File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/marxism_25Jul.94, message 21


Date: Tue, 26 Jul 94 19:45:02 MDT
From: Hans Ehrbar <ehrbar-AT-econ.utah.edu>
Subject: Re: Some theses on Marx 




Here is  my response to Jonathan Beasley Murray's points IIIa and IIIb:

Jon wrote that the labor theory of value is a "banality in that

Jon> IIIa.	as it expresses a transhistorical proposition (valid
Jon> from slavery to the present day), this knowledge cannot situate
Jon> us or enable us to understand society in any detail.

Marx sees a big difference between the production of surplus value and
earlier forms of exploitation, in which the labor of the immediate
producer was expropriated as well, but this expropriation usually was
an expropriation of concrete, not abstract labor.  In other words, the
laborer was commanded to produce very specific things which were then
taken away from him.  In capitalism, any production counts as long as
it results in something for which there is a market.  It is the
accumulation of abstract, monetized wealth.


Jon> IIIb.	this knowledge carries no political valence--and if
Jon> anything is of more practical use to the bourgeois political
Jon> observer (a Machiavellian Adam Smith) than to one wishing to
Jon> change this state of affairs.

I agree with you that the knowledge that exploitation always consists
in making the direct producer work for others will not get us very
far, it is one of the empty transhistorical abstractions Marx talks
about in the Introduction to the Grundrisse.

But if you accept my argument that Marx's labor theory of value means
something more specific, then you say yourself in point IV below,
this specific knowledge is indeed relevant.  My claim is that it is
not only relevant to know that the wage relation mystifies
exploitation, but it is already relevant to know that value is
abstract labor.

Abstract wealth is a contradiction in terms: it is empoverished wealth
because it is one-dimensional wealth, it is quantifiable wealth.
Wealth protests against this restriction by doing the only thing
something that is restricted to a quantity can do, namely, by
increasing its magnitude.  Marx discussed these immanent
contradictions of abstract wealth in his very funny treatment of the
miser in Chapter 3 of Capital, Vintage edition 229--231, or at more
length in the corresponding passage in A Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy, and this is then taken up in Capital, Chapter 4,
Vintage edition p. 255 and the few pages preceding it.  More (and in my
view a better treatment) is also in
Grundrisse, Vintage edition pp. 270/71.

Under capitalism this drive immanent in abstract wealth for
self-expansion finds a less paradoxical outlet than that of the miser,
namely, the purchase of labor power.  In my view, the capitalist is
not the only one who stands under the spell of the logic of abstract
wealth. All of us who draw, from the monetary constraints we
continually have to grapple with, the conclusion that ``making''
_more_ money (instead of a rational allocation and distribution which
dispenses with money) is the solution, become by this myopia the
vehicles of accumulation.  The need for capital to accumulate is
therefore very deeply entrenched in capitalist society.  It is a social
tendency which we all contribute to and which we do not master, and
the effects of which may destroy us all.

This leads to the following alternative, more general response your
point IIIb, and here I am not as alone as with the preceding argument:
Many Marxists hold that nowadays any correct knowledge
about society is emancipatory.  The reason is simple: We want to
replace capitalist exploitation not by a different kind of
exploitation but by a state of affairs in which individuals have
better control over the social context of which they are a part and
for this they need to understand society.

Hans G. Ehrbar                                    ehrbar-AT-econ.utah.edu
Economics Department, 308 BuC                     (801) 581 7797
University of Utah                                (801) 581 7481
Salt Lake City    UT 84112-1107                   (801) 585 5649 (FAX)

   

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