Date: Thu, 16 Jan 1997 10:56:56 +0000
Subject: Re: M-G: Re: planning please


Dave

I want just to say how helpful I found your this morning's reply to
Justin 
and your work in general.
I am logging off for 2 weeks because of pressing other business. I do so 
agree with the thrust and rigour of your defence of the Labour Theory of
Value. 
I shall pick up this when I get back.

I hope we shal find ways of connecting this debate to the Marxian theory 
of the state which IMO must begin with the question of its relation to 
labour-power.
Generally speaking we discuss the state in terms of its functioning, or
of 
the relation of different classes to the state, in particular of the
bourgeoisie. 
Or we analyse the state in terms of its relation to the valorisation
process -- 
its role in creating conditions necessary to smooth capital
reproduction, its intervention in the cycles of capital, its enforcement
of 
the collective interest of the capitalist class in face of competing 
sectional interests, at each stage of reproduction from commodity 
production to exchange and the circulation of capital and commodities,
and 
then the role of the state in the distribution of resultant value 
and surplus value (rent, wages, profit). We are all very good at doing
this 
sort of calculation and looking at how the markets work, and why Ford 
and GM are now credit-brokers and credit-card operators, and so on. 
But in this process the Ricardians, MSers etc miss out something
crucial. 
The state is necessary to the capitalist class because capitalism cannot 
secure the conditions of its own reproduction unaided. In particular, it 
cannot secure the reproduction of labour-power. 
It would like to, but it cannot. Much as capitalists dislike the state
and 
think constantly about privatising its functions and eliminating it or
anyway 
slimming it down, they cannot. This is fundamental: "labour-power", the 
commodity specific to capitalism in the sense that its existence is the 
"unique historical condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of 
production", cannot be reproduced as a capitalist commodity. 
And if it could -- then capitalist production would cease by definition
to 
be commodity production, would cease to exist. For if it produced
labour-
power it would neither need nor be able to purchase labour-power. It 
would thereby lose the basis of value-production, which depends upon an 
exchange between capital and labour, an exchange which takes place both 
within the labour process and within the realm of circulation, when a 
capitalist agrees to buy and a worker to sell his/her labour power. 
Capitalism is a transient social order because in the process of 
revolutionising its own material basis it constantly struggles against
this 
inherent barrier: it cannot produce the commodity which its own
existence 
is predicated upon. It struggles (a) to eliminate live labour from
production 
(b) to reduce the value of labour-power by for example the coercive 
actions of the state (c) to deconstruct (disassemble) labour-power by 
means which have included deskilling and the reduction of the
subjectivity 
of labour to objective, quantifiable and reproducible elements by means
of 
science and technology. (d) latterly, to deconstruct the labourer
him/herself 
(a process now assuming dramatic and rapid proportions, as technologies 
as diverse as ex-vitro embryology, genetic engineering, brain-computer 
interfacing, and many others, prepare the grounds for a quite different 
human race, or no human race).
If capitalist science and technology does not succeed in pressing these 
breakthrough technologies to their logical conclusions -- eliminating
the 
working class from production -- then it will face the equally-fatal
problem of an 
organic composition of capital rising so rapidly that valorisation will 
become impossible. Why is this? Because capitalist production entails 
accumulation. The total mass of surplus value cannot be dispersed merely 
by the parasitism of the bourgeoisie, or by war, but today 
a mass devalorisation/revalorisation through war will be 
at the price of the biosphere and inevitable social revolution.
Therefore (as is already visible) there will be rising levels of
liquidity, 
surplus capital, low interest rates, falling profitability, endemic and
chronic 
deflationary crises. 
Capitalism is now pressing harder than ever against its historical
limits. 
The alternatives are (a) growing polarisation of the global haves and
have-
nots as chronic deflationary crisis pushes more and more regions and 
populations off the economic map.  'Hollowing-out' of the cores,
relocation 
of industries, the growing extension of the markets into 3rd world 
countries, are counter-tendencies. They cannot compensate for the main 
tendency of polarisation of wealth caused by constant deflationary
policies 
needed in the metropoles in order to make revalorisation possible in 
conditions of chronic capital surplus and overproduction of capital, low 
and declining profits and interest rates.
(b) war. In fact this possibility is distinct. War can begin at the
rubbing 
edge between NATO and the former Warsaw bloc. It can begin by 
accident or by the unstoppable progression of smaller conflicts (1914 
style). It can begin by design. The continued disintegration of the
former 
economic and political space of the USSR creates many opportunities for 
this. If deflations precipitate savage economic recessions, political 
instability in eastern Europe can develop  into wars of a regional and
wider 
kind in which thermonuclear weapons will certainly be used.
Or war can begin in the Pacific. The chances may be small of a general 
war -- say 5-10 percent in the next ten or twenty years. But the 
consequences will be so dramatic that the risk must be addressed. 
In this case, a large proportion of the human race and other species
will 
be destroyed. The tendency for humankind to disappear into the machine 
will be immeasurably accelerated in the aftermath of a general war -- an 
aftermath whose conditions are unpredictable, unknowable and even 
unthinkable.
(c) Then only other alternative is that humankind will disappear into
the machine anyway. The idea that it will not, that despite the powerful
transformatory processes now underway, nothing wil really change, that
co-ops and/or capitalist enterprises, will continue 'social production'
in a century's time in conditions almost indistinguishable from today,
is as anacrhonistic and absurd as Jules Verne.
The process may be smooth and relatively gradual (I don't believe this;
crisis and revolution is much more likely) but most predictions seem to
agree that 
within a century a mass of converging technologies will have made human 
subjectivity a knowable quantity. 
Capitalism will have completed its historical
mission, and live-labour will cease to be an input which it cannot
produce. 
The material basis of capitalism will have disappeared.
The question is: under what conditions? That is the political question 
marxists face.

 



-- 
Regards,
Mark Jones
majones-AT-netcomuk.co.uk




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