https://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/gik/1930/index.htm
"Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution" was written in 1930 by Council Communists who were opposed to how the USSR was being run. It explains how a communist economy could be run using objective labor-time as the regulating mechanism and unit of account.
Some quotes :
"Whilst reformist Social Democracy conceived of realising communism through a continuous and gradual process of nationalisation, the revolutionary Bolshevik tendency considered that a revolution was necessary in order to complete the process of nationalisation. Thus the conception of the men from Moscow is based on fundamentally the same theoretical methods as that of the reformists. " TLDR, communism is not nationalizing everything. Communism as nationalization is SocDem revisionism that doesnt understand that the real problem with capitalism is not just who owns what, but that the products themselves dominate the lives of people.
"It was especially after the experience of the Paris Commune that the view began to gain ground with Marx that the organisation of the economy could not be realised through the state but only through a combination of the Free Associations of the Socialist society." Slow down Anarchists, this doesnt mean Marx is anti-statist, he is saying that the new economy is something consciously built and run by the working class, rather than the state running everything. The state has nothing to do with the economy, but it will still exist as the political force used by the working class to dominate all other classes through violence.
"Marx therefore took his stand upon the concept of the "Association of Free and Equal Producers". This Association, however, has nothing in the least to do with the vague concepts of 'mutual aid' which are currently circulating, but has a very material basis. That basis is the computation of the labour-time which is necessary in order to produce use-values. As will be demonstrated in the course of this text, this has nothing to do with value."
"Marx also very clearly indicates the labour-hour as the unit of computation. In his well-known discussion of "Robinson on his Island" he says of this island inhabitant:
"Necessity itself compels him to divide his time with precision between his different functions. Whether one function occupies a greater space of his total activity than another depends on the magnitude of the difficulties to be overcome in attaining the useful effect aimed at. Our friend Robinson Crusoe learns this by experience, and having saved a watch, ledger, ink and pen from the shipwreck, he soon begins, like a good Englishman, to keep a set of books. His stock-book contains a catalogue of the various objects he possesses, of the various operations necessary for their production, and finally, of the labour-time that specific quantities of these products have on average cost him. All the relations between Robinson and these objects that form his self-created wealth are here so simple and transparent that even Mr Sedley Taylor could understand them." We can calculate the exact amount of labor-time required to make anything. Using this data we can plan what and how much to produce. Economic growth is achieved by using new tech that reduces the time to produce things. With modern tech, this kind of accounting and planning is trivial. Communism doesnt need science-fiction level tech or automation to be achieved.
"Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force. All the characteristics of Robinson's labour are represented, but with the difference that they are social instead of individual." The beauty of a communist economy is how transparent and objective everything is. There is no exploitation not because people become morally pure, but because the very basis of this economy makes any attempt at exploitation very transparent and hard to conceal.
Also from the text (actually read for once)
"It is intended gradually to nationalise one industrial enterprise after another. In other words, to replace the private employers with the state, to continue capitalist industry only with a different exploiter ... It (the state) appears as employer in the place of the private employers, and the workers gain nothing from this, although indeed the state has strengthened its power and its means of oppression ... The more bourgeois society comes to realise that it cannot defend itself for ever against the tide of socialist ideas, the more do we approach that moment at which state socialism is proclaimed in real earnest, and the last battle which Democracy has to fight out will be waged under the slogan: "Forward to Social Democracy, forward to State Socialism!" - W. Liebknecht (d.1900)
40 years before Stalinist bullshit, state socialism was already called out by a principled Marxist. It really is a last ditch effort to preserve the value-form, which the bourgeoisie is wise enough to know will contain the germ of capitalism, and save it from complete destruction. Your politics are deader than the Soviet Union, and you can only delude yourself that China is ML while it has less public sector employment than Norway.
In case you still didnt get it, he was being sarcastic in that passage.
Yes I'm anti AES, I thought I already made it clear by linking this text which criticizes the Stalinist concept of socialism. Is that supposed to be some kind of gotcha?
The text is criticizing "State Socialism" as it existed in the USSR, not the NEP, which is just capitalism and Lenin explicitly maintained was capitalism. I cant handle this stupidity anymore. It's clear you have no intention of reading anything at all, being a braindead ML.
State and Revolution by Lenin - not Leninism
Who is even debating about State and Revolution here dumbass. I agree with everything Lenin wrote in State and Revolution. The Stalinist counterrevolution went against what was written in it by disarming the workers.
