I agree with much of what Julio says below, but I think he should avoid the word "efficiency," which is usually seen as a normative goal. Perhaps "productivity" is a better word.
On 6/27/07, Julio Huato <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The usual meaning of efficiency is "best use" of -- ultimately -- the productive force of labor in terms of overall human wellbeing. In general, there's little problematic about the notion of efficiency. The devil is in the details. What is "wellbeing" in a given historical epoch (the standard of efficiency) is not fixed once and forever. Societies are not homogeneous. So, who determines what is "best use" and what is "overall human wellbeing"? Concrete people in concrete conditions, to the extent they are effectively agents or makers of history in its many layers. As a rule, in functional capitalist societies, the main "deciders" (to use George Bush's term) are the capitalists.
in that case, efficiency is not a normative goal, right? ...
What I usually try to do, something that those who've read my stuff here and in other lists can attest to, is follow Marx's lead with respect to the political economy of his time, i.e. not to reject the concepts of the economists tout court, but *to critique them*, in the sense of deriving from them further and further consequences (reducing them ad absurdum if you will) beyond the point where the economists leave them. It's like the category of profit under Ricardo or Mill, which Marx takes away and turns into a specific form of surplus value. That's what I think should be done with the apparatus of today's economics: toss the shell of ideological rationalization and keep the rational kernel, etc. And in this exercise, I've been insistent to the point of bugging people that we need to represent the concepts of the economists adequately, resisting the temptation to trivialize them or mock them for cheap political or ideological thrill.
but your use of the word "efficiency" is not standard. In this neoliberal era, neoclassicals most often use the term as synonymous with "Pareto efficiency" -- but in practice tend to use "Kaldor-Hicks efficiency." I also do not reject neoclassical or orthodox economics _tout court_. My general conclusion is that if you clear away the Chicago-school nonsense (and not all that the U of C produces is nonsense), you get a more sophisticated microeconomics, as seen in the work of such folks as Leibenstein, Scitovsky, Stiglitz, Akerlof, etc. This more sophisticated microeconomics can be largely valid within its own framework. However, it misses the larger context of the capitalist mode of production, with its exploitation, domination, and alienation of the working class, and its expansionism (accumulation). ...
But, in this light, the content of the category starts to reflect the POV of the working people as an emerging political force. It's not that merely by disputing the content of a term one secures some sort of progress. In a sense, all one is doing is giving conceptual expression to what is already a practical reality -- the movement that collectively asserts the interest of the working people, that collectively enforces a decreasing tolerance towards the garbage of capitalism, i.e. giving expression to a social rebellion!
I don't think that the concept of efficiency does this job very well. I'd say the struggle for the fulfillment of human needs would do it better. ...
Note that I am not questioning the possibility or the necessity to build communism. As a matter of fact, I'm convinced that -- within the boundaries of historical contingency and excluding a nuclear or environmental catastrophe -- communism will prevail *necessarily*. I have never been more convinced of this. I also hold the old view that there's an inherent fundamental tendency in capitalism to hit the ultimate limits with increasing acuteness, not through some agent-less mechanism, but through its spontaneous impact on -- mixed with an increasingly conscious self-transformation of -- the working people.
communism will prevail "necessarily"? why? and what is mean by "necessarily" here? ... -- Jim Devine / "Bong Hits 4 Jesus."
