Re: Re: US men working 4 hours a week longer II

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 13:51 02/01/01 -0800, you wrote:
> Gene Coyle wrote:
>
> >Tom, I think you are on to something here.  Tell us more.
>
> I wish I knew more and/or knew how to tell it. The point about productivity
> transcending labour input comes from the famous 10 pages in the Grundrisse
> (pp. 704-714),


This is exciting, and dangerous.

Could I ask you please to slow down, and dare I say it, debate the issue
with icy sobriety. The problem is that the internet puts a premium on speed
reading and these arguments need to be considered very carefully.

Think of it, as you have already suggested, as a problem of narrative and
how to keep the attention of the reader. If we can reach a story that is
tru*er*, if not completely true,  that could be a goal.


I must admit I am stunned to read on page 704 of Grundrisse,

"to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth
comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed
than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose
'powerful effectiveness' is itself in turn out of all proportion to the
direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the
general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the
application of science to production."

and (page 705)

"the human being comes to relate more as a watchman and regulator to the
production process itself....it is neither the direct labour he himself
performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation
of his own general productive power, his understanding of the nature and
his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body - it is, in
a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great
foundation-stone of production and of wealth."

This appears to open the doors wide to the post-modernist heresy, in which
many good marxists have drowned.

Tom, the angle I would like to come to on this, is with respect, not your
ideas, but how these sort of comments by Marx are compatible with the
marxian law of value.

For several years I have banged on boringly that Marx never used the term
"labour theory of value" and it is a mechanical simplification of his
economics to reduce it to this term. Rather the term he and Engels used was
the "law of value".

There is a separate question of whether USA productivity is rising and what
someone like the Governor of the Bank of England, Eddie George, means by
that - what figures he regards as reliable indicators.

But the problem if we are to see Marx as coherent is whether the passages
above do not detach themselves completely from an accounting in terms of
labour time.

At present I would say that Marx's approach is dialectical. In Kapital he
chose to unfold the scientific truth in a certain way from the opening
chords of Chapter 1 taking the commodity as the fundamental unit. In
dialectics it is not a logic contradiction in the English sense of the
word, to look at something also from another aspect. Indeed "Gegensatz" is
close to "contrast" than "contradiction".

I would say that the passages above *are* compatible with a view that the
"general productive power" of the worker is part of their skills and that
it does consume energy and time to put these into operation. It requires a
much more highly educated *and flexible* workforce, who can travel the
internet as easily as modern international airports. They can make
connections with other "middle class people" half a continent away to draw
together two economic connections in the productive forces to market a
commodity (probably a service even more than a concrete object) which can
be sold and can accumulate capital.

But as burn-out, social fragmentation, and mental illness rise, there is
clearly a value to this "general productive power" which takes time and
skill in turn to reproduce.

What advanced capitalism needs is a different type of workforce. It is
getting it, and post modernism is one of the reflections of the ideology it
needs.

Could you please argue very very slowly whether you think the propositions
by Marx in this section of Grundrisse are compatible or incompatible with
Marx's law of value?

Many thanks

Chris Burford

London


PS Tom, I am nervous of your signature line about Sandwichman and
Deconsultant. In the context of a very tricky theoretical discussion, I am
not entirely joking. Could you explain this in a separate post?