Это окончание невероятной информации про политическая экономия социализма.
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also distributed (above all, education and healthcare services). But in their distribution, forms already shaped on the basis of a complex hybridization of communist and non-communist principles predominate. For example, school education services are distributed under socialism on the basis of equalization, rather than the principle of free access. However, socialism is aimed at the gradual transformation of equalization into free access to education (a transition from providing a standard package of educational services on a territorial principle to organizing education on the basis of establishing free voluntary cooperation between teachers and students).
A number of socially significant goods and services may be provided under socialism on the basis of various combinations of the principles of equalization, distribution according to need (material benefits for those already or still unable to work), and partial payment (housing services, tourism and recreation). The specific set of these goods and services, as well as the specific combination of the principles of their distribution, are historically conditioned and change owing to differences in the particulars of historical development, in the degree to which society is saturated with material goods and services, and so on.
The main mass of material goods and services is distributed under socialism on the basis of the principle of distribution according to labor. This principle largely inherits the laws of distribution of commodity production, but at the same time also differs substantially from them.
"...Every producer receives back from society, after the deductions1 have been made, exactly what he gives to it. <...>
Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form"1 2.
1 This refers to deductions for the costs of administration not directly connected with production, for the social consumption funds, and for the funds for the maintenance of those unable to work. (See: Marx K. Critique of the Gotha Programme // Marx K., Engels F. Collected Works, 2nd ed., Vol. 19, Moscow: IPL, 1961, p. 17).
2 Marx K. Critique of the Gotha Programme // Marx K., Engels F. Collected Works, 2nd ed., Vol. 19, Moscow: IPL, 1961, pp. 18-19.
I will not analyze in detail here all the propositions from the "Critique of the Gotha Programme," where K. Marx specifically dwells on the problem of distribution in socialist society. I only wish to note that Marx in fact emphasizes here the transitional character of the relations of distribution according to labor, pointing to their kinship with the relations of commodity production (while at the same time also noting the differences from them), and advancing the thesis that distribution according to labor implies the presence of elements of "bourgeois right" under socialism.
It should be noted that the remnants of "bourgeois right" that persist under socialism differ from the bourgeois right dominant under capitalism also in a purely quantitative respect. Socialism resolves the question of the just measure of income differentiation differently. The question of justice here is not a question of applying this or that ethical principle to distribution, but a question of the correspondence of the relations of distribution to the dominant relations of production.
Socialism recognizes unequal abilities as a natural privilege, and accordingly recognizes both unequal labor contribution and unequal distribution of income. However, it strictly limits the differentiation of income to the inequality of personal labor contribution, not recognizing the worker's right to claim a higher income on the basis of higher productivity if that productivity is due to an unequal distribution of the social conditions of production. The quantitative measure of such inequality is already fairly clearly outlined in practice under capitalism, on the basis of the experience of workers' cooperatives with a democratic system of management. In such cooperatives, the ratio of the lowest wage rate to the highest (I wish to emphasize — not the decile differentiation coefficient, but precisely the ratio of the lowest wage rate to the highest) is set within the range of 1:3 to 1:6.
Socialism, as an epoch of transition from the hegemony of corporate capital to the formal emancipation of labor, will naturally also include a whole series of more complex transitional forms, combining the distribution characteristic of the nascent "realm of freedom" with mechanisms of distribution inherited from the bourgeois era. In particular, the socialist system will apparently include (at least
in its initial stages) income that citizens will receive from private property, whether labor-based private property, property in shares, or property in money deposited in a bank. In all these cases the income will be non-labor in character and will retain features of bourgeois income. However, here too significant differences will arise in the nature and mechanisms of obtaining this income.
Citizens' deposits of money in nationwide financial institutions (say, in a state bank), or the purchase of shares in enterprises operating under state control and within nationwide programs — all this substantially distinguishes even such income under socialism from income obtained on the basis of the exploitation of labor by private capital and the appropriation of surplus value. At the same time, this income does not automatically become socialist, let alone communist. In order to regulate this type of income in a world in transition from the bourgeois to the new, it will be necessary to use a complex system of parameters that will make it possible gradually to displace such income and to strengthen distribution according to labor.
Let us note two of the most important of these regulators.
The first, known from the experience of social-democratic countries, is a progressive tax on income from property, from capital, from investments in the financial sector. If such income remains within the limits characteristic of income obtained through distribution according to labor, then the tax on it may be relatively low. But if you receive higher income, or income qualitatively different from labor income, then taxation may be very high, reaching 60-70 percent or more.
