File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2002/bhaskar.0205, message 69


Date: Wed, 8 May 2002 11:44:40 -0600 (MDT)
From: Hans Ehrbar <ehrbar-AT-econ.utah.edu>
Subject: BHA: causal bearers in the social world



Here is part of the answer to Viren,
this is a smaller point, the main stuff will come in my next email.


I had written:

>> Under capitalism, abstract human labor is not just an
>> abstraction which one can make in one's mind.  Of course
>> one can, not only under capitalism but under all social
>> circumstances, consider labor under the point of view
>> that it is expenditure of human labor-power.  Nothing
>> prevents you from making this abstraction.

And Viren responded:

> I am not sure about this.  Wouldn't Marx say that this general idea of
> labor as the expenditure of human labor power is specific to capitalism in
> an epistemological sense?  In other words, the change in social relations
> is the condition for the possibility of thinking this generalizable
> concept of labor.

My answer: if you mean by "general idea" that this is a
conception widely shared, then I agree with you, this is
definitely not the case.  Maybe one can say, those things
can be thought on an individual basis, but there is no
social resonance for that thought, and therefore such
thoughts are likely considered wrong.

Here is a contemporary example: if someone uses the word
"labor" today, then everyone thinks of drudgery, of the
boring and tiring wearing-out of body and mind.  If I say
"No, I mean the joyful exercise of human powers to realize
our dreams, within a rewarding relationship with my
coworkers," then people will think: this is not what labor
is, this is wishful thinking.  Only under socialism will
everyone think of labor in these terms.  But even today, or
at all other times, has it been possible to think of labor
in these terms.

Let's look at the a passage in in *Captial I*, chapter One,
Section 3 (Penguin/Vintage edition p. 151/52, translation
adjusted) which is often interpreted to mean that in
antiquity with its slave labor it was impossible to think of
labor as the expenditure of human labor-power:

> However, Aristotle could not infer, from inspecting the
> form of value itself, that in the form of
> commodity-values, all labor is expressed as equal human
> labor and therefore as labor of equal validity---because
> Greek society was founded on the labor of slaves, hence
> had as its natural basis the inequality of men and of
> their labor-powers.  The secret of the expression of
> value, namely the equality and equal validity of all kinds
> of labor because and in so far as they are human labor in
> general, could not be deciphered until the concept of
> human equality had already acquired the fixity of a
> commonly held prejudice (Volksvorurteil).  This however
> becomes possible only in a society where the commodity
> form is the universal form of the product of labor, hence
> the dominant social relation is the relation between men
> as possessors of commodities.  Aristotle's genius is
> displayed precisely by his discovery of a relation of
> equality in the value-expression of commodities.  Only the
> historical limitation inherent in the society in which he
> lived prevented him from finding out what `in reality'
> this relation of equality consisted of.

Many marxists interpret this to mean that the brain of the
Greeks was somehow wired in such a way that the obvious
abstraction that all labor is the expenditure of human
brains, nerves, and muscles, could not be made.  I say, and
I think this Marx quote here supports this reading: such
thoughts were of course possible, but this abstraction was
not thought to be valid and was therefore not used to
explain anything that happened in society (such as the
exchanges 5 beds = 1 house etc.).  Why was it not thought to
be valid?  Because it was just considered a thought of some
individual who happened to look at labor in a particular
way.  The social relations which would coordinate
everybody's thoughts, so that everybody would look at labor
from this angle, were not yet in place.


Hans G. Ehrbar



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