Date: Mon, 24 Nov 1997 06:44:17 -0500 (EST) From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us> Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: Surplus value, Marx and science Hugh writes a longish message, mainly consisting in quotes from the Manifesto which (a) all of us here have damn near memorized and (b) anyway ready to hand. He mainpoint is that I am an antiscientific victim of Stalinism because I deny that Marx basded hi whole theory on the contradiction between the forces and relations of production. I am quite aware that there is a strain in Marx's thought that emphasizes that line of argument. But there are other strains with which the forces/relations or fettering line sits quite unhappily, most notably the proposition that the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle. For reasons that I explained in some detail, between these views I prefer to resolve the contractions in favor of the second. Doing so means of course saying that Marx was wrong about some things he said. Unlike Hugh, I am happy to do this, as you all know. I suggested that I saw no sign of fettering in capitalism. Hugh thinks that's absurd. He suggests by way of counterexample, if I understand the point of his quote from the Manifesto correctly, that crises are manifestations of fettering. I think this is a misunderstanding of what fettering must mean. We can all agree, Hugh and I and each of our Marxes, that capitalism does not use the forces it creates in a rational manner, at least from the perspective of the working class. But the idea of the relations fettering the forces has to mean, if it has a more definite content than just the proposition that capitalism is irrational, something like this: at some point in the history of a mode of production, the relations cease to become optimal for the development of the forces, in the sense that greater forces could be creatred under a different set of relations. "Greater" here must mean something like more productive or efficient, in the sense of producing more output per unit labor (or other, but for Marx certainly labor) input. I submit that we are not in any such situation in contemporary or historical capitalism. We might be, if crises grew so severe or irremediable that new investment dried up and innovation trickled off. It might have looked that way in 1932, after 50 or 60 years of increasingly severe panics and crises. But from our vantage point 60 years on, it doesn't look like that atl all, even taking into account the earlier periood of crises. On the whole,innovation has proceeded at an unimaginbaly rapid pace. Moreover, the notion of fettering is comparative. The forces are fettering by one set of relations only if they are promoted by a feasibale alternative optimal set. Again in 1932 it might have seemed that that was the case. The capitalist west was in the basement and the Soviet Union seemed to many to be a real alternative that was economically superior. That turned out to be wrong. So if we are to make out a claim that capitalist realtions fetter the forces, we now need detailed, precise and specific argument that socialist relations would be better. At the very least we need a reply to Moore's arguments. I am actually in a better position to maintain the fettering thesis than Hugh is, because I have a reasonably specific alternative model (Schweickart's market socialism) that avoids the problems that Moore correctly advances against Marx's planning model. But I think that fettering is the wrong way to go anyway because I think that the hypothetical promise of doing better cannot cause or motivate revolutionary change unless people think they are doing badly enough. In the area of the developmentof the productive forces, I cannot see that anyone has complaints about capitalism jus now. Of course workers and farmers might wish the forces were being developed _differently_, in ways that promote their interests rather than those of the bosses. See here David Noble's work on numerically controlled machine technology, for example. But as far as sheer development and increased effiency goes, capitalism is good enough even if we could, as I think, do better. Which means we need an alternative motor for revolutionary change. Unlike Hugh's idealism, on which workers revolt because of the unspecified promise that an undescribed nonmarket system will promote greater productivity, I propose the materialist theory that worker's concrete experience of increased exploitation will provoke resistance and that this may, in proper circumstances, lead to revplutionary organization to get rid of exploitation. I agree with Hugh, I think, that Marx does hold, or anyway use, the labor content rather than the "monetary" version of the LTV. I disagree that formal rigor is some sort of bourgeois illusion. This is an absurd line advocated by those Marxists who are too lazy to learn math and think they can handle quantitative analysis without it. C'mon, guys, it's work, but it's not so hard. Well, it is hard work, but if you can understand Hegel you can learn enough calculus to follow modern economic theory. --Justin --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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