I think my problem with this debate is that it seems to be another attempt be Marxists to remove themselves from the reality of use value. Use value is not evil and a "freeware" economy is obviously a fantasy. Even an end-state will have to valorize in some way for commerce across communities to be administered.
In my view, too many Marxists believe that the project of Marxism is defy the logic and validity of use-value - as if we could take consumers out of the picture; as if it insults or opresses workers to suggest that their work-product should judged by consumers.
We must, as Marxists, resolve ourselves to the fact that there is a moment between production and use in which there exists a real, ontological uncertainty. Production does not, in itself, create usefulness and therefore the value of work-product MUST have some value assigned to it. This fact does not - cannot - defeat Marxism because it is inescapable.
I would propose that social process of valorization itself ultimately implies the end of capitalist valorization. Consider this: fiat money is money because "we" say that it's money. It is self-referential - a pure social relation. This fact is acknowledged by capitalists to each other without being acknowledged to the wider society. They pretend they have access to some substance or power that exists outside of society - but all they really have is access to is us. Our behavior creates the value of the very "commodity" against which our work-product is judged.
Peace,
boddhisatva
On 9/25/06, Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Very happy to see you on this list Rakesh!
>
> --- Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at berkeley.edu> wrote:
>
> > Hi Angelus and others,
> > Noted the favorable reference to Polanyi; do you
> > know the critiques
> > by John Lie and Maurice Godelier?
>
> I am not aware of those criticisms. Are they
> available online?
>
> > Once the nature of value is understood, all belief
> > in the necessity of the
> > bourgeois mode of production vanishes.
>
> The difficult part is getting people to grasp the
> nature of value. Especially among Marxists, value
> tends to be reified into an eternal feature of human
> productive activity. I have even heard such an
> argument made by a poster on this list. But Marx is
> concerned with the forms that certain relationships
> between humans take in capitalism. The Value form is
> at the core of what makes capitalism. To see value as
> an anthropological constant is to succumb to and
> reproduce the fetish.
>
> Too long the left has seens capitalism as being
> defined by the domination of a particular social
> class, or an inegalitarian distribution of property.
> But Marx himself notes that social classes as they
> appear in the account of Capital are character masks.
> I don't think this is an idiosyncrasy of Marx's
> account. If classes as they appear in Capital are
> merely character masks, it is because for Marx the
> imperatives of the value form are central.
>
> Richard Harris wrote:
>
> >I'm not sure I even understand what we need to
> reverse >this separation, i.e. to end capitalism.
> What is our >political project in the world as it now
> is, except as >a saying no to the institutions of
> capital?
>
> This is a question that plagues me constantly. I
> liked some of what John Holloway has to say in his
> book Change the World Without Taking Power, but I
> think many of the criticisms made by Daniel Bensaid
> in Un monde à changer (German title: Eine Welt zu
> Verändern) are very pertinent. But as eloquent
> as his critique of Holloway is, I don't see that he
> has much to offer other than a post-modernized
> Leninism.
>
> I am intriqued by attempts at de-valorization in
> everyday life, like free software, squatted housing,
> communal kitchens, the "umsonst" campaigns in some
> German cities but ultimately these kind of projects
> are damned to live as anamolous phenomena at the
> margins of commodity society without a wider movement
> for communism.
>
> And how do we get that wider movement for communism?
>
>
>
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