[lbo-talk] The zen of marx (was clarification) ADDENDUM

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Tue Feb 16 15:41:39 PST 2010


SA: 'I tend to think it's the technical division of labor that would have to be abolished'

So we could have an economy where everyone made the same thing? What? Televisions? Cloth? Bolognaise sauce?

It is not possible to have a society without a division of labour. Marx's point was that the allocation of social labour under capitalism was attained spontaneously through the exchange of commodities, but that a division of labour could be organised along more rational lines, planned even.

One of his examples was the factory, which, despite its oppressive relations of capital to labour, nonetheless showed that you could achieve a complex division of labour without the products of labour taking on the character of commodities before collectivity of tasks before the factory were pooled.



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