File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/marxism_25Jul.94, message 26


Date: Tue, 26 Jul 1994 20:52:18 +0700
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (donna jones)
Subject: Labor, surplus value and catastrophism


I lost a longer post.  I will only indicate what I argued--more precisely,
the arguments of others I recapitulated. I am still near the very beginning
of that difficult road to science.

1. against Keen's argument that dead labor can create value. In his
Frontiers of Political Economy, G Carchedi calls this the fetish of dead
labor.  He works at the same level of abstraction that Marx did to show, on
the basis of the law of value, how equal capitals with different organic
compositions of capital could realize (tendentially) an average rate of
profit.  Since the equalization of profit rates is  a tendency (of a
particular kind that Carchedi describes), some individual capitals are
always operating above any average rate of profit.  That success is
sometimes attributed to their higher capital intensity.  Again by working
at an abstract level, Carchedi shows that this success involves a
redistribution of value.  I found this to be one of the most important
findings of Carchedi's rigorous investigation, though he does not seem to
emphasize it.  The fetish of fixed capital or dead labor is very much
alive, I believe--especially in the imperialist countries.

2. There is an excellent piece by Kay in Elson, ed.1979. Value.  He
attempts to bring out and criticize the very notions of logic and
contradiction inherent in Boehm-Bawerk's critique.  Kay's reasoning is too
supple for me to summarize.  He also frees the concept of abstract labor
from any common physiological standard.
I believe that clarification of the concept pf abstract  also enables one
to understand Marx's reduction of skilled to unskilled labor.  On the
latter, Carchedi has a discussion of it as a process; he introduces the
concept of value required to better understand that process. William J
Blake's 1939 rejoinder to the Austrians is still interesting reading.

3. Is the environmentalist critique of capitalism similar to Ricardo's fear
of soil depletion and rent hikes?  is the limit to capital the rebellion of
nature, or the revolution of wage-slaves? Of course Marx deals eloquently
with the reality of soil depletion in volume I. A side question: does
environmentalism in the imperialist countries share with big capital an
interest in relocating to the neo-colonial countries certain
environmentally disastrous activity, which requires a devalued dollar to
remain profitable on the world market--that devaluation being at the
expense of certain high-value activities in the first world: speciality
microchips, biotech, advanced machinery of all kinds. Has environmentalism
been theorized at the level of the concrete totality? Such establishment
biggies such as Gilder, Wriston have long complained that the dollar is
being excessively devalued to the advantage of the domestic timber, mining,
textile industries--incidentally, considered by many environmentalists to
be the big polluters.  The Japanese strategy of relocation of dirty
activity to its neo-colonies has always been touted as a way of cleaning up
Japan

4. Grossmann never argued that capitalism would simply collapse. This is
very clear in his 1943 writings and in his concluding chapter to his magnum
opus, inexcusably left out of the translation.  Of course there are always
ways out of crisis.  Marx and Grossmann recognize this.  But for whom and
at what price (greater monopolization on a global scale and greater surplus
populations on the same scale, ever more brutal consumption of human life
in the produciton process, fascism and war)?  There is no way out for
associated humanity, and the communist never puts the interest of any
fraction of the working class above the whole.  If communism has any
morality, this must be at the core.  

5. At the same time, Grossmann was carrying out the old polemic against
voluntarism, which has now found theoretical expression in the so-called
class struggle school.  In  Marx's Theory of Scientific Knowledge, Patrick
Murray brilliantly elucidates Marx's critique of the subjectivism of Left
Hegelians--the "nexus of idolatry, transcedence,
conservatism-subjectivism". (murray's book is about much more than this).
The overthrow of capitalism by a class-conscious proletariat requires
objective conditions.  (Trotter brilliantly laid out so many important
questions!) The failure to assent to that can have many consequences:
impatience in the form of terrorism, nihilism, contempt for the working
class.  A mind impatient for action is a dangerous thing.  Sometimes
pathetic too--it can convince itself that any movement--or the action then
possible--is red: running stoplights and speeding, doing destructive drugs,
sending viruses through information networks, simply refusing to work, etc.
(Actual examples of defiance I have heard anarcho-class struggle types brag
about). Everything then becomes red but organized class struggle to achieve
a classless society.

6. The necessity of imperialism and nationalist struggles to achieve
supremacy on the world market to a late capitalism has been questioned by
Tilla Siegel in her book translated in the International Journal of
Sociology in 1984.  I say this by way of self-criticism, as I had argued
against the minimization of imperialism as counter-tendency to breakdown
tendencies.  It is unfortunate however that Grossmann's discussion of US
oil "diplomacy" and dollar diplomacy are basically left out--though his
discussion of the imperialist rentier state is intact.
d jones


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005