| This question <80|80> overall <81|83> Hans: <79|84>. |
| Question 197: Which social forms do the three determinations of value take in Marx's example of a socialist society? |
| [82] Hans: More about Communism Everything is correct in Luc's answer [80] until the point where he explains the meaning of “Expending their many different forms of labor-power in self awareness as one single labor force.” And I am not surprised that he did not get this entirely right because the translation he used (the Vintage edition) is lousy here. The original translation by Moore and Aveling, supervised by Engels, is much better: |
| Let us now picture to ourselves, by way of change, a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labor power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labor power of the community. |
| In socialism, the individual labor powers are pooled on an egalitarian basis. In this respect socialism is similar to commodity production, but socialism does it consciously rather than as the blind side effect of anonymous market interactions. This is a big difference. A socialism organized in this way will almost certainly take the individual circumstances of production into consideration, while the market blithely disregards those circumstances, which can be not only cruel but also counterproductive. |
| Luc gets somewhat similar results, but in a different way. Luc thinks that wages are so low in capitalism because workers do not bargain confidently enough. Even in areas of the country where workers are more confident than in Utah, wages are not that much higher, because the capitalist market is simply rigged against the workers. We will learn more details when we get to Chapter 25. |
| When Luc writes “individuals are working together for the good of society,” then this is a common misconception about socialism which has no basis in Marx. Marx's emphasis has always been that in socialism, society is good for the individuals, it is a benign backdrop enabling individual flourishing, rather than trying to subordinate the individual to society. |
| Regarding the “existence of interactions between the producers” Luc writes: |
| The value of products is common knowledge to all and no exploitation takes place. |
| Marx would even go a step further and say: the concept of value attached to goods as a social organizing principle ceases to exist in socialism. The producers are in direct communication with each other, rather than commnicating only through their goods. |
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