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In Marx writing "private" and "social" receive strict determination we need carefully use these term
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I have understood - perhaps incorrectly but I don't think so, the words "social labor" to in fact means the "social character of labor" as it evolves in the context of the socialization of production. Can one currently speak of the private labor of individuals in the context of the triumph of world imperialist relations? I think not and below will show why.
On what basis does the social character of labor arise? This is a somewhat different question than "through what mode of existence is the social character of labor revealed" - as it arose historically?
As I understand your meaning it is the following: To view the productive forces as the fundamental connecting tissues transforming and creating the category called the social character of labor, prevents the unfolding of the mysterious character of the commodity form. Further, articles produced by the private labor of individuals become commodities - not through, but as the act of exchange. The act of exchange is by definition a social act and become the mode through which material relations between human beings appear as social relations between things.
Below is the material from Frederick Engels Anti Duhring
"We have seen that the capitalistic mode of production thrust its way into a society of commodity-producers, of individual producers, whose social bond was the exchange of their products. But every society based upon the production of commodities has this peculiarity: that the producers have lost control over their own social interrelations. Each man produces for himself with such means of production as he may happen to have, and for such exchange as he may require to satisfy his remaining wants. No one knows how much of his particular article is coming on the market, nor how much of it will be wanted. No one knows whether his individual product will meet an actual demand, whether he will be able to make good his costs of production or even to sell his commodity at all. Anarchy reigns in socialized production.
But the production of commodities, like every other form of production, has it peculiar, inherent laws inseparable from it; and these laws work, despite anarchy, in and through anarchy. They reveal themselves in the only persistent form of social interrelations - i.e., in exchange - and here they affect the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition. They are, at first, unknown to these producers themselves, and have to be discovered by them gradually and as the result of experience. They work themselves out, therefore, independently of the producers, and in antagonism to them, as inexorable natural laws of their particular form of production. The product governs the producers.
In mediaeval society, especially in the earlier centuries, production was essentially directed toward satisfying the wants of the individual. It satisfied, in the main, only the wants of the producer and his family. Where relations of personal dependence existed, as in the country, it also helped to satisfy the wants of the feudal lord. In all this there was, therefore, no exchange; the products, consequently, did not assume the character of commodities. The family of the peasant produced almost everything they wanted: clothes and furniture, as well as the means of subsistence. Only when it began to produce more than was sufficient to supply its own wants and the payments in kind to the feudal lords, only then did it also produce commodities. This surplus, thrown into socialized exchange and offered for sale, became commodities.
The artisan in the towns, it is true, had from the first to produce for exchange. But they, also, themselves supplied the greatest part of their individual wants. They had gardens and plots of land. They turned their cattle out into the communal forest, which, also, yielded them timber and firing. The women spun flax, wool, and so forth. Production for the purpose of exchange, production of commodities, was only in its infancy. Hence, exchange was restricted, the market narrow, the methods of production stable; there was local exclusiveness without, local unity within; the mark in the country; in the town, the guild.
But with the extension of the production of commodities, and especially with the introduction of the capitalist mode of production, the laws of commodity-production, hitherto latent, came into action more openly and with greater force. The old bonds were loosened, the old exclusive limits broken through; the producers were more and more turned into independent, isolated producers of commodities.
It became apparent that the production of society at large was ruled by absence of plan, by accident, by anarchy; and this anarchy grew to greater and greater height. But the chief means by aid of which the capitalist mode of production intensified this anarchy of socialized production was the exact opposite of anarchy. It was the increasing organization of production, upon a social basis, in every individual productive establishment. This ended the old, peaceful, stable condition of things. Wherever this organization of production was introduced into a branch of industry, it brooked no other method of production by its side. The field of labor became a battleground. The great geographical discoveries, and the colonization following them, multiplied markets and quickened the transformation of handicraft into manufacture. The war did not simply break out between the individual producers of particular localities. The local struggles begat, in their turn, national conflicts!
, and the commercial wars of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Finally, modern industry and the opening of the world-market made the struggle universal, and at the same time gave it an unheard-of virulence. Advantages in natural or artificial conditions of production now decide the existence or nonexistence of individual capitalists, as well as of whole industries and countries. He that falls is remorselessly cast aside. It is the Darwinian struggle of the individual for existence transferred from Nature to society with intensified violence. The conditions of existence natural to the animal appear as the final term of human development. The contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation now presents itself as an antagonism between the organization of production in the individual workshop and the anarchy of production in society generally.
The capitalistic mode of production moves in these two forms of the antagonism immanent to it from its very origin. It is never able to get out of that "vicious circle" which Fourier had already discovered. What Fourier could not, indeed, see in his time is that this circle is gradually narrowing; that the movement becomes more and more a spiral, and must come to an end, like the movement of planets, by collision with the center. It is the compelling force of anarchy in the production of society at large that more and more completely turns the great majority of men into proletarians; and it is the masses of the proletariat again who will finally put an end to anarchy in production. It is the compelling force of anarchy in social production that turns the limitless perfectibility of machinery under modern industry into a compulsory law by which every individual industrial capitalist must perfect his machinery more and more, under penalty of ruin.
But the perfecting of machinery is making human labor superfluous. If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845 [3], available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead weight upon the limbs of the working-class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator for keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital.
Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working-class; that the instruments of labor constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the laborer; that they very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his subjugation.
