Abstract labor vs. concrete labor?

Submitted by yoda's walking stick on April 6, 2011

can someone explain the difference between these two like I'm five years old? I mean, really, truly, condescend to me.

Dave B

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on June 5, 2012

Abstract labor vs. concrete labor?

can someone explain the difference between these two like I'm five years old? I mean, really, truly, condescend to me.

Yoda should have been more specific about exactly what kind of condescension he came looking for.

Sounds like a Monty Python sketch

andy g

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by andy g on June 5, 2012

am going to regret involving myself in this one but.....

Dave B - you are very, very, very wrong on this. Quite how you can misinterpret Rubin so completely is beyond me. I assume you are sincere in what you are saying though and don't want to get involved in a tit-for-tat. especially not if it makes me a crypto-fascist.

I came across this vid the other day - you shoud have a look. the guy presenting is involved in the MEGA project and has been collating Marx's original manuscripts for publication - including the various drafts of "Capital". He doesn't address the issue you raise directly but if you listen you will clearly see that the material discussed doesn't support your reading of Marx.

http://vimeo.com/33204484

i should warn you the guy is german though - don't go off on one or anything.....

jura

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by jura on June 5, 2012

Plus he's a professor on the scientific board of ATTAC. Let's put him in a factory!

Dave B

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on June 5, 2012

Lets focus on this one from Rubin for the moment

I. I. Rubin's Essays on Marx's Theory of Value Chapter Eight BASIC CHARACTERISTICS OF MARX'S THEORY OF VALUE

For the time being we are concerned only with one basic type of production relation among people in a commodity economy, namely the relation among people as commodity producers who are separate and formally independent from each other.

As he is about to tell us this is simple commodity production. Incidentally elsewhere I think he defines ‘private labour’, as in Karl’s linen, in similar terms to separate and formally independent from each other using the word autonomous as well I think.

He continues

We know only that the cloth is produced by the commodity producers and is taken to the market to be exchanged or sold to other commodity producers. We are dealing with a society of commodity producers, with a so-called "simple commodity economy" as opposed to a more complex capitalist economy.

In conditions of a simple commodity economy the average prices of products are proportional to their labor value. In other words, value represents that average level around which market prices fluctuate and with which the prices would coincide if social labor were proportionally distributed among the various branches of production. Thus a state of equilibrium would be established among the branches of production.

The exchange of two different commodities according to their values corresponds to the state of equilibrium among two given branches of production. In this equilibrium, all transfer of labor from one branch to another comes to an end. But if this happens, then it is obvious that the exchange of two commodities according to their values equalizes the advantages for the commodity producers in both branches of production, and removes the motives for transfer from one branch to another.

In the simple commodity economy, such an equalization of conditions of production in the various branches means that a determined quantity of labor used up by commodity producers in different spheres of the national economy furnishes each with a product of equal value. The value of commodities is directly proportional to the quantity of labor necessary for their production.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/rubin/value/ch08a.htm

This is exactly what I was attempting to put across with my goose eggs and blue suede shoes, and Bukharin does it just as well.

Before I pulled out or cited Bukharin and Rubin. I argued it first.

As to citing authorities I also argued this very point, using goose eggs and blue suede shoes on our forum maybe eight years ago before I had even heard of Rubin or Bukharin never mind read them.

I think I am aware of the general problem ie from Wikipedia

Significantly, Rubin is at pains to argue that simple commodity production is not a historical phenomenon that developed into capitalism, as it is often understood by both Marxists and critics of Marx; rather, it is a theoretical abstraction that explains one aspect of a fully developed capitalist economy. The concept of value, as understood by Rubin, cannot exist without the other elements of a full-blown capitalist economy: money, capital, the existence of a proletariat, and so on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaak_Illich_Rubin

Where is the imaginary simple commodity production and the criticism of the real simple commodity production that Rosa and Kautksy talked about?

Incidentally Karl talked amount value in a barter economy before money never mind capitalism.

I only go off on Germans when they do themselves a disservice and behave according to their renowned stereotype, that I didn’t invent.

My first scientific paper was published in the English section of a German journal Fruit Processing April 1995 and I think it was translated and published in the German edition Flussiges Obst or something.

