[p2p-research] Fwd: Launch of Abundance: The Journal of Post-Scarcity Studies, preliminary plans

[Kevin Carson]

On 2/6/09, Christian Siefkes <christian at siefkes.net> wrote:
> Joseph Jackson wrote:

>  > I agree with most of the LTV and by "normative" I meant that the LTV
>  > provides an objective notion of "fair price" (if price exceeds the
>  > average cost of production it is a sign that some barrier prevents
>  > competitors from entering).
>
>  That's true, but if that's your ideal, it's not much different from what
>  things are now, since in most areas, the barriers of entry are sufficiently
>  weak to make the actual prices quite similar to the "fair price", as you
>  call it.
>
>  The problem with capitalism isn't that prices are "unfair"--most prices
>  aren't. There are other problems. First, production only takes place if
>  there is _profit._ The goal of all capitalist production is to make profit,
>  i.e. to turn money into more money. So, in order to get the things you need,
>  you have to convince some capitalist that they need you, i.e. that employing
>  you allows them to make more profit than they would make otherwise. But
>  capitalists only need a limited number of personnel, much less than there
>  are people on Earth, so that's the big hurdle which most people fail to
>  overcome (when speaking on a global scale).
>
>  A second problem is that, as a worker, you don't sell the results of your
>  labor, you sell your _labor power_ (workers, or would-be workers, are people
>  who don't have anything to sell than their labor power--most people
>  haven't). The deal by selling your labor power is: you get paid the value of
>  your labor power (NOT the value of your labor--labor doesn't _have_ value,
>  it _produces_ values), and the value of your labor power is what you need in
>  order to survive (according to your local community standard of living). In
>  return, you have to give your full labor power (according to the local
>  standard for the length of they work day/week, say, 8 hours a day/40 hours a
>  week). If the production of the goods you need for your standard of living
>  takes 20 hours a week, you still have to work 40 hours--the other 20 hours
>  are the "surplus"--they go to the capitalist, become their profit and are,
>  in fact, the only reason why they employed you in the first place.
>
>  So the problem isn't unfair prices, it's the fact that people have to sell
>  their labor power, because they don't have anything else to sell. And this
>  situation will necessarily arise in a market system (even in a fictitious
>  scenario where initially everybody had some means to production--inevitable,
>  some people would go bankrupt and again have only their labor power to sell).

This was at the heart of Marx's conflict with Proudhon and
market-oriented Ricardian socialists like Thomas Hogskin.  As Maurice
Dobb pointed out in his introduction to Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy, "unequal exchange" was "the kind of explanation
that Marx was avoiding rather than seeking":  "It did not make
exploitation consistent with the law of value and with market
competition, but explained it by departures from, or imperfections in,
the latter."  And this explanation left him vulnerable to a response
from left-wing classical liberals, including market socialists like
Hodgskin and the American individualist anarchists:  "join with us in
demanding really free trade and then there can be no 'unequal
exchanges' and exploitation."

This defensive posture was indicated, I think, by Engels' argument
against the "force theory" in Anti-Duhring that the development of the
wage system would have followed the same path even had there been no
land expropriations, slavery, authoritarian state controls on labor,
etc., involved in the primitive accumulation process.  In so doing, he
essentially backtracked (apparently with Marx's approval, given that
Marx is supposed to have examined the manuscripts) from Marx's
brilliant historical analysis in vol. 1 of Capital.

As an individualist anarchist, obviously, I believe Hodgskin et al got
it right.

Unequal exchange was built into the labor market from the beginning.
That unequal exchange results not from the sale of labor-power as
such, but from the fact that privilege (state-enforced scarcity of
land and capital) makes land and capital artificially costly and
forces labor to sell itself in a buyer's market, paying a premium for
access to the means of production.  The natural price of labor in a
free market is not, as Ricardo and Marx argued, its reproduction cost
(however that argument is qualified by the cultural definition of
reproduction cost).  The natural price of labor results from its
disutility:  the fact that only labor, of all the "factors of
production," must be forced to contribute itself to the production
process. This is why effort is the source of all exchange value.  As
Benjamin Tucker argued, in a free market only what has cost
contributes to cost; and in the end, what but labor has any real cost?

The prices of all the non-labor factors, over and above amortization
costs of embedded past labor, result from monopoly rents attending to
artificial property rights.  They are examples of Dobb's privileged
tollgate keepers, engaged in what Veblen called "capitalized
serviceability."

Were such forms of artificial scarcity not enforced by the state, and
were labor allowed free access to vacant land and allowed to mobilize
credit at cost without the state banking system's entry barriers, then
a much larger portion of the labor force would be self-employed,
either in individual and family businesses or in worker co-ops.  More
importantly, where wage employment continued, the rate of profit would
be driven down by competition from the possibility of self-employment.
 As a wide range of thinkers have pointed out, it is only possible to
get labor to work for less than its full product only when it is
deprived of independent access to the means of subsistence and
production.  That's why it has been such a central focus of the
employed classes to close off such access, and to eliminate
competition from the possibility of self-employment.

Even so, under the old and conventionally (but wrongly) named
"laissez-faire" regime, you are at least right that commodities tended
toward their actual value.  The main form of exploitation took place
within the production process, through the sale of labor-power at less
than its natural rate (which was its full product).

But this is not at all true of commodity prices under monopoly
capitalism.  Economic exploitation in the exchange process has,
arguably, superceded exploitation in the employment process in
importance.  It's quite likely that the total of super-profits
extracted from the consumer through oligopoly markup, embedded rents
on artificial property rights like "intellectual property," etc.,
exceed the amount of surplus value extracted through the production
process.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Anarchist Organization Theory Project
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html