Simon wrote:
>
> I think that where we are parting company is that I am seeing the
> productive relationship also as a social relationship, and the purpose of
> revolution to change the social relationship by qualitatively changing the
> productive relationship, not quantitatively.
Yes SOCIAL relations are relations of production. No problem there.
Revolutionising the social relations of production is the aim of
revolutionaries.
> I also think that, as I have > pointed out before, the dialectics of Left wing
>philosophy are
> fundamentally flawed in failing to grasp this fact in their analysis of
> society, by treating people and thus their ENTIRE needs, rather than just
> their PHYSICAL needs, as objective.
If you mean that physical=production and entire=social then same as
above, the two cannot be separated. In human society physical
reproduction has to be social.
> Now i know that it would be very nice
> for me as a member of the working class to get a cut of my own surplus,
> possibly an equal share with everyone else in that society. I wouldn't call
> it anything other than capitalism, even if my nose was no longer rubbed
> quite so hard in my own means of subsistence and my wage was somehow
> removed from what I actually produced (which leads to the labour vouchers
> systems which Marx correctly criticised: and to criticise a distribution of
> surplus for one abstraction by reference to the real facts is surely to
> criticise all abstractions with reference to the same fact...?) In
> particular, however, if I was no longer allowed to consider my wage a
> realistic sum, and saw a few people telling me what to do and rolling in
> the loot which I amd my brothers and sisters had produced, I would start
> thinking that someone is pulling a fast one. If anything, the law of value
> is intensified, because I have to define it consciously! Or, alternatively,
> I live in a society which does not allow me to discuss such
> things, which > means that someone else is making that decision.
You are talking about the quantitative distribution of the surplus
without qualitatively transforming the social relations here I take
it? I agree that no quantitative change under capitalism can qualify
as a change of the capitalist social relations of production. But
this begs the question as to what that change was in the case of the
workers states. The effect may be similar, namely persistence of
unequal distribution, but can you can only draw the conclusion that
unqual distribution equals capitalism if you have an abstract
definition of capitalism as unequal distribution and an idealist
definition of socialism as equal distribution. Lenin argued
that capitalist social relations of production had been overthrown in
Russia, but that under the new workers state, bourgeois inqualities
(to each according to their work) would persist until such time as
what Hugh talked about as primitive socialist accumulation would
produce sufficient economic goodies (plenty) to allow truly socialist
norms of distribution to evolve (to each according to their need).
So even in the case of a healthy workers state you could not define
socialism as one of equal distribution. In a degenerated workers
state where the bureaucrats control production, the inequality is
clearly much greater, and in reality conforms to the bourgeois norms
of unequal distribution. But to deduce from that that bourgeois
social relations of production exit would be a mistake. Because it
would mean that you did not recognise the material leap made possible
by a workers revolution and by workers property, since you put in
its place an idealist blueprint of socialism as a 'finished product'.
To forsake the real because of its imperfections for the sake of a
perfect ideal is no way to run a revolution.
> At the end of the day, in the society I live in I have a value, as a
> complete entity, rather than having a dual existence (as conscious creature
> and as machine) where the machine can be made a machine and be given a
> value, and I can enter the productive process freely as architect rather
> than as bee. Whatever end of the telescope you look through.
You feel you have value and subjectively want to escape the
determinism of necessary labour and surplus labour, but how? As you
say at the start only by qualitatively transforming social AND
productive relations.
