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>In this time, let argue social labor and social production. *
>Marx said
(Translation)
"Lets us discuss the question of social labor as a histrionically evolved form of social production and social production as a historically evolved form of the laboring process."
Reply
I call the above formulation the dialectic of labor. I do not call this the dialectic of abstract labor whose mode of external expression is the question of the value form. Labor has no value but is the substance that creates value and consequently its external modes of expression.
I do not call this the dialectic of social labor because the mode of expression of private labor and individual labor - as they interpenetrate one another and "become something else" cannot be understood.
"As a general rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of the labor of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently of each other. The sum total of the labor of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labor of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer's labor does not show itself except in the act of exchange."
"In sum in Capitalist society labor is private and production is social."
In other word, Private labor mediate market to gain social character
if capitalist labor is social. The labor needs not "Sachen character. " (End of quote).
No!
Individual labor appears in its external mode as private labor, which "mediate market to gain social character if capitalist labor is social."
Here is my understanding of the above as applied to the here and now and historical.
In present day Capitalist society, the labor of the individual has a private character, in as much as we are speaking of an individual biological unit that enters the market under conditions where the totality of production is interactive on a planetary scale.
You state the following as best as I can translate:
(Note: Comrade Miyachi Tatsuo, I hate when I modify and not translate your words. I never mean to "modify" but my translation skills are primitive.)
You state:
"In other words, the labor of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labor of society, only by means of the relations, which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labor of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things."
This is correct as a theoretical presentation but historically obsolete. Nay, this is correct as a theoretical presentation, but does not take into account an evolution that takes place between that which is called private labor and individual labor - in my opinion.
Here is the reason. Marx speaks of the
"labor of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently of each other."
"Independently of each other" is a historical category whose "distance" is measurable. On the surface "distance" is merely a quantitative configuration meaning "how much." This matter of "how much" is a measure of the relationship of individual human beings during a definable period of history and a definable configuration of the mode of production.
I am stating the obvious because all material categories are historical, meaning they evolved as an expression of human praxis.
What happens when the "private labor" of the individual is torn from that which gives the word "private" meaning and distinguishes it from the word "individual?" Private is connected or rather fused with ownership of means of production - implements. This is a historical category.
In the context of my culture - (which does not make it correct) the word "private" means ownership of personal means of production. No one in American society as a social force owns personal means of production.
From this material fact of life the concept of "private labor and individual labor" is understood as a historical mode of evolution of the value form.
American was founded as a country - not nation, of capitalist production relations. There were no concrete feudal economic and social forms of intercourse. None. Zero!
The specific period of history formation of American society was the transition from manufacture to industry and not the emergence of the commodity form as it took place under feudal relations of production, or rather the emergence of mercantile capitalism.
The specific period of history formation of American society was the transition from manufacture to industry and not the emergence of the commodity form of the social product, as it took place under the private labor of the individual whose social bond was revealed in the exchange of the social product.
Comrade Miyachi,
In history I am a slave devoid of means of production or "private labor" by definition. I possess individual labor capacity, which was transformed into labor power under a unique distortion of capitalist market relations.
I cannot enter Marxism from the standpoint of "free men" or "free laborers" or what is articulated as the dialectic of private and individual labor. But rather from the standpoint of "freed men." Hence, an inherent distinction of the dialectic of private and individual.
I have a very different sense of Marx Capital.
Melvin P.