The second is the so-called social maximum. Its introduction was proposed not only by socialists but also by humanist scholars, theorists of the Club of Rome, in particular Aurelio Peccei. Both showed that beyond a certain limit, an extremely high personal income is not an incentive for entrepreneurship, for innovation, or for more effective labor activity, but instead engenders either thoughtless extravagance or an unbridled thirst for gain. Therefore such income can be withdrawn (for example, through a progressive tax approaching 90% on extremely high incomes) relatively painlessly for lines of activity that are of fundamental importance from the standpoint of the genesis of the creatosphere.
On the System of Social Accounting and Control over the Movement of Income
An important issue for socialist society will be that of controlling the movement of income. And here it is worth recalling the mechanisms that were partly implemented already during the period of the NEP in the USSR1. For such a model of economic and social life, tied to labor and other legal income, various technical means of controlling the movement of income can be used. Some of these are already fairly well known, for example, individual electronic money. If we move to a system in which every individual will have only one bank card (account), and only in one bank, moreover a state bank, then under these conditions accounting for and control over the movement of the income and expenditures of that individual will automatically be ensured. Each of us, having such a card (account), will be obliged to record all our monetary income on it. And it will always be known how and from whom exactly you received this money: wages, a fee, income from a bank deposit, a personal gift, help from your comrades... 1
1 We would like to remind readers of Ilf and Petrov's novel "The Golden Calf," in which the underground millionaire Koreiko, possessing gigantic monetary savings for that time (several million rubles), had no way to spend even a small part of that money, for he lived in a country where labor income and the absence of anything beyond it were the generally accepted norm of behavior.
In the same way, virtually all major expenditures can be recorded (with the exception of small purchases made using cash).
This mechanism develops certain contemporary tendencies. For example, today in Western Europe and the United States of America, purchases for amounts exceeding several tens of euros (dollars) are, as a rule, made using bank cards. The difference is that the contemporary bourgeois world makes everyone's account a commercial secret. Moreover, it allows one to open accounts not in one but in several banks, to transfer money to banks in neutral countries, and by other means to conceal one's income (or, conversely, expenditures). However, even within the bourgeois system, in order to launder illegally obtained money, one must expend enormous effort and considerable sums, losing from 20 to 50 percent of the proceeds in order to legalize these criminal gains. Under conditions of socialism, it is all the more possible to create a system in which such laundering of illegal income becomes extremely difficult, by means of a transition to individual accounts and a system for the accessibility of information about the movement of funds in them.
Of course, the actual disclosure of such information should be more the exception than the rule. It should be regulated by strictly established legislative norms, and used only to suppress violations of the law in the economic sphere.
At the same time, of course, a serious contradiction will arise, one that in general characterizes the use of monetary relations under conditions of socialism. Indeed, for the philistine (the subject of the market), his monetary income and the expenditures he makes are the holy of holies of his personal life, the main constituent of his human personality. For him, any possibility of outsiders (and all the more of public organizations) peering into this his innermost "self" and counting the money in his pocket will be perceived as an infringement of personal freedom, of human rights, of what is not only his commercial but also his spiritual secret — of what in the West is called privacy.
At the same time, if we speak of socialism as a world of the development of the creative human being (a world of free associations, a world moving away from the dominance of commodity and monetary fetishism), then in this case the possibility of social control over the movement of financial resources will not constitute a great moral or personal problem, and will not be a threat to the secrecy of the individual. For the true secret of personal life, for a creative person, is the secret of his communication, his personal relations with friends, his tastes and interests. However, even this secret is quite conditional, and it is each person's own private affair — to publicize or to conceal his creative achievements, his friendships and his enmities, his love and his hatred.
Under socialism, a mass of deviations ("abuses") from the aforementioned mechanisms of distribution will almost certainly persist — the use of social funds, or the funds of enterprises, cooperatives, and other structures, for personal consumption (for example, the use of a company car for personal purposes, as repeatedly occurred under conditions of mutant socialism). But it is precisely for this that a system of democratic social accounting and control is needed, in order to prevent this kind of bureaucratic abuse on a mass scale, and to have future socialist society classify such abuses as criminal offenses.
There is also the danger of the degeneration of the system of social accounting and control into surveillance and the undermining of the secrecy of personal life. But the resolution of this contradiction depends on whether socialist society relies on the development of genuine grassroots democracy, or slides into bureaucratic degradation.
18.3.3. Socialism and Commodity Production
Not only in the relations of distributing consumer goods, but also in other relations of production of socialism, the presence of elements of the relations of commodity production is undeniable, and within certain limits remnants of commodity production may exist as an integral mode of production.