Thus it comes about that the economizing of the instruments of labor becomes at the same time, from the outset, the most reckless waste of labor-power, and robbery based upon the normal conditions under which labor functions; that machinery,
"the most powerful instrument for shortening labor time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the laborer's time and that of his family at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital." (Capital, English edition, p. 406)
Thus it comes about that the overwork of some becomes the preliminary condition for the idleness of others, and that modern industry, which hunts after new consumers over the whole world, forces the consumption of the masses at home down to a starvation minimum, and in doing thus destroys its own home market." (End of quote)
It is my understanding that what Engels is describing are the various stages in the quantitative and qualitative development of the social character of labor on the basis of the increased socialization of the productive forces, i.e., development of the productive forces. You are correct to state that I have deviated from a strict determination of the meaning of private and social labor as quoted by Marx. I have presented the reason for this "deviation." Marx context is how and why articles become commodities, a historical period spent. Marx was quoted as stating:
"As a general rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of the labour of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently of each other."
Here is my understanding: during the period of history in which articles of utility becomes commodities, the private labor assumes the mode of operation of individual labor. With the development of the mode production private labor is transformed into social labor of the individual. However, I do not like these kinds of explanations and opt to use Engels mode of formulation.
Stated another way: At the dawn of capital articles are transformed into commodities by the private labor of the individual. At this stage of development of the productive forces the private labor emerges as the mode of operation of the individual. This private labor of the individual is revealed as a social bond through the exchange of the individual product he produces.
These various groups of individuals constitutes a small social group in society and what makes their individual labor private is their possession of means of production - not their individual biological constitution. With the increasing development of the means of production "private labor " is transformed into social labor and private labor as a category of history is regulated to antiquity. Or rather, the private labor of the individual biological unit, whose social bond is revealed in the exchange of his products in society, casts off its private shell and now appear as social labor on the part of the individual.
I am going to seek another mode of expression because when the word dialectic is mentioned a response occurs - here I am "sensitive," that I cannot decipher.
I am assuming that my lack of mastery of the external mode of operation of value limits my understanding of the commodity form of the social products in their external modes. I am working towards correcting this defect.
My point of departure in respects to the Soviet Union is that a defect in understanding of the commodity form - from Marx standpoint, cannot lead to capitalism.
Once a new law system emerges ones subjective assessment of objective laws of a process cannot destroy the process but only inhibit its operation or in the context of the Soviet infrastructure, alter the tempo of evolution and development. This is so because once a new law system emerges, its emergence signifies that it is now operating on its own internal impulses. Bad policy and ignorant and selfish people capturing the leadership of the working class in the Soviet Union could not destroy the systems laws system. Even under conditions of stagnation, the stagnation could not produce collapse. Destroying a process requires the dismantling - not stagnation, of the basis on which its laws of operation becomes "operational."
Stalin was a class with a new law system and this is not understood. Let us assume that Stalin was the greatest butchery in history - which he most certainly was not but rather a great revolutionary of extraordinary insight and class stamina. The question remains to describe the law system of Soviet socialism. This law system cannot be unraveled on the basis of the commodity form or rather the external mode of value.
Actually, Marx materialist conception of the materialist conception of history and what he called "my dialectic" unraveled and articulated the law of society. Capital - the book, came much later. I must insist that the key in grasping the economic problems of socialism in the USSR resides in a materialist conception of the productive forces and property relations as class factors and then the role of individuals as personification of class.
Even with the overthrow of the class rule of the proletariat - which began with the ascendancy of Khrushchev, and the consolidation of a hostile class rule in the Soviet Union, this was not enough to overthrow the law system of socialism. Even those hostile to Stalin and his government are compelled by the logic of current history to admit that he was a class rule with a different law system. Stalin was most certainly not a different form of capitalism or state capitalism.
I have no intention of defending the Textbook 4 edition. Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR addressed the issues of creating a "proper" Economic Textbook on socialism for the world communist movement.
The Soviet Union was in fact a society of associated producers at a certain definable stage in the development of the productive forces. This "certain definable stage" has remained undefinable in its qualitative feature until a new development in society arose by which the boundary of transitions could be understood as a law system of development.
Communism was not possible in the Soviet Union. I am aware that this is one of our small points of contention.
The external pressure of capital means does not simply mean the pressure of hostile capitalist states but rather also means the external pressure of capitalist production relations in unity with the agricultural sector of the Soviet economy. The only persistent social bond the agricultural producers would accept with the working class and the industrial proletariat in particular was that of the exchange of their product.
The law of value did not however operate in the Soviet Union as its does in capitalist society. The law of value existed in the Soviet Union on several levels. The law of value had no regulating function in socialist production within the industrial infrastructure as the production of the mean of production, but asserted itself somewhat through articles of personal consumption and of course with the agricultural producers who would only accept the exchange of their products as the social bond with the working class.
This specific configuration of Soviet society can now be fully understood as a distinct historical category defining a specific boundary in the development of the productive forces. What had been called the exploitation of the Soviet peasantry is a bourgeois category when the actual destruction of the family farm under capitalism - on the basis of the mechanization of agriculture, is grasped.
Stalin did not wreck the agricultural sector but fought to develop it on the only basis historically available: collectivization. Khrushchev and his predecessors wrecked the agricultural sector. Khrushchev and his predecessors had no personal or individual merits whatsoever and where not Marxist but capital within socialism.
It is not a question of bad planning on the part of Khrushchev and his predecessors. It is not a question of bad accounting on the part of Khrushchev and his predecessors. The exponential growth of the industrial infrastructure contains its own law system, be it private or public property relations. The law of value does not and did not determine the exponential growth of the Soviet industrial sector or the agricultural sector. This is so because the development of their industrial infrastructure was not driven by the production of commodities because the means of production in Soviet society were not commodities.
It is true that means of production entered the realm of exchange with capital externally. Thus the law of value had some sway. Stalin is remarkably clear on this matter.
Thus is my understanding of social labor and socialized production in the context of the law system that governed Soviet society.
Melvin P.
Your Comrade in Arms.
Arms are theoretical weapons, not guns or material artifacts.
