On Sun, 01 Jul 2001, you wrote: > > > > > Money is the universal form of existence of this social, and no longer personal, labour . Money is the gateway by which private property is able to act for its own society, it blesses the private offering with the stamp of social validation. It reveals the abstract, social, nature of the labour performed privately. > ------------------------------------------------- PC This seems fine by me. It recornises that money merely makes evident what is actually the case - that labour is performed for society even if the money given for its product is privately appropriated. I ------------------------------------------------- PB > We can continue, correctly to say that 'abstract labour' is the substance of value, we thus separate out the social quality of labour performed for private property with society in mind, from any particular skill of any labour resulting in a useful thing. The former cannot exist without the latter, the latter can, has existed and will exist in the future without the former. ------------------------------------------------------- PC The formula that I would always have used prior to seeing the discussions on this list is that the substance of value is "abstract socially necessary labour". I would view the sale of the commodity for money as validating the socially necessary aspect of the labour not the abstract aspect. Thus whilst I would agree that abstract labour in one sense pre-supposes particular skills - concrete labours into which the abstract labour is distributed. I do not see how most concrete labours can exist without abstract social labour. The pre-condition for most concrete labours is that they exist as part of a general social division of labour. In the absence of that, the only concrete labours that exist are the most primitive hunting and gathering skills. In socialist society concrete labours will obviously still exits, but only because the society will support a complex division of labour and associated advanced technologies. The existence of that complex division of labour in its turn implies some mechanism for regulating the division of labour between different activities - some form of economic calculation. The classical view of Marx and Engels was that this calculation would be explicitly in terms of a calculus of labour time. This calculus is obviously not a calculus of concrete labour - since these are incomensurable, but a calculus of labour time in the abstract. We know that in most socialist economies - with the possible exception of the work-point system on the Chinese People's Communes, such explicit calculation in labour time did not take place - though I dont know enough about the internal practices of GOSPLAN to know if labour budgets were drawn up as part of the planning process. Instead calculations were done in a combination of material terms ( system of material balances ) and in monetary units - what Makoto Itoh calls S money. Here we no longer have the social character of the labour validated by sale - the labour has its social character pre-conditioned by the plan. Nor do we have the private appropriate of the value of the product - since S money was not freely convertible into goods, and in any case the bulk of any surplus reverted to the state treasury. I think that it is arguable that the absence of an explicit calculation of abstract labour time acted as a severe constraint upon the effectiveness of planning, and indirectly contributed to the economic difficulties encountered by hitherto existing socialism. That is the main reason why I am so dogmatic an intolerant about suggestions that abstract labour necessarily entails the existence of the market and money. If one takes that position one is either being wildly adventurist in proposing socialism without having any concrete ideas about how you would run a socialist economy - and who is likely to end up directing planning agencies if not socialist economists - or one ends up with a market socialist position since one holds that the social character of labour can only be validated by monetary sales. This, of course, is the classic objection of von Mises and Hayek. --------------------------------------------------- PB >Our concern however is not to make this simple distinction (simple for us to pick up from Marx), but constantly to relate the 'abstract' quality to the class nature of capitalist society, that it is a society of private property using the 'alienable' powers of propertyless labour. ---------------------------------------------- Paul C This is what I think smacks of adventurism. I think it is based on a conflation of abstract social labour which exists wherever there is a division of labour - with a historically specific form of economic calculation arising from the private appropriation of the product through monetary sale. --------------------------------------------- So please, even if you take this as given, can we constantly relate the 'abstract' to the specific relations between private property, and so class society based on labour power as a commodity, and not one sidedly reiterate the fact of exchange as such. > > Fraternally > > Paul B. > -- Paul Cockshott paul@cockshott.com
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