Marx had a particular definition of value, namely that value is the units of socially necessary labour-time expanded on the production of commodities. What Khawaga described is what is commonly known as the 'labour theory of value' (somewhat of a misnomer). This is distinct from the law of value.
The Law of Value is Marx's theory of the allocation of labour time in capitalist society. It is the mechanism by which 'units of production/capital' are disciplined, that is, it is a theory of the operation of market forces. Private producers are compelled to sell their commodities at or around the average socially necessary labour time (the social value). If the individual value of the commodity produced by certain private producers is above the social value, the private producers in question will still have to sell the commodity at a price around the social value, and consequently will tend to not be profitable. They are compelled to lower the labour time they have expanded upon the production of the commodity, or else risk bankruptcy. This disciplining mechanism by which labour, dead and alive, is allocated is the law of value.
Dennis, what I wrote is the law of value in the simplest terms and is, in a nuthsell, what you described in much more complicated terms. The very term socially necessary labour-time refers to commodities having been exchanged, as individually spent labour time is reduced tot his social average at the moment of exchange. It is not an either/or when you refer to the labour theory of value and Marx's law of value, they are, for all intents and purposes basically the same. After all, when Marx speaks of labour-time, he immediately refer to SNLT. The bourgeois economists did not have a concept for SNLT because they did not have a concept of abstract labour.
From what I gather, a private producer is someone (or some entity) that is not producing directly for society. So any wage worker (and the business they work for) and most peasants (that produce directly for the family, but may sell their surplus on the market). Private production, in a nutshell, is basically not direct social production.
Marx doesn't really explain that term very well, though he may have in a text of his I have not read.
From what I gather, a private producer is someone (or some entity) that is not producing directly for society. So any wage worker (and the business they work for) and most peasants (that produce directly for the family, but may sell their surplus on the market). Private production, in a nutshell, is basically not direct social production.
Marx doesn't really explain that term very well, though he may have in a text of his I have not read.
It's not where the labourer is the private owner of his own means of labour set in action by himself, like an artisan then?
What is value? First, its an economic category. What does it describe? Not the use value that satisfies a need, but the exchange value. What is said by how much exchange value does it have? Its the capacity of a good to get hold of other goods. If you take money as the expression of value, as exchange value itself, which is separate from the use value, what does it consist in? The capacity of money to command other goods, to get access to labor. If that’s what value is, that’s the economic substance. If the value of a good describes the capacity of a good to get hold of other goods, you are excluded from what you want. This relation of exclusion is what private property (a legal category) is. All goods exist under it. Value is the capacity to get hold of those goods. The economic category of value is a relation of political force. The state decrees that all goods are under exclusive ownership.
1) Concentration of means of production in few hands, whereby they cease to appear as the property of the immediate labourers and turn into social production capacities. Even if initially they are the private property of capitalists. These are the trustees of bourgeois society, but they pocket all the proceeds of this trusteeship.
2) Organisation of labour itself into social labour: through co-operation, division of labour, and the uniting of labour with the natural sciences.
In these two senses, the capitalist mode of production abolishes private property and private labour, even though in contradictory forms
Or wage labour is a contradictory form of social labour that is done in private. As I said, I am not entirely sure what Marx means with the term private labour as he uses it in the first three chapters of Das Kapital. His use of private labour there is to show that an activity that is done in "isolation" and in private becomes social (or rather appears as such) when the commodity is exchanged. This in itself is a contradiction. But I am not sure if he uses it in the same way in Volume 3, which was an unfinished work. In any case, even if capital "socializes" production by bringing workers into co-operation under the same roof (or through technology today), it is still labour that is expended "privately" in the sense that the product is not merely given away.
I've tried several times to find a clear definition of what Marx means with private labour, but as of yet I have not been able to.
In the very beginnings of bourgeois society, private labour emerged even in advance of the development of wage-labour and capital, with individual artisans producing goods for the market. In private labour, prior to the development of a proletariat and bourgeois class, all the essential relations of capitalism are found: people work to earn a living, dominated by a world populated by things (commodities) which appear to possess human powers.
Well, yes, it is a start. But by relying on this definition alone, you may be led to interpret the first three chapters of Capital as historically rather than logically.
What is value? First, its an economic category. What does it describe? Not the use value that satisfies a need, but the exchange value. What is said by how much exchange value does it have? Its the capacity of a good to get hold of other goods. If you take money as the expression of value, as exchange value itself, which is separate from the use value, what does it consist in? The capacity of money to command other goods, to get access to labor. If that’s what value is, that’s the economic substance. If the value of a good describes the capacity of a good to get hold of other goods, you are excluded from what you want. This relation of exclusion is what private property (a legal category) is. All goods exist under it. Value is the capacity to get hold of those goods. The economic category of value is a relation of political force. The state decrees that all goods are under exclusive ownership.
This isn't accurate. Value is as it is described by S. Artesian, Khawaga, and myself in this thread.
Dave B
Hi Khawaga
what does Karl mean by the following?
....cardinal facts of capitalist production:
1) Concentration of means of production in few hands, whereby they cease to appear as the property of the immediate labourers and turn into social production capacities. Even if initially they are the private property of capitalists. These are the trustees of bourgeois society, but they pocket all the proceeds of this trusteeship.
2) Organisation of labour itself into social labour: through co-operation, division of labour, and the uniting of labour with the natural sciences.
In these two senses, the capitalist mode of production abolishes private property and private labour, even though in contradictory forms
Is wage labour a contradictory form of private labour?
Indeed, private labour is labour done in relative isolation, or more obscurely (dialectically expressed), in reciprocal independence. The labour done within 'units of production' is directly social, and these units of production exchange their products. The labour of these units of production is private labour, and this private labour becomes social only indirectly through the confrontation of commodities in the market. Private labour is labour executed in reciprocal independence.
Marx is describing how capitalism is undermining its own premises. In the era of proto-industrialisation, when capitalism was first emerging, production was small-scale, and scattered, still in a 'pygmy format'. The manufacturers of this era, the immediate producers, owned the tools with which they laboured. A smith owned his hammer and anvil. As the development of capitalism progresses, small-scale production is displaced by large-scale industrial production. The means of production become too large to be owned by the immediate producers themselves, and pass into the hands of a segment of the population that is privileged enough to afford them -- the capitalist class. Therefore, the individual private property of the manufacturing working class is replaced by a different type of private property, based on the separation of the producers from the means of production with which they produce.
In the first sense, capitalism abolishes private property and private labour because it destroys individual property. In the second sense, because it socially integrates labour -- it socialises the labour process. It is in a contradictory form because it undermines its own premises. This contradiction is resolved when the method of appropriation is harmonised with the method of production -- both becoming social (i.e. communism).
Here is a description of private labour to go with that definition:
The first step made by an object of utility towards acquiring exchange-value is when it forms a non-use-value for its owner, and that happens when it forms a superfluous portion of some article required for his immediate wants. Objects in themselves are external to man, and consequently alienable by him. In order that this alienation may be reciprocal, it is only necessary for men, by a tacit understanding, to treat each other as private owners of those alienable objects, and by implication as independent individuals. But such a state of reciprocal independence has no existence in a primitive society based on property in common, whether such a society takes the form of a patriarchal family, an ancient Indian community, or a Peruvian Inca State. The exchange of commodities, therefore, first begins on the boundaries of such communities, at their points of contact with other similar communities, or with members of the latter. So soon, however, as products once become commodities in the external relations of a community, they also, by reaction, become so in its internal intercourse. The proportions in which they are exchangeable are at first quite a matter of chance. What makes them exchangeable is the mutual desire of their owners to alienate them. Meantime the need for foreign objects of utility gradually establishes itself. The constant repetition of exchange makes it a normal social act. In the course of time, therefore, some portion at least of the products of labour must be produced with a special view to exchange. From that moment the distinction becomes firmly established between the utility of an object for the purposes of consumption, and its utility for the purposes of exchange. Its use-value becomes distinguished from its exchange-value. On the other hand, the quantitative proportion in which the articles are exchangeable, becomes dependent on their production itself. Custom stamps them as values with definite magnitudes.
Exactly. I think that was Chili's initial point: to see how convoluted it would get.
It wasn't, I promise!
To be honest, it came up because I was telling a liberally-lefty friend of mine about Paul Mason's argument regarding technology and I said that - according to Mason - the ability to reproduce information with the click of a button is effectively reducing the cost of many modern goods to zero, and, thus, undermining the law of value.
My friend asked me what I meant by this and I realized I couldn't give an adequate response.
So, would folks agree with my assessment of Mason's claim?
Just, for the record, I always understood the law of value to mean that commodities have within them a use-value and an exchange-value and that the exchange-value is a result of the socially necessary labor time contained within them. And, further, that ability of commodities to be exchanged for one another results from the fact the labor time within them can be measured proportionally between different goods. Thus, the law of value.
How's my understanding here? And can you think any way to put all that more simply?
It's all coming out now Chilli - you've been hobnobbing with left liberals! Shame on you! You're clearly listening to the wrong punk bands bro!
Seriously though, how do you even talk politics with those guys? I find politically engaged liberals to be the very worst people to knock ideas around with. Anything that even questions the idea of a state doing all the taking care of things seems to be like the conversational equivalent of a fart in a lift. Tell me your secret.
Eh, with most liberals, their heart's in the right place. I mean, literally everyone in my workplace - from the boss on down - supports Sanders. And, to speak to them, they do because they see him as being able to bring Scandinavian-style social democracy to America and they view that as a fairer, better society. And, shit, we live in New York, we all want some rent-controlled housing!
So, for a lot of them, it's not ideological in the sense that they're wedded to the state - more that they don't see any option beyond the liberal-conservative political discourse. Oh, and that communism is a nice idea on paper, but that it would never work. And, from there, there's something to work with. Committed Leftists on the other hand....
how is social labor time different from labor time?
as this seems to have got missed, basically socially necessary labour time, means the average necessary in a society at a given moment.
So if example Nike used machines to make trainers, which were so efficient it took half an hour of worker time to make a pair of trainers (and this technology had become the norm for the industry) the value would be proportionate to half an hour of labour time.
Whereas if Adidas made stuff all by hand and it took 6 of their worker hours to make one pair, that wouldn't mean the value of their product was greater than Nike, as value is determined by the socially necessary labour time, not the actual labour time. Do you see what I mean?
Perhaps because I am a scientist and a chemist in particular I tend to look at things more from that perspective and thus I seem to have interpreted the opening chapter of volume one in a more eccentric way.
I have been trained to think that if two or more things are say interchangeable or broader way are ‘equal’ then there must be something about them that is the same.
Thus if sugar side of a reaction is converted or changed into alcohol and carbon dioxide etc then the stuff on both sides of the equation is the same and we just need to count up the carbons, hydrogens and oxygens etc.
What is on one side of the equation or chemical reaction is the same as on the other; radically different in sense perception form but merely when totted up just different manifestations of the same stuff.
In fact we could say the content on both sides of the equation, ie carbons, hydrogens and oxygens the same.
It is the same in physics where they do heat being converted to movement being converted to light etc.
It is for them all the same thing, energy, thus;
In a paper Über die Natur der Wärme(German "On the Nature of Heat/Warmth"), published in the Zeitschrift für Physik in 1837, Karl Friedrich Mohr gave one of the earliest general statements of the doctrine of the conservation of energy in the words: "besides the 54 known chemical elements there is in the physical world one agent only, and this is called Kraft [energy or work]. It may appear, according to circumstances, as motion, chemical affinity, cohesion, electricity, light and magnetism; and from any one of these forms it can be transformed into any of the others."
Interestingly they don’t know what energy is yet or even all its forms eg dark energy.
But the logic is, that really goes back to the ‘Greeks’ (Democritus in particular perhaps- Karl did his pHd thesis on him) is that if one thing is ‘equivalent’ to another in anyway then it is just a matter of them in ‘reality’ being the same thing manifesting itself in different ways.
So for me Karl said if a coat is ‘equivalent’ to 10 yards of linen or whatever and for whatever reason that is initially of little interest.
Then there must be something about the coat and the linen that is the same.
And I think he goes onto to say maybe what is the same about them is that they are made by human effort (value) and that is what makes them ‘equivalent’ and runs with the idea to see where it leads to.
This remains fine as long as you have;
C(100) – M(100) –C(100)
As in each transformation or, - , you have a ‘conservation of value’ or (100).
But in capitalism we would seem to have;
M(100) – C(100) – M(150)
Which looks like a non conservation of value which was a premise or starting point of the investigation (or law of value if you like - which is analogous to the law of the conservation and conversion of energies?)
Or M(100) –M(150)
The physics people don’t believe you can get more energy out of a series of transformations any more than chemical engineers believe you can get more elements out of a series of chemical reactions than what you started with.
So what might be gong on in capitalism.
Is there something a bit funny about this C(100)?
Perhaps a special C(100) that wasn’t there before capitalism?
What was there C like in capitalism that wasn’t there before; or what could be bought in capitalism for money that couldn’t or wasn’t bought before capitalism?
It would nice to hope and assume that this special, * ,capitalist case of the special C(100)* that the
M(100) – C(100)
Or
M(100) – C(100)*
Still held fast to the law of the conservation of value.
What is C(100), generally.
Well it is something useful at the end of the day.
What if as that it is just somebody’s human effort that is bought?
You can’t really argue against the idea that other peoples effort can be useful for those of us who have Pilipino house maids or waitresses to serve you drinks in the Manhattan Crowne Plaza etc .
What if you can use that kind of thing to get for your paid for labour as a utility to produce ‘more effort embodied in something’?
I really have to go now; just now got a phone call.
On this issue of private labour in chapter one and what is or isn’t etc
Perhaps it might be useful to dip into the first version of chapter one?
Marx 1867 (Capital)
The Commodity
This is an English translation by Albert Dragstedt of the first chapter of the first German edition of Capital.
Modern editions of Capital have a first chapter based on the second or subsequent editions.
Source: Albert Dragstedt, Value: Studies By Karl Marx, New Park Publications, London, 1976, pp. 7-40.
Transcribed: by Steve Palmer.
Now as far as concerns the amount of value, we note that the private labours which are plied independently of one another (but because they are members of the primordial division of labour are dependent upon one another) on all sides are constantly reduced to their socially proportional measure by the fact that in the accidental and perpetually shifting exchange relationships of their products the labour-time which is socially necessary for their production forcibly obtrudes itself as a regulating natural-law, just as the law of gravity does, for example, when the house falls down on one’s head. The determination of the amount of value by the labour-time is consequently the mystery lurking under the apparent motions of the relative commodity-values….
Is private labour associated with, or a category of some, “primordial division of labour”?
Can capitalism and wage labour be part of a primordial division of labour?
-------------
Re general linguistics (not my bag at all), contents and form, and sets and subsets etc.
I think you start with a category or set like ‘wine’.
And, in English, when one sub-divide it into sub-sets one normally attaches a qualitative word in front of it thus;
Red wine
And
White wine
And thus Red wine and white wine become mutually exclusive and ‘contradictory forms’ of each other?
Although in Latin Linnaean taxonomy the qulaifying statement comes after.
Eg Homo as the genus of a species Homo sapiens; homo being a genus and a class of things which have common characteristics and which can be divided into subordinate kinds.
From that and just following normal and standard procedures of classification; one should expect that private labour and wage labour are mutually exclusive sub categories of labour?
So actually we could speculate about adding certain other sub categories of labour, depending on the classification procedure you are using I suppose.
Eg communist labour and slave labour?
If private labour was essentially artisan (self employment) as opposed to wage labour.
I think at least, ‘artisan’ commodity production would be consistent with primordial division of labour?
That is if you believe artisan, and dare I say it simple commodity production, preceded capitalist production.
I suppose I could ask the question of myself why private labour and where Karl got it from?
I would suggest to myself that he got it from John Locke which fed somewhat into Hegel; buts lets stay away from Hegel.
Locke is quite interesting and readable anyway.
Second Treatise of Civil Government John Locke (1690)
CHAP. V. Of Property.
………..yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property………..
That labour put a distinction between them and common: that added something to them more than nature, the common mother of all, had done; and so they became his private right. And will any one say, he had no right to those acorns or apples, he thus appropriated, because he had not the consent of all mankind to make them his? Was it a robbery…………
"It is important to emphasise the point that what determines value is not the time taken to produce a thing, but the minimum time it could possibly be produced in, and the minimum is ascertained by competition. Suppose for a moment that there is no more competition and consequently no longer any means to ascertain the minimum of labour necessary for the production of a commodity; what will happen? It will suffice to spend six hours’ work on the production of an object, in order to have the right [...] to demand in exchange six times as much as the one who has taken only one hour to produce the same object. "
"Every new invention that enables the production in one hour of that which has hitherto been produced in two hours depreciates all similar products on the market. Competition forces the producer to sell the product of two hours as cheaply as the product of one hour. Competition carries into effect the law according to which the relative value of a product is determined by the labour time needed to produce it. Labour time serving as the measure of marketable value becomes in this way the law of the continual depreciation of labour. We will say more. There will be depreciation not only of the commodities brought into the market, but also of the instrumentsof production and of whole plants."
"It is not the sale of a given product at the price of its cost of production that constitutes the “proportional relation” of supply to demand, or the proportional quota of this product relatively to the sum total of production; it is the variations in supply and demand that show the producer what amount of a given commodity he must produce in order to receive in exchange at least the cost of
production. And as these variations are continually occurring, there is also a continual movement of withdrawal and application of capital in the different branches of industry. "
"In a future society, in which class antagonism will have ceased, in which there will no longer be any classes, use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production; but the time of production devoted to different articles will be determined by the degree of their social utility."
I'm completely new to this. My head is spinning from the series linked to by vincent. I need to read more. Can anyone recommend another introductory text?
Whatever the manner in which the prices of various commodities are first mutually fixed or regulated, their movements are always governed by the law of value. If the labour-time required for their production happens to shrink, prices fall; if it increases, prices rise, provided other conditions remain the same.
I can see the price drop is a consequence of asserting that 'only labour adds value'. And I presume what this describes is what actually happens in real life. But how does the SNLT move the price?
The usual short formulation of this theory holds that the value of the commodity depends on the quantity of labor socially necessary for its production; or, in a general formulation, that labor is hidden behind, or contained in, value: value = "materialized" labor.
It is more accurate to express the theory of value inversely: in the commodity-capitalist economy, production work relations among people necessarily acquire the form of the value of things, and can appear only in this material form; social labor can only be expressed in value.
SNLT is referred to by Marx specifically as the "magnitude" or "content" of value. The "form" of value is more abstract - the material expression of productive relations among people, specifically labor or products of labor which are exchanged; bourgeois society specifically is dominated by exchange and value. Wealth in bourgeois societies takes the form of value whereas wealth in previous modes of production did not.
The law of value is the regulating mechanism of capitalism. In capitalist societies society is based on production for exchange and thus based on buying and selling on the market and producing things to buy and sell. Every institution in capitalist society is thus subordinated to the will of the market, even institutions that are seen to be outside of the capitalist sphere such as the state, churches, and social clubs. This is the law of value.