Unlike the Philosophers us scientists have it ‘beaten’ into our heads not to move from one thing to another without references to other peoples work.

I provided 10 references which was a bit light but it was a fairly original and well received piece of work.

They even asked us to provide pictures of yourself, which was a nice un-Germanic touch, I am the good looking one on the left.

We got told off by the company for sending in photo’s that made us look like ‘Anarchists’ and they made us go to professional photographers for the next ones.

Dave B

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on June 5, 2012

jura

Plus he's a professor on the scientific board of ATTAC. Let's put him in a factory!

No I don't think that would be appropriate or suitable for a real proletarian Bolshevik;

Are the social and economic conditions in our country today such as to induce real proletarians to go into the factories? No. It would be true according to Marx; but Marx did not write about Germany; he wrote about capitalism as a whole, beginning with the fifteenth century. It held true over a period of six hundred years, but it is not true for present-day Germany.

Very often those who go into the factories are not proletarians; they are casual elements of every description

.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm

Dave B

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on June 5, 2012

Well I watched that video, he seems like nice and cuddly enough.

Shit he is living next door to me!

What is he on the scientific board for when he isn’t a scientist?

I am so glad Fred abridged volume II.

Although I was suffering from unrequited love at the time so maybe it wasn’t a good time to read it.

Yeah I agree with him that Karl was crap at maths and algebra, I said that whilst I was reading it on the WSM forum and the ‘Marxists’ went ballistic.

I don’t know what the problem is with differential ground rent which I thought was OK and that he plagairised or developed the idea from someone else, Ricardo?

I would need to re re-read it.

Or for that matter his stuff on interest bearing capital which needs to be taken with profit of enterprise, it’s cousin.

Can’t remember when Karl got started off with anthropology, was it after reading Darwin and realising that they had been turned by Stirner and dropped Feuerbach to soon with their;

That's the way to answer the fellow. In the second place he must be told that in its egoism the human heart is of itself, from the very outset, unselfish and self-sacrificing, so that he finally ends up with what he is combating.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/letters/44_11_19.htm

What is wrong with the ‘falling rate of profit theory’ apart from the fact that people miss-interpret it and Karl could spot an obvious (Sweezy) algebraic manipulation.

I was waiting with baited breath for the simple commodity production stuff, but alas, like S Artisans necessary product, it never came.

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 6, 2012

Geez are you congenitally this dishonest, or is it a manifestation of something less deep seated?

I gave you the citation from the Grundrisse where Marx referred to necessary product, did I not?

I have no intention of searching through the 4 volumes of the Economic Manuscripts to find further references, one is quite enough. It's one more than you can come up with for Marx ever using the term "simple commodity production" or claiming that abstract labor was the mediator of exchange in societies of "simple commodity production" or that the law of value determined the modes of production trans-historically.

You need to re-read a lot.

andy g

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by andy g on June 6, 2012

did say that it didn't address the issue directly, Dave. I think the general tenor, however, ran directly against a "historical" interpretation of the transformation of values into prices of production. I think Kratke is very clear on the specificity of the "law of value" as a regulator of social (re)production.

on Rubin, how about this one

First of all, we turn to Marx's work. Some passages in Volume III of Capital can be used by proponents of a historical explanation of labor value. However, now that other works by Marx are available to us, we know with certainty that Marx himself was strongly opposed to the view that the law of value was in force in the period preceding the development of capitalism. Marx objected to the view of the English economist Torrens, a proponent of a view which one can even find in Adam Smith's work. Torrens held that the full development of a commodity economy, and consequently the full development of the laws which exist in that economy, is possible only in capitalism and not before. "This would mean that the law of labor-value exists in production which is not commodity production (or only partly commodity production), but it does not exist in production which is not based on the existence of products in the form of commodities. This law itself, and the commodity as the general form of products, are abstracted from capitalist production, and now supposedly cannot be applied to it" (Theorien über den Mehrwert, III, p. 80). "It now turns out that the law of value abstracted from capitalist production contradicts its phenomena" (Ibid., p. 78). These ironical notes by Marx clearly show his relation to the view of the theory of value as a law which functions in the pre-capitalist economy, but not in the capitalist economy. But how can we reconcile these statements with some observations in Volume III of Capital? The seeming divergence between them disappears if we return to the "Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy," which gives us a valuable explanation of Marx's abstract method of analysis. Marx emphasizes that the method of moving from abstract to concrete concepts is only a method by which thought grasps the concrete, and not the way the concrete phenomenon actually happened.[14] This means that the transition from labor-value or simple commodity economy to production price or the capitalist economy is a method for grasping the concrete, i.e., the capitalist economy. This is a theoretical abstraction and not a picture of the historical transition from simple commodity economy to capitalist economy. This confirms the view which we formulated earlier that the tables in Chapter 9 of the third volume of Capital, which illustrate the formation of general average rates of profit from different rates of profit, depict a theoretical schema of phenomena, and not the historical development of the phenomena. "The simplest economic category, say exchange value ... can have no other existence except as an abstract one-sided relation of an already given concrete and living aggregate" (Ibid.), i.e., the capitalist economy.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/rubin/value/ch18.htm#h5

