As I understood it, the abstract equality based in equality of exchange presuppose inequality in property of a systematic nature. Can see this in the highly abstract way in which many economists have historically begun from individuals trading with one another, abstracting away the actual existing relations that are presupposed to make a scientific account of modern economy (eg
Barter illusion and assumption of
representative individual)
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/marginal-futility-reflections-on-simon-clarkes-marx-marginalism-and-modern-sociology/I like the way Clarke develop his proof this problem: Commodity exchange presupposes individuals with different needs and different resources because if everyone had the same stuff there would be no reason for exchange. Thus exchange presupposes differences. If exchange is systematic these differences must also be systematic. Thus the formal equality and freedom of exchange is founded on different resource endowments. This means that the content of exchange can’t be reduced to its form (free, juridically equal relations between people) but must be found outside of exchange in the realm of production and property.
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdfMarx argues that bourgeois freedom, equality, and property only retain their validity within a specific form of activity under capitalism—the exchange of commodities and in particular, the sale and purchase of labor-power. Abstracting away from the rest of social existence under capitalism, it is possible to believe that the worker is truly free, because he is able to make his will effective through contract, truly equal, because he receives in exchange for his labor-power a wage of equivalent value, and truly in possession of the rights of property, because he is able to dispose of his belongings—and of course in his case we are speaking chiefly of his own labor-power—as he wills.
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But as soon as we leave this realm of abstraction and see, for instance, that the worker is denied access to the means of production, it becomes possible to notice that he is not truly free to dispose of his labor-power as he wills, but rather compelled to sell it that he might continue to live. These illusions of bourgeois morality become less and less tenable, the more concretely we understand the real situation of the worker and the real economic relations of capitalist society
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Once realized, bourgeois equality and freedom are proven to be inequality and unfreedom. Bourgeois freedom is the freedom of the atomistic, individual agent to buy or sell a commodity, and bourgeois equality is the formal equality of individuals who expect to receive remuneration equivalent to the value of the commodities they enter into exchange. The worker and the capitalist already confront one another as formally free and equal in this manner116. It is precisely this formal universal freedom and equality which forms the basis for the capitalist mode of production and which gives rise to the widespread de facto bondage of workers and the de facto social and economic inequality so characteristic of capitalist society.
This discussion to me seems like it would fit right into the historical emphasis of reformist. There developed a socialist movement, though assertedly a Utopian sort, which asserted a right to one's labour from the standpoint of bourgeoisie proprietorial right. If I remember correctly, this is typical of ricardian socialists, proving exploitation of labor so as to argue that an individual should paid in full for their work, without apparently any sense of how this exploitation is presupposed by all sorts of relations in society.
p. 75Far from adopting the labour theory of value to ‘prove’ the exploitation of the working class, Marx’s critique of Ricardo undermines any such proof, both philosophically, in undermining the liberal theory of property which sees labour as the basis of proprietorial rights, and theoretically, in removing the immediate connection between the expenditure of individual labour and the value of the commodity, so that the relationship between ‘effort’ and ‘reward’ can only be constituted socially. Thus Marx was harshly critical of ‘Ricardian socialism’ which proclaimed labour’s entitlement to its product, arguing that such a ‘right’ was only a bourgeois right, expressing bourgeois property relations.4
An issue of socialist movements as a result of study of the political economy, was the issue of of distribution. To resist the radical conclusions of movements, there became a importance to reconcile classes and scientifically establish the limits of reform (this is pretty much the expression of social democrats we say today, wanting to temporarily resolve an inherent class conflict to achieve a stable equilibrium).
So there is a history of asserting that class conflict was resolved through economic prosperity based on a self interested individual, but eventually that lost it's basis as sensible.
Such a focus on distribution was neglected somewhat upon the marginalist revolution, which was considered a science devoid of the moral and political concerns of distribution, capitalism was rational efficient system that needed to only be understood technically. Here there was no class conflict because of classes, instead there was individuals, which also opened up for the sociological account of class (which is arbitrary rather than essential in it's definition, seemingly conflating strata within the classes for classes by emphasizing their sociocultural aspects).
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What makes Quality, Quantity and Measure stages of Being is that they remain forms of concept which are not self-conscious, that is, they are completely objective, describing the object in observer terms, and terms which lack a concept of the phenomenon as such. This is the standpoint of natural science, mathematics and contemporary, positivist social science. In contemporary mainstream social science, one doesn’t have, for example, political movements or even political opinions. You just have so many votes for such and such a party, so many days of lost production due to industrial action, so many positive and negative responses on a survey form and so forth, and any amount of statistics and correlations.