Much of the social antagonisms of capitalism are rooted in this tension between use-value and exchange value.
What is meant by the tension between use and exchange values? Is it simply that wealth accumulation (and thus social tensions) will always arise alongside exchange values?
"use- value" refers to how useful an object is; you could say it's subjectively determined. "exchange - value" refers to the LTV; how the commodity relates to other commodities on the market. it's often just called "value". twenty linens exchanged for two coats, to use marx's example.
the usefulness of an object does not necessarily correspond to what value it has - diamonds are not very useful, but have a very large value. using marx's examples, water is the most useful thing on the planet, but it has a very low value.
If I can make a bicycle in one day and you can make a car in one week, would you let me trade my bicycle for your car? I mean one bicycle for one car. That's the simplest I can explain the law of value.
As far as I am aware, the term "law of value" was first used by Proudhon in System of Economic Contradictions -- he coined the term to describe how market value was regulated by cost of production. Marx probably picked it up there -- like his theory of exploitation, amongst other things (see my review of The Poverty of Philosophy).
As to what it means, I discuss it in this unfinished appendix to An Anarchist FAQ (saying that, probably wise for me to reread and revise this as it was written a while ago).
Also, read Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation as he explains it much better than Marx did. Proudhon's account is more concerned with discussing the contradictions within supply and demand but his constituted value explains how market price is regulated by cost (ultimately labour) and this was “the centre around which useful and exchangeable value oscillate”, the “absolute, unchangeable law which regulates economic disturbances” for “whoever says oscillation necessarily supposes a mean direction toward which value’s centre of gravity continually tends”. (Système I: 62, 23) This was inherently dynamic:
“The idea of value socially constituted […] serves to explain […] how, by a series of oscillations between supply and demand, the value of every product constantly seeks a level with cost and with the needs of consumption, and consequently tends to establish itself in a fixed and positive manner” (Système I: 87)
From this it is clear that Marx's notion that Proudhon advocated labour-notes is just a lie -- like most of his book against Proudhon.
To explain it to someone who is steeped in the neo-classical nonsense they teach in school.
When demand matches supply, the price will generally be relative to the socially necessary labor time.
It's not opposed to the "subjective" value theory, or addresses a seperate question.
The "subjective" value theory does what neo-liberal idiots always do with Marx, they mis-represent him and then ignore the issue he was addressing and answer a different question. I'm not a Marxist, but I'm sick of him being slandered by neo-liberal idiots who seem to not be able to read when they look at Marx.
Anarcho, where is the passage where Marx argues that Proudhon advocates for labor notes?
Why should a recognition that the quantity of labor socially imbued in a commodity negate the advocacy of labor notes? The idea behind labor notes as I understand it is to lift the veil of mysticism in price; because while prices are *regulated* by the quantity of socially necessary labor time, they incorporate also enough value which is yielded to the capitalists as profits.
Because labor notes are supposed to express things purely in terms of labor hours, and capitalists don't perform labor, this is mean to reveal the graft of every capitalist everywhere; that it costs 2000 labor hours, say, to make a care, and yet we pay 6000 labor hours worth of money, etc.
Presuming we now have enough in previous posts to assume that the law of value, or the labor theory of value, has been sufficiently explained, on one level at least, is it now worth asking what underlies the theory and what the theory might be useful for?
Is the theory, for example, based on the prevalent materialist view of the time (and ours) that ‘Man [sic] is the tool-making animal’, etc? Something expressed perfectly by Marx (though it is fair to point to inconsistencies elsewhere in his writing that may show he was not entirely certain about this) when he wrote in Capital 1:
Labor is “the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence”.
Which has been explained by Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, in this way:
“The seemingly blasphemous notion of Marx that labor (and not God) created man or that labor (and not reason) distinguished man from the other animals was only the most radical and consistent formulation of something upon which the whole modern age was agreed”.
So, does the theory rest on a presumption about humankind’s (voluntary) capacity for labor as the demarcation line between it and other ‘animals’, as opposed to, say, the capacity for ‘reason’?
If so, then what implications might this have for the understanding of ‘use-value’ and, indeed, communism?
Secondly, what use is the labor theory of value to us? That is, to revolts and pro-revolutionary groups and individuals?
Some thoughts/side notes on this:
I'd say, it's a theoretical phrase which aims to make visible some of the processes which undermine capitalist social relations in the long run, and which are the result of their own operation. The law of value assists in demonstrating how socially necessary labour is progressively reduced, which on the one hand serves the capitalist appropriation of surplus labour (in the form of profit/accumulation), but which may also serve the future radical reduction of work time, and the alternative uses of time, in a society beyond capitalist relations.
So rather than a deterministic view of the law of value (inexorable Law! it always applies!), it's an inexorable law of capitalist development which shows how the capitalist social form is undermined by capitalist development itself. The point is that it reveals the long term weakness and the possible strategic points of attack for working class action, and suggests what it means to go beyond capitalism, both in terms of the requirements of doing so, and in its possibilities.
In a book by Negri I found a quote somewhere, ascribed to Marx, about the suppression of private property as only being possible as the suppression of work.
But I think what Tom Henry quotes in the post above, saying that labor is “the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence”, is only true for Marx if you understand labor as "practical-critical, sensuous activity" etc. and not the image we have of it, capitalist work or any activity which revolves around commodity production. Capitalist work does not exhaust the definition of labour, in the anthropological sense, very far from it. Marx's results are also different from his presuppositions, which are the starting point of his investigation, and a lot of which he demonstrates to be stuff that gets uprooted by the historical process itself. "The everlasting nature-imposed condition" undergoes a tremendous abstraction and transformation, where the individual worker is first stripped of the property of the conditions of it, the ownership of tools, rights to land etc, and subsequently (by capitalist development) of the recognizable substance of work "as it was before", and so on, so the nature-imposed condition is gradually turned into a fully social form of alienated activity, which makes sense to itself, but where each worker does only tiny parts of work in a very elaborate social division of labour, which has very little to do with the starting point, and thus also with the starting point which capitalism historically proceeds from (the labour process which it appropriates).
Marx' wasn't too concerned about demonstrating the perpetuity of anything, least of all the things which are in the end only observable patterns of the functioning of capitalism.
In his analysis, everything is liable to get uprooted by a process which doesn't respect its own presuppositions, even though it departs from them. That such presuppositions would survive the process is something to be demonstrated rather than assumed.
I would think it only makes sense to talk about "the law of value" in such a context, to describe the whole process, to point to patterns in it, and not as "a single, succinctly definable rule" which is for ever valid (ie. as something unhistorical), and which could somehow survive the process of undermining/uprooting of its own preconditions which was how Marx saw capitalism.
When demand matches supply, the price will generally be relative to the socially necessary labor time.
...they mis-represent him and then ignore the issue he was addressing
Pennoid
The idea behind labor notes as I understand it is to lift the veil of mysticism in price;
The theory of value is not a theory of prices. It might have started that way, but it certainly wasn't for Marx by the time that Capital was published. Assuming a constant rate of surplus-value, if the labour theory of value were adequate to explain market prices, we would expect to see capitals with lower organic compositions extract higher rates of profit, and vice versa. But in reality, competition tends towards the establishment of an average rate of profit, because capital migrates from industries with lower profits to those with higher ones, until the diminishing of supply in the former and the increase of supply in the latter balances out. Prices then don't fluctuate around their actual values, but around the commodity's cost of production (it's 'cost-price') plus the average rate of profit.
Of course, since value is the means by which social labour announces itself as such within a system of production dominated by private enterprises (Marx notes at one point in 'A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy', that to speak of labour as the substance of value is really an obvious tautology), and since the source of the total surplus-value is always the exploitation of labour (and this mass of surplus-value governs the rate of profit), value relations always lie behind the surface phenomena of prices and govern their movements. But it would be an economic absurdity to directly stamp every commodity with the quantity of social labour it embodies. In practice, this would have to mean that the social relations of capitalism and commodity production have already been abolished.
Someone asked what the relevance of value theory is to revolutionary political activity. The theory of value is the source of Marx's analysis of how capital accumulates, and how it always comes up against barriers to it's accumulation. These barriers to accumulation manifest themselves in crises, which demonstrate in practice the contradictions of the system and open up the door to revolutionary transformation.
So, does the theory rest on a presumption about humankind’s (voluntary) capacity for labor as the demarcation line between it and other ‘animals’, as opposed to, say, the capacity for ‘reason’?
Yes and no. Yes, the LTV does rest on a line of demarcation between the activity of human beings and animals and it's the capacity for labour that is that line. While Marx doesn't refer to reason as such, it's pretty clear that that is one of the qualities he find uniquely human, though he refers to creativity and imagination explicitly and indirectly human beings' capacity for symbolic, abstract thought. This argument is best captured in the 1844 Manuscripts and in the famous bees and architects passage in Capital Vol. 1
Marx
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose.
(please note that Fowkes translates this better than the one above by Moore and Aveling)
Secondly, what use is the labor theory of value to us? That is, to revolts and pro-revolutionary groups and individuals?
Nothing and everything. I think specious replied pretty well, but I will give a short answer. The LTV is of use to use because it tells us how capitalist society is organized around the production and circulation of value, and that this is what is actually enslaving us. As such, the LTV tells us more about what we don't want in a communist society and hence also what we should struggle for and against. Hence, on the basis of the LTV you would not push co-operatives as the solution to get out of capitalism. But the LTV, like Marx's analysis of the capitalist MoP, helps us analyze capitalist society and understand how it functions. But the LTV is really shit to use for purposes of, say, political agitation. If you're on the picket lines, people would be looking at you like you're mad if you talk about how the capitalist are just exploiting us for surplus-value rather than just saying that bosses are fuckers that squeeze us so thin that it's hard to put food on the table.
Secondly, what use is the labor theory of value to us? That is, to revolts and pro-revolutionary groups and individuals?
When comes a threat that something you have work hard for will be taken away from you, what will your reaction be? If you get mad or sad, the labor theory of value applies.
Thanks for the thoughtful responses, I am chewing them over.
At the moment I have two questions.
I think the two quotes below express/summarize what everyone has said here.
Zanthorus wrote:
Someone asked what the relevance of value theory is to revolutionary political activity. The theory of value is the source of Marx's analysis of how capital accumulates, and how it always comes up against barriers to it's accumulation. These barriers to accumulation manifest themselves in crises, which demonstrate in practice the contradictions of the system and open up the door to revolutionary transformation.
What does this mean? It is well-known that economic and political crises open the door to radical social alternatives. What does the labor theory of value have to do with that, apart from being a term revealing the reasons for the predilection of capitalism to experience crisis? How is it useful, apart from, as Khawaga writes:
But the LTV [labor theory of value], like Marx's analysis of the capitalist MoP [mode of production], helps us analyze capitalist society and understand how it functions.
(I am reminded of something from Emil Cioran here, which I read the other day: "Our chief grievance against knowledge is that it has not helped us to live." And it makes me wonder if Marx really did, as he hoped to, give us the tools to transcend philosophy,make it useful, and change the world.)
And S. Artesian wrote:
The necessity for revolution, for the abolition of wage-labor, is immanent to the law of value.
What does this mean? Does it mean that we can read the revolution (the 'abolition of wage-labor' - my italics) as inevitable through the law of value (whether we understand it or not)? Or does it mean that the law of value just shows those who understand it that revolution [an end to all oppression] is, as you say, 'necessary'?
What does the labor theory of value have to do with that, apart from being a term revealing the reasons for the predilection of capitalism to experience crisis?
I'm not sure exactly what you want, a handbook to specific forms of political activism guaranteed to lead to the end of capitalism? Such a thing in general isn't possible. It would be absurd to ask it of any social theory, not just value theory in particular.
Capital allows a much greater understanding of capitalist phenomena, and the concept of value is the bed rock upon which that understanding rests.
reading analyses of the way capital is going, of social phenomena, is something which is much easier with terms like "organic composition of capital," "declining rate of profit," or "fetishized relations" already understood and not needing explanation.
The necessity for revolution, for the abolition of wage-labor, is immanent to the law of value.
What does this mean? Does it mean that we can read the revolution (the 'abolition of wage-labor' - my italics) as inevitable through the law of value (whether we understand it or not)? Or does it mean that the law of value just shows those who understand it that revolution [an end to all oppression] is, as you say, 'necessary'?
The meaning cannot be extracted separate from the previous statements: that the law of value is the product of a social relation, a specific organization of labor power. Then, the functioning of the law of value expresses the way capital accumulates value, and the limits to that accumulation. Those limits are questions of class struggle. The limits become the necessity for the overthrow of the mode of production and is internal to the basis for accumulation.
The conflict between the labor process and the valorization process becomes manifest, acute, critical.
Short version, paraphrasing Marx: "Economics is shit."
I don't think capitalist crisis by itself enlightens anyone, or else Marx wouldn't have worked so hard to make the complicated interplay of forces intelligible. Neither do I think that economics is pure ideology, and I doubt Marx did, or he wouldn't have built upon so much of the political economy that came before. I'm not sure if that's quite what others are saying. There is a sort of retreat by some on the left these days from the political prescriptions of Marx and Engels.
The point of Marx's value theory as I've understood it is that it argues that human working relations take different social forms in different societies, as a function of the level of technology and class struggle. Working from that assumption, Marx argues that human labor takes the form of "value" in capitalist society. What does that mean?
The short answer is that it means the labor-time plays a role in regulating price (of course not one to one). Why does it do this and how?
As others have pointed out the process of production in capitalism is based on individual companies who produce a good to be sold for money. The money is then given to each contributor to production; the worker, the landlord, the capitalist, the financier. Each is free to switch jobs at will. None produce their own necessities. Marx argues that the workers are the only group that actually *produces* the physical goods or services. The other three simply take a portion of the product via political-legal justification.
However, I must be very clear: there is a distinction between the physical product and the *value*. Value is a representation of the labor that it took to produce a quantity of product. By this means, capitalists, landlords, financiers are able to pay workers enough *value* for the workers to purchase necessities. But the workers always produce *more than they need*. How? Because the *value* or worth of labor-power is less than the value that labor-power produces. This is a fancy way of saying that a human can produce more than they need for themselves. How are they forced to do it? By threat of starvation; if you don't work at the rate of 7$ an hour (all the while producing about 21$ of value per hour) then you don't work at all.
This arrangement remains because the capitalist state protects it. And because the working class remains disorganized and uneducated about these particular facts.
The feudal lords were guaranteed the right to appropriate from the serfs and peasants by virtue of their loyalty and service to a king. This was a political-legal arrangement based on particular production relationships.
In capitalism, the capitalist (anybody with enough money) has the right to appropriate the product of workers (those without enough money). That is, the condition of your right to appropriate, to become a member of the ruling class isn't contingent on a king, access to land, etc. but is much wider. It relies only on *money*. Hence the bit about the cash nexus in Marx. Land can be bought, labor can be bought, tools can be bought, etc. During the decline of feudalism, the various rights to the purchase of land, tools, labor evolved and changed according to the struggles of the emerging bourgeois, the peasants, artisans, clergy, etc.
This to me implies the unity between politics, the form of the state (political-legal relations) and production relations (economics). The form of the state reflects the needs of the ruling class in its war against the oppressed and exploited class(es).
Thus, politics is the arena of class struggle, as much as the workplace. The reason that human labor takes the form it does is a result of the current state of the class war; there is the "universal right" (private property) for those with enough money to exploit those without enough money. It's also worth noting that capitalist exploiting workers isn't even the complete picture of the nightmare scenario; they also monopolize control of future investment, and thereby exercise a veto power on what human labor time will be devoted to in the future, which has grave implications for managing ecological collapse/pollution, not to mention quality of life levels of investment and planning regarding the urban/rural divide, healthcare, public transportation, etc.
The "Law of Value" is what Ayn Rand misinterpreted as greed, thus giving her the notion that greed is human nature where Capitalists saw an opportunity to use this notion and justify their nature.
But… On several re-readings of this thread I now want to take it back a notch because, for me, the discussion is still too abstract.
What I want to ask now is:
What is the crisis (or crises) that the labor theory of value points to in the development of capitalism, and from exactly where does the crisis originate?
Zanthorus usefully lays out this out in post #50:
The theory of value is the source of Marx's analysis of how capital accumulates, and how it always comes up against barriers to it's accumulation. These barriers to accumulation manifest themselves in crises, which demonstrate in practice the contradictions of the system and open up the door to revolutionary transformation.
So, using this paragraph, we can identify two questions in order to clarify:
1) What is the actual physical basis for how capital accumulates? That is, what is the essential component for capital accumulation in capitalism?
2) What are the actual physical barriers to this accumulation? That is, what are the actual causes of crises? (And which crises are we talking about?)
Essentially, there are several factors that contribute to crises in capitalism but they tend to be crises of *overproduction*. This results from the fact that businesses have extremely imperfect information, incentives to pursue short-term profit above most else, and compete with eachother to cut costs. The result is a tendency to overproduce, to drive profit rates down through competition, and to generally overshoot production, investment, etc. as a result of using cut-costs to grab a wider market share.
One of the most important underlying factors to capitalist crisis is that production is separate from distribution; distribution is carried out through the market. Hence, producers are always having to approximate demand, and may well be very wrong.
Perhaps that's still too abstract? In the wiki article linked, the section on the 'prisoner's dilemma' explains the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Do you see how this would also lead to overproduction?
El Psy is more or less on the right track here, but I'll elaborate a bit and I am sure Artesian will chime in at one point to fill in blanks. (Edit: I see I haven't really elaborated that much, but I hardly slept last night and this heat is killing me; hopefully this post makes sense)
One point that I should make immediately is that when it comes to Marx, you can never focus on the "physical" alone (what Marx terms "sensible"), but more on the supersensible/abstract forms that material/physical objects appear in (hence, commodity, money, capital etc.).
Tom Henry
1) What is the actual physical basis for how capital accumulates?
Broadly, it is matter both in terms of the "material" of living labourers (human beings) and the stuff that makes up commodities (doesn't matter if it's digital objects or services). If this matter does not move around, to factories, warehouses, markets and so on, there cannot be any capital accumulation because capital/value is always invested in matter. Matter (or use-value) is thus the material support for the supersensible/abstract process that is capital, which must pass through the forms of money-commodity...production process... commodity (with surplus value)--money.
That is, what is the essential component for capital accumulation in capitalism?
Labour-power/labour. Without labour-power being a commodity, there is no basis for capitalism. Sure there are many other essential components, but it all goes back to labour.
2) What are the actual physical barriers to this accumulation?
There are so fucking many barriers, although barriers to capital are not inherently so. Capital posits barriers to itself, which include space, time, need, availability of equivalents (money), available raw material/ means of production, class struggling workers, tech, and many
more.
That is, what are the actual causes of crises? (And which crises are we talking about?)
