Just to complete a few thoughts left unfinished in the excerpt:
1. It follows from Marx and Engels that, under socialist planning, as
a tendency (under abstract conditions, obviously), the marginal rates
of transformation of productive inputs (ultimately social labor time)
into goods must tend to equalize across all goods and productive
inputs and also equal to the marginal rates of substitution (Engels'
comparison of useful effects) across all goods. It's really simple:
If these marginal rates are not equal, then that means that society
can gain wellbeing for free simply by switching between resources or
by switching its resources from producing one good to producing
another. Why wouldn't a socialist society want to do that? As Marx
noted in Grundrisse, in the "communal society" the economizing of
labor time becomes "a law to an even higher degree."
2. As I have said here before, the notion of "prices" (again, think
here of the material content of prices instead of the social form) as
measures of "relative scarcity" follows in a straightforward manner
from Marx's notion of value. "Scarcity" is the quality of goods that
are costly to reproduce (if at all possible) under specific
conditions. In other words, goods are "scarce" because the productive
force of labor is finite. Value (units of labor/good) is, obviously,
the reciprocal of the productive force of labor (measured as
goods/unit of labor). Therefore, value is a measure of "relative
scarcity"!
3. On Marx's distinction between "material content" and "social form,"
think by analogy with biological sexual differences between men and
women ("material content") and gender oppression ("social form"). As
Gerald Cohen noted, this distinction can be traced back to the Greek
Sophists' distinction between "nature" and "convention." This
distinction underlies any and all critiques of a social order; it is a
distinction between the aspects of social life that can be altered and
those that have to be accepted and managed one way or another (at
least for the time being, given the apparent horizon of the productive
force of our labor).
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