/edu/ - Education

Engels talks about socialism transforming man into an animal whivh no longer seeks trade, and is self-sufficient, giving and taking as he sees necessary from the honeypot of social labor.
This idea was discussed as "the new soviet man" as opposed to the dependent western subject.
Socialism is a transition to a stateless moneyless society, not an instant transformation

>>19799
What if someone takes much more than they need?

>>19800
Well the utopian idea is that no one would
But realistically there would simply be social customs to disallow this from happening
Like how you dont poison the water hole or curse the corn fields
There have been recordings of monkeys having "fair play" and sharing resources with no external authority - its a natural primate tendency to be considerate and of maintaining balance, especially in the broader scope of maintaining ecosystems.
Liberalism is an anti-life system whereas communism is a return to life.

From my very limited understanding of money (I'm still working through Capital and some Yugoslav Political Economy Course), the problem with money is its dual nature, both as the universal equivalent and as commodity, which is a contradiction because on one hand in capitalist economy it being a universal equivalent means that it should signal value and on the other hand as a commodity it also falls under the laws of value. Resolving this means sublating money to just be a universal equivalent, which can only happen if it accurately shows value, i.e. socially average time of production &c &c but this can only happen after labor is no longer a commodity (because money really is labor in a different form), which is the goal of communist revolution. Some better read anon should correct me if I'm wrong.

>>19800
tube dispenses workers needs to them on press of button

if you press the button twice a sniper kills you instantly

>>19802
sounds like an interesting take but I'm not sure I understand

>>19802
Aesthetically also, money quantifies all social relations, contracting humanity rather than having a qualitative fruition.
Like how marx quotes carlyle (a reactionary) in capital:
>"cash has become the sole nexus between man and man"
The common cause is in escaping the artificial prison of liberalism

>>19805
Good point. Value is a social phenomenon, in particular a mediator between people and other people, and if money signals value, and itself is a commodity that means all human relations are commodified. It's quite clear how alienation ties into all this…

Computerised voucher system entitles you to 1/8billionth of the world's consumer goods output

>>19806
Its the strange thing about capital - that in materializing a store of value for your labor you immediately become dislocated by it, seeking to regain the wholeness which was lost, but gained incash, as an anonymous token - seeking endless circulation and accumulation. People become slaves and puppets to a piece of paper, which they sprawl their soul onto.
Its the interesting thing of when you work for your family or yourself, there is a value in its engagement, yet there is a terror in having a job and being paid. Theres something terribly unnatural about having a "job", but work comes naturally.
Even the rich are miserable. The only apotheosis is consumption, but it has no lasting remedy.

Marx and Engels had a very specific idea about what money is and virtually no Marxists actually follow them in that. If you have enough of it, you can use money to obtain means of production and hire people and sell the output they produce. This is only a realistic option for a minority of people, so it's not really the first thing on everybody's mind when they hear the word money. For Marx and Engels, money without that feature, money that you could still use to obtain consumer items, would not be money anymore. M & E never published a text with the sole purpose to educate people about the distinctions between these labor vouchers and money, instead there's a footnote in Capital I and another one in Capital II, so you easily miss that. And it's in Critique of the Gotha Programme, which was only published after the death of Marx.

But even the absence of consumption budgets would not logically imply waiting queues and chaos. One could use requests with item rankings or whatever (I am not advocating that). A thing that has been mentioned in the cybernetic socialism threads is this: When you have at least as many units of an item in a pile of produced outputs as there are people to allocate to, you can guarantee that everyone asking for one unit of it gets that. This idea can be generalized with a use-value tree: When there are enough units in a broader category of items, you can guarantee everyone to get one of those things. This can be combined with a social tree (you are a member of a group that is part of a super-group which is part of a super-super-group etc.) to make minimum delivery guarantees to groups.

>>19809
Would you mind searching up those footnotes?

>>19811
Thank you very much comrade.
>Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return – that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent – a misfortune.

>>19800
Why? What would they do with it? They can't really trade trade it since in this scenario most if not all things would be free.

