Could you be a bit clearer on who is saying what? At least hit the return twice between one speaker and another.
Carrol -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Paul Cockshott Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2012 2:24 PM To: Progressive Economics Subject: Re: [Pen-l] FW: Determinaton of the value of state token money 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. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l The University of Glasgow, charity number SC004401 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
