Comment:
It strikes me that unless we regard Marx's writings as Holy Writ,
Dr. Who is right. The idea of Labor Time Vouchers must be tested
by the evidence available today, 125 years after Marx wrote the
Gotha Program. In 1875 the material incapacity of society to
satisfy human needs-in other words scarcity--was the fact that
made LTVs a logical part of a program for a socialist society.
Clearly the socialist revolution alone wouldn't solve the problem
of scarcity immediately. A system of rationing or allotting goods
or services would have to be developed for use until society had
succeeded in raising production to the point where goods and
services could be produced in excess of needs. We know how
capitalism solves its problem of scarcity: Those with money to
buy what they need and want can do so; the rest go without in
proportion to their lack of money.
LTVs were an idea for an equitable system of rationing. It made
sense in 1875, but it makes no sense in 2001. Not only do we have
the material resources for producing plenty today; we have the
human labor. In fact, the supply of labor available to a
socialist society in the year 2001 seems almost boundless. Five
years ago we were being told that the global unemployment figure
was one billion! 1,000,000,000! And this doesn't take into
consideration the millions who today are counted as employed but
whose labor is unproductive so far as social usefulness is
concerned: bankers, stockbrokers, politicians, drug peddlers,
insurance company employees, military personnel, lawyers and all
their secretaries and others who assist the unproductive. And we
still haven't gotten into the hordes whose "work" is
counter-productive: people in advertising, the police, economics,
much of education, and on and on
In my opinion the danger is not that the administrators of an LTV
system would conspire to undermine working class control of the
system but rather that it would so evolve naturally as time
passed. The question then becomes why-if it is not needed-create
the beast that might grow to destroy the socialist society?
- Frank Girard
