Re: [Marxism] From here to there? The Road Forward

[Paul Cockshott <clyder@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>
> To get from here to there means defining "there?"
>
> "There" is defined differently by almost everyone who has encountered some
> form of socialist ideology. From the standpoint of my political ideology 
> "there"
> is communism or to be more accurate a society without value producing
> classes, or what Marx refers to as the classless society.


This formulation is confused. It conflates value with exchange value.
Value is defined by Marx to be abstract social labour.
This exists in any mode of production
with social production - that is a mode of production where the product
is not directly consumed by the producer.

Exchange value is a historically specific form of representation of
abstract social labour.  It is set of exchange ratios between products
exchanged as items of private property - commodities.

Abstract social labour will exist, indeed be even more prevelant, in
communist society, as more and more aspects of what are currently
domestic labour are socialised. But commodity production will not
exist.

Marx's formulation, following Owen, was that in the first phase
of communism labour time would still regulate distribution - the
famous system of labour vouchers he spoke of in Critique of the
Gotha Programme.

Waistline has repeatedly said that we are reaching the end of
the period of value production, this is a provocative and original
insight, but I think he overstates the case. Where he is right
is in certain branches of activity associated with the information
economy. Here the reproduction cost of information tends to zero
and commodity relations can only be maintained with difficulty using
copyright legislation. In this instance the forces of production
militate against commodity production. The LInux phenomenon is also
an instance of the nascent communism of information technology.

However, for very many areas of activity direct human labour remains
essential, and will remain so for a long period until artificial
intelligence is much advanced. Thus whilst one can foresee as an
abstract possiblility an economy run entirely by robots that is still
some way off.

Secondly one should not be too sanguine that this would necessarily
be incompatible with the reproduction of capitalism. There are certain
abstract models of capitalism based on Sraffa's work with allow for
commodity production to continue in a fully robotised economy.




> Value is NOT a social relations that assumes a material form in the process of
> production. Value is NOT materialized labor because laboring is not an
> abstract process but an assertion of muscle and blood. Value is not price or 
> money.
> Value is the amount of socially necessary labor embodied - that goes into,
> commodities. The socially necessary amount of labor in commodities changes 
> with
> the development of the material power of production.  With the injection into
> the production process of a qualitatively different production logic, the
> commodity form - the value relations, begins decay.
>


I think this is over optimistic. Currently commodity prices are 95%
determined
by labour input, I and others have published a number of econometric
papers showing
this.


> Rather my vision and advocacy is for communism - distribution of all social
> necessary needs of humanity based on a common sense understanding of needs at
> this juncture of society and our existing state of development of production.
>

This implies generalised rationing. I prefer Marx's proposal for the
use of labour vouchers.

However I think that your vision has much to reckomend it as being
susceptible
to the formation of good popular propaganda, whatever differences I may
have with you regarding the current obsolescence of labour time in
determining
exchange value.

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