From: Howard Engelskirchen (howarde@TWCNY.RR.COM)
Date: Wed Jun 16 2004 - 01:52:52 EDT
In this post I'll try to address Costas's points around abstract labor. This will also touch on ground raised in Ian's recent post. Hegel had the view that any time you considered a thing in isolation from the totality of which it was a part, your conception of it was to that extent abstract. There's nothing wrong with that. To consider value today in isolation from capitalism would be inadequate and incomplete, just as it would be to consider it in the ancient world in isolation from the patriarchal form of production to which it was subordinate. But if its value we're calling abstract, I want to insist that it is a real social object capable of existing wherever the appropriate social conditions for its operation are present and that these do not include wage labor. Generalized commodity production certainly requires wage labor. The question is whether what we learn about the commodity form as it is disclosed in its approximately 'pure' development within the capitalist mode of production doesn't allow us to understand it in those situations where wage labor didn't exist but appropriate conditions for its emergence did. So if the question is whether Chapter 1 presupposes wage labor or not, the answer it seems to me is unambiguously yes and no. Yes, in the sense that generalized commodity production is presupposed; no in the sense that no theoretical category specific to capital as such, e.g. wage labor, surplus value, etc., is introduced. Therefore, the analysis there presented can be applied where commodity production existed but was not generalized and did not dominate production. But that argument collapses if abstract labor presented in Chapter 1 is a theoretical category that requires wage labor. Marx refers to abstract labor in three different contexts. On the one hand he refers to labor as just physiological expenditure common to all human history. As simple labor common to all history. Labor never occurs except in a specific social form under given historical conditions, yet we can abstract to the general features that characterize all human labor. Second, he refers to labor that is equal and homogeneous in Chapter 1. Third, he refers in the third notebook of the Grundrisse to labor denuded of all objectivity, altogether indifferent to the form of labor. Labor abstract in the sense that it is indifferent to the utility of the product which it produces, commodity producing labor, equal and homogeneous labor, is not at all necessarily indifferent to the form of labor -- Marx gives the example of guilds and crafts which remained immersed in the particularity of labor. Indifference to the utility of the product, the thing that causes(!) recourse to exchange, does not at all imply or presuppose indifference to the particularity of labor. The conditions for capitalist production do. Labor as pure subjectivity, as the use value of capital, labor indifferent to form, presupposes production for exchange value, not for use. A key here is a footnote found in the Nicolaus edition of the Grundrisse at 360: the quote is from Hegel: matter is that which is indifferent to form. It's just the quote that's important, not the analysis it footnotes. That point, of course, Hegel took from Aristotle. For Aristotle, matter was indifferent to form and, as such, pure potentiality. If we try that on labor we get abstract labor in the first sense -- the kind of labor that is the substratum of human production and common to every historical period. Labor accessible not empirically, but only "in account," because you never get actual labor without form. Marx's contribution, of course, is to insist on the forms of social labor and the epochs of human history are characterized by ways of joining the different social forms of labor with labor abstract in this most rudimentary sense. The commodity form is one form; the capital form is another. Notice incidentally that while the commodity form gives you equal and homogeneous labor, generating ideas of equality, that is not the case with labor as the use value of capital. Unless these things are kept distinct, analysis of the base will lead to a muddle when it comes to understanding the superstructure. Finally, as the Grundrisse Introduction makes clear, it isn't possible to think of understanding any of this until the category of labor's pure subjectivity has been developed by modern economic relations. So, yes, slaves embodied abstract labor in the same way money or other commodities did -- by the social substance formed of the union of labor indifferent to form and the social form of the commodity. A point on working backwards from exchange which Costas raised in the post below. It is exchange that renders commodity producing labor commensurable, but that does not establish the priority of exchange. In some of the value form literature there is a tendency to make the error of collapsing powers to their exercise or, what amounts to the same thing here, reducing real possibilitiy to abstract possibility (the way Hume did). It's logically possible a banana will grow out of the prime minister's ear -- that's abstract possibility. Where there is surplus production not needed by an independent producer for individual reproduction, that production can be taken to market -- that's real possibliity. It may not be, but to the extent the division of labor develops and spreads you generate dependencies and the real possibility of exchange. Value has its source in those production relations, not exchange, though without exchange it will not be actualized. Howard ---- Original Message ----- From: "Costas Lapavitsas" <Cl5@SOAS.AC.UK> To: <OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU> Sent: Sunday, June 06, 2004 8:14 AM Subject: Re: [OPE-L] Money, mind and the ontological status of value Howard marshals a long array of quotes mostly from the Contribution and the Grundrisse and states that "It passes understanding to imagine how anyone can review these materials and not suppose Marx is talking about commodity exchange across history". Howard is also interested to know how the view took hold that abstract labour rests on capitalist relations of production, and if there is another strand to this but the new Hegelianism. It is possible to engage in textual analysis of the quotes that