joanna bujes wrote:
>
> Bill wrote:
>
> "As you point out, even the most unskilled worker on the production line expresses that labour value of all the hours that go into rearing a person to adulthood too. Its the same principle. except that everyone has to be reared through childhood, so the differences in value are more subtle."
>
> I utterly reject this. Life is not an achievement contest. No one has more value than anyone else. An hour of my life is worth an hour of your life. That's the only sane basis for an economic-social system. Everything else devolves into self-justification contests, is a waste of time, and reinforces the worst aspects of being a verbal and calculating being.
>
> An hour of my life is worth an hour of yours, and we support whoever for whatever reason can't work. If you keep it simple, it may even be doable.
>
To understand capitalism, it is essential to keep the word "value" a technical, not an ethical term. (Both Engels & Arendt comment on the contrasts of value/worth and labor/work.) An hour of your time may (and does) have the same _worth_ as that of any other person's, but the _value_ may (and probably does) vary enormously from person to person.
Maintaining this distinction is of great importance in understanding the historical specificity of capitalist exploitation, and recognition of that specificity grounds our hopes for the destruction of capitalism.
(I haven't been following the parecon discussion so I don't know how this point relates to that topic.)
Carrol
> Joanna
>
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