From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Thu Aug 16 2007 - 16:52:34 EDT
Hi all, It's just that I think that in the Marx/Engels theory, the products of human labour have a "value", irrespective of whether they are sold or not sold, and it has evidently been like that, ever since human beings produced anything with their work. They have that value, simply because it takes a quantity of labour-time to make them or replace them. Otherwise, Engels's statement that commodities can be "depreciated below their value" in the trading process doesn't make sense. I obviously distinguish here between value and exchange-value. Morover, a product has that value, irrespective of its perceived utility. To replace money with labour-tokens (a form of rationing) is to regress to a more primitive, and less efficient allocation method in most cases. Much more advanced techniques of giving and receiving credit are possible nowadays. In Cap. Vol. 2, Marx distinguished between three great forms of economic allocation: natural economy, money economy and credit economy. Globally, we are increasingly moving towards credit economy now, as far as economic exchange is concerned. Credit economy is concerned with estimated future potential, specifically future earning power. The point of a socialist or communist allocation system is not "equal exchange", but to ensure normal human needs are met efficiently for everybody, in a way that maximises liberty, justice and equality for everybody. For this purpose, a wide range of allocation principles can be used, most of which are already present in capitalist society, though possibly with more restricted applications, given the ruling property forms. If the most human beings can imagine, is that they make the allocation of resources more "efficient" by privatising their ownership, then that's a serious impoverishment of economic thought. It is true only in some cases, but not all cases. It overlooks the main modern problem of capitalist regulation: the growing intermediation between the private ownership of an asset and its actual use, i.e. that private ownership in practice doesn't resolve much anymore, as regards the actual management of resource use. When I lived in New Zealand, the real estate millionaire Bob Jones frankly admitted this - he said (paraphrase) whether an asset is state-owned or privately owned does not necessarily imply anything about the efficiency or wisdom of its management. He supported privatisation only because then he could do more business, and make more money. He wanted a better society for capitalists, believing that this is better for everybody. We live in the "age of the manager", and the social ideal is, a manager who takes it upon himself to exercise "creative responsibility and stewardship" over a bunch of people and resources with due integrity. To be emancipated these days, is thus to be a manager. But point is, this manager may not privately own most, or even any, of the resources he takes responsibility for. His strength is only his personal capacity to relate, in a way that provides power. Consequently, the employee gets graded according to how well he is able to relate, vis-a-vis the goals of the manager, who tries to reshape the world and his employees after his own image. Part of the sickness of modern capitalist society, is precisely that the traditional close connection between private ownership of resources, and the responsibility for the use of those resources, has been broken. That is why you get woolly concepts such as "governance" - this means neither real government, nor real ownership, but an enforcable or voluntary contract pertaining to the use of resources by "stakeholders". But the very concept of a "stakeholding" refers to "any party which can affect, or is affected by, the activities of a company or institution" or who has a "legitimate interest" in it. A legitimate interest is primarily political, not necessarily legal. In law, a stakeholder is a third party who temporarily holds an asset "while its owner is still being determined". There you can already see, the ambiguities of modern private property. It is, as Marx suggested, "the socialization of property within capitalism". Jurriaan
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