[twc]

 Kitching is wrong.ExampleAssume that we are productive capitalists, and that the going social labour rate, i.e. the socially necessary labour rate (or money equivalent of labour time) is   1 hour of labour time = £1As productive capitalists, we are “productive” because our production process produces surplus value, ostensibly for ourselves but, under competitive capitalist conditions, we are producing it socially for competitive carve up by the entire capitalist class.Purchase of Socially Necessary MachineryTo be competitive—i.e. to be socially necessary—we, as productive capitalists, need to buy machinery, which we look for on the open, competitive, machinery capitalist market.We find a machine that appears perfect for our needs.The maker is selling it for £1000 money, for him potentially valued at 1000 hours of physical labour time.But an unsold commodity is an unloved thing, and asks “Do I really embody 1000 hours of socially necessary labour time? Am I really worth £1000?”Meanwhile, its equally anxious seller, poor fellow, has no inkling of what unforeseen surprises, game changers, and market disruptions may await him, between the manufacture and eventual sale of his product.Fortunately for him, we as part of a competitive community of purchasers, consider his machine is well priced at £1000 for our needs, and we buy it from him for £1000.Our mutual transaction has now collapsed the machine’s physical value into its money price. We, and our fellow purchasers, on the machinery market, have just validated that his machine really does embody 1000 hours of socially necessary labour time.[Note. This market transaction is not a mechanical operation. It is the working out of a socially necessary competitive process, that continually reproduces and refines itself. It is systemic development. It is, in form, though not in content, a continuous Hegelian development operating before our eyes.]End of transaction.Physical v Socially Necessary Labour Time Our machine has now dropped out of the circuit of production. It is no longer a commodity. Its destiny is no longer the market. It has been sold.Its physically embodied labour time is ancient history. Its socially necessary labour time has been settled, socially, by the market at £1000 or 1000 hours of socially necessary labour.But social evaluation is a dynamic process. Tomorrow, a competing capitalist unveils a cheaper machine that drops the socially necessary purchase price of all machines similar to ours down to £500.Lo and behold, 1000 hours of socially agreed embodied labour has been devalued, in a flash, from 1000 to only 500 hours of embodied socially necessary labour time.The actual time to produce remains the same, but capital pays scant respect to dead labour, even less so than it does to the living variety, which begs gentler handling because it alone is productive. And we, purchasers of the higher priced machine, reluctantly have to wear its social devaluation in order to remain competitive, i.e. to remain alive as a competitive productive capitalist enterprise.Relative to our new competitors, we have to spread our surcharge over twice as many products as they, in order to cover the cost of our over-valued purchase.  Paying off the cost of a machine, by the way, is a purely bookkeeping transaction.[Note. To dramatise the difference between impotent dead labour embodied in a machine and virile living labour-power embodied a worker—which is the crucial distinction here under discussion—Ruthless one-off devaluation of constant capital, such as plant and machinery, is periodically enforced by economic collapse to the delight of circling vultures who pick it up “for a song”.Such fire-sale stocks are cleared at a fraction of their original embodied physical labour hours, something that’s not feasible for precious living labour-power, which hovers about a socially necessary norm.]False Accounting in Physical ValueA machine is a socially necessary purchase but not a productive one, in and of itself. Only living labour—labour engaged in the production process—is productive, i.e. preservative of embodied dead labour time and productive of new surplus labour time.Now, most critics of marxian economics think of labour time in terms of fixed physical valuation in one form or another.The supreme example is Sraffa, who chased his tail in recursing through past labour time, reducing embodied labour time to dated labour time, ad infinitum, to utter frustration.It never occurred to Sraffa that market transaction, like our socially necessary purchase of machinery (or raw materials, etc.) is the socially necessary mechanism that short circuits all such labour reduction, once and for all, by collapsing embodied dead labour into socially necessary labour time.Physical labour time, like the category of ‘use-value’, is subservient to socially necessary labour time. And money, as in everything else in the capitalist market, is the ultimate arbiter of labour time.That’s precisely why the capitalist market cannot be understood in pure utility or physical terms.

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“Socially necessary” means, of course, necessary for the production of surplus value.That is the supreme social necessity, to which all else is subservient, in our social system.