That things of social need takes on the form of and is produced as commodities. Someone earlier in the thread asked why Marxist say that all of the contradictions of capital (which leads to crises) can be tied to the commodity's contradiction between use-value and value.
Thanks for all this good stuff. I am working my way through it.
I still have questions, and after thinking about it I am going to ask them separately, to keep things contained. So, my questions may seem a little haphazard and disjointed, but bear with me!
In post 64 S. Artesian wrote (in regard to barriers to accumulation for capital):
The organized, collective resistance of the workers; the fact that the working day can only be so long (although capital has a certain evil genius for working around that).
What is this ‘evil genius’?
I ask this because I think you mean the extraction of relative surplus value (as opposed to absolute surplus value) … but you may not mean this specifically. If you do mean relative surplus value then what is the importance the extraction of relative surplus value, and its constant revolutionizing, has for defining capitalism? (I ask this because I feel, perhaps wrongly, that analysis/understanding of this is crucial to understanding the law of value.)
A brief note on the difference between absolute and relative surplus value as I read it, in order to explain what I am asking:
Marx identified the crucial difference between old school extraction of 'absolute surplus value' (making people work harder and longer to acquire greater profit) and 'relative surplus value' (using technology and organizational innovations to get more production/profit from the same level of effort and time, a process that is constantly revolutionized, or rather, revolutionizes itself, in order to further increase wealth in the arena of competition).
Capitalism is a mode of production that began by taking ownership of all the means of production (dispossessing all laborers, or increasing numbers, and forcing them to work for a wage in order to survive) – this is the period of the formal subsumption (?) of labor and it equates to the extraction of absolute surplus value as the social norm.
But discoveries made in regard as to how to increase productivity through organisational innovation and technological invention led to a situation where minds were put to work, as it were, in the endeavour (in reality they were born into a particular culture – one based on emerging or fully-fledged capitalism, so they did it 'unconsciously') to constantly improve efficiency and production in order to increase wealth.
(Where and when, or by what historical process, these 'discoveries' were made, by the way, is another huge subject for discussion, so I don't want to go into that here.)
Thus, the extraction of relative surplus value became dominant, the societal norm – capitalism became the mode of production for society. It is at this point (whenever one chooses to say that capitalism established itself on the basis of the extraction of relative surplus value above all else) that capitalism achieved a ‘life’ or ‘culture’ of its own. This is when labor in society, in general, is defined as being under real subsumption (?). It is when capitalism becomes the motor itself for its future development, and when humans become the tools for that development.
So, what do you mean precisely by the ‘evil genius’ of capitalism?
I may be jumping the gun here, as in perhaps I should wait for others to comment, but I just want to clarify a couple of things in how you (S. Artesian) define the ‘evil genius’ of capitalism:
I'm referring to changing work rules-- using temporary employment, part-time "spot" working; wage tiers; eliminating overtime payments-- driving down the wage. Now to be sure, relative surplus value does reduce the value of the labor power-- by reducing the value of the means of subsistence necessary to reproduce the labor power. The "evil genius" part comes with reducing the wage without reducing the value necessary to reproduce the labor power.
I’m not sure precisely what you mean here (‘reducing the value of the means of subsistence’ etc) – but perhaps I can ask one question:
How is your list of ‘changing work rules’ specific to capitalism? Why can’t measures like these (i.e., measures taken to make one’s labouring for others more precarious or less recompensed) be undertaken in a pre-capitalist labor situation, such as feudalism?
'[i]f wages fall below the ability of workers to purchase their means of subsistence, they will be unable to reproduce themselves and the capitalists will not be able to find sufficient labor power.' (Wikipedia)
I'm not sure if what Artesian references is evil genius or suicidal myopia?
What is functional evil genius (or just common inventiveness with the aid of consultants, tax lawyers etc. who sell the same recipes to each client) for individual capitalists, is suicidal myopia for the capitalist class as a whole.
However, just a brief interjection (and I am still not understanding what you have written S. Artesian):
S. Artesian writes:
IMO, "relative surplus value" is not an adequate, or even correct, analysis for the way capital expands, because quite simply, it confuses the value of labor power with the productivity of labor power.
So, when Marx, Capital Vol 1, Chapter 12 writes:
The technical and social conditions of the process and consequently the mode of production itself must be revolutionized [this is the transition from the extortion of absolute surplus value to relative surplus value, or formal to real subsumption of labor] before the productivity of labor can be increased. Then, with the increase in the productivity of labor, the value of labor-power will fall, and the portion of the working day necessary for the reproduction of that value will be shortened [but this does not mean that the actual working day will be shortened in capitalism, of course].
And when he writes in the Appendix of Vol 1, under the title The Real Subsumption of Labor under Capital, or the Specific Mode of Capitalist Production:
We have demonstrated in detail the [Chapter 12 and following] the crucial importance of relative surplus value. […] With the production of relative surplus value the entire real form of production is altered and a specifically capitalist form of production comes into being.
He is misguided or missing the point (or I am?)? (Or is it, as has been suggested previously, not without complete merit perhaps, that Marx never actually writes what he actually means!)
The thing is, I think capitalism EITHER exists more as a different mode of production (or society) to previous ones, which means that it is not just a form of society that naturally develops from previous societies OR capitalism is the natural and inevitable consequence of humanity embarking (voluntarily or not) on the project of living within state societies. Would Marx say that full, properly functioning, societal-wide, capitalism (like what we know today, guv) emerged from the particular elements that gave bosses (merchants) the ‘idea’ of owning all the means of production, and making labor ‘free’, as they had been handed down from history which then inspired them to revolutionize technology and the organization of labor (by serious and societal wide re-investment in the machineries of production) so that their workers could produce more in the working day so as to increase their boss's wealth? OR would he say that modern capitalism was a foregone conclusion as soon as people organized themselves (voluntarily or not) in hierarchical and sedentary living conditions?
Maybe we need to change tack? Like in the game, ‘stuck in the mud’… but at the end of that game everyone ends up stuck… :)
In post #36 vicent suggested, in order to understand what the law of value was, we look at the “law of value series” of videos by Brendan M Cooney. I think this is worthwhile. I haven’t seen all of them but what I have seen seems OK.
Also, in post#2 Khawaga gave his simplest terms version of what the Law of Value was:
Value of commodities is measured by the (socially necessary) labour-time that goes into them.
Of course, even though this sentence is short there is a lot in it. Therefore, looking at the videos above might put it into context.
Because these and other things had been put into this thread I figured that the basic explanation of what the law of value was had been done (even though not everyone might get it, of course).
Thus, my question in post#48 aimed at extending the discussion into the question of what is the law of value theory for, and what is it useful for? I asked this because there is a lot of thinking about value form being done lately by radicals. I also asked it because it relates to ‘crisis theory’ and the notion of the contradictions of capitalism not just being two-dimensional ‘problems’ within capitalism, but antagonisms that have an apparently real effect on the possibility of communism.
In post#51, Khawaga gives an answer to why the law of value is useful:
The LTV is of use to use because it tells us how capitalist society is organized around the production and circulation of value, and that this is what is actually enslaving us. As such, the LTV tells us more about what we don't want in a communist society and hence also what we should struggle for and against. Hence, on the basis of the LTV you would not push co-operatives as the solution to get out of capitalism. But the LTV, like Marx's analysis of the capitalist MoP, helps us analyze capitalist society and understand how it functions. But the LTV is really shit to use for purposes of, say, political agitation. If you're on the picket lines, people would be looking at you like you're mad if you talk about how the capitalist are just exploiting us for surplus-value rather than just saying that bosses are fuckers that squeeze us so thin that it's hard to put food on the table.
But there is also a lot more in this than meets the eye.
Yes, I can agree, I think, that “capitalist society is organized around the production and circulation of value, and that is what is enslaving us” – but I have to ask: who do you mean by “us”?
If the labor theory of value tells us what we should struggle for and against (for example, not cooperatives), what exactly, and exactly how, does it tell us to struggle for and against? (In post#55 Zanthorus complained that I was asking for a manual for 'action', which was impossible for a 'social theory', but isn't this a kind of manual at least?)
If, going on from the fact that the labor theory of value tells us what to struggle for and against, then why shouldn’t we, as pro-revolutionaries, be trying to explain that at the points where struggle is most intense – i.e., on the picket line?
I know that Khawaga doesn’t mean to do this, but one could extrapolate from what he has written here that knowledge of the labor theory of value must and should, or by default due to the ‘intelligence’ of revolutionaries, remain the preserve of revolutionaries. If one went down to a picket line and told folk there that you thought the bosses were “fuckers that squeeze us so hard that it’s hard to put food on the table” (depending on what kind of workers they are, eg cleaners or teachers), then I am sure they would be pleased that you understood their situation, but they might also think that they don’t need you to tell them this.
In post#60, I thought that things might be made clearer if we went back a bit and talked about how capitalism worked and what relation its crises might have to the theory that it was likely (?) to end in communism.
So, what do people think about this from Marx (from The Real Subsumption… in the Appendix) in Capital Vol 1:
If the production of absolute surplus-value was the material expression of the formal subsumption of labor under capital, then the production of relative surplus-value may be viewed as its real subsumption.
Why am I picking this? Because in order to have a view on what Marx writes here one must have a view on what absolute and relative surplus value is, and also what formal and real subsumption of labor is.
And what I think I want to know is: does how one interprets these categories from Marx affect one’s view of the trajectory of labor struggles, and ‘proletarianization’, since the beginning of capitalism (or, perhaps more tellingly, since 1914, or since the 1970s, etc)?
Real subsumption has had a lot of hubbub made about it. Its really, as far as I can tell, simply the complete legal and social 'subsumption' of the production and distribution process under the power of capitalists. Put another way, the difference between capitalists exerting influence on older forms of production, and them organizing production process directly, itself.
People forget that capitalism is a *class* society; that a particular group in society has legal and social rights/privileges, and that these are fundamental in the commission of production and distribution along class lines.
So subsumption, periodization, whether or not you use the term surplus value with your co-workers (this is like saying a dr. shouldn't use the name of a drug, procedure, diagnosis), fits within the perspective; are you trying to overthrow a system of class rule, or understand how some machine with automaticity works?
The law of value forms the *basis* for Marx's work; from explaining the *origin* of profit (in the form of surplus value) to explaining it's *distribution* among the classes in society (what laws govern how income is distributed?). The law of value is the fundamental component which gives explanatory scope to the rest of the argument.
This is sort of like (forgive me if the metaphor is forced) Darwin's natural selection; it is the guiding principle, and foundational statement of his argument about the nature of speciation, variation, biological development and change. It cannot stand on it's own, and of course requires that detailed supporting arguments be made, but it forms the bottom of the argument.
In the same way, the law of value is foundational to marx; but it is meaningless to talk about value without assuming classes.
The answer to your question is; the law of value helps us understand class society and capitalism in particular, and helps us understand how to fight it. People on the left have this idiotic obsession with "man-on-the-streetisms". It's a complete distraction. So long as you establish a relationship with people, you can speak technically if you define your terms and show how it's useful to them. People aren't shopping for neat ideologies, people like to be stimulated they like to argue. Not everyone, all the time, but there's no reason to dumb stuff down or pretend workers "know how capitalism works *intuitively*". They don't.
I should add; a perfect example of the fumbling of real Subsumption is Endnotes discussion; they take the appearance of real Subsumption, for the essence. The mistake taylorism as one manifestation of real Subsumption, for the *lack of taylorism* equaling the lack of real Subsumption. But taylorism has a narrow application; based on both social and technical limitations, and ultimately upon class struggle.
To take marx's terms, the material expression of real (political/legal and direct social) Subsumption is the production of relative surplus value. This happens wherever capitalists are able to control the application of technology to the process directly. It may be taylorism or lean production or any number of slick new management ideologies. I believe William petty called it 'improvement' etc.
On my phone and on holiday so can't chime in as much as I could, but on the issue of subsumption I agree with Pennoid. Some people and groups read too much into it and taking it to refer to historical stages (see communization folks in particular) when it really refers to something quite simple: how capital takes a pre-existing labour process and transform it to fit production that is specifically capitalist,the end result being a machine replacing living labour. In general, it is just a more particular version of how preconditions are produced as results (e.g. commodities, money, class relations), which are the the Conditions for the next cycle of reproduction which again reproduce them as a result etc and ad finitum.
I'll try to respond to other points when I'm on my laptop.
In the same way, the law of value is foundational to marx; but it is meaningless to talk about value without assuming classes.
Word.
That's it, exactly. The law of value is the relation of classes.
I shall briefly examine this:
The beginning of the Communist Manifesto:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
[…O]ppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another [and] carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
[…]
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonism. It has established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society is more and more splitting up into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
[But] the bourgeoisie [has] forged the weapons that bring death to itself [and] has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians.
[These weapons that bring death are] its relations of production, of exchange and of property [and this] society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells [note: does this mean capitalism has run away with itself and is out of human control?]
And finally, Engels, in a preface to the Manifesto writes:
[This long history of class struggle] has now reached a stage [i.e., capitalism; also ‘stage’ meaning next level, rather than continuous development?] where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and dominates it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time for ever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression and class struggles – this thought belongs solely and exclusively to Marx.
And then, in The Holy Family, Marx writes:
The possessing class and the proletarian class represent one and the same human self-alienation. But the former feels satisfied and affirmed in this self-alienation, experiences the alienation as a sign of its own power, and possesses in it the appearance of a human existence. The latter, however, feels destroyed in this alienation, seeing in it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence.
[…]
In its economic movement, it is true, private property presses towards its own dissolution, but it does this only by means of a developmental course that is unconscious and takes place independently of it and against its will, a course determined by the nature of the thing itself. It does this only by giving rise to the proletariat as proletariat-this poverty conscious of its own spiritual and physical poverty, this dehumanization which is conscious of itself as a dehumanization and hence abolishes itself. The proletariat executes the sentence that proletariat-producing private property passes upon itself, just as it executes the sentence that wage labour passes upon itself by producing others' wealth and its own poverty. When the
proletariat wins victory, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it wins victory only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Both the proletariat itself and its conditioning opposite – private property - disappear with the victory of the proletariat.
So, after having read through this one must assume that S. Artesian is right to equate the law of value to [the particular] relations of classes [in capitalism]. Thanks to Pennoid for this.
So, we are back at coming up with a succinct definition for the law of value – although, of course, in order for people to understand it they need to understand the particular relations of classes in capitalism as opposed to other societies.
So, back to my annoying question: what is it useful for?
But this time, let us just take the paragraph above from Marx (“In its economic movement… victory of the proletariat”) and ask how this prognosis has affected the thinking of radicals. What is the victory of the proletariat and how will it be attained? How does the proletariat avoid the ‘mistakes’ of the Paris Commune, of 1871, and the Russian Revolution? Does the law of value actually tell us this? Or are we on new terrain?
Just one more thing, Pennoid is justly critical, I think, of Endnotes’ ‘fumbling’ on ‘real subsumption’ but when he writes:
Real subsumption has had a lot of hubbub made about it. Its really, as far as I can tell, simply the complete legal and social 'subsumption' of the production and distribution process under the power of capitalists. Put another way, the difference between capitalists exerting influence on older forms of production, and them organizing production process directly, itself.
This is a description of the extraction of absolute surplus value under the condition of the formal subsumption of labor, not a description of the real subsumption of labor. I think these categories are really useful, and crucial to understanding the difference between the relations of classes (and production) in capitalism and all other societies – and in understanding how things like decadence theory, programmatism, and communization theory are confused, confusing, and misleading. So, I actually think one should, contra Khawaga, read more into these categories, in the sense of taking them more seriously at face value (as Marx actually described them), rather than apparently misreading them and turning them into some kind of incomprehensible, mystical sooth-saying apparatus a la TC, Endnotes, and Dauve. Though, to be honest, when Marx writes things like: “[The fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable” then I guess his far-left adherents can be understood in their (what might be called) equivocation?
Capitalists organizing the production process directly *is* the real Subsumption. That is when they are able to apply the technology of organization, chemistry, biology, engineering etc. To the whole process, thus driving down the snlt to produce a given output, especially the means of subsistence.
They can only do this as they break down the old forms of production, hence the two categories of formal and then real Subsumption; they describe the historical process of the conquest of power or the development of power of the bourgeoisie as against workers.
To concretize it; formal Subsumption was like petty agriculture; this provided the *social* basis for its own dissolution, hence why the peasants were a "doomed social class". The same rules that made them "free" and independent, laid the foundation for the accumulation of land as private property, as capital. The formal Subsumption (sale of product on the market) eventually gives way to the real Subsumption (pushing out of 'family' farming) and the development of capitalist industrial agriculture.
Marx explains the distinctions here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/ch02a.htm#469a
The formal subsumption is the actual conversion of the laborer's labor-power into a commodity, into value producing value. It is distinct from the mercantile appropriation of the product, say of handicraft or agriculture. Formal subsumption is the actual "reduction" "dispossession" of the laborer through which labor-power is compelled to become a means of exchange. It is the vital process of capital.
The actual processes of production do not change-- the "putting out" method for example still functions. Home production is still the dominant process, but the instruments of production become a) the condition of labor b) a force belong to the "other" the capitalist, and so exert authority over the laborer(s)
The real subsumption represents a temporal and spatial dispossession-- the instruments of production, the condition of labor, are now relocation, centralized, concentrated, and exert their "authority" not over the individual laborer in isolation, but over the class of laborers. Circumscribed within the shell of private property are the growing forces of social productiion.
We have already analysed the essence of this latter mode of production so exhaustively [236] that we can be very brief here. It is production which is not limited by any predetermining or predetermined barriers set by needs. (Its antagonistic character implies barriers to production, which it constantly wants to go beyond. Hence crises, overproduction, etc.) This is one side, one distinction from the earlier mode of production; the positive side, if you like. The other side is the negative, or antagonistic one: production in opposition to, and without concerning itself about, the producer. The real producer as mere means of production, objective wealth as an end in itself. And therefore the development of this objective wealth in opposition to, and at the cost of, the human individual. The productivity of labour in general = the maximum of product with the minimum of labour, hence the greatest possible cheapening of the commodities. This becomes a law in the capitalist mode of production, independently of the will of the individual capitalist. And this law is only realised because it implies another one, namely that the scale of production is not determined according to given needs but rather the reverse: the number of products is determined by the constantly increasing scale of production, which is prescribed by the mode of production itself. Its purpose is that the individual product, etc., should contain as much unpaid labour as possible, and this is only attained by engaging in production for production’s sake. On the one hand this appears as a law, to the extent that the capitalist who produces on too small a scale would embody in his products more than the quantity of labour socially necessary. It therefore appears as the adequate implementation of the law of value, which first develops completely on the basis of the capitalist mode of production. On the other hand, however, it appears as the drive of the individual capitalist, who endeavours to reduce the individual value of his commodity below its socially determined value in order to break through this law, or to cheat it to gain an advantage for himself.
Was this particular passage referenced before? It relates the process of real subsumption to the law of value.
