>Why do you say so casually that "no one has shown that
>machinofacture makes direct
>human labor superflous in the production of commodities - it just
>changes the character of that labor"? Marx says as much in
>the Grundrisse, as I showed in two previous missives. Here he writes
>unequivocally that the application of science and technology makes
>direct labor superflous, and suggests that the ltv does not apply in
>advanced capitalism.
Ricardo will doubtless be interested in Postone's discussion of both
Habermas (whose argument is, well, similar to Ricardo's) and those passages
from the Grundrisse, which R has cited. Please see p. 232f of Time, Labor
and Social Domination: a reinterpretation of Marx's critical theory.
Cambridge. 1993.
There are at least two problems to work out in decreasing orders of
abstraction: first, Marx's conceptual distinction between value (labor time
as a measure of wealth) and wealth itself, the production of which has come
indeed to depend less on direct labor because of scientific and
technological advance; second, Marx's analysis of the redistribution of
value towards capitals of high organic composition and/or with a
technological monopoly which those capitals on account of their high
profitability thus only appear to be highly productive of value. Of course
this is only to way that we need to get Marx's basic concepts right: the
distinction between wealth and value, the distinction between surplus value
and profit.
By the way, Postone comments on methodological individualism. He also
probes why capital does indeed appear to take on the properties of a
Goal-Directed Subject.
Rakesh
