Differences

This shows you the differences between two versions of the page.

--- en:communist-values.-or-a-positive-theory-of-socialism-a-propos-peter-astroem-s-critique-of-communisation-and-value-form-theory [2022/12/29 20:07]
henriksson
+++ en:communist-values.-or-a-positive-theory-of-socialism-a-propos-peter-astroem-s-critique-of-communisation-and-value-form-theory [2023/01/01 09:10] (current)
henriksson
@@ Line 15: / Line 15: @@
 Further, I will try to show how Åström’s critique of the value-form paradigm misses its point, and that his understanding of value, labour, and Marx’s theory is both substantialist and essentialist, suffering from a kind of positivist sclerosis. The problem with his programme is not only and not primarily his preoccupation with value and abstract labour logically, as it were, or quantitatively. His problem lies deeper: With his focus on value proportions he can’t see that value expresses a specific relation of production; a social relation, at once constituting and constituted by the capitalist classes.
-At the same time, however, he has exposed some weak spots in certain articulations of both the communisation perspective and the value-form paradigm, and this merits a continuation of the discussion. At best, Åström suggests a non-answer to the flaws he locates in communisation theory; at worst, the alternative he suggests, in its practical implementation, would take the shape of a state-planned economy, where some socialist engineering, rationality and instrumentality, instead of capital, rules and dominates the individuals, specifically the immediate producers.
+At the same time, however, he has exposed some weak spots in certain articulations of both the communisation perspective and the value-form paradigm, and this merits a continuation of the discussion. At best, Åström suggests a non-answer to the flaws he locates in communisation theory; at worst, the alternative he suggests, in its practical implementation, would take the shape of a state-planned economy, where socialist engineering, rationality and instrumentality, instead of capital, rules and dominates the individuals, specifically the immediate producers.
 On the terrain Åström directs his critique, the controversy is not so much about communist revolution in a historically determined, specific form as communisation, but in a more abstract realm where we try to project a revolutionary overcoming as such. It may be illustrated by the frequent references in this discussion to the theory of Marx from the mid-decades of the 19th Century.
@@ Line 43: / Line 43: @@
-> It is always hazardous to speak of the future […].((Åström, “Crisis and communisation”, //riff-raff//, no 9, 2011; //Sic//, no. 1, 2011.))
+> It is always hazardous to speak of the future […].((Åström, [[en/crisis-and-communisation|“Crisis and communisation”]], //riff-raff//, no 9, 2011; //Sic//, no. 1, 2011.))
-Since //riff-raff// no. nine (and //Sic// no. one) was published in 2011, and Peter Åström wrote his text on “Crisis and communisation”, he has come to develop a critique of the communisation perspective–a critique of the dignity of a veritable break with this entire perspective. In the same process, he has also re-valued his understanding of the conceptual apparatus of Marx, in particular the key categories “value” and “abstract labour”, with implications for both the understanding of the present situation and of a possible, future communist society, as well as for the path leading there.((From what can be seen in his new text (in this issue of //riff-raff//), “Commodity, value, and communism”, Åström seems, at least partially, to have re-valued his understanding of Marx and value once again.))
+Since //riff-raff// no. nine (and //Sic// no. one) was published in 2011, and Peter Åström wrote his text on “Crisis and communisation”, he has come to develop a critique of the communisation perspective–a critique of the dignity of a veritable break with this entire perspective. In the same process, he has also re-valued his understanding of the conceptual apparatus of Marx, in particular the key categories “value” and “abstract labour”, with implications for both the understanding of the present situation and of a possible, future communist society, as well as for the path leading there.((From what can be seen in his new text [[en/the-commodity-and-communism|“From the commodity to communism”]] (in this issue of //riff-raff//), Åström seems, at least partially, to have re-valued his understanding of Marx and value once again.))
