Date: Mon, 12 May 97 19:27:53 +0200
From: Fiocco-AT-ccuws4.unical.it (Fiocco Laura)
Subject: Re: Economics of Communist Society


I have no idea were it goes, but the assumptions below are a strange
interpretation of Marx.

On 12-O5 Leutha wrote:
>
>At a theoretical level one text I've come across attempting to deal with
>these "externalities" is Asger Jorn's 'Critique of Political Economy' in
>that he puts the use object into the economic equation, although not on the
>basis of ecological concern:
>
>"Marx frequently said that the content of value was work and added that the
>true form is the form of the content. He said: "We now know the substance
>of value, it is labour." Thus, according to Marx, substance and content are
>identical. But he also said that use value is the substance of (exchange)
>value and nevertheless explained that "Labour is therefore not the only
>source of material wealth, i.e. of the use values it produces. [As William
>Petty says] labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its
>mother."

>For use value to become exchange value, it is therefore (????)
>necessary
>to eliminate a magnitude, its terrestrial character, or, if you like, to
>repudiate the mother, the true source of its birth. thus the passage from
>use value to exchange value can therefore only be acheived by the
>devalorisation of an aspect of use value, its material reality."

Marx says:
For use value to become exchange value it is necessary......a social
relation, ie expropriation (a relation between men) in the form of private
appropriation (a relation which seems to concerne men and things).

Land becomes commodity through expropriation (enclosures)
every produce of labour becomes commodity trough expropriation

Maybe it is true that capitalists 'repudiate the mother", but this has
nothing to do with the concept of exchange value

>
>Thus political economy banishes these 'externalities'.
>
>"We can accept that the use object represents the substance or primary
>matter of commodities, but the use object is more than the substance of the
>commodity, it is in itself a form of value

(utility or inner nature?)

>devalorised in its conditions as a commodity (?)

as if it was not a thing but a human beeing?

>but whose value is restored when the exchange process is
>over.

If a commodity whouldn't be a "use value for others" (valore d'uso per
altri) (Marx, Capital, somewere) before beeing sold, it wouldn't be sold.

>Once a use object has been bought by a customer, it becomes a use
>object once again. This is a necessary for every commodity except money."

All this discourse assumes that commodity *has* two "values"
Marx says that commodity is the unity of a dwoble (duplice) determination,
ie use value and exchange value.
The determinations (both of them in their reciprocal contradiction) are
needed to define the concept of commodity (each of them alone is not
enouth)


>"But this whole process even of the creation of use objects is artificial,
>invented by man; and the substance of the use object is found in nature.
>But nature is no longer substance in itself. It is only substance for the
>man-made use object . Nature is not simply a means. It is the first
>condition of production. Nature shows itself as natural forms or qualities.
>Natural objects must be consumed, destroying their natural form, to produce
>use objects, and once consumed and exhausted by mankind they only return to
>nature, becoming new natural values, albeit at an inferior level. There is
>a consumption of nature prior to all production, and a loss of energy at
>each passage from one form to another. This a primary and universal
>devalorisation."
>
>"Marx declared that the exchange of commodities implied the change of forms
>like this:
>Commodity - Money - Commodity
>   C      -   M   -     C

If C is a commodity (in a proper meaning)
and M is capital (in a proper meaning)
the assumption is wrong.
It is not the exchange of commodities which implies the change of forms, it
is the capitalist social relations which imply the change of form

If M is not capital but a medium of exchange (moneta non denaro: in italian
we have two differents words)
then C and C are use values exchanged as such not as commodities.

Maybe the logic which follows can lead somewere, but the assumptions are
not correct. See what it implies.
Ciao laura