>>19809 (me)
>>19811 (not me)
Huh? Actually I had these two in mind:
<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 pre-supposes directly associated labour, a form of production that is entirely inconsistent 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.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch03.htm
<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.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch18.htm

>>19800
why would they take more?
not like they could exchange it later on or fear shortage

>>19800
More of what? Not money, certainly, as that wouldn't exist. Food would be fine I suppose, but you need somewhere to store it, and it goes off fairly quickly. Plus, assuming you're just taking it to eat, you'd ultimately not use any more of it than any other person over the course of your life. If there was only enough for exactly 2000 calories per person per day, some type of rationing system would presumably be put in place that would make it hard to take more than you had been allocated. Also, yeah, there would be a social imperative to not take more than you needed. Animals are capable of doing it, so we certainly are. The talk about humans being inherently selfish or whatever is just rightoids telling on themselves.

>>19815
>not like they could exchange it later on or fear shortage
well the point would be to accumulate a hoard then deliberately cause a shortage through sabotage in order to take power. Just like the kulaks resisted collectivization by burning their own grain, kulaks in a communist society could secretly accumulate a hoard, then sabotage the commons

>>19797
Consumption of goods and services
would need to be predicted.

>>19817
>Just like the kulaks resisted collectivization by burning their own grain
And we all know what happened to them, don't we?
But seriously, what would they gain by doing this? Without money, they don't have a motive. And how? They'd have to create their own state apparatus in order to enforce their new-found power (and remember, this is a stateless society, meaning no army or police), and create some type of explanation as to why they deserve to have all of x. For Kings it was divine right, for today's rich it's because they're harder working than everyone else. What would their myth be?

>>19819
i'm just pointing out that even when society is improved, reactionary groups tend to form and support returning things to an old order. Either because they are an aggrieved group that feels like they lost power, or they are the descendants of said group, or they think returning to the old ways would be better, or they're just power hungry. The English and French beheaded their monarchs but the monarchies were restored afterwards, in France, temporarily, in England, permanently. So you can't discount the possibility that things could collapse and go backwards. Revolutionary gains have to be permanently defended. You can't just expect everyone to obey on an honor system.

>>19817
Even if consumption vouchers aren't to be used for whatever reason, that doesn't imply that people just run into a storage place and grab things. There are more than these two ways. People could fill out forms of what they want online using the method alluded to in the second paragraph of >>19809.

Overly simplistic example: Suppose there are 100 people in a commune and they use this method to allocate some stuff. There are 110 packets of rice, 80 apples and 40 pears to allocate. This means you can guarantee at least one packet of rice to anyone in the group asking for it. You cannot make such a guarantee to people in the group asking for apples, nor to people asking for pears. However, you can offer the set "apples or pears" and guarantee anybody in the group gets an item from that set if they ask. There are two sisters in the group who are officially registered as super-comrades of each other. You can guarantee that at least one person from the two sisters as well as from any other super-comrade group gets an apple. Said more generally, with a group of N people and K units of an item and X people in a subset of that group, you can guarantee at least one unit of such an item going to at least one person in the subset if K is bigger than or equal to N/X. (Keep in mind that these sets of people we are talking about here form a tree.)

>>19797
The palace economies of the bronze age seems to have worked without money.

Look at it like this.
First we centrally plan the economy. Everyone works makes stuff, get money, buys back from the same society wide single institution as a starting point.
Then we start making stuff free of charge. Water and electricity for your home (with some laws against gross waste ofc)? Free. Vegetables at the market? Free. Housing? Free. Education? Free. Then we just keep working until so much is free that you hardly use or earn money anymore, at which point we can just ration the remaining stuff without money.

>>19823
Hmm nice outlining of the future scenario. But will state will remain forever ? Who will defend place against invasion without a state ?

>>19824
nice bait

>>19797
>Do we have examples of what a communist, money-less world would be like?
The average household.

>>19824
You use a different definition of state than Marxists.
For Marxists, a state is a tool used to suppress classes for the benefit of one class. If we have a global state, with no more classes, it's no longer a state. What this means is that it no longer needs to stand above society to oppress certain classes and becomes something hardly recognisable as a coherent state.
The state remains a state of there are outside bourgoies forces trying to undermine it.

>>19827
to add upon this anons definition, state and govs are two different things in marxism. In marxism, after the withering away of the state, there will still be an administrative body with laws, public service and etc. Its just that it wont be a state since it wont be used for class oppression or control.

>>19800
That already happens. It's called being rich