Marx returns to this "arithmetic" scheme time and time again and uses it to prove....well largely itself.
And so we get statements like this: "As soon as labour in the direct
form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value
[must cease to be the measure] of use value." - which is pretty nonsensical.
Yeah, if people didn't have to work, they might not think "how many hours of work is that thing I want to buy/have worth?" But obviously that can't happen, because SOMEBODY is going to have to ask the question "is X a productive use of labor?" Marx does not really deal well with the chance that a chosen productive venture will not prove fruitful. I think he does not because he fears that considering this question would tend to validate capitalism, wherein the capitalist claims his profits as a prize for being the risk-taker.
[In fact, risk-taking is a big, big advantage of capitalism. The capitalist desire for profit and the human desire to solve problems and make things better do find happy intersection. Because the capitalist is largely agnostic as to HOW he makes his money, he imposes fewer strictures on the conduct of the economy than did, say, the fedal lord.]
But the statement itself is hogwash. The problem of economic planning and the problem of the market are the same problem - comparing things which are difficult to compare (a sofa-bed is worth how many chickens?). To do so, you need an objective measure and labor time is that objective measure. Money is a less objective measure, but still not bad. To deal rationally with economic decision-making, you have to have some reasonably objective measure, once you measure you value and thus the whole argument about throwing out the "value form" is called into question.
Marx goes on:
"The surplus labour of the masshas ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few,for the development of the general powers of the human head."
This second point is obviously a false comparison, based on the prejudice that there is a small, otherwise useless, class of thinkers who develop human knowledge, rather than a Bell curve of people who spend more and less time on knowledge work. The first point is ridiculous - a society without surplus. A factory intended to produce something of uncertain value is surplus. The labor of the masses will alway sbe necessary for surplus and surplus will always be necessary because of uncertainty.
"With that, production based on exchange value breaks down" - ridiculous.
"and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means
created, for all of them." - Here we get to the crux of it. Marxists have gotten - from Capitalists - the idea that an economy based on work is misery. And yet we know that people freely CHOOSE to do even very hard work on a purely voluntary basis if they feel comaraderie and accomplishment for having done it.
Beginning with Marx, Marxists started to hate the nitty-gritty of the economy and Marxism was injected with a healthy dose of Utopianism. Given economic conditions in the 1850s, that's understandable, as life was pretty grim. But in a modern economy, things aren't so grim and I think we can come to terms with work and trade as facts of life.
"Penury" is producing for the anti-community of capitalism. Working - even very hard - for a real community is not penury at all. In a modern economy, even working people have - relative to the laborer of the 1850s - lots of free time. They waste most of it simply recovering from and sheltering themselves from the stress of alienation. But it is not work and trade that are alienating. It is capitalism that alienates work and trade from a decent, community-affirming life.
Value simply is not the problem here. The problem is WHO measures that value.
Boddi