One of the
best summaries of the essential problem of economic theory and of the solution
offered by Karl Marx is in Lucio Colletti’s From Rousseau to Lenin. It
is well worth our while to reproduce here the entirety of Colletti’s account of
the problem which, we must aver, far excels what we ourselves could ever
achieve!
THE THEORY OF VALUE AND FETISHISM The decisive point which, I believe,
remains misunderstood in all these interpretations is, as already indicated,
the concept of ‘abstract labour’; i.e. (a) how this abstraction of labour is
produced, and (b) what it really means. The first part of the question is
relatively straightforward. According to Marx, the products of labour take the
form of commodities when they are produced for exchange. And they are produced
for exchange when they are products of autonomous, private labours carried out
independently of one another. Like Robinson Crusoe, the producer of com-
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modities decides by himself how much and what to produce. But unlike
Robinson Crusoe he lives in society and hence within a social division of
labour in which his labour depends on that of others and vice versa. It follows
that while Crusoe carried out all his indispensable labour by himself and
relied only on his own labour for the satisfaction of his needs, the producer
of commodities carries out only one determinate form of labour, the products of
which are destined for others, just as the products of the other producers’ different
forms of labour go to him. If this social division of labour were a conscious
and planned distribution to all its members on the part of society of the
various necessary types of labour and quantities to be produced, the products
of individual labour would not take the form of commodities. For example,
in a patriarchal peasant family there is a distribution of the work which the
members themselves must carry out, but the products of this labour do not
become commodities, nor do the members of the family nucleus buy or sell their
products to each other.“ On the other hand, in conditions of commodity
production, the work of individual producers is not labour carried out at the
command or on behalf of society: rather it is private, autonomous
labour, carried out by each producer independently of the next. Hence,
lacking any conscious assignment or distribution on the part of society, individual
labour is not immediately an articulation of social labour; it
acquires its character as an aliquot of aggregate labour solely through the
mediation of exchange relations or the market. Now Marx’s essential thesis
is that in order to exchange their products, men must equalize them,
i.e. abstract from the physical-natural or use-value aspect in which one
product differs from another (corn from iron, iron from glass, etc.). In
abstracting from the object or concrete material of their labour they also
abstract ipso facto from that which serves to differentiate their labours.
‘Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of
sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them
and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common
to them all . . . human labour in the abstract.” Hence in abstracting from the natural, sensory
objectivity of their products, men also and simultaneously abstract from what
differentiates their various subjective activities. ‘The Labour . . . that
forms the substance of value is homogeneous labour-power, expenditure of one
uniform labour-power. The total labour-power of society which is embodied in
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the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society
counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour-power, composed though it
be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any
other, so far as it has the character of the average labour-power of society
and takes effect as such. By now it should be clear that the process whereby
‘abstract labour’ is obtained, far from being a mere mental abstraction of the
investigator's, is one which takes place daily in the reality of exchange itself
(‘When we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as
values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of
homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever by an exchange we equate
as values our different products, by that very act we also
equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We
are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it.')'”
As Colletti rightfully
reminds us, the central problem of the critique of capitalism is to explain how
concrete labour can be turned by capitalists into abstract labour – or in other
words how social labour, which cannot possibly be measured and remunerated
individually, can turn into an aggregate of individual labours remunerated
individually as wage labour. Notice two things immediately. One is that
Colletti refers to “the social division of labour” when in fact he should be
referring to “the division of social labour”. The distinction is crucial
because by referring to the social division of “labour”, Colletti implies that
there is only one total aggregate of homogeneous “labour” that is naturally
divided by “society”. In one simple move, thus, Colletti has reified both “labour”
and “society”. What Colletti should have done, instead, is to stress the fact
that the division of social labour – hence the character of “social labour” and
of “society” itself – changes from social formation to social formation, from
feudalism to capitalism, for instance.
