Lots of questions, and I'm a little spaced out today, but I'll try to answer them.
On 5/13/06, Walt Byars <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I find David Laibman's justification of the LoV the best I have seen. His basic argument is that Capitalist power derives from control over the labor process and since the social relation of capital appears in fragmented form, it must be individually validated through the sale of commidities. Thus, the social relation that commodities are an outward expression of is the capitalist controlled labor process.
that's the way I understood it. Where is Dave's article published? (I'd say that control of the labor process arises from the workers' separation from the means of production and subsistence and their resulting dependence on the capitalists for survival.)
My question is, if we accept that the social relation expressed by commodities is the quantitative aspect of the labor process (labor time), where does the "socially necessary" labor time come in to play here?
the socially necessary aspect refers to the _quantitative_ dimension. Saying that labor-time is "socially necessary" means that commodity-producing society values the labor (so that the value of a commodity depends on that commodity's place in the social totality).
Does the commodity express the labor process that actually was used to produce it?
it's the value (or socially necessary labor-time) of the commodity that expresses the labor process, but in Marx it's typically not the actual labor process as much as the social average (see below).
If so it wouldn't express socially necessary labor time. If the commodity expresses socially necessary labor time, why is this (in Laibman's framework)?
I don't know Dave's framework, so I can't answer that.
Perhaps the commodity expresses the entire spectrum of techniques that could be used to reproduce it, and society merely perceives that which would occur under "the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labor prevalent in that society?"
It's typically the social average of actually-used techniques that prevails.
Or is it that the social relation expressed is the average of the specific labor processses that the various producers of the commodity would use? Because each commmodity can only express one quantitative social relation and thus it must be an average in order to express the multiplicty of different labor processes used to produce it? Why must that be so?
this seems to be the same as what you said above. It's not the average, by the way, in situations where there is temporary or persistent scarcity of inputs or outputs, in which the marginal case dominates, as with the theory of rent.
How [would] it work with similar but differentiated commodities?
with differentiated commodities, each version would have a different value. Instead of thinking about average steel with a single value, there would be a variety of different steels (specialty steels) each with its own value. In that case, it would be the actual labor process that would determine socially-necessary labor and value, but that would equal the social average (the average of the values of a set of one is equal to the value of the one). Marx obviously wasn't familiar with modern theories of monopolistic competition (nor are a lot of Chicago-school type economists), but I don't think they contradict his view.
Is the social relation expressed by a commodity a result of the perception of those who come into contact with the commodity.
no, it's an objective (after-the-fact) relationship among people. That does reflect peoples' perceptions (since demand can play a role in determining values) but does not correspond to those perceptions.
And for historical materialists, wouldn't that perception be conditioned by "the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labor prevalent in that society?"
yes. -- Jim Devine / "the world still seems stuck in greed-lock, ruled by fossilized fools fueled by fossil fuels." -- Swami Beyondananda
