Re: AUT: still more questions

[chris wright <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

One quick note,
>
> Your comments on the efficiency of the specific capitalist firms are helpful
> I think, as they bring the issue back to Value as related to socially
> necessary labor time - a specific firm may only be getting $480 for what
> others are getting $500 for (that's really clumsy, I apologize, what I mean
> is that different surpluses may be derived by different capitalists, causing
> different rates of profit and capitalization), but if everyone's getting
> $480 or the average take is that much then firm getting that much is okay
> (until others speed up paces of work or lengthen work time in order to get
> more surplus and capitalize faster).

Of course its Stan.  Doh.  You need to have Jen reading with you guys,
she is much more careful than Stan on this.

Here's the thing.  I think you can have a whole industry which is
selling 'below value' from the point of view of socially necessary labor
time.  This has to do with average rates of exploitation (and in a way
begins to get you into Vol. 3, which I have only read a small portion
of.  In fact, even though I have Vol. 2 two or three times, I am quite
certain I do not get that either.)  That is how you end up with moribund
industries.  That is usually determined on the basis of a combination of
issues: relation of constant to variable capital (very labor intensive
industries are usually less productive per hour of labor than heavily
mechanized industries);the ability to push the workers harder and
faster, that is, pure speed up, which was a common feature of the auto
industry in the US in the 1980's; the level of wages (the lower the
wage, the less V relative to S even if productivity remains constant or
sometmes even if it drops), which includes benefits, vacation time, sick
time, etc.;and so on.

However, the point is that no one company or even industry is a basis
for Marx's notion of socially necessary labor time, although you can see
it play out within a business, across an indsutry or nationally and
internationaly.  What constitutes socially necessary is determined at at
least the national level, and more than ever at the international
level.  At least, that is certainly the case today in a way that it was
not 100 years ago.  There is a lot of debate on whether or not the
'socially necessary' is determined on a world basis now.  I am not up on
all of those arguments.  Gugliemo Carchedi, a councilist last time I
checked, has written some very technical stuff on this addressing some
of this.  Mattick may have as well, though I am less familiar with
Mattick's work.  Carchedi's book from 1986, I think, takes up this
problem relative to people like Ernest Mandel and other MPEs.

In the end, however, the intent is not to generate accurate numbers so
that one could actually analyze 'the economy' in this way.  Value may
quantify human social relations, stripping them of quality, and making
them measurable in some sense, but that does not mean that Value is some
measurable thing in that way (the way I think Stan wants.)  Capital and
its minions do not sit around measuring the rate of exploitation or
talking in terms of Value.  They talk in terms of inputs and outputs,
and capitalization and other bourgeois economic terms, none of which
correspond to Marx's categories exactly.  Nor should they, since Marx is
trying to show that these categories are fluid, that they are not 'in
themselves' but the forms taken by, the mode of existence of,
contradictory, antagonistic social relations.  IMO, that is why Marx
calls these relations Verrukt, meaning crazy or insane, roughly.

As such, I think that those relations are beyond measure already.  Its
part of my gripe with Negri: he treats value just like Stan does.  There
is no way to get an accurate measure of V or S (yes, that's Surplus
Value, sorry for not noting that) or their relative weight.  Nor is that
the point.  It is not what Marx was looking for.  Rather, it was to show
that there is no value without exploitation, that valorization requires
taking from the workers' hide, that capital as auto-valorizing value, is
only such by turning labor into capital, by turning human activity into
a commodity.  Even further, to show that capital is nothing other than
our own practice objectified as something beyond our control, which
rules over us.

Cheers,
Chris



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