Jim Devine wrote: > Simple commodity production does not have > the same mechanisms that capitalism has > for taking abstract labor-time out of the > realm of theory and putting it into the > world of practice. That is, there's no > capitalist drive to simplify labor, > breaking it down into the littlest pieces > and making it homogeneous, reducing skill > levels, etc. ... > But there's another problem. Values do not > correspond to the amount of labor that's > used to produce things. Rather, it's the > social necessary abstract labor-time that > defines value. The "abstract" part is crucial. > Simple commodity production does not have the > same mechanisms that capitalism has for taking > abstract labor-time out of the realm of theory > and putting it into the world of practice. > That is, there's no capitalist drive to > simplify labor, breaking it down into the > littlest pieces and making it homogeneous, > reducing skill levels, etc. Braverman's story > in LABOR AND MONOPOLY CAPITAL does not > apply. In practice, labor would be still concrete > labor. > > Well, many Marxologists don't see deskilling > as required to make abstract labor real. > Rather, under SCP, what's important is the > value = price of what an individual concrete > labor produces. That defines what's socially > necessary and labor "proves" its abstract > content in the exchange of its products.
Let's leave Marxology alone. Let's think about it. When we cooperate directly, our private labor is immediately social labor. When we trade, our private labor becomes social labor only indirectly. It needs mediation. Commodity exchange bridges the division of (private) labor(s): it mediates the conversion of concrete private labors into abstract social labor. What Marx wrote in Grundrisse is that, historically, the concept of abstract labor required economic conditions under which individual labor is fluid: workers are standardized and routinely transferred across occupations, industries, etc. Capitalist production makes this standardization and transfer of labor a matter of routine. So it makes sense that it took the development of capitalist production for thinkers to get the notion of abstract labor. But conceptualizing abstract labor is not the same as bringing about abstract labor in reality. Analogy: to understand that combustion uses up O2 and emits CO2, we need the chemical sciences to develop up to a point, which requires that the productive force of labor develops up to a point. But chemistry, backward or advanced, doesn't create actual O2 or CO2 out of concepts. The fact is that abstract labor exists as long as people trade and thereby combine concrete private, independent labors at a social scale. How about de-skilling? Well, capital continuously revolutionizes the conditions of production, individual labor processes and the whole division of social labor. Capital continuously em-skills, de-skills, and re-skills labor, both at the level of the individual and the collective worker. Witness the current state of the publishing industry. The division of labor is extended and continuously reshuffled under capitalism, but the division of labor and private ownership didn't start historically with capitalism. The dual character of labor is inherent to commodity production in general. I'm writing all this to follow you in your long detour around abstract labor, de-skilling, etc., to show that these issues are not material to the question of whether some sort of cost/benefit analysis is inherent to allocating social labor time under any type of society -- the issue that David posed to Michael, which triggered this thread. Also, the notion that individual capital has a built-in impulse to crush us, unless we force it to back off, is a given. Capital tends to degrades human life and the very natural basis of human life. The issue is whether c/b analysis in general is fundamentally flawed or the flaw lies in the way in which it is done by the capitalists. Another red herring is the issue of the "impossibility" of a "social welfare function." Do people regularly cooperate? Yes, they do. Or they perish. Do the mechanisms through which humans cooperate lead to paradoxes? Absolutely. It's not a problem of democracies alone. It's a problem of human cooperation in general. (By the way, it's not true that "economists know" that -- as you wrote -- "a democratic process cannot be summarized by any kind of 'social welfare function'." Arrow's theorem doesn't say that a well-behaved social welfare function is impossible when people allocate social labor time democratically. All it says is that it is not guaranteed under his reasonable assumptions. Very different. By the same token, it is easy to show that "well-behaved markets" are "impossible" under very reasonable assumptions.) The real issue here is simple (even a child can understand it, as Marx says in his letter to Ludwig Kugelmann): A communist society (or any other for that matter) must decide on whether to allocate more labor to apple production at the expense of orange production, or the alternative. There's nothing mystical about human life. The production of apples and oranges (along with other things) *is* the production and reproduction of human material life. The economic choice is not only about "things" outside of us: it's mainly about the use of our time, the use of our life, the reproduction of our life -- nothing less. In other words, our life exists in the form of apples and oranges, because apples and oranges objectify our human subjectivity (they are our products) and also because they are objects of our consumption, i.e. objects that reproduce us as subjects, as humans. Therefore, to make our collective economic choice, we have to be able to compare apples and oranges! How? How can we know that we rather produce more apples and less oranges, or the alternative? Please don't say that economic choices under communism are multidimensional or that communism celebrates heterogeneity. Of course. There are many dimensions in how we lead our lives, qualitative diversity in what we make out of our time on earth. Here I'm giving you two of those dimensions: apples and oranges. The real issue is that we need to compare them! So, tell us, how do *you* compare apples and oranges? I'll tell you how: by "reducing" them to a scalar, an amount of one and the same attribute common to both. This reduction is a fact of social life. The reduction is done differently in different types of society, but it is always done. Under commodity production, capitalist production, and actually existing political democracies, it is to some extent an alienated process: it escapes our control and crushes us. Under other forms of production, it may be a means to direct human ends placed under our conscious control. Insofar as we are deciding how much to produce of each good, that attribute can only be the amount of humanity it takes us to produce each good, apples and oranges: i.e. our social labor time. > I guess my prose is really bad, because > Julio doesn't understand what I wrote > (and thus does not know that I already > answered his questions). You give no straight answer to the questions: How would you act if your life were infinitely valuable? How would others act? Would that make any sense to you? > As I said before, the "value" of > _anyone's_ life depends on one's _point > of view_, just as opportunity costs > always depend on one's point of view. This is no problem. Suppose your life is infinitely valuable from your point of view: how would you act? Alternatively, suppose your life is infinitely valuable from the point of view of society: how would others act? _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
