I think I am going to have to get on with replying to Andrew's long post in bits, otherwise I will not reply at all.
At 05:18 AM 8/4/98 , Andrew Kliman wrote:
>This is a reply to Chris Burford's posts of July 13th and 14th.
>I'm sorry it has taken me so long to reply, but the issues are
>hard ones, and I haven't had a chunk of time long enough to think
>things through.
>
>
>Chris: "Now further reading of the Chapter 1 of Capital suggest
>to me that the content of value for Marx is more properly called
>human labour in the abstract, rather than "labour time". That is,
>abstracted from the conditions of commodity exchange that make
>the "form" of value "exchange value"."
>
>I agree with this. The *abstract* character of the labor that
>produces value is all-important. Marx calls abstract labor a
>peculiar "social substance." It belongs to a particular type of
>society. It is not universal throughout all societies.
I am not sure about the latter point. I do not understand the difference between social labour and abstract labour.
>
>
>Chris: "The sarcasm in this footnote by Marx against the
>bourgeois economists is
>stressing the continuity of economic processes across different
>economic
>formations: "The economists have a singular way of proceeding.
>For them,
>there are only tow kinds of institutions, artificial and natural.
>The
>institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of
>the
>bourgeoisie are natural institutions.""
>
>I don't see how you get this. The sarcasm is directed against
>the idea that the social forms of capitalist society --
>particularly that the products of labor take the form of value
>and the duration of labor-time takes the form of the magnitude of
>value -- are "self-evident and nature-imposed." (p. 175) The
>point of the footnote, just like the text, is that the
>bourgeoisie is wrong to think its institutions are natural. They
>are social forms peculiar to this one society, nothing immutable.
>Marx is therefore stressing the exact opposite of what you say,
>the DISCONTINUITY of capitalist society from earlier ones. Note
>that only a few pages earlier, he indicates that the categories
>of bourgeois economics are "absurd," not because they fail to
>correspond to bourgeois reality, but precisely because they do
>correspond to this inverted reality: "They are forms of thought
>which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for the
>relations of production belonging to this *historically
>determined* mode of social production, i.e., commodity production
>[emphasis added, p. 169]."
We really read the same text different ways. Marx is objecting to the simplistic bourgeois imposition of bourgeois perspectives on the analysis of pre-capitalist societies. That to me means he must have an over-arching concept of the self-reproduction of societies, which have some things in common. This is perhaps what he calls the social life process or the life-process of society (Capital, Ch 1, Section 4 para 16)
>Chris: "He is saying that exchange value is peculiar to
>commodity exchange. Therefore it is more correct to say above "in
>his view, labour time is not always expressed as
>*exchange*-value"."
>
>No. As I indicated in my analysis of the paragraph, it is clear
>that he is referring to value, not exchange-value. For instance,
>he refers to "why labour-time is expressed in value," NOT "why
>value is expressed as exchange-value."
I have got a bit lost as to which paragraph, but I now accept there are paragraphs where Marx is specifically referring to value and not just exchange-value, being specific to commodity exchange. I have just been looking again at Notes on Wagner.
One of my problems about this is what about gift economies, or mixtures of gift and other economies.
What of a large car company that produces commodities for its own use, eg spark plugs.
Also what of economies where there is a state sector? It is not necessary to make the mistake of Rodbertus of talking about social use-value, to say that economies with a state sector have a portion of labour time that is not manifested solely on commodity production, and that is important for their reproduction. This is of urgent current practical importance in resisting the predatory behaviour of global neo-liberalism.
Marx and you want to make the distinction. I want to look for the connection. They are both contrasting aspects of the same contradiction.
That's enough for one session.
Chris Burford
London.