Re: Economics of Communist Society

[LPA <blissett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>I thought this was a very lucid and helpful comment, but it brings to light
>my frustration with this list -- the lack of any content related to either
>the contributions of indigenous societies or the insights of
>environmentalists.  the treatment of the Zapatistas on this list tends to
>sharply discount any of the aspects of their politics and critique based on
>the pre-Colombian character of the Mayan and other indigenous peoples of
>Mexico.

Have you come across Lorainne Stobbart's 'Utopia: Fact or Fiction" (Alan
Sutton,1992), where she argues that More's Utopia was based on sailors'
accounts of Mayan society. Her discussion of this involves comparing the
social structure of Utopia and Mayan society particularly in the Yucutan
peninisular. She discusses how there was universal education,
redistribution of surplus amongst the city states, free distribution of
city produced goods amongst the rural population, slavery for criminals,
and prisoners of war. Although More was obviously influenced by Plato in
his book, she argues a good point and illustrates pre-Colombian society
very well.

 And all this discussion of pricing and labor time has not
>given an ounce of consideration to what the capitalist economists refer to
>as "externalities"  the costs to the planet, the environment, air , water,
>the genome, etc etc of doing "business."

I while ago Bob argued that there would be no scarcity in communism, or if
so only in an insignificant way. While generally true, I am worried that
there is an important area where increasing scarcity today will noy be
readily overcome i.e. water. Even in Britain, a country renowned for its
rain, water restrictions are being applied, whereas its political
implications are well known in California and Palestine.


At a theoretical level one text I've come across attempting to deal with
these "externalities" is Asger Jorn's 'Critique of Political Economy' in
that he puts the use object into the economic equation, although not on the
basis of ecological concern:

"Marx frequently said that the content of value was work and added that the
true form is the form of the content. He said: "We now know the substance
of value, it is labour." Thus, according to Marx, substance and content are
identical. But he also said that use value is the substance of (exchange)
value and nevertheless explained that "Labour is therefore not the only
source of material wealth, i.e. of the use values it produces. [As William
Petty says] labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its
mother." For use value to become exchange value, it is therefore necessary
to eliminate a magnitude, its terrestrial character, or, if you like, to
repudiate the mother, the true source of its birth. thus the passage from
use value to exchange value can therefore only be acheived by the
devalorisation of an aspect of use value, its material reality."

Thus political economy banishes these 'externalities'.

"We can accept that the use object represents the substance or primary
matter of commodities, but the use object is more than the substance of the
commodity, it is in itself a form of value, devalorised in its conditions
as a commodity but whose value is restored when the exchange process is
over. Once a use object has been bought by a customer, it becomes a use
object once again. This is a necessary for every commodity except money."

"But this whole process even of the creation of use objects is artificial,
invented by man; and the substance of the use object is found in nature.
But nature is no longer substance in itself. It is only substance for the
man-made use object . Nature is not simply a means. It is the first
condition of production. Nature shows itself as natural forms or qualities.
Natural objects must be consumed, destroying their natural form, to produce
use objects, and once consumed and exhausted by mankind they only return to
nature, becoming new natural values, albeit at an inferior level. There is
a consumption of nature prior to all production, and a loss of energy at
each passage from one form to another. This a primary and universal
devalorisation."

"Marx declared that the exchange of commodities implied the change of forms
like this:
Commodity - Money - Commodity
   C      -   M   -     C
But this very exchange necessarily implies these changes of form:
Use object - Commodity - Use object
     U     -    C      -     U
The use of use objects implies these changes of form:
Natural form -   Use Object  - Natural form
     N       -       U       -       N
The whole process neccessary for the creation of capital is thus a cycle of
changes of form which can be written like this:
        N - U - C - M - C - U - N
Only through studying this cycle in all its phases can we get a scientific
view of production and consumption."

This much neglected work has, to my knowledge only been dealt with by
Richard Gombin in 'The Radical tradition (Methuen, 1978). Trendy academics
didn't find it as sexy as Debord's material.

