andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> CAN WE NOT DISCUSS VALUE IN A FUTURE POSTCAPITALIST
> SICIRTY? IS THERE ANYONE WHO CANTS TO DISCUSS VALUE
> AND THE P-U DISTINCTION IN CAPITALISM? IF NOT, I QUIT.
Your first sentence is garbled, or at least I can't construe it to be consistent with the rest of your arguments in this thread.
But my answer to the qeustion I think you are raising is No we can't have the discussion you want because of the moralism which poisons the thought of so many and because of the word-magic that goes along with that moralism. Incidentally, you were of course correct in your intra-solidrity debate as reported in your first post. Anyone who disagrees with you there either hasn't read Marx at all or is merely expressing their own opinion of what should be the case.
The only way that you can get the conversation you want, if you can get it, is by simply _not_ seeing those posts which don't accept the parameters you set up.
Prices, incidentally, tell us nothing about the organization of daily life in capitalist society, nor (since prices occur in all post-neolithic modes of production) are they of any assistance in (a) distinguishing capitalism from other highly commercialized societies (b) of analyzing the (really quite weird) _unity_ (or drive toward unity) of the capitalist system as a whole. Within at least some versions of Marxism* value theory as well as that of productive/unproductive labor do contribute to these questions, however little they might tell you about prices. (*Defined here as strictly confined to the critique of political economy rather than as a TOE - Marx had interesting things to say about politics, but there is no such thing as a Marxist Theory of Revolution: Revolution can't be theorized).
If the unproductive labor hypothesis is valid (and I'm not going to pay any attention to arguments either for or against its validity), and _if_ we assume that the distinction makes sense ONLY in a developed capitalist society (and if it is valid at all it is only within that constraint), _then_ while it might or might not tell us anything about economics (or about class), it might illuminate the social/cultural/political implications of devoting such a large proportion of human activity under capitalism to the realization of value/profit as you please. That is _not_ the case in other modes of production.
Carrol