From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Tue Jun 12 2007 - 04:45:58 EDT
>What I meant was that it is hopeless to think that anyone could >quantify the amount of abstract labor in an economy. > > >What I meant was that it is hopeless to think that anyone could >quantify the amount of abstract labor in an economy. > >You could possibly get the total number of hours, but using wages as an >indication of the amount of abstract labor reflected in those hours >does not make sense to me. If wages (the price of labor) reflect >values, why not use prices everywhere & throw out values altogether -- >a la Joan Robinson? Yes I agree that we can't use wages. And I agree that the problem is in the process of abstraction, though I don't think the main problem is quantitative but qualitative. Marx reasons commodities, qua sensuous particulars, are valued as modes of expression of average simple or abstract labor. It's as if Roman and German law were modes of actualization of the abstraction of the Law. This is what it make difficult to understand the value form. There is a reversal such that the sensuously concrete is considered only in the value form as the form of appearance of the abstract universal. The essence of commodity is indeed not its sensuous concreteness but its existence as a mere carcass of some portion of of an undifferentiated substance-- the simple average labor time required by society to produce the commodity. That may seem mystical at first sight, but I don't think this means that capitalism conforms to the upside down world of Hegelian logic. Nor more importantly do I think Marx is criticizing as opposed to simply understanding the value form for its reversal whereby the sensuously concrete is considered as only the form of appearance of the abstract universal as opposed to the case where the abstract universal is a property of the concrete. Indeed Marx mocks the granting of monopoly, i.e. that boots or gold are alone the immediate form of appearance of the abstract univeral but in my reading Marx is not mocking the understanding of all commodities as such forms of appearance. What Postone provocatively argues is that attempts to reverse the reversal or to extirpate the abstract universal have created all kinds of political problems; the brilliant point is that reactionary anti capitalism can be understood as a cultural revolt against what appears to be mystical in the value form. This would of course have to be much elaborated--I think even beyond what Postone has done himself. Now the problem of skilled labor is deep. We couldn't possibly say that Greek art is also a mode of actualization of the abstraction of Law, yet this is what Marx is forced to do--his critics charge--in insisting that the concrete particulars which are the products of qualified or specially trained labor are also modes of expression of average simple or abstract labor. The qualitative irreducibility of the commodities makes it impossible for them all to be modes of actualization of an abstract general substance such as simple average labor time, his critics charge. Yet we see all the time ordinary workers, if not their children, training themselves to become qualified workers. Rakesh
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