From: Gerald A. Levy (Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM)
Date: Wed Sep 15 2004 - 08:56:12 EDT
Hi Howard. I'll reply briefly to the following since you refer to it in the post from yesterday that you were addressing to me. > Suppose 3 people produce cutting boards for a farmers market. Each > produces 10 and 30 satisfy demand. A spends 10 hours on production, > B spends 60 and C spends 80. If the boards are qualitatively > indistinguishable they will tend to sell for the same price today or 2500 > years ago. Because they tend to sell at the same price the return to > each producer will tend toward the money equivalent of five hours. > Presumably A sells out sooner; then the price moves above the social > average and if no other forces operate will stay there. Still, the point > is that the causal tendencies set in motion by independent production > for private exchange operate and do not depend on the > capital labor relation. You didn't select a very good example, imo. The type of production that you are referring to as having existed historically in ancient Greece in elsewhere was typically artisanal. A characteristic of the cutting boards produced by independent artisans was that they were _not_ identical and _were_ qualitatively distinguishable. The concrete labour performed by different artisans was by no means considered to be identical by buyers. The standardization of commodity quality, such that the quality of tomorrow's output is typically identical to the quality of today's output and the quality produced by one worker at a firm is identical to the quality produced by other workers, is a consequence of the growth of manufacture and modern industry that emerged in the course of _capitalist_ history. In solidarity, Jerry
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