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

[Kevin Carson]

On 2/10/09, Nathan Cravens <knuggy at gmail.com> wrote:

>  Labor, given a productive technology remains static, can be measured more
> easily than a material resource. Yet, because someone, somewhere, is
> ingenious enough or has access and interest in the production knowledge to
> want to tinker with the productive technology in a manner that captures
> labor value, it becomes difficult to measure a labor's worth over time. I
> also think it is difficult to assess labor's worth because of the
> subjective, or better, the varied absolute sentiments of value itself from
> person to person within an environment.

Adam Smith, faced with a similar question about how the cost of
schooling, difficulty and unpleasantness of work, etc., could be
factored into wages.  He argued that this would be done by the
"higgling and bargaining of the market."  Thomas Hodgskin, a market
socialist heavily influenced by Smith, argued that this "higgling"
process would result in wages that reflected such factors, if a free
market existed in which the propertied classes lacked the
legally-enforced privilege that enabled them to charge artificial
scarcity rents on land.

And if I can throw another name in there, Franz Oppenheimer (a
Georgist of sorts) argued that, absent monopoly rents on land and
capital, the produce of labor would automatically distribute itself
among workers in proportion to their subjective disutility.   In cases
of work that was more onerous or unpleasant to some than to others,
people would eventually sort themselves out into new lines of work,
until the subjective satisfactions and dissatisfactions were equalized
between employments with wages reflecting the average level of
disutility.

Another question comes to mind: "Would
> the labor plus the productive technology that captured and continues to
> capture it be factored as labor value?" Perhaps this tricky question to
> answer is the reason marginal value theory is used in place of labor value
> theory, seemingly, to avert the issue of labor value vs technological
> capture and (perhaps?) the right to possession this serious developing issue
> generates.

Absent artificial scarcity rents on capital, the individualist
anarchists argued, the price of capital would reflect only the cost of
retiring the past labor embedded in them.

>  To provide a rough estimate of labor value, might we refine this into a
> formula: demand vs scarcity. Demand can be measured rather accurately.
> Scarcity in labor terms can be reduced to: "At what percentage does a
> populace lack in this specific productive knowledge?" Increased demand may
> well provide the factor for scarcity of applied knowledge, yet to ignore
> scarcity would mean to acquiesce to continued conditions of scarcity. I'm
> curious to know what labor theory you would put stock in, Kevin. I am
> largely ignorant of the giants that dwelled in this territory.

Far from disproving or replacing the LTV in classical political
economy, IMO marginal utility theory simply described the mechanism by
which it operated.  The classicals, Smith and Ricardo, saw the law of
value as describing the natural value toward which actual prices were
always fluctuating.  But this gravitation toward natural value took
place *through* supply and demand.  The marginalists are right that
value is determined, given the snapshot conditions of supply and
demand at the point of exchange at any particular time, by marginal
utility.  This is, as Simpson's lawyer Lionel Hutz put it, "the best
kind of true:  technically true."  The part it leaves out is that
supply itself changes over time in response to price, for goods whose
supply is elastic, until the marginal utility of the last unit
produced equals the cost of producing it.

The classicals had two separate paradigms, one (the law of labor value
or the law of cost) for goods in elastic supply, and the other
(pricing by scarcity) for inelastic goods like rare collectibles, or
food in a city under siege.  The marginalists took the scarcity
paradigm and applied it to all goods.  But to make it work, they had
to abstract the time factor and treat the calculation of marginal
utility as something that took place at a point in time, rather than a
dynamic dependent variable over time.

>  It would be an interesting exercise to say, "Okay, what if energy where
> free?" If the aim is to capture the Sun's abundant energy to power devices:
> free energy is the result. I'm curious to see how this would affect current
> costs, even with the misappropriations, divisions, monopolies, and the egos
> that insist on being depended on for productive knowledge.

It would probably cause a collapse of much of the corporate economy,
as the scarcity its profits depended on ceased to exist.  But it seems
to me that, absent some radical breakthrough working on new scientific
principles, the available replacements for fossil fuels are either
available in limited quantities, or have a much lower energy return on
energy invstment (EROEI), or both.  In that case, the best path to
energy abundance is to reduce the need for energy as an input,
following Amory Lovins soft energy path.

