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Re: [jox] p2p and market



Hi Toni, 
I totally agree with you and Marx would agree too. In the time of Adam Smith there were 1000000 domestic workers in England (or in The Great Britain, I don`t recall) far above the number of industrial workers. Of course, domestic workers perfomed useful services for their employers. But employers , did not sell the products (services) of the labor of these workers but consumed them.
These workers did not produced any abstract value or surplus value , so the products of their labor were not subjucted to the law of value. However, the wages that employers paid to domestic workers originated from surplus values produced by industrial workers. Marx discusses this example in the first or second volume of the Theories of Surplus Value , I don`t remember. 

Of course services that are offerred for free by state are not subjected to the law of value, the same is true of P2P products. But state funds these services by values produced by those workers whose labor`s products are commodities. 

all the best
Jakob
Toni Prug 04/01/12 4:03 PM >>> 
Accounting brings us straight to the question of value. I
I agree with Jacob that Marx's theory of value is the best theory of 
value we have. It is a monetary theory since it exclusively uses prices 
(quantity of money) to determine values. However, it does not apply to 
goods and services that do not have take the form of commodity i.e. that 
do not have their value expressed in price. Hence, all the state goods 
and services (education, healthcare, housing, infrastructure), a hugely 
important development from an egalitarian point of view, which accounts 
for a huge part of GDP spending, can not be account for with Marx's theory. 

As Colin Barker argues, we cannot blame Marx for this. The state 
spending and services provided at his time were tiny, and most likely 
with miniscule relevance to the overall economy, in comparison with today. 

We do however have to recognize that many valuable service and goods, 
which includes a lot of p2p production, do not take the form of 
commodity and hence cannot be theorized with Marx's theory of value alone. 

This is no way changes my conviction that marxist economics, along with 
suistanable and green economists' work on new macroeconomic measures, 
are the best places to start investigating how to come up with a better, 
egalitarian and directly democratic (as participative as possible), 
theory of value. 

On 01/04/2012 14:42, Toni Prug wrote: 
On 01/04/2012 13:47, Michel Bauwens wrote: 
I think the question is whether the nation-state is still the dominant 
force, or has it become a globally distributed system of power, as argued 
in Empire, which thwarts any attempt by nation-states to control it 

Although at the time Empire was a timely and inspiring book, i believe 
that there is so much evidence that nation-states have enormous (but far 
from total) control over own destinies, that it is the wrong question to 
ask. Yes, productivity of external production and external capital 
seeking profit significantly limits what economic units within national 
economies can produce and at which price. Yes, the list of limits is 
long (rating agencies, individual states, groups of states, 
supra-state/national organizations, funding bodies like Paris Club, 
IMF). Regardless of all that, i believe that the right question is: what 
kind of international competition and international interaction and 
power struggle exist that limit the nation-state power, and how do those 
limits operate in practice. 

For p2p production to develop widely, we have to account for it. Whether 
the accounting occurs through use of money, or through other means, it 
has to be done, and it has to be made commensurable with commodities 
whose value is determined through monetary exchange and as such 
accounted for in GDP and in other upcoming measures of national 
economies (new indexes created by sustainable and green economists - 
ISEW/GPI, A.Sen's capabilities approach, EU's Beyond GDP project). 

P2p production is not alone in facing this problem. State services and 
goods which do not take the form of commodity (education, health, 
housing, infrastructure, institutions necessary for complex societies to 
operate) face the same problem. Pro-capitalist efforts, like Atkins 
report in UK (2005), are an attempt to account for state production 
within the logic of capitalist for profit production. The task of us 
believing in post-capitalist, egalitarian and directly democratic (both 
in "real" production and in political work as another site of 
production) is to come up with alternative measures, both on micro 
(money/price) and macro (regional, national accounting, and beyond) levels. 

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