re Ajit's 5553 >Rakesh Narpat Bhandari wrote: > >> in 5541 Ajit says of what he calls the traditional interpretation: >> >> > >> >Secondly, this approach must explain how does it take the total >> >social labor as >> >*given* that is supposedly distributed. >> >> Ajit, would you kindly elaborate on exactly what this explanatory burden is? >> Nice to have you back. >> Rakesh > >____________________ > >Well, the question is: is there something given to you (in this case abstract >social labor) before you distribute it. Adam Smith recognized that objects exchange due to the division of labor. Marx then asks not only why did this division of labor arise but also whose labor is it that is divided. To the latter question Marx answered that it society's labor that is divided. So then we understand that while Smith argued that exchange of commodities is an exchange of equal quantities of labor, Marx analyzes the situation further to show that this labor is not personal or invididual labor but a social substance, some aliquot of the labor at the disposal of a society. So what does it mean to say that social labor is a substance? It means that individuals producing in society is the starting point, that production by a Robinsonade individual outside society is just as much an absurdity as the idea that language could develop without people living and speaking together. It is a recognition that men must associate and depend on each other and more to the point depend on social production. Man is in short a zoon politikon. This is the starting point (it may even be understood as a transcedental condition as Max Adler argued). It is thus society that has labor time at its disposal and that depends on social labor for its reproduction just as the individual depends on society for her consciousness, individuation and reproduction: the individual activity of every single person is only a mode of functioning of the species, and it is this social and abstractly general labor time that is expressed by way of its products in the exchange relationship. To answer your question then: yes. something is given before distribution: it is humanity's dependence on social labor carried out in association in determinate social relations. > If so, then where does this come from are you asking where does the labor time at the disposal of any society come from? It comes from the capacity of the members of that society to labor. So are you then asking where that capacity derives from? From metabolic processes? The meaning and significance of this question are unclear to me. >and how do you know how much of its quantity there is. A larger society, a healthier society, etc. would have a greater quantity of labor time at its disposal. > If not, then does the >distribution of this thing affect its total quantity. Well under various social relations, the proportion of the labor time at any society's disposal which is actually distributed to various concrete production processes may be great or small. So the quantity of the labor time at any society's disposal which is actually expended depends on its social relations of production and distribution. > In what way the total >quantity and its distribution are related to each other? There is a historically variable relation; while each society has to accomplish an ongoing division in (or distribution of) the social labor on which it depends--no natural law can be done away with--that division is effected in historically variable ways. Starting then with social labor, Marx reasons that in a society in which man's relations are primarily through things, the distribution of social labor obviously has to be effected through the exchange value of those things. That it is social--as opposed to personal or individual--labor then that has to be represented in the exchange relationship can be recognized without any palaver about proving or deducing value as the third thing in terms of which (reproducible) commodities are commensurated in the exchange relation. Since I am still quite unclear what criticism of what you have called the traditional interpretion these questions are trying to set up, I am not quite sure I understand your meaning here; consequently, I may not have answered your queries. Rakesh
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