 It seems to be one text in particular that provoked Åström's fierce critique of the communisation perspective: (the late) BL’s “The suspended step of communisation” in //Sic// no. 1 (2011). What may have triggered his critique, and after a while his abandonment, of this entire milieu and “paradigm” may eventually be illustrated by the following quotations:
@@ Line 95: / Line 95: @@
 What I suggest is that the communisation perspective is both relevant and adequate for our understanding of communism and revolution based on the contemporary actually existing capitalism. For this, TC’s participation can serve as a point of departure. Åström’s critique of the more wild or speculative (in the ordinary sense) aspects of the communisation perspective, may hit some soft-spots in this theoretical system; nevertheless, it misses the hard kernel of the revolutionary perspective of a notion of communisation.
-Åström’s, explicit and implicit, alternative is, at best, a huge leap back in history, at least to a revolutionary program à la 1920. At worst, where his argument ends, as it were, an image is conjured up of a planner state, constituted by a rational and instrumental ’socialist engineering’. Even this image, however, seems to be unlikely, already from the fact that both class and class struggle is absent from his scheme, and that revolution, thus, seems to be a revolution without revolutionary overthrow, or rather a revolutionary overthrow without revolution, in which ‘production’ (‘labour’) is kept as a separate sphere–to be able to maintain the achieved level of labour productivity (understood most narrowly). Only distribution is to be altered from the anarchy of the market to the regulation of the departments of planning and prognosis. One could even argue, that this scheme is based on a Schumpeterian ‘socialism’ as a bureaucratic overgrowth into a socialist planned economy, in which bureaucrats and intellectuals regulate the economy, or, in a more dramatic scenario, as an office revolution. The invisible hand of the market is replaced by the visible and transparent hand of bureaucracy.
+Åström’s, explicit and implicit, alternative is, at best, a huge leap back in history, at least to a revolutionary program à la 1920. At worst, where his argument ends, as it were, an image is conjured up of a planner state, constituted by a rational and instrumental ’socialist engineering’. Even this image, however, seems to be unlikely, already from the fact that both class and class struggle is absent from his scheme, and that revolution, thus, seems to be a revolution without revolutionary overthrow, or rather a revolutionary overthrow without revolution, in which ‘production’ (‘labour’) is kept as a separate sphere–to be able to maintain the achieved level of labour productivity (understood most narrowly). Only distribution is to be altered from the anarchy of the market to the regulation of the departments of planning and prognosis. One could even argue, that this scheme is based on a Schumpeterian ‘socialism’ as a bureaucratic overgrowth into a socialist planned economy, in which bureaucrats and intellectuals regulate the economy, or, in a more dramatic scenario, as a palace revolution. The invisible hand of the market is replaced by the visible and transparent hand of bureaucracy.
 The somewhat dismal image I have felt obliged to conjure up from Åström’s argument has its theoretical ground in Åström’s reconsideration of Marx’s conceptual apparatus, first and foremost of ‘value’ and ‘abstract labour’, and in the remaining part of this text I will focus on this aspect.
@@ Line 145: / Line 145: @@
 As categories, commodity form and value form are not identical and shall not be blended. The value form is merely one aspect of the commodity form of a product of labour. They are, however, internally related: ‘Every product of labour is, in all states of society, a use value; but it is only at a definite historical epoch in a society’s development that such a product becomes a commodity, viz., at the epoch when the labour spent on the production of a useful article becomes expressed as one of the objective qualities of that article, i.e., as its value’.((Marx, //Capital I//, MECW 35, p. 72.)) In a letter to Engels (July 22, 1859), Marx notes: ‘the //specifically// social, by no means //absolute//, character of bourgeois production is analysed straight away in its simplest form, that of the //commodity//’. By exchanging products of labour as commodities they become objects of value. At the same time, it is only in a specific historical epoch that the ‘objective’ property of the products of labour is expressed as //labour//, as time, as value. For this reason, Marx speak of the value character of a commodity as its ‘ghostly objectivity’ [gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit], as the ‘common [gemeinschaftliche] social substance’ of different commodities.((//Capital I//, MECW 35, p. 48, amended (cf. MEGA II.6, p. 72).))
