Thomas Lunde wrote:
>Marx's suggestion that "the theft of somebody else's labor time" is a
>miserable foundation to calculate our wealth - which we should measure by
>disposable time not by labor time - is so much truer today than it was 150
>years ago.
>
>Sometimes the common sense of Marx is amazing to me.
Marx was a remarkable scholar and polemicist, but the core idea was
published thirty years before Marx got hold of it in an anonymous pamphlet
that -- according to Engels -- Marx "rescued from oblivion".
It's debatable to what extent Marx succeeded in rescuing the pamphlet or its
argument from oblivion. Who has heard of "The Source and Remedy of the
National Difficulties, deduced from Principles of Political Economy, in A
Letter to Lord John Russell"? But more importantly, who suspects that Marx's
mature economic thinking involved, as Moishe Postone has demonstrated, the
working out of the contradiction between the increasing appetite of capital
for the expenditure of SOCIALLY UNNECESSARY labour time and the immense
unrealized potential of modern industry to set free DISPOSABLE TIME for
society and individuals.
The allegation that much of the work performed today is "socially
unnecessary" sounds like a subjective moral judgment. It would take an
entire book to demonstrate that it is not. Fortunately, that book has been
written: Time, Labor and Social Domination.
In summing up his argument, Postone noted, "It should be clear that
"superfluous" [labour time] is not an unhistorical category of judgment
developed from a position purportedly outside of society. It is, rather, an
immanent critical category that is rooted in the growing contradiction
between the potential of the developed forces of production and their
existent social form. From this point of view, one can distinguish labor
time necessary for capitalism from that which would be necessary for society
were it not for capitalism."
The Postonian Marx differs radically from traditional Marxism. The
traditional view holds that there is a contradiction between capitalism's
productive capabilities and its distributive limitations. The structure and
theme of the published volumes of Capital tend to vindicate such a
traditional interpretation of Marx: volume I is about production, volume II
is about circulation and volume III is about production and circulation
together -- "capitalism as a whole".
Proceeding from that traditional reading of Marx's Capital as a "closed
book", traditional Marxism emphasizes the crisis potential of such
symptomatic tendencies as the "law of the rate of profit to fall" and the
"immiseration of the working class". The implication is that increasingly
frequent and severe economic crises will radicalize an increasingly
oppressed working class leading to a revolutionary upheaval. Although Marx
himself may well have hoped for such an outcome, it doesn't follow from the
logic of the system as he analysed it.
What does follow from Marx's analysis -- and here I'm going out on my own
interpretive limb -- is that eventually capitalism abolishes capitalism. In
the name of 'competitiveness', monopoly replaces competition. In the name of
'labour market flexibility', outright slavery replaces 'wage slavery'. And
in the name of 'free markets' and 'free trade', the Federal Reserve Board
and the International Monetary Fund assume a precipitously centralized
administrative function of promulgating and enforcing this so-called
'competitiveness' and 'flexibility'.
It all boils down (on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week) to a cult of
personality, a myth of the infallibility of one man, Alan Greenspan. What
everyone already knows is that this week the Federal Reserve Board's Open
Market Committee will raise the overnight funds rate by a quarter of a
point. What no one knows is what the hell an overnight funds rate is or why
the entire civilized world as we know it hangs in the balance of a tiny
adjustment of that obscure interest rate.
The answer is, of course: it doesn't. Greenspan is the Wizard of Oz. The
whole elaborate apparatus is a hoax, a bluff calculated to distract us from
the embarrassing fact -- this ain't capitalism anymore. Capitalism abolished
itself. We couldn't bring it back even if we wanted to. Today, an ever
increasing amount of socially unnecessary labour time goes into propping up
the facade of a "market economy" that no simply longer exists. The discovery
of a tumor in Greenspan's colon would have a greater impact on the "market"
than all the utility calculations of all the rational economic actors combined.
What makes sense, today, June 28, 1999: a quarter of a percentage point
calibration of an obscure interest rate upon which the fate of the entire
world allegedly hinges?
or
"The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of
necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general
reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then
corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals
in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them."?
regards,
Tom Walker
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/worksite.htm
