On Mon, 4 Nov 1996 09:15:11 -0800 (PST), Doug Henwood
([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
> At 7:45 AM 11/4/96, Blair Sandler wrote:
>> Doug wrote,
>>> When Habermas said that "technology and science become a
>>> leading productive force, rendering inoperative the
>>> condition for Marx's labor theory of value" and
>>> "scientific-technical progress has become an independent
>>> source of surplus value" he contributes to an erasure of the
>>> working class from political life, and allies himself with
>>> George Gilder and Wired magazine.
>>> Ditto Manuel Castels, with his vision of "information" as a
>>> directly productive force.
>> Oh? Catch this old dead white guy, Karl somebody, writing in
>> his notebooks a century and a half ago:
> [a wonderful quote follows]
> The difference between the two versions is that Marx could
> never say that info and tech were directly productive in
> themselves, and I doubt he'd have conceded the (Ziegler-like)
> inoperativeness of the LTV. In the Castels-Gilder version, info
> takes on a life of its own, divorced from its social roots, its
> status as dead labor - a new fetishism at one remove from
> commodity fetishism. And, as Marx said, machine production
> presupposes masses of workers. What are all those billions of
> people doing every day if not working?
One of the divisions between institutionalist
economics[1] and Marxian economics has been the former's
insistence on multi-dimensional theories of 'value'. From
the outset, this has included the technological legacy of
society, where a capitalist economy is organized so that
aquisition of title over productive equipment permits the
owner to benefit from the technological information embodied
in that equipment (confer Veblen's 'On Capital' essays).
The institutionalist critique of the "information as an
independent source of value" (apart from the
institutionalist critique of the notion of surplus value) is
that same as the institutionalist critique of "labor" as an
"independent source of value":
- social capabilities are entirely composed of
individual actions, so no source of 'value' is independent
of human effort
- people are a species of social animals, and our
collective capabilities exceed our individual capabilities,
so no source of 'value' is independent of social
organization of human effort
- our collective capabilities are limited by our
technological knowledge, so no source of 'value' is
independent of our accumulation of technological knowledge.
OTOH, it might be argued, under a Marxian 'social theory
of value', that the status of labor as an *independent*
source of value is simply a formal abstraction, where the
empirical- scientific version is fairly close to the above,
so that the disagreement boils down to different strategies
regarding formalization (and of course the difference
regarding the notion of "surplus" value).
Virtually,
Bruce R. McFarling, Newcastle, NSW
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[1] Extremely descriptive subject header for this discussion,
I might add.
[2] By which I mean actual institutionalist theory, a la
Commons, Veblen, Wesley Mitchell, Ayres, Galbraith, Myrdal,
etc., and not the so-called "New Institutionalist"
economics.