-This circumstance becomes even more clear when Marx, in //Capital III//, in discussing human labour as such as ‘a mere ghost’, notes: ‘“the” Labour, which is no more than an abstraction and taken by itself does not exist at all, […] the productive activity of human beings in general, by which they promote the interchange with Nature, divested not only of every social form and well-defined character, but even in its bare natural existence, independent of society, removed from all societies, and as an expression and confirmation of life which the still nonsocial man in general has in common with the one who is in any way social’.((MECW 37, p. 802.)) This ‘mere ghost’ does not positively exist, as an empirically fact, but it has practical effect in capitalism; it is a poltergeist making its presence known both day and night. It is the phantom that ascribes to the product of labour its objectivity as value, its ‘ghostly objectivity’, as one aspect of the fetish character of commodities: that the aspect of human labour that produces value //seems// to be ‘human labour as such’. This character of being human labour is its specific social character, and what makes it a historically determined form of ‘social labour’. Value producing abstract labour is thereby not ‘labour’ without any form, but a specific (social, historical) form by which labour appears //as// ‘labour’.
+This circumstance becomes even more clear when Marx, in //Capital III//, in discussing human labour as such as ‘a mere ghost’, notes: ‘“the” Labour, which is no more than an abstraction and taken by itself does not exist at all, […] the productive activity of human beings in general, by which they promote the interchange with Nature, divested not only of every social form and well-defined character, but even in its bare natural existence, independent of society, removed from all societies, and as an expression and confirmation of life which the still nonsocial man in general has in common with the one who is in any way social’.((MECW 37, p. 802.)) This ‘mere ghost’ does not positively exist, as an empirically fact, but it has practical effect in capitalism; it is a poltergeist making its presence known both day and night. It is the phantom that ascribes to the product of labour its objectivity as value, its ‘ghostly objectivity’, as one aspect of the fetish character of commodities: that the aspect of human labour that produces value //seems// to be ‘human labour as such’. This character of being human labour is its specific social character, and what makes it a historically determined form of ‘social labour’. Value producing abstract labour is thereby not ‘labour’ without any form, but a specific (social, historical) form by which labour appears as ‘labour’.
 What in all forms of society is, formally, expressed in the products of labour as objects of utility assumes in capitalism also a purely social objectivity as //value//, constituted by ‘abstract labour’ as a historical determination of human labour. In his marginal notes to Adolph Wagner, from 1881–2, Marx clarifies that ‘the “value” of the commodity merely expresses in a historically developed form something which also exists in all other historical forms of society, albeit //in a different form, namely the social character of labour, insofar as [sofern] it exists as expenditure of “social” labour-power//’.((MECW 24, p. 551.)) The bare expenditure of labour-power is, in capitalism, the social form of value producing labour. Value is the purely social substance of commodities that is established and existent in the relation between (at least) two commodities, as their common ‘third’, as it were. The price-tags of commodities have nothing to do with some metaphysic property of human labour as such. But, as commodities, the labour bestowed upon them nevertheless appear as their value, as, in the words of Marx’s critique of the Gotha programme (1875), ‘a thing-like quality possessed [bessesene] by them’.((MECW 24, p. 85.))
@@ Line 155: / Line 155: @@
 It is true that in //Capital III// Marx makes the remark that ‘after the abolition of the capitalist mode or production, but still retaining social production, the determination of value continues to prevail in the sense [in dem Sinn] that the regulation of the labour time and the distribution of social labour among the various production groups, ultimately the bookkeeping encompassing all this, become more essential than ever’.((MECW 37, p. 838. On bookkeeping, etc., and its role in social pre-capitalist, capitalist, and ‘collective’ production, cf. //Capital II//, MECW 36, pp. 138–9.)) But as noted by e.g. Paul Mattick, in this context the word ‘value’ is only to be understood as a manner of speech.((Mattick, //Marx and Keynes. The limits of the mixed economy//, Merlin 1969, pp. 29–30.)) When Marx’s conceptual apparatus is strictly applied, the category of value is not to be handled as a mere manner of speech; the determination of the commodity as an object of value is not some value nominalism.