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I appreciate the greatness of the reply to WB of Upton Park.  But I also acknowledge that this reply is just the first word on a fraught matter.  It is by no means the last. Many more words are needed to carefully flesh out its implications.A capitalist parliament is a Socialist minefieldBear in mindAll parliamentary measures will be capitalist political measures.Capitalist political measures, as now, will be tainted by being framed to work under capitalism.Capitalist political measures, as now, “must succeed” under capitalist conditions.Capital seeks freedom. It outsmarts all capitalist political measures aimed at controlling it.Capitalist political measures, to block capital functioning somewhere nasty, simply drive capital to function somewhere else, possibly even nastier.Capitalist political measures demand due diligence—for us possibly more so than the cursory glance they regularly receive from parliamentarians and their staffers today.Capitalist political measures make serious demands on Socialist Party delegate and staffer time, effort and resources, diverting them indirectly from our direct Object.Capitalist political measures that sabotage the system will, under capitalism, always operate at the expense of the working class or, at least, sections of it.A Socialist in a capitalist dominated parliament perpetually faces the dilemma—the contradiction of opposites—whether to undermine capitalism and harm the working class or to support capitalism and “benefit the working class”. A savvy capitalist opponent susses out the Socialist Party’s reformist Achilles heel, and pursues a deliberate counter strategy of perpetually bogging it down in tantalising contentious legislation after legislation after legislation…These fraught considerations, which seem almost fatal to me, can be annulled if the Socialist Party never swerves from its direct Object. The Risk of Never SwervingFrom countless apocalyptic scenarios and sob stories told by others above, the alternative strategy of “never swerving” is seen as taking an unacceptable political risk.But political risk “comes with the territory” from the moment a Socialist enters a capitalist parliament.A Socialist delegate must learn to harness risk. Risk brings out the unexpected, unlocks the unforeseen and, in the overcoming, stuns the naysayer.For me, the calculated risk of “never swerving” is the only Socialist path to glorious victory.

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Robbo, it’s not a matter of what I think about reducing the rate of exploitation, i.e. profits.It’s what the ruling class of capitalists think, i.e. those whose representatives dominate the parliament in which Socialists are a minority.But deeper still, it’s what the dynamic capitalist system will allow.  We don't have as much of a free hand in it as you imagine.Anyone can “support” a reduction in profits as much as he likes, but an adaptive capitalist class simply retaliates by seeking profit elsewhere,  e.g., as Marx showed, reinvesting in technology rather than labour.The consequential “benefit to the working class” is that unemployment in affected sectors skyrockets.Capital moves faster than parliamentary legislation, which is a disappointing laggard.In response to any legislative act against capital, and so a legislative act gainst exploitation, capital never fails to find a way out. It always squeezes you, and so the harder you squeeze it, you give it no choice but to squeeze you harder back.Futility of supporting capitalist reforms…Society daily reproduces itself entirely through working class exploitation—the sole motive of daily renewal being capital expansion.Reformists of all stripes vainly try to deny, ignore, or mitigate this process which “operates with the inexorability of a law of nature”.  Capital outsmarts them every time.  It survives and thrives long after its antagonists are gone and forgotten.Final thoughtsMy considered thoughts are given in the previous post.This issue is dangerous and hypothetical and requires more thought.  For these, and for independent external reasons, I hereby close my keyboard on it.

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No it demonstrates that capitalism can cure social ills, which you claim it is doing after its fashion.  That’s all that can be expected under capitalism.It’s come to a sorry pass when capitalist exploitation is not seen as the culprit.How many horrifying scenarios—and there are equally horrendous ones everywhere—do you want to attend to, after a capitalist fashion, before you get round to Socialism?And, yes, naive in not realising that your free-willed “socialist” reformer is caught in the cleft stick that Engels pops him in.Which of items 1, 2, 3 or 4 should he adopt, and watch how his action damns him.Which one, please?

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Robbo wrote:

It is NOT being suggested that such delegates should themselves actually propose any such legislation which would indeed be reformist.Its a question of what sort of message you are sending out by abstaining on  a peice of leglislation that could mitigate but never eliminate the exploitation  of workers. 

