On 26/07/2007 17:28:34, bhandari at berkeley.edu wrote:
> On Jul 26, 2007, at 11:12 AM, Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
>
Rakesh is not the only one whose posts are not read in this which threatens to become a dialogue of the deaf. He writes:
RB: labor power tends to be paid at its value in a just and free transaction
This is an example of what Marx calls "obsolete verbal rubbish". Buying and selling labour power is an economic transaction which has no connection with morality. That it is a just and free transaction is lying bourgeois ideology.
RB: such that worker has no rightful claim to the surplus value embodied in the produced commodities.
I.e. no claim in bourgeois economics, which is the only relevant category. (An unalienated economy /politics /morality would not deal in value).
RB: Yet the Golden Rule seems realized in the free market, not contravened.
See above. What is "realised" in the "free" market is the accumulation of value.
The golden rule is of course not an unproblematic concept. For instance we cannot all bring each other up breakfast in bed. But it has a use as a reminder of the equality and universality at the heart of morality. A bourgeois apologist might attempt to justify a small family enterprise market as an example of living by the golden rule -- but not the capitalist world market. Common ownership by the human race, and production from each according to ability and distribution according to need could be argued to be the perfect fulfilment of the golden rule in the economic domain.
RB: the class struggle ... at its most robust is motivated by non moral goods.
At its most robust, perhaps -- because we are human, all-too-human. But not at its most intelligent or moral -- as long as it is contaminated by the muck of ages. The genuine class struggle is against the Pentagon and the war criminals as much as against Wall Street -- as Thomas Friedman said, the invisible hand of the market is the US Marine Corps. It is not only corporations which are unjust (from a proletarian perspective) -- the inequality of the standard of living in the first and third worlds, its causes and its consequences are monstrous injustices, and part of the muck of ages.
RB: But the just exchange of labor power (sic) is not the answer for reasons Marx gives in a book Carl dare not open.
I cannot speak for Carl, but if the book is the anti-Weston *Wages Price and Profit* it's one of my favourites. Among other things it says the working-class movement will have no success until it stops confining itself to [the so-called (not by Marx) *non-moral* goods! -- shades of Kant and Bentham!] wages, hours and conditions (which can only bring the price of labour power up towards its value), and openly aims for the abolition of the wages system. That goal can only be international.