Subject: [OPE-L:1726] Re: value-form theories and the Uno-school
From: Paul Cockshott (wpc@dcs.gla.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Nov 23 1999 - 07:50:06 EST
At 14:29 23/11/99 +0200, you wrote:
>Second, and here my view is different from Makoto's, the
>ontological status of the substance of value is best settled in
>historically specific terms. Capitalist conditions amount to
>developed division of labour with autonomous and competing
>producers, and worker mobility and indifference among jobs. These
>conditions give to the substance of value (abstract labour) as social
>'reality', and it is very hard to show that anything approximating
>them can be found in past social formations. If they are absent,
>abstract labour begins to look like theoretical speculation. One,
>less than perfect, way of resolving the problem would be to argue
>that some degree of these conditions exists in all past societies,
>and might even exist in a socialist society, thus giving abstract
>labour some (variously imperfect) material foundation.
Might even exist in a socialist society?
What was the work points system on the peoples communes
if not a socialist form of representation of abstract labour?
More generally, abstract labour exists wherever there is the possibility
of a variation over time of the distribution of social labour between
different activities. You would be hard put to come up with a real
human society where such variations in labour allocation did not
exist.
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