At 14:27 25/09/00 -0700, you wrote:
<snip>
>I often hear opponents of Marxist economics demanding some sort of proof
>that labor is the source of all value. There is no proof. Marx was
>trying to understand the way a particular form of social labor was
>organized. Natural forces as well as natural resources suddenly
>affected the way labor worked. For Marx, these natural forces amplified
>the productivity of labor and thereby reduced the value of an individual
>product.
>
>This theory is neither right nor wrong, in the sense that it can either
>be proven nor disproven. Instead, it is a very powerful way of
>analyzing capitalist society.
>
>--
>Michael Perelman
Opponents of Marxism are unlikely to hear the subtlety behind the
proposition they expect marxists to defend. As phrased, and as they
probably understand it, the proposition that
labor is the source of all value
is probably equivalent to the proposition Marx criticises at the beginning
of hsi notes on the Gotha Programme that
labour is the source of all wealth.
The Critique of the Gotha Programme was not written for widespread
publication but for the head of the Eisenacher socialists, and was only
published 16 years later. It ends "Dixi et salvavi animam meam" [I have
spoken and saved my soul.] It is a very condensed series of almost
spluttered protestations against vulgar socialism.
It is therefore not easy to extract clues that are relevant for today, but
the Critique does suggest it is important for would be marxists to maintain
a distinction between use-values and exchange values, and to remember that
Nature is, in marxist theory, also very much a source of use values. We
should readily reassure people that we accept this.
I suggest that the implications of the Critique on this point apply not
only to the importance of highlighting the private ownership of the means
of production in the sense of industrial capital, but also of the private
ownership of land.
On this subject we should be able to find common cause with many people who
approach radical politics from a green perspective.
>FIRST PART OF THE PARAGRAPH: "Labor is the source of all wealth and all
>culture."
>
>Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source
>of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as
>labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human
>labor power. the above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and
>is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the
>appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow
>such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone
>give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward
>nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an
>owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use
>values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for
>falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely
>from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who
>possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions
>of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves
>the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with
>their permission, hence live only with their permission.
Where marxists may have some difficulty is that the marxian law of value
frankly focuses on the cycle of human social energy in the form of work and
commodity products of labour. That enabled Marx to adapt the classical
labour theory of value to explain the invisible mechanism of the
exploitation of labour power, and the voracious nature of capital itself.
Nevertheless there should be no insuperable difficulty in viewing the cycle
of human energy within the larger cycle of all energy and matter in which
the ecology movement rightly locates the human species.
Although it is a subset of the larger energy cycle of natural matter on
this planet, under the insatiable propulsion of capital to accumulate it
means that capitalist-led production eats into all pre-existing
self-sustaining patterns of both human social reproduction and the
reproduction of the biosphere. It is therefore like a cancer taking over
the planet from within the human society.
Only if human energy in the form of labour power is fully socialised will
we be able to bring social foresight to the management of the global
biosphere. Indeed the two struggles should complement one another because
they both require the use of land and the use of other means of production
to be brought under social control.
