Why can’t we just issue currency that represents a unit of labor? For example, a one-minute note, a one-hour note, an eight-hour note, and so on. For example, why not pay a worker in an eight-hour note after the worker has performed a standard eight-hour workday? Actually, we would have to pay the worker in a four-hour note, assuming the rate of surplus value is 100 percent. If that were done, the exploitation would not be hidden but would be obvious. There is also the problem, of course, that we would be measuring the workers’ concrete labor here, not abstract labor. But doesn’t on average eight hours of concrete labor amount to eight hours of abstract labor? What makes such “labor money” schemes completely impossible is the very nature of a commodity economy. Commodity producers are independent producers performing their labor for their own private accounts. They have no idea what their fellow commodity owners are producing, let alone what the broader needs are of society. Over the last three weeks, in my examination of capitalist reproduction, I have shown that production must be carried out in certain very precise proportions. If it is not, production completely breaks down, and with it human society itself. How are the correct proportions among the various branches of production achieved and maintained among the various branches of production under a commodity system where there is no central organ that consciously organizes the labor of society among the various branches of production? What do you think?
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 03:40:57 +0000
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