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

Tue Feb 10 03:22:03 CET 2009

Kevin,

I find this a great explanation of what your mutualist tradition is about,
so I will publish it on the blog on the 17th,

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/unequal-exchange-of-labor-at-the-heart-of-the-mutualist-argument/2009/02/17

excerpt will start from: Unequal exchange was built into the labor market
from the beginning.

Michel

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 5:07 AM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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>

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