Democratising and Socialising The Plan
Paul's confusion in relation to the labour theory of value, and the distinction between the value created by labour, and the value of labour-power is again illustrated when he says,
“I will try to spell out what a large scale postcapitalist project might involve. I call it Project Zero – because its aims are a zero-carbon energy system; the production of machines, products and services with zero marginal costs; and the reduction of necessary labour-time as close as possible to zero.” (p 266)
This also conflates two further separate concepts – socially necessary labour, and necessary labour. Socially necessary labour refers to the average labour-time required for the production of commodities. Necessary labour, by contrast, refers to the portion of the working-day required to reproduce labour-power. So, for example, the socially necessary labour-time required to produce 10 kilos of grain might equal 10 hours. If a worker requires only 1 kilo of grain, or its value equivalent, in other commodities, to reproduce their labour-power, then the necessary labour performed by the worker is only 1 hour. In other words, it is only necessary for them to work for 1 hour to reproduce their labour-power. The fact they labour for 10 hours simply means they provide 9 hours of surplus labour/surplus value, producing a surplus product of 9 kilos.
Because Paul fails to grasp this distinction, and works instead with a version of Adam Smith's cost of production theory of value, where value is a function of the value of labour-power, i.e. wages, he fails to recognise that if necessary labour-time is reduced to zero, a condition capital would love to achieve, that simply means that surplus labour-time, i.e. relative surplus value, can more easily be raised to a maximum!
The fact that it is only necessary for a worker to work a minute, in such a world, to reproduce their labour-power, does not at all prevent a capitalist employing them for 10 hours, during which they produce 10 hours of new value, and thereby producing 9 hours, 59 minutes of surplus value.
If we give these amounts of labour-time monetary labels, so that 1 minute of labour is equal to £1, then, say a brothel keeper employs a prostitute, and pays them £1 in wages, which is equal to the value of their labour-power, because necessary labour has been reduced to near zero. The prostitute then undertakes 10 hours of labour, thereby creating £600 of new value, and realised in £600 of money paid in exchange by clients. The result is that the brothel keeper then obtains a profit of £599, a rate of profit of 59,900%. The fact that Paul adopts a Smithian cost of production theory, rather even than a Ricardian, let alone Marxian, labour theory of value, is shown by his reference to the significance of the reduction of marginal costs to zero. Essentially, for marginal costs here, read wage costs.
I agree with Paul in his arguments about learning from past failures, and his reference to Preobrazhensky's comments about the economic relations requiring an “extremely complex and ramified nervous system of social foresight and planned guidance” (p 266).
In fact, for the reasons I have set out previously, I believe we already have the infrastructure in place to achieve that. A social revolution has effectively already occurred. It is socialised capital that predominates and planned and regulated productive relations that increasingly dominate, on the basis of it. But, we still have, even in the developed economies, a plethora of small private capitals – about 5 million in Britain – whilst control over much of the socialised capital is exercised by that top 0.01% that own the controlling share of fictitious capital.
Nevertheless, in terms of the actual socialised capital, as Simon Clarke pointed out thirty years ago, it operates on the basis of long-term planning of its investments, it is now fed by real-time information about even individual consumers and individual consumer preferences and behaviour. As I have pointed out in the past, individuals' actual preferences, as manifest by their spending choices are, usually, more accurate than their verbally expressed preferences. For example, people say they think more public transport is a good idea, to get cars off the road, but that usually just means they would prefer others to use public transport, leaving the roads clearer for them, in their own car; people say, in surveys, they think nurses are more deserving of higher wages than footballers etc., but they regularly vote against tax rises to pay for the NHS, whilst paying out £1,000 for a football season ticket, or a subscription to satellite sports channels etc.
So, real-time, big data analysis of tens of millions of workers' spending choices, together with longer-term analysis of demographic changes, provides a detailed basis for formulating plan projections in a way that the market research studies of the 1970's could never achieve. That data is currently mined by the individual firms for their own purposes, but, the more socialised capital is democratised, and brought together under one organisation, the more it becomes social information, available for constantly improving adaptive planning within a larger, longer-term social plan.
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