I've followed this thread closely for about two weeks (rare for Libcom nowadays) and while reflecting on the themes and topics in it that interested me, I've found the last few exchanges -- mainly those from yesterday -- somewhat befuddling; for now I'll get back to Tom's question of 'what's the law of value for?', as well as offering some other thoughts.
I think Marx created his law of value 'for' helping industrial workers to understand the 'exact' behavior (almost to a mechanical level) of capital. He wanted to highlight, as has been pointed out in this thread a few times now, the very notion of value itself is 'dehumanizing'. Capital, it's domination over Earth (like the great evil 'Aku' from Samurai Jack), and it's social relations cannot, nor ever intends to, address the issue of social need. Value, the question of a given thing or beings 'worth', spawns directly from the capitalist system, the system where we're forced to fight essentially for basic survival, for basic needs, on a daily or weekly basis; the system of utterly fake scarcity; the system of the total robbery of commonly-generated social wealth.
I'd like to thank the poster spacious for their post #72:
'What is functional evil genius (or just common inventiveness with the aid of consultants, tax lawyers etc. who sell the same recipes to each client) for individual capitalists, is suicidal myopia for the capitalist class as a whole.'
This brings to the fore the biggest barrier to capital's accumulation: capital itself.
Capitalism forces us into a position of total alienation or 'estrangement' from the fruits and products of our labor and their 'use-value'. You can't sell your commodity and have it, too. The concept of 'use-value' itself addresses commodities satisfying social needs, and not much more. 'Use-value' is still a product of class society, it still asks the question of 'worth' (in my view a terrible question to ask) and in the end is itself also 'dehumanizing'. More importantly, as the apes called Homo sapiens, that is to say the animals that we are, there was no question of 'worth' before class society created it. We are only in a position to hold and question a concept such as 'worth' because we are ourselves products (that is, commodities) within this modern society, a class society. When we talk of worth and value we are conditioned by them.
The user Tom Henry viewably raises a number of other issues and questions which I find important; the one about periodizations resulting from understandings (or lack-of) in the theory of value, how it informs 'crisis theores', theories of capitalism's 'decadence' or 'decline' -- I cannot answer, but am eager to see it discussed further.
Tom also asked these intriguing questions:
'What is the victory of the proletariat and how will it be attained? How does the proletariat avoid the ‘mistakes’ of the Paris Commune, of 1871, and the Russian Revolution? Does the law of value actually tell us this? Or are we on new terrain?'
Obviously this is one of the more controversial elements of this discussion, but it shouldn't be shied away from; quite the opposite. There are many like the SI, elements of John Zerzan's work, Jacques Camatte, Fredy Perlman and others, who have pointed out specifically what this 'new terrain' looks like. Modern marxism and marxists demonstrate an inability to address, head-on, many the questions at play in this thread. I myself have shown an aversion to those labelled 'post-leftists' in the past. But more and more, I find myself agreeing with (the modern, survivalist, commune-retreating) Camatte when he says in his The Wandering of Humanity that 'Capital becomes autonomous by domesticating the human being.' This, in my muddled mind, is what real subsumption is. It's when, as Camatte said, 'Human beings are...turned into the willing slaves of capital.'
Yes, S. Artesian and Pennoid, we can find various pieces in Marx’s works where he discusses formal and real subsumption – not sure why you put those up? Does that mean you agree with me?
I like epc’s contribution because it tends more towards a general doubt and uncertainty, and a desire to get somewhere new. If we understand the methodology of ‘science’ we know that science can only disprove theories, it can never prove them. Proofs can only exist within the closed and imaginary worlds of mathematics and philosophical logic. Science is defined as a real world undertaking looking at evidence. ‘Scientific understanding’ is what we colloquially call current scientific theories. But modern science, since the Enlightenment, has contained all the elements of relativism and postmodernism within its method, since each new ‘understanding’ is accepted as just an understanding, or theory, waiting to be demolished, altered, or transcended.
Having gone ‘backward’ in discussing the law of value, I now want to leap forward:
If, as Marx and Engels state, ‘The history of all hitherto existing [state] society is the history of class struggles,” then is it not true that, since the world has definitely witnessed significant technical progress since the emergence of the state, class struggle has been part of that development rather than an obstruction or impediment to that development? (Despite, as Marx affirms, that the events that have resulted in our present material abundance, or level of technology, have been ‘the product of a long and tormented historical development’?)
If one follows Marx here is it possible to say that the class struggle has, ultimately, helped create more productive forms of exploitation? Since, in the current day we have the most effective form of exploitation of humans that the world has ever seen, despite millennia of objections to this by sections of ‘the masses’, and despite a long history of class struggle under capitalism.
Is it the case, then, that it was the workers’ struggles against the formal subsumption of labour - the extortion of absolute surplus value - that ‘forced’ the new capitalist owners of (all) the means of production to enact the real subsumption of labour through the extortion of relative surplus value?
Therefore, would it be logical to assume that the working class, in its struggle as a class (class struggle), aids the development of capitalism?
Therefore, should ‘revolutionaries’ participate in class struggle, on the side of the workers, consciously knowing that this struggle aids the development of capitalism (is this the argument of some Accelerationists, is it the argument of ‘Jehu’, see below?) – because capitalism needs to reach its ‘limits’ before it will collapse?
Or should revolutionaries (we who claim to have some idea of what is going on, thanks to reading people like Marx, etc) refrain from class struggle, even oppose it, in order to hinder the development of capitalism? (Bear with me here!)
If we think capitalism is heading for its own destruction, or reaching its limits, should we help it along its way, or should we hinder its progress? But the answers are the opposite of what we might think they should be. Hindering the progress of capitalism would mean arguing against class struggle. Promoting the fullest development of capitalism (and its possible eventual downfall, the thing we all hope for) would mean engaging in class struggle. If we therefore engage in class struggle, accepting these terms, then we will be doing it for motives that must remain hidden. If we support the development of capitalism we must support the antagonism between classes. But we must not tell those we support that the reason we are doing this is because we want capitalism to refine and progress so much that it implodes. We must not 'admit' that it is only through the long and tormented road that humanity has travelled on through history that we are where we are now, so close to revolution. We must not say that we support the deepening of exploitation, the escalation of misery, for the short time we have before the hoped-for arrival of (inevitable) communism.
Capitalism, apparently, will be abolished when value is abolished. And value will only be abolished when workers are expelled from the labour process: when they are abolished as workers caught in the wage relation; when there is no longer any means of making value, or profit, according to the law of value that rests on socially necessary labor time.
How might this happen?
Firstly, the process whereby workers are relieved of the necessity to work could be the result of a proletarian (?) movement as suggested by ‘Jehu’ in his recent blog proposal:
Secondly, we just wait until the new non-working class are driven into such dire straits that the only choice they have (apparently or hopefully) is to revolt and abolish money, and freely distribute all the stuff that is being produced by machines.
Or will the UBI solve this dilemma, for a time at least?
And all this, perhaps, relies on humans preventing or controlling the so-called technological singularity, the prophesied next great leap forward in technology made possible by AI when it becomes effectively able to upgrade itself, Terminator-style.
So, what does the law of value, which is, as we have accepted, the relation of classes, actually tell us? Does it tell us to support capitalism or to oppose it?
PS. I just wanted to say that I never use those 'up' and 'down' vote buttons, as I don't think they help readers in analysing what they are reading, but it's always nice if I get an up vote... ;)
Er, the kind of 'automatic' elimination of working categories has never in the past led to a decimation of the right of property owners to exploit; never led to the destruction of their class privilege.
I'm a pessimist; I think its more likely that a kind of automated neo-antiquity (with a monopoly on robots rather than land) would be the order of the day. Then we'd have a more Roman "proletariat" of humans; with no robots and not means of living independently; but only off of some degrading dole. And a small class of owners.
Again, you can't decouple the production and distribution of value or goods from the social relations; law, politics, etc. If the working class doesn't conquer state power through the form of fits class dictatorship, then humanity is pretty fucked.
As I see it - The development of capitalism from the formal domination of capital towards it's real domination (a continuing but as yet incomplete process) is a product of the inter-relationship of class struggle and competition between capitalist factions. Class struggle is not 'a choice' but a necessity in our defence (both material and human) against the capitalist class and their representatives, but in so far as that struggle remains sectional then 'success' in the struggle will remain limited to a respite in the struggle in which the continued domination of capital will result in it's further refinement or modernisation. The potential for a rupture in the otherwise never ending cycle of class struggle is dependent it would seem on a mixture of 'objective' and 'subjective' factors that cannot be predetermined or manipulated by pro-revolutionary minorities, but the inherent contradictions of capitalism's law of value suggest that extended crisis (amidst potential abundance) on a global scale are inevitable and provide the 'objective' circumstances for a 'rupture' dependent on an alignment of 'subjective' forces that are equally global in scale. The worry of course is that the continued process towards the 'real domination ' of capital will see every aspect of humanities social and psychological make-up so degraded that we are unable to think outside, to imagine, a completely different way of life. But such imagination does seem too periodically resurface if not always in the traditional language we anarchist and communists are used to. The may be a bit of repetition for Henry but maybe not others!
Yes, S. Artesian and Pennoid, we can find various pieces in Marx’s works where he discusses formal and real subsumption – not sure why you put those up? Does that mean you agree with me?
Was only responding to clarify the distinction between formal and real subsumption of (EDIT) labor bycapital in Marx's critique.
Both conditions, "formal or subsumption" are conditions under, and expressions of, the law of value.
Class struggle is not 'a choice' but a necessity in our defence (both material and human) against the capitalist class and their representatives, but in so far as that struggle remains sectional then 'success' in the struggle will remain limited to a respite in the struggle in which the continued domination of capital will result in it's further refinement or modernisation.
But this is either misunderstanding or avoiding the point I was trying to make about ‘revolutionaries’. Yes, of course, generally speaking class struggle is not a choice for people when they are at the site of struggles and they need to defend themselves and those around them. (Although one could argue that although there seems no choice, one only has to look at a scab to see that, in fact, there is... but perhaps this takes us into philosophical questions of free will.) BUT I wasn’t talking about proletarians at the site of struggle, I was talking about the ‘voluntarist’ activities of ‘revolutionaries’. We make the choice to ‘support’ distant struggles, or to intervene in local ones, for example, going down to the picket line, etc, or, as I did in my distant youth, getting work in a place fairly rife with industrial struggle. The point I was trying to make, which seems to have been missed here so far is this: was I effectively – by my choice to intervene - helping capitalism to improve itself, or was I hindering its progress? If the progress of history is ‘the history of class struggles…’ then what is actually going on?
Secondly, Spikeymike writes:
The development of capitalism from the formal domination of capital towards it's real domination (a continuing but as yet incomplete process) is a product of the inter-relationship of class struggle and competition between capitalist factions.
Yes, the real domination of capital (the real subsumption of labor) is indeed ‘a product of the inter-relationship of class struggle and competition between capitalist factions’. This has been established on this thread, I think. But what is the real significance of the class struggle aspect? Above, you say that we have no choice in what we do, but here you are saying that class struggle aids the development of capitalism. This is a very determinist perspective on the role of 'revolutionaries'.
When you support class struggle do you think to yourself?: I support this sectional struggle but I know that all sectional struggles actually ultimately aid capitalism.
While we are on the topic of sectional as opposed to general struggles, would you say that ‘successful’ general struggles that have occurred in capitalist history have actually resulted quite quickly in escalations of the capitalist machine? For example, Russia 1917, which led to the fastest and most enormous industrialisation of a region so far, England 1648, France 1789, or Cuba, etc.
Marx wrote:
After each new popular revolution, resulting in the transfer of the direction of the State machinery from one set of the ruling classes to another, the repressive character of the State power was more fully developed and more mercilessly used, because the promises made, and seemingly assured by the Revolution, could only be broken by the employment of force [Civil War in France, 1977, p238].
He wrote this in his enthusiasm for the heroic example of the Paris Commune of 1871. He and Engels referred to the Paris Commune as an example of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Now, what we have to bear in mind is that the Paris Commune ‘failed’. Lenin took up the notion of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Russia, and what we have to remember is that the revolution there ‘succeeded’.
In the quote above Marx identified popular revolts as being the ‘tools’ of different sections of the already existing ruling class, and he was right (because usually he was a proper scientist). What he couldn’t identify, because it hadn’t happened (even though Bakunin and the anarchists in the First International were on to it theoretically) was a popular revolt that became the tool of a new ruling class. What he couldn’t witness in 1871 in France he could have witnessed in the period 1917 to 1921 in Russia.
These are difficult questions, and they relate directly to Marx’s categories around surplus value and the subsumption of labor, and it is long overdue that ‘revolutionaries’ seriously engaged with them.
Spikeymike also writes above, forgive me for repeating:
The development of capitalism from the formal domination of capital towards it's real domination (a continuing but as yet incomplete process).
The significant line here being: “a continuing but as yet incomplete process”.
While we might think that capitalism is developing – indeed the whole essence of capitalism is, according to Marx, that it constantly revolutionizes its processes, due to the inter-relationship of class struggle and competition in the market – do we not think that capitalism has effectively achieved, on a global scale (which doesn’t mean in every single pocket of humanity, of course) its real domination of labor? Are you mistaking here the well-known constant revolutionizing of the wide/general production process with the transition from the extraction of absolute to relative surplus value?
If we don’t think that the extraction of relative surplus value is the dominant, and properly established, production strategy in the formation of value, then do we think that we are still at the level of the formal domination of capital (the formal subsumption of labor)?
If so then do we not think that capitalism relies on the extraction of relative surplus value from labor but on the extraction of absolute surplus value?
In this case (your case?) capitalism is still only, in general, at its first stage. If this is the case, then it would have been hard for Marx to identify the extraction of relative surplus value, since it didn’t really exist as a societal wide phenomenon when he was around. This would also mean that he would have had no understanding of how the Industrial Revolution had happened, since it was only a feature of absolute surplus value. And such prophesying about the immanence of a hypothesised real subsumption would have been unscientific for him.
Marx wrote, in Capital Vol 1, as I put in a previous post:
If the production of absolute surplus-value was the material expression of the formal subsumption of labor under capital, then the production of relative surplus-value may be viewed as its real subsumption.
The reason I am persisting with this is because I think that these categories Marx has defined are really useful for understanding where we are now and how we got here as proletarians. But few people seem to take them seriously, or understand them, and prefer to keep things vague. And keeping things vague is the direct opposite of a doubting, ‘question everything’ approach, even if, as is the usual case with honest scepticism, it means we end up by admitting that we do not know.
I think it might also be useful to check out (to understand what I am getting at) what I wrote on the 'Formal and Real Subsumption' thread back in October 2016.
Tom may agree perhaps that 'generalised class struggle' as expressed in the 'revolutionary' wave post the First World War was the nearest we got to threatening the continued existence of capitalism? and why many other pro-revolutionary groups hark back to it so much, but then as he says it failed and then resulted in the further geographical expansion of capitalist social relations. The ebb and flow of the class struggle has produced benefits to us as workers which however tend to be of limited duration as capitalism responds, re-organises and continues. Is capitalism then more stable or immune to further crisis from the same inter-related forces of continuing class struggle and capitalist competition - it seems not. For all the continuing but still resisted tendency towards the 'real domination of capital' beyond the immediate relations of production and across the social, economic and psychological spheres of human experience it seems unable to achieve 'the end of history' in it's favour because it cannot avoid re-creating contradictions and conflict which will always it seems open up the potential, if not the certainty, of a more general rupture in the cycle of class struggle. Popular revolts may and often do become the tools of other classes but should we assume this is inevitable irrespective of the objective conditions in which they take place - I'm not that much of a determinist.
Yes it is worthwhile pursuing some of the other discussion threads and linked texts around these issues as I fear I will again end up in a circular discussion over this here.
Thanks, S. Artesian, for considering some of the points I made in my last post.
I’d just like to clarify a couple of things.
As I stressed, the ‘choice’ I am referring to is the choice of people like you and I (‘revolutionaries’) to involve themselves or not in ‘politics’ and struggles, with acknowledgement that there are some struggles that we may not choose, but rather, due to where we are (as proletarians), choose us. BUT what you are saying here is that all action by all of us is done out of ‘necessity’, as in, it is determined. This is more determinist than Marx ever was. Usually it would be me who was being accused of being overly deterministic (meaning social and environmental forces shape who we are and what we do), so this is new for me! But do you really mean that you have no choice in writing something in support of a strike somewhere, or that you have no choice in travelling to a picket line of workers who have no ‘direct’ relationship to you to show your solidarity?
S. Artesian writes:
But there's no path to the overthrow of capital without engaging in the class struggle as it actually materializes.
But surely this is merely an assertion without evidence? A statement of your ideals, even if it is derived from Marx. What you have written in and around this sentence doesn’t address the question I posed, which is: does class struggle form a component in the escalation and strengthening of domination and exploitation? – no matter that the oppressed effectively have no choice but to fight back periodically and continually. (One will need to re-read my posts to understand the question I have summarized here properly if you have just come to this thread.)
S.Artesian writes:
For two, Marx cautions against holding too diligently to the distinction between relative and absolute surplus value-- pointing out how inseparable the two truly are. For example, is it not machinery, according to Marx, which spurs the bourgeoisie on to the most severe extensions of the working period?
Not quite a caution in the sense you mean:
[...] one form always precedes the other, although the second form, the more highly developed one, can provide the foundations for the introduction of the first, in new branches of industry (Capital Vol 1, Appendix).
Yes, Marx recognised that the introduction of machinery was also a factor in being able to lengthen the working period – to the point that work might go on with no stop. And today we see that all the improvements in communications, reporting software, filing systems, etc does not lead to people working less, they end up working harder and longer. If one is middle class in the West then one would surely yearn for a return to the work rhythms of the 1970s?
So, I am not sure what point you are making here.
The fact that machinery makes work harder and longer is not relevant to his categories, only to the nature of 'the profit motive'. What machinery does tell us, is that without 'the profit motive' we could all work less.
S. Artesian writes, in relation to my suggestion that the Bolsheviks formed a new ruling class in Russia:
How in fact could the revolution become the tool of a new ruling class if that class did not exist
Yes, this is an interesting point indeed. I was keeping it simple. In fact, putting my determinist head on again, I would argue that the Bolsheviks were the unwitting puppets of the economic forces that were already shaping the new Russia (if one personifies capitalism, as Marx was wont to do to make his points, then they were the unwitting pawns of capital).
What the Bolsheviks did was speed up the introduction of proper capitalism in Russia (the real subsumption of labor) by taking things into their own hands, and taking the place of the capitalists who would have achieved this task anyway (the Bolsheviks kept some of them on to help out, of course), but much more slowly.
One could argue (to throw everything in the air!) that capitalism had run away with itself in Russia as early as, say, 1900, engendering a popular revolt not directly in the interests of a section of the ruling class, but in the interests of the pure acquisition of relative surplus value, and pure industrialization. Who were the best capitalists, the best industrialists, Russia has ever seen? The Bolsheviks!
