Date: Fri, 1 Nov 1996 08:48:56 -0800
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Subject: Re: M-TH: Value: theoretical vs.practice concern


I forgot to send this last night...

Juan has yet again cast light on central concerns and concepts of Marx's
revolutionary critique:  necessity and freedom, society, individuals as
supports of capital, capital as an alienated potency, value as
representation. I cannot imagine the reconstruction of Marx's critical
theory without a philosophical elaboration of such concerns, and I thank
Juan for illuminating aspects of Marx's work which have long struck me to
be of the greatest importance (especially after reading Leswek Kolakowski's
ultimately unconvincing criticism of Max Adler's little library of works
in LK's *Main Currents of Marxism, vol II* and TA Jackson's analysis of the
dialectic of socialization in his *Dialectics: The Logic and Practice of
Socialism*).

Let me pose a few obvious questions.

>In it, society allocates its total laboring capacity among the different
>concrete modalities of labor by representing the socially necessary
>abstract labor embodied in the products of the concrete labors carried out
>by the independent private producers, as the capacity of these products for
>relating among themselves in exchange and, therefore, for socially relating
>their producers.

How can society allocate anything, including social labor?  Isn't any
specific allocation of labor the unintended result of millions and millions
of consumer choices by utility-maximizing individuals? Isn't to posit such
powers to such a mythical super-entity as society simply to prepare the
grounds for the the rule of a totalitarian state in the name of this
all-determining "society"?



>This annihilation is, in itself, that of the social classes. It is the
>annihilation of the bourgeoisie, straightway. But, in this same
>annihilation, the proletariat realizes its own necessity, negating itself
>absolutely as such, certainly, to affirm its potencies as human potencies
>of the freely associated individuals; that is to say, of the concrete
>subjects of the human social process of metabolism that consciously
>regulate this process on cognizing, each of them, their own determination
>as such subjects. It is about the supersession of capitalism in the third
>main step in the historical development of human society, i.e.,
>communism/socialism

This would seem to say that the most important way communist society will
differ from contemporary society is simply that conscious planning will
replace the law of value in the organization of advanced, complex and
differentiated production

  While such conscious planning  may (or may not) help smooth out some of
the wrinkles of a market society and may even enable faster and better
accumulation (for example there could be conscious intervention to meet the
equilibrium conditions between  the two departments, that the consumer
goods industries must realize sufficient value to purchase new means of
production for the technical reproduction of the capital stock while the
latter industries must realize sufficient value to purchase the necessary
consumer goods as use values for the reproduction of the labor force), it
does not seem to suggest that a communist society would be qualitatively
different than unplanned, value-regulated production. Once we recognize the
underlying necessity of such balanced exchanges and take conscious actions
to realize them, will we have realized communism?

Rakesh




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