There is a distinct and strong sense of unaware irony in this comment.
46 karma · joined October 26, 2017
There is a distinct and strong sense of unaware irony in this comment.
I think the problem with central planning stretches further; the goal of the Communists is to avoid alienation from one's labour, the non-commodity of labour-power, however having labour being externally imposed (whether by the capitalist and the "market" within capitalist society, or by the central planner within Socialist society) is alienation by definition. Therefore some change in the method of planning is required. Marx wrote that there are four forms of alienation, one which I think is important here is alienation of the worker from the act of production; the Communist movement aims to reject this alienation through making the whole productive capacity of society available to all such that the worker can in almost all cases direct his own labour, all production is social therefore, as all workers contribute.
So the kind of planning in higher stage Communism is much past the idea of a government planning, rather, as Marx wrote (to what some consider a contradiction), society regulates general production. To quote,
>For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
Can you expand on what you mean by this, please? If I understand it correctly, you're saying that organisers of the means of production would draw benefit which is not distributed to the collective of people who "own" the means of production. How would they do this?
I think it is important also to note that capital requires circulation, as in M-C-M', which not only requires money but also the value-form - these two things are what the Communists desire to render useless through the collective control of means of production.
There are strong currents in Communism which are anti-bureaucracy, and insist on models which do not place the economic organisers of a lower-stage Communist society to be above others in terms of access to goods. As I understand it, within Communist society a line is drawn between end goods and goods which will be used for further production.
What is the justification for separating natural resources from other forms of capital? They require labour to extract, transport and refine so in my view they are as much capital as outputs from previous industrial processes.