Howard presents and argue plausibly that several refer to exchange value, not abstract labour. It could equally be argued that their meaning is not nearly as indisputable as he suggests. But I won't do that because I actually agree with Howard that Marx could indeed be read the way he suggests. It cannot be an accident that Marxists have debated the historical problem of value, or even simple commodity production, for as long as we have. What I can easily do, however, is point to the source of the view that abstract labour (value) is bound up with capitalist production: Marx himself. Marx's developed analysis of abstract labour is found in the first chapter of Capital, from which, I note, Howard quotes much less. The opening paragraph of this chapter, thus of Capital, is, as we all know: The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an "immense collection of commodities"; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the commodity." This seems to me a pretty clear and powerful statement of the dialectic. Marx starts with the capitalist mode of production, abstracts down to an appropriate elementary component and, through analysis, aims gradually to construct the capitalist mode of production in thought. The choice of elementary component, incidentally, is not predetermined. Marx chose to start from the commodity and this starting point must be justified by the rest of his analysis. He could, for instance, have started with "value", which is broadly what Ricardo does, or the "market", which is what neoclassical theory does. Both of these starting points would have been ideally abstract, and consequently problematic. It is entirely legitimate to think, therefore, that Marx's discussion of the process of exchange in Capital refers to capitalist exchange, and not to exchange across history. Moreover, bearing in mind the 'man - ape' analogy that Marx himself used for the historical aspect of the dialectic, his ample references to exchange in history could be seen as demonstration of how the template of capitalist exchange can provide insights into 'earlier' forms of exchange and 'simpler' expressions of value. Marx's historical references are not necessarily a demonstration of the trans-historical aspect of value, as Howard suggests. Nor is there any great mystery regarding the recent origins of the view that abstract labour is bound up with capitalist production relations. It is, for instance, one of the strongest results of British political economy from the 1970s onward, partly inspired by the need to oppose Sraffianism and its ahistorical understanding of labour time. There have been several important contributors to these debates, often associated with the Conference of Socialist Economists - Pilling, Fine, Kay, Mohun, Weeks and many others whose names escape me right now. In a different but related way, the Uno school in Japan has developed an even broader and more elaborate analysis of the link between abstract labour and capitalist production as well as the implications for the form of value. The Uno school, unlike British theorists, also conveys in deflected form the debates of the great German and Austrian Marxists of the beginning of twnetieth century. To go back to the beginning, though, I am still struck by our focus on the consistency of Marx's views rather than on the problem itself. The real question for me is, do we gain a better understanding of value in contemporary capitalism by interpreting abstract labour trans-historically and working backwards from exchange, as Howard seems to suggest? I don't think that we do because abstract labour as social substance appears then as assertion. For abstract labour to have social content, there must be appropriate social processes (especially wage labour) which are in turn summarily captured by the concept of abstract labour. This, I think, is a vital advantage of connecting abstract labour to capitalist production. By the same token, in non-capitalist modes of production, abstract labour is either absent or undeveloped. I discuss some of these ideas in my Social Foundations of Markets, Money and Credit, Routledge, 2003. Costas -----Original Message----- From: Howard Engelskirchen <howarde@TWCNY.RR.COM> To: OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Date: Sun, 6 Jun 2004 03:52:34 -0400 Subject: Re: Money, mind and the ontological status of value In a post just sent I presented a bunch of quotes showing that Marx's analysis of commodities and value does not require the buying nd selling of albor power or the capitalist mode of production or the dominance of the circuit M-C-M. Here are some points of clarity: 1. The dispute is not about the existence of a simple mode of production. I agree with the critique of that notion. Value does not take over production except as capitalist production. But we don’t have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Accepting that there is no linear historical progression from simple commodity production to capitalist production, what is at issue is whether the social relation of value could have existed in pre-capitalist social formations as a subordinate social form. 2. Commodities existed in pre-capitalist societies, but wealth in those societies could never have been characterized as “an immense accumulation of commodities.” 3. In Capital, the Contribution, the Grundrisse, etc. Marx mixes theoretical analysis of value, exchange value, commodities and money with illustrations from the ancient and medieval worlds and from pre-capitalist formations on other continents. He never says – ‘but I don’t really mean ‘value’ here because I’m talking about ancient Rome.’ 5. Exchange value is a form of the manifestation of value. Therefore, references to exchange value presuppose the existence of value. Money is exchange value with independent existence. Therefore, the existence of money presupposes the existence of value. Marx never suggests the nature of money as money is different in pre-capitalist economic formations. Undoubtedly I’ve missed a lot, but it doesn’t seem like the evidence of what Marx’s understanding was on the existence of exchange value before bourgeois production is even a close call. This comes through particularly in the Grundrisse chapter on Money where he is engaged in working out his ideas. Howard
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