This is connected with the fact that commodity relations have deeper economic roots than the relations of capitalist exploitation, and hence overcoming them is a more complex and historically more prolonged matter. The contradiction underlying commodity production, between the social character of labor and the isolation of commodity producers from one another, cannot be destroyed by "the expropriation of the expropriators." For this, the real socialization of production must rise to a level at which there will be no room for the isolation of producers and the private character of labor, and where, on the contrary, production is directly social (and not indirectly, through the market), and its product ceases to be a commodity, being instead the product of an association that distributes labor among its members.
Since socialism is directly-historically born as the negation of late capitalism (and not of medieval petty commodity production), within the framework of the new economic system what is preserved is not so much the relations of simple commodity production as the market forms of late capitalism (banks and credit, for example).
However, it is entirely impossible to agree with the fairly widespread view according to which socialism could exist on the basis of the relations of commodity production. Apart from the fact that this position has nothing in common with Marxism ("...nothing could be more erroneous and absurd," wrote K. Marx, "than to postulate the control by united individuals over their total production on the basis of exchange value [and money]..."1), it does not withstand either historical or logical scrutiny.
The socialist transformation of society may begin (and inevitably does begin) under conditions of the dominance of the relations of commodity production. However, the socialist revolution itself consists in clearing the way for relations, already arising under capitalism, that displace and replace commodity production with its social regulation and planning. Socialism eliminates the relations of production under which the product dominates the isolated producers, and replaces them with the joint control of associated producers over their production and its product.
Of course, on this path society passes through a period when its production as a whole still retains a commodity character, one that is merely substantially limited by social control, regulation, and planning. However, such a transitional state cannot be stable. Either it will turn out that the relations of commodity production have deeper roots in the attained level of development of the productive forces, and then they will restore their dominant character, and along with this — since large-scale commodity production based on machine technology generally has a capitalist character — the relations of production of capitalism will also be restored. Or there will occur a consistent displacement of the relations of commodity production, relying on a high and growing level of the socialization of labor, and commodity production will be replaced by directly social, planned production.
The historical experience of the so-called "market reforms" in Yugoslavia, in Hungary (from the late 1960s to the late 1980s), in Poland (in the 1980s), and later in the USSR, showed that the expansion, on a substantial scale, of the field of relations of commodity production can gradually lead to the formation, first, of latent (hidden, usually illegal) capitalist relations, and then to their spontaneous emergence into the open, to the erosion and destruction of the planned management of social production. This, of course, depends not on the mere fact of the presence of commodity relations, but on their historical dynamics. The process can, after all, also develop in the opposite direction, if sufficient objective and subjective prerequisites exist for that. But, one way or another, the dominance of commodity production under socialism can continue only for a historically brief time, and the model of "market socialism" can represent only a transitional state — either toward directly social socialist production, or toward capitalist commodity production.
Thesaurus for Chapter 18
THE FORMAL EMANCIPATION OF LABOR appears as the establishment of freedom in people's social relations in labor, in production — but only in terms of socio-economic form, that is, only from the side of the new relations of production.
THE REAL EMANCIPATION OF LABOR will be achieved when the freedom provided by the formal emancipation of labor is also secured on the side of the productive forces, on the side of the content of the process of human activity itself.
THE SOCIALLY GUARANTEED MINIMUM — a mandatory component of the income of the working population, as well as of those unable to work, ensuring the inclusion of the human being in social life (socialization). The socially guaranteed minimum should also be provided (under special conditions) to persons avoiding work, in order to prevent the criminalization of this social stratum and not to close off the possibility of their readaptation to work.
Self-Check Questions
- 18.1. What is the specificity of the productive forces of socialist society?
- 18.2. Characterize the difference between the formal and the real emancipation of labor.
- 18.3. In what does the immaturity of communist relations of production manifest itself?
- 18.4. How are the planned character of production and socialism connected with one another?
- 18.5. How can the relations between the owner of the means of production and the direct producer be characterized at the first phase of communism?
- 18.6. On what basis is the reproduction of socialist relations of production ensured?
- 18.7. How is the system of property relations organized at the first phase of communist society?
- 18.8. What is distribution according to labor, and what other principles of distribution exist under socialism?
- 18.9. What is the fate of commodity production under socialism? Can "market socialism" exist?
- 18.10. Does socialist society have a class structure?
Продолжение:
Часть 1 Chapter 18. The Political Economy of Socialism
Часть 2 Thesaurus for Chapter 18 - Chapter 18. The Political Economy
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