Date: Fri, 13 Mar 1998 13:44:32 +0100
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-TH: Re: Value and gambling


BodySack serves up a kaleidoscopic jumble!

>"Socially necessary labor time" is a conclusion that begs the question.
>It is a
>dodge.

No. Labour that's not socially necessary is wasted, if it's less efficient,
and cause for surplus profits if it's more efficient. It's no dodge to make
average socially necessary labour time the measure of value.


>Strict LTV adherents are claiming that labor time, as such,
>creates value.

This is unclear. Marx claimed that socially necessary labour time creates
value, and that it's dimensions are revealed if and only if the good is
sold. No socially necessary labour time, no value. No sale, no value. Some
would-be LTV-ers such as Siddarth C claim that value is created even if the
good isn't sold. This is nonsense, as I've said before.

>Labor time is clearly, inarguably
>independent from the value of a given good.  All the "socially necessary"
>in the world is not going to get you around that fact.

The value of a given good is determined by the socially necessary labour
time embodied in it. Marx was right. Its price varies from this value due
to pressures such as competition and its consequence the average rate of
profit, supply and demand, monopoly etc, but this doesn't affect the value.
What price does is skew the distribution of value through the economy in
favour of high-tech low-labour capitals, creating what I've referred to as
the Value Pump.

>The real problem that strict LTVism creates is a belief that "If
>we plan it, it will work."

Planning is not divine decree. Only the idiocy of Stalinism (or IBM!) could
lead anyone to think that. Sensible planning takes reality into account, in
this case the amount of labour that it is reasonable to expect is necessary
given socially average effort and skill. If its estimates are based on good
information and rapid accurate feedback, then it will work more often than
not.

>or "If we produce it, they will consume."

This again is based on the crudest of Stalinist caricatures of supply by
decree.

>It creates an attitude that revolution is sufficient
>to engender socialism.  It isn't.

No Marxist, or Bolshevik-Leninist ever said it was. It's necessary, but not
sufficient.

(Body is using arguments against the worst stupidities of Stalinism to
argue against October here.)

>Socialism, therefore, has to develop a
>method *beyond* revolution to compensate for economic risk, allow
>independent production decisions and resolve inevitably conflicting
>interests.

So what's new? Read The New Economics by Preobrazhensky, or the New Course
by Trotsky or any of Lenin's stuff on the post-civil-war economic situation
in the Soviet Union. Socialist revolution is the act of overturning
bourgeois property relations by expropriating the bourgeoisie and setting
up a dictatorship of the proletariat. Once this is done, new tasks arise.


>Currently it does not. While that failure may not in itself
>have relegated Marxism to the status of near irrelevance in the modern
>political world, it hasn't helped.

Stalinism didn't. Stalinism isn't socialism. It isn't Marxism either, which
is why Marxism has not been relegated to irrelevance but has instead shown
itself more and more irresistible as the only possible framework of
explanation for current historical developments, ie the current stage of
the class struggle.


>Freeing abstract labor won't help anyone.

Freeing labour from being tied to the wage-slave relationship and the
compulsive dependency of labour-power on selling itself to capital will
help every worker and poor person in the world.


>Giving the workers ownership of the means of produiction will.

That's what the workers' state is. Generalized ownership of the means of
production by all citizens by way of their representatives (freely elected
and recallable, if the state isn't degenerated or deformed).

>Capitalists are not stealing surplus value.

This is pure sophistry.

>Profit is a perquisite.

It depends on ownership, and the appropriation of the produce of labour by
such ownership. This is hardly a perk, it's the be-all and end-all of the
system.


>What they are stealing is the power of ownership. Each worker has a right to
>that power.

No. The working class has the right to overthrow the capitalist monopoly of
the means of production. It's a class question not an individual question.
By this overthrow each worker will become a citizen of the new state, and
as such will have an immediate and inalienable part in the means of
production and distribution, by right.


Cheers,

Hugh




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