Jim Devine wrote:
Does "surplus-value" in the sense applicable to capitalism have
meaning in an ideal community?
no it doesn't. Surplus-value is a category unique to capitalism. An
ideal society might produce a surplus, though, as Marx noted in his
CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM.
If "labour time" in capitalism means something "essentially
different" from labour time in an ideal community because the
activity of individuals as "universally developed individuals" is
essentially different from the activity of wage labour, then the
"essence" of activity in the ideal community can't be captured by
concepts depending for their meaning on the different "essence" of
wage labour.
Since all prior forms of labour are essentially different from the
form actualized in an ideal community, the "essence" of activity in
such a community can't be fully elaborated in terms of
characteristics shared with these earlier forms. It must actualize
a form that had only fully existed previously as an unactualized
potential.
This is true even of those historical forms of activity, e.g.
historical forms of "composing," that are much closer to "really free
working" than the alienated labour characteristic of the capitalist
labour process. The actualization of the "essence" of ideal
activity requires "subjective and objective conditions" whose
creation requires the whole of previous history.
"He [Adam Smith] is right, of course, that, in its historic forms as
slave-labour, serf-labour, and wage-labour, labour always appears as
repulsive, always as external forced labour; and not-labour, by
contrast, as 'freedom, and happiness'. This holds doubly: for this
contradictory labour; and, relatedly, for labour which has not yet
created the subjective and objective conditions for itself (or also,
in contrast to the pastoral etc. state, which it has lost), in which
labour becomes attractive work, the individual's self-realization,
which in no way means that it becomes mere fun, mere amusement, as
Fourier, with grisette-like naiveté, conceives it. Really free
working, e.g. composing, is at the same time precisely the most
damned seriousness, the most intense exertion. The work of material
production can achieve this character only (1) when its social
character is posited, (2) when it is of a scientific and at the same
time general character, not merely human exertion as a specifically
harnessed natural force, but exertion as subject, which appears in
the production process not in a merely natural, spontaneous form, but
as an activity regulating all the forces of nature." (Grundrisse p.
611)
Ted