Advocates of this kind of science insist on the necessity of basing science in observation, measurement and, in short, facts not opinions. And so long as we don’t elevate this principle to an absolute, it can’t be denied that it is a necessary, even unavoidable stage in the development of a science. Before you can determine whether hygiene is a cause of susceptibility to allergies, you have to gather a lot of data, and hypotheses about the causes don’t count for much in such a complex problem until you have a great deal of well-organised data on which to base any idea.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/marginal-futility-reflections-on-simon-clarkes-marx-marginalism-and-modern-sociology/Despite their similarities, marginalism’s subjective approach to value came as a response to some inadequacies in classical economics. In classical political economy prices were only theorized after a consideration of distribution. Once the contribution of land, labor and capital were analyzed independently price was just the adding of up of these sums. Thus we can only understand markets and prices through an understanding of class, leaving the way open for more radical interpretations of the theory that might question this distribution. (2)
Marginalism responded by developing a theory of price that directly related price to the subjective valuations of individuals contemplating objects. All social phenomena were abstracted away. This narrowed scope achieved three things: 1. Class and distribution were spirited away, allowing marginalists to claim that such questions were outside the sphere of economics; 2. The obviously political nature of distribution could be reduced to purely technical explanations (marginal productivity, etc) thereby allowing marginalists to claim that they were engaged in pure, non-partisan theory; 3. It provided a naturalistic justification of capitalism.
Clarke argues that the early founders of marginalism were not wholly ideologically motivated by the need to establish a new theory of capitalist apologetics, but that by the 1890’s the marginalist ‘revolution’ had taken on a deep apologetic nature, playing a central role in the worker movements of the late 1800’s in debates between reformist and revolutionary factions. Also, this was a time of rapidly growing social movements for reform. Marginalists wanted to develop some science of economics that could measure the effects of state intervention on the economy. This brought together people of different political persuasions to the marginalist project.
http://libcom.org/files/marx,%20marginalism%20and%20modern%20sociology%20-%20clarke.pdfThe classical theory of production, based on the model of the division of labour, established the complementarity of interests of social classes defined by their ownership of the co-operating factors of production. The classical theory of exchange established that voluntary exchange must be to the benefit of both parties, so that restrictions on the freedom of exchange could only restrict the opportunities for self-improvement. Conflicts of economic interest only arose when consideration of the distribution of the benefits of economic growth was introduced. These interests were defined by the distinct laws which determined the revenues accruing to the various social classes, on the basis of their ownership of the distinct factors of production. Thus the key to the resolution of the problem of order was the identification of the relationship between the interests of particular classes and the general interest of society as a whole. For political economy it was the common interest in the growing prosperity of the nation which provided the criterion against which distributional conflicts could be resolved.
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This denial of the independent interest of the working class could not survive the growth of trade unionism, working class political agitation, and the wider movement for social reform. A more pragmatic approach to the problem of order was called for than was allowed by political economy, and this approach was provided by various schools of sociology and historicism. However the abandonment of the laws of political economy removed any coherent basis on which to address the ‘problem of order’, and so to evaluate proposed reforms. Political economy had provided a model of the ideal society, based on the rational individual, against which to judge misguided reformist schemes. The pragmatic approach to social reform provided no means of setting limits to the demands for reform, which escalated with the legalisation of trades unions, the extension of the franchise, and the growth of working class parties. Without an adequate liberal solution to the ‘problem of order’, which could recognise the necessity for social reform while confining reformist ambitions within appropriate limits, there appeared to be nothing to stop the inexorable advance of social reform towards socialism.
The liberal response to the socialist challenge was provided by the marginalist revolution in economics, which set political economy on a rigorously subjective and individualist foundation. The basis of the marginalist revolution was the replacement of the classical cost of production theory of value with a subjective theory of value. The primary significance of this change was to undermine the classical theory of distribution, according to which the revenues of different classes were determined by different laws, and were evaluated in terms of their contribution to the growth of production. For marginalism the determination of revenues was integrated into the theory of exchange, as revenues were identified with the prices of the commodities from which they derived. The question of distribution was then a question of the initial allocation of resources, which was not a concern of the economist but a matter for moral and political judgement. Thus marginalism rescued political economy from the socialist challenge by removing questions of distribution from the domain of economics. The rationality of capitalism no longer lay in its dynamic efficiency as a system of production, based on the productive employment of the surplus product, but in its allocative efficiency as a system of provision for human needs. The ‘problem of order’ was therefore redefined as the problem of reconciling the efficiency of capitalist relations of production and exchange with the equity of capitalist relations of distribution.
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However much marginalism defined itself in opposition to classical political economy, it represented much more a reformulation than a rejection of the latter doctrine. On the one hand, marginalism altered the basis on which capitalist society was evaluated. Where classical political economy sought to establish the rationality of capitalist society on the basis of a theory of distribution and growth, marginalism sought to do so on the basis of capitalism’s allocative efficiency, viewing problems of growth simply as problems of allocation of resources over time.
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The radical separation of distribution from production and exchange removed the concept of class from the domain of economics, to set economics on an uncompromisingly individualistic foundation. However, the removal of its social content from the field of economics simultaneously defined a space in which sociology could emerge as a complementary discipline.
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The separation of distribution from production and exchange redefined the boundaries between economics and sociology, making it possible for sociology to accept the marginalists’ theory of production and exchange as an account of the ‘economic’ relationship between the individual and nature, without thereby having to accept a particular theory of class and distribution, and associated theories of the proper constitutional and moral order of society. Thus the marginalist revolution, in seeking to define the possibility and limits of social reform, simultaneously defined both the possibility and the limits of the complementary discipline of sociology, as the science which explored the comparative and historical variability of the moral and institutional framework of economic life.