"To treat labour as Quantity, the intensity must be constant. For the
measure of labour to be an hour of labour, all the workers must work at the
same tension; in order that the unit of work represents the same energy,
which is another expression of work. But an hour of human work as the basis
of value leads to the elimination of intensity as a variable in human
labour. This elimination is made by means of machinery which control the
general rythm of production, and constitutes the constant which eliminates
surplus-value. Thus machinery represent inertia and resistance to change in
production. But as the transfer of energy can only be acheived by a fall of
tension, by a change of tension, and as this transfer which gives energy
its value, industrial labour cannot create value: it is without value,
thanks to the constancy of its tension. If one hour of human labour is
identical to another hour of human labour, human labour is without value.
This is the weakness of the marxist labour theory of value, because  as
industrial work is without value, the worker who does it does not represent
a human value superior  to other classes on account of their work. If the
worker possesses such value, it is for other reasons.
        If there is any truth in the marxist labour theory of value, it is
not in labour, but in labour time, or in other words time. Value must be
time not work. For the human being, time is nothing but a succession of
phenomena from a spatially determined place, since space is the order of
coexistence of phenomena in time or process."

After a discussion on the relation between time and space Jorn continues:

"The political goal of marxism is to replace the state with an automatic
and inoffensive administration of all matters pertaining to the common
interest. And then this, in the socialist language, will be managed by an
apparatus through which everyone makes decisions. Robot-statiticians,
guided by public opinion surveys, will calculate according to the desire or
non-desire of the greatest number, and so ensure a perfect and effective
dictatorship of the majority in future society, without any possibility of
trickery, that is to say politicking, the domination of man by man.
        But the fact that this technical administration, which is being
formed across the whole world, eliminates all possibility of political
manouvers, does not however eliminate the state. On the contrary it becomes
the state. It's just that the state is not a political instrument. On the
contrary, it is an instrument to avoid or lessen the damage of politics.
The state is made to establish stability for the ruling class, and this
stability is precisely economic stability. The statesperson does not take
the form of an emperor, a king, a noble or a capitalist. They bear the
lineaments of a "major-domo" of the economy, the bureaucrat, the ideal
model of the robot-statitician.
        The pure state is what we have already described as quality, unity
or the perfect form, form without value, an unchanging constant. This
socialist goal is in striking contradiction with progressive politics of
the working class."

Jorn proceeds to then look at art:

"The invention of money is the basis for "scientific" socialism, and the
supercession of money will be the basis of the supercession of socialist
mechanism. Money is the work of art transformed into a cypher. The
realisation of communism will be the transformation of the work of art into
the totality of daily life."

He then proceeds with a critique of both the 2nd and 3rd International and
offers a resolution which places art at the centre of a communist
resolution:

"Real communism will be a leap into the domain of liberty, of values, of
communication. Artistic value, contrary to utilitarian value (ordinarily
called material value) is the progressive value because it is the
valorisation of mankind itself, through a process of provocation.
Since Marx's day, political economy has shown its weaknesses and its set
backs. A hyper-politics must tend towards the direct realisation of human
nature. The goal of economy would then be the realisation of art. It is a
matter of recognising these goals passionately enough for the masses, in
deciding to strive for these goals, take matters sufficiently in hand. It
is necessary to search for new artistic goals, giving life itself a new
interest; opening humanity to the joy of even better situations. The need
and absence of such perspectives has constituited the back drop of the
general mediocrity which has plagued our times. Hitherto there have never
been any ideas which have comanded the revolutionary power of marxism; nor
which have lost their spirit so quickly."

Whilst appreciating what Jorn was trying to do,, I feel his use of 'Art' as
the category with which to resolve the weakness of Marx's abstraction
doomed to failure. On the one hand we can search in language and we shall
only find abstractions because that is the way language works, and in that
sense his remarks should be seen in relation to the activities of the
Situation International for whom he wrote this text in 1960. But at a more
specific level, as 'art' arrives precisely with the bourgeoisie, when the
aesthetic dominates the content, as opposed to the subsumption of
representation under piety
 of religious worship during feudalism, we can see that it is intimately
tied up with the commodification of the 'creativity'. This is clearly not
what Jorn wants to tackle, but I'm afraid he's still lumbered with it.

I'm afraid this has dragged on quite a lot, and perhaps quoting from a
translation of a hard to find text should be superceded by finishing the
translation and putting it on a website.


ttfn


Leutha Blissett

PS: The edition of which I have a photocopy was published "by the Unitary
International on the occasion of Asger Jorn's exhibition 'The Luxury of
Aesthesia'". Does anyone know who these people were?






http://www.unpopular.demon.co.uk
http://www.dsnet.it/qwerg/blissett/bliss0.htm
http://www.skatta.demon.co.uk
http://www.geocities.com/~johngray




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