From: rakeshb@stanford.edu
Date: Fri Jan 31 2003 - 13:30:46 EST
Working from a terrible webmail program, I am just going to make several replies in this one post. 1. quantitative or qualitative unimportance of direct labor due to development of science and technology? Quoting Paul Adler <padler@usc.edu>: > I have been following the thred on Electronic and value, and would > like to submit to the list a cluster of thoughts -- if I have things > > right in my reading of Marx, I am hoping this might make for a > useful, empirical research agenda. So, with you forebearance, here > goes: > > My starting point is the Grundrisse: > "As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great > well-spring on wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its > measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of > use value." (705) > > That is: Science becomes increasingly central to productivity > improvement, but that makes the market system of coordination > increasing ineffectual. Paul, I would read the passage this way: Only once the appropriation of unpaid direct labor time [as objectified in commodities which have to be sold for money] has ceased to be the aim of production will wealth be truly measured in the abundance of use values and free time. That is, labor time or exchange value can never cease to be the measure of wealth under bourgeois production. To the extent that it does in exceptional conditions, e.g. software as a result of IPRs and lock in advantages, then we have only monopoly profits which represent a redistribution of value. I don't think Marx ever thought that bourgeois production could rest on anything other than the foundation of labor in its direct form. Of course Marx thought this was proving to be or would prove to be a miserable foundation but one on which bourgeois production had to stand. The saving of labor can never be the foundational principle of capitalist production. Technology is adopted only to the extent that it reduces costs, and since capital pays for labor power, not labor time itself, its interest in labor saving is economically circumscribed. Total automation is not only a technical impossibility but an economic one. Labor in its direct form remains the basis of capitalist production. Exactly because of this capitalist production now plugs well spring of wealth. Rosdolsky's discussion of Bauer's theory of rationalization is quite good on this. 2. is new technology undertandable in terms of relative surplus value? I think Marx for the most part only considered the direct impact of labor-saving technology on the production of relative surplus value. But technology which improves communication or allows for inventory management makes an indirect contribution to relative surplus value, and the indirect process has to be analyzed. Except for a few additions by Engels to Capital 3, I don't think there is much in Marx's Capital to work with. Nathan Rosenberg made this criticism long ago. Moreover, to the extent that new technology allows for the elimination of unproductive labor, there is no real contribution to the production of surplus value. 3. will unproductive workers betray the real productive proletariat? I don't see why this has to be so. If the wages of the former are low and uncertain and hours long and the threat of permanent technological unemployment menacing, I don't see why the proletariat could not be united around the goal of the abolition of wage labor as such. Productive workers may reason that their chances of success are much improved if all workers see in socialism an immediate improvement of their condition and thus fashion a transitional agenda which guarantees the security of those workers whose jobs will be eliminated in a socialist society. 4. Jairus' latest book is actually critical of Marx (and Weber), of what he takes to be their primitivist historiography. There is a fascinating comparison between his book and Perry Anderson's >From Antiquity to Feudalism. Aside from his piece on Hegel's Logic, Jairus wrotes a series of papers in the 70s on the mode of production (a theory of a colonial mode of production, a general theory, a critique of dependency theory), and he has written on hidden forms of wage labor (which led to an important debate with Gail Omvedt on the nature of the Indian peasantry in the early 90s, his review of Daniel Thorner's Atlas, and a forthcoming piece in Historical Materialism) 5. As for too much philosophy...All I meant was that in understanding Marx's theory of the value form one should not delve into Hegel and Aristotle to the exclusion of Richard Jones. Of course understanding the value form in terms of the principle of historical specificity has nothing to do with the idea of Marx's Capital being organized in terms of systematic dialectics. Yours, Rakesh
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