File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-03-25.232, message 57


Date: Mon, 24 Mar 1997 00:30:13 -0500 (EST)
From: Paul Zarembka <zarembka-AT-acsu.buffalo.edu>
Subject: M-I: Albania and state capitalism


Dave, 

You write "Paul asks for my definition of the LOV.
Shane comes up with a definition from Marx that I won't quibble with.
It states that the LOV is the means by which social labour is
allocated under capitalism. It is specific to capitalism, since VALUE
is a form specific to capitalism. For the LOV to operate as the
mechanism of allocation of social labour, value as abstract labour
presupposes labour-power as a commodity which a use-value and
exchange value, its use-value being its capacity to satisfy the need
of capital to extract surplus-value.

"As I understand bureaucratic planning in the SU, the LOV was not the
mechanism of allocation of social labour,  planning was.  Production
was of use-values not exchange-values. The fact that planning was
inefficient and wasteful [by the standards of a healthy workers plan]
and was augmented by "incentives" to labour and management etc
does not change this. The prices attached to goods did not gravitate
around "value" as abstract labour,  since no extraction of value in
exchange was possible.  Prices in fact were set by the bureaucracy
and did not represent "socially necessary labour time" but centrally
determined allocative priorities...."

Your post goes on and I'll have to have more time to absorb it, but the
above strikes me as something OTHER THAN the most important element of the
law of value (Marx used this phrase rarely, by the way).  It is NOT so
much about allocating production among alternative products as about
demonstrating that capitalism is a system of extracting surplus value out
of workers by paying them the exchange value of their labor power which
has no connection to their use value (the number of hours they can work in
a day for capital).  So, if stat-cap people can argue that labor was
"abstract" and labor power was being sold at its exchange value but less
than the working day, surplus value arises and capitalism exists.  In
other words, from my point of view, you are asking the wrong question and
thus coming up with the wrong answer.

The allocation-of-production approach you seem to  favor is rather the
concern of economists, bourgeois or petty-bourgeois (hey, I'm not trying
to label you!) and really diverts attention from class issues than focuses
attention on class issues.

I think this is enough of a reaction for the moment.  We'll see how it
moves forward. Walter's intervention, of course, will be connected.

Paul Z.

*************************************************************************
Paul Zarembka, supporting the  RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY  Web site at
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka,  and using OS/2 Warp.
*************************************************************************




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