[PEN-L:2394] Re: The V-word

[blairs@xxxxxxxxxxx (Blair Sandler)]

At 10:02 AM 1/17/96, James Devine wrote:

>I think the Marxian "meta-economic vision" or "problematic" or
>whatever you want to call it almost automatically implies that the
>concept of "socially necessary abstract labor time" (i.e., value)
>is central to the political economy, helping us to address the
>questions of the sort that Alan mentions.
>
> ...
>
>I am pushed to ask: "yardstick for what?"  As far as I can tell,
>Marx never used value as a _moral_ yardstick, at least not
>measuring his own morality; "value theory" is not primarily a
>normative theory. Obviously, for a normative theory as for a
>positive theory, human society's impact on nature (and nature's
>impact on humanity) is crucial.
>
>My understanding is of "value theory" that, at a relatively high
>level of abstraction, Marx was examining the political economy as
>a societal division of labor, a process of people creating their
>own history by producing goods and services, of course without
>conscious central planning. Specifically, he focused on
>commodity-producing society, including capitalism. In such a
>context, value represents a "yardstick": in each production
>process, workers contribute a certain amount of something to the
>"societal factory." The actual value of that something depends on
>the unconscious decision of society (or rather the unintended
>consequence of many conscious decisions).


1) Jim is certainly right about labor and nature: Marx was clear that labor
is NOT the source of all wealth, that nature is necessary as well (this
much should be obvious and was to Marx).

2) I also agree with Jim on the importance of SNALT (socially necessary
abstract labor time): my dissertation argues that the key to understanding
corporate responses to environmentalism depends on grasping the social
constitution of SNALT (yes this is redundant but aparently requires
emphasis) by culture, nature, politics and economics. This in turn
constitutes particular concrete labor time as productive or unproductive.

Blair