Date: Thu, 12 Mar 1998 17:40:43 +0100
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-TH: Re: Value and gambling


BodySack writes:

>Sorry, old top, but you've been reading too much Marx.

Impossible. Too little.

>We no longer live in a world of cotton mills and can factories.

It's a world of large-scale manufacturing, regardless.

>When a factory costs a billion dollars before it produces a single memory
>chip, the
>capitalist system is laying out large bucks *in advance* of sales.

So what's new? Why the pressure to invest? Where does the necessary capital
for investment come from?


>The "abstract labor"  in that factory comes to nothing if your technology
>becomes outdated before you amortize the cost.

It's easier if you think  of it as socially necessary labour. Of course it
comes to nothing if you can't sell the stuff it makes. It's an abortive
investment. Win a few. lose a few. What's new?

>I certainly don't think that capitalists who lose money are exploited by
>workers.  >What it means however is that the "abstract value" argument,
>with its inherent
>determinism, is wrong.

Pure assertion. The factory is part of a very large system. Capitalism
survives like an organism, if sufficient of its cells function the way they
have to. If some cells die, well partly it's normal and planned for --
they've become worn out, and die to make way for new ones -- and partly
it's unplanned-for damage, like losing a finger or a toe. The consequences
of the damage depend on the importance of the organ lost and the ease with
which it can be regrown. Insurance and economic rescue packages are the
economic equivalent of medicine and hospitals for capital.

Not all investment is forced to make maximum returns all the time for the
law of  value to assert itself or for capitalism to survive.

>The relationship between labor value and use value is one of influencing the
>odds - constraining the probabilities. Look, whenever you have two things
>that are clearly related but just as clearly independent, it has to be a
>probabilistic relationship.  It's as simple as that.

Like I said, working out the actual value of something is done after the
event. The whole of capitalism proceeds on the basis of more or less
well-founded guesses at to what will be the socially necessary labour time
involved in the production of a commodity. But these guesses are only
confirmed after the bets have been made and the horses have run the race.

Body's betting is a natural metaphor for a bourgeois view of the world.
Lukacs makes a big thing of this in his analysis of the gambling aspects of
bourgeois literature.

It encourages fetishism, superstition and fixing the odds. It also replaces
the "use-value" fun of the race with the abstract exchange-value aspect of
universal social power that money represents, eternally empty and
insatiable, the ravenous hunger of a vampire that will never be satisfied
however much blood is sucked from the warm bodies of the living.


Cheers,

Hugh




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