Re: Serfdom/China

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 8/9/03 1:22:52 PM Pacific Daylight Time, swillsqueal@xxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

Dear PEN-Listers,

I hate commodity production and I hate the marketplace
of commodities.  They have both outlived their
usefulness.  Controlled or planned commodity
production only maintains the agony of wage-slavery.


For the end of pre-history,
Mike B)

Most certainly a sentiment I deeply share. Under what conditions is it possible to render the commodity form of the social product obsolete? Products become commodity under certain social conditions, with a corresponding political structure and distribution mechanism expressing the property relations.

Under what conditions does the law of value move, not simply in contradiction but  into antagonism with an enormously developed productivity infrastructure and hence begins to be unable to maintain its economic validity. Here is the economic problem of socialism as it emerged during the transition - not from socialism to capitalism, but from feudalism and the manufacturing system to capitalism - the bourgeois property relations and the industrial system.

At what stage of the development of the productive forces does the value form itself causes such a state of universal stagnation that society is compelled to leap to a new political basis, i.e., property relations and their corresponding political forms?

No one would argue that a political act created the manufacturing process which was the positive result of the technological advance and accelerated the exchange between individuals. Apparently political stages can be skipped over but not economic stages - on a world scale.

All economies requiring planning in the macro - or rather large and small sense. That is on the basis of individual enterprise and their internal cooperation and systematically. The concepts of "planned" and "controlled" or "command economy" is not accurate and in my opinion confusing the developing with of the commodity form of the social product with property relations corresponding to certain stages of the technological advance.

One author pinpointed property relations as cardinal and this makes sense to me, but property relations and bourgeois property does not mean "free as such" but rather that the circuit or cycle of capital as investment and reproduction follow a path of logic based on what is individually and collectively profitable to the private owner or in today's world - what Marx calls in Capital Volume 2 (the credit system) "those regarded as capitalist."

It seems to be becoming fairly obvious that during the era of industrial production one cannot leave the value producing system no matter what the property relations. The reason is because the historic advance is from agriculture and manufacture to the industrial "mode of production." The law of value can be dampened but the structure of the world market makes it impossible for any single country or group of countries to dispense with the law of value on the basis of simply changing the property relations.

The industrial production as a specific configuration of the material power of  production is a category of history - prehistory. A search of the web under the heading "China Market Socialism" contains a wealth of material basically indicating that roughly 800 million people in China are still living in the agricultural sector or outside the industrial, service and financial sector of the economy.

China is an industrial country - more than less, but one cannot compel a mass of people in agriculture to alienate their products - the products of their labor, on the basis of ideology or politics. Stated another way the agricultural producer is compelled to alienate their product on the basis of exchange no matter what the property relations because this exchange is what allows for their standard of living and culture to be enhanced and enjoy the privileges of those in the industrial sector of the economy. To alienate a product on the basis of exchange recreates the commodity form and reproduces the law of value no matter how noble ones ideas.

The communism of Marx could be better understood from the standpoint of American history and our trajectory in the development of the means of production or what is the same the technological revolution. 

One can easily find on the Web an equal amount of literature on Russia. Literature concerning her application to the World Trade Organization - and given the historical and current international division of labor all countries must import and export no matter what the property relations, states Russian officials as saying she will not be prepared to join until around 2020 or 2023. Why is this?

Russia must effect a technological transfer that will allow her to engage in broad exchange, which means you must conform to the law of value whether you like it or not. Equal quality Russian products - which is another question altogether, cannot compete with the labor content of products coming out of China and the same products produced with advance technology in America. The value form or the commodity form of the social product cannot be abolished by a political act or a change in property relations. Putin is burning the midnight oil.

A socialist world system is of course preferable but this in itself cannot change the law of value but rather create the conditions for its more than less peaceful dissolution. The reason is because the circuit or cycle of capital is changed and no longer is compelled by the law of necessity to flow along the pathways of maximum profitability. Capital itself cannot be abolished by a political act because it also embraces human material as it has been historically constituted and steps off of the "land" into the "cities."

The market place as a market loses its force only under conditions where the exchange form loses its force and distribution loses its property character or becomes detached from captial/property. Collective property or socialism is still a property relations. The labor content simply will not matter, but this requires an enormous advance in the material power of production.

Such a projection is not and was not possible during the transition from agriculture to industry by definition. The small producers in agriculture must exchange their labor or rather products. "Market socialism" - and there are literally thousands of sources on the web, is a concept that express the pressure of the law of value that demands products exchange for the socially necessary amount of labor in them. Putin is burning the midnight oil and the most privilege sectors of our working class are under attack as they watch their jobs follow the circuit of capital governed by the bourgeois property relations.

Then there is China with well over a billion "heads." 800 million in the countryside means there are more people involved in her industrial, financial and service sector  than all of America and her intellectuals and economist deal with a scale of magnitudes - the laws governing large numbers, in a manner that is mind boggling for many of us.

By the time Russia enters the WTO - according to her projections, American society will be at another qualitative stage in the development of computerization, digitalized production process and advance robotics. We face some profound moral question concerning what is right and wrong in society and they are being driven on a societal basis - not just the visionaries, by the revolution in the mode of production.

Kind of remind me of the abolitionist 30 years before the abolition of slavery. The economic logic of history assumes a moral shell and then a political form - at least in America. In 1852, Uncle Tom's cabin, or Life among the lowly  by Harriet Beecher Stowe, changed the American people. Tom was not the villain, but rather Sambo who represented enforcing the old productive forces with a whip. After all it was Sambo who beat Tom too death.


"He ain't heavy . . . he's my brother."