Who might have been the best industrialists France ever saw? (Though I really hate to say it) The Communards?
As I wrote before, comparing the ‘failed’ Commune of Paris in 1871 and the ‘successful’ Bolshevik seizure of power, and specifically what Marx and Engels write about the Commune as the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, is fundamentally enlightening. (Along with an examination of the rift between Marx and Bakunin in the First International).
Can we avoid the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in the communist revolution? The evidence says no. Indeed when S. Artesian writes:
Hence the need, more or less, for revolutionary program, and organs of dual power, where the question of program and the need for power can be engaged by the class.
Is this the same program identified and suggested by Marx (who, to be fair, never had the chance to witness a successful Dictatorship of the Proletariat - again, see my post above) and enacted by Lenin?
PS
For some reason I can't get the link to work, so, for what Dual Power is look up 'Dual power Russian Revolution' on Wikipedia.
The quote from Lenin is socialism is soviets plus electrification, and in the context of the Russian Revolution, I think that was a pretty good condensation, distillation of what the Russian Revolution required to move towards socialism-- workers councils and advancing the productivityof labor. Neither, however, could be achieved or sustained without an international revolution.
Lots of problems with Lenin and the Bolsheviks-- but "soviets + electrification" is definitely not one of them.
Ah, somehow I missed that thread completely! Thanks for pointing it out.
The difference between S. Artesian and the commmunizers of modern day, including the Maoist Alain Badiou, is that the second group keep the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, or the Transitional State, secretly up their sleeves, though they would claim not to (I think I have touched on this elsewhere, if not I can elaborate later). Others, such as Spikeymike, who are perhaps more cautious, will, it seems, play the historic role of allowing these deceits to persist (or at least not objecting to them) in order to feign their participation in 'real life' and not be put on the outer. Perhaps until it is too late, as the left communists did in the early part of the last century - people who were unable to assess the warnings of Bakunin and the anarchists of the First International because of their adherence to Marxism. We all may fail at all of this, but it is better to fail with 'intelligence' and integrity, with the refusal of bullshit spat from one's lips, than as a sheep to the slaughter of the transitional state.
The 'revolution' in Russia was different to any previous revolution, as I pointed out. The revolution it was closest to, prior to it, was the one in Paris in 1871, and the links between these two revolutions are crucial, as I note in previous posts. The phenomenon of the Bolsheviks suddenly becoming a new faction of the 'the ruling class' (a bureaucratic bourgeoisie, if you like), but more than that, an absolute monarchy, or the only 'faction' (if you see what I mean!), through the revolution is really interesting and, as far as I am aware, it has not been explored fully, or in the light of an understanding of the real subsumption of labor, or the domestication of humans in Camatte's terminology.
But you are right in your identification of the productivIst discourse that runs through Marx's writing and is expressed in reality by Lenin. And this is where we part company in this discussion, and it takes us right back to my mention of Marx's view on labor that I noted at the beginning of my contributions to this thread.
With respect, S. Artesian, what’s really unfortunate is that yours has become the only voice here. My intention was never to debate Marxist-Leninists (I presume you would identify yourself in this way, or at least close to this?) but to debate those who, in my opinion, think they have escaped that sphere, or that ‘Leninist loop’.
But, maybe it was a good thing that the Paris revolution in 1871 didn't extend to the countryside. The 'problem' of the peasantry was a feature of the 'schoolboy drivel' debate between Bakunin (who I am not supporting in a general sense by the way) and Marx about what might happen 'after the revolution'.
Marx scolded Bakunin thus:
A fine idea, that the rule of the workers includes the enslavement of agricultural labor!
But Marx never saw the collectivisation and dekulakization in the USSR. One can't help but smile… despite the bodies that were piled up and trod down.
And agriculture is still a 'problem' even for those who might purport to have abandoned the idea of the transitional state and to be outside the circle of Marxist-Leninism that S. Artesian inhabits:
The communizers at Théorie Communiste, in 2011, write:
The essential question which we will have to solve is to understand how we extend communism […] how we integrate agriculture so as not to have to exchange with farmers.
It may be, of course, that TC are hopelessly behind the times here, since capitalism may have solved the peasant problem in key areas by introducing the technology that enables a couple of managers, a team of seasonal hired-hands, and an array of clever machinery to farm vast tracts of land.
But, still, the writer Andrei Platonov, who was perhaps conflicted in his perspective on the USSR, puts it well, in 1930 [edit]:
‘And truth?’ asked Voshchev. ‘Is truth the due of the proletariat?’
‘Movement is the due of the proletariat,’ summarized the activist, ‘along with whatever the proletariat comes across on the way. Doesn’t matter if it’s truth or a looted kulak jacket – it’ll all go into the organized cauldron till you won’t be able to recognize anything at all’ (The Foundation Pit).
He continues elsewhere, in 1934, on the subject of ‘electrification’:
Truth — in my opinion — lies in the fact that “technology decides everything”. It is indeed technology that constitutes the theme of our contemporary historical tragedy — if technology is understood to mean not only the entire complex of man-made production tools but also the social organization that is based on the technology of production, and if ideology too is included in this understanding.
The question becomes, or remains: have the libertarian communists here, the communizers there, and the Badouists elsewhere, escaped the Leninism, the Jacobinism (yes, I went there!), that lies at the heart of the approach of those such as S. Artesian, or are they deluding themselves? This is the dilemma for me. My questions about surplus value and subsumption were intended to dig into this.
Value of commodities is
Value of commodities is measured by the (socially necessary) labour-time that goes into them.
Ok, let's be simple then. The
Ok, let's be simple then. The law of value is a law applied to value.
Do I get a prize?
Marx had a particular
Marx had a particular definition of value, namely that value is the units of socially necessary labour-time expanded on the production of commodities. What Khawaga described is what is commonly known as the 'labour theory of value' (somewhat of a misnomer). This is distinct from the law of value.
The Law of Value is Marx's theory of the allocation of labour time in capitalist society. It is the mechanism by which 'units of production/capital' are disciplined, that is, it is a theory of the operation of market forces. Private producers are compelled to sell their commodities at or around the average socially necessary labour time (the social value). If the individual value of the commodity produced by certain private producers is above the social value, the private producers in question will still have to sell the commodity at a price around the social value, and consequently will tend to not be profitable. They are compelled to lower the labour time they have expanded upon the production of the commodity, or else risk bankruptcy. This disciplining mechanism by which labour, dead and alive, is allocated is the law of value.
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Dennis, what I wrote is the
Dennis, what I wrote is the law of value in the simplest terms and is, in a nuthsell, what you described in much more complicated terms. The very term socially necessary labour-time refers to commodities having been exchanged, as individually spent labour time is reduced tot his social average at the moment of exchange. It is not an either/or when you refer to the labour theory of value and Marx's law of value, they are, for all intents and purposes basically the same. After all, when Marx speaks of labour-time, he immediately refer to SNLT. The bourgeois economists did not have a concept for SNLT because they did not have a concept of abstract labour.
What is a private
What is a private producer?
Is someone who engages in private labour?
What would be private labour?
From what I gather, a private
From what I gather, a private producer is someone (or some entity) that is not producing directly for society. So any wage worker (and the business they work for) and most peasants (that produce directly for the family, but may sell their surplus on the market). Private production, in a nutshell, is basically not direct social production.
Marx doesn't really explain that term very well, though he may have in a text of his I have not read.
how is social labor time
how is social labor time different from labor time?
Quote: From what I gather, a
It's not where the labourer is the private owner of his own means of labour set in action by himself, like an artisan then?
That would also be a case of
That would also be a case of private labour if I understand Marx correctly.
not sure I really understood
not sure I really understood your definition properly.
Is wage labour also private labour?
Yes.
Yes.
What is value? First, its an
What is value? First, its an economic category. What does it describe? Not the use value that satisfies a need, but the exchange value. What is said by how much exchange value does it have? Its the capacity of a good to get hold of other goods. If you take money as the expression of value, as exchange value itself, which is separate from the use value, what does it consist in? The capacity of money to command other goods, to get access to labor. If that’s what value is, that’s the economic substance. If the value of a good describes the capacity of a good to get hold of other goods, you are excluded from what you want. This relation of exclusion is what private property (a legal category) is. All goods exist under it. Value is the capacity to get hold of those goods. The economic category of value is a relation of political force. The state decrees that all goods are under exclusive ownership.
Hi Khawaga what does Karl
Hi Khawaga
what does Karl mean by the following?
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch15.htm
Is wage labour a contradictory form of private labour?
Or wage labour is a
Or wage labour is a contradictory form of social labour that is done in private. As I said, I am not entirely sure what Marx means with the term private labour as he uses it in the first three chapters of Das Kapital. His use of private labour there is to show that an activity that is done in "isolation" and in private becomes social (or rather appears as such) when the commodity is exchanged. This in itself is a contradiction. But I am not sure if he uses it in the same way in Volume 3, which was an unfinished work. In any case, even if capital "socializes" production by bringing workers into co-operation under the same roof (or through technology today), it is still labour that is expended "privately" in the sense that the product is not merely given away.
I've tried several times to find a clear definition of what Marx means with private labour, but as of yet I have not been able to.
What about this; just as
What about this; just as start?
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/r.htm
Well, yes, it is a start. But
Well, yes, it is a start. But by relying on this definition alone, you may be led to interpret the first three chapters of Capital as historically rather than logically.
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Exactly. I think that was
Exactly. I think that was Chili's initial point: to see how convoluted it would get.
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RC wrote: What is value?
RC
This isn't accurate. Value is as it is described by S. Artesian, Khawaga, and myself in this thread.
Dave B
Indeed, private labour is labour done in relative isolation, or more obscurely (dialectically expressed), in reciprocal independence. The labour done within 'units of production' is directly social, and these units of production exchange their products. The labour of these units of production is private labour, and this private labour becomes social only indirectly through the confrontation of commodities in the market. Private labour is labour executed in reciprocal independence.
Marx is describing how capitalism is undermining its own premises. In the era of proto-industrialisation, when capitalism was first emerging, production was small-scale, and scattered, still in a 'pygmy format'. The manufacturers of this era, the immediate producers, owned the tools with which they laboured. A smith owned his hammer and anvil. As the development of capitalism progresses, small-scale production is displaced by large-scale industrial production. The means of production become too large to be owned by the immediate producers themselves, and pass into the hands of a segment of the population that is privileged enough to afford them -- the capitalist class. Therefore, the individual private property of the manufacturing working class is replaced by a different type of private property, based on the separation of the producers from the means of production with which they produce.
In the first sense, capitalism abolishes private property and private labour because it destroys individual property. In the second sense, because it socially integrates labour -- it socialises the labour process. It is in a contradictory form because it undermines its own premises. This contradiction is resolved when the method of appropriation is harmonised with the method of production -- both becoming social (i.e. communism).
Here is a description of private labour to go with that definition:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch02.htm
Khawaga wrote: Exactly. I
Khawaga
It wasn't, I promise!
To be honest, it came up because I was telling a liberally-lefty friend of mine about Paul Mason's argument regarding technology and I said that - according to Mason - the ability to reproduce information with the click of a button is effectively reducing the cost of many modern goods to zero, and, thus, undermining the law of value.
My friend asked me what I meant by this and I realized I couldn't give an adequate response.
So, would folks agree with my assessment of Mason's claim?
Just, for the record, I always understood the law of value to mean that commodities have within them a use-value and an exchange-value and that the exchange-value is a result of the socially necessary labor time contained within them. And, further, that ability of commodities to be exchanged for one another results from the fact the labor time within them can be measured proportionally between different goods. Thus, the law of value.
How's my understanding here? And can you think any way to put all that more simply?
Value is the feature of
Value is the feature of private property that it has a claim on other private property.
It's all coming out now
It's all coming out now Chilli - you've been hobnobbing with left liberals! Shame on you! You're clearly listening to the wrong punk bands bro!
Seriously though, how do you even talk politics with those guys? I find politically engaged liberals to be the very worst people to knock ideas around with. Anything that even questions the idea of a state doing all the taking care of things seems to be like the conversational equivalent of a fart in a lift. Tell me your secret.
Eh, with most liberals, their
Eh, with most liberals, their heart's in the right place. I mean, literally everyone in my workplace - from the boss on down - supports Sanders. And, to speak to them, they do because they see him as being able to bring Scandinavian-style social democracy to America and they view that as a fairer, better society. And, shit, we live in New York, we all want some rent-controlled housing!
So, for a lot of them, it's not ideological in the sense that they're wedded to the state - more that they don't see any option beyond the liberal-conservative political discourse. Oh, and that communism is a nice idea on paper, but that it would never work. And, from there, there's something to work with. Committed Leftists on the other hand....
Chilli Sauce wrote: we live
Chilli Sauce
petey wrote: Chilli Sauce
petey
Hear, hear!
We all can't live a countryside mansion with Crass like certain libcom posters ;-)
petey wrote: how is social
petey
as this seems to have got missed, basically socially necessary labour time, means the average necessary in a society at a given moment.
So if example Nike used machines to make trainers, which were so efficient it took half an hour of worker time to make a pair of trainers (and this technology had become the norm for the industry) the value would be proportionate to half an hour of labour time.
Whereas if Adidas made stuff all by hand and it took 6 of their worker hours to make one pair, that wouldn't mean the value of their product was greater than Nike, as value is determined by the socially necessary labour time, not the actual labour time. Do you see what I mean?
Quote: We all can't live a
Hey but you know, like everyone can come live in my mansion with me anytime they like. Just don't forget to bring some organic mung beans with you.
Perhaps because I am a
Perhaps because I am a scientist and a chemist in particular I tend to look at things more from that perspective and thus I seem to have interpreted the opening chapter of volume one in a more eccentric way.
I have been trained to think that if two or more things are say interchangeable or broader way are ‘equal’ then there must be something about them that is the same.
Thus if sugar side of a reaction is converted or changed into alcohol and carbon dioxide etc then the stuff on both sides of the equation is the same and we just need to count up the carbons, hydrogens and oxygens etc.
What is on one side of the equation or chemical reaction is the same as on the other; radically different in sense perception form but merely when totted up just different manifestations of the same stuff.
In fact we could say the content on both sides of the equation, ie carbons, hydrogens and oxygens the same.
It is the same in physics where they do heat being converted to movement being converted to light etc.
It is for them all the same thing, energy, thus;
In a paper Über die Natur der Wärme(German "On the Nature of Heat/Warmth"), published in the Zeitschrift für Physik in 1837, Karl Friedrich Mohr gave one of the earliest general statements of the doctrine of the conservation of energy in the words: "besides the 54 known chemical elements there is in the physical world one agent only, and this is called Kraft [energy or work]. It may appear, according to circumstances, as motion, chemical affinity, cohesion, electricity, light and magnetism; and from any one of these forms it can be transformed into any of the others."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy
Interestingly they don’t know what energy is yet or even all its forms eg dark energy.
But the logic is, that really goes back to the ‘Greeks’ (Democritus in particular perhaps- Karl did his pHd thesis on him) is that if one thing is ‘equivalent’ to another in anyway then it is just a matter of them in ‘reality’ being the same thing manifesting itself in different ways.
So for me Karl said if a coat is ‘equivalent’ to 10 yards of linen or whatever and for whatever reason that is initially of little interest.
Then there must be something about the coat and the linen that is the same.
And I think he goes onto to say maybe what is the same about them is that they are made by human effort (value) and that is what makes them ‘equivalent’ and runs with the idea to see where it leads to.
This remains fine as long as you have;
C(100) – M(100) –C(100)
As in each transformation or, - , you have a ‘conservation of value’ or (100).
But in capitalism we would seem to have;
M(100) – C(100) – M(150)
Which looks like a non conservation of value which was a premise or starting point of the investigation (or law of value if you like - which is analogous to the law of the conservation and conversion of energies?)
Or M(100) –M(150)
The physics people don’t believe you can get more energy out of a series of transformations any more than chemical engineers believe you can get more elements out of a series of chemical reactions than what you started with.
So what might be gong on in capitalism.
Is there something a bit funny about this C(100)?
Perhaps a special C(100) that wasn’t there before capitalism?
What was there C like in capitalism that wasn’t there before; or what could be bought in capitalism for money that couldn’t or wasn’t bought before capitalism?
It would nice to hope and assume that this special, * ,capitalist case of the special C(100)* that the
M(100) – C(100)
Or
M(100) – C(100)*
Still held fast to the law of the conservation of value.
What is C(100), generally.
Well it is something useful at the end of the day.
What if as that it is just somebody’s human effort that is bought?
You can’t really argue against the idea that other peoples effort can be useful for those of us who have Pilipino house maids or waitresses to serve you drinks in the Manhattan Crowne Plaza etc .
What if you can use that kind of thing to get for your paid for labour as a utility to produce ‘more effort embodied in something’?
I really have to go now; just now got a phone call.
Would I lose all credibility
Would I lose all credibility if I said "how natural something is"....
On this issue of private
On this issue of private labour in chapter one and what is or isn’t etc
Perhaps it might be useful to dip into the first version of chapter one?
Marx 1867 (Capital)
The Commodity
This is an English translation by Albert Dragstedt of the first chapter of the first German edition of Capital.
Modern editions of Capital have a first chapter based on the second or subsequent editions.
Source: Albert Dragstedt, Value: Studies By Karl Marx, New Park Publications, London, 1976, pp. 7-40.
Transcribed: by Steve Palmer.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/commodity.htm
What is he saying here?????????
Is private labour associated with, or a category of some, “primordial division of labour”?
Can capitalism and wage labour be part of a primordial division of labour?
-------------
Re general linguistics (not my bag at all), contents and form, and sets and subsets etc.
I think you start with a category or set like ‘wine’.
And, in English, when one sub-divide it into sub-sets one normally attaches a qualitative word in front of it thus;
Red wine
And
White wine
And thus Red wine and white wine become mutually exclusive and ‘contradictory forms’ of each other?
Although in Latin Linnaean taxonomy the qulaifying statement comes after.
Eg Homo as the genus of a species Homo sapiens; homo being a genus and a class of things which have common characteristics and which can be divided into subordinate kinds.
From that and just following normal and standard procedures of classification; one should expect that private labour and wage labour are mutually exclusive sub categories of labour?
So actually we could speculate about adding certain other sub categories of labour, depending on the classification procedure you are using I suppose.
Eg communist labour and slave labour?
If private labour was essentially artisan (self employment) as opposed to wage labour.
I think at least, ‘artisan’ commodity production would be consistent with primordial division of labour?
That is if you believe artisan, and dare I say it simple commodity production, preceded capitalist production.
OK so I am on my own now; no
OK so I am on my own now; no matter.
I suppose I could ask the question of myself why private labour and where Karl got it from?
I would suggest to myself that he got it from John Locke which fed somewhat into Hegel; buts lets stay away from Hegel.
Locke is quite interesting and readable anyway.