-Value is the purely social substance of exchange value, constituted by abstract labour, as a social relation–not as a thing-like property, other than //as// (a socially necessary) illusion (Schein). As such, this relation is reified, and necessarily expressed in and objectified as the autonomised form as money. Without form, value can neither be measured nor observed; value is not something in itself invisible, as, e.g., radioactivity or carbon monoxide. Value does not exist positively without form, without a value form, without its necessary form of appearance as money. When Marx remarks that no chemist has ever found value in a pearl or diamond, it is not only as irony but as a matter of fact.
+Value is the purely social substance of exchange value, constituted by abstract labour, as a social relation–not as a thing-like property, other than as (a socially necessary) illusion (Schein). As such, this relation is reified, and necessarily expressed in and objectified as the autonomised form as money. Without form, value can neither be measured nor observed; value is not something in itself invisible, as, e.g., radioactivity or carbon monoxide. Value does not exist positively without form, without a value form, without its necessary form of appearance as money. When Marx remarks that no chemist has ever found value in a pearl or diamond, it is not only as irony but as a matter of fact.
 From a bourgeois horizon, the appearance of ‘labour’, as substance, as ‘objectivity’–obviously!–be categorised as ‘value’; then, however, it is not ‘real’ or ‘actual’ value, but value in one-sided, undeveloped (mentally ideal), mutilated form, as an analytical abstraction. In brief, when Marx in his letter to Kugelmann, cited above, speaks of social labour (in general), he does not necessarily speak of //abstract, value-producing labour// or //value//, as something general, transhistorical, that exists in itself, ready to find some (contingent) historical form dangling in mid-air. Value is not a transhistorical category that expresses ‘human labour in general’ and, pace Åström, will prevail in a future communist context. Value is //a historical abstraction// as the (social) substance constituted by a specific form of social labour, that in and through the form of money makes labour count, and be counted, as human labour as such.
@@ Line 179: / Line 179: @@
 Finally, what is the form of value? The simple answer is: exchange value, //the// value form, or price. This is made clear by Marx already in the title of this section in //Capital I//–‘The form of value or exchange value’. If the use value form of a commodity is its material form, such as bread, butter, and beer, its value form is the economic, social form; it is the ‘suprasensible’ aspect of a commodity.
-Only as general form of value does the //value form// correspond to the //concept of value//.((‘The value-form’, in //Capital & Class//, 1978, p. 146.)) This form is a transitional form to the form of general equivalence, i.e. the money form of the commodity and value, and as such the form of value as such. Already the developed form of value makes is clear that the value of a specific commodity is expressed in the world of commodities, and only with this, this value itself ‘//appear// truly as a //jelly of undifferentiated human labour//’, as //abstract labour//. ((//Loc. cit.//, p. 145.)) From this, we may conclude that the value form and the value concept correspond to each other in the money form, as a specific expression of exchange value, the aspect of exchange value of a commodity, as the unity of the quality value in general and the quantity socially necessary labour time. Thus, when, in the discussion about the doctrine of value by Marx, we speak of the ‘value form’ it is the over grasping characterisation of the value form in general, //as// general form of equivalence, //as// money form: ‘The universal equivalent form is a form of value in general’.((//Capital I//, MECW 35, p. 80.))
+Only as general form of value does the //value form// correspond to the //concept of value//.((‘The value-form’, in //Capital & Class//, 1978, p. 146.)) This form is a transitional form to the form of general equivalence, i.e. the money form of the commodity and value, and as such the form of value as such. Already the developed form of value makes is clear that the value of a specific commodity is expressed in the world of commodities, and only with this, this value itself ‘//appear// truly as a //jelly of undifferentiated human labour//’, as //abstract labour//. ((//Loc. cit.//, p. 145.)) From this, we may conclude that the value form and the value concept correspond to each other in the money form, as a specific expression of exchange value, the aspect of exchange value of a commodity, as the unity of the quality value in general and the quantity socially necessary labour time. Thus, when, in the discussion about the doctrine of value by Marx, we speak of the ‘value form’ it is the over grasping characterisation of the value form in general, as general form of equivalence, as money form: ‘The universal equivalent form is a form of value in general’.((//Capital I//, MECW 35, p. 80.))