I think S Artesian is right - you need to do a lot or re-reading....

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 6, 2012

Perhaps we can clarify this matter-- not for Dave B. who is ideologically wedded to his "private labor=commodity production="proto-capitalism"=supra historical law of value" thesis, but for others.

And let's clarify it with a remark by Marx in his Economic Manuscripts:

"Wealth is the disposition over time"-- wealth is the ability to dispose of, organize, accrue time.

Time here is a social category. And as such time is expression of social labor. Wealth is the disposition over social labor. However it is only under certain historically specific conditions that that time, that unit and mass of social labor is expressed as value.

Whereas forms of private property can express the disposition of, the power over, the time of personal labor and/or the labor of others, value only represents wealth when it embodies the command of, the disposition over the time of others.

Value production requires a transformation, a revolution as it were, in the relation of the laborer to his/her own labor, to, in part, a relation of the laborers to their collective, social labor. That labor must be stripped, dispossessed, "denatured" from its connection to the immediate, specific, and determinant products of labor that satisfy the subsistence requirements of the laborers.

This is a social transformation that in fact makes labor useless to the laborers save for its use as a means of exchange for subsistence or thevalue equivalent of the means of subsistence.

That is how value becomes the law of value and takes hold of social production; becomes the disposition over the raw, "uniform," essential, abstraction labor-time.

Dave B

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on June 8, 2012

In order to interpret that passage by Rubin in which he quotes from some pre 1930 German edition of theories of surplus value, I assume, we would need to look at it really.

Which I presume ‘we’ have.

It took me a while when I first read that Rubin passage, that I needed to ‘re-read’, to find both quotes from “page 78 and “80” from theories of surplus value.

Which I think I did, but you can never be absolutely sure as Karl does have a habit of repeating himself.

If I did identify the correct passage; then the actual translation of the Rubin quotes in the modern English MIA version is quite different and it looks like a bit of a liberty, incidentally.

And that it might be a translation of a translation, just guessing.

It would be better to sort that out first before I decide whether or not to proceed further.

If I have identified the correct section then the context is critical.

As we know you have to be careful with theories of surplus value as it is a bit like Grundrisse and they both can or often take the form of a kind of dialogue or a Socratic method.

And you certainly have to look out for irony.

This may I fear degenerate into an irresolvable subjective reading of that passage in theories of surplus value and a wanky philosophical debate on the relationship between a scientific abstraction and ‘reality’.

I am not providing the MIA link on what was “supposed” to have been written as I am sure our German Intelligentsia can provide it easily enough.

I had added to this a vitriolic and inflammatory rant against ‘Marxist’ intellectualism but decided after a long think to cut it out, but I have saved it.

Felix Frost

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Felix Frost on June 9, 2012

This is getting a bit silly. The quotes in Rubin's text is a different translation from the text on MIA, but there is no change in the meaning.

