[this thread is getting very repetitive. Unless some new point comes up, I'm bailing out. The only original point I make is to refer to Frank Ackerman's work on c/b analysis.]
Julio writes: > Let's leave Marxology alone. Let's think about it. < Good idea. BTW, I was only making reference to Marxology to acknowledge that some other people have a different interpretation of Marx than I do. > 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.< Right. However, if we're talking about direct cooperation, as in a factory or similar workplace, private or individual labors are social but not in a quantative sense. The labor of the skilled machine-repairer cannot be seen as quantatively comparable to that of an assembly line worker in the same plant. (I presume that these labors are complements, not substitutes. Each labor's value to management is dependent on the other.) It's only the combined labor of the plant that can be quantified, via selling the product. Speaking of Marxology, Julio continues: > 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.< Routine? It's true that capitalist accumulation has a _tendency_ to standardize and homogenize individual labors so that there is transfer of individual labors between jobs. (This is the Braverman tendency that I referred to.) But capitalism does not represent the be-all and end-all of the social formation; it has not swallowed all of society. There is also working-class resistance to this deskilling & homogenizing tendency. In addition, there are all sorts of social barriers to homogenization, such as differences in ethnicity and language that prevent homogenization. Capitalism itself creates new occupations (and new bureaucracies) which add heterogeneity to the labor force. So even though capitalism has a tendency to reduce all labor to homogenous robot status, this tendency is not fully realized in practice. > 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.< Yes, but capitalism involves more than just private individual workers selling their products (i.e. simple commodity production). It also involves some very complex bureaucratic organizations in which non-market methods of organization (mostly, command, but also tradition and sometimes even democracy) are used. So even under capitalism, people can't quantify all labor. (Using "natural" units (hours) for quantification and aggregation is nice and democratic, but it's hardly an accurate description of how capitalism does it.) > 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.< Right. I don't think that the deskilling tendency is fully realized in practice. Individual labors are not directly and quantitatively comparable. Thus, abstract labor is not actualized within workplaces, etc. > 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.< If labor can't be quantified and aggregated in a simple way, that makes it extremely difficult to due quantitative c/b analysis, where a single metric is applied to both "c" and "b." That's partly because one important element of cost -- the opportunity cost of labor -- cannot be quantitatively compared among individuals. Put this another way: it's very subjective, so my estimation of the cost and worth of your labor will be different than yours. > 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.< c/b analysis isn't flawed unless you pretend that "c" and "b" are both scalars (single-dimensioned, single valued, numbers). If we see each as instead being a vector (a set of elements), I see nothing wrong with c/b analysis. (cf. Frank Ackerman's work, "Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing,” which I should have cited earlier.) Of course, capitalists and their agents not only pretend that "c" and "b" are scalars but actually do so using market prices, the universal metric that capitalism tries to use to measure everything. (It's not "Man" that's the "measure of all things," as Protagoras would have it. Instead, under capitalism, it's market prices.) This quantification assumes, among other things, that market prices correctly measure costs. What alternative metric are you proposing, Julio? By the way, the capitalist kind of c/b analysis isn't automatically flawed if our frame of reference is capitalism. It might be flawed (if done poorly). > Another red herring [of mine] is the issue of the "impossibility" of a > "social welfare function." Do people regularly cooperate? Yes, they do. > Or they perish. [who said anything otherwise? not I.] 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. < _This_ (the reference to "human cooperation in general") is a red herring. If you're not going to use market prices to add up the elements of the c and b vectors, what are you going to use? Some sort of shadow prices. (To keep it simple, as before I'm ignoring the case where both market prices and shadow prices are used.) To calculate shadow prices, you have to have some sort of unified maximand (i.e., a scalar number to maximize). Not only do I think that it's infeasible (in most practical situations) to summarize a real-world democratic process as maximizing some single number, but I think it's a _bad idea_. It's denying the fact that c/b decisions are by their very nature political decisions that cannot be decided by objective technocrats, capitalist or otherwise. The idea of summarizing the conflicting goals of any society with a single number seems nothing but an effort to take the politics out of democracy, just as capitalist c/b analysis strives to depoliticize decision-making. That's undemocratic. > (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 no 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.)