>  Ponderousness aside, this brings up a discussion between Marcin Jakubowski
> and I that largely relates to this conversation. Let's introduce what I call
> "efficiency through recursion."  The test subject for this model is: Open
> Source Ecology: Global Village Construction Set: Compressed Earth Block
> Press: melting and casting from scrap metal vs purchasing caste parts. This
> process can be called a form of "productive recursion," an open source form
> of production from the bottom-up, produced more efficiently to generate more
> value than top down proprietary methods. The "efficiency through recursion"
> theory assumes a 5:1 ratio of value generated to labor used in the
> theoretical case presented. This may mean more labor time to produce an
> artifact than purchasing assembled materials elsewhere, yet the financial
> cost (waste) saved means less toil or wage labor in the long run to generate
> the same item: therefore: a recursive acceleration in production efficiency.
> In theory, this will mean more leisure time as a result when proven in
> practice: for one that chooses to construct the item oneself at a community
> generated Fab Lab or when purchasing the same item from an agent that
> applied similar methods of production. This means the time to manufacture a
> product through community supported manufacturing or personal fabrication,
> whichever is most efficient, will receive highly significant productive
> increases, and when proven by results, will become adopted. This theory can
> be proven many times over when communities can easily acquire the knowledge
> and materials to assemble the meta-tools or Open Source Fab Lab to generate
> productive tools that reduce toil and increase leisure. Inspired by our
> e-mail conversation and my stay at Factor e Farm, Marcin developed a working
> formula to test the theory of "efficiency through recursion" here:
> http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Recursion
>
>  As these methods of recursive production acceleration are determined viable
> and applied, economic growth in the financial (waste) sense will then
> dwindle rather than accelerate. Agents that compete with one another to
> reduce cost to zero play a game I call "zero-point competition." Because the
> work of community supported manufacturing and personal fabrication
> accelerate this form of competition, I am in support of it. Debts, as it
> were, will become paid. If we are to remain alive on this planet "living
> well," I believe the present "mixed" economic model (monopoly government vs
> monopoly free market) must power down rather than move forward.
>
> Clearly, Kevin, we would both agree we must abandon presently accepted
> economic models altogether over time, however increasingly questioned, as
> inefficiencies of the proprietary means of production and its subsequent
> regulational methods are opened, translated, and rooted out. It can be put
> this way: The best form of management does not require a manager. Therefore,
> the most stable economies do not require external force known as government
> as presently understood due to the self regulating nature of localized and
> personal economies.
>
> I assume built-in responsibility and accountability will be generated from
> personal ties generated by local and personal economies. This is nourished
> from empowered methods of labor, less abstract and alienated, to give deeper
> reason for one's activity and that of members of a personally committed
> community. If this assumption is correct generally, it reinforces self
> regulation as economies become localized through local production, thus:
> external governments power down as previous economic growth models power
> down. The new form of economic growth will be in a new form of centralized
> production: personal fabrication. All the roads I observe seem to be
> threshing toward this destination. The result: effortless economy.
>
>  The theory of "efficiency through recursion" will be far more significant
> once it is proven by the developments at Factor e Farm, or other community
> supported manufacturing methods, or once fossil fuels become too costly and
> force local and personal production into action. It will likely be a variety
> of influences that bring production inward where it began. I'm sure, Kevin,
> you've already noted the trends that demonstrate the in-source (P2P)
> movement of production.
>
> From my perspective, the alienation of the Industrial out-source method is
> of some benefit to a degree. The insecurity that comes of a deskilled person
> demands and has generated machines to do what one cannot. The great issue
> with alienation (other than violence) however is a lack of knowledge to
> understand how these tools are used to appropriate leisurely livelihoods.
> This may be why doomsday scenarios are so avidly distributed in Industrial
> societies: 1) to keep people dependent to generate higher rates of exchange
> value for a self, and 2) the classical model in general is taken for granted
> as the only model available with its disastrous consequences at least
> intuitively felt enough to generate the feelings of anxiety, dread, and
> finally: DOOM. That is, if "certain death," a lifeless notion, can be felt
> as a most extreme form of a lived emotion.
>
>  I'm certain this issue will be alleviated when communication technologies
> like the web are used to present productive knowledge in a manner most can
> easily understand. The technology is already available today to accelerate
> this knowledge transfer. I briefly outline a method for transferring this
> technical knowledge here:
> http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Replication
>
>  The argument for localized production would be deeply enriched by your
> knowledge of political economy as applied to the working theory of
> "efficiency through recursion." If you are interested, I would like to your
> comment on this posted to that wiki or by e-mail.

I think I grasp the gist of the Recursion page at Open Farm Tech wiki,
although I got it mainly from the text rather than the formulas, not
being a math person.  If I understand you correctly, I suspect the
reason for that 5:1 savings in substituting labor on-site for purchase
is all the hidden markups in the bought product (including overhead
costs from administration in a conventional business firm, rents on
IP, fixed job categories, failure to optimize choice of
cheap/vernacular/locally available materials, etc.--all the stuff Ivan
Illich and Paul Goodman wrote about).  More generally, it results from
the superior ingenuity available when the  intermediate steps between
design, decision and execution are reduced, and the person doing the
work is free (and has the incentive) to tweak design so as to minimize
cost.

I totally agree with your point about cost savings being passed on
through competition.  This is the normal process in a free market:
for the cost-saving benefits of technological innovation being
"socialized" through competition.  One of the main functions of
artificial property rights, whether in land or in ideas, is to enable
a privileged class to appropriate the free gifts of nature (inherent
productivity of the land, the power of the sun, the elasticity of
steam, etc.), or to appropriate the productivity benefits of
innovation.  Compare your and Marcin's model for replication with
James Watt's exercise of his patent rights over the steam engine.

I wrote about this in a chapter of my org theory book:
Chapter Eleven:  The Abolition of Privilege
http://members.tripod.com/kevin_carson/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/Chapter11.pdf


-- 
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