On Fri, 30 Mar 2001, you wrote: > It is a fetish to think the only way we can measure time is by a clock. > Think of all the ways we measure time. PLEASE ENUMERATE THESE AND GIVE SOME ESTIMATE OF THE ERRORS ASSOCIATED WITH OTHER MEASURES THAN THOSE DERIVED FROM CLOCKS. > Capital shows us in a profound way > the manner in which labor time can be measured under capitalism. You > cannot come up with technical by the clock measures because social > reproduction is a matter of the unity of production and exchange. My understanding is that socially necessary labour time is given as 'average' socially necessary labour time. It is fair to say that one can not determine the time necessary for a task by observing a single worker doing the task, but that if one has observations of a large group, one can then obtain the average time required. One would have to study the time required accross several different work places in order to arrive at this, since the method of production will vary to some extent across them. I think you should qualify your statement that "social > reproduction is a matter of the unity of production and exchange." to say that social reproduction under capitalism is a unity of production and exchange. Non commodity producing societies reproduce themselves without exchange. In a non commodity producing society, there are still constraints on the amount of labour that has to be expended to produce things, there is still an amount of labour that is socially necessary for that purpose. It is just not represented as sums of money. -- Paul Cockshott, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland 0141 330 3125 mobile:07946 476966 paul@cockshott.com http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/people/personal/wpc/ http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/index.html
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