File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/94-07-31.000, message 151


Date: 28 Jul 94 00:55:52
From: wpc-AT-clyder.gn.apc.org (Paul Cockshott)
Subject: Labour Value again



Chris wrote:
>     In my presentation of the Austrian approach, I took
>pains to point out that while Boehm-Bawerk's argument struck
>at the very LOGIC of the LTV, it was a mistake to keep
>drawing a distinction, as Paul does, between LOGIC and
>EMPIRICAL REALITY.  The dialectical approach tell us, IF
>ANYTHING, that there is something deeply wrong with such
>dualistic thinking.  And yet Paul continues to bifurcate
>social life in such a manner.

Since Peano, logics have been recognised as formal systems
which provide rules for the rewriting of symbol strings.
As such there is a potentially infinite set of logics,
certain of which prove to be useful boolean, predicate and
some temporal logics, etc. They are however only useful within
very tightly defined domains and even within these have
potential ambiguities. Their domain of application does not
extend to arguments in natural language because of the notorious
ambiguities of parsing and semantics of natural language.

Any attempt to apply a logic to an extended argument in natural
language is liable to be inconclusive because of these semantic
difficulties. When the subject matter is as socially contentious
as the theory of value, the logical content of the argument
becomes secondary to plays on the meanings of words, which in
turn are likely to be influenced by different class perceptions.

>     .... in the subjective theory, prices establish
>OBJECTIVE parameters; they transmit OBJECTIVE information on
>relative scarcities.  But this information is presented to
>market participants who relate such knowledge to their own
>contexts.  This context is both social and individual.  Like
>hermeneutical texts, prices REVEAL different things to
>different people RELATIVE to their specific contexts.  The
>prices HAVE MEANING because they not only relate to these
>contexts, but are GENERATED by the context itself, i.e., by
>the SOCIAL interactions of the participants.

Prices do encode information, probably about 10 bits of information
per raw price. To decode this information, humans or any
other decoder must be appropriately structured. The actions that
the recievers of prices take will obviously vary according to their
circumstances - whether a person decides that a new pair of
shoes is too expensive to buy or cheap enough, depends on how
much money they have. But the question at issue is what the
objective information encoded in prices is. The labour theory
of value says that this objective information is how much labour
went into producing the thing. This is born out by statistical
tests on collections of actual prices. The proposition that these
prices mean different things to different people may be true 
but does not alter the objective content of the information.
It thus in no way challenges the LTV

The next passage by Chris is a good example of the hazards
of applying logic to natural language:
>     The status of the subjectivist theory is NO LESS UN-
>empirical than the spurious notions of "socially necessary"
>labor time which are DEFINED as "socially necessary" BY THE
>THEORIST.  What is "socially necessary" to me MAY NOT be
>"socially necessary" to another person.

If we perform the the plausible transformations
NO LESS -> MORE
MORE UN- -> LESS
we get a first sentence that starts 'The status of the subjectivist
theory is LESS empirical than the spurious notions of "socially
necessary" labour...' Perhaps this is what Chris meant to say
but it seems inconsistent with the general tone of his contribution.

But the labour theory of value does not say that it is up to theorists
to estimate the social necessity of labour. This is done through
the real process of evolution of the economy. New technologies reduce
the labour that is socially necessary to make computers for example,
without this process requiring any intervention by economic theorists.

Chris quotes Marx correctly to the effect that the result of
a labour process exists previously in the imaginination of
the labourer. This may be true for some forms of handicraft
production, but it is not true for modern industry. Here work
is often broken down into small sub-tasks, many of which are
automated. Marx justifies his statement with a fable about
the architect and the bee, which is a blatant abstraction from
social reality. Architects dont build things, building workers do,
and the building does not exist in their imagination before they start.
Work does require attention, but that does not make actually
existing social labour 'free conscious activity'. For most of
history and much of humanity it has been anything but free.


>My statement about a
>"difference in kind" between the INVENTOR and the "NUTS-AND-
>BOLTS" tightener on the assembly line did not carry with it
>any moral judgment about the relative value of either; it was
>a mere observation that the inventor's "skills" or "know how"
>could not be explained as - or reduced to - a simple
>aggregate of "nut and bolt" tightening.  10,000 turns on nuts
>and bolts does not produce Henry Ford.

The 'INVENTOR' or Henry Ford, in this context are fabulous beasts.
The real contrast is between a worker in the design department
and a worker in the body shop or engine plant. The concrete labour
of these workers differs, they operate different machines, and
produce different immediate products, CAD plots versus actual
components. But the concrete labour of the body shop worker differs
too from that of the farmer, 10000 turns of a screw will not grow
an ear of wheat. Abstract socially necessary labour abstracts
from these concrete differences. 

Society forms groups of individuals to conform to the needs of
production. It has a certain pool of people available, its fundamental
productive resource which may be directed into different concrete
activities. Labour is abstract social labour to the extent that
it can potentially be redeployed between different concrete activities.
These require training, and to that extent, the costs of training
constitute a necessary social cost of forming different trades.
As Smith said 'talents can seldom be acquired but in consequence
of long application, and the superior value of their produce, may
frequently be no more than reasonable compensation for the time
and labour which must be spent acquiring them'. 

>     The labor theory AS A THEORY OF RELATIVE PRICES should
>be abandonned NOT because it is a "levelers manifesto," but
>because it is invalid.  You might wish to entertain the
>theory as a "moral-philosophical" one, as Doug Henwood
>suggests, but it simply doesn't work as a theory of relative
>prices.

There you go again. I provided evidence that it does work
as a theory of relative prices for the UK economy. Petrovik 
provides equally strong evidence that it worked for the
Jugoslav economy and Ochoa, in a very thorough paper 
shows that it works for the US economy for all years for
which data is available.
You are simply ignoring the evidence.

>     Finally, while I sympathize with charges of "class
>bias," AND DON'T TAKE THESE CHARGES LIGHTLY, I must remind
>Paul that such charges should be levelled with all due care.

the political and class positions taken up by the Austrian
school against  the proletarian movement are clear enough.
My argument is that they have no redeeming scientific merit,
being nothing more than propaganda against communism.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Cockshott , 		        
Phone: 041 637 2927		wpc-AT-clyder.gn.apc.org
				wpc-AT-cs.strath.ac.uk


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