From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Wed Apr 06 2005 - 11:52:38 EDT
At 5:22 PM +0200 4/5/05, Riccardo Bellofiore wrote: > >Whatever Marx said or wrote or thought, I guess >it is true that the notion of living labour is >fundamental, and underrated in most Marxian >thought (at least before the Grundrisse came to >be known). OPE-Lers Ernesto Screpanti questions the over-rating of living labour in Marxian value theory in his response to Carchedi in the latest Review of Political Economy. Carchedi also provides a further reply in that issue. Ernesto raises the question of why animals cannot create value. This seems to me a strange question, but I am not an economist. Social labor has to be carried out, and to this practical necessity people must submit; the way in which social labor is organized is related to particular conceptions about and actual characteristics of agents. For example, the juridicalization of persons is joined to the universalization of the commodity form. The person understood in any substantive sense is thus very much a mode of appearance of a determinate social whole, though the social whole has no existence outside its modes of appearance. It exists only in its effects. Marx does away with Man but not with agents. In a society in which the traditional division of labour and sovereign authority recede in the face of the economy in which relations are mediated through things, the determination of what counts as social labor and its organization have to happen through the imputation of value to those things (i.e. commodities) by which people alone relate; value thus representing that the labor objectified in that thing proved to be socially necessary. Marx's value theory is radically anti Robinsonade in character. There is a similarity to Kant's critical anti empiricism divulging radically anti individualist, transcendental conditions of experience. The commodity, qua commodity, is thus proved by Marx to be a mode of appearance of social labor, not a simple privately owned objectification of personal concrete labor or embodiment of personal toil and trouble. That simple object is in fact abounding in theological niceties and metaphysical absurdities. If Marx had a truly social theory of value, what possibly could animals have to do with value (except in the indirect way that Carchedi mentions)? Before animals are used, social labor itself has to be organized. Two more quick points: just as for Weber the state has a monopoly over legitimate violence, money for Marx has a monopoly over the representation of abstract social labor time. The state and money are forms of social power. What crisis brings out is full force of this monopoly--the state as an instrument of legitimate violence and money as the sole objective of production. All this is not to say that money simply re-presents social labor time which is already homogenous and divisible. Money shapes social labor time in its image; it makes possible the ontological levelling of social labor time as homogeneous--skilled labor for example is actively reduced to smaller multiples of simple labor over time. Second quick point: No one needs to remind Marx that things do not in fact possess or have value; the question is why in this form of life--to use Wittgenstein's expression--people have to involve themselves in this distorted way of speaking and acting. Simply put, it is because before anything else--including the use of animals--social labor has to be organized, and if relations are dissolved into commodity ones then commodities must be imputed with properties needed for that organizing. Nothing could be more absurd than dismissing Marx's labor theory of value as metaphysical. Rakesh > The distinction would have helped to articulate >better the notions of abstract and concrete >labour themselves. > >The real problem is another one, that Dussel, >who is a very serious scholar, equates living >labour with the pauper ante festum, the worker >as "poor", basic in being creative outside >capital, and this is an error. In my view, he >loses the crucial notion of labour as the >"internal other", to quote Chris Arthur. > >This is why he has to go back (in all the >meaning of this back: that is, it a >retrocession, a step back) to Schelling. > >rb > > > >-- > >Riccardo Bellofiore >Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche >"Hyman P. Minsky" >Università di Bergamo >Via dei Caniana 2 >I-24127 Bergamo, Italy >e-mail: riccardo.bellofiore@unibg.it >direct +39-035-2052545 >secretary +39-035 2052501 >fax: +39 035 2052549 >homepage: http://www.unibg.it/pers/?riccardo.bellofiore
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