>But this very exchange necessarily implies these changes of form:
>Use object - Commodity - Use object
>     U     -    C      -     U
>The use of use objects implies these changes of form:
>Natural form -   Use Object  - Natural form
>     N       -       U       -       N
>The whole process neccessary for the creation of capital is thus a cycle of
>changes of form which can be written like this:
>        N - U - C - M - C - U - N
>Only through studying this cycle in all its phases can we get a scientific
>view of production and consumption."
>
>This much neglected work has, to my knowledge only been dealt with by
>Richard Gombin in 'The Radical tradition (Methuen, 1978). Trendy academics
>didn't find it as sexy as Debord's material.
>
>"To treat labour as Quantity, the intensity must be constant. For the
>measure of labour to be an hour of labour, all the workers must work at the
>same tension; in order that the unit of work represents the same energy,
>which is another expression of work. But an hour of human work as the basis
>of value leads to the elimination of intensity as a variable in human
>labour. This elimination is made by means of machinery which control the
>general rythm of production, and constitutes the constant which eliminates
>surplus-value. Thus machinery represent inertia and resistance to change in
>production. But as the transfer of energy can only be acheived by a fall of
>tension, by a change of tension, and as this transfer which gives energy
>its value, industrial labour cannot create value: it is without value,
>thanks to the constancy of its tension. If one hour of human labour is
>identical to another hour of human labour, human labour is without value.
>This is the weakness of the marxist labour theory of value, because  as
>industrial work is without value, the worker who does it does not represent
>a human value superior  to other classes on account of their work. If the
>worker possesses such value, it is for other reasons.
>        If there is any truth in the marxist labour theory of value, it is
>not in labour, but in labour time, or in other words time. Value must be
>time not work. For the human being, time is nothing but a succession of
>phenomena from a spatially determined place, since space is the order of
>coexistence of phenomena in time or process."
>
>After a discussion on the relation between time and space Jorn continues:
>
>"The political goal of marxism is to replace the state with an automatic
>and inoffensive administration of all matters pertaining to the common
>interest. And then this, in the socialist language, will be managed by an
>apparatus through which everyone makes decisions. Robot-statiticians,
>guided by public opinion surveys, will calculate according to the desire or
>non-desire of the greatest number, and so ensure a perfect and effective
>dictatorship of the majority in future society, without any possibility of
>trickery, that is to say politicking, the domination of man by man.
>        But the fact that this technical administration, which is being
>formed across the whole world, eliminates all possibility of political
>manouvers, does not however eliminate the state. On the contrary it becomes
>the state. It's just that the state is not a political instrument. On the
>contrary, it is an instrument to avoid or lessen the damage of politics.
>The state is made to establish stability for the ruling class, and this
>stability is precisely economic stability. The statesperson does not take
>the form of an emperor, a king, a noble or a capitalist. They bear the
>lineaments of a "major-domo" of the economy, the bureaucrat, the ideal
>model of the robot-statitician.
>        The pure state is what we have already described as quality, unity
>or the perfect form, form without value, an unchanging constant. This
>socialist goal is in striking contradiction with progressive politics of
>the working class."
>
>Jorn proceeds to then look at art:
>
>"The invention of money is the basis for "scientific" socialism, and the
>supercession of money will be the basis of the supercession of socialist
>mechanism. Money is the work of art transformed into a cypher. The
>realisation of communism will be the transformation of the work of art into
>the totality of daily life."
>
>He then proceeds with a critique of both the 2nd and 3rd International and
>offers a resolution which places art at the centre of a communist
>resolution:
>
>"Real communism will be a leap into the domain of liberty, of values, of
>communication. Artistic value, contrary to utilitarian value (ordinarily
>called material value) is the progressive value because it is the
>valorisation of mankind itself, through a process of provocation.
>Since Marx's day, political economy has shown its weaknesses and its set
>backs. A hyper-politics must tend towards the direct realisation of human
>nature. The goal of economy would then be the realisation of art. It is a
>matter of recognising these goals passionately enough for the masses, in
>deciding to strive for these goals, take matters sufficiently in hand. It
>is necessary to search for new artistic goals, giving life itself a new
>interest; opening humanity to the joy of even better situations. The need
>and absence of such perspectives has constituited the back drop of the
>general mediocrity which has plagued our times. Hitherto there have never
>been any ideas which have comanded the revolutionary power of marxism; nor
>which have lost their spirit so quickly."
>
>Whilst appreciating what Jorn was trying to do,, I feel his use of 'Art' as
>the category with which to resolve the weakness of Marx's abstraction
>doomed to failure. On the one hand we can search in language and we shall
>only find abstractions because that is the way language works, and in that
>sense his remarks should be seen in relation to the activities of the
>Situation International for whom he wrote this text in 1960. But at a more
>specific level, as 'art' arrives precisely with the bourgeoisie, when the
>aesthetic dominates the content, as opposed to the subsumption of
>representation under piety
> of religious worship during feudalism, we can see that it is intimately
>tied up with the commodification of the 'creativity'. This is clearly not
>what Jorn wants to tackle, but I'm afraid he's still lumbered with it.
>
>I'm afraid this has dragged on quite a lot, and perhaps quoting from a
>translation of a hard to find text should be superceded by finishing the
>translation and putting it on a website.
>
>
>ttfn
>
>
>Leutha Blissett
>
>PS: The edition of which I have a photocopy was published "by the Unitary
>International on the occasion of Asger Jorn's exhibition 'The Luxury of
>Aesthesia'". Does anyone know who these people were?
>
>
>
>
>
>
>http://www.unpopular.demon.co.uk
>http://www.dsnet.it/qwerg/blissett/bliss0.htm
>http://www.skatta.demon.co.uk
>http://www.geocities.com/~johngray
>
>
>
>
>     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---




     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---