Comment on When we explain to other people how our capitalist system works and they recoil in horror
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 3 days agoTrade isn’t the same as a market, necessarily, and markets aren’t the same as the specific Capitalist iteration that depends on the M-C-M’ circuit where commodities C are produced with money M in exchange for greater money M’. When Marxists say they wish to abolish markets, they mean so by stating that they wish, rather than production being handled through competing entities where that M-C-M’ circuit applies, we instead fold all of these entities into the public sector and democratically plan them along a cooperative basis.
Early on, there would presumably be labor vouchers, which differ from money in that they would be destroyed on first use. A sort of credit for work, for use in the only “store” that exists. Social services and safety nets would be deducted from your “pay” and be free at point of service. Things like that, and this doesn’t really constitute a “market” in the normal sense of the word. Eventually, these labor vouchers would likely be abolished once they became unnecessary.
Wogi@lemmy.world 3 days ago
That’s really just a company store but worse somehow.
You’re going to have a market. If you make markets illegal you’ll just have black markets. You need to contend with that, failing to realize that literally killed the Soviet Union. It got so bad, and was such a core part of daily life that they just kinda made it legal, and the union collapsed shortly after.
You can’t fix homelessness by making it illegal, you can destroy markets by making them illegal. These things have been tried and failed in practice.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
There’s a difference between saying we should work towards getting rid of the necessity for Markets, and saying we need to do that instantly, today. Black Markets didn’t kill the Soviet Union, but they did highlight flaws in how it was run and where it was lacking. That’s a separate conversation that we can have, if you want, but is largely unimportant.
The thing is, over time, markets centralize through firms outcompeting and absorbing or eliminating smaller firms. This increases barrier to entry as it is more expensive to compete on even footing. Marxists don’t want to abolish markets simply by decree, but developing to the point that they no longer make sense.