File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-01-19.123, message 14


Date: Fri, 17 Jan 1997 21:38:11 +1000
From: rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au (Rob Schaap)
Subject: M-I: 'The Doug Henwood Follow-on'


Rakesh asks/suggests:  
'DO WE NEED A SEMINAR ON THE DETERMINATION OF THE VALUE OF THE LABOR POWER
IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY.'

[Going by the immense erudition evident on this list, I'm sure I'm not
alone in suddenly feeling the need for seminars on everything.  I'm sure I
shouldn't talk about things I know nothing about, but ...

I'll guess at what's being talked about and opine that, while the notion of
underlying value is important, my instinct is Rakesh is hinting at a
mathematical formulation that just can not be (I realise we've talked about
this - but the added magnitude/complexity/uncertainty/chaos at a global
level is an interesting notion).  

What, for instance, is the socially necessary labour time congealed in a
book?  My answer would be a speculative 'lots'.  Learning the language (a
background constant, perhaps?) and reading comparative literature are
usually two components brought to the author's desk, as is paper, ink,
pens, writing skills, ideas from experience etc, library resources blah
blah ... Then the book is read, where its use value becomes a function of
just as many social investments in the reader (and knowledge of the
socially constructed audience is itself a socially produced quality in the
writer).  You don't seem to get anywhere near a tenable basis for a
transformation calculation, do you?  You just know a process of
transformation lies, mystified as a concept, and ever a dynamic complex of
indeterminate magnitudes, somewhere under the surface.  Then there's also
the question of use value in the *process*, not just the 'product' (we
mustn't fetishise the product, after all - and isn't the process of work a
potentially rewarding category where alienation is absent?  I imagine
writing a book is less alienating than most production regimes under
capitalism).

A socialist world can offer nought but the crucial proviso that the
category (as opposed to any specific magnitude) 'socially necessary labour
time' is always one of two fundamental considerations in the budgeting of
resources and distribution to the people (the equally problematic category
of 'need' is the other I had in mind).  

As Brody said: 'So long as it is necessary to economise the labour of
society, the notion of value is necessary whether or not there is a
market.'

BTW, is there an available statistic on global profit - in terms of
exchange value of total produced minus exchange value of total labour
power?  If so, is a trend apparent in this daring statistic?

Sorry if I'm being either irrelevant or dense.

Oh, and I've just discovered why I'm a menshevik reformist - some
terminally romantic fool (or sarcastic genius) called Debray sunk his boot
into my ilk thus:

'What does it all mean?  To do what?  At what cost?  For what aim? 
Inappropriate questions ... For the acts of the revolutionary are too
disinterested for him to lower himself to considering the usefulness, the
results, or the limits of revolution ... Such questions, apart from sapping
our energy, would deprive the revolution of its entire point by subjecting
it to the contemptible criteria of efficacy, a task undertaken only by
those who do not make revolutions ...'

Condemned as I am, I think I find myself in some good company.  BTW, I got
the quotes from chapter two of Nove (with whom I share a crowded cell).

All the best,
Rob






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