Jim: Marx's perspective in CAPITAL volume I was from the perspective of profit-making (or rather, -seeking) capitalists organizing production of commodities. It's only in that context that "socially necessary" is defined.
Paul, you seem to be mixing Marx's value theory with Paul Baran's view of production, in which different kinds of labor are socially necessary according to the standards of a rational society. _______________________________________________ Whether I am saying the same as Baran I cant say, it is so long since I read him as an undergraduate that I dont have a firm memory of his theory. But Marx was analysing a purely capitalist economy before there was an effective social democratic movement able to organise the production and delivery of free social services. One should not assume that the concept of socially necessary labour as it was applied to Victorian England 150 years ago can be applied to modern Europe with partially changed social relations of reproduction. I think you have to go beyond the particular details of the concept as applied then to the deeper layers of its meaning, which come out I think in his famous letter to Kugelmann and also by implication when he distinguishes between productive work and the unproductive faux frais of captalist marketing. There is a deeper concept of the necessity for society to divide up its labour time between different activities in order to ensure its reproduction. To the independent agents in capitalist society this necessity becomes apparent in terms of the need to at least break even in commodity trading. But this is a projection down onto the individual agents of a bigger overriding social necessity. As the socialisation of production and reproduction advances, this partial perspective becomes historically superceded by the direct planning of social needs. This reached a much more advanced stage say in Social Democratic Russia than in Social Democratic Sweden or Britain, but the some of the same issues are at stake there. The University of Glasgow, charity number SC004401 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
