At 20:05 03/01/01 -0800, Tom Walker wrote:
>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.
Agreed. Yes, this is true, at a very high level of abstraction.
>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.
This is a much more focussed precis of what is relevant in Postone than the
publisher's introduction.
I obtained the book in England in hard back at great expense and have not
made use of it.
My reservations may be relevant. The interest in Horkheimer and Habermas
suggested an intellectual descent from the Frankfurt School of marxists.
While I think this school is sensitive about the negative psychosocial
features of advanced capitalist society they are open to the charge that
they have failed to differentiate themselves from the social democratic or
liberal wing of politics.
Certainly dipping into Time Labor and Social Domination I felt I was
looking at a subtle sociological work with philosophical overtones. The
publisher's notes perhaps deliberately removes any combativity from the
message:
"This reinterpretation... relates the form of economic growth and the
structure of social labor in modern society to the alienation and
domination at the heart of capitalism."
I accept your propositions above that it may be important to remember that
Kapital is a critique of political economy and not political economy
itself. I also share very much a reservation about the frequent use by
marxists of the term "labour theory of value" which does not distinguish
marxism from classical political economy and opens the door to a
reductionist political economy, which is positivist in character.
I harbour an anxiety that Marx's profound dialectical analysis of
capitalism exposes contradictions that may be resolved in ways other than
revolution, although they may certainly also place revolution on the
agenda. I suspect at times that the abolition of wage labour may have to
come about in the context of a society in which the private ownership of
the means of production for accumulating surplus shifts step by step to an
open re-affirmation that all production is social and must be carried on
with social foresight and under social control.
Advanced monopoly capitalism may not be adverse to cooperating with the
state at times in setting up some of this regulation. But fundamentally I
think the private ownership of the means of production and the way in which
finance circulates are the crunch issues.
I would rather emphasise in re-applying marxism that that social
reproduction involves many features that cannot be reduced to commodity
exchange even in a society totally dominated by capitalist commodity exchange.
I would emphasise that the reproduction of labour power takes place in this
context. You write:
>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 would say that the reproduction of this work force is *indirectly* rather
than directly the result of the present stage of capitalism. Certainly it
involves the creation of commodities, including goods and services, in the
production of which surplus value can be accumulated by capitalists. But it
also very much involves people's perceptions of their social situation.
I am not quite international enough to have remembered the name of Ted
Kaczynski (do you on the other hand recognise the name of Harold Shipman?)
But I am globally literate enough to have been able to do a web search.
From the detailed psychiatric report on him one can see how his parents
struggled to move up from a working class part of Chicago, only a couple of
steps above the slums, to a middle class environment and how this above
average student, rather socially unskilled, got to Harvard. It is also
vitally important for the safe reproduction of modern capitalist society to
note that on several occasions he did not get the psychiatric care he
needed because it would have cost too much.
Even if only one in 10 million of the workforce go dramatically crazy like
the unabomber, the rational monopolistic management of society (and
remember that capital is not opposed to monopoly) suggests the need for a
comprehensive socially organised health care system, including mental health.
I am not sure, in turn whether I have sharpened things up in my response,
bhanks for the exchange.
At this moment I am not prepared to concede that the increasing
importance of psychosocial features in commodity exchange blurs the role of
*time* as a key determinant of whether capital can make a profit. Rather
that the capitalist continues to plunder a wide range of socially created
use values in grinding out as many commodity services and goods out of a
limited workforce.
Could you perhaps point me please to no more than ten pages in Postone that
will focus me on these questions, and preferably three of four?
Chris Burford
London