Second Treatise of Civil Government John Locke (1690)
CHAP. V. Of Property.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/politics/locke/ch05.htm
Karl Marx (The Poverty of
Karl Marx (The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847):
"It is important to emphasise the point that what determines value is not the time taken to produce a thing, but the minimum time it could possibly be produced in, and the minimum is ascertained by competition. Suppose for a moment that there is no more competition and consequently no longer any means to ascertain the minimum of labour necessary for the production of a commodity; what will happen? It will suffice to spend six hours’ work on the production of an object, in order to have the right [...] to demand in exchange six times as much as the one who has taken only one hour to produce the same object. "
"Every new invention that enables the production in one hour of that which has hitherto been produced in two hours depreciates all similar products on the market. Competition forces the producer to sell the product of two hours as cheaply as the product of one hour. Competition carries into effect the law according to which the relative value of a product is determined by the labour time needed to produce it. Labour time serving as the measure of marketable value becomes in this way the law of the continual depreciation of labour. We will say more. There will be depreciation not only of the commodities brought into the market, but also of the instrumentsof production and of whole plants."
"It is not the sale of a given product at the price of its cost of production that constitutes the “proportional relation” of supply to demand, or the proportional quota of this product relatively to the sum total of production; it is the variations in supply and demand that show the producer what amount of a given commodity he must produce in order to receive in exchange at least the cost of
production. And as these variations are continually occurring, there is also a continual movement of withdrawal and application of capital in the different branches of industry. "
"In a future society, in which class antagonism will have ceased, in which there will no longer be any classes, use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production; but the time of production devoted to different articles will be determined by the degree of their social utility."
http://libcom.org/library/law
http://libcom.org/library/law-value-series
I'm completely new to this.
I'm completely new to this. My head is spinning from the series linked to by vincent. I need to read more. Can anyone recommend another introductory text?
S. Artesian quotes Marx
S. Artesian quotes Marx earlier in this thread:
I can see the price drop is a consequence of asserting that 'only labour adds value'. And I presume what this describes is what actually happens in real life. But how does the SNLT move the price?
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I like Isaak Illyich Rubin's
I like Isaak Illyich Rubin's definition -
SNLT is referred to by Marx specifically as the "magnitude" or "content" of value. The "form" of value is more abstract - the material expression of productive relations among people, specifically labor or products of labor which are exchanged; bourgeois society specifically is dominated by exchange and value. Wealth in bourgeois societies takes the form of value whereas wealth in previous modes of production did not.
The law of value is the
The law of value is the regulating mechanism of capitalism. In capitalist societies society is based on production for exchange and thus based on buying and selling on the market and producing things to buy and sell. Every institution in capitalist society is thus subordinated to the will of the market, even institutions that are seen to be outside of the capitalist sphere such as the state, churches, and social clubs. This is the law of value.
In the law of value series it
In the law of value series it says:
What is meant by the tension between use and exchange values? Is it simply that wealth accumulation (and thus social tensions) will always arise alongside exchange values?
"use- value" refers to how
"use- value" refers to how useful an object is; you could say it's subjectively determined. "exchange - value" refers to the LTV; how the commodity relates to other commodities on the market. it's often just called "value". twenty linens exchanged for two coats, to use marx's example.
the usefulness of an object does not necessarily correspond to what value it has - diamonds are not very useful, but have a very large value. using marx's examples, water is the most useful thing on the planet, but it has a very low value.
If I can make a bicycle in
If I can make a bicycle in one day and you can make a car in one week, would you let me trade my bicycle for your car? I mean one bicycle for one car. That's the simplest I can explain the law of value.
As far as I am aware, the
As far as I am aware, the term "law of value" was first used by Proudhon in System of Economic Contradictions -- he coined the term to describe how market value was regulated by cost of production. Marx probably picked it up there -- like his theory of exploitation, amongst other things (see my review of The Poverty of Philosophy).
As to what it means, I discuss it in this unfinished appendix to An Anarchist FAQ (saying that, probably wise for me to reread and revise this as it was written a while ago).
Also, read Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation as he explains it much better than Marx did. Proudhon's account is more concerned with discussing the contradictions within supply and demand but his constituted value explains how market price is regulated by cost (ultimately labour) and this was “the centre around which useful and exchangeable value oscillate”, the “absolute, unchangeable law which regulates economic disturbances” for “whoever says oscillation necessarily supposes a mean direction toward which value’s centre of gravity continually tends”. (Système I: 62, 23) This was inherently dynamic:
From this it is clear that Marx's notion that Proudhon advocated labour-notes is just a lie -- like most of his book against Proudhon.
To explain it to someone who
To explain it to someone who is steeped in the neo-classical nonsense they teach in school.
When demand matches supply, the price will generally be relative to the socially necessary labor time.
It's not opposed to the "subjective" value theory, or addresses a seperate question.
The "subjective" value theory does what neo-liberal idiots always do with Marx, they mis-represent him and then ignore the issue he was addressing and answer a different question. I'm not a Marxist, but I'm sick of him being slandered by neo-liberal idiots who seem to not be able to read when they look at Marx.
Anarcho, where is the passage
Anarcho, where is the passage where Marx argues that Proudhon advocates for labor notes?
Why should a recognition that the quantity of labor socially imbued in a commodity negate the advocacy of labor notes? The idea behind labor notes as I understand it is to lift the veil of mysticism in price; because while prices are *regulated* by the quantity of socially necessary labor time, they incorporate also enough value which is yielded to the capitalists as profits.
Because labor notes are supposed to express things purely in terms of labor hours, and capitalists don't perform labor, this is mean to reveal the graft of every capitalist everywhere; that it costs 2000 labor hours, say, to make a care, and yet we pay 6000 labor hours worth of money, etc.
Presuming we now have enough
Presuming we now have enough in previous posts to assume that the law of value, or the labor theory of value, has been sufficiently explained, on one level at least, is it now worth asking what underlies the theory and what the theory might be useful for?
Is the theory, for example, based on the prevalent materialist view of the time (and ours) that ‘Man [sic] is the tool-making animal’, etc? Something expressed perfectly by Marx (though it is fair to point to inconsistencies elsewhere in his writing that may show he was not entirely certain about this) when he wrote in Capital 1:
Which has been explained by Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, in this way:
So, does the theory rest on a presumption about humankind’s (voluntary) capacity for labor as the demarcation line between it and other ‘animals’, as opposed to, say, the capacity for ‘reason’?
If so, then what implications might this have for the understanding of ‘use-value’ and, indeed, communism?
Secondly, what use is the labor theory of value to us? That is, to revolts and pro-revolutionary groups and individuals?
Go!
Some thoughts/side notes on
Some thoughts/side notes on this:
I'd say, it's a theoretical phrase which aims to make visible some of the processes which undermine capitalist social relations in the long run, and which are the result of their own operation. The law of value assists in demonstrating how socially necessary labour is progressively reduced, which on the one hand serves the capitalist appropriation of surplus labour (in the form of profit/accumulation), but which may also serve the future radical reduction of work time, and the alternative uses of time, in a society beyond capitalist relations.
So rather than a deterministic view of the law of value (inexorable Law! it always applies!), it's an inexorable law of capitalist development which shows how the capitalist social form is undermined by capitalist development itself. The point is that it reveals the long term weakness and the possible strategic points of attack for working class action, and suggests what it means to go beyond capitalism, both in terms of the requirements of doing so, and in its possibilities.
In a book by Negri I found a quote somewhere, ascribed to Marx, about the suppression of private property as only being possible as the suppression of work.
But I think what Tom Henry quotes in the post above, saying that labor is “the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence”, is only true for Marx if you understand labor as "practical-critical, sensuous activity" etc. and not the image we have of it, capitalist work or any activity which revolves around commodity production. Capitalist work does not exhaust the definition of labour, in the anthropological sense, very far from it. Marx's results are also different from his presuppositions, which are the starting point of his investigation, and a lot of which he demonstrates to be stuff that gets uprooted by the historical process itself. "The everlasting nature-imposed condition" undergoes a tremendous abstraction and transformation, where the individual worker is first stripped of the property of the conditions of it, the ownership of tools, rights to land etc, and subsequently (by capitalist development) of the recognizable substance of work "as it was before", and so on, so the nature-imposed condition is gradually turned into a fully social form of alienated activity, which makes sense to itself, but where each worker does only tiny parts of work in a very elaborate social division of labour, which has very little to do with the starting point, and thus also with the starting point which capitalism historically proceeds from (the labour process which it appropriates).
Marx' wasn't too concerned about demonstrating the perpetuity of anything, least of all the things which are in the end only observable patterns of the functioning of capitalism.
In his analysis, everything is liable to get uprooted by a process which doesn't respect its own presuppositions, even though it departs from them. That such presuppositions would survive the process is something to be demonstrated rather than assumed.
I would think it only makes sense to talk about "the law of value" in such a context, to describe the whole process, to point to patterns in it, and not as "a single, succinctly definable rule" which is for ever valid (ie. as something unhistorical), and which could somehow survive the process of undermining/uprooting of its own preconditions which was how Marx saw capitalism.
Rommon wrote: When demand
Rommon
Pennoid
The theory of value is not a theory of prices. It might have started that way, but it certainly wasn't for Marx by the time that Capital was published. Assuming a constant rate of surplus-value, if the labour theory of value were adequate to explain market prices, we would expect to see capitals with lower organic compositions extract higher rates of profit, and vice versa. But in reality, competition tends towards the establishment of an average rate of profit, because capital migrates from industries with lower profits to those with higher ones, until the diminishing of supply in the former and the increase of supply in the latter balances out. Prices then don't fluctuate around their actual values, but around the commodity's cost of production (it's 'cost-price') plus the average rate of profit.
Of course, since value is the means by which social labour announces itself as such within a system of production dominated by private enterprises (Marx notes at one point in 'A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy', that to speak of labour as the substance of value is really an obvious tautology), and since the source of the total surplus-value is always the exploitation of labour (and this mass of surplus-value governs the rate of profit), value relations always lie behind the surface phenomena of prices and govern their movements. But it would be an economic absurdity to directly stamp every commodity with the quantity of social labour it embodies. In practice, this would have to mean that the social relations of capitalism and commodity production have already been abolished.
Someone asked what the relevance of value theory is to revolutionary political activity. The theory of value is the source of Marx's analysis of how capital accumulates, and how it always comes up against barriers to it's accumulation. These barriers to accumulation manifest themselves in crises, which demonstrate in practice the contradictions of the system and open up the door to revolutionary transformation.
Tom Henry wrote: So, does the
Tom Henry
Yes and no. Yes, the LTV does rest on a line of demarcation between the activity of human beings and animals and it's the capacity for labour that is that line. While Marx doesn't refer to reason as such, it's pretty clear that that is one of the qualities he find uniquely human, though he refers to creativity and imagination explicitly and indirectly human beings' capacity for symbolic, abstract thought. This argument is best captured in the 1844 Manuscripts and in the famous bees and architects passage in Capital Vol. 1
Marx
(please note that Fowkes translates this better than the one above by Moore and Aveling)
Nothing and everything. I think specious replied pretty well, but I will give a short answer. The LTV is of use to use because it tells us how capitalist society is organized around the production and circulation of value, and that this is what is actually enslaving us. As such, the LTV tells us more about what we don't want in a communist society and hence also what we should struggle for and against. Hence, on the basis of the LTV you would not push co-operatives as the solution to get out of capitalism. But the LTV, like Marx's analysis of the capitalist MoP, helps us analyze capitalist society and understand how it functions. But the LTV is really shit to use for purposes of, say, political agitation. If you're on the picket lines, people would be looking at you like you're mad if you talk about how the capitalist are just exploiting us for surplus-value rather than just saying that bosses are fuckers that squeeze us so thin that it's hard to put food on the table.
Quote: Secondly, what use is
When comes a threat that something you have work hard for will be taken away from you, what will your reaction be? If you get mad or sad, the labor theory of value applies.
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Thanks for the thoughtful
Thanks for the thoughtful responses, I am chewing them over.
At the moment I have two questions.
I think the two quotes below express/summarize what everyone has said here.
Zanthorus wrote:
What does this mean? It is well-known that economic and political crises open the door to radical social alternatives. What does the labor theory of value have to do with that, apart from being a term revealing the reasons for the predilection of capitalism to experience crisis? How is it useful, apart from, as Khawaga writes:
(I am reminded of something from Emil Cioran here, which I read the other day: "Our chief grievance against knowledge is that it has not helped us to live." And it makes me wonder if Marx really did, as he hoped to, give us the tools to transcend philosophy,make it useful, and change the world.)
And S. Artesian wrote:
What does this mean? Does it mean that we can read the revolution (the 'abolition of wage-labor' - my italics) as inevitable through the law of value (whether we understand it or not)? Or does it mean that the law of value just shows those who understand it that revolution [an end to all oppression] is, as you say, 'necessary'?
Tom Henry wrote: What does
Tom Henry
I'm not sure exactly what you want, a handbook to specific forms of political activism guaranteed to lead to the end of capitalism? Such a thing in general isn't possible. It would be absurd to ask it of any social theory, not just value theory in particular.
Capital allows a much greater
Capital allows a much greater understanding of capitalist phenomena, and the concept of value is the bed rock upon which that understanding rests.
reading analyses of the way capital is going, of social phenomena, is something which is much easier with terms like "organic composition of capital," "declining rate of profit," or "fetishized relations" already understood and not needing explanation.
Quote: The necessity for
The meaning cannot be extracted separate from the previous statements: that the law of value is the product of a social relation, a specific organization of labor power. Then, the functioning of the law of value expresses the way capital accumulates value, and the limits to that accumulation. Those limits are questions of class struggle. The limits become the necessity for the overthrow of the mode of production and is internal to the basis for accumulation.
The conflict between the labor process and the valorization process becomes manifest, acute, critical.
Short version, paraphrasing Marx: "Economics is shit."
What's the political use of
What's the political use of the "law value"?
I don't think capitalist crisis by itself enlightens anyone, or else Marx wouldn't have worked so hard to make the complicated interplay of forces intelligible. Neither do I think that economics is pure ideology, and I doubt Marx did, or he wouldn't have built upon so much of the political economy that came before. I'm not sure if that's quite what others are saying. There is a sort of retreat by some on the left these days from the political prescriptions of Marx and Engels.
The point of Marx's value theory as I've understood it is that it argues that human working relations take different social forms in different societies, as a function of the level of technology and class struggle. Working from that assumption, Marx argues that human labor takes the form of "value" in capitalist society. What does that mean?
The short answer is that it means the labor-time plays a role in regulating price (of course not one to one). Why does it do this and how?
As others have pointed out the process of production in capitalism is based on individual companies who produce a good to be sold for money. The money is then given to each contributor to production; the worker, the landlord, the capitalist, the financier. Each is free to switch jobs at will. None produce their own necessities. Marx argues that the workers are the only group that actually *produces* the physical goods or services. The other three simply take a portion of the product via political-legal justification.
However, I must be very clear: there is a distinction between the physical product and the *value*. Value is a representation of the labor that it took to produce a quantity of product. By this means, capitalists, landlords, financiers are able to pay workers enough *value* for the workers to purchase necessities. But the workers always produce *more than they need*. How? Because the *value* or worth of labor-power is less than the value that labor-power produces. This is a fancy way of saying that a human can produce more than they need for themselves. How are they forced to do it? By threat of starvation; if you don't work at the rate of 7$ an hour (all the while producing about 21$ of value per hour) then you don't work at all.
This arrangement remains because the capitalist state protects it. And because the working class remains disorganized and uneducated about these particular facts.
The feudal lords were guaranteed the right to appropriate from the serfs and peasants by virtue of their loyalty and service to a king. This was a political-legal arrangement based on particular production relationships.
In capitalism, the capitalist (anybody with enough money) has the right to appropriate the product of workers (those without enough money). That is, the condition of your right to appropriate, to become a member of the ruling class isn't contingent on a king, access to land, etc. but is much wider. It relies only on *money*. Hence the bit about the cash nexus in Marx. Land can be bought, labor can be bought, tools can be bought, etc. During the decline of feudalism, the various rights to the purchase of land, tools, labor evolved and changed according to the struggles of the emerging bourgeois, the peasants, artisans, clergy, etc.
This to me implies the unity between politics, the form of the state (political-legal relations) and production relations (economics). The form of the state reflects the needs of the ruling class in its war against the oppressed and exploited class(es).
Thus, politics is the arena of class struggle, as much as the workplace. The reason that human labor takes the form it does is a result of the current state of the class war; there is the "universal right" (private property) for those with enough money to exploit those without enough money. It's also worth noting that capitalist exploiting workers isn't even the complete picture of the nightmare scenario; they also monopolize control of future investment, and thereby exercise a veto power on what human labor time will be devoted to in the future, which has grave implications for managing ecological collapse/pollution, not to mention quality of life levels of investment and planning regarding the urban/rural divide, healthcare, public transportation, etc.
The "Law of Value" is what
The "Law of Value" is what Ayn Rand misinterpreted as greed, thus giving her the notion that greed is human nature where Capitalists saw an opportunity to use this notion and justify their nature.
Thanks again for all these
Thanks again for all these contributions.
But… On several re-readings of this thread I now want to take it back a notch because, for me, the discussion is still too abstract.
What I want to ask now is:
What is the crisis (or crises) that the labor theory of value points to in the development of capitalism, and from exactly where does the crisis originate?
Zanthorus usefully lays out this out in post #50:
So, using this paragraph, we can identify two questions in order to clarify:
1) What is the actual physical basis for how capital accumulates? That is, what is the essential component for capital accumulation in capitalism?
2) What are the actual physical barriers to this accumulation? That is, what are the actual causes of crises? (And which crises are we talking about?)
Not physical - profit isn't a
Not physical - profit isn't a physical thing. It's a social relation dictating the distribution of physical things.
This is a good place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rate_of_profit
Essentially, there are several factors that contribute to crises in capitalism but they tend to be crises of *overproduction*. This results from the fact that businesses have extremely imperfect information, incentives to pursue short-term profit above most else, and compete with eachother to cut costs. The result is a tendency to overproduce, to drive profit rates down through competition, and to generally overshoot production, investment, etc. as a result of using cut-costs to grab a wider market share.
One of the most important underlying factors to capitalist crisis is that production is separate from distribution; distribution is carried out through the market. Hence, producers are always having to approximate demand, and may well be very wrong.
Perhaps that's still too abstract? In the wiki article linked, the section on the 'prisoner's dilemma' explains the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Do you see how this would also lead to overproduction?
Tom Henry wrote: 1) What is
Tom Henry
Augmenting nature through physical labor and work? 'Private property'?
Capital itself? Labor?
The lack of technology? Lack of training or education (aka 'human capital')? The exhaustion of an essential resource or element? Nature itself? Time?
I'm wondering the same.
