Chris Burford wrote,
>This is exciting, and dangerous.
Admittedly it's dangerous. How exciting it is depends on if it can ever be
properly articulated.
>Could I ask you please to slow down, and dare I say it, debate the issue
>with icy sobriety.
There's no harm in asking. What I was trying to say, in part, is that in the
absense of mutually accepted narrative conventions that's extremely hard to
do -- hence the example of Marx's hyperbole about "blowing the foundation
sky-high". What does that really tell us about other than his excitement?
What it requires to establish the necessary new conventions is first of all
a conversation -- a debate would be premature because the unconventional
interpretation is at a disadvantage, notwithstanding that I can do a more
conventional interpretation, perhaps better than I can do the unconventional
one.
>The problem is that the internet puts a premium on speed
>reading and these arguments need to be considered very carefully.
Yes and no. The internet puts a premium on speed reading in these kinds of
back-and-forth instant gratification messagings. My sense is that's how most
people use it most of the time. But it can also function as a big baggy,
searchable archive of fragments, comments and records once we learn how to
use it and as long as we are mindful of contributing to that archive in a
retrievable way. In this latter respect, the internet contributes to the
development of that "social individual" Marx refers to on page 705 that you
cited.
>page 704 of Grundrisse,
>
>"to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth
>comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed
>than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose
>'powerful effectiveness' is itself in turn out of all proportion to the
>direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the
>general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the
>application of science to production."
>
>and (page 705)
>
>"the human being comes to relate more as a watchman and regulator to the
>production process itself....it is neither the direct labour he himself
>performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation
>of his own general productive power, his understanding of the nature and
>his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body - it is, in
>a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great
>foundation-stone of production and of wealth."
And Chris's comment:
>This appears to open the doors wide to the post-modernist heresy, in which
>many good marxists have drowned.
>
>Tom, the angle I would like to come to on this, is with respect, not your
>ideas, but how these sort of comments by Marx are compatible with the
> marxian law of value.
Postone deals with this question exhaustively in Time, Labor and Social
Domination. His argument is that volume I of Capital presents an immanent
critique of the law of value or labour theory of value and NOT an
alternative political economy based on the labour theory of value. Marx's
critique holds that the law of value is "valid" from the perspective of
capital, standing on its own foundations, but ONLY from that historically
determinate perspective. The labour theory of value, per se, doesn't grasp
how capitalism came to be or how it will some day perish.
As for heresy, it may well be what Postone criticizes as "traditional
Marxism" that has been heretical in its attempt to establish a positive
political economy in place of this immanent critique.
>Could you please argue very very slowly whether you think the propositions
>by Marx in this section of Grundrisse are compatible or incompatible with
>Marx's law of value?
I think they are entirely compatible in that the law of value holds
provisionally within capitalist society while the propositions from this
section of Grundrisse address the possibility of transcending the
historically determinate foundation and the tendency of capitalist
development itself to move in the direction of such a transcendence. More on
the provisional status of the law, later.
Postone's comment on the passage from page 704, cited above, includes the
following: "according to Marx, the form of production based on value
develops in a way that points to the possible historical negation of value
itself . . . Value becomes anachronistic in terms of the potential of the
system of production to which it gives rise; the realization of that
potential would entail the abolition of value."
As you put it, this doesn't suggest a logical contradiction but a contrast
in viewing the phenomenon from different perspectives -- in terms,
respectively, of capital's foundation and its developmental potential.
However, this contrast does become a logical contradiction if one mistakes
the historically determinate perspective for a transhistorical one.
It is also crucially important what different perspective one takes.
According to Postone, traditional Marxism assumes that the other perspective
is from the standpoint of labor, which Postone points out, however, is not
"outside" of capital but is itself "historically specific and constitutes
the essential structures of the society". Postone argues that Marx developed
a critique *of* labor in capitalist society, not a critique of capitalist
society from this (transhistorical) perspective of labor.
With regard to the provisional nature of the law of value within capitalism,
talking about a "within" and "outside" capitalist society as I do above
implies that the anachronism and the abolition of value refers only to some
end state, the last days so to speak. This is misleading. It seems to me
that the tendency to anachronism of the value form is already implicated in
the incessant drive to obsolescence of fixed capital. Might we even say that
devalorization of individual capitals through periodic crises is both a
microcosm of the anachronism of the value form and a way of restoring the
law and forestalling its final abolition? The quasi-objective law of value
thus requires perpetual sacrifice, or transgression, of precisely those
values that are (provisionally) determined by the law. If the law of value
was "strictly enforced", development would come to a standstill.
The thing to be wary of here is the drift of the concept or metaphor of
"lawfulness" from the quasi-objective to the juridical to the customary. In
the case of US men working 4 hours a week longer, we have just such a
congeries of laws, e.g.,: 1. the physiological relationship between output
and fatigue, 2. the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 establishing the
40-hour workweek standard and 3. corporate culture norms regarding face time
as "revealed work ethic". Nothing says that all of these laws have to
operate in alignment with each other, although political economy and the law
of value imply "self-correction" if 2 or 3 stray too far, for too long, from
the anchor of 1.
Here we reach the other side of that danger detected in the astonishing
formulations of the Grundrisse -- namely the danger of being consoled by
expectations of a correction that may never come because the law of value
upon which that reckoning depends has been suspended. I don't know where the
greater danger lies, I wish I did.
As for advanced capitalism, on the one hand, needing and getting a more
flexible, educated workforce and on the other hand the burn-out, social
fragmentation and mental illness, I see that as basically emptying the
granaries. Once they're empty, it's a hard act to follow, at least on the
same scale. The *need* of advanced capitalism for a more flexible, more
educated workforce is also the historical result of the *supply* of a
surplus more educated population -- at the front end of which was a baby
boom and a defense education act.
Yes, it does take time and skill to develop the social individuals who can
connect with other middle class folks on the internet or at an airport. But
that time was expended amorphously and not necessarily ON the beautiful
people in proportion to the compensation they will receive for representing
BOTH the labour time expended on their social development and that expended
on the care and grooming of Ted Kaczynski. It's not that production has been
completely disconnected from the expenditure of human labour, but that it
becomes increasingly difficult to attribute any particular output to any
particular direct expenditure of labour time.
I am not sure if what I have said above really clarifies anything or simply
dwells on the gaping uncertainty.
Tom Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
Bowen Island, BC
