Bob McDaniel wrote:
>Never mind just the poor: How will anyone qualify to partake of the
>fruits of automation? That is one of my favourite areas of speculation.
>Take it to the reductio ad absurdum - everyone is put out of work!
>I find it hard to believe that the automated factories will simply
>continue to churn out stuff when no one can buy it. What kind of
>allocative system may emerge?
Bob may be surprised to learn that by assuming the answer lies in the
emergence of a different "allocative system" he places himself squarely in
the camp that Moishe Postone characterizes as "traditional Marxism". Postone
argues that Marx saw the real dilemma of capitalism as not the disjunction
between the production system and the allocative system but as occurring
within production itself. Thus under capitalism we could never arrive at the
"reductio ad absurdum" where everyone is put out of work because capitalism
requires that people do more and more *superfluous* work as a precondition
for the necessary:
"Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce
labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as
sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the
necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits
the superfluous in growing measure as a condition -- question of life or
death -- for the necessary."
The consequence of this drive is not simply misallocation but an ever
increasing production of "the superfluous", that is, *waste* in the form of
value-added. The function of this waste becomes simply to absorb labour time
so as to prevent it from being directly enjoyed as disposable time. That is
real wealth is destroyed for the sake of the continued expansion of exchange
value. In the Grundrisse, Marx envisioned a different outcome,
". . .not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus
labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society
to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc.
development of the individuals in the time set free . . ."
I have posted the revelant passages of the Grundrisse at:
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/grundris.htm
regards,
Tom Walker
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/worksite.htm