Btw I want you to know that I am "arguing" with you for entertainment. If you post more boring Stalinist tripe, instead of something new and spicy, I might just not respond anymore
So the issue is not that Stalin is a pedophile but that I mentioned pedophilia?
I love wrecking the glorious Marxist-Leninist movement. It's so fun to destroy China and Cuba by posting passages from Marx. Turns out Marx himself was an ultra wrecker anti-communist
Tell me, tell me, were there ever people who successfully did what you demand for at least two days? Tell us, tell us, was there any practice within the last 200 years of history?
I don't think this really solves anything for functioning communist society if the goal is to abolish the value form, like this carries a substantialist view of value and its use in distribution into communism, when imo the point is that there is no such thing and the goal is to move past that as a way of socially putting value onto goods and distributing to them according to that value. There's some other issues I think with some of the quotes you posted, may edit later.
Also to the whacky Laufenberg comment, uhhh he literally had nothing to do with the text, and nothing to do with the council communist movement at all, like the council communists hated Laufenberg and the other nationalists for their nationalism and abandonment of class struggle lol what on earth are you talking about.
Edit: Okay, your analysis of Marx's support for the state I think is also wrong. Marx was imo decidedly anti-statist in the way you describe in that the organization of society, see this lecture, really ceases to be the state during the revolution (there's no withering period imo in Marx's writing, Lenin got the term from Engels). Not passing judgement on which one of them is more right, just that imo you can't find that position in Marx. Also separating the political and the economic like you did also is totally nonsensical.
Separating the political and the economic like you did also is totally nonsensical.
which was done in parts with this phrase
The state has nothing to do with the economy
Which truly isn't materialist, but utopist. It uses a conception akin to the US discourse about what the state is and that interference in the economy is bad. The state developed in his specific form due to the needs and material reality of the capitalist mode of production.
While it is good to acknowledge that
but it will still exist as the political force used by the working class to dominate all other classes through violence.
It is problematic to act as if you could isolate the state and the economy and the social relations between them and between others and cut them in half like Salomon's baby. There are more substantial critiques in this thread, however I would like to underline that this is utopist post-revolutionary thinking, that takes elements of Marx and draws them away heavily into another idealized place entirely.
The text deals with how the "first stage of socialism" works where the maxim is "to each according to their contribution". The important point is that everything is objective, so questions of distribution can be resolved in a transparent manner. The text explains how the next stage of socialism is gradually achieved, by gradually creating and expanding firms called GSUs that take in labor-inputs, but their output is deducted from the total fund available for individual consumption, thus gradually eliminating even labor-vouchers.
Yeah I don't think that works. Like Appel and Pannekoek and the other councilist's plan do not shed the law of value. Like computing the SNLT of goods and distributing them with these firms in that manner, even when the labor-vouchers are gone, still are not imo producing for need.
Yeah I don’t think that works. Like Appel and Pannekoek and the other councilist’s plan do not shed the law of value.
They are not computing SNLT but the direct labor-time to produce goods. The value-form is abolished because commodities no longer exist. Nothing is produced to be exchanged, nothing has value. When planning production, you need to know how much labor is needed to produce according to a plan, how much labor should be allocated here or there, and whether or not your firm is efficient, by calculating its productivity factor. So labor-time is what is used to rationalize production.
Distribution is done in a way that is decided by the people themselves, but there are some objective laws to follow, for example, some part of the product goes into accumulation, some into social services etc. Using labor-time, it is possible to calculate these things in an exact manner. So the amount of social product that can be consumed individually is exactly known.
even when the labor-vouchers are gone, still are not imo producing for need.
They are producing for need even when using labor-vouchers, because there is no exchange here. Nobody makes money from what is produced.
In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The rightof the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact thatmeasurement is made with an equal standard, labor
[...]
But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emergedafter prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structureof society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the divisionof labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after laborhas become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increasedwith the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow moreabundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety andsociety inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
- Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme
Contrast his point (which was specifically about the SPD and their move away from previous theory) with Volume 3. You will find that there is quite a development in Marx thinking.