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This claim to value-neutrality on the part of marginalism would appear to be belied at once by the observation that the capitalist system as presented by marginalism was not simply a fact, but was also an ideal. The free market system was claimed to represent the perfect self-realisation of individual rationality in achieving the optimal allocation of resources on the basis of a given distribution of tastes, skills and resources. The apparent paradox is resolved when we realise that the society the marginalists described was ideal not because it corresponded to the evaluations of the theorist, but because it offered the most perfect expression of the preferences of the members of the society. The exchange economy was simply a rational instrument, a means through which individuals could seek to achieve their economic ends. It was the most perfect such instrument in the sense that anything that could be achieved outside the market economy could be achieved more economically within it, while it remained purely an instrument, so that it imposed no constraints on the ends that could be achieved through it.
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The marginalist revolution abolished the classical theory of distribution, and so expelled the concept of class from economics in favour of a purely individualistic theory of economic relations. The concept of class now appears at a lower level of abstraction, becoming a purely sociological concept in the sense that it now characterises particular social groups that arise out of the free association of individuals on the basis of their perception of a common economic interest. It is now economic interest that underlies the formation of classes, not the existence of classes that underlies the conflict of interest. Common economic interest can in principle be found in any situation in which the fate of a number of individuals depends on the terms of the purchase or sale of a given commodity, so there is no reason to limit the application of the concept to capitalists and workers as a whole.
Following the point of Marxism and some sense of economic equality, the equality I see is perhaps that all labours should be equal in value with the labour time spent, whilst at present, they are disciplined by an average (socially necessary labor time). By giving labour time value to the actual time rather than an average, an inequality would result based on differences in productive abilities of people, the more productive will be rewarded. There is perhaps something there to help illustrate socialism as perhaps as a better means to achieving people being rewarded on account of their work which is often assumed to be the case with capitalist and the stuff of unions in it's collectivism somehow destroys this individual merit.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2014/07/02/indirectly-social-labor/But if we understand indirectly social labor to be the result of socially necessary labor time then it does not matter whether this labor’s social nature is realized by a market or by a plan. What gives it its indirectly social nature is the fact that one hour of my work is not worth as much as another’s. Labors are not treated equally. Instead a process of social averaging takes place which rewards some labors and punishes others. The mechanism which realizes or reinforces this does not alter matters.
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Marx lays out, briefly, a way to make labor directly social, breaking with capitalist value production, in his Critique of the Gotha program. In Marx’s concept of directly social labor he advocates a system which breaks with the disciplining of production by socially necessary labor time. Producers in this post-capitalist society will not be compensated according to the social average but instead compensated directly for the actual amount of labor time they expend in production. If I spend 2 hours making a widget I get a labor-certificate entitling me to purchase consumption goods equal to two hours of labor. If you spend 3 hours making the same widget you get a certificate entitling you to 3 hours of consumption goods. Regardless of productivity our labors are directly social because they are compensated in full, considered part of the total labor of society, no matter what.11
Careful readers may ask how such a society would determine the labor-content of consumption goods (the ‘prices’ at which workers ‘buy’ them with their labor-certificates) in the absence of socially necessary labor time. This calculation would be based on the average social labor-time that it took to make a commodity. The calculation could be done simply by adding up all of the concrete labor times that go into making widgets and dividing this by the number of widgets. Such a calculation would allow society to continue to make production plans and to ‘price’ commodities. But the compensation of laborers would not be done through such a process of averaging. So such a system would not eliminate the role of average labor time as an accounting unit. What it would eliminate is the role of average time in the compensation of workers.12
Earlier we used a similar example of a Wallmart executive finding the average cost of of producing a commodity to set the price of the commodity. This example demonstrated how this process of averaging, which determines the socially necessary labor time, erases all particularity of workers, treating individuals only as units of average labor time, as abstract labor. Here, in our example of a communist society with directly social labor, we also see an example of the ‘prices’ of goods being calculated through a similar calculation of average labor time. What is the difference between these two examples? The difference is that Wallmart pays the same price for all of the commodities it buys from suppliers and those suppliers in turn only pay workers to the extent that they can produce at the social average. Any wasted time is not compensated. This creates an incentive for speed-up, exploitation, and the domination of machines over humans in production. In our communist society workers are compensated for the actual amount of time they labor, not just the part that achieves the average. This means that their labor is directly social. The immediate practical implications of this are that there is not an incentive for speed-up and so machines do not loom over production demanding more and more life from the worker.
To execute such an organization of labor it would be necessary for production to be owned and planned by society and not by individual capitals competing in the market. A society of directly social labor would entail different property relations and a different organization of production. In such a system labor-certificates would not circulate independently as money nor would alternative monies emerge spontaneously. This elimination of money would not be the result of political fiat. It would be a result of the organization of the mode of production. Directly social labor has no need for money. Money does not have a role in measuring socially necessary labor time. There is no need for a money commodity to measure the abstract labor content of commodities. The products of labor do not function as commodities with values. Without money and commodities there is no capital.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htmIn spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.
But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
- By litwin
- By FiveofSwords
- By Doug64