Robbo, my reply to you is more or less the same as that to Alan.Then you are restricting socialist delegates to voting for a capitalist framed bill, with all the baggage that entails.  Not a very bright strategy for a “socialist” reformer to cripple his “socialist” drafting hands, and meekly vote on capitalist designed legislation.  He’s already crossed the boundary to reformism, why not go the whole hog?Socialist delegates are in parliament to propagate the socialist case and to expose capitalist legislation for exactly what it is; not to endorse it.  Endorsing (shonky) capitalist legislation just as surely “sends a message” of abject admission of socialist defeat.  You seem eager to be “doing something” that “sends a message”, however capitalist at the core, instead of crafting a message that exposes the rotten core of capitalism to the light of day.Why on earth waste precious socialist time and effort in supporting the damn social system we seek to eradicate?

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

But, TWC, are you saying our socialist delegates … would not vote for those remedial repairs because it meant reformism I think not.  

On the contrary, I do think so, for the following reasons..Your confident claim is predicated upon the ignorantly naive assumption that the bill for remedial repairs will be drafted to satisfactory “socialist” standards.In the actual world of capitalism, any rational capitalist remediation bill will be drafted to meet, not “socialist” but, capitalist expectations, which necessarily conform to the capitalist conditions under which it must operate.Just look at world-wide mining remediation practices, if you seek evidence!Capitalist remediation is at best an economic compromise solution; at worst something altogether disgusting.  In either case, it will necessarily fall short of “socialist” standards and satisfaction.What is our “socialist ”reformer then to do when faced with a capitalist remediation bill:Endorse the capitalist cost-cutting remediation bill, as is.Negotiate—horse trade—with the capitalist bill-framers to seek to reframe their bill to the “benefit of the working class” (and “detriment to the capitalist class”).Draft his own bill that he imagines can meet compromise “socialist” standards under prevailing capitalist constraints.Back off.If our socialist reformer drinks from any of these poisoned cups, he kills his “socialism” by:Supporting a shonky remediation process, i.e. shafting his socialist supporters.Horse-trading with [alleged labour, avowedly capitalist] political opponents, though he entered parliament expressly to oppose them.Actual reformism—the very treachery he repudiated when he stood for parliament.Enough said!Engels, who was far more prescient, wrote…

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 What he can do is in contrast to all his actions as hitherto practised, to all his principles and to the present interests of his party; what he ought to do cannot be achieved.In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whom conditions are ripe for domination. In the interests of the movement itself, he is compelled to defend the interests of an alien class…Whoever puts himself in this awkward position is irrevocably lost.

Or, as Marx said, he will soon discover that capitalism is full of irreconcilable contradictions.So much for your breezy future “socialist” reformer, whom you unconditionally invite me to admire.To quote your own confident words back at you: “I think not.”

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Quote:

we do not seek to attract non-socialists wanting half-measures and gradual changes. 

Then there is no pressing need to pander to half-measures and gradual changes.  Socialists understand.Poisoning the water supply is not regional, it’s global. Like poisoning the atmosphere, and the land. What capitalist solution can fix it?What about drying up the water supply?  Pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Removing nutrient from the land?  Denuding the rain forests.  They are not regional.  They are global!They are also systemic. The system urgently needs to be addressed over, apparently pressing, regional issues, no matter how disgusting and enraging.Think World.  Think World Socialism

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ajj wrote:

Whatever strengthens the potential power of the working class, what keeps it healthy and virile, is a benefit to it and a benefit to the goal to achieve socialism when we have strong, physically and mentally healthy fellow-workers, in a fit state to heed our message, but more importantly to reach their own socialist conclusions, without necessarily having heard our voice.

