Date: Wed, 5 Feb 1997 10:05:07 -0500 (EST)
From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin-AT-utkux.utcc.utk.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: Capitalism and Human Nature 2nd try


Comrades,

The LTV is extremely important to Marxian theory. It is also relevant to
the production of commodity production. Surplus extraction takes place in
other contexts outside of commodity production. LTV is bound up in the
total cycle of capital. It is the operation of the LTV that explains the
capital accumulation process. It is the key to understanding the central
contradiction in the capitalist mode of production.

Various mathematical formulae have partially demonstrated the theory, but
the proof of its reality is not to be found mathematically; it is to be
found in its self-evident character. I mean by this that the relationsip
between the LTV and commodity production is tautological. Mandel expresses
this best in his third proof of the LTV, "the proof by reduction to the
absurd":

    Imagine for a moment a society in which living human labor has
    completely disappeared, that is to say, a society in which all
    production has been 100% automated and human labor has been completely
    eliminated from all forms of production and services. Can value
    continue to exist under these conditions? Can there be a society where
    nobody has an income but commodities continue to have value and to be
    sold? Obviously such a situation would be absurd. A huge mass of
    products would be produced without this production creating any
    income, since no human being would be involved in this production. But
    someone would want to "sell" these products for which there were no
    longer any buyers!
    
    It is obvious that the distribution of products in such a society
    would no longer be effected in the form of a sale of commodities and
    as a matter of fact selling would become all the more absurd because
    of the abundance produced by general automation.
    
    Expressed another way, a society in which human labor would be totally
    eliminated from production, in the most general sense of the term,
    with serviced included, would be a society in which exchange-value had
    also been eliminated. This proves the validity of the theory, for at
    the moment human labor disappears from production, value, too,
    disappears with it.
 
As for "human nature." I discussed my view of human nature in depth
several days ago. I argued that humans, nature, society were not
ontological, that their "essence" was transitory. What was ontological, I
argued, was the relation between subjects and objects. The form of this
relation determined the nature of the subjects and the objects, which are
therefore historically specific. However we are constituted at any given
historical moment is the outcome of these concrete relations.

However, if relations constitute an ontology, and if the labor process is
a relation, and if society is the ensemble of unique social and material
relations, and if the human is the ensemble of unique relations in
society, then sensual human activity constitutes an ontology. Alienation
is the result of estrangement from this activity and its products. 

In this view, one consistent with Marx, humanism and structuralism are
fused; the relationship is more unitary than mutually reinforcing. As I
argued in earlier posts, you cannot separate Marx's humanism and
structuralism, and there is no point in Marx's work that can be called an
"epistemological break." From the standpoint of the dialectic, neither one
or the other would make sense if shorn from this unity. They are only
analytically separable, and one separates them with a consequent loss of
intelligibility.

AA



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