Paul Cockshott wrote:
> ... Marx was analysing a purely capitalist economy before there was an
> effective
> social democratic movement able to organise the production and delivery of
> free social services. One should not assume that the concept of socially
> necessary
> labour as it was applied to Victorian England 150 years ago can be applied to
> modern Europe with partially changed social relations of reproduction.
Jim
Actually, I don't think that Marx's value theory applies to non-market
(non-commodity-producing) economic relationships. There are other
theories for that task, I'm sure. We need to understand democracy and
bureaucracy, not just markets.
Paul
> I think you have to go beyond the particular details of the concept as applied
> then to the deeper layers of its meaning, which come out I think in his famous
> letter to Kugelmann and also by implication when he distinguishes between
> productive
> work and the unproductive faux frais of captalist marketing. There is a
> deeper concept
> of the necessity for society to divide up its labour time between different
> activities
> in order to ensure its reproduction. To the independent agents in capitalist
> society this necessity
> becomes apparent in terms of the need to at least break even in commodity
> trading. But this
> is a projection down onto the individual agents of a bigger overriding social
> necessity.
Jim
That is different from Baran, who seemed to use the term "waste" to
refer to spending that didn't make rational sense to _him_. (So I'll
drop the guilt by association. ;-)) In contrast, it makes sense to me
that there exist certain conditions necessary for any given society to
reproduce itself over time, in parallel to Marx's volume II
reproduction schemes for a commodity-producing society. (I interpret
those schemes as describing a possible state of economic harmony
rather than actual economic behavior.) But those conditions would
likely not be stated in Marxian value terms. A country needs a public
health system, for example. That's different from saying that a
certain fraction of total labor-time must be spent on public health in
order to reproduce the society over time.
---------------------------------
Paul
Yes Marx's exchange value theory only applies to commodity production, but that
does not imply that the law of necessary distribution of labour between
activities can be abolished along with commodity production.
"Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year,
but even for a few weeks, would perish. Every child knows, too, that the masses
of products corresponding to the different needs required different and
quantitatively determined masses of the total labor of society. That this
necessity of the distribution of social labor in definite proportions cannot
possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can
only change the mode of its appearance , is self-evident. No natural laws can
be done away with. What can change in historically different circumstances is
only the form in which these laws assert themselves. And the form in which this
proportional distribution of labor asserts itself, in the state of society
where the interconnection of social labor is manifested in the private exchange
of the individual products of labor, is precisely the exchange value of these
products.
Science consists precisely in demonstrating how the law of value asserts
itself. So that if one wanted at the very beginning to "explain" all the
phenomenon which seemingly contradict that law, one would have to present
science before science. It is precisely Ricardo's mistake that in his first
chapter on value [ On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation , Page
479] he takes as given all possible and still to be developed categories in
order to prove their conformity with the law of value.
On the other hand, as you correctly assumed, the history of the theory
certainly shows that the concept of the value relation has always been the same
— more or less clear, hedged more or less with illusions or scientifically more
or less definite. Since the thought process itself grows out of conditions, is
itself a natural process, thinking that really comprehends must always be the
same, and can vary only gradually, according to maturity of development,
including the development of the organ by which the thinking is done.
Everything else is drivel.
The vulgar economist has not the faintest idea that the actual everyday
exchange relations can not be directly identical with the magnitudes of value.
The essence of bourgeois society consists precisely in this, that a priori
there is no conscious social regulation of production. The rational and
naturally necessary asserts itself only as a blindly working average. And then
the vulgar economist thinks he has made a great discovery when, as against the
revelation of the inner interconnection, he proudly claims that in appearance
things look different. In fact, he boasts that he holds fast to appearance, and
takes it for the ultimate. Why, then, have any science at all?"( Marx to
Kugelman Jully 11 1868)
What I take him to be saying here is that the 'law of value' is the law of the
proportionate distribution of social labour, that this is a natural law which
can not be done away with. Only the form of its appearance can change.
In a society like Sweden this distribution of labour occurs primarily through
the state and secondarily through private commodity production. In Soviet
Russia it occured even more predominantly vial the state, though private and
semi private production still existed in agriculture.
> As the socialisation of production and reproduction advances, this partial
> perspective becomes
> historically superceded by the direct planning of social needs. This reached
> a much more advanced
> stage say in Social Democratic [??] Russia than in Social Democratic Sweden
> or Britain, but the some of
> the same issues are at stake there.
Again, I don't think that Marx's value theory applies to non-commodity
relations. Though I haven't read the literature on this subject, I'm
pretty sure that Stalin thought that the "law of value" applied under
what he called "socialism," but he's not an authority that I would
appeal to. I'd say that if an economy becomes totally socialized,
Marx's law of value becomes totally irrelevant.
======================
Stalin did say that the law of value applied under socialism but it is not
clear to me whether by this he meant the same sense of the law of value as in
Marx's Letter to Kugelmann. He may have meant simply the regulation of
production by exchange values. It would take some historical work to see what
impact the Letter had on Soviet Political Economy and whether this was the
meaning commonly attached to the phrase. I dont get that impression myself.
--
Jim Devine / If you're going to support the lesser of two evils, you
should at least know the nature of that evil.
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