Paul Cockshott wrote: > ... 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.
Actually, I don't think that Marx's value theory applies to non-market (non-commodity-producing) economic relationships. There are other theories for that task, I'm sure. We need to understand democracy and bureaucracy, not just markets. > 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. That is different from Baran, who seemed to use the term "waste" to refer to spending that didn't make rational sense to _him_. (So I'll drop the guilt by association. ;-)) In contrast, it makes sense to me that there exist certain conditions necessary for any given society to reproduce itself over time, in parallel to Marx's volume II reproduction schemes for a commodity-producing society. (I interpret those schemes as describing a possible state of economic harmony rather than actual economic behavior.) But those conditions would likely not be stated in Marxian value terms. A country needs a public health system, for example. That's different from saying that a certain fraction of total labor-time must be spent on public health in order to reproduce the society over time. > 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 historically superceded by the direct planning of social needs.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. Again, I don't think that Marx's value theory applies to non-commodity relations. Though I haven't read the literature on this subject, I'm pretty sure that Stalin thought that the "law of value" applied under what he called "socialism," but he's not an authority that I would appeal to. I'd say that if an economy becomes totally socialized, Marx's law of value becomes totally irrelevant. -- Jim Devine / If you're going to support the lesser of two evils, you should at least know the nature of that evil. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
