Paul, I'm sorry to tear passages out of various of your comments and replies to other people and jumble them together, but it was the only way to keep this comment down to a reasonable size.
Paul Cockshott wrote: > I think that they have got entirely the wrong end of the stick here in > confusing abstract labour with its historical form of > appearance in commodity producing society. Abstract labour is simply labour > under its general aspect of work > performed by humans, this stems from something prior to and independent of > commodity production : the unique > ability of the human species to learn new labour skills combined with an > ability to cooperate in the division of labour. No, you are wrong. You are confusing concrete human labor, which existed prior to commodity-producing society, and will continue to exist as long as human beings exist, with abstract human labor. Marx wrote in volume I of "Capital" that the amount of abstract labor-time embodied in a product is a "non-natural property" of the product, something that is "purely social". He wrote that when exchange equates a definite quantity of one product with a definite quantity of another, the result "represents a non-natural property of both, something purely social, namely, their value." (Capital, Kerr edition,vol. I, Chapter I, section 3, Subsection 2.2.3, p. 66.) The value being referred to is, of course, the amount of abstract labor contained in a product. If the value is a non-natural property, then so is the amount of abstract labor. Marx even states that this is "purely social". Well, the amount of abstract labor usually has some connection to the amounts and types of concrete labor involved, although you can't measure concrete labor simply by a number. So what Marx is the stressing is that the very process of reducing concrete labor to abstract labor, and hence measuring it with a single number (the amount of abstract labor, the value), is something that is "non-natural". Paul Cockshott wrote: > The claim that only a capitalist market allows the measure of abstract > socially necessary labour time turns Marx onto his head and reads him > without his advocacy of communism. One could,in any society, seek to define and measure the amount of abstract labor in a product, but what one would obtain is a "non-natural property" of a product. This "non-natural property" could be defined, but it would have lost its significance. Paul Cockshott wrote: > In a commodity producing society money is the form of representation of > this, but in other societies other forms of representation are possible. That is what the market socialists wish to the do: duplicate capitalist value while attempting to avoid the evil consequences of the law of value. It goes against the analysis put forward in "Capital". Market socialism just isn't really socialism. Paul Cockshott wrote: >The French passage is interesting. At the moment I am not certain that >will take the interpretation you put on it because that interpretation is >so hugely at variance with other treatments of abstract labour in Marx's >writings I will have to consult it in context to see if he had >significantly changed his opinion in producing the French edition. I discussed the various passages by Marx and Engels that seemed to show that they advocated the use of abstract labor-time as the method of socialist calculation, and showed that this is not so. See the article "Labor money and socialist planning" part 3. (NB: The article argues against labor-money.) To give some idea of what I am arguing, I'll just give the introduction to the discussion of these quotations here. For the discussion of the particular quotations referred to, you'll have to go to the URL: www.communistvoice.org/27cLaborHour3.html ==================================================== This article has referred repeatedly to Marx and Engels' views on the law of value. But to this day, there are many who believe that Marx and Engels themselves advocated that the labor-hour would be the natural unit of socialist calculation and that socialist society would value goods according to their labor-content. There are several passages from the writings of Marx and Engels that have been interpreted as saying this. This section will examine some representative passages that have, or might be, used in this way, and see what Marx and Engels were actually saying. In doing so, I by no means mean to imply that textual analysis of Marxist writings suffices to settle economic controversies. It is economic and theoretical investigation, including a careful examination of economic history, that should serve as the judge, and it is the experience of socialist society itself that will eventually give the final answer. Marx and Engels' views on this or that issue might be right or wrong, and it's conceivable that they might even occasionally be inconsistent. But Marx and Engels not only established the general framework which still underlies any materialist conception of socialism, but they were among those rare authors whose works merit repeated reading. It pays not to casually write off various Marxist passages as inconsistent but first to ponder the matter very closely. Indeed, examining the disputed passages will shed further light on the content of the labor-hour controversy, and this is the main reason that I will go into these passages in such detail. It turns out that the main reasons for the controversy about the meaning of these passages are as follows: * Marx and Engels' stress on the need to take account of labor-time under socialism is often taken to mean that they believed that the labor-content would be used in a way analogous to how value is used under capitalism. It is imagined that they thought that the labor-hour