From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Sun Aug 26 2007 - 17:46:33 EDT
Hi Alejandro, You asked: "Do all you agree in the necessity of a full consumer market? I see so much apprehension in your writings." You are correct, I am apprehensive because this problematic requires a knowledge which is not easily accessible to me yet, since few thinkers I know of (in languages I can read) have thought these things through to the end. I am not yet sure what exactly you understand by a "full" consumer market. In defending Marx's idea of labour-value, I am not at all rejecting other kinds of modalities of economic value. That would be absurd. Many different sorts of valuations are essential to assess economic optimality. In defending the idea of labour-value, I am claiming it is a real regulative force in the trading process and the economising of work effort, and that you have to reckon with it, just as e.g. you have to reckon with the law of gravity. For most purposes, knowledge of the law of gravity is uninteresting, assumed and obvious, but that is not to say it doesn't have an enormous effect on human activities nevertheless. It is true, markets can mediate the contradiction between self-interest and the common interest. It is also true that markets can provide stability for the social system. However, markets cannot exist without a social and legal framework, and without a lot of non-market activity and co-operation. And the stability markets do provide, is typically shortlived - in the history of the world economy since 1820 there have been something like 25 destabilising recessions and depressions, and an uninterrupted series of wars, many of which issue forth precisely from the destabilising, corrosive effects of commercial expansion on the traditional social structures. This corrosion, just like economic growth, is also directly related to crime incidence. One of the points Oskar Lange made is, that the way economic theory pictures consumer behaviour vis-a-vis prices often has little in common with reality, i.e. prices really function in a different way in practice than is depicted in economic theory. So we need much better theories of consumer preferences and consumer behaviour, and of how prices are actually used in the real world, based on a more realistic appraisal of empirical reality. You write: "what you call objective value is a confusion with empirical facts whose existence is impossible out social construction. Objective value properly conceived derived from a meta-agreement needed to conceive a functional social order." "Objective value relations" mean that value relations exist, which escape from human control, gain an independent status, and persist regardless of what one might think about them. There is no "meta-agreement" about those value relations, they arise spontaneously out of the social existence of a producing community. The objectification of value occurs when object relationships between products or assets (objects) come into existence which transcend individuals, which limit what they can do, and to which they must necessarily adjust their behaviour, regardless of what they may think. Money-prices are not essential for these value relations to exist at all, but money-prices objectify them all the more. "We" do not "propose" to record and allocate labour-time, that is something which already occurs every day on a mass scale in capitalist society. Planning also occurs on a large scale in capitalist society. It is just that the allocations occur in a specific way, and according to specific principles, and it is argued that a different kind of allocation would have a better result, i.e. less war, less crime, more satisfaction, and more possibility to fulfil human potential. When capitalism seems to work fine, few people are interested in alternatives. But if capitalism is in crisis, people do look for alternatives. Social accounting for labour-time is a planning tool, which aims to facilitate the effectivity of human work and promote a just allocation of resources. It acknowledges that work is central to human lives, and that is why it should be collectively accounted for, morally and economically speaking. No society, according to Marx, can escape from the necessity of producers to adjust their work activity to each other and to consumers. The question is only which kinds of methods best promote human development of a healthy, happy and peaceful kind. In this regard, there is something like a "hierarchy or logic of human needs", in the sense that the fulfilment of some needs is predicated on the fulfilment of other needs. In socialist ethics, satisfying the basic needs of all has priority, since the satisfaction of all other needs depends on them. Certain conditions (e.g. health, housing, security, work, education, access to biological and physical necessaries, proper care for the old, the young, the sick and the disabled) are an essential precondition for meeting all other needs, and as soon as they are met, the amount of social conflict and immorality (as indicated by crime incidence for example) decrease. If they are not met, social conflict and immorality increase. In my personal thoughts about socialism, what I emphasised is, that there is no need for only one principle of allocation, or one principle of property rights, numerous different allocation principles and property rights could in principle be