El Psy is more or less on the
El Psy is more or less on the right track here, but I'll elaborate a bit and I am sure Artesian will chime in at one point to fill in blanks. (Edit: I see I haven't really elaborated that much, but I hardly slept last night and this heat is killing me; hopefully this post makes sense)
One point that I should make immediately is that when it comes to Marx, you can never focus on the "physical" alone (what Marx terms "sensible"), but more on the supersensible/abstract forms that material/physical objects appear in (hence, commodity, money, capital etc.).
Tom Henry
Broadly, it is matter both in terms of the "material" of living labourers (human beings) and the stuff that makes up commodities (doesn't matter if it's digital objects or services). If this matter does not move around, to factories, warehouses, markets and so on, there cannot be any capital accumulation because capital/value is always invested in matter. Matter (or use-value) is thus the material support for the supersensible/abstract process that is capital, which must pass through the forms of money-commodity...production process... commodity (with surplus value)--money.
Labour-power/labour. Without labour-power being a commodity, there is no basis for capitalism. Sure there are many other essential components, but it all goes back to labour.
There are so fucking many barriers, although barriers to capital are not inherently so. Capital posits barriers to itself, which include space, time, need, availability of equivalents (money), available raw material/ means of production, class struggling workers, tech, and many
more.
That things of social need takes on the form of and is produced as commodities. Someone earlier in the thread asked why Marxist say that all of the contradictions of capital (which leads to crises) can be tied to the commodity's contradiction between use-value and value.
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I'm in Canada, but close to
I'm in Canada, but close to Detroit and Buffalo. I fucken hate this heat. Give me a nice old-timey Norwegian summer: overcast and low 20s.
Thanks for all this good
Thanks for all this good stuff. I am working my way through it.
I still have questions, and after thinking about it I am going to ask them separately, to keep things contained. So, my questions may seem a little haphazard and disjointed, but bear with me!
In post 64 S. Artesian wrote (in regard to barriers to accumulation for capital):
What is this ‘evil genius’?
I ask this because I think you mean the extraction of relative surplus value (as opposed to absolute surplus value) … but you may not mean this specifically. If you do mean relative surplus value then what is the importance the extraction of relative surplus value, and its constant revolutionizing, has for defining capitalism? (I ask this because I feel, perhaps wrongly, that analysis/understanding of this is crucial to understanding the law of value.)
A brief note on the difference between absolute and relative surplus value as I read it, in order to explain what I am asking:
Marx identified the crucial difference between old school extraction of 'absolute surplus value' (making people work harder and longer to acquire greater profit) and 'relative surplus value' (using technology and organizational innovations to get more production/profit from the same level of effort and time, a process that is constantly revolutionized, or rather, revolutionizes itself, in order to further increase wealth in the arena of competition).
Capitalism is a mode of production that began by taking ownership of all the means of production (dispossessing all laborers, or increasing numbers, and forcing them to work for a wage in order to survive) – this is the period of the formal subsumption (?) of labor and it equates to the extraction of absolute surplus value as the social norm.
But discoveries made in regard as to how to increase productivity through organisational innovation and technological invention led to a situation where minds were put to work, as it were, in the endeavour (in reality they were born into a particular culture – one based on emerging or fully-fledged capitalism, so they did it 'unconsciously') to constantly improve efficiency and production in order to increase wealth.
(Where and when, or by what historical process, these 'discoveries' were made, by the way, is another huge subject for discussion, so I don't want to go into that here.)
Thus, the extraction of relative surplus value became dominant, the societal norm – capitalism became the mode of production for society. It is at this point (whenever one chooses to say that capitalism established itself on the basis of the extraction of relative surplus value above all else) that capitalism achieved a ‘life’ or ‘culture’ of its own. This is when labor in society, in general, is defined as being under real subsumption (?). It is when capitalism becomes the motor itself for its future development, and when humans become the tools for that development.
So, what do you mean precisely by the ‘evil genius’ of capitalism?
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I may be jumping the gun
I may be jumping the gun here, as in perhaps I should wait for others to comment, but I just want to clarify a couple of things in how you (S. Artesian) define the ‘evil genius’ of capitalism:
I’m not sure precisely what you mean here (‘reducing the value of the means of subsistence’ etc) – but perhaps I can ask one question:
How is your list of ‘changing work rules’ specific to capitalism? Why can’t measures like these (i.e., measures taken to make one’s labouring for others more precarious or less recompensed) be undertaken in a pre-capitalist labor situation, such as feudalism?
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I'm not sure what point you
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here... I'm confused...!
'[I]f wages fall below the
'[i]f wages fall below the ability of workers to purchase their means of subsistence, they will be unable to reproduce themselves and the capitalists will not be able to find sufficient labor power.' (Wikipedia)
I'm not sure if what Artesian references is evil genius or suicidal myopia?
What is functional evil
What is functional evil genius (or just common inventiveness with the aid of consultants, tax lawyers etc. who sell the same recipes to each client) for individual capitalists, is suicidal myopia for the capitalist class as a whole.
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It’s all on you
It’s all on you Khawaga!
However, just a brief interjection (and I am still not understanding what you have written S. Artesian):
S. Artesian writes:
So, when Marx, Capital Vol 1, Chapter 12 writes:
And when he writes in the Appendix of Vol 1, under the title The Real Subsumption of Labor under Capital, or the Specific Mode of Capitalist Production:
He is misguided or missing the point (or I am?)? (Or is it, as has been suggested previously, not without complete merit perhaps, that Marx never actually writes what he actually means!)
The thing is, I think capitalism EITHER exists more as a different mode of production (or society) to previous ones, which means that it is not just a form of society that naturally develops from previous societies OR capitalism is the natural and inevitable consequence of humanity embarking (voluntarily or not) on the project of living within state societies. Would Marx say that full, properly functioning, societal-wide, capitalism (like what we know today, guv) emerged from the particular elements that gave bosses (merchants) the ‘idea’ of owning all the means of production, and making labor ‘free’, as they had been handed down from history which then inspired them to revolutionize technology and the organization of labor (by serious and societal wide re-investment in the machineries of production) so that their workers could produce more in the working day so as to increase their boss's wealth? OR would he say that modern capitalism was a foregone conclusion as soon as people organized themselves (voluntarily or not) in hierarchical and sedentary living conditions?
Maybe we need to change tack?
Maybe we need to change tack? Like in the game, ‘stuck in the mud’… but at the end of that game everyone ends up stuck… :)
In post #36 vicent suggested, in order to understand what the law of value was, we look at the “law of value series” of videos by Brendan M Cooney. I think this is worthwhile. I haven’t seen all of them but what I have seen seems OK.
One could start at the Law of Value 5: Contradiction (parts 1 and 2):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REQSvBXfC1U&t=303s
Also, in post#2 Khawaga gave his simplest terms version of what the Law of Value was:
Of course, even though this sentence is short there is a lot in it. Therefore, looking at the videos above might put it into context.
Because these and other things had been put into this thread I figured that the basic explanation of what the law of value was had been done (even though not everyone might get it, of course).
Thus, my question in post#48 aimed at extending the discussion into the question of what is the law of value theory for, and what is it useful for? I asked this because there is a lot of thinking about value form being done lately by radicals. I also asked it because it relates to ‘crisis theory’ and the notion of the contradictions of capitalism not just being two-dimensional ‘problems’ within capitalism, but antagonisms that have an apparently real effect on the possibility of communism.
In post#51, Khawaga gives an answer to why the law of value is useful:
But there is also a lot more in this than meets the eye.
Yes, I can agree, I think, that “capitalist society is organized around the production and circulation of value, and that is what is enslaving us” – but I have to ask: who do you mean by “us”?
If the labor theory of value tells us what we should struggle for and against (for example, not cooperatives), what exactly, and exactly how, does it tell us to struggle for and against? (In post#55 Zanthorus complained that I was asking for a manual for 'action', which was impossible for a 'social theory', but isn't this a kind of manual at least?)
If, going on from the fact that the labor theory of value tells us what to struggle for and against, then why shouldn’t we, as pro-revolutionaries, be trying to explain that at the points where struggle is most intense – i.e., on the picket line?
I know that Khawaga doesn’t mean to do this, but one could extrapolate from what he has written here that knowledge of the labor theory of value must and should, or by default due to the ‘intelligence’ of revolutionaries, remain the preserve of revolutionaries. If one went down to a picket line and told folk there that you thought the bosses were “fuckers that squeeze us so hard that it’s hard to put food on the table” (depending on what kind of workers they are, eg cleaners or teachers), then I am sure they would be pleased that you understood their situation, but they might also think that they don’t need you to tell them this.
In post#60, I thought that things might be made clearer if we went back a bit and talked about how capitalism worked and what relation its crises might have to the theory that it was likely (?) to end in communism.
So, my change of tack to get at all this is to ask what people think about the different types of surplus value (which I have gone into from my own perspective here: https://libcom.org/blog/thoughts-david-graeber%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98debt-first-5000-years%E2%80%99-03012012?page=2)
So, what do people think about this from Marx (from The Real Subsumption… in the Appendix) in Capital Vol 1:
Why am I picking this? Because in order to have a view on what Marx writes here one must have a view on what absolute and relative surplus value is, and also what formal and real subsumption of labor is.
And what I think I want to know is: does how one interprets these categories from Marx affect one’s view of the trajectory of labor struggles, and ‘proletarianization’, since the beginning of capitalism (or, perhaps more tellingly, since 1914, or since the 1970s, etc)?
Real subsumption has had a
Real subsumption has had a lot of hubbub made about it. Its really, as far as I can tell, simply the complete legal and social 'subsumption' of the production and distribution process under the power of capitalists. Put another way, the difference between capitalists exerting influence on older forms of production, and them organizing production process directly, itself.
People forget that capitalism is a *class* society; that a particular group in society has legal and social rights/privileges, and that these are fundamental in the commission of production and distribution along class lines.
So subsumption, periodization, whether or not you use the term surplus value with your co-workers (this is like saying a dr. shouldn't use the name of a drug, procedure, diagnosis), fits within the perspective; are you trying to overthrow a system of class rule, or understand how some machine with automaticity works?
The law of value forms the *basis* for Marx's work; from explaining the *origin* of profit (in the form of surplus value) to explaining it's *distribution* among the classes in society (what laws govern how income is distributed?). The law of value is the fundamental component which gives explanatory scope to the rest of the argument.
This is sort of like (forgive me if the metaphor is forced) Darwin's natural selection; it is the guiding principle, and foundational statement of his argument about the nature of speciation, variation, biological development and change. It cannot stand on it's own, and of course requires that detailed supporting arguments be made, but it forms the bottom of the argument.
In the same way, the law of value is foundational to marx; but it is meaningless to talk about value without assuming classes.
The answer to your question is; the law of value helps us understand class society and capitalism in particular, and helps us understand how to fight it. People on the left have this idiotic obsession with "man-on-the-streetisms". It's a complete distraction. So long as you establish a relationship with people, you can speak technically if you define your terms and show how it's useful to them. People aren't shopping for neat ideologies, people like to be stimulated they like to argue. Not everyone, all the time, but there's no reason to dumb stuff down or pretend workers "know how capitalism works *intuitively*". They don't.
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I should add; a perfect
I should add; a perfect example of the fumbling of real Subsumption is Endnotes discussion; they take the appearance of real Subsumption, for the essence. The mistake taylorism as one manifestation of real Subsumption, for the *lack of taylorism* equaling the lack of real Subsumption. But taylorism has a narrow application; based on both social and technical limitations, and ultimately upon class struggle.
To take marx's terms, the material expression of real (political/legal and direct social) Subsumption is the production of relative surplus value. This happens wherever capitalists are able to control the application of technology to the process directly. It may be taylorism or lean production or any number of slick new management ideologies. I believe William petty called it 'improvement' etc.
On my phone and on holiday so
On my phone and on holiday so can't chime in as much as I could, but on the issue of subsumption I agree with Pennoid. Some people and groups read too much into it and taking it to refer to historical stages (see communization folks in particular) when it really refers to something quite simple: how capital takes a pre-existing labour process and transform it to fit production that is specifically capitalist,the end result being a machine replacing living labour. In general, it is just a more particular version of how preconditions are produced as results (e.g. commodities, money, class relations), which are the the Conditions for the next cycle of reproduction which again reproduce them as a result etc and ad finitum.
I'll try to respond to other points when I'm on my laptop.
S. Artesian writes: Quote: In
S. Artesian writes:
I shall briefly examine this:
The beginning of the Communist Manifesto:
And finally, Engels, in a preface to the Manifesto writes:
And then, in The Holy Family, Marx writes:
So, after having read through this one must assume that S. Artesian is right to equate the law of value to [the particular] relations of classes [in capitalism]. Thanks to Pennoid for this.
So, we are back at coming up with a succinct definition for the law of value – although, of course, in order for people to understand it they need to understand the particular relations of classes in capitalism as opposed to other societies.
So, back to my annoying question: what is it useful for?
But this time, let us just take the paragraph above from Marx (“In its economic movement… victory of the proletariat”) and ask how this prognosis has affected the thinking of radicals. What is the victory of the proletariat and how will it be attained? How does the proletariat avoid the ‘mistakes’ of the Paris Commune, of 1871, and the Russian Revolution? Does the law of value actually tell us this? Or are we on new terrain?
Just one more thing, Pennoid is justly critical, I think, of Endnotes’ ‘fumbling’ on ‘real subsumption’ but when he writes:
This is a description of the extraction of absolute surplus value under the condition of the formal subsumption of labor, not a description of the real subsumption of labor. I think these categories are really useful, and crucial to understanding the difference between the relations of classes (and production) in capitalism and all other societies – and in understanding how things like decadence theory, programmatism, and communization theory are confused, confusing, and misleading. So, I actually think one should, contra Khawaga, read more into these categories, in the sense of taking them more seriously at face value (as Marx actually described them), rather than apparently misreading them and turning them into some kind of incomprehensible, mystical sooth-saying apparatus a la TC, Endnotes, and Dauve. Though, to be honest, when Marx writes things like: “[The fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable” then I guess his far-left adherents can be understood in their (what might be called) equivocation?
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Capitalists organizing the
Capitalists organizing the production process directly *is* the real Subsumption. That is when they are able to apply the technology of organization, chemistry, biology, engineering etc. To the whole process, thus driving down the snlt to produce a given output, especially the means of subsistence.
They can only do this as they break down the old forms of production, hence the two categories of formal and then real Subsumption; they describe the historical process of the conquest of power or the development of power of the bourgeoisie as against workers.
To concretize it; formal Subsumption was like petty agriculture; this provided the *social* basis for its own dissolution, hence why the peasants were a "doomed social class". The same rules that made them "free" and independent, laid the foundation for the accumulation of land as private property, as capital. The formal Subsumption (sale of product on the market) eventually gives way to the real Subsumption (pushing out of 'family' farming) and the development of capitalist industrial agriculture.
Marx explains the
Marx explains the distinctions here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/ch02a.htm#469a
The formal subsumption is the actual conversion of the laborer's labor-power into a commodity, into value producing value. It is distinct from the mercantile appropriation of the product, say of handicraft or agriculture. Formal subsumption is the actual "reduction" "dispossession" of the laborer through which labor-power is compelled to become a means of exchange. It is the vital process of capital.
The actual processes of production do not change-- the "putting out" method for example still functions. Home production is still the dominant process, but the instruments of production become a) the condition of labor b) a force belong to the "other" the capitalist, and so exert authority over the laborer(s)
The real subsumption represents a temporal and spatial dispossession-- the instruments of production, the condition of labor, are now relocation, centralized, concentrated, and exert their "authority" not over the individual laborer in isolation, but over the class of laborers. Circumscribed within the shell of private property are the growing forces of social productiion.
Quote: We have already
Was this particular passage referenced before? It relates the process of real subsumption to the law of value.
I've followed this thread
I've followed this thread closely for about two weeks (rare for Libcom nowadays) and while reflecting on the themes and topics in it that interested me, I've found the last few exchanges -- mainly those from yesterday -- somewhat befuddling; for now I'll get back to Tom's question of 'what's the law of value for?', as well as offering some other thoughts.
I think Marx created his law of value 'for' helping industrial workers to understand the 'exact' behavior (almost to a mechanical level) of capital. He wanted to highlight, as has been pointed out in this thread a few times now, the very notion of value itself is 'dehumanizing'. Capital, it's domination over Earth (like the great evil 'Aku' from Samurai Jack), and it's social relations cannot, nor ever intends to, address the issue of social need. Value, the question of a given thing or beings 'worth', spawns directly from the capitalist system, the system where we're forced to fight essentially for basic survival, for basic needs, on a daily or weekly basis; the system of utterly fake scarcity; the system of the total robbery of commonly-generated social wealth.
I'd like to thank the poster spacious for their post #72:
'What is functional evil genius (or just common inventiveness with the aid of consultants, tax lawyers etc. who sell the same recipes to each client) for individual capitalists, is suicidal myopia for the capitalist class as a whole.'
This brings to the fore the biggest barrier to capital's accumulation: capital itself.
Capitalism forces us into a position of total alienation or 'estrangement' from the fruits and products of our labor and their 'use-value'. You can't sell your commodity and have it, too. The concept of 'use-value' itself addresses commodities satisfying social needs, and not much more. 'Use-value' is still a product of class society, it still asks the question of 'worth' (in my view a terrible question to ask) and in the end is itself also 'dehumanizing'. More importantly, as the apes called Homo sapiens, that is to say the animals that we are, there was no question of 'worth' before class society created it. We are only in a position to hold and question a concept such as 'worth' because we are ourselves products (that is, commodities) within this modern society, a class society. When we talk of worth and value we are conditioned by them.
The user Tom Henry viewably raises a number of other issues and questions which I find important; the one about periodizations resulting from understandings (or lack-of) in the theory of value, how it informs 'crisis theores', theories of capitalism's 'decadence' or 'decline' -- I cannot answer, but am eager to see it discussed further.
Tom also asked these intriguing questions:
'What is the victory of the proletariat and how will it be attained? How does the proletariat avoid the ‘mistakes’ of the Paris Commune, of 1871, and the Russian Revolution? Does the law of value actually tell us this? Or are we on new terrain?'
Obviously this is one of the more controversial elements of this discussion, but it shouldn't be shied away from; quite the opposite. There are many like the SI, elements of John Zerzan's work, Jacques Camatte, Fredy Perlman and others, who have pointed out specifically what this 'new terrain' looks like. Modern marxism and marxists demonstrate an inability to address, head-on, many the questions at play in this thread. I myself have shown an aversion to those labelled 'post-leftists' in the past. But more and more, I find myself agreeing with (the modern, survivalist, commune-retreating) Camatte when he says in his The Wandering of Humanity that 'Capital becomes autonomous by domesticating the human being.' This, in my muddled mind, is what real subsumption is. It's when, as Camatte said, 'Human beings are...turned into the willing slaves of capital.'
Yes, S. Artesian and Pennoid,
Yes, S. Artesian and Pennoid, we can find various pieces in Marx’s works where he discusses formal and real subsumption – not sure why you put those up? Does that mean you agree with me?
