In fact, the nature of The Law of Value can be seen by looking at Nature itself. The Law of Value means that, to maximise use-value/utility/social welfare, the value of each product must be reduced, so that a given amount of social labour produces a greater quantity of products. In other words, productivity must rise, which requires technological development, of new forces of production, and, as Marx has set out, it is this which results in new productive relations, new social relations, and new modes of production, forms of property, social classes, and so drives history forward.
But, this underlying law is no different than seen elsewhere in Nature that a given result is achieved using the minimum possible energy. Water flows to sea-level by the most direct route, and where it is diverted by obstacles, it gradually erodes the obstacle to move it from its path. Cows grazing in a field, if allowed, eat the lushest grass first, to obtain the greatest nutrition in the least time, and with least effort and so on. Farmers do not allow cows to do that freely, but pen them into different areas of a field, so that all of it is used in rotation.
However, this law that drives social evolution leads to the development of different modes of production, and within these different modes of production exist different economic categories, and social laws, specific to them. What bourgeois ideology fails to distinguish is the purely historical and transitory nature of these specific social laws, as against The Law of Value as a natural law. As Marx sets out in Theories of Surplus Value, therefore, Ricardo's fear of the consequences of his falling rate of profit was that it leads to the end of society, whereas, because it is only a law relating to the capitalist mode of production, it is part of the historical process that leads to a higher form of society – Socialism. Indeed, the means by which capitalism itself resolves each period of crisis of overproduction of capital, and fall in profits, is by again revolutionising technology, to raise productivity.
Marx quotes Proudhon.
““It is not correct then,” says M. Proudhon, the philosopher, “to say that something appears, that something is produced: in civilization as in the universe, everything has existed, has acted, from eternity. This applies to the whole of social economy.”” (p 108)
As Marx says, Proudhon is, thereby, led to deny history. If everything has always existed, and nothing new is produced, there is no change, no history, simply stasis, in the same way that reactionaries talk about a “balance of Nature”. Any such balance implies stasis, because a movement from balance involves change, in which case organic life would not have moved beyond the amoeba, if even organic life itself could have arisen. Similarly, any such balance would mean that dinosaurs should still walk the Earth!
“So great is the productive force of the contradictions which function and which made M. Proudhon function, that, in trying to explain history, he is forced to deny it; in trying to explain the successive appearance of social relations, he denies that anything can appear: in trying to explain production, with all its phases, he questions whether anything can be produced!” (p 108)
But, if there is no profane history, as a sequence of new modes of production, new forms of property, and so on, nor could there be any sequence of ideas, as a reflection of those new phenomena. Again, there is stasis.
“Thus, for M. Proudhon, there is no longer any history: no longer any sequence of ideas. And yet his book still exists; and it is precisely that book which is, to use his own expression, “history according to the sequence of ideas.” How shall we find a formula, for M. Proudhon is a man of formulas, to help him to clear all these contradictions in one leap?” (p 108)
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