combined, in accordance with social priorities and what works best. In a very modest way, I often try to determine very exactly and with as much objectivity as possible what works best and why that is, in my own life, or why exactly some things are right/wrong or beneficial/harmful to do (some phenomena remain terribly puzzling to me, maybe that is my naivity, and some things I am not game to try at all). You can have all kinds of moral theories or ideologies about why some things are good or bad, but the point is to verify with precision yourself, why that is really the case, with an open mind, and come to a definite conclusion about it. Of course, you should not be so open-minded, that your brains fall out. This is an experiential or experimental ethics, which says that which norms are finally best to adopt, is something which often cannot be stated definitely in advance of experience, they have to be verified from experience (including historical experience). Ethics must therefore be open to experience, rather than simply an a priori dogma. It makes a living environment desirable, in which there is both room for making mistakes and trial-and-error, but in which big mistakes can be avoided, i.e. a learning environment which is non-arbitrary (non-chaotic), informed by scientific insight, permitting at least some predictability, and allowing definite experiential conclusions to accumulate. If, for example, people have to live a life in which they can hardly predict or anticipate what will happen next, because everything about their future is rather uncertain and beyond their control, this makes any balanced human development impossible. A basic amount of continuity is simply essential to achieve anything beyond survival, and socialists argue that therefore society should be organised to provide it. Planning is not something socialists invented, it has always existed, the question is only whether we can plan better, and whether we can create an organisational framework within which the best effect can be given to the plans made. The effectivity of planning is almost totally dependent on the mode of co-operation which can be realised, and this is obviously the stuff of political insight. If co-operation fails, you do not even get the information necessary to make the plan. Planning techniques are one thing, but a critical question is what motivates people to co-operate with the plan, and that depends greatly on how their interests and needs are taken into account. What socialists argue is that the interests and needs of the working majority (as producers and consumers) should be taken into account, since they create the wealth on which everything else in society depends. You can coerce people into co-operating with the collective plan, or they can do so voluntarily. Too much reliance on coercion does not work, and becomes inefficient and unjust, but too much reliance on voluntary co-operation (lack of sanctions for anti-social behaviour) also does not work. Markets however cannot address this problem adequately by themselves, because they contain no specific morality other than whatever happens to be required to settle transactions and contracts, and every contract/transaction can be negated by another contract/transaction. I am personally convinced now through personal study that commerce - if not in the first instance, still in the last instance - generates a kind of nihilism (a "why not?" or "who says?" or "anything goes" approach). It could be benign, or very harmful. That is, in reality, exactly why market expansion has gone hand in hand with the expansion of the aegis of state activities (not simply public ownership, but increased rule-making and regulation) which aims to restrict the amount of nihilism. But a totalitarian state generates just as much nihilism. That is just to say, that this nihilism is really sourced in a malformed relationship between the "individual" and the "social", such that it is no longer clear why any norm or rule - whether individually chosen or socially imposed - should necessarily be followed, or apply. Another way of putting that is, that how the ability for people to "rule themselves" combines with the imposition of social rules becomes riddled with contradictions. It can be difficult to fathom, but the result is typically a perspective which sees the world as being without objective meanings, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value. This nihilist perspective conflicts directly with an experiential ethics, and with an environment that can contain such an ethics, causing its critics often to retreat (conservatively or not) to religion, fundamentalisms and tradition. A Marxist would of course emphasise that the nihilism is an effect of the conditions of social existence, and that if society is reorganised appropriately, the nihilism will reduce, since in that case there will be "objective meanings, purpose, comprehensible truth, and essential value". A little amount of nihilism is maybe not such a bad thing, it could even be radical and progressive in some sense (often difficult to judge), but a lot of nihilism simply cripples the capacity for social learning, because it becomes impossible to conclude anything durable from experience that could orient behaviour. In that case, we are left just surviving in a world that makes no sense. Jurriaan
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