Of course I'd love to see your work. I have found these discussions very illuminating over the years. In fact, it's because of these discussions that I've concluded that Marx's theory of value is badly flawed. We keep coming back and back to these debates about the various forms of value and I think that's because we are trying to reconcile ideas with reality that can't be reconciled - at least in the way most directly suggested by Marx's writings.
The debate is always the same. Someone like Angelus Novus says that if you accept exchange you inevitably accept oppression. I just think that's wrong. There is a quantum difference between exchange in goods and exchange in labor. Some labor - say an accountant offering to do an individual tax return in exchange for money - is very much like a physical product. It's individual-to-individual and harkens back to a pre-capitalist mode of production. But most labor is dominated by large organizations which require investment to create them. In Marx's day there really were individual capitalists with personally-owned piles of gold who did this investment. In our day, investment is clearly a complex social relation.
The myth-making around capitalism suggests that a person who has acquired an excess stock of gold through personal labor goes to the market and parts with that gold at great risk in order to buy the means and pay the workers necessary to start a business. All this, according to capitalist myth-making, is the result of simple exchange. Marx knew he had to undercut that myth and so he was very severe on the subject of exchange. But we don't have to be, because the myth is simply inoperable now. Capitalists go to capital markets to get investment funds and most often these investment funds are in the form of debt - a highly complex social relation.
So I think we have to get away from the idea that exchange inevitably leads to oppression of workers. I just don't think it's valid. Exchange is inevitable and relatively benign. Value can be assigned to goods without implying wage-slavery. We have, in the modern world, an alienated, disconnected working class and a hyper-connected investing class who are extremely cooperative. I think the central project of Marxism is the broaden the investing class in order to make investment a democratic process.
At some point after that, we will examine the underlying logic of exchange, as the family/clan ethic is re-applied to economic relations. So I'm not hostile to "freeware" and other efforts to get away from exchange value. However, I think trying to rid the world of exchange is putting the cart *well* before the horse.
boddi
On 9/27/06, Mike Ballard <swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> boddhisatva wrote:
>
> 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/
>
> ________________________________
> Talk is cheap. Use Yahoo! Messenger to make PC-to-Phone calls. Great rates
> starting at 1¢/min.
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>