Ted,
Hi, good to hear from you.
You wrote:
> IMO, the key idea in your argument is not to isolate production
from
> exchange so that commodity exchange reveals the magnitude of socially
> necessary labor in a price. Yet, I appreciated your comment in an
earlier
> post that the producer anticipates exchange in organizing production.
> Wouldn't you say that production is already social because of the
> anticipation?
Michael W:
Yes I would - but precisely because it is embedded in a *system* of
capitalist generalised commodity circulation. The micro grounding of this
in capitalist subjectivity (ie much more concretely) is that she
pre-commensurates in the light of what she 'sees' going on in the relevant
bits of the system around her.
Ted:
> Isn't it true that producers are aware of world standards of
> production TIME and that this is a measure of value magnitude in
production.
Michael W:
Very likely. Capitalist pre-commensuration may contingently involve all
kinds of management and accounting tools, industrial espionage and what
all. Much of this is well *described* in the Management Studies literature
on 'world class' companies etc. etc.
Ted:
> Further, the overriding social necessity of capitalist production is
to
> extract unpaid hours of labor. The goal isn't to produce for the sake
of
> consumption , a demand theory of value, but for the sake of production
> through which value gets bigger.
Michael W:
I agree with Jerry when he points out that valorisation and accumulation
depend on the successful production of output *as commodities*.
Ted:
> I think of social necessity "for capital"
> as being different from social necessity for human consumption.
Michael W:
So do I. (btw, the imperatives of workers consumption via the purchase of
commodities is also but a distorted an alienated for of the
trans-historical 'social necessity for human consumption'.)
Ted:
> 1. SNLT is already social in production and is not isolated and
> thus requiring the market to become social.
Michael W:
As I said above, this is on ongoing dynamic system, not an outcome. The
reason that snlt is 'already' social in production is because that
production is embedded in a Value-form associated system, that is (perhaps
contingently) grounded in universal markets.
Ted:
> 2. Selling is not "the" problem for value production, extraction of
unpaid
> labor time is the foremost necessity.
Michael W:
Extraction of unpaid labour time is possible because the separation of
workers from means of production is continuously reproduced by the
operation of this system.
Stay in touch!
Michael
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Dr Michael Williams
"Books are Weapons"
Department of Economics Home:
School of Social Sciences 26 Glenwood Avenue
De Montfort University Southampton
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email: mwilliam@torres.mk.dmu.ac.uk mwilliam@compuserve.com
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