Parsani

I have "The Antonio Gramsci Reader", it seems to have a good range of selections from his entire career. I've only read a few from it so far.

How many funko pops?

So the way I understand it is that more complicated work requires training and/or special talent to be done. An hour of brain surgery is not qual to a hour of ditch digging in terms of the value of the labor but it is still essentially the same thing. A brain surgeon has expended a significant amount of time to be capable of doing brain surgery so the value of the labor is multiplied and is worth more.

This is how I read it the first time, but thought maybe I was misreading.

I wonder how this can be accounted for though. It doesn't figure into the chapter or his example he gives. On the scale of the entirety of social labor, these situations are outliers, so I'm fine with the blunt way he is using labor time, but once he invoked his example of a non-capitalist association I wanted more specificity.

Having these books is actually worse than having no books

but his mates ~~were like "nah"~~ killed him

Chapter 2, footnote 2. Proudhon creates his ideal of justice, of 'justice eternelle," from the juridical relations that correspond to the production of commodities: he thereby proves, to the consolation of all good petty bourgeois, that the production of commodities is a form as eternal as justice.

"Come out Proudhon, you petty-bourgeois bastard!"

Thanks, I'll give that a read.

Actually it might have been David Harvey who originally said it, in that case take it with grain of salt.

Reading capital is haunted by a specter, the specter of Harvey

my interpretation of the Gotha Program is that the labor vouchers presuppose a post-capitalist society which has already abolished private property. The labor vouchers would not serve as money but as a token to receive one's means of subsistence from the social fund; so not for use in private exchange.

That's my read too, vouchers don't really circulate in the formulations of it I've read. The article seems to say that it is still a surrogate even within post-capitalist society. They seem to favor a more volunteerist approach that most communization people seem to do.

Some Marxists will say that it is more aptly described as a value theory of labor

This is interesting, who writes about it like this?

1. Curiously enough, Marx does advocate for something akin to a "moneyless and labor voucher" distribution in Critique of the Gotha Program. Did he ever deal with this again later?

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

The authors of this paper don't seem to be proponents of labor vouchers (like Cockshott, Cottrell, and now Dapprich--in their latest book "Economic Planning in An Age of Climate Crisis):

Although those points are fundamental to solve in reality, our aim here is simply to provide an intuitive vision of how “supply” and “demand” in general could be handled without the value form and other surrogates like vouchers of working time.

and:

A vision of abolishing capitalist mediations, alongside capitalist social forms, has to move beyond the first steps of the socialist society posed in the Critique of the Gotha Programme.

2. When reading, I automatically assumed that this all requires the abolition of private property, but now I'm not quite sure, or at least it isn't as clear as it could be:

It is worth noting that Ostrom received the Nobel prize in Economics for her work, which is a concrete answer to the speculative, while highly influential, The tragedy of the commons by Hardin (1968), where only two forms of governing the usage of common goods exist: either centralized State interventions through planned use or market-based, with a private property regime. Despite certain naivety of this “either-or” argument, it seems that the majority of the debates is still posed as a struggle between (authoritarian or supportive) centralized State versus (free or regulated) distributed markets. Following a Marxist standpoint, in particular, the Value-form Theory presented in Heinrich (2012), whose focus is on the social forms, this article displaces this type of question by arguing that this debate assumes the capitalist forms of relations as fixed points. At this level of abstraction, the value-form serves as the logical articulation of the specifically capitalist social forms, such as commodity, money, labor, capital, State, and Law.

...but not property? Or is that assumed under capital, state and law?

4. ~~They don't seem to be completely focusing entirely on distribution. The most interesting parts of this paper are later on when they are dealing with I-EPOS, and then later with Energy. The article focuses in as it goes, even if it starts and then ends in vague communization lol~~ idk anymore, I-EPOS seems to be designed around consumption/distribution, and their own section on energy seems to be primarily about consumption and hand waves production a little too much. I still find Cockshott, et. al. to have the most convincing way of dealing with production/resource/energy/labor/etc..

idk, I'm going to read it again one day. But I want to look into I-EPOS which seems pretty interesting.

Simple average labour, it is true, varies in character in different countries and at different cultural epochs, but in a particular society it is given. More complex labour counts only as intensified, or rather multiplied simple labour, so that a smaller quantity of complex labour is considered equal to a larger quantity of simple labour. Experience shows that this reduction is constantly being made. A commodity may be the outcome of the most complicated labour, but through its value it is posited as equal to the product of simple labour, hence it represents only a specific quantity of simple labour.15 The various proportions in which different kinds of labour are reduced to simple labour as their unit of measurement are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers; these proportions therefore appear to the producers to have been handed down by tradition. In the interests of simplification, we shall henceforth view every form of labour-power directly as simple labour-power; by this we shall simply be saving ourselves the trouble of making the reduction. p. 135

Is intensified/multiplied labor referring to the use of fixed capital in production? I.e. the machinery as dead-labor whose value is then transferred to the product through living labor, intensifying the value transferred into a commodity per unit of labor-time? Or to forms of labor which are more difficult/intensive/complex?

If the latter, is Marx always considering that 1 hour = 1 hour? I understand how this works in the abstract, but I guess I am just curious how this has implications for the later imagined association of "free men" (though perhaps I am subjecting his "parallel" to too much scrutiny):

We shall assume, but only for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour-time. Labour-time would in that case play a double part. Its apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the correct proportion between the different functions of labour and the various needs of the associations. On the other hand, labour-time also serves as a measure of the part taken by each individual in the common labour, and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption. p 172

Both quotes from the Fowkes translation.