would serve as the overall measure of the economic cost of a product similar to how the dollar does this under capitalism. Marx and Engels repeatedly pointed out that the abolition of capitalism did not mean the end of economic calculation; that labor time had to be distributed properly between different spheres of production; and even that "economy of labor" was the ultimate principle involved. But the question is whether they thought that this meant planning according to the labor-content. * In particular, in dealing with these passages the distinction made by Marx and Engels between concrete and abstract labor is generally forgotten, or regarded as inapplicable to the planning of production. Socialist society will naturally pay close attention to the number of concrete labor hours needed to produce something. Value and the labor-content, however, are measured by abstract labor-hours, and thus don't deal with the qualitative differences between different types of labor, and between the different products which labor produces. Planning via the abstract labor-hour amounts to applying the law of value. Planning via concrete labor-hours means, among other things, that the economic effort needed to produce something can no longer be measured by a single number; that the qualitative differences between the labor of different people, between labor in different occupations, and between present and past labor must be taken into account; that the immediate labor devoted to a product is recognized as being only part of the economic cost of producing it; and that conscious attention is paid to the qualitative and material differences between different products and different sectors of the economy. These are very different types of planning. * But Marx and Engels did not seek to invent their own special system of communist economic calculation. They only pointed out certain basic features which would characterize the economics of a socialist society, such as that economic calculation would still be necessary; that there would be "apportionment [of labor-time] in accordance with a definite social plan"(5); and that commodity-value would disappear. They didn't give any detailed examples of how this apportionment could be worked out; they didn't describe any system that could be used for planning without value. It was only in the twentieth century that material balances and input-out economics, although not socialist planning, were developed to deal with the myriad of interrelations between different products and different sectors of the economy. These methods of economic planning went beyond evaluating everything on a single, universal numerical scale. But as most commentators either aren't familiar with material balances and input-output economics, or haven't thought very much about their significance, they believe that planning can only be done with the abstract labor-hour, and see any reference to a societal plan for the distribution of labor as requiring use of the abstract labor-hour. * Sometimes Marx, when analyzing a particular feature of capitalist economics, would briefly remark on how this would differ in a socialist economy. To do so, he might temporarily discuss most of the features of capitalist and socialist economies in parallel terms, using the familiar capitalist categories. This is a perfectly reasonable way to make a point, but the resulting inconsistencies of expression led some people to imagine that he envisioned that these capitalist categories would really exist under socialism. * Marx's discussion of the possible use of labor-certificates in the early stage of a socialist economy has often been taken to mean that labor- certificates would circulate throughout the socialist economy like money, only denominated in labor-hours. It either wasn't understood, or it wasn't regarded as significant, that neither labor-certificates nor money were to circulate among factories, farms, and other workplaces, nor would they determine how labor was distributed among these workplaces. The labor- certificate only concerned the distribution of consumer goods among the working population, not the planning to produce these goods. * And some passages were just straight-out misunderstood. The habits of thought consequent upon living in capitalist society, where the marketplace is universal and looking at things in terms of value is second-nature, makes it easy to see everything in the light of the categories of commodity production. Now let's examine a number of these disputed quotations. (see www.communistvoice.org/27cLaborHour3.html) =========================================== That said, I don't agree with Prof. Devine in putting a philosophical wall between price and value. The price of a product and its value aren't the same thing, but value is supposed to underlie price. This is the same as the relationship between, in natural science, a natural force and its appearance in nature. For example, you can't calculate how fast something falls simply from the law of gravity and the mass of the earth, but have to take account of a number of perturbing factors. The necessity of putting a philosophical wall between price and value is because the so-called "new solution" of the transformation problem (Dumenil, Lipietz, Foley) is inconsistent and incorrect, so it covers over the essence of the issue with a lot of philosophical talk. I also don't agree with those who have made an industry out of finding contradictions between Marx and Engels. The fact that they collaborated on "Anti-Duhring", which deals with value and so forth, should have been enough to make these people think twice about such facile claims. -- Joseph Green [email protected] _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
