Producers do not exchange their products", Marx tells us, but he admits that "the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities".
Equivalent amounts of labour are still in fact exchanged, only in this case it is certificates which are exchanged with products.
True enough, these certificates are not money since they are not intended to circulate -and exchange is supposed to be confined to relationships between the communally owned warehouses (or whatever one calls them) and the individual. Yet, even if we assume this to be so, this would still not prevent Marx's "first phase of communist society" from being a form of capitalism.
The fact is, though, that even these restrictions on the process of exchange could in reality be nothing more than pious hopes. Exchange between individuals would still be bound to occur and, whatever the intention behind the labour certificates, they would be bound to circulate too, The only way to prevent this, or at least to drive it underground, would be to devise some strict form of policing system for suppressing exchange between individuals.
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