I am including Engels' Preface, because it is significant in its own right. Engels deals with some of the issues and developments since the first publication, and also gives some very concise descriptions of ideas, such as in relation to the overproduction of commodities, as against the overproduction of capital. This, in itself, is important, in confronting the notions of the petty-bourgeois socialists.
For Proudhon, as with Bray, this takes the form of the idea of labour notes, in place of money. The idea is that all producers get a labour note in exchange for the labour undertaken in producing commodities. They can then use these notes to take commodities out of society's store, to equal value. But, this is envisaged under continued commodity production and exchange, by small producers, not planned socialist production, undertaken by large enterprises.
So, commodity producer A might spend 10 hours producing a metre of linen, and obtain a labour note entitling them to also take commodities out of the store, also with a value of 10 hours. But, as Marx sets out in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, there is no consideration, here, of whether this 10 hours of linen producing labour is simple or complex labour, whether the average labour-time for producing a metre of linen is the 10 hours taken, or only 5 hours, or, similarly, 20 hours; there is no consideration of whether there is, in fact, demand for this metre of linen, in the market, or not, whether such demand would only be present if the value were 6 or less hours, and so on. All of these factors are resolved by money and competition, in the market, but completely missing in Proudhon's schema.
In effect, the economies of the Stalinist states were all a huge experiment in this petty-bourgeois, Proudhonist economic theory, except they implemented it on a huge scale, with mammoth industries, rather than via small scale commodity producers. They produced huge volumes of products without knowing whether they constituted use values for society or not, whilst handing out the equivalent of these labour notes to workers, to go and purchase the actual products they desired. Inevitably, there was a mismatch between the two, because vast amounts of production did not constitute a use value for consumers. The notes themselves became increasingly worthless. Citizens sought to dispose of them at any exchange rate for Western currency that could be used to buy the actual commodities they required, often only available on the black market. A similar thing occurred with all of the money tokens printed during, and following, lockdowns in 2020-2022.
And, petty-bourgeois socialists promote the same kinds of ideas in the West too. Such is the demands for nationalisation of failed enterprises and entire industries. These are businesses that have not produced actual use values, or use values at prices that consumers are prepared to pay for them. The labour undertaken was not necessary labour, and yet what the proposal for nationalisation amounts to is that this unnecessary labour continue, useless things continue to be produced, and the state then hand out labour notes to its producers, so that they can go and buy the actual, necessary and useful commodities that other workers have produced. To achieve this, either additional notes/money tokens must be printed, or else the workers and businesses that produced the useful and demanded commodities must be penalised, via taxation, so that their own consumption (personal and productive) be reduced, so as to finance the workers and capitalists producing the unwanted products.
As Marx put it in Capital III, Chapter 30,
“The entire artificial system of forced expansion of the reproduction process cannot, of course, be remedied by having some bank, like the Bank of England, give to all the swindlers the deficient capital by means of its paper and having it buy up all the depreciated commodities at their old nominal values.”
The printing of such worthless notes to hand to consumers to buy commodities that had not been produced, during lockdowns, is another version of that.
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