The effect wrought upon Kautsky by the criticism of communism, particularly that it necessitates the introduction of a unit of regulation and accounting control, was that of luring him out of his theoretical hiding-place; it was now impossible for him to remain attached to the old general formula which states that 'value' disappears along with capitalism, and was now compelled to seek the truth as he saw it. In actual truth, a unit of regulation and accounting control did show itself to be necessary. And if Marx had maintained that, in the case of a communist economy, "it is at first money capital which is eliminated", then it becomes necessary to subject to a closer examination the concept of the unit of accounting control, which Engels in Anti-Duhring and Marx in Capital and the Marginal Notes (Critique of the Gotha Programme) had shown to be the average social hour of labour. We now know to what result his researches led, and it will now prove worth our while to unravel the source from which Kautsky's idea that a system of regulation and accounting control is a practical impossibility actually derives.
We have already indicated that the conception of the development towards communism which was then widely current was that capitalism would dig its own grave by virtue of its inherent tendency towards concentration. Hilferding examined the consequences of a total concentration of economic establishments on the basis of the assumption that the entire economy would be organised in one single giant trust, a general cartel. Within this imaginary cartel there is no market, no money and no prices. The economy without money would have been realised.
Within this trust, production would have become a closed system. In the course of their transformation from natural materials to the finished product, the products move through the most varied industrial installations. For instance, coal and iron ore make their way to the smelting ovens, (and as their product), iron and steel move to the engineering works, this then provides machinery to the textile factories, where finally the textile commodities appear as the end product. In the course of their movement from one economic installation to another, thousands and tens of thousands of workers from all possible branches of industry have played their role in fashioning the products, in order finally to create the end product. Exactly how much labour does this final product contain? It is thus that Kautsky's famous puzzle is formulated and, in the face of such a super-human task, he sadly buries his head in his hands. Yes, in theory there must be a solution to the problem. But, in practice? No, it is impossible "to calculate for each product the total amount of labour which represents its costs, from its first beginnings right up to the final finishing operations." ( 4 ) "An evaluation of commodities according to the labour (sic) contained in them is, even assuming the most colossal and technically perfect statistical apparatus", quite impossible (K. Kautsky: ibid., page 321). ( 5 )
Yes, indeed, Kautsky is completely justified in saying that by this method a computation of labour-time expended in the production of commodities is quite impossible!
1. The Marxist Theory of Money.return to text
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References
2. K. Kautsky: Die proletarische Revolution und ihr Programm, page 318.return to text
3. K. Kautsky: Karl Marx' Oekonomische Lehren, page 21.return to text
4. K. Kautsky: Die proletarische Revolution und ihr Programm, page 318.
5. K. Kautsky: Die proletarische Revolution und ihr Programm, page 321.
The same observations apply here in respect of modern computer technology as were made above.
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