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
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005