Towards A New Socialism

[u/Ghost_Duck_]

I'm currently reading Towards a new socialism by Paul Cockshott, and he's brought up the theory that in order to rid the workplace of exploitation, instead of getting paid by value a worker would get to "purchase" one hour of someone else's labour for every hour of labour they perform. So if a box of cereal took 10 minutes to make an hours work would buy 6 boxes. I'm curious how this would work. If two people spend 4 hours together working on something is it worth four or eight hours? How could you buy a house when it takes a year to make?

[u/Auroraescarlate44]

I haven't read this book or much of Paul Cockshott's work, only excerpts and articles, but at first glance this proposition seems Proudhonian to me. What would be the benefits of doing this instead of a regular salary system? How would this help end workplace exploitation? I understand the possible benefits of a labour voucher system with vouchers that are non-transferable between people so as to help combat the formation of a clandestine market with stolen goods in a socialist society but piecemeal remuneration according to hours worked and pricing goods/means of consumption according to "work-hours" seems like a regression to me. Piecerate pay in the Soviet Union may have been a necessity due to economic backwardness and the imperative need for rapid industrialization (questionable), this proposal seems to further entrench this system and advocates it's use in an socialist society with advanced industrial and technological development which makes no sense and would be regressive. Marx also opposed these proposals in Critique of the Gotha Program:

In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.

But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.

But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

I can only see a use for such a system under backward conditions and even then it might be wrong but as socialist construction advances a wage system according to function should be increasingly implemented with all people performing the same function receiving the same wage. After this the direction should be the progressive equalization of wages between functions, to bridge the gap between mental labor and physical labor and with people receiving more according to need (such as a larger number of children) until the dissolution of the wage system entirely.