From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Sun Mar 04 2007 - 08:23:09 EST
Jerry, You wrote: "If then we call this valuation 'value' then we arrive at the conclusion that value is natural and eternal! A corollary to this is that struggle against the value system is futile." This seems to be a case of bad thinking. It is true that even animals, at the very least higher mammals, are capable of valuations, i.e. of choosing and prioritising between different options for survival needs, to avoid pain, or experience pleasure, and even to attach value to objects, just as a baby has a cuddly toy or a pet. Apes have even been taught to perform simple arithmetic operations. But that does not make value natural and eternal, insofar as it takes the emergent properties of consciousness (or at least sentience or self-awareness) to enable valuations to be made, as I said previously, and insofar as these valuations are subject to a long history of evolution, change and development from primieval instincts and vague intuitions to the heights of mathematics, abstract art, reasoned ethics, erotic sophistication, and so forth. Marx was always 100% clear that economic value existed in society quite independently of whatever "social form" it happened to take, simply because what products people physically produce, exchange and consume has a value to them, implying the need to economise their use - but he was also 100% clear that value could not exist, without taking specific "social forms", and those forms depended precisely on their (durable) social relations and types of association. Since their social relations were subject to change, the forms of value also underwent change. If for instance you had asked somebody in the 1950s "what are derivatives?" most probably they would not have had a clue about what you meant, even the language was lacking, and indeed many if not most people don't understand it even now! In bourgeois society, exchange-value dominates social use-value. In socialist society, social use-value dominates exchange-value, and the both are realigned in different ways. It is not "the struggle against the value system" that is futile, whatever it means. It is the primitive leftist slogan of "the struggle against the value system" that is futile, because you cannot abolish human valuations, and you cannot abolish economic value (other than to destroy value, for example by smashing up a McDonald's store as the radical Quixotes and Luddites do sometimes). What you can change, is the forms which economic value takes, but after reading tonnes of Marx, it should be perfectly clear that this can happen only if you genuinely change the way people relate and associate, including self-change (John Holloways's point). That requires insight into those relations, including scientific insight, but it also requires a practical engagement in which more desirable values are asserted. The bourgeoisie wants to create a New Jerusalem in Iraq, and then they run smack-bang into the problem that changing social relations requires the co-operation of people. Here in the Netherlands, the Socialist Party is constantly engaging in battles about values, because, you see, the ordinary working people of this country do have values of their own, and then the question is one of people asserting those values as moral subjects and critically inquiring into them. Marxist-Leninists want to be the boss over the working class, armed with a theory which explains everything in advance. The SP has a different approach, and it works much better. It's not that the SP is correct about everything, but it can correct itself by learning from experience, that's all that matters. The approach works, to the extent that its influence grows. I am sad to say that I have met oodles of Marxists who pontificate about the theory of value, but they haven't got a clue about what the point of it is. They are radically confused people, or enamoured with the intellectual sophistication of Marx. The main reason is that they lack any profound, historically grounded or coherent understanding of the ethics of power and the power of ethics, they are at the level of a puberal understanding that "some things happening in the world are bad, and some things happening are good", which yields a moralistic condemnation of the bad things and praising the good things in their opinion, with references to Marx said... Lenin said... and so on, blah blah. No wonder then that their so-called "Marxism" does not develop into anything credible that commands respect. A mature person thinks things through to the end, and if we cannot even understand and agree about the most elementary expressions of value and their origins, I think we are not getting very far at all. In that case, we only replicate the uncertainties of the bourgeoisie which has unleashed global forces that escape from its control. BTW when Marx refers to "salto mortale", he says this: "The leap taken by value from the body of the commodity, into the body of the gold, is, as I have elsewhere called it, the salto mortale of the commodity. If it falls short, then, although the commodity itself is not harmed, its owner decidedly is. The social division of labour causes his labour to be as one-sided as his wants are many-sided. This is precisely the reason why the product of his labour serves him solely as exchange-value. But it cannot acquire the properties of a socially recognised universal equivalent, except by being converted into money. That money, however, is in some one else's pocket." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch03.htm Cheers Jurriaan
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