> And you are still using the word "value" instead of "price" when you talk
> of suspending the LOV.It does require certain inputs for a labourer at a
> certain historical level of production to create a certain product. If you
> give over and above that you may be investing in future production
> (teaching the worker, making him/her healthier, etc.), genuinely unaware of
> the value of their labour (which the market finds via the price mechanism,
> and the state guesses), forced into paying more (a REAL strike), or
> genuinely uncaring (either uneconomically flogging workers to death in
> concentration camps/ gulags, or giving workers a share of their profits as
> a gratuity). The value of their labour remains the same. By charging or
> giving a higher price for labour, you skew the market in labour's favour
> for buying other goods (thus lowering the rate of profit by handing over a
> portion of what, by values, is surplus) and make it unfavourable to employ
> that labour, leading to a drive towards technology. Let's face it, putting
> an arbitrarily high price on labour is a good Archimedes screw for
> technological advance, at the cost of surplus: either cutting into profits,
> or into investment. I'm sure the nice Chinese bureaucrats of the Mao era
> went for belt-tightening, intrue proletarian style..... it is noticeable
> that the whole LOV "suspension" has taken a major downturn now that instead
> of China being a potential major power needing industrialisation like a
> human needs air, it is getting already existing industrialised countries to
> provide FDI at the going technological level by selling its sons and
> daughters as slaves. The peasants have noticed very little difference,
> apparently....
What you call artificially screwing up the price of labour as a
mechanism for technological advance is a relatively secondary factor.
It is a factor which alters the relation between demand and supply in
the labour market. This cannot cause capitalist development. That
results from competition to increase relative surplus-value by
increasing the productivity of labour. This can result in rising,
or falling real wages as a secondary effect which does not really
impact back on the independent variable. This the fundamental
difference between Marx and Ricardo. While the former explained
capitalist dynamics as a zero-sum struggle between wages and profits,
Marx showed that increases in relative sv do not require a reduction
in wages. In fact capital can experience increased profits with
rising wages, and crises of overproduction with falling wages. The
key to Marx's critique of Ricardo was his rejection of Ricardo's
universal concept of labour = value. Marx showed that value is
specific to capitalism and is defined by the historically specific
socially necessary labour time (expenditure of labour power). And
this in turn resulted from his recognition of the dual aspect of the
commodity labour-power as use-value (capital's ability to use it
beyond necessary labour time) and exchange value, the socially
necessary labour time required to produce the commodities necessary
to reproduce it.
As for China, which is were we began and should finish, the
reintroduction of the LOV as you say combines advanced technology
with very low wages. It is the advanced technology that creates the
super-profits for DFI, the low wages are a bonus. As workers organise
and drive up their wages, this may eliminate the bonus, but not
the super-profits from relative surplus-value. The point for us as
revolutionaries is not to project such trends as if China has to go
through capitalist restoration to develop. As Russia and China
showed, under bureaucratic mismanged plans they achieved great leaps
forward. Under a democratic workers plan, China would leave the
crisis ridden capitalist world behind in its dust. Crude competition
as the spur to development would be replaced by planned production
for need, and the chaos and destruction of capitalism would be
replaced by a system that came close to meeting your need to have a
'value' that is not reduced to necessary labour.
> The above para is just an attempt on the spot to construct a meaningful
> reason for China favouring over-the-odds prices for labour: would like some
> comments (I'm not emotionally attached to it or anything, so get your
> biggest boots on).
>Oh, and as to the revolutionary upsurge: I identify this as
authentic
> revolutionary feeling which has been squashed by the Left and forced into
> capitalist channels. The people wrote "Abolition of the Wages System!" on
> their banners: the Left sneaked in at night with a crayon and changed it to
> "A fair day's pay for a fair day's work!" Thus I see the fall of these
> regimes as a positive historical step, just as I see their previous
> existence as historically necessary for Capitalism to develop. If that is
> the level of feeling available to the capitalist project: what will we see
> for a world where capitalism is abolished?
>
The role played by psuedo communists and all manner of left
misleaders is not ended by capitalist restoration. So one should'nt
lightly write off the counter-revolution as a "positive historical
step" . A real positive step would have been (and still is in
China) to overthrow these bureuacratic barriers from the base of
workers property. Once restoration occurs we have to do so from a
position of enforced retreat into a highly uneven and backward
capitalism. As Hugh pointed out, talking about historically
necessary gains in this way is to credit history with a fatalist
force, and to abdicate from collective responsibility for the
struggle to defend the gains of the past and fight for real gains on
the ground today in favour of idealist projections which depend upon
some predetermined ideal of capitalism and socialism.
Dave
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