my attention is what levels or nodes of cooperation will be needed on a broader scale than the small-enough-to-be-involved-in-all-decisions grassroots level?)

%%

Another very interesting – and important – point. Perhaps what we ought to be doing is to try to reach out to those people who “will/are discover/ing new ways of living together cooperatively `despite’ capitalism”. Many if not most of these do not see themselves as part of a political movement while we in the non-market anti-statist sector are perhaps too politically focussed. There is common ground enough upon which we could surely meet.

love, Chris

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