My challenge remains “by what criterion can you judge what will benefit the working class in a system that operates solely by exploiting it?"There may well be answers, but how do we judge them?Once we know how to evaluate what “benefits the working class” under capitalism, a second question intrudes—Why should the Socialist Party devote precious Socialist time and resources over the form taken by a capitalist issue whose essence remains captive to capitalist controlling conditions? Thus, returning to your provisioning of health-and-education criterion—which dismally supported social provisions we started off with—the obvious upshot is that Socialists should be actively supporting a reform of gym-for-all and after-hours schooling.But comfortably deferring this, apparently pressing, health-and-education reform to the future merely squibs this, apparently pressing, social issue now. And postponing it cannot escape simultaneously binding the Party to future reformism.Sending it off to the never-never, enshrines it in the here-and-now. It slackens the Party’s here-and-now resolve on reformism (as instanced by taking sides on capitalist referenda, etc.)Can you see the problem?Reformism, whisked off into a future time and place, lays us open to the charge of finally succumbing to the pressures of capitalism, and capitalist thought?  Our ultimate capitulation after [an apparently misguided] century of opposing reformism?Why didn’t we realise the “benefits we might have conferred upon the working class” so much earlier?That’s what bothers me.

ajj wrote:

We cannot bind a future party and its elected members to a policy of abstaining on every issue that comes before it when we don' know what those issues might be. The bigger the threat socialism becomes the bigger the scraps they will throw us

It’s you who are unconsciously binding a future Party to act out reformism, on a humanitarian(?) case-by-case basis.  I am merely asking for a rational justification for your ready acceptance. If reformism is essential in the future, why isn’t it now?  A reasonable enough, but ticklish, question.I seek clarity.  Will binders of a future Party to reformism please clarify?

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Alan, anyone would have to be a moron not to accept the bleeding obvious about our insignificance. That was never the putdown, and you know it.Your put down was that it’s all a little too abstract.  Which one might be tempted to believe you meant, until you immediately proceed to indulge in lots of concrete instances of a situation you consider to be a little too abstract.If future reformism is really a little too abstract, then we should all rightly leave it alone.  Forget the future fantasies.. I entered the fray because people were hotly defending abstract hypotheticals about future reformism.I challenged the confident pro-reform view, implying that no convincing argument—despite past scuffles–had made the case for selectively putting future reformism ahead of Socialism.All of a sudden the substantive issue of reformism ahead of Socialism becomes a little too abstract.Well, let the issue of selective future reformism over Socialism, and its attendant concrete instances, remain vapid abstractions, where they currently belong.

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Tim, I don’t think the Socialist Party has to “solve” all the world’s problems in a capitalist parliament—no matter how dire the capitalist predicament.A capitalist parliament supposedly acts in the interests of its electors.If Socialists hold steadfast to their conviction that they can’t solve capitalism’s problems in capitalism, it’s downright dishonest—as well as political poison—for them to curry favour with an electorate in order to solve a problem that they advocate can’t be solved.That’s what will kill a Socialist Party stone cold motherless dead, just as it did every other party that allowed itself to succumb to reformist tactics on the urgent grounds of:just as an exception—a special case because of [pop in your exceptional circumstances here].just this time—even though we are about to establish a reformist precedent.A Socialist Party can survive the ignorant wrath of liberal humanist voters who see our stance as their betrayal.But a Socialist Party can’t hope to survive its tactical capitulation to liberal humanist fantasies. Remember, they are our, avowedly labour, political enemies.  We only defeat them by opposing them.As you rightly fear, we may be kicked out of parliament on such perceived urgent (exceptional) special issues.  So what?  We pick ourselves up, and dust ourselves off to fight another day. Like love, the path to socialism won’t run smoothly, but it must run true to its Socialist cause, or not at all.In parliamentary confrontation over Socialism, he who bends loses.  It is the electorate that must bend before Socialism.It’s no counter argument for anyone to fret that we may [shock!] be rebuffed by that humiliated product of capitalist exploitation, the electorate!  What, by the prescient electorate that gave us xxx, yyy, zzz, [who shall remain nameless]!The unconscious cowardice expressed by all advocates of exceptional future reformism—apparently on case-by-case merit—is timidity over being rebuffed by the electorate.For crying out loud, of course we may be rebuffed along the way. One has every reason to think that a century of constant rebuf might have steeled us somewhat.Steadfast holding to Socialism is the only reliable, theoretically justifiable, Socialist course.  And that implies:  No compromise to reformism — Socialism before reformism.

