Planning, Market & Unemployment

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Fri Aug 27 07:54:08 PDT 1999


To try to make the below even less abstract, the increase in the division of labor refers to the long term historical process of specialization, wherein different forms of labor are complementarily combined ( this is sociologist Emile Durkheim's organic solidarity) In the distant past, the band or tribe was a self-sufficient economic unit. Each laborer was largely a generalized laborer ( Durkheim's mechanical solidarity) with the main division of labor being between genders/sexes, and age.

Specialization is the basis for trade, by the way, and thus commodity production, or production for exchange and not for use. If I specialize in producing only one use-value, I have to exchange some of them to get my complete kit of socially necessary use-values; and vice versa with all the other specialized use-value producers.

The issue of "whole and part" in capitalism, might be best described in historical relation to feudalism. The feudal manor was substantially a self-sufficient economic unit. With capitalism, a town or city or specific enterprise is not a self-sufficient economic unit , but is interconnected and interdependent with many other units, both local and national. This is a result of more and more specialization ( increase in the division of labor). Or as Marx holds, there is a qualitative increase in the socialization of labor from feudalism to capitalism, and production is social, while appropriation remains private or individual.

So, the problem is perhaps better termed a misplacement of the whole. Bourgeois theory places the whole at the level of the individual person or individual enterprise. But in reality, the individual or individual enterprise is specialized and a complementary PART to other parts in a larger social whole.Thus, the main contradiction of capitalism is the social nature of production and the private nature of appropriation. This is the basic cause of the business cycle ( feudalism didn't have a business cycle) . It is a more concrete application of the philosophical principle of the relation of the whole to the parts on the topic of this thread.

Marxism proposes to plan at the level of this social and economic whole, rather than plan at the level of individual enterprise (as if it were the whole) with indifference to all of the other enterprises with which the individual enterprise is intimately interconnected.

Charles Brown


>>> "Charles Brown" <CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> 08/26/99 05:27PM >>>
The issue of the relation of the whole to the parts is more concretely termed the relation between the public and the private, or the social and the individual. Each individual private enterprise must be related to the public whole, contra capitalism approach. The division of labor or socialization of production is the highest in history with capitalism. Yet, appropriation is private or according to parts and without attention to the complexly interrelated social whole of production. It is an illusion that individual enterprises are monads or isolated entities. Socialism merely acknowledges this empirical fact and seeks to organizatize production consciously taking account of the complexly interconnected whole.

Charles Brown


>>> "Michael Hoover" <hoov at freenet.tlh.fl.us> 08/26/99 05:13PM >>>
Planning discussion has been too abstract for prosaic me but then I take it that intellectualism is opiate of intellectuals rather than marxism as Raymond Aron claimed.



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