Both revolutionary communism and Goldman's anti-statist anarchism are in agreement on the issue of abolition of the wage system of labor compensation, and thus share a common heritage of Marxist economic theory. It is interesting to see how each interprets one element in particular of this heritage, Marx's reinterpretation under industrial conditions of the so called "labor theory of value", to draw opposite conclusions about how it should apply to practical action. The theory purports to establish the essentially exploitive and inevitably self defeating nature of wage compensation, first by showing that the money in which compensation consists is a commodity like any other insofar as it must be generated by work, and as a standard commodity of exchange is a matter of convention and has no fixed value of its own. Second it shows that in any translation of the value of one commodity into a value of another, e.g. three bales of hay are worth one bale of cotton, there must be an invariant basis of comparison, or a "third thing" which remains unchanged in the transaction. This, as the theory goes, is the time the laborer put into it, or the quantifiable duration of labor necessary to produce it. Because this quantity doesn't change regardless of what it's exchanged for, Marx claims that it is "fixed" in the commodity which is thus the sole determining factor of its exchange value, independently from what use is made of what it might be exchanged for, or its practical value. By accumulation of exchange value, wages then emerge as the current form of labor exploitation updated for industrial conditions, emphasized by one class, composed of the owners of the means by which exchangeable products are produced, in opposition to another, composed of those who produce the products which are exchanged.

What's interesting as an historical question and on which the difference in wages-interpretation between Goldman's anarchism and revolutionary communism hinges, is how wage-system appearances, how wages appear to the compensated, differ from wage-system realities, what wages cost the owner/employer. In slave economies for example, where there is no compensation, the laborer's work appears to the laborer to be (relatively) cost-free for the owner, but in reality is paid in the form of material necessities of survival and productivity. Under a feudal regime of agricultural serfdom, on the other hand, the laborer sees clearly the difference between what quantity of labor is compensated, namely the days worked on the feudal lord's estate, and what quantity is not compensated, the days worked on the laborer's own plot of land for individual use, so that no difference occurs between laborer's perception of compensation and its reality for the owner. But under the wage-compensation system, both because payment occurs after the labor time is over and because the unpaid quantity of labor for what exceeds the costs to the owner of maintaining the laborer in productive existence is not known to, or even deliberately hidden from, the laborer, it seems to the laborer her/himself that they're getting paid for all of it, while only being paid for a part. This is counted therefore as one of the elements which makes the so-called "proletariat", the class of wage laborers, a revolutionary class insofar as appearance of formal compensation and reality of material exploitation succeed one another in a progressively disclosive phenomenological chronology. Having passed through an ostensibly final stage of labor exploitation, by truncating the class of wage laborers from the class of owners and associated elements, the oppressed class is not disposed merely to overthrow an oppressor class to become an oppressor itself over another, but rather to serve as a liberation of work from the distinction between classes themselves. To this the question of the state's role comes in, where Goldman stands firmly and consistently against any such involvement. Does anyone, before continuing, have any suggestions with regards to the nature of the dispute?

While suggestions from contributors are being organized and collated, I'd like to point out that Goldman held that Marx's theories, not only for economics but social revolution as well, were primarily destructive in both senses on account of an unwarranted exclusion-claim for alternates deemed unscientific. Her view of the historical Marx is that, being a "narrow, jealous, vainglorious and dictatorial creature", he was Stalinist in tendencies of behavior but lacked the power of the state to equal the destructiveness of his Bolshevik disciples.(1)* She held however that it was the theory itself which was the real sociological toxin which eviscerated the progressive social movements of the working classes, the effect of which "tends to annihilate all freedom and initiative", and produces either dictatorship in control of the state or parliamentary association in apology for it.(2)* It would be false however to assert that she didn't understand the theory merely because she didn't like it. To the contrary, there is much evidence of detailed discussions with her friends and comrades who supported it, and in consequence one can safely assert her to have shared in common its intellectual heritage.

Goldman's anarchism (or libertarian socialism) represents therefore a fundamental opposition to what's known as "communism" (or state socialism) with sufficient precision to describe an antinomous conflict between two ideational tendencies. The notion of Antinomy which is sketched by Kant in the Critical period is deployed for the purpose of dispelling logical illusion generated by the illicit use of Reason, or concepts known without the aid of experience. The six Antinomies described in the system, (for spatial limits, material composition, effectual determination, universe-generation, action-grounds, and taste, respectively) are of Reason, but the seventh antinomy, (which is found in the second half of the Critique of Judgement), is of Judgement; the difference being that the former describes claims which logically contradict each other but which could only be decided in favor of one or the other by experience to which they are both constitutively denied, whereas the latter describes opposing claims which could only be decided by a capacity to limit an unmanageable volume of experience which one does not possess. The Antinomy of Judgement therefore occurs only on the occasion of a special class of experiences, namely, those having to do with organisms.

How might the period-specific dispute between communists and anarchists, Goldman's radically anti-statist anarchism in particular, be accurately described as an Antinomy of Judgement? And is the dichotomy between mechanistic and non-mechanistic determinations of the relationship between independent labor and just product distribution in the context of the human organism as a "political animal" in fact irreconcilable? Please however don't respond all at once, as there is plenty of room for additional comment before continuing.
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*(1) Vision on Fire, Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution: ed. David Porter, c. 1983, 2006 David Porter; (Published AK Press, 2006), p. 173.
*(2) ibid. p. 300.

Thanks for the information here. If you wanna test your IQ, let's play a fun game called water sort

With regards to the question posed by my 11/6/24 email above as to whether disputes between revolutionary communists and anarcho-socialists could be accurately described as an antinomy of judgement, the answer is that it can't. Although the pair constitute a genuine antinomy, that is, a logical opposition between unverifiable claims understood nevertheless as each precluding the truth of the other, it is one of Reason deriving from concepts rather than sensible information unmanaged or not yet managed by them as in the case of a judgement-antinomy. Because this latter is described as required by the inclusion of organic nature in experience, no antinomy of judgement arises with respect to the human organism, because in this latter case one understands a whole object prior to the observation of its superficial parts, and is therefore subordinate to a concept of the object.

The tension between Goldman and the Marxists is therefore an Antinomy of Reason which resembles Kant's third antinomy, which is between freedom and determinism. While a genuine antinomy's resolution is constituted by showing how it's not resolvable, for the third one the possibility of a shared position is suggested: Assuming you're free couldn't hurt, which is a reversable formula in the claim that no one knows how free they are until it's assumed. In a dual structure of liberty and responsibility, the concept of Freedom, as constituted by a presupposition of effect deliberateness, suggests a similar position shared by both authoritarian (or state-) and libertarian (or anarcho-) socialism, where both could be true.