https://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/gik/1930/index.htm

"Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution" was written in 1930 by Council Communists who were opposed to how the USSR was being run. It explains how a communist economy could be run using objective labor-time as the regulating mechanism and unit of account.

Some quotes :

"Whilst reformist Social Democracy conceived of realising communism through a continuous and gradual process of nationalisation, the revolutionary Bolshevik tendency considered that a revolution was necessary in order to complete the process of nationalisation. Thus the conception of the men from Moscow is based on fundamentally the same theoretical methods as that of the reformists. " TLDR, communism is not nationalizing everything. Communism as nationalization is SocDem revisionism that doesnt understand that the real problem with capitalism is not just who owns what, but that the products themselves dominate the lives of people.

"It was especially after the experience of the Paris Commune that the view began to gain ground with Marx that the organisation of the economy could not be realised through the state but only through a combination of the Free Associations of the Socialist society." Slow down Anarchists, this doesnt mean Marx is anti-statist, he is saying that the new economy is something consciously built and run by the working class, rather than the state running everything. The state has nothing to do with the economy, but it will still exist as the political force used by the working class to dominate all other classes through violence.

"Marx therefore took his stand upon the concept of the "Association of Free and Equal Producers". This Association, however, has nothing in the least to do with the vague concepts of 'mutual aid' which are currently circulating, but has a very material basis. That basis is the computation of the labour-time which is necessary in order to produce use-values. As will be demonstrated in the course of this text, this has nothing to do with value."

"Marx also very clearly indicates the labour-hour as the unit of computation. In his well-known discussion of "Robinson on his Island" he says of this island inhabitant:

"Necessity itself compels him to divide his time with precision between his different functions. Whether one function occupies a greater space of his total activity than another depends on the magnitude of the difficulties to be overcome in attaining the useful effect aimed at. Our friend Robinson Crusoe learns this by experience, and having saved a watch, ledger, ink and pen from the shipwreck, he soon begins, like a good Englishman, to keep a set of books. His stock-book contains a catalogue of the various objects he possesses, of the various operations necessary for their production, and finally, of the labour-time that specific quantities of these products have on average cost him. All the relations between Robinson and these objects that form his self-created wealth are here so simple and transparent that even Mr Sedley Taylor could understand them." We can calculate the exact amount of labor-time required to make anything. Using this data we can plan what and how much to produce. Economic growth is achieved by using new tech that reduces the time to produce things. With modern tech, this kind of accounting and planning is trivial. Communism doesnt need science-fiction level tech or automation to be achieved.

"Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force. All the characteristics of Robinson's labour are represented, but with the difference that they are social instead of individual." The beauty of a communist economy is how transparent and objective everything is. There is no exploitation not because people become morally pure, but because the very basis of this economy makes any attempt at exploitation very transparent and hard to conceal.

  • gammison [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Appel (who was not the sole author of this btw) literally wrote articles arguing for the expulsion of Laufenberg and associates for their nationalism and abandonment of class struggle and was part of the council communist movement while Laufenberg was not. There's no reason to bring him in to the discussion of this document other than to attempt to slander it (and I don't even like this document lol). Political opposition to Leninism also has no bearing on its merits, even if it's taking Leninist economic organization and working backwards (which I would in some ways dispute, the bases of a lot of arguments in this document are established in 1918-1920 before coherent Leninist economic policy can even be said to have cohered but it's been reformulated as a critique of the path the USSR took through the 1920s, and significant portions of this document are cooked up while Appel is in jail in 1924 where all he has is Capital volume 1 and 2 and no info on soviet policy, it's not a work produced backwards in those ways), that's a totally valid method of critique lol. How do you think critique works, you take a position and work backwards to discredit it.

      • gammison [none/use name]
        ·
        4 years ago

        If the link is literally wrong, I dunno how I’m supposed to know that.

        This draft was subsequently revised and completed in Dutch by a collective composed of members of the Group of International Communists of Holland (GIK) and published in German by the Allgemeine Arbeiterunion Deutschlands (General Workers' Union of Germany) in 1930.

        Next line (I understand if you thought this meant just editing though lol, but afaik there were large changes to the text by the collective from GIK who ended up publishing it).

        Appel only wrote defending the expulsion of Laufenberg after the KAPD was told their participation in the 3rd international depended on doing so, if you think it is unlikely that the founders of a political party would share common ideology then I doubt I could convince you otherwise.

        I mean just look at the first KAPD congress of 1920 notes, (it's before LWC is even distributed widely and actually can you give me a citation where that demand was issued because all I know of is a book chapter by Gilles Dauvé and Denis Authier citing Rühle’s Report from Moscow in the September 1920 issue of Der Kommunist where it's said that Appel and several others agreed in writing to favor the expulsion but it's unclear under what conditions this was and whether the articles for supporting that expulsion were written after the convention where Laufenberg was disavowed but not expelled, like this report is written in Augustish most likely, recounting something that happened in July-August, during which something happening in May-June was recounted, and the report was definitely written after the August congress where Laufenberg is disavowed so the timeline is a very jumbled 5 months. I'm looking for Appel's articles in Kommunistische Arbeiter-Zeitung but may not be able to find them as the archives don't seem to be online, regardless I don't think they were published before the August congress) and 36 to 6 they voted explicitly to disavow all of his ideas (basically only Laufenbergs organization in Hamburg voted for him), and the only reason they don't expel him then is that they demand he quit and could not decide then and there if the KAPD was able to expel its own members. Like the super majority of the KAPD wanted him out long before any sort of order could have been given and disseminated and enforced if Laufenberg had support. The KAPD was formed from several breakaway factions of the KPD, they were not at all tied together ideologically much beyond that anti-parliamentarianism. I mean just look at this quote from the convention about the resolution to disavow him:

        I am the author of the resolution. If today the Congress has expressed its desire to have nothing to do with nationalist tendencies, then it is the moral[!] duty of comrades Laufenberg and Wolffheim to cut loose from us. In this way we are distinguished from other parties[!!], where comrades are excluded: we say that we leave it to the comrades' feelings of honour to cause them to depart. Then they say we haven't the courage to declare them excluded. Now the comrades should declare that they have no more business with us. source.

        And the preceding result of the vote:

        The Congress of the KAPD declares that it cannot agree with the nationalist teaching of Laufenberg and Wolffheim. The workers organised in the KAPD recognise themselves without reservation as international socialists and, as such, reject all propaganda for the revival of nationalist thought in the ranks of the working class.If comrades Laufenberg and Wolffheim continue to propagate their nationalist tendency, they place themselves outside the ranks of the international socialists.

        One failure of LWC is that it fails to analyze the movements it's critiquing with enough nuance in ways like this (see Appel's conversation with Lenin about it for several others) but even then that's more a fault of how people use the text today out of its context as a rapidly written pamphlet for the 1920 World Congress of the Comintern.

        Edit: had to fix some dates, was off by a couple months and flipped the founding KAPD conference with the August KAPD conference. Also on your edit, yeah I'd reject that notion.