Date: Tue, 11 Feb 1997 08:36:30 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-I: Re: Labour Theory of Value



Rob asks where Marx says market socialism is incomptable with his thought.
The best study of Marx's relation to MS is Stanley Moore's Marx v.
Markets, Penn. State Univ. Press, 1990? The short version is this. In the
Manifesto Marx and Engels briefly entertain a transitional MS phase. The
descriotion of initial measures to be taken by a  ruling proletariat there
do not include abolition of markets. But already in 1847, Marx has
attacked Proudhon's syndalism as incoherent. Granted, this did not involve
socialist collective ownership. In 1959, in the Contrib. to the Critique
of PE, Marx attacks the MS scheme of Grey in quite general terms. Engels'
ANti-Duering, written with Marx's approval and participation in a couple
of chapters, attacks D's ideas about MS. In the Inaugural Address to the
1I, Marx talks about cooperatives in positive terms, but In Capital, Marx
discusses coopertaives, saying that one one hand that they represent an
educational step forward for the workers and on the other involve all the
defects of markets. In Cpital he makes it clear that a major objection of
his to markets is the fetishism and lack of conscious control over the
economy that they implicate. Finally in the Critique of the Gotha Program,
Marx clearly comes out for a nonmarket first phase of communism.

As to my claim that the basic ideas of exploittaion can be preserved
without reference to a labor theory of value. Marx defines
capitalist exploitation in capital as the extraction of surplus value. In
my paper What's Wrong With Exploitation? I defend this in qualitative
terms. But the key thing is that exploitation in any class society
involves the extraction of a surplus. The claim that that surplus is based
in labor value in capital is not necessary to the claim that capitalism is
exploitative. 

--Justin

On Tue, 11 Feb 1997, Rob Schaap wrote:

> [Synthesising from some of the very helpful responses to my plea, I find
> myself in absolute agreement with Carrol, when he says:]
>  
> 'The first point about the LTV is not its relation or non-relation
> to prices but the fact that it gives a basic grasp on how living
> human activity is allocated under *given historical conditions.*
> Price theory by itself ignores humans as humans.'
> 
> [and feel that this is reinforced by Chris's quote from the big fella:]
> 
> "For example, the simplest economic category, say eg exchange
> value, presupposes population, moreover a population producing
> in specific relations; as well as a certain kind of family, or commune,
> or state, etc. It can never exist other than as an abstract,
> one-sided relation within an already given, concrete, living whole."
> 
> [Justin says something that I find interesting:]
> 
> 'In my view, most of the important insights of Marxist economics that Mark
> wishes to preserve can be not only adequately but better represented
> without appeal to the LTV. These include the existence of exploitation and
> its location in production, the social character of capitalist production
> and its tendency towards instability, and a good many other things.'
> 
> ['The existence of exploitation and its location in production' is, I
> assume, a reference to the 'surplus value' category.  If my take on all
> this is okay, capitalism is that mode of production where each commodity
> produced has congealed in it a component of labour time for which the
> proprietor does not pay (s).  As c is beyond manipulation, only the v/s
> ratio leaves room for profit.  Does profit then equal the rate of
> exploitation?  
> 
> Do we, or do we not, need a theory of value to substantiate a theory of
> exploitation?  
> 
> And of Mark I ask, where does Marx pronounce a phase of market socialism as
> incompatible with his thought?  I ask because I wouldn't like the job of
> assuring potential fellow travellers that our much vaunted revolution will
> be one from capitalism one minute to 'from each according to capacity to
> each according to need' the next.  That doesn't wash with me and it won't
> wash with them.  Even Lenin thought along the lines of transitory market
> socialism (as conditions for education on the human potential for the next
> step), didn't he?
> 
> For my part, I shall undertake (if listers think it necessary) to pursue
> neither market socialism nor the transformation problem beyond this point -
> currently I am with Justin on the principle of market socialism and I am
> with Mark, Carrol and Chris (if I read them right) on there being no
> pressing need to quantify value and mathematicise transformation (which is
> just as well as I can't see either occurring to anyone's satisfaction).  If
> this last bit is logically incompatible, I'd appreciate being put right.
> 
> Ta.
> Rob.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>      --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---





     --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---