me:
>> Note my clause that starts with the word "when"
>> in the statement above. Julio's statements apply
>> only if it is I who is making a decision about
>> what to do with my own life. But in this case, I
>> was talking about someone else making the decision
>> _for_ me.
Julio:
> I noted the word "when."
you could have fooled me. I talked about someone (e.g. , Ford) making
choices for me. Julio talked about my making choices.
> If what I say applies only if you make the choice, then your argument
> becomes even more absurd. If in your own practice, you don't value
> your life infinitely, then why do you expect others to act as if your
> life were infinitely valuable? How would you act if your life were
> infinitely valuable? How would others act?
Absurd? I can see taking risks, etc., suggesting that the value of my
life is finite _when I am making my own decisions_. But why should I
allow someone else to decide to kill me if the estimated value of my
life to them is less than the benefits to them? I think it's better to
fight back against such bastards. I like the line in the
"Internationale" about getting rid of condescending masters. Now, if
the decision assigning me a finite value were made in a legitimately
democratic way (with me having the same value assigned to my life as
was assigned to similar people), I can accept that.
> [...] Human life -- as specifically human -- is a product, a social product,
> a product of social labor. Private ownership, a given type of
> political democracy, etc. are specific, historically confined forms
> under which human *material* life is reproduced. The *material*
> content of the process is inherent to the reproduction of human life
> in general, i.e. a sine qua non fact under any social form.
This sounds reasonable, but I'm not clear what Julio means by
"material" here. In my interpretation of Marx (based primarily on the
"Theses on Feuerbach" and "The German Ideology"), he and Engels used
the word "material" not to refer to "matter in motion" (the crude
materialist version) but to refer to human practice in society. I
think that usage makes sense (even if my interpretation of Marx is
wrong on this). Human practice involves not just people moving their
bodies but also their thinking about what to do, etc. ("... what
distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that
the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it
in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that
already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its
commencement.")
> The
> material content of the process is easier to see by reference to a
> communist society, which excludes commodity production. Under
> communism, you still have to allocate social labor between the
> production of "safety" and the production of other goods. You have a
> different social form coordinating this allocation -- other than
> market exchange, or political democracy under conditions of wealth
> inequality, which are rather opaque social forms.
A communist society would still have to allocate social labor between
different goals. And, unlike under commodity production, the actual
labor-value of goods and services may be obvious. But that doesn't
mean that they would use relative labor content in making those
decisions. Instead, if things went right, they would reject the idea
that labor is the only measure of opportunity cost. Among other
things, there's the environmental impact. As I've told David over and
over again, there no objective way to aggregate the different elements
of cost (or for that matter, the different elements of benefit). The
only legitimate principle for making cost/benefit analyses would be
democracy based on the _details_ of costs and benefits rather than
some arbitrarily aggregated version (using market prices -- shouldn't
exist under communism -- or shadow prices derived from maximizing some
social welfare function).
> See Marx's letter to L. Kugelmann (July 11, 1868) or Capital I, ch.
> 1's section on commodity fetishism or the 1857 introduction. In fact,
> the underlying distinction goes back at least to Protagoras (see
> Guthrie's book or Gerald Cohen's book on Marx's theory of history).
I wouldn't trust Cohen at all, since his goal seemed to have been to
reproduce the discredited Marxism of the 2nd or 3rd International
using what he saw as "respectable" social science and philosophy
(rather than that dialectical BS).[*] In any case, I'm not sure what
"distinction" you're referring to. Perhaps it's because I'm tired from
the gym and the post-gym over-eating.
It's clear that commodity fetishism is an important factor in life in
commodity-producing societies. It keeps us from seeing the nature of
the commodity-producing system and the systematic alienation that
working people have to tolerate. It's true that this fetishism hides
the social nature of labor from view, and (along with it) our
alienation from the "community of free individuals" that represents
our _species-being_ but that does not say that Marx's vision of the
community of free individuals is sufficient. Communism will itself be
a (collective) human product and it will be the collectivity that
decides on the nature of communism.
--
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
[*] "BS" is his (and his school's) phrase, not mine.
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