Concerning The Necessity and The Nature of Commodity Production Under Socialism

Abstract

Commodity production has greatly developed under socialism. Is this not in contradiction with the Marxist treatment of commodity production as a historical category ? Some writers think that commodity production is necessary because of the existence of the collective farms (as a form of relation between the state and the farms); but this is not true: 1) commodity relations exist between state concerns; 2) there is no absolute necessity of money relations between the state and the collective farms. Other writers believe that the commodity character of socialist production is required by the law of distribution according to labor. This is also wrong. Commodity production makes it possible to express various kinds of concrete labor, qualitatively different, in terms of abstract social labor. The impossibility of recording qualitatively different kinds of social labor in natural measure — working time — is the result not of these differences, but of the character of social labor itself in the first phase of communism.