Because he fails to make
this vital distinction, Colletti is then forced rightaway to replicate and
perpetuate Marx’s initial fallacy and conundrum, that is, to assume that
capitalist society reproduces truly and effectively without any form or shape of
“planning” simply by means of the market exchange of “commodities” which, in
turn, automatically turns into the abstraction of concrete social labour. The
conundrum then becomes, of course, to explain how “individual labours” based on
“private property” and therefore also “individual production decisions” can
ensure the efficient yet un-planned reproduction of capitalist society. This is
a conundrum because it is an evident mystery to see how an unplanned economy
can actually co-ordinate itself in reality through unplanned market
transactions! The problem with Colletti’s excellent description of the problem
of the social synthesis or the co-ordination of human activities for the
reproduction of society is in the final part: the part where he follows Marx in
stressing that the equalization of living labour as abstract labour is due to
the very act and practice of market exchange. By so doing, Colletti
uncritically subscribes to the Marxian contention that concrete labour is
abstracted through the unconscious acts and practices of individual independent
agents – and not by means of orchestrated political coercion! As we explained
above, Marx tries to solve this conundrum in two ways – a realist and a
phenomenological way. The realist solution assumes that there is an aggregate of
socially necessary labour time that is then redistributed by means of individual
autonomous market transactions which, because totally unplanned, can then result
in regular market anarchy and economic crises. The problem with the realist
solution to the conundrum of capitalist market reproduction is that there is
and there can be no such thing as “socially necessary labour time” because the
minute we try to define what is “socially necessary” we fall into a tautology: what
is socially necessary is what is socially necessary for capitalist society to
reproduce itself – which is determined by market transactions. But market transactions
or exchanges are ex post facto! In other words, market exchanges fall into the
trap of post hoc ergo propter hoc! In reality, if Colletti and Marx allowed
that capitalist industry, far from being unplanned, is actually very
politically and coercively planned, the conundrum would disappear. Once again,
the difficulty arises because Colletti and Marx assume that there is a mythical
“social division of labour”, that is to say, an invariable “society”
independent of modes of production, and one invariable aggregate “labour”
available to that mythical “society”. What we are affirming here is that instead
we must refer to historically specific “social labours” that are politically
managed for specific social formations or modes of production. This way, we can
consign the mythical notion of “the market” to the scrap-heap of social
theories to which it belongs.
The reason why Colletti,
like Marx, has to fall back (a) on fusing the realist theory of
value with the phenomenological theory of fetishism, and consequently
(b) on con-fusing capitalism with “lack of planning” is precisely
because, without planning, the reproduction of capitalist society cannot rely
solely on “the market”; and, without the notion of “commodity fetishism” or
that of “socially necessary labour time” it is impossible or tautological to
explain how “the market” can ensure the reproduction of capitalist society –
because market explanations are always and everywhere ex post facto
rationalizations of social reproduction: they are valid only until such time as
economic crises show the catastrophic inadequacy of “market solutions”!
Let us show how Colletti
falls back on (a) first:
THE LABOUR THEORY OF VALUE The inadequacy and simplification of the concept
of ‘economy’, which, as we have seen, is an element more or less common to all
the tendencies of Marxism in the Second International, helps to explain the
foundation, during the same period, of an interpretation of the labour theory
of value from which even later Marxism has been unable to free itself. This
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interpretation consisted in the reduction of Marx’s theory of value to that
of Ricardo, or even to the theory of value which developed in the course of the
‘dissolution of the Ricardian school’. Its hallmark is the inability to
grasp, or even to suspect, that Marx’s theory of value is identical to his theory
of fetishism and that it is precisely by virtue of this element (in which
the crucial importance of the relation with Hegel is intuitively evident) that
Marx’s theory differs in principle from the whole of classical political
economy.
And also at pg.93:
Since ‘value’ is now considered as the objectification of human
labour-power, the critical scientific or anti-fetishistic discourse of Capital
comes to coincide with the self-consciousness of the working class (a
further proof of the unity of science and ideology). For just as wage labour,
by recognizing the essence of ‘value’ and ‘capital’, sees that essence as an
objectification of ‘itself’ (and hence reaches self—consciousness through this
knowledge), the working class, by becoming conscious of itself, achieves — for
profit and rent are forms derived from surplus value — the knowledge of the
origin and basis of other classes and hence of society as a whole. This point
serves to indicate the profound difference between Marx and his Marxist but
(more or less consciously) Ricardian interpreters. They failed to grasp the
organic unity between the theory of value and the theory of fetishism
and therefore could not avoid confusing two totally distinct things.
And now we illustrate
both (a) and (b):
On the one hand, in dividing its total labour force between different
employments, society must take account of the labour-time involved in each of
these employments. On the other hand, we have the specific way in which this
law operates under capitalism where, in the absence of a conscious or
planned division of social labour, the labour-time required by the
various productive activities is presented as an intrinsic quality in the
products themselves, as the ‘value’ of a ‘thing’. This confusion between
the law of labour-time (which applies to all societies) and its fetishized
realization in the world of capital and of commodities, or between the
principles of planning and the law of value is the root of modern revisionism…
Here Colletti, like the Ricardians and revisionists he is critiquing, clearly mistakes capitalism with the Planlosigkeit – the lack of planning and anarchy which, together with the theft of labour time, was the essential point of attack of Marxist and Social Democrats against capitalist industry! The problem with capitalist industry is most emphatically not “the absence of a conscious or planned division of social labour”! The problem is the organized, regimented political coercion of living labour for the sake of the accumulation of dead labour for the further coercion of living labour! It is only through political coercion that concrete social labour can be turned into abstract individual wage labour.
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