For that, de-valorization has some value - again, largely rhetorical.
However, for a move towards Communism, Marxists are going to have to take the bull by the horns and thing hard about the question of value. Things are going to be valued, no matter what we say. The idea that Communism depends on people no longer assigning value to goods and services is clearly nonsensical. What would this post-value world look like? Would a person trade a feather for a car? Or a gas grill for a pebble?
The idea underlying is that a person works and therefore deserves a reasonable basket of goods and services to be provided him by the wider society. Okay, the wider society can be responsible for him, so long as he works to serve the wider society and that is not in HIS judgment, but in theirs. They must, therefore, assign value (or potential value) to his work-product.
I don't think Marx anticipates any post-value economy - only an economy of collective decision-making and responsibility.
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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