Jim: ----- let's see. The Ancient slave-owner dehumanizes labor by assigning weights to different kinds of labor (2.3 field hands = 1 swineherd, etc.), valuing different workers according to the relative benefit to the slave-owner (in terms of use-value produced for him or her?) The capitalist, on the other hand, dehumanizes labor by valuing labor according to the amount of revenues collected by selling the commodity each worker produces (i.e., his or her exchange-value). So if it is going to use "values" in planning, how would a socialist economy dehumanize labor?
In other words, why should socialism emulate either Ancient Roman slavery or the capitalist mode of production? -- I dont know where this ratio of 2.3 is comming from, there is no mention of it in Cato or Varro - decimal numbers anyway not having yet been invented. And if you read Varro you see that another handicap that the ancients had in conceptualising labour time was that they had no reliable unit of time less than the day clocks not having been invented, time for them is either the cycle of the seasons or the cycle of the sun, so you never get any conceptualisation of labour time in units less than days. What Varro as an advisor to the owners of slave estates is doing is giving them a lesson in economics in its original sense of household or estate management. The reason I cite Varro was to illustrate that the economists of the ancient world knew about calculations in terms of labour time and the rational use of labour resources given the production relations of the day. But I am not sure just what your question about dehumanising relates to? The University of Glasgow, charity number SC004401 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
