Michael Perelman wrote: > I agree with Carrol in believing that a particular way of quantitatively > reducing concrete labor to abstract labor is a dead-end.
In my book, abstract labor is a category confined to commodity producing societies. But I think I know what you mean. Now, Marx's point is that such "reduction" is implied in market prices, as well as in any other social outcomes. It takes place one way or another. To refer to the extreme cases, we either conduct the "reduction" through a market process, blindly, behind our backs, or we try and conduct it consciously to make it fit our designs. Capitalist firms do it the latter way, and they hit and miss, as do markets. Imagine how Sam Walton and Steve Jobs would have reacted to your telling them that they shouldn't have tried to allocate their resources among their various internal uses purposefully. "Why try when you cannot get it all right" may work for you and Carrol, but there are a people out there who believe the economy should be at their service. Socialist societies will attempt to do what firms do at a larger scale. > Even in professional sports, where the owners spend huge amounts of > money in attempting to evaluate every aspect of the athlete, they do of > very poor job. The fact that they keep trying at such large expense should tell you that the job done by the hands-off method appears even poorer to them. If they did consistently a lousy job, they would be crushed by the competition (and the class struggle)? > To think that socialist planners should be expected to develop such a > scheme in the midst of a capitalist economy seems far-fetched. Marx's > categories do an excellent job of showing how capitalist economies > (mis)function. He did very little in attempting to quantify such matters -- > with good reason. That wasn't Marx job. But that will be the job of a socialist society. (At some point, Marx's job was to rationally allocate the meager resources of the IWA, to help migrant worker families and political exiles, and apparently he did a much better job there than he did in handling his own personal finances, since Mary Gabriel couldn't find much fault in it. Also, Engels is famous for having kept the books of Ermen & Engels in spiffy shape.) _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