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ajj wrote:

I simply find this all rather abstract…a few members in an organisation of negligible numbers choosing to decide what billions must do. Isn't this similar to why we are reticent about devising blueprints of socialism…it is not our task to do so, but for the future generations who have that job

Don't come the snarky put down I simply find this all rather abstract, when you just feverishly proffered a grabbag of concrete cases for which, quite apparently, you do want “a few members in an organisation of negligible numbers choosing to decide what billions must do”.Sorry to inconvenience you.When I challenged you to think carefully about your hypothetical future, which up til then you had been deliriously hypotheticising over, you backed out, because you now daren’t.  So you come on all brave and dismissive.Tu l'as voulu, Georges Dandin! [You brought this upon yourself; as you have made your bed so you must lie on it—Molière]

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Tim Kilgallon wrote:

Twc, are you seriously saying that we should abstain from such a vote, allow the supression of free speech, the shackling of trades unions? I think the working class would be very unforgiving of such a move.

Dear Tim, yes I suppose I am.Everyone else is defending reformism, i.e. voting—as a matter of socialist life and death—on purely capitalist issues, on the grounds of changed conditions.Why won’t steadfast advocacy of socialism, as now, receive its true platform in these changed conditions?Steadfast advocacy of socialism strikes me as being even more important then, when we are at last called on to demonstrate our worth. I think people, caught up in the fantasy of capitalist hypotheticals, are consciously suppressing socialist theory in place of their [quite cheap and untrammelled] imagination.Yes, this is my challenge to those who advocate reform under changed capitalist conditions.Capitalism, like a crocodile, is ever itself.  Its conditions are unchanging exploitation, actually so even under hypothetical changed conditions. Capitalism can’t be reformed. As that expert on hypothetical conditions, Sir Toby Belch (or perhaps, Falstaff), quite rightly objects “I’ll reform myself no better than I am!”

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robbo wrote:

By reducing the rate at which it is robbed, pehaps?  Isnt that of some benefit? 

But that flies in the face of “return on investment”, which is the driving force of capitalism, and manifests itself as the driving motive of the capitalist.A capitalist parliament, with or without socialists, has to guarantee social reproduction.  But social reproduction is capitalist reproduction, and remains so, whatever the rate people are robbed at, for they are still robbed.Parliament is there to guarantee this driving force of social reproduction, i.e. to act on behalf of dear old capital expanding itself.The robbing I refer to is the essential mechanism of capital expansion, i.e. Marxian exploitation. Watch the capitalists panic when their precious market rate falls!  It is life or death to those whose motive drives the system—those bearers of the will of capital to expand itself.Reducing the mere rate of robbing is a fantasy solution of liberal humanism in an illiberal inhuman world. It forgets, or fails to comprehend, that we are dealing with a dynamical process that is necessarily insatiable.We dealing with something enormous—an entire social system, or mode of production.  Not fixing its minor unfixable problems.The socialist case is diametrically opposed to liberal humanism—a position that wallows in glorious defeatism.The socialist case abolishes the illiberal inhuman conditions that generate liberal humanism.  Ours is a consciously victorious case. 

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Robbo wrote:

we shall probably see a signficant shift in the patten of state spending away from such things as defence (or for that matter, splashing out 200 million quid plus on refurbishing the royal household such as has just been sanctioned) to spending on things like healthcare. 

When capitalism comes to this sorry pass, it is already on the ropes.  Why then should Socialists palliate an agonised conscience-stricken death-fearing patient? Euthenase the poor demented creature.As to “a signficant shift in the patten of state spending away from such things as defence”…Here’s Marx on this very subject, in his 61st year, 35 years before World War I—the supreme instance of a war that “stopped all future wars”!https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/bio/media/marx/79_01_31.htm 

Quote:

Question:  But supposing that the rulers of Europe came to an understanding amongst themselves for a reduction of armaments which might greatly relieve the burden on the people what would become of the Revolution which you expect it one day to bring about?Marx:  Ah, they can't do that. All sorts of fears and jealousies will make that impossible. The burden will grow worse and worse as science advances, for the improvements in the Art of Destruction will keep pace with its advance, and every year more and more will have to be devoted to costly engines of war. It is a vicious circle—there is no escape from it.

 

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