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. The problem is, of course, to explain how a society of private producers with “individual labours” can ever co-ordinate its productive activities so as to ensure its successful reproduction. For Marxist theory, this is the equivalent of establishing how concrete social labour, which is unmeasurable and incommensurable, can be equalized or homogenized and abstracted so that it can be measured. 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
obverse is also true: Colletti equates communism with a planned society. 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 – by means of market exchange and
not by means of orchestrated political coercion!
Now, it is true that, as
Marx and Colletti maintain, concrete social labour can be abstracted or
equalized or homogenised only when the products of that social labour are
exchanged, and thence also “priced”, as individual commodities – because once products
(commodities or “goods”) are priced individually, it is entirely obvious and it
follows necessarily that the concrete social labour behind their production must
be treated as if it were homogeneous abstract labour rather as concrete social
labour. But the pricing of the products of social labour for market exchange
– their treatment as individual products separate from all other products – and
therefore the homogenization and equalization of the concrete social labour
that pro-duced these “products” can only take place if and only if there is an
institutional political regulation and thus necessarily political co-action or
co-ercion behind such equalization and homologation as abstract individual wage
labour of the concrete social labour that went into their production!
As we explained above,
Marx tries to solve this conundrum of how concrete social labour can be transmuted
into abstract individual labours measurable and remunerated as wage labour 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 explanations, or rather,
rationalizations! In other words, market exchanges fall into the fallacies of
tautology first – socially necessary labour time determines market prices and
market prices determine socially necessary labour time – and the fallacy called
post hoc ergo propter hoc - because it is the final market-clearing
prices that rationalize socially necessary labour time in causal terms – as
“necessary” labour time! 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, and we would have to describe how this
planning or regulation takes place. 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 scrapheap of social theories to which it belongs.
Now, once Marx and
Colletti perceive that it is impossible for market prices to explain the equalization
of concrete labour into abstract labour, it is then a natural tendency for them
to insist on the phenomenological explanation of this mysterious (not
“mystical” as Marx describes it in the chapter on commodity fetishism)
transmutation by means of a psycho-sociological phenomenological collective
hypnosis (a “social imaginary” as Sartre and Althusser would label it) –
commodity fetishism! 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 socialism with “planning”
and capitalism with “lack of planning” because he identifies “social labour” with
“planned labour” and “individual labours” with “unplanned society”! In reality,
all societies rely on concrete social labour for their reproduction The
difference between social formations rests on the kind of social labour that
they employ and on the use they make of their production.
Because without planning
the reproduction of capitalist society cannot rely solely on “the market”, then
Marx and Colletti, who insist strenuously on the “unplanned” or “market”
essence of capitalism, must of necessity rely on the notion of “commodity
fetishism” or that of “socially necessary labour time”. For it is impossible or
tautological to explain how “the market” can ensure the reproduction of
capitalist society once we realize that 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” – at which time we all become aware of the
utter futility of “market equilibrium” accounts of capitalism!
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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