Re: "Blindly operating averages" and price-value divergence

[Rogers <egwinslow@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Jim Devine wrote:

> > Does "surplus-value" in the sense applicable to capitalism have
> > meaning in an ideal community?
>
> no it doesn't. Surplus-value is a category unique to capitalism. An
> ideal society might produce a surplus, though, as Marx noted in his
> CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM.

If "labour time" in capitalism means something "essentially  
different" from labour time in an ideal community because the  
activity of individuals as "universally developed individuals" is  
essentially different from the activity of wage labour, then the  
"essence" of activity in the ideal community can't be captured by  
concepts depending for their meaning on the different "essence" of  
wage labour.

Since all prior forms of labour  are essentially different from the  
form actualized in an ideal community, the "essence" of activity in  
such a community can't be fully elaborated in terms of  
characteristics shared with these earlier forms.   It must actualize  
a form that had only fully existed previously as an unactualized  
potential.

This is true even of those historical forms of activity, e.g.  
historical forms of "composing," that are much closer to "really free  
working" than the alienated labour characteristic of the capitalist  
labour process.   The actualization of the "essence" of ideal  
activity requires "subjective and objective conditions" whose  
creation requires the whole of previous history.

"He [Adam Smith] is right, of course, that, in its historic forms as  
slave-labour, serf-labour, and wage-labour, labour always appears as  
repulsive, always as external forced labour; and not-labour, by  
contrast, as 'freedom, and happiness'.  This holds doubly: for this  
contradictory labour; and, relatedly, for labour which has not yet  
created the subjective and objective conditions for itself (or also,  
in contrast to the pastoral etc. state, which it has lost), in which  
labour becomes attractive work, the individual's self-realization,  
which in no way means that it becomes mere fun, mere amusement, as  
Fourier, with grisette-like naiveté, conceives it.  Really free  
working, e.g. composing, is at the same time precisely the most  
damned seriousness, the most intense exertion.  The work of material  
production can achieve this character only (1) when its social  
character is posited, (2) when it is of a scientific and at the same  
time general character, not merely human exertion as a specifically  
harnessed natural force, but exertion as subject, which appears in  
the production process not in a merely natural, spontaneous form, but  
as an activity regulating all the forces of nature."  (Grundrisse p.  
611)

Ted