Now, a policy which sacrifices the consumption of four generations of workers and their families merely to increase the rate of growth of that consumption starting with the fifth generation has nothing in common with an ‘ideal socialist norm’, and cannot be rationally motivated except in terms of purely political contingencies. For Dobb’s argumentation is, of course, completely spurious; all that his calculations show is that the value of consumer goods produced cannot grow at an increasing rate after x years unless the value of department I immediately rises at a faster rate than that of department II.

However, neither an individual worker nor the working class itself in a post-capitalist society (not to speak of a socialist commonwealth) is interested in a constantly rising rate of growth of the value of consumer goods. On the contrary, they are concerned with reducing that ‘value’ as much as possible by raising the productivity of labour, and with the withering away of commodity production and market economy. Their basic interests lie in the most rapid optimum satisfaction of rational consumer needs, i.e. the production at lowest possible cost of an optimum basket of consumer goods (thereby combining maximum economy of the labour of the producers with maximum satisfaction of consumer needs). To believe that this is the same as maximization of capitalist commodity-value (or profit) is to commit not only a grave theoretical error, but also a disastrous political and social miscalculation.

Even worse were the attempts made in the sixties to revive a so-called ‘structural law’ of ‘socialism’, according to which department I must expand at a faster rate than department II.31 All such endeavours abstract from the value nature of the reproduction schemas, and assume that optimum satisfaction of social needs implies both continuous, unlimited expansion of the output of means of production, and the allocation of an even higher fraction of the total labour potential of society to the creation of material producer goods (as against social services dealing with health, education, artistic creation, ‘pure’ scientific research, child-care, etc., etc.). None of these assumptions can be scientifically proven or justified. Indeed, their apologetic function – as a straightforward rationalization of existing practice in the USSR and the ‘Peoples’ Democracies’ – is obvious to any critical observer.

It should be added that both Oskar Lange and Bronislaw Mine, while not clarifying the difference between capitalist and socialist reproduction schemas, correctly demonstrated that increased productivity of labour and technical progress do not necessarily require department I to grow more quickly than department II; nor do they imply increased current outlay on means of production per unit currently (annually) produced.32

Rosa Luxemburg well understood that the form of the reproduction schemas applies only to capitalist commodity and value production, and that the laws of motion corresponding to that form can have no validity in non-capitalist societies. But even she erred by attaching to the ‘equilibrium proportions’ derived from the schemas an a-historical, eternal validity which they do not and cannot possess.33

If a socially appropriated surplus product is substituted for surplus-value, then the equilibrium formula takes on a new form which expresses the different social goal of reproduction, corresponding to the changed social structure. Surplus-value is not simply a part of the total value of commodities produced under capitalism, nor is it just a fraction of the newly produced value product (the national income). It is also the goal of the capitalist production process. As such, it is much more than a mere symbol in a reproduction schema which is intended to represent reality at a high level of abstraction. For Marx, the schemas refer to the reproduction of quantified use-value and exchange-value in a given proportion. But they also express the reproduction of capitalist relations of production themselves.34 All that is implied in the formula Iv + Is = IIc. And all that changes under socialism, once s disappears.

Furthermore, in a society where commodity production has withered away, and where the concept of surplus labour is essentially reducible to that of social service and economic growth, the meaning of the notion of ‘equilibrium’ derived from the ‘proportionality formula’ is subject to a fundamental transformation. When proportionality is upset in a commodity-producing society, production of both use-values and exchange-values declines, because both are inextricably linked to each other. Under socialism, however, no such inexorable nexus survives – not even as a necessary proportion (in the form of an ‘eternal law’) between labour inputs and use-value inputs. Indeed, in Capital Volume 2, Marx goes so far as to state categorically that, after the abolition of capitalism, there will be ‘constant relative over-production’ of equipment, raw materials and foodstuffs. ‘Over-production of this kind’, he says, ‘is equivalent to control by the society over the objective means of its own reproduction.’35

It is easy to imagine a society which, having reached a certain level of consumption, consciously decides to give absolute priority to a single goal: reduction of the work load. Its efforts would then be concentrated on assuring the production and distribution of an ‘ideal’ package of use-values with fewer and fewer labour inputs. There would still be ‘simple reproduction’ at the level of use-values, but it would be achieved with, let us say, a reduction in man-days of 4 per cent per annum (if population increased by 1 per cent and labour productivity by 5 per cent). To call this a situation of ‘contracted reproduction’ would be wrong, both because a socialist society would calculate essentially with use-values, and because in Marx’s reproduction schema the concept of ‘contracted reproduction’ is logically connected with the notions of crisis, interrupted economic equilibrium and declining living standards, whereas the conditions just described involve smooth continuity of material production and reproduction, stable living standards and absence of any kind of crisis.

This does not mean that planned socialist production could do without specific proportions in the flow of labour, means of production and consumer goods between the two departments. Such proportional allocation of resources is indeed the very essence of socialist planning. It means only that there is a qualitative as well as a quantitative difference between value calculations and calculations in labour time – between the dynamics of, on the one hand, appropriation and accumulation of surplus-value, and, on the other hand, rising efficiency (labour productivity) achieved in successive phases of production and measured in quantities of use-values produced during a fixed length of time.36

Minc goes much farther than Luxemburg when, summing up the opinion of two generations of Stalinist and post-Stalinist East European and Soviet economists, he clearly asserts: ‘The basic theses of Marx’s theory of expanded reproduction, as expressed in the schémas, are entirely valid under socialism.’37 Contrary to the explicit theory of Marx and Engels, such ‘socialist production’ would thus remain generalized commodity production, i.e. generalized production of value. We may well ask what kind of intrinsic ‘law’ of raising surplus labour would then be incorporated into these ‘socialist production relations’. For Marx distinctly states that such a law underlies the schemas of expanded reproduction referring to the production of surplus-value.38

6. PRODUCTIVE AND UNPRODUCTIVE LABOUR

Marx’s theory of reproduction is firmly rooted in his perfected labour theory of value, not only in the sense that his reproduction schemas are based upon a common numéraire, labour-time, but also in the sense that what they measure and express is the distribution (and movement) of the labour force available to society among different departments and branches of material production. Value, in Marx’s theory, is abstract social labour.

Michio Morishima, who has devoted much effort and ingenuity to rehabilitating Marx in the eyes of academic economists as one of the principal forerunners of aggregation techniques, nevertheless continues to detect a contradiction between a macro-economic theory of value, based upon aggregation, and a micro-economic labour theory of value. While dismissing the trite ‘contradiction’ between Volume 1 and Volume 3, around which so much academic criticism of Marx has revolved for almost a century, he constructs quite an imposing straw man out of this ‘new’ contradiction.39 In our opinion, however, his subtle distinction between Marx’s ‘two’ labour theories of value is based upon a simple conceptual confusion.