Date: Tue, 4 Apr 1995 02:12:48 -0800 From: jones/bhandari <djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu> Subject: value constancy Chris responded to me thusly: >On 3rd April Rakesh wrote > > > In his analysis of what he calls the treadmill of capitalist production, > > Moishe Postone also demonstrates at a high level of abstraction why > > increased labor productivity in itself does not increase wealth in its > > capitalist form--value. > >Hello Rakesh, > >Did not Marx do the same - in that the labour theory of value argues that >the sum total of exchange value - at whatever level of productivity - >cannot be larger than the total number of hours of labour time engaged in >producing commodities according to what is socially necessary with >the prevailing customs and technology? Postone analyzes the constancy of total value in his chapter "The Dialectic of labor and time", which as of yet has not received sustained treatment by any reviewer. At the initial determination of his argument, he writes: "increased productivity results in short-term increases in the amount of value yielded per unit time, which induces the general adoption of the newer methods of producing; however, once these methods become generalized, the value yielded per unit time returns to its older level. In effect, those producers who had not yet adopted these new methods are now COMPELLED to do so. The introduction of still newer methods of increasing productivity bring about further short-term increases in value. One consequence of labor time measure of wealth, then, is that as the temporal constant is redetermined by increased productivity, it induces, in turn, still greater productivity. The result is a directional dynamic..."(290) Note here Postone's own emphasis on compulsion; this is developed into a theory of abstract social domination: "the domination of abstract time as the present, and a necessary process of ongoing transformation." (300) As noted, the passage above is only the most initial determination of his argument. However we may quibble here about the constancy of value to which Chris has drawn attention. Against Postone, Chris and Andrew Kliman, I think that one could argue that productivity increases DO enable the greater production of value: "With increases in productivity and the mass of use values, the mass of means of production (and of subsistence) which can function as means of absorbing labor expands more rapidly than the value of the accumulated capital. The means of production can therefore employ more labor and extort more surplus labour than would otherwise correspond to the accumulation of value as such." (Grossmann, 1991: 146) In short, Postone's treadmill metaphor does not I think fully ground the expansionary nature of capital. Instead of summarizing Postone's very careful argument which I imperfectly understand , I will note here that the political stakes are very significant. While socialism has often been defined as nationalization and planning (as Sweezy has put it), Postone demonstrates how through these forms the law of value can be mediated politically with the exploitation of the working class still intact, as well as the specific value-induced dynamic which both dominates people through temporal abstractions and destroys nature. Interestingly then, far from being invalidated by the fall of the USSR, Marxian value theory can explain the rise, fall and inhumanity of Stalinism as a particular form of state capitalism. (In this regard, I am reading a very serious book by Walter Daum, The Rise and Fall of Stalinism. New York. 1990; last time I heard from Walter on this line he was rabble-rousing for a general strike in the CUNY system.) In other words, Postone is attempting to understand the many forms of domination and exploitation which inhere in commodity production and free communism from Stalinism and all other forms of capitalism. This is a work that can clarify and embolden the communist project, I believe. To be sure, Postone's is not the only critique of Stalinism or the only theory of abstract social domination. More about this later. I hope that the more advanced people on this line who have read Postone contribute to this conversation. I am feeling uncomfortable, a bit of the bull in the chinashop. Rakesh --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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