On Tue, 1 Aug 1995 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Paul Cockshott) said: >I feel that John is over complicating the idea of abstract social labour. I >understand it to be labour which society could potentially dispose of in any >branch of production, but which at any given point in time must have a >particular concreted allocation into different productive activities. As >abstract social labour it is a fraction of the total working day of society. > >In these terms, money and prices are irrelevant, since the concept of abstract >social labour refers to a deeper reality than that revealed in prices. Abstract >social labour is a category that goes beyond capitalist production. A communist >society would have abstract social labour as well, and would calculate its >costs directly in these terms. > >It is true that it is in prices that the law of value actually reveals itself >to the participants of a capitalist economy, but the underlying reality is that >any society must carry out an appropriate distribution of its social labour. >Thus the conceptual category can not depend on prices, and its dimension of >measurement can not refer to price, but only to time. Paul, I do think there may well be social labor in a socialist society. However, I do not think that the two-fold nature of labor peculiar to capitalist society will prevail in socialist society. It seems to me that once again you are adding up the concrete labor times observed in a given society and calling it abstract. Since you see a correspondence between these labor times and prices, it would seem you see little need of prices. As always, John
