Useful talk

[Young Master Smeet]

https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2020/06/13/what-is-abstract-labour-and-who-does-the-abstracting/

This is a handy talk that was just given at the Oxford Communist Corresponding Society, it’s a good schematic introduction to Marx’s thought behind the power of Capital.

[ALB]

I agree this is a rather good description of what capital(ism) really is and how it controls our lives, based on Marx’s idea of the “fetishism of commodities”, ie that it is a something that people create and which comes to dominate them as if it were, and which humans regard as, an outside force  operating on them. Ian Wright explains well how it does this

But there is one thing that is problematic. At the beginning he describes money as an invention, a unit of account as a thing for measuring human labour-time. Money is used as a unit of account but it is more than this. It is a social relation, an expression of a society in which wealth is privately owned and produced for sale.

His definition suggests that money could still be used in a post-capitalist society insofar as a common unit of account is needed. Which in fact is his position as he envisages post-capitalist society as one in which profit is eliminated and humans are no longer compelled by an alien force to produce it, but where worker cooperatives still produce for sale and where there is in effect labour-time accounting using money to measure this.

I could be wrong (since I have not checked) but I think he also envisages abstract labour and value continuing too. In other words, that his objection to capitalism is that it obliges people to misuse these tools. Maybe I will ask him (he knows us and our position).

[ZJW]

ALB, Yes, do ask him.

[ALB]

Here is my question and his answer from his blog (see link given by YMS):

 Are you saying that “abstract labour” and “value” will exist in a post-capitalist  society but that they will no longer be misused by Capital?

Thanks for your question. “Abstract labour” is capital’s concept of our causal powers. Like any successful concept it does refer to an objective property of the world, yet nonetheless it doesn’t fully capture its content (e.g., the scientific concept of heat does refer to something real and independent of us, yet nonetheless our concept of heat has evolved and subtly changed along with our theory and practice). So in a hypothetical post-capitalist society (presumably where capital no longer exists, and no longer controls us) then capital’s concept “abstract labour” will have ceased to exist. However, society, while it remains within the realm of necessity, will still need some mechanism to allocate labour-power, and therefore represent it and count it. So the political economy of a post-capitalist society will also need to reify the common causal powers of social labour; probably we’ll still need some kind of “average” and fungible concept of labour-power. Whether that would be a purely quantitative representation, or something more qualitative and complex, I do not know. My guess is that any new concept will bear a family resemblance to capital’s concept of “abstract labour” (I do not subscribe to Feyerabend’s incommensurability of paradigms). I hope this somewhat philosophical answer responds to your question.

Best wishes!
Ian.

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