[OPE-L] A startling quotation from Engels.

From: Alejandro Agafonow (alejandro_agafonow@YAHOO.ES)
Date: Fri Aug 10 2007 - 04:23:33 EDT


I think we don’t exaggerate if we say that Engels anticipated Mises & Hayek when he stated about Rodbertus: “He would thereby have been confronted with the question as to how the adjustment of the production of separate commodity producers to the total social demand takes place, and his whole utopia would thereby have been made impossible.”
 
The knowledge problem of handing out the correct certificates for every good have been the most important pitfall of labour value accounting and this critique is surprisingly expressed in a clear way by Engels in the Preface to the First German Edition of The Poverty of Philosophy. This issue was the first Austrian critique delivered by the Dutch Nicolaas Gerard Pierson back to 1902.
 
But this contradicts an assertion that Engles made in Anti-Dühring: “From the moment when society enters into possession of the means of production and uses them in direct association for production […] The quantity of social labour contained in a product need not then be established in a roundabout way; daily experience shows in a direct way how much of it is required on the average. Society can simply calculate how many hours of labour are contained in a steam-engine, a bushel of wheat of the last harvest, or a hundred square yards of cloth of a certain quality.”
 
The clue in this contradiction is the role of the law of value of commodity production in a Socialist Commonwealth. Have been Marxists divided about this issue? Some have stated that the functioning of the law of value has disabled the true assertion of Socialism (‘Che’ Guevara among them). Others have been more realistic and have advocated a watered down market mechanism hopping to depreciate below their labour value those commodities that have been shown usefulness (Charles Bettelheim among them), as the second Engels said.
 
Best regards,
Alejandro Agafonow


       
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