Simon writes,
> Dear all,
>
> Stop me if you've heard this before - but surely, all capitalism plans
> extensively? To argue that an economy is planned does not stop it from
> being capitalist. And on the suspension of the Law of Value - you can
> suspend prices, if you like, and pretend that they don't exist, but you
> can't suspend the law of value because workers are still working for a
> wage!
Capitalist planning like the welfare state distorts the market and
therefore the operation of the LOV. It doesnt suspend it. The workers
states did suspend the LOV by replacing the market as the mechanism
of allocating prices, fluctuating around value, with administered
prices which bear no relation to the socially necessary labour time
required to produce goods and services under capitalism. The
critical point, is that the LOV does not operate historically outside
capitalism because labour power is not a commodity. Workers can be
paid a wage in a workers state, but that does not signify that their
labour-power is being sold as a commodity. For labour power to be a
commodity its value must be set by the socially necessary labour time
required to reproduce it. This is determined like the value of all
other commodities by the LOV i.e. the mechanism of the market, no
matter how distorted by state interevention etc. Value and the LOV is
specific to capitalism. This is what allows capitalism to develop the
forces of production as capitalists compete to reduce necessary
labour time. This is not the case in the degenerated workers states,
despite the surface forms of wages, exchange and what you call
"value". It is because value is absent in the degenerated workers
states (since by definition their degeneration removed the role of
democratic workers planning allocating labour time efficiently to
overcome scarcity and because they necessarily degenerated and
collapsed) that the bureaucrats/bourgeois were despearate to
re-establish the LOV.
And peasants are still making payments at the farm gate that, even if
> paid in wheat and pigs, are based upon their value. Or even if you removed
> money entirely, commodities would still be produced and have value, as per
> classic Marxism.
Except this simple commodity capitalist production was not an actual
historical stage in the development of capitalism, rather a logical
stage in the development of capitalism. It cannot be capitalism
because it lacks generalised commodity production (wage labour as
commodity). Petty capitalist production especially in agriculture
like the NEP in Russia did not mean that the dominant character of
the economy was driven by capital because the plan determined prices
not the LOV. That is why the pressure to restore capitalism in China
is itself an acknowledgment that the suspension of the LOVcould not
develop the forces of production. Failing a political revolution
which puts workers in power, the bureaucrats are forced to rejoin the
global capitalist economy and allow the biggest TNC's in
communications, banking, insurance etc to buy up massive chunks of
the state sector. When this happens to the point that these TNC's
demand that China converts its currency (allowing the LOV to set
prices across the whole of China) provide insurance and commercial
law to protect investment, then we can say the LOV rules.
> I went back to read the section in W,P +P on this.
>
> "We arrive, therefore, at this conclusion. A commodity has value, because
> it is a crystallisation of social labour...The relative values of
> commodities are, therefore, determined by the respective quantities or
> amounts of labour, worked up, realised, fixed in them." (Wages, Price and
> Profit)
Note that Marx talks of "social labour". This does not mean all
societies throughout history. It means commodity producing society
which for him means only the society that is characterised by
"generalised production of commodities" capitalism.
> There is nothing in here which requires the price mechanism, which is
> effectively one way that the ruling class divides up the surplus between
> themselves in an "agreed" upon manner. In a system where relationship to
> society's surplus is political, then that society will focus more on these
> ties and less on prices. In this case, access to the vanguard party is the
> means to the surplus.
Better to read Capital where its clear that value cannot be realised
except as a price. Nor does this mean that the ruling class can
suspend the LOV to "agree" on dividing surplus value (profits in
practice) and remain capitalist. It it does this by definition means
that its rule is not by means of the ownership of the means of
production, but through political control of them, and this makes
them not a class but a caste. Where the caste defines itself in terms
of a vanguard party, this is clearly not what a revolutionary calls a
vanguard party.
> If a Chinese worker produces three bicycles a day, and takes (alowing for
> all other economic inputs, expressed variously) the equivalent of two
> bicycles home, he has been exploited to the tune of one bicycle. Bear in
> mind that under the truck system most workers didn't see their pay anyway:
> it was a calculation of equivalents, hideously distorted by the employer
> who offered the goods.
Marx never claimed to discover necessary labour time. The Chinese
worker you describe could be a labourer under the Asiatic mode (The
Chinese invented gunpowder they may also have invented bicycles), a
feudal mode, a simple commodity economy (where in history did they
exist?) a degenerated Workers state (especially today in Russia where
restoration has left workers having to barter what they produce) , or
a healthy workers state (unlikely since the division of labour would
not see workers being paid in the goods they produce) where one
bicycle worth of labour is surplus-labour appropriated by the
collective.
> The real point of the law of value is that human labour has a value as a
> commodity.
As I argued above value is value only as a commmodity under
capitalism. Therefore it is not "human labour" which is an
ahistorical concept, but labour power whose value is established by
socially necessary labour time under capitalism. Without this
conception, it is not possible to understand why capitalism developed
out of feudalism, and why socialism will develop out of capitalism.
You equate any production process in which producers have part of
their product deducted as a surplus as commodity production and
therefore capitalism. This is to turn Marx's method on its head. He
started by isolating what was specific to capitalism, commodity
production, and could then isolate past and future social forms, and
make trans-historical generalisations. By starting with what is
specific to capitalism, it becomes clear why the workers states wre
not capitalist, and it also explains why it was necessary to have a
revolution and a counter-revolution to overthrow capitalism and to
restore it. And that in the current period we are living through, it
is the counter-revolutionary victory over the workers states that
shapes the struggle and sets the tasks of revolutionaries today.
Dave
>
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