< I wasn't engaging in any kind of market vs. democracy c/b comparison. But I think that Arrow's reasonable assumptions apply in practice. In general, I try to refer to the real world of practice whenever I discuss theoretical stuff. People should assume that I do so. In any event, as I said above, I think that the idea that the idea of a social welfare function is an effort to depoliticize decision-making -- and thus is profoundly undemocratic. The argument for democracy isn't that it's always clean and always produces nice quantitative results. returning to Marxology, > 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.< Yes, I didn't say anything different. A communist society should decide how to allocate labor between alternative ends democratically. This involves, among other things, getting away from the conceit that "c" and "b" can be easily be turned into scalars. People might _decide_ to use scalars, but (as I believe I said in my first or second missive in this thread), it's more democratic to use alternative weighting schemes with the weights stated explicitly (i.e., transparent). > There's nothing mystical about human life. [wow!] The production of apples > and oranges (along with other things) *is* the production and reproduction > of human material life. [is this true for luxury goods?] 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.< I don't see the relevance of this. In any event, there's more to life than "the form of apples and oranges," since life (as I know it) also involves social relationships that are not commodified or quantifiable. > 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!< As long as you don't _add_ them, that's fine. I don't see anything wrong with the idea that a democratic society has to make choices (and don't see why that point needed to be brought up). What I disagree with is the reductionist idea that these choices can be easily quantifiable (and thus easy to aggregate) so that technocrats can make decisions for us or that the quantative costs and benefits are self-evident and objective, rather than involving subjectivity and politics. > 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.< See above: I would weight apples and oranges using my own subjective weights; I make no pretension that my weights have any objective truth behind them. Since capitalism has not yet reduced individual human beings to the status of homogeneous robots doing abstract labor (even though they try like crazy to do so), we can't simply assert that different labors are all quantifiable and can thus be added up to calculate "c" and "b." Invoking the idea that we can weigh the elements of "c" and "b" using "social labor time" only works if that can be measured and actually has some democratic legitmacy. How is "social labor time" calculated? does this involve creating a Sraffa-type model of all of the input-output relations of the economy (determining prices with an equalized profit rate) and then assuming that the profit rate equals zero? I doubt that this could be done with sufficient precision to assign different social labor time values to different kinds of fruit. In any event, it would only reflect the costs of production. It would not say anything about benefits. [ellipsis] > You [allegedly] 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?< Repeating myself: my life is only "infinitely valuable" is _someone else_ is assigning value to it, deciding what my life is worth (like Ford making paternalistic decisions about how to cut their costs in producing the Pinto). If I'm making the decision, my life clearly has finite value (to me), since I take risks, etc. Also, in a legitimate democracy, where I participate in legislative decision directly or indirectly, I can easily see that I could have a finite value. (If I'm not mistaken, Rousseau defined legitimate laws as those which the people impose on themselves (in a democratic way). I'd agree to that: among other things, within reasonable bounds, every person's life would have equal value. Specifically, someone won't be worth more than another due to wealth or power differences.) me: >> 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.<< Julio: >[...] 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? < As I said before: If I'm making the decision, I do not treat my life as infinitely valuable. If I'm making the decision, I do not treat my life as infinitely valuable. If I'm making the decision, I do not treat my life as infinitely valuable. If I'm making the decision, I do not treat my life as infinitely valuable. I hope that repetition makes it clear. I never said that "society" could or should attach an infinite value to my life. That case is irrelevant, since "society" isn't organized to make that kind of decision at this point in history. More importantly, what is the "point of view of society"? _which_ society? capitalist society? according to market principles, not only does _my_ life have a (finite) value, but I'm worth significantly more than a poor person. The present value of the rest of my life is higher; the cost of my production is higher; and I can afford to spend more money on life insurance (which involves the "market test"). The only reason that this logic does not play out in _every_ walk of capitalist life is that even the most oppressive capitalist state has to have some democratic legitimacy. They can't make explicit that the rich and powerful are more valuable than the poor and weak. They at least have to make a nod in the direction of egalitarianism. >From the point of view of a _communist_ society? I've already talked about this (see above and previous missives) so I find that the cost of repeating myself exceeds the benefits (from my point of view, as I weight the disparate elements of the "c" and "b" vectors, natch). -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
