From: Ian Wright (iwright@GMAIL.COM)
Date: Mon May 31 2004 - 14:01:01 EDT
Hi Riccardo
I'm not an expert on these matters but one of your paragraphs
interested me greatly because it addresses issues I am currently
thinking about, and I'd be grateful if we could discuss it.
>(iv) this [Marx's money-commodity approach] does not work, thus,
> either we maintain the view that labour is dis-homogeneous before
> final exchange (then, abstract labour arises only in commodity
> exchange, you have only money as measure, no labour "content" or
> "substance" as immanent mesure) or we must have a way to argue
> that labour is tentatively social before final exchange. tried by
> Rubin, and failed (because he didin't had finance before production)
In my studies of a simple case of Rubin's concept of a simple
commodity economy this difficulty does not arise. This leads me to
think that it does not arise for more general cases. If so, there is
no need to turn to finance to make the concept of abstract labour
coherent. But these are difficult issues, and I have an open mind. Let
me try to be more specific.
To keep things simple, assume each commodity is basic and requires
only labour for its manufacture. Assume also non-commodity money, i.e.
non-produced tokens of some kind.
Let alpha_{i,j} be the reduction coefficient of concrete labour type i
to type j, such that 1 unit of labour type i is equivalent to
alpha_{i,j} units of labour type j. The equivalence relation is
induced by market exchanges against money, i.e. in virtue of the
respective price of the product of each labour type i ... n.
In a non-equilibrium state I have found that the reduction
coefficients of one type of concrete labour to another are indeed
non-homogenous. That is, alpha_{i,j} is not equal to 1 for at least
one i and j (i not equal to j).
In other words, in a non-equilibrium state, at least one type of
concrete labour is valued higher or lower than another in the
marketplace. This is not very surprising.
But I would like to know why you think that this state-of-affairs
implies that "labour is dis-homogenous before final exchange"?
It seems to me there is a possible category mistake here. Reduction
coefficients by definition are exchange phenomena, but the homogeneity
or otherwise of labour is not.
From the point of view that abstract labour refers to the productive
powers of people the fact that different instances of it are not
equivalently valued in market transactions does not seem relevant. I
think Rubin took the view that abstract labour is homogenous because
people are objectively equal in their productive powers:
"The act of exchange is an act of equalization. This equalization of
exchanged commodities reflects the basic social characteristic of the
commodity economy: the equality of commodity producers." (Rubin,
Essays on Marx's Theory of Value).
The issue of whether there is a tendency for the reduction
coefficients to tend to 1 for all i and j is essentially a discussion
on the causal efficacy of the law of value. Instead of developing the
example, I'll stop here, in case I have misunderstood what you have
written.
ATB
-Ian.
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