Dear James:
On Marx's use of "abstraction" in Capital I you wrote:
> In order to understand
> capitalist production in volume I, he deliberately
> and clearly abstracts from the differences among
> heterogeneous use-values, types of labor-power, and
> means of production. He uses the "acid of
> abstraction" to clarify the nature of class
> relations and exploitation.
I disagree. I interpret that Marx is not
"deliberately" abstracting the differences among
heterogenous use-values and concrete labours, but
describing an abstraction, a "reduction" that actually
occurs through exchange (Cf. Isaak Rubin), in a
"social process", in "the capitalist mode of
production". The values of the commodities are
"realized" through exchange, and so the substance of
value, the expenditure of simple human labor.
" ...by equating their different products to each
other in exchange as values, they equate their
different kinds of labour as human labour. They do
this without being aware of it." (Capital I (Penguin
Ed., p. 166)
"The production of commodities must be fully
developed before the scientific conviction emerges,
from experience itself, that all the different kinds
of private labor... are continually being reduced to
the quantitative proportions in which society requires
them. The reason for this reduction is that in the
midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange
relations between products, the labour-time socially
necessary to produce them asserts itself as a
regulative law of nature. In the same way, the law of
gravity asserts itself when a person's house collapse
on top of him."(C. p. 168)
Marx is not just starting here with his
clarification of "the nature of class relations and
exploitation", as your wrote, but also developing the
concept of form of value, which for him is crucial in
his book and embodies "the whole secret of the money
form and thereby, in nuce,of all burgeois forms of the
product of labour" (Marx to Engels, june 22 1867). Of
course this opens discussion on the role and validity
of Marx's theory of value, but that is an issue that
is of course beyond this email (but not beyond our
argument).
> It's presumed that the output of use-values
> increases with both labor-power hired (and the
> intensity of the labor process) and with the
> productiveness of labor. The latter rises with the
> technical composition of capital, an effort to
> measure the "capital intensity" of production.
Regarding the production of material wealth, i.e.
use-values, and the so-called "productivity", I think
that we need a benchmark here, and such benchmark is
the amount of use-values that concrete useful labour
achieve in the same length of time. As Marx clearly
put it, the expression "productive power"
[produktivkraft] means "of course... the productive
power of concrete useful labor; in reality this
determines only the degree of effectiveness of
productive activity directed towards a given purpose
within a ginver period of time." (C. p. 137) Here MArx
is clearly following the Smithian concept of
"productive powers of labor" -Wealth of Nations, book
I- and Ricardo, although he also assigns "productive
powers" to the land. Marx defines explicitly what
determines the "productive power of labor":
"it is determined amongst other things by the
worker's average degree skill, the level of
development of science and its technological
application, the social organization of the process of
production, the extent and effectiveness of the means
of production, and the conditions found in the natural
environment". It should be stressed that throught
Capital I Marx uses the expression "productive powers"
in this sense, and not as Goran Thernborn and G.A.
Cohen, among other, wrongly interpret, assigning
"productive powers" to **things**, that at the sime
time, as Cohen incredibly argues, ARE productive
powers. Nonsense.
My query about a critique of production functions goes
in this direction. That is why I am interested in a
critique of the very concept of production functions.
Julio Huato wrongly believes, if I understant his
email, that I am looking for a rejection of this
"concept". What I am trying to find is a serious
critique of the concepts behind the "forms" (this is a
sarcasm) of neoclassical economics. For instance, I
still cannot find what the letter k stands for, I
still cannot find the concept of capital, just to put
an example. I presume that the conceptual
underdevelopment of the process of capitalist
production in neoclassical economics certainly reveals
an irrational development of knowlege since the demise
of the critical version of political economy achieved
by Marx.
Matías
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