raghu wrote: > That might apply to most commodities, but does that apply to finite > non-renewables like oil? > > If labor productivity is infinite (and therefore labor cost per unit > commodity is zero), are we going to have an infinite supply of oil?
It applies to everything. It's an entirely general principle. Now, I am not saying that we're about to become gods. An infinite level of labor productivity is not in the horizon. I alluded to it simply to push the abstraction to its limit, for the sake of clarity, not for the sake of relevance. If, for the time being, oil is a true "non-renewable," in other words, if it is indeed impossible for humans to speed up the natural geological processes that convert solar energy, organic matter, etc. into oil and do so at a sensible cost, then indeed the productivity of the labor involved in producing oil in addition to the oil that nature has produced will be zero. As humans, we face that and a bunch of other impossibilities. For the time being at least. In non-renewable production, we would expect to come up empty handed, i.e. with zero output, even if we spent all our resources -- ultimately our social labor time -- in their pursuit. For all practical purposes, the value of a true "non-renewable" is infinity, because its labor productivity is zero. However, this is *not* a binding constraint to society. I see no risk that, as a society, we are about to switch *all* our social labor time to adding oil to the natural reserve. No society interested in sustaining itself over the long run would even get close to trying to reproduce something at an infinite cost, or even at a cost above some threshold. That would be tremendously wasteful. As Marx notices (and so do you, below), it is not economical for a society to spend more labor trying to produce a means of production (e.g. oil) than the labor this means of production saves for society. In fact, even before that point, societies would find that alternative uses of their ultimate resource (social labor time) yield a higher return in welfare, human overall development, what have you, than the zero or near zero return that the production of "non-renewables" yields for the time being. So, we would switch our social labor time to those alternative uses. Oil is not immediately human welfare. Oil is an input to producing other things (materials, energy, and ultimately welfare), which -- materially speaking -- are what society wants in the last analysis. As soon as oil becomes too expensive a source of energy or as a raw material for the production of materials, etc., society will switch its social labor time to cheaper alternative ways of producing energy, materials, etc. I expect some people to quip, "But wait a moment. It's a global capitalist society we're talking about. The purpose of capitalist production is not 'welfare' or 'human development,' but sheer profit making. Capital doesn't give a damn about sustainability or human well-being or the planet." To that, my answer is: "You may be talking about a capitalist society alone. But I am not. I have no need to assume that capitalism is the terminal fate of human history. Not in this 21st century. Not after what happened in the last 200 years. I'm talking about capital, capital the social relation, but not capital in a vacuum. I'm talking about capital radically and globally challenged by large portions of the human race that want to retain and expand their humanity." Our era is not the era of capital's absolute domination, capital operating in a backdrop of absolute passivity of working people would create. I'm taking about capital besieged by fighting people bent on negating it. This fight, and not unencumbered capitalism, is what characterizes our time. The purpose of the society that is emerging in this struggle is not profit making. It seems to me that, as we speak, our collective, global notion of human welfare keeps shifting away from the mindless, individualist consumption of stuff, positional goods, and other garbage to a broader, deeper, universal development of our potential as human beings, the embryo of which is our development as fighters against capital. Capital cannot get around the fact that, to be profitable or just to be marketable, production has to be of *use values*, it has to meet human wants. And human wants evolve. Our notion of human welfare shifts. That notion is an arena of the class struggle. Capital doesn't care about the planet. But we do. And we are fighting for it in many ways. Capital will temporarily adapt to this or risk its dissolution. If you say that there's no mechanism enforcing what I say above, my answer is that the mechanism is not a given, but an endogenous variable. Our struggle *is* the mechanism that enforces what I say above. I am not going to bet on human passivity. > Clearly not because soon enough the non-labor cost of production would > exceed the value of the oil. How do you reconcile this? Again, I don't need to reconcile this. If that is indeed the case, then we won't be trying to produce oil. We will continue to extract the oil that nature has produced, until extracting it and transforming it into other things becomes too costly given the alternatives. > Maybe you are > assuming perfect substitutability of non-labor inputs with labor? No need to assume *perfect* substitutability. But substitutability exists. Alternative inputs to producing materials, energy, and ultimately welfare do exist and as the value of oil increases, they become more economical. However, in the last analysis, or if you broaden your period of time, all inputs are labor inputs: living and "objectified" labor inputs. To sum things up, a given degree of "scarcity" translates in general as labor productivity equal to some finite number. (Obviously, a particular case of that is "absolute" or infinite scarcity or non-renewability, which translates as labor productivity = 0. What I say allows for that.) With regards to Jim's comments. My point is true regardless of market structure. Introducing monopoly and complicated forms of value (market price) doesn't help to clarify the general concept. It just complicates and confuses the story with no visible gain. People are very confused about these fundamental things, which are rather straightforward if one stops to think *abstractly* about them. Why mix them up prematurely? I don't think Marx's anti-Malthusian (and anti-Ricardian) stance on these matters was some impulsive, petty political or personal quirk. Or the result of Marx's inability to see that capitalism could end up threatening human life on earth. Instead, it was an argument based on Marx's fundamental views, which -- I argue -- still hold water nowadays. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
