I've been reading the work by those dutch councilists on labor time computation recently. I' have a question regarding the labor time of new products. If a product has never been "produced" before, then how to we attain an average labor time for it by which to produce it? And how do we prevent that labor time from being over/under productive of what it should be?
Question on labor time computation
Colton Wood
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Jeremiah Murphy
When a new product comes into production we can make reasonable estimates as to how fast it can produce (because we test machines). The avarage labour time it takes to produce is not something we think up, its something we measure. If the measurement is off, we can always adjust it later on, just like how capitalists sometimes over or undershoot production costs. Its no big deal.
If your question is, how do we attain the labour cost of any given product if not from a continuous market process:
1. Make an array with one element for all products. Initialize them to zero.
2. For each product, take the formula describing its direct labour time cost and its costs in terms of how much of another product it has. (IE bread = B, grain = G, water = W -> B = 2G + 0.5W + 3 (3 labour))
3. For each product, take this formula and substitute the variables with the labour cost of those products from your array, sum them up, store the answer in the array.
4. Repeat. Every iteration your list of labour costs will approach the true cost more closely. It should not take more than 20 iterations to converge to within nanoseconds of labour time (or put otherwise, the change will be so teeny tiny it will hardly change).
This process is linear time in relation to the amount of products you produce, or O(n). You can, at any point, calculate the labour cost in so little time you will hardly notice, without needing any information about previous prices or costs.
Jose Ortiz
also read cockshott
Bentley King
By analogy. What are the most similar production processes. Motion studies take apart complex movements and show the simple combinations of motions (and rest) these are made of. You can use these molecules of motion to estimate the amount of work different shop layouts would entail. Time-estimation models also exist for interface design of machines and computers. But in the end, you need repetition. A unique person doing a unique thing knows no standard to compare. Many people have to be asked would they rather do brand-new task X according to some productivity requirement which is built on somewhat shaky foundations or old task A or B or C, whatever they are familiar with and with well-established productivity requirements for the same salary; and how you answer these questions must have consequences for how you get assigned. And if it turns out that after a while there is a flood of people willing to do A now, the productivity requirement gets raised, and the people who consented to do it for the lower requirement get the choice to stay or go back to their old work.
Easton Howard
Read Cockshott's Towards A New Socialism.
Brody Morales
Why don't you lurk a bit before making dumb assumptions?
Connor Long
The LTV is a poor rubric for individual compensation. It's purpose is to explain the way capitalism and the market works, and specifically how it works on labor and the production process in the aggregate. It's sufficient for explaining the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, but it's not a total rubric for how to run a planned economy. The whole point of the planned economy is to account for a wider picture of the production process, rather than just looking at this thing exchange value that only makes sense because we believe in a monetized fair exchange. If you try to use labor vouchers in this way you inevitably get bogged down in debates about how value technically went into this or that process, how much your education is worth, whether scarcely available intellectual skillsets have more value than others (and this is the big one, because there's no rule in these considerations that knowledge is to be publicized, and it's often assumed that the so-called meritorious have a right to their merit and credential and status). You'd also have to adjust constantly based on unplanned circumstances, when all you're really debating is the value of something like money rather than all the processes that go into production, distribution, and using the products.
I imagine compensation will work something like a salary, where everyone who has agreed to be a producer in this system is paid in full because they agreed to make themselves available to build socialism, rather than because they agreed to sell themselves by the hour and get cajoled like any other exploitable labor. The system would necessarily need to look at people as people and make people, their well-being and their growth the whole point, rather than essentially retaining wage labor in some more scientific form.
Jayden Garcia
read marx and cockshott
the point of LTV in a planned economy is solely for allocating the final product. all intermediate products are allocated according to a plan with no respect for value.
no you don't. you just measure how long each productive task takes. that's it.
why? the plan should include things like disasters.
If they're not being exploited, then it's not exploitation. someone who works ten hours a week doesn't deserve the same social product as someone who works thirty five.
Xavier Adams
I should add because I hit submit too soon that the very concept of a labor board decreeing what labor is worth what necessarily implies a technocratic body above society, and such a state of affairs would inevitably lead to a new sort of system where intellectual knowledge is considered akin to private property, becomes sacrosanct, and congratulations, you've ultimately just found another form of class society, etched into the very fabric of how people are compensated. It may evolve into something different than wage labor in the long term (indeed, the primary currency to be obtained now isn't the credits, which eventually become more or less arbitrary, but merits that win you the ability to decide who gets to be what in the system, and the trade of favors will run rampant). At some point you have to think about something more than just building another system of compensation and changing the deal from money to "merit" (which we all know will just be hoarded by a clique), and set forward a program not of compensation for labor but compensation for agreeing to build a socialist system, which would in practice mean a fixed salary for everyone who is productively working, and ample free time for people to develop skills that will allow them to fulfill as many tasks as their natural abilities will allow, without inhibiting people by gating their ability to live life based on perceived merit. Unfortunately, the problem with such a system is that it is very hard for technological society to get away from the privatization of knowledge, of intelligence, and the years of ideology pumped into left-liberals to sell "meritocracy". You're fighting a whole new struggle after you get rid of Porky, in the hopes that maybe something actually worthwhile can be built.
Alexander Cooper
youtu.be
don't even have to read