@@ Line 193: / Line 193: @@
 Åström’s argument can be traced back to Marx’s presentation of the capitalist process of production in //Capital I//: On the one hand, it is a unity of labour process and value producing process; the former corresponds to concrete labour, and the latter to abstract labour. On the other hand, as value producing process it is, when further examined, a process of valorisation, i.e. a surplus value producing process. Following Åström, the former is to be kept, and the latter is to be abolished. Consequently, the labour process is to function as a value producing process, but no longer as a surplus value producing process. An implication of this argument is that Åström collapses value producing process into labour process, as–conceptually–one and the same process, as two words for one and the same thing. This is, to be noted, how it appears in capitalism, as the fetish character of the capitalist process of production that by way of an objective illusion (Schein) appears to be a human process of labour as such.
-However, a capitalist process of production is to be understood as a valorisation process; this is the only way it makes sense. It is the pursuit of profit, grounded in capital as self-valorisation of value, that is the motivating force of capitalism, its overarching end.((Cf. ‘Urtext’ (1859): ‘QUOTE’.)) Considered thus, value producing process, as well as labour process, is merely moments of the capitalist process of production //as// valorisation process, abstract, in itself, as a such one-sided aspect that does not positively exist as such, outside and external to the capitalist process of production.((Cf. //loc. cit.//, p. xxx. For Marx’s methodological approach concerning abstract moments, and ‘in itself’, see the first edition of //Capital I//, in the beginning of the presentation of the value form, the simple form of relative value: ‘The different specifications which are contained in it are veiled, undeveloped, abstract, and consequently only able to be distinguished and focused upon through the rather intense application of our power of abstraction’ (//loc. cit.//, p. 18. In a footnote on the same page, Marx remarks: ‘They are to a certain extent the cell-form or, as Hegel would have said, //the in-itself of money// (MEGA II.5, p. 28, PH trans).))
+However, a capitalist process of production is to be understood as a valorisation process; this is the only way it makes sense. It is the pursuit of profit, grounded in capital as self-valorisation of value, that is the motivating force of capitalism, its overarching end.((Cf. ‘Urtext’ (1859), MECW 29, p. 496: ‘So, fixed as wealth, as the universal form of wealth , as value that counts as value, money is a constant drive to go beyond its quantitative limits; an endless process. Its own viability consists exclusively in this; it preserves itself as self-important value distinct from use value only when it //continually multiplies itself// by means of the process of exchange itself. The active value is only a surplus-value-positing value.’.)) Considered thus, value producing process, as well as labour process, is merely moments of the capitalist process of production as valorisation process, abstract, in itself, as a such one-sided aspect that does not positively exist as such, outside and external to the capitalist process of production.((Cf. Ibid. For Marx’s methodological approach concerning abstract moments, and ‘in itself’, see the first edition of //Capital I//, in the beginning of the presentation of the value form, the simple form of relative value: ‘The different specifications which are contained in it are veiled, undeveloped, abstract, and consequently only able to be distinguished and focused upon through the rather intense application of our power of abstraction’ (//loc. cit.//, p. 18. In a footnote on the same page, Marx remarks: ‘They are to a certain extent the cell-form or, as Hegel would have said, //the in-itself of money// (MEGA II.5, p. 28, PH trans).))
 To toy around some with the argument of Åström’s: The circuit of capital is Money (M) – Commodity (C) – more Money (M’), viz. M–C–M’. To exchange £100 (M) for £100 (M) is absurd in the context of capital. To interrupt the process of production after its value producing aspect, as it were, and to think, with this, that you have reached a point at which capital, as ‘accumulation’, is abolished, and to maintain ‘simple reproduction’ based on ‘value’, understood as socially necessary labour time, is naïve, if not vulgar. As stressed above, labour process and value producing process do not exist in themselves, empirically, positively, when you abstract from the valorisation aspect. They are, as it were, subsumed under, and incorporated in the valorisation process understood as a capitalist process of production. In Marx’s presentation, they are mere conceptual steps in his theoretical development of the capitalist process of production //as// surplus value producing process.