I like epc’s contribution because it tends more towards a general doubt and uncertainty, and a desire to get somewhere new. If we understand the methodology of ‘science’ we know that science can only disprove theories, it can never prove them. Proofs can only exist within the closed and imaginary worlds of mathematics and philosophical logic. Science is defined as a real world undertaking looking at evidence. ‘Scientific understanding’ is what we colloquially call current scientific theories. But modern science, since the Enlightenment, has contained all the elements of relativism and postmodernism within its method, since each new ‘understanding’ is accepted as just an understanding, or theory, waiting to be demolished, altered, or transcended.
Having gone ‘backward’ in discussing the law of value, I now want to leap forward:
If, as Marx and Engels state, ‘The history of all hitherto existing [state] society is the history of class struggles,” then is it not true that, since the world has definitely witnessed significant technical progress since the emergence of the state, class struggle has been part of that development rather than an obstruction or impediment to that development? (Despite, as Marx affirms, that the events that have resulted in our present material abundance, or level of technology, have been ‘the product of a long and tormented historical development’?)
If one follows Marx here is it possible to say that the class struggle has, ultimately, helped create more productive forms of exploitation? Since, in the current day we have the most effective form of exploitation of humans that the world has ever seen, despite millennia of objections to this by sections of ‘the masses’, and despite a long history of class struggle under capitalism.
Is it the case, then, that it was the workers’ struggles against the formal subsumption of labour - the extortion of absolute surplus value - that ‘forced’ the new capitalist owners of (all) the means of production to enact the real subsumption of labour through the extortion of relative surplus value?
Therefore, would it be logical to assume that the working class, in its struggle as a class (class struggle), aids the development of capitalism?
Therefore, should ‘revolutionaries’ participate in class struggle, on the side of the workers, consciously knowing that this struggle aids the development of capitalism (is this the argument of some Accelerationists, is it the argument of ‘Jehu’, see below?) – because capitalism needs to reach its ‘limits’ before it will collapse?
Or should revolutionaries (we who claim to have some idea of what is going on, thanks to reading people like Marx, etc) refrain from class struggle, even oppose it, in order to hinder the development of capitalism? (Bear with me here!)
If we think capitalism is heading for its own destruction, or reaching its limits, should we help it along its way, or should we hinder its progress? But the answers are the opposite of what we might think they should be. Hindering the progress of capitalism would mean arguing against class struggle. Promoting the fullest development of capitalism (and its possible eventual downfall, the thing we all hope for) would mean engaging in class struggle. If we therefore engage in class struggle, accepting these terms, then we will be doing it for motives that must remain hidden. If we support the development of capitalism we must support the antagonism between classes. But we must not tell those we support that the reason we are doing this is because we want capitalism to refine and progress so much that it implodes. We must not 'admit' that it is only through the long and tormented road that humanity has travelled on through history that we are where we are now, so close to revolution. We must not say that we support the deepening of exploitation, the escalation of misery, for the short time we have before the hoped-for arrival of (inevitable) communism.
Capitalism, apparently, will be abolished when value is abolished. And value will only be abolished when workers are expelled from the labour process: when they are abolished as workers caught in the wage relation; when there is no longer any means of making value, or profit, according to the law of value that rests on socially necessary labor time.
How might this happen?
Firstly, the process whereby workers are relieved of the necessity to work could be the result of a proletarian (?) movement as suggested by ‘Jehu’ in his recent blog proposal:
Abolish Wage Labor by 2027: Is such a movement possible?
Secondly, we just wait until the new non-working class are driven into such dire straits that the only choice they have (apparently or hopefully) is to revolt and abolish money, and freely distribute all the stuff that is being produced by machines.
Or will the UBI solve this dilemma, for a time at least?
And all this, perhaps, relies on humans preventing or controlling the so-called technological singularity, the prophesied next great leap forward in technology made possible by AI when it becomes effectively able to upgrade itself, Terminator-style.
So, what does the law of value, which is, as we have accepted, the relation of classes, actually tell us? Does it tell us to support capitalism or to oppose it?
PS. I just wanted to say that I never use those 'up' and 'down' vote buttons, as I don't think they help readers in analysing what they are reading, but it's always nice if I get an up vote... ;)
Er, the kind of 'automatic'
Er, the kind of 'automatic' elimination of working categories has never in the past led to a decimation of the right of property owners to exploit; never led to the destruction of their class privilege.
I'm a pessimist; I think its more likely that a kind of automated neo-antiquity (with a monopoly on robots rather than land) would be the order of the day. Then we'd have a more Roman "proletariat" of humans; with no robots and not means of living independently; but only off of some degrading dole. And a small class of owners.
Again, you can't decouple the production and distribution of value or goods from the social relations; law, politics, etc. If the working class doesn't conquer state power through the form of fits class dictatorship, then humanity is pretty fucked.
As I see it - The
As I see it - The development of capitalism from the formal domination of capital towards it's real domination (a continuing but as yet incomplete process) is a product of the inter-relationship of class struggle and competition between capitalist factions. Class struggle is not 'a choice' but a necessity in our defence (both material and human) against the capitalist class and their representatives, but in so far as that struggle remains sectional then 'success' in the struggle will remain limited to a respite in the struggle in which the continued domination of capital will result in it's further refinement or modernisation. The potential for a rupture in the otherwise never ending cycle of class struggle is dependent it would seem on a mixture of 'objective' and 'subjective' factors that cannot be predetermined or manipulated by pro-revolutionary minorities, but the inherent contradictions of capitalism's law of value suggest that extended crisis (amidst potential abundance) on a global scale are inevitable and provide the 'objective' circumstances for a 'rupture' dependent on an alignment of 'subjective' forces that are equally global in scale. The worry of course is that the continued process towards the 'real domination ' of capital will see every aspect of humanities social and psychological make-up so degraded that we are unable to think outside, to imagine, a completely different way of life. But such imagination does seem too periodically resurface if not always in the traditional language we anarchist and communists are used to. The may be a bit of repetition for Henry but maybe not others!
Quote: Yes, S. Artesian and
Was only responding to clarify the distinction between formal and real subsumption of (EDIT) labor bycapital in Marx's critique.
Both conditions, "formal or subsumption" are conditions under, and expressions of, the law of value.
Spikeymike
Spikeymike writes:
But this is either misunderstanding or avoiding the point I was trying to make about ‘revolutionaries’. Yes, of course, generally speaking class struggle is not a choice for people when they are at the site of struggles and they need to defend themselves and those around them. (Although one could argue that although there seems no choice, one only has to look at a scab to see that, in fact, there is... but perhaps this takes us into philosophical questions of free will.) BUT I wasn’t talking about proletarians at the site of struggle, I was talking about the ‘voluntarist’ activities of ‘revolutionaries’. We make the choice to ‘support’ distant struggles, or to intervene in local ones, for example, going down to the picket line, etc, or, as I did in my distant youth, getting work in a place fairly rife with industrial struggle. The point I was trying to make, which seems to have been missed here so far is this: was I effectively – by my choice to intervene - helping capitalism to improve itself, or was I hindering its progress? If the progress of history is ‘the history of class struggles…’ then what is actually going on?
Secondly, Spikeymike writes:
Yes, the real domination of capital (the real subsumption of labor) is indeed ‘a product of the inter-relationship of class struggle and competition between capitalist factions’. This has been established on this thread, I think. But what is the real significance of the class struggle aspect? Above, you say that we have no choice in what we do, but here you are saying that class struggle aids the development of capitalism. This is a very determinist perspective on the role of 'revolutionaries'.
When you support class struggle do you think to yourself?: I support this sectional struggle but I know that all sectional struggles actually ultimately aid capitalism.
While we are on the topic of sectional as opposed to general struggles, would you say that ‘successful’ general struggles that have occurred in capitalist history have actually resulted quite quickly in escalations of the capitalist machine? For example, Russia 1917, which led to the fastest and most enormous industrialisation of a region so far, England 1648, France 1789, or Cuba, etc.
Marx wrote:
He wrote this in his enthusiasm for the heroic example of the Paris Commune of 1871. He and Engels referred to the Paris Commune as an example of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Now, what we have to bear in mind is that the Paris Commune ‘failed’. Lenin took up the notion of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Russia, and what we have to remember is that the revolution there ‘succeeded’.
In the quote above Marx identified popular revolts as being the ‘tools’ of different sections of the already existing ruling class, and he was right (because usually he was a proper scientist). What he couldn’t identify, because it hadn’t happened (even though Bakunin and the anarchists in the First International were on to it theoretically) was a popular revolt that became the tool of a new ruling class. What he couldn’t witness in 1871 in France he could have witnessed in the period 1917 to 1921 in Russia.
These are difficult questions, and they relate directly to Marx’s categories around surplus value and the subsumption of labor, and it is long overdue that ‘revolutionaries’ seriously engaged with them.
Spikeymike also writes above, forgive me for repeating:
The significant line here being: “a continuing but as yet incomplete process”.
While we might think that capitalism is developing – indeed the whole essence of capitalism is, according to Marx, that it constantly revolutionizes its processes, due to the inter-relationship of class struggle and competition in the market – do we not think that capitalism has effectively achieved, on a global scale (which doesn’t mean in every single pocket of humanity, of course) its real domination of labor? Are you mistaking here the well-known constant revolutionizing of the wide/general production process with the transition from the extraction of absolute to relative surplus value?
If we don’t think that the extraction of relative surplus value is the dominant, and properly established, production strategy in the formation of value, then do we think that we are still at the level of the formal domination of capital (the formal subsumption of labor)?
If so then do we not think that capitalism relies on the extraction of relative surplus value from labor but on the extraction of absolute surplus value?
In this case (your case?) capitalism is still only, in general, at its first stage. If this is the case, then it would have been hard for Marx to identify the extraction of relative surplus value, since it didn’t really exist as a societal wide phenomenon when he was around. This would also mean that he would have had no understanding of how the Industrial Revolution had happened, since it was only a feature of absolute surplus value. And such prophesying about the immanence of a hypothesised real subsumption would have been unscientific for him.
Marx wrote, in Capital Vol 1, as I put in a previous post:
The reason I am persisting with this is because I think that these categories Marx has defined are really useful for understanding where we are now and how we got here as proletarians. But few people seem to take them seriously, or understand them, and prefer to keep things vague. And keeping things vague is the direct opposite of a doubting, ‘question everything’ approach, even if, as is the usual case with honest scepticism, it means we end up by admitting that we do not know.
I think it might also be
I think it might also be useful to check out (to understand what I am getting at) what I wrote on the 'Formal and Real Subsumption' thread back in October 2016.
https://libcom.org/forums/thought/formal-real-subsumption-28012008?page=1#comment-586250
Tom may agree perhaps that
Tom may agree perhaps that 'generalised class struggle' as expressed in the 'revolutionary' wave post the First World War was the nearest we got to threatening the continued existence of capitalism? and why many other pro-revolutionary groups hark back to it so much, but then as he says it failed and then resulted in the further geographical expansion of capitalist social relations. The ebb and flow of the class struggle has produced benefits to us as workers which however tend to be of limited duration as capitalism responds, re-organises and continues. Is capitalism then more stable or immune to further crisis from the same inter-related forces of continuing class struggle and capitalist competition - it seems not. For all the continuing but still resisted tendency towards the 'real domination of capital' beyond the immediate relations of production and across the social, economic and psychological spheres of human experience it seems unable to achieve 'the end of history' in it's favour because it cannot avoid re-creating contradictions and conflict which will always it seems open up the potential, if not the certainty, of a more general rupture in the cycle of class struggle. Popular revolts may and often do become the tools of other classes but should we assume this is inevitable irrespective of the objective conditions in which they take place - I'm not that much of a determinist.
Yes it is worthwhile pursuing some of the other discussion threads and linked texts around these issues as I fear I will again end up in a circular discussion over this here.
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Thanks, S. Artesian, for
Thanks, S. Artesian, for considering some of the points I made in my last post.
I’d just like to clarify a couple of things.
As I stressed, the ‘choice’ I am referring to is the choice of people like you and I (‘revolutionaries’) to involve themselves or not in ‘politics’ and struggles, with acknowledgement that there are some struggles that we may not choose, but rather, due to where we are (as proletarians), choose us. BUT what you are saying here is that all action by all of us is done out of ‘necessity’, as in, it is determined. This is more determinist than Marx ever was. Usually it would be me who was being accused of being overly deterministic (meaning social and environmental forces shape who we are and what we do), so this is new for me! But do you really mean that you have no choice in writing something in support of a strike somewhere, or that you have no choice in travelling to a picket line of workers who have no ‘direct’ relationship to you to show your solidarity?
S. Artesian writes:
But surely this is merely an assertion without evidence? A statement of your ideals, even if it is derived from Marx. What you have written in and around this sentence doesn’t address the question I posed, which is: does class struggle form a component in the escalation and strengthening of domination and exploitation? – no matter that the oppressed effectively have no choice but to fight back periodically and continually. (One will need to re-read my posts to understand the question I have summarized here properly if you have just come to this thread.)
S.Artesian writes:
Not quite a caution in the sense you mean:
Yes, Marx recognised that the introduction of machinery was also a factor in being able to lengthen the working period – to the point that work might go on with no stop. And today we see that all the improvements in communications, reporting software, filing systems, etc does not lead to people working less, they end up working harder and longer. If one is middle class in the West then one would surely yearn for a return to the work rhythms of the 1970s?
So, I am not sure what point you are making here.
The fact that machinery makes work harder and longer is not relevant to his categories, only to the nature of 'the profit motive'. What machinery does tell us, is that without 'the profit motive' we could all work less.
S. Artesian writes, in relation to my suggestion that the Bolsheviks formed a new ruling class in Russia:
Yes, this is an interesting point indeed. I was keeping it simple. In fact, putting my determinist head on again, I would argue that the Bolsheviks were the unwitting puppets of the economic forces that were already shaping the new Russia (if one personifies capitalism, as Marx was wont to do to make his points, then they were the unwitting pawns of capital).
What the Bolsheviks did was speed up the introduction of proper capitalism in Russia (the real subsumption of labor) by taking things into their own hands, and taking the place of the capitalists who would have achieved this task anyway (the Bolsheviks kept some of them on to help out, of course), but much more slowly.
One could argue (to throw everything in the air!) that capitalism had run away with itself in Russia as early as, say, 1900, engendering a popular revolt not directly in the interests of a section of the ruling class, but in the interests of the pure acquisition of relative surplus value, and pure industrialization. Who were the best capitalists, the best industrialists, Russia has ever seen? The Bolsheviks!
Who might have been the best industrialists France ever saw? (Though I really hate to say it) The Communards?
As I wrote before, comparing the ‘failed’ Commune of Paris in 1871 and the ‘successful’ Bolshevik seizure of power, and specifically what Marx and Engels write about the Commune as the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, is fundamentally enlightening. (Along with an examination of the rift between Marx and Bakunin in the First International).
Can we avoid the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in the communist revolution? The evidence says no. Indeed when S. Artesian writes:
Is this the same program identified and suggested by Marx (who, to be fair, never had the chance to witness a successful Dictatorship of the Proletariat - again, see my post above) and enacted by Lenin?
PS
For some reason I can't get the link to work, so, for what Dual Power is look up 'Dual power Russian Revolution' on Wikipedia.
S. Artestian wrote: The
S. Artestian
thread
Tom Henry
Ah, somehow I missed that
Ah, somehow I missed that thread completely! Thanks for pointing it out.
The difference between S. Artesian and the commmunizers of modern day, including the Maoist Alain Badiou, is that the second group keep the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, or the Transitional State, secretly up their sleeves, though they would claim not to (I think I have touched on this elsewhere, if not I can elaborate later). Others, such as Spikeymike, who are perhaps more cautious, will, it seems, play the historic role of allowing these deceits to persist (or at least not objecting to them) in order to feign their participation in 'real life' and not be put on the outer. Perhaps until it is too late, as the left communists did in the early part of the last century - people who were unable to assess the warnings of Bakunin and the anarchists of the First International because of their adherence to Marxism. We all may fail at all of this, but it is better to fail with 'intelligence' and integrity, with the refusal of bullshit spat from one's lips, than as a sheep to the slaughter of the transitional state.
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The 'revolution' in Russia
The 'revolution' in Russia was different to any previous revolution, as I pointed out. The revolution it was closest to, prior to it, was the one in Paris in 1871, and the links between these two revolutions are crucial, as I note in previous posts. The phenomenon of the Bolsheviks suddenly becoming a new faction of the 'the ruling class' (a bureaucratic bourgeoisie, if you like), but more than that, an absolute monarchy, or the only 'faction' (if you see what I mean!), through the revolution is really interesting and, as far as I am aware, it has not been explored fully, or in the light of an understanding of the real subsumption of labor, or the domestication of humans in Camatte's terminology.
But you are right in your identification of the productivIst discourse that runs through Marx's writing and is expressed in reality by Lenin. And this is where we part company in this discussion, and it takes us right back to my mention of Marx's view on labor that I noted at the beginning of my contributions to this thread.
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With respect, S. Artesian,
With respect, S. Artesian, what’s really unfortunate is that yours has become the only voice here. My intention was never to debate Marxist-Leninists (I presume you would identify yourself in this way, or at least close to this?) but to debate those who, in my opinion, think they have escaped that sphere, or that ‘Leninist loop’.
But, maybe it was a good thing that the Paris revolution in 1871 didn't extend to the countryside. The 'problem' of the peasantry was a feature of the 'schoolboy drivel' debate between Bakunin (who I am not supporting in a general sense by the way) and Marx about what might happen 'after the revolution'.
Marx scolded Bakunin thus:
But Marx never saw the collectivisation and dekulakization in the USSR. One can't help but smile… despite the bodies that were piled up and trod down.
And agriculture is still a 'problem' even for those who might purport to have abandoned the idea of the transitional state and to be outside the circle of Marxist-Leninism that S. Artesian inhabits:
The communizers at Théorie Communiste, in 2011, write:
It may be, of course, that TC are hopelessly behind the times here, since capitalism may have solved the peasant problem in key areas by introducing the technology that enables a couple of managers, a team of seasonal hired-hands, and an array of clever machinery to farm vast tracts of land.
But, still, the writer Andrei Platonov, who was perhaps conflicted in his perspective on the USSR, puts it well, in 1930 [edit]:
He continues elsewhere, in 1934, on the subject of ‘electrification’:
(from: https://newleftreview.org/II/69/andrei-platonov-on-the-first-socialist-tragedy . There is another translation of On The First Socialist Tragedy in the book Happy Moscow.)
The question becomes, or remains: have the libertarian communists here, the communizers there, and the Badouists elsewhere, escaped the Leninism, the Jacobinism (yes, I went there!), that lies at the heart of the approach of those such as S. Artesian, or are they deluding themselves? This is the dilemma for me. My questions about surplus value and subsumption were intended to dig into this.
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