Michael wrote: > Julio, thanks for your response. I suspect that we are not all that far > apart.
Thank you, for hosting, Michael. > Julio, you correctly said that abstract labor is relevant only in > commodity producing societies. Social relations in socialism will be > different -- at least in any socialism that I would endorse. Of > course, allocation of labor will be part of socialism, but the social > relations of allocation would be quite different. Well, I have been referring to the allocation of labor. The whole point of my "critique" of the "capital critique" is that the capital critics don't note that the alleged inconsistency in quantifying "capital" (i.e. a composite of means of production in physical units) is inherent to the allocation of labor in general. It is not a neoclassical or a Marxian flaw[*], but a fact of life. It is not a value thing (or a marginal return thing), but its material content. [*] See http://203.200.22.249:8080/jspui/bitstream/123456789/1375/1/An_essay_on_Marxian_Economics.pdf > For example, a sport like basketball can be played as a pickup game in > which people figure out what each person's role will be or there can > be a coach -- as in professional games. Presumably something more > systematic than a pick up game and less hierarchical than a coached > game. No matter what illustration we may propose, we'll be liable to the charge (cf. Ted's post) that things under communism will be different, because so many things will be oh so different. Apparently, people won't need shoes, or shoes will not be made by a group of workers, or perhaps no so-called "manual" labor will be required, etc. I get it that the vertical or hierarchical division of labor on which class divisions are erected would have to be dismantled and re-dismantled under communism. But other labor divisions are not going away. Occupational, industrial, and functional divisions will be re-structured and then re-re-structured, but they won't disappear. Needs, consumptive and productive, are diverse and will become increasingly more so. And yes, subsisting horizontal labor divisions will provide bases for all sorts of social hierarchies to reemerge, and people will have to be vigilant to prevent them from getting entrenched. Individuals will be diverse. Historical time, geography, and circumstance will provide for heterogeneity, that will have to be managed, with management solutions that will have to be improvised and improved on. Because all people will have to do is do things a bit better than the conditions they inherit. Under any arrangement, social labor exists necessarily as divided labor. Spatially and temporally. Social labor is (and will ever be) performed by individual laborers, so social labor exists (and will always exist) as an aggregate of individual labors. Yet social reproduction requires that labor gets integrated, unified, or reconciled along each and all of its dimensions. Marx was right that such re-integration of divided labor can be done by default, relying on seemingly "automatic" mechanisms markets, alienated political systems, etc., or deliberately, democratically, and based on the best that science can provide. The idea that, if this is to be done at all consciously, it must be perfect or not be done at all is preposterous. Communist social life cannot start from the assumption that labor is already socially validated, that individual labor needs not social reconciliation. The challenge of reproducing social life at each point in time will exist then as it does now. If anybody's communism entails the a priori disappearance of all these labor divisions, then that communism is impossible. > I hope that socialism would not attempt to replicate corporations. That will be the point of departure, of course. Unless we believe that working people will just pop out fully developed as a scientific self-managed productive force off the head of Jupiter, capitalism will be the training ground. All historical attempts to build socialism show that a first step is to try and keep the damn economy together as new management takes over and begins to tweak things, given how hard the old management resists the eviction. As Michael Lebowitz argues in his book on socialism, even capitalism starts by appropriating as is the productive force that pre-exist it. Although, instead of "the point of departure" I should say "one point of departure," since there will be many other experiences by then that will be more immediately relevant. I was once asked by a colleague to comment on a course on finance for non-profit organizations and review a few textbooks on the subject, and it became obvious to me the many ways in which workers would benefit from such training. More on how training may help, regardless of the intentions of those who provide the training: http://tech.nycga.net/2012/03/25/reportback-the-99spring-training-for-trainers-and-the-plot-to-coopt-occupy/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
