tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post2896316993835467674..comments2024-03-18T22:33:57.428-04:00Comments on The Philosopher's Stone: FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS ABILITYRobert Paul Wolffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11970360952872431856noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-34645709438996558692019-02-07T16:59:02.203-05:002019-02-07T16:59:02.203-05:00I am grateful for the kind and generous comment by...I am grateful for the kind and generous comment by Bob [or Dr. Wolff, as I knew him when he was my professor. As I am in debt to professor Wolff, all credit is his! :)]Christopher J. Mulvaney, Ph.D.https://www.blogger.com/profile/15817420454023465228noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-49503113067425313072019-02-07T08:31:16.208-05:002019-02-07T08:31:16.208-05:00This is an extraordinarily important and well-expr...This is an extraordinarily important and well-expressed series of points by Dr. Mulvaney [or Chris, as I knew him when he was my student -- naturally I take total credit for the value of his comment. :) ]Robert Paul Wolffhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11970360952872431856noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-10404874896686446972019-02-06T20:40:36.513-05:002019-02-06T20:40:36.513-05:00“No social order disappears before all of the prod...“No social order disappears before all of the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed, and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material components of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society.” <br /><br />There is a prescient discussion in the Grundrisse where Marx develops the above point. He does it in a discussion of the advancement of fixed capital. In the future the development of the forces of production will reach the point where the machinery itself, and not labor, transforms nature. The role of labor then is to manage that process. Industry, he suggests, will reach the stage where science is "pressed into the service of capital" and "invention becomes a business." When this happens the "creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labor time and the amount of labor employed than on the agencies set in motion during labor time..." <br /><br />My father was a chemist and at one point managed a large plant in Linden, N.J. and when I read this section it seems to me that Marx could be describing a chemical pant or oil refinery. How to mass produce chemical compounds or refine oil has been discovered through the practice of science. The laborers necessary to run these operations must be cognizant of the science and engineering that is contained in the machinery that produces the final product. Those who manage and superintend the chemical plant need to know how, when and where to introduce reagents, and under what condition of heat and pressure the desired reaction will occur.<br /><br />It is no longer the worker reduced to performing a single activity that produces value, and with that everything starts to change. "As soon as labor in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labor time... must cease to be its measure and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. "<br /><br />This development is precisely the new forces and relations of production that have been created by the 'ancien regime' and will come to contradict the social relations of advanced capitalism (or whatever we want to call it these days) and provide, one hopes the basis for a rational, socialist society. That there is a ways to go was demonstrated last night in Trump's condemnation of 'socialism', and the subsequent U - S - A chant by the fascist right. But I digress.<br /><br />I have not done Marx justice in this short summary. But this material provides a prescient discussion of the future development of capital and points concretely to the situation described in the quote cited by Dr. Wolff. The first time I read this material was in 1974. I was a history grad student and most of my fellow students thought I was nuts to be reading this tome. At that time I was struggling trying to grasp all the concepts and relationships Marx was writing about. However, the implications of these early sections of Notebook VII blew my mind and it still does. I have quoted from: Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus, (Vintage Books: 1973) Notebook VII, p.704 - 706Christopher J. Mulvaney, Ph.D.https://www.blogger.com/profile/15817420454023465228noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-69077976857756913322019-02-06T14:26:03.368-05:002019-02-06T14:26:03.368-05:00What's fascinating about this conversation, ...What's fascinating about this conversation, among other things, is that no one participating, including myself, believes in the higher morality of Socialist Man any more.<br /><br />If we were having this discussion in the 60's or early 70's, the higher morality of Socialist Man would have been taken for granted. Anyone who talked about monetary rewards for right choices, as Professor Wolff does above, would have been mocked as being infiltrated from Readers Digest. <br /><br />I'm not sure exactly when I stopped believing in the higher morality of Socialist Man, but now that I see that others no longer believe in it, I realize that I haven't believed in it for quite a few years. That's a real sea change among what might be called the "socialist community".<br /><br />s. wallersteinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17448905469871566228noreply@blogger.com