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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