Hi Rakesh,
Thanks for your reply. I don't want to discuss the relative merits of
bolshevism and council communism here, I am only exploring the
concept of the Marxian law of value. I am very appreciative of
Weeks's writings, but I have four objections to his interpretation of
the law of value.
A. Weeks is actually unable to specify unambiguously what the law of
value means and shifts from one meaning to another. In his book
Capital and Exploitation, he defines the law of value variously as:
1. The law of the minimization of abstract labour time (p. 33)
2. The 'law of socially necessary labour time' and the 'law of the
tendency of the rate of profit to equalize'. (p. 40).
3. The law of the exchange of equivalent quantities of social labor,
which "is in fact the law of surplus value - the law of the
appropriation of unpaid labor (p. 40)
4. The law of labor time under capitalism (division of labor), the
law of surplus value (exploitation), but also the mechanism of
alienation (p.48-49)
5. A law of capitalist accumulation, not a natural law (p. 85)
6. The law of the exploitation of labor under capitalist social
relations (p. 85)
Now of course one could, like Alice in Wonderland, make words mean
what one wants them to mean at any particular time, but then our
argumentation is a tautology. In this case, the tautology is that the
law of value is specific to the capitalist mode of production
alone... because it is specific to the capitalist mode of production
alone. Weeks' proof is just a matter of juggling terms. The
consequence is that there is no adequate explanation of the
historical origin of the law of value, and that the conditions for
the withering away of the law of value cannot be specified adequately
either.
(B) Weeks caricatures Engels's position, by extracting quotes out of
context. I don't have the time at the moment to lay all the texts
side by side, but consider just one quote from the central essay by
Engels which Weeks finds so objectionable, included as a supplement
to Capital Vol 3:
"If manufacture sprung ahead by cheapening its products, this is even
more true of modern industry, which forces the production costs of
commodities lower and lower through its repeated revolutions in
production, relentlessly eliminating all former modes of production.
Its is large-scale industry, too, that thus finally conquers the
domestic market for capital, puts an end to smallscale production and
natural economy of the self-sufficient peasant family, eliminates
direct exchange between small producers, and places the entire nation
in the service of capital. Likewise, it equalises the profit rate of
the different commercial and industrial branches of business into one
general rate of profit, and finally ensures industry the position of
power due to it in this equalisation by eliminating most of the
obstacles formerly hindering the transfer of capital from one branch
to another. Thereby the conversion of values into production prices
is accomplished for all exchange as a whole. THIS CONVERSION
THEREFORE PROCEEDS ACCORDING TO OBJECTIVE LAWS, WITHOUT THE
CONSCIOUSNESS OR THE INTENT OF THE PARTICIPANTS" (my emphasis,
Capital Vol 3., Moscow ed., p. 906).
In other words, the "subjective perception theory of labour-value"
which Weeks ascribes to Engels doesn't do justice to what Engels
means. What Engels means is that in pre-capitalist societies a lot of
labour-accounting took place, people were well aware of the
labour-time involved in producing products offered for exchange.
Therefore under conditions of "simple exchange" or less developed
exchange, they took this in consideration in pricing goods or
determining the exchange ratios of goods. They were indeed forced to
do this to survive, and the more dependent they became on exchange,
the more it regulated their behaviour, regardless of the original
subjective intentions. That is, briefly put, the historical origin of
the economic category of abstract labour.
Engels however does not say, as Weeks alleges, that "subjective
perception of labour-time" is the way people go about exchanging in a
full-fledged capitalist society (other than, perhaps, in the sense
that capitalists carefully monitor labour-costs, and that workers
compare labour-effort to the wages they receive and to the price of
goods they buy). His point is rather that with the growth of the
capital and commodity market, the law of value increasingly asserts
itself regardless of subjective valuations, in the specific way that
Marx describes. In Weeks's own interpretation, you just "suddenly"
have abstract labour when you have capitalism, he ignores the
historical process by which the abstraction of labour occurs through
the emergence, growth and increasing sophistication of trade in
commodities.
C. What Marx and Engels meant by the law of value is quite simply
that, other things being equal, the value of commodities being
exchanged is determined by the average labour-time socially necessary
for their production (assuming equal exchange). A simple statement of
the law of value in this sense was already provided by David Ricardo
at the very beginning of the first chapter of The Principles of
Political Economy and Taxation (although Ricardo doesn't use the
expression "law of value"): "The value of a commodity, or the
quantity of any other commodity for which it will exchange, depends
on the relative quantity of labour which is necessary for its
production, and not on the greater or less compensation which is paid
for that labour".
In his famous letter to Kugelmann of 11 July 1868, Marx does not
object to this idea as such (which, as he says, is quite a lot older
than Ricardo), but rather that Ricardo assumes that which has to be
explained: "Science consists precisely in demonstrating HOW THE LAW
OF VALUE ASSERTS ITSELF (my emphasis). So that if one wanted at the
very beginning to "explain" all the phenomena which seemingly
contradict that law, one would have to present science before
science. It is precisely Ricardo's mistake that in his first chapter
on value he takes as given all possible and still to be developed
categories in order to prove their conformity with the law of value".
The root of Ricardo's error is his ahistorical approach.
So the determination of commodity values by labour-time is indeed
thousands of years old, as Engels says, and in his book Capital Marx
indeed painstakingly traces out the forms of exchange-value from the
elementary to the general forms, insisting the substance of value is
labour.
But that does not mean that the law of value asserts itself IN THE
SAME WAY under conditions of partial (simple) commodity production
and generalised commodity production (capitalism). The law of value
asserts itself in a different way under capitalism precisely because
it is "production of commodities by means of commodities", which
means inter alia the formation of production prices and market
values. So the story of the evolution of the law of value is a
question of tracing out the development of trade, showing how the
growth of trade gradually dissolves primitive communities and forms a
national and international market, and how it gradually engulfs the
entire production process of society.
D. Because of Weeks's definition of the law of value, he is unable to
give an adequate critique of Stalin's views of the law of value under
socialism. Weeks says that Stalin confuses the law of value with the
necessity for allocating labour-time, but that is not the case.
Stalin says explicitly that the law of value applies only to
commodity production, which was partially superseded in the USSR.
Stalin was not wrong in saying that the law of value "influences
production" in the USSR, to the extent that you had a market for
consumer goods, faced pressures of the world market to an extent, and
remunerated labour through wages which were related to labour effort.
Rather the problem is that Stalin believed that the USSR was
genuinely socialist, and that the law of value does operate in a
socialist economy. That is, Stalin's concept of socialism was at
variance with Marx's idea of socialism as a marketless and classless
society in which labour is no longer dominated by commercial forms,
and Stalin had no adequate program for the supersession of market
relations, through a different set of institutions for the production
and distribution of goods and services.
Regards
Jurriaan
CC. Paul Bullock
Paul Cockshott
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