@@ Line 228: / Line 228: @@
 To state this a bit vulgar: The abolishing of capitalist categories is about doing and acting in another way, other than today and hitherto; it is to act together within revolutionary circumstances. Often it takes the form of confronting your boss, politician, union official, or the cops, being the incarnations of these abstractions (institutionalisations, social roles). And this is so way before a revolutionary situation. It is, as it were, the chain of command in everyday life in capitalism. At the same time, capital is embodied in the capitalist, it takes material form in machinery, in means of production and subsistence.((Cf. Marx, “Results of the immediate process of production”, p. 411.)) As stated by TC: To abolish a social relation is a material thing.
-It is a characteristic inversion of the state of things in capitalism that abstractions, such as value and capital, haunt factories and take possession of the individuals of the bourgeois society (workers, capitalists, and others), so that the latter appear on the capitalist stage as character masks, as personifications of economic relations. Shoot your boss, and he will disappear as a private person; but the boss //as// boss, as a social role and function, will remain, since capital will remain, and there need to be some body to possess for it to make its ghost-walking around the globe.
+It is a characteristic inversion of the state of things in capitalism that abstractions, such as value and capital, haunt factories and take possession of the individuals of the bourgeois society (workers, capitalists, and others), so that the latter appear on the capitalist stage as character masks, as personifications of economic relations. Shoot your boss, and he will disappear as a private person; but the boss as boss, as a social role and function, will remain, since capital will remain, and there need to be some body to possess for it to make its ghost-walking around the globe.
 We have seen how Åström’s unarguably formal-logical line of argument result in rather obscure conclusions that seem pretty distant from Marx’s dialectical presentation of //Capital//: He wishes to keep ‘value’, but not ‘valorisation’; the aspect of the process of production as ‘value-producing process’, but not as ‘valorisation process’, that, nevertheless, is to produce a ‘surplus’. This, he claims, will abolish capital since ‘accumulation’ will no longer be the overarching and dominating aim and goal of social (re-) production.
@@ Line 240: / Line 240: @@
 Further, I have highlighted that communism fundamentally has to do with praxis, with other ways to act socially, individually and in common, and that human activity must assume other forms than in the capitalist division of labour, not only between industries, nations, or genders, but also, and most fundamentally, between ‘labour’ and ‘leisure time’. Such a re-formulation of praxis at one and the same time expresses and makes happen this revolutionised content. As long as labour productivity is regarded as the overarching aim and mean of society, the imperative to increase efficiency, and to exploit the immediate producers–for the best of ‘society’–will remain, and, therefore, the classes and oppression will continue or be able to rise again, as the acute forms of counter-revolution.
-We have seen that on the level which Åström addresses his charges against a communisation perspective, a response necessarily will have to be focused on already the more abstract level of revolution and communism as such, as it were, and not as specific and historical determinations and forms //as// communisation, as the revolutionary perspective of the present moment.
+We have seen that on the level which Åström addresses his charges against a communisation perspective, a response necessarily will have to be focused on already the more abstract level of revolution and communism as such, as it were, and not as specific and historical determinations and forms as communisation, as the revolutionary perspective of the present moment.
 In Åström, just like in so many other utopian programmes and sketches throughout history, there is an authoritarian scent, if, however, involuntary and implicit. To return to the initial quote as the motto of this essay, it is a utopian scent to Åström’s charges against a communisation perspective, that he makes his plea to reason when it comes to a post-capitalist alternative to the misery of today. Ad absurdum, however, the position of Åström expresses a mix of naivety–about capitalism, class struggle, and counter-revolution–and dystopia–a planner state. By this, he misses the opportunity to develop a productive critique of both the communisation perspective, as it has been advocated by TC in particular, and the value-form paradigm, as exemplified by Chris Arthur. Luckily for us, however, the last word in this conversation has not yet been spoken.