The failure to understand the point that value has no meaning outside a generalized commodity economy based on market exchange led the Soviets to some disastrous early economic experiments based on attempting to plan on the basis of value. Something like it underlies the silly idea to remunerate labor in a nonmarket context terms or chits for labor time -- Marx actually takes this silly notion on somewhere, I used to know, but it doesn't come to mind, Shane? anyone? -- it's not a new idea. And it won't go away.
Although not officially accepting value theory, Parecon offers a version of this form of compensation which betrays the misunderstanding of the fact, expressed in Marx's value theory, that it is the labor market as part of a generalized system of commodity exchange that enforces an objective meaning on a unit of labor time as socially necessary.
I don't even believe in value theory, why should I
have to explain this point to its advocates?
**********************
KM's 'silly' notions about labour time
:
<The creation of a large quantity of disposable time apart from necessary
labour time for society generally and each of its members (i.e. room for the
development of the individuals’ full productive forces, hence those of society
also), this creation of not-labour time appears in the stage of capital, as of
all earlier ones, as not-labour time, free time, for a few. What capital adds
is that it increases the surplus labour time of the mass by all the means of
art and science, because its wealth consists directly in the appropriation of
surplus labour time; since value directly its purpose, not use value. It is
thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable
time, in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing
minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development. But its
tendency always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to
convert it into surplus labour. If it succeeds too well at the first, then it
suffers from surplus production, and then necessary labour is interrupted,
because no surplus labour can be realized by capital. The more this
contradiction develops, the more does it become evident that the growth of the
forces of production can no longer be bound up with the appropriation of alien
labour, but that the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own
surplus labour. (N.B. get out your blackberrys, cell phones and endless hours
at the office, MB)*Once they have done so – and disposable time thereby ceases
to have an antithetical existence – then, on one side, necessary labour time
will be measured by the needs of the social individual, and, on the other, the
development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even
though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will
grow for all. For real wealth is the developed productive power of all
individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour
time, but rather disposable time. Labour time as the measure of value posits
wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and
because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an
individual’s entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere
worker, subsumption under labour. The most developed machinery thus forces the
worker to work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the
simplest, crudest tools.*>
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm#p708
Mike B)
http://www.iww.org.au/node/10 "Would you have freedom from wage-slavery.." Joe Hill http://www.iww.org/en/join
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