Appel (who was not the sole author of this btw) literally wrote articles arguing for the expulsion of Laufenberg and associates for their nationalism and abandonment of class struggle and was part of the council communist movement while Laufenberg was not. There's no reason to bring him in to the discussion of this document other than to attempt to slander it (and I don't even like this document lol). Political opposition to Leninism also has no bearing on its merits, even if it's taking Leninist economic organization and working backwards (which I would in some ways dispute, the bases of a lot of arguments in this document are established in 1918-1920 before coherent Leninist economic policy can even be said to have cohered but it's been reformulated as a critique of the path the USSR took through the 1920s, and significant portions of this document are cooked up while Appel is in jail in 1924 where all he has is Capital volume 1 and 2 and no info on soviet policy, it's not a work produced backwards in those ways), that's a totally valid method of critique lol. How do you think critique works, you take a position and work backwards to discredit it.
If the link is literally wrong, I dunno how I’m supposed to know that.
This draft was subsequently revised and completed in Dutch by a collective composed of members of the Group of International Communists of Holland (GIK) and published in German by the Allgemeine Arbeiterunion Deutschlands (General Workers' Union of Germany) in 1930.
Next line (I understand if you thought this meant just editing though lol, but afaik there were large changes to the text by the collective from GIK who ended up publishing it).
Appel only wrote defending the expulsion of Laufenberg after the KAPD was told their participation in the 3rd international depended on doing so, if you think it is unlikely that the founders of a political party would share common ideology then I doubt I could convince you otherwise.
I mean just look at the first KAPD congress of 1920 notes, (it's before LWC is even distributed widely and actually can you give me a citation where that demand was issued because all I know of is a book chapter by Gilles Dauvé and Denis Authier citing Rühle’s Report from Moscow in the September 1920 issue of Der Kommunist where it's said that Appel and several others agreed in writing to favor the expulsion but it's unclear under what conditions this was and whether the articles for supporting that expulsion were written after the convention where Laufenberg was disavowed but not expelled, like this report is written in Augustish most likely, recounting something that happened in July-August, during which something happening in May-June was recounted, and the report was definitely written after the August congress where Laufenberg is disavowed so the timeline is a very jumbled 5 months. I'm looking for Appel's articles in Kommunistische Arbeiter-Zeitung but may not be able to find them as the archives don't seem to be online, regardless I don't think they were published before the August congress) and 36 to 6 they voted explicitly to disavow all of his ideas (basically only Laufenbergs organization in Hamburg voted for him), and the only reason they don't expel him then is that they demand he quit and could not decide then and there if the KAPD was able to expel its own members. Like the super majority of the KAPD wanted him out long before any sort of order could have been given and disseminated and enforced if Laufenberg had support. The KAPD was formed from several breakaway factions of the KPD, they were not at all tied together ideologically much beyond that anti-parliamentarianism. I mean just look at this quote from the convention about the resolution to disavow him:
I am the author of the resolution. If today the Congress has expressed its desire to have nothing to do with nationalist tendencies, then it is the moral[!] duty of comrades Laufenberg and Wolffheim to cut loose from us. In this way we are distinguished from other parties[!!], where comrades are excluded: we say that we leave it to the comrades' feelings of honour to cause them to depart. Then they say we haven't the courage to declare them excluded. Now the comrades should declare that they have no more business with us. source.
And the preceding result of the vote:
The Congress of the KAPD declares that it cannot agree with the nationalist teaching of Laufenberg and Wolffheim. The workers organised in the KAPD recognise themselves without reservation as international socialists and, as such, reject all propaganda for the revival of nationalist thought in the ranks of the working class.If comrades Laufenberg and Wolffheim continue to propagate their nationalist tendency, they place themselves outside the ranks of the international socialists.
One failure of LWC is that it fails to analyze the movements it's critiquing with enough nuance in ways like this (see Appel's conversation with Lenin about it for several others) but even then that's more a fault of how people use the text today out of its context as a rapidly written pamphlet for the 1920 World Congress of the Comintern.
Edit: had to fix some dates, was off by a couple months and flipped the founding KAPD conference with the August KAPD conference. Also on your edit, yeah I'd reject that notion.
Quote from the Marxists org topic site sayssanford copied the link from:
Left-Wing, Anti-Bolshevik and Council Communism
Index to the works of “Left Communists” (a.k.a. “Council Communists” or “Anti-Bolshevik Communists”) and other ultra-left Communist currents and the debates between Left Communists and the leaders of the Comintern and each other.
It really encapsulates sayssanfords posts in general looking through their history (maybe with slight utopian socialist tendencies).
honestly at that point might as well just recommend The Conquest of Bread and With the Peasants of Aragon (the latter being a first-hand account of how these ideas worked out in practice which I'd say is very helpful for relating to the concepts and considering how they might be applied today)
