The same applies with the demands of reformists for the state to nationalise this or that business or industry, where the labour it expended in production proved not to have been socially necessary, and so the output did not find adequate demand at prices that reproduced the consumed capital.
Gray “assumed that commodities could be directly compared with one another as products of social labour. But they are only comparable as the things they are. Commodities are the direct products of isolated independent individual kinds of labour, and through their alienation in the course of individual exchange they must prove that they are general social labour, in other words, on the basis of commodity production, labour becomes social labour only as a result of the universal alienation of individual kinds of labour. But as Gray presupposes that the labour-time contained in commodities is immediately social labour-time, he presupposes that it is communal labour-time or labour-time of directly associated individuals. In that case, it would indeed be impossible for a specific commodity, such as gold or silver, to confront other commodities as the incarnation of universal labour and exchange-value would not be turned into price; but neither would use-value be turned into exchange-value and the product into a commodity, and thus the very basis of bourgeois production would be abolished.” (p 84-5)
That was not what Gray, Proudhon and the Narodniks wanted. They wanted commodities to continue to be produced as commodities, but not exchanged as commodities. In reality, it amounts to a petty-bourgeois demand for continued independent commodity production, with all of these commodities then bought by the state – by a central bank in Gray's formulation – which then acts to distribute them to society. A form of that was undertaken by the EEC under CAP, which led to the creation of huge wine lakes, butter mountains and so on, of overproduced commodities.
In order to deal with these contradictions, either the entire scheme must be abandoned, or it requires one aspect of bourgeois production after another to be scrapped.
“Thus he turns capital into national capital, and land into national property and if his bank is examined carefully it will be seen that it not only receives commodities with one hand and issues certificates for labour supplied with the other, but that it directs production itself.” (p 85)
Gray confuses the fact that every commodity is money in the sense that it is a representative of a quantity of social labour-time, and so can act as a claim on that quantity of social labour-time – under barter that is clear, because commodities are directly bought by commodities – with the dogma that every commodity immediately is money, and can always fulfil that function. It assumes, as with Say's Law, that supply creates its own demand, and that commodities are produced and exchanged as products, i.e. solely to satisfy consumption needs. It assumes that commodities continue to be bought by commodities, as Ricardo mistakenly believed, with money simply having been invented to facilitate this exchange.
The same error has been replicated by Paul Cockshott, as I set out, a while ago, in my critique of Paul Mason's “Post-Capitalism”.
“The dogma that a commodity is immediately money or that the particular labour of a private individual contained in it is immediately social labour, does not of course become true because a bank believes in it and conducts its operations in accordance with this dogma. On the contrary, bankruptcy would in such a case fulfil the function of practical criticism.” (p 85-6)
That, essentially, is what befell the Stalinist states, and the same is seen with those welfare states in which this same dogma is applied, sucking in huge amounts of value and surplus value, to subsidise the misallocation of resources, and a consequent effect of negative expanded reproduction.
Although Gray was unaware that the logic of his argument was a progressive undermining of bourgeois production, it was the conscious aim of a number of British socialists, such as Thompson and Bray. By their nature, however, much as with Sismondi, their ideas were, on the whole, reactionary. They were “anti-capitalist”, seeking to place restrictions on it, and to statify it, rather than seeking to develop the contradictions within it, via its more rapid development, and so its replacement brought about from below, by the working-class.
“But it was left to M. Proudhon and his school to declare seriously that the degradation of money and the exaltation of commodities was the essence of socialism and thereby to reduce socialism to an elementary misunderstanding of the inevitable correlation existing between commodities and money.” (p 86)
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