It's very well to say that exchange-value can be stripped off use-value if we look at it as a theoretical construct, but what does it mean in practical terms. I just don't know of any reasonable system of managing the distribution of goods and services that does not treat those goods and services as a commodity. What I see Marx saying - fundamentally, if not in so many words - is that human beings must not be commodities. Commoditizing labor is, in large measure commoditizing the human being herself. While I understand, therefore, the desire to get away from the "commodity form" or "value form". I think it's a dead end.
Rather consider what happens if labor and capital are the same thing. By that I mean that those who labor also allocate capital. In that case a worker is not alienated from any part of his work product because he "owns" his labor and the capital used to channel that labor to the marketplace.
Understandably, Marx focused on the marketplace, but I think the revolution takes place at the level of capital. Change the means of production from money capital to information/social accounting and you change the society. Trying to throw out valorization or the idea of a commodity is, in my view, simply not possible outside the realm of academic discussion. *****************************************************************
Hi boddhisatva,
As you probably know, Marx wasn't big on providing recipes for the cookshops of the future. You can
find postive hints about the nature of socialism/communism (and even the DOP see THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE), e.g.: The Critique of the Gotha Programme and
say, pages 707-709 of my edition of THE GRUNDRISSE (Marx Library, Vintage Books, 1973)
I see his work as largely as a critique of what is, rather than a prescription
for what should be. However, that critique is pretty comprehensive, especially in
the area of the generalized commodity production under the rule of Capital, where
wealth appears as that vast accumulation of commodities and how when that
wealth is generated using exchange-value, price and profit, you get a working class
subject to a fairly upside down view of the world, camera-obscura--a fetishism of commodities.
Marx mostly avoided the positive, kind of, "here's what you've got to construct" writing. This
had to do with the principles upon which socialists agreed on amongst themselves in the 19th Century (see the principles of the First International). The assumption was that the social revolution had to be the class conscious act of the workers themselves. That is, there couldn't be a socialist revolution from above, given from on high, by some leadership. It had to become real out of the felt necessary of the producers. After all, changing the system from class rule and wage-slavery would mean taking social ownership of the means of production and using those means in ways which the associated producers would agree on. Hard to predict what exactly might come from that history making process, presumptive even.
As an individual communist, I can say what I think would work best, in terms of stripping exchange-values from
goods and services and engaging in conscious production for use and need. Purely speculative fiction, but I wrote up my version of a society based on use-value. Let me know, if you want the whole thing. It's too large for the LOBster list. I can e-mail it to you offlist as a Word attachment.
Regards,
Mike B)
Read "Penguins in Bondage": http://happystiletto.blogspot.com/
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