From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@STANFORD.EDU)
Date: Wed May 14 2003 - 17:06:12 EDT
Ian wrote: > >I think the paragraph you quote is almost right, apart from the third >sentence. In an economy of simple commodity producers no-one >can produce for capital accumulation because there are no wage-labourers >(this is true for me by definition). However, it is correct to say that, if >such a simple commodity economy existed, then the anarchy of the market >is a sufficient explanation for the emergence of significant income >differences. Why not the emergence of actual class differences as well? >The event of a particular producer enjoying a sequence of highly >advantageous trades has a low but non-zero probability. So some individuals >will accumulate disproportionate amounts of money. If there is a pool of >wage-labourers then, formally at least, such individuals can employ them, >and classes >naturally emerge. > >(In my experiements with the simple commodity economy, irrespective >of the initial money endowments, the stationary income distribution for >the economy is approximately exponential, i.e. a small proportion of the >producing population is always very rich). > >What's behind your question? I think Marx's point was that bourgeois society alone is regulated by the law of value, albeit indirectly. For Marx generalized simple commodity production neither had historical existence nor coherence even as a logical possibility. One could say (as Cohen does) that generalized simple commodity production is not a viable social form as it would soon break down into a two class sytem. Or, one could say that it would never have been rational to become dependent on the production of commodities unless the market had the depth which only results from workers having to buy commodities for their subsistence, i.e., unless workers are not independent proprietors or peasants or, in other words, unless they are alienated from the objective conditions of production. Or, one could say that people would exit from dependence on a system of specialized generalized commodity production unless they were sure that their needs could be met on and through the market and that only a system in which objectively alienated proletarian labor could be moved or would move from enterprise to enterprise would have the elasticity to meet needs as they changed. The commodity becomes the general form of wealth only in capitalist society. I don't believe that you dispute this as a historical but as a logical proposition. Yet it does not seem to me to make much logical sense to speak of generalized simple commodity production. I follow OPE-L'er Martha Campbell in believing that Marx's focus was from the begininning not on the commodity as an independent existent alienated from any particular whole or social formation and certainly not on the commodity as a product in a system of generalized simple commodity production but on the commodity as a part of the totality of generalized commodity production based on proletarian labor. Yet, commodities obviously predate capitalism--and Marx includes some historic notes here throughout Capital--so one question becomes (though this is not your question) whether the commodity itself acquires any new properties as a result of being part of a system of generalized commodity production on and through which agents have become overwhelmingly dependent for the satisfication of their needs. Is there a relation between ontological novelty and the kind of generally interdependent totality which bourgeois society achieves? I think one affirmative answer is implicit in Postone's chapter on abstract labor in Time, Labor and Social Domination. I also think the question of the relation between ontological novelty and the bourgeois form of totality is perhaps a more interesting question than the old Lukacsian one about whether bourgeois society discourages the very epistemological holism which is needed to understand it (see Tom Rockmore's book on Lukacs theory of reason). Ontology before epistemology. Also, to the extent that Marx is studying the properties of a pure bourgeois society, this raises the quasi Althusserian question of the nature of the object Marx has brought into being through his theoretical effort. Yours, Rakesh ps as time goes on, I find Cohen's book on Marx's theory of history a limited work. There is almost no discussion on the distinction between tax and rent and the theory of the Asiatic Mode of Production and Marx's attempt to find in India and then in Native America the primitive condition for own European development of so-called Roman and Germanic property forms (the important works of Habib, Thorner, Sharma, and Krader were not cited); I don't remember a discussion of Lewis Morgan or Kovalevsky!!!; the questions about the historical limits on the validity of the law of value are not raised; there is almost no mention of Ricard Jones and his ideas about the social implications of the different forms of the wage fund (self-produced, out of revenue, out of profit) and the different forms of rent (even it is a commonplace in development economics to compare metayer rent or sharecropping with fixed rents in terms of their differential incentives for 'the development of the productive forces'); the discussion about Galbraith and use value must seem quaint by now. I suppose Cohen's book will remain the most used introduction to Marx's theory of history unless a better synthesis is produced. I think one is desperately needed. My understanding is much indebted to the work of Jairus Banaji.
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