Here is the full paragraph from the MIA containing the first quote:

Marx

Ricardo sought to prove that, apart from certain exceptions, the separation between capital and wage-labour does not change anything in the determination of the value of commodities. Basing himself on the exceptions noted by Ricardo, Torrens rejects the law. He reverts to Adam Smith (against whom the Ricardian demonstration is directed) according to whom the value of commodities was determined by the labour-time embodied in them "in that early period" when men confronted one another simply as owners and exchangers of goods, but not when capital and property in land have been evolved. This means (as I observed in Part I) that the law which applies to commodities qua commodities, no longer applies to them once they are regarded as capital or as products of capital, or as soon as there is, in general, an advance from the commodity to capital. On the other hand, the product wholly assumes the form of a commodity only—as a result of the fact that the entire product has to be transformed into exchange-value and that also all the ingredients necessary for its production enter it as commodities—in other words it wholly becomes a commodity only with the development and on the basis of capitalist production. Thus the law of value is supposed to be valid for a type of production which produces no commodities (or produces commodities only to a limited extent) and not to be valid for a type of production which is based on the product as a commodity. The law itself, as well as the commodity as the general form of the product, is abstracted from capitalist production and yet it is precisely in respect of capitalist production that the law is held to be invalid.

Marx puts the bit "in that early period" in quotation marks to refer back to the following comment he had just made regarding this quote from Torrens:

Marx

"In that early period of society"

(that is, precisely when exchange-value in general, the product as commodity, is hardly developed at all, and consequently when there is no law of value either)

Locustinferno

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Locustinferno on June 9, 2012

This is as good a time as any in this thread for this I think:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X50WO4m3k1E

Dave B

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on June 9, 2012

Well if this whole, how should I put it politely, ‘unorthodox’ interpretation is supposed to be based on an interpretation of Rubin’s interpretation on something Karl wrote in theories of surplus value.

Then we might as well get the basics right.

Including exactly what Karl said, shouldn’t we?

I am not sure exactly what Felix meant by

Marx puts the bit "in that early period" in quotation marks to refer back to the following comment he had just made regarding this quote from Torrens:

But it doesn’t matter as maybe Felix can clarify it.

The;

In that early period of society….

Was from Torrens not Karl, thus

Robert Torrens An essay on the production of wealth

In that early period of society…….. (karl then drops the next bit)……. which precedes the separation of the community into a class of capitalists and a class of labourers and in which the individual who undertakes any branch of industry performs his own work,

(Karl picks it up again from here)...... the total quantity of labour, accumulated and imediate, expended on production, is that on which comparison and competition turn and which in the transactions of barter or sale ultimately determines the quantity of one commodity which shall be received for a given quantity of another.

When stock is accumulated when capitalists become a class distinct from labourers and when the person who undertake any branch of industry does not perform his own work, but advances subsistence and material to others then it is the amount of capital or the quantity of accumulated labour expended in production on which comparison and competition turn and which determines the exchangeable power of commodities.

Compare Karl’s

“In that early period of society”

(that is, precisely when exchange-value in general, the product as commodity, is hardly developed at all, and consequently when there is no law of value either)

“the total quantity of labour, accumulated and immediate, expended on production, is that […] which […] determines the quantity of one commodity which shall be received for a given quantity of another. When stock has accumulated, when capitalists became a class distinct from labourers, […] when the person who undertakes any branch of industry, does not perform his own work, but advances subsistence and materials to others, then it is the amount of capital, or the quantity of accumulated labour expended in production, […] which determines the exchangeable power of commodities” (op. cit., pp. 33-34).

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch20.htm

As to my motivation, it is altruistic.

In my opinion if people start to read chapter one volume one with the ‘prejudiced’ idea that it is about capitalism rather than ‘simple commodity production’ and not with the idea that.

….in the beginning of his first book Marx proceeds from the simple production of commodities as the historical premise, ultimately to arrive from this basis to capital — why he proceeds from the simple commodity instead of a logically and historically secondary form — from an already capitalistically modified commodity.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/pref.htm

Then they are lost before they begin.

I read Capital unprejudiced and stone cold and hadn’t read any Marx at all before that.

I think Das Capital is a curse. And as an impenetrable and dense book it attracts elitist intellectuals to it like flies to a dung heap.

Which was exactly my opinion of it before I read it.

The Anarchist community are fortunate not to have it hanging around their neck and are comparatively free from the plague.

I have ‘only’ spent about 25% of my reading time on MIA type crap over the last 10 years just case others think I am another complete marxist nerd.

jura

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by jura on June 9, 2012

This is ridiculous! The bit from TSV actually confirms that the law of value is a law of capitalism:

Marx

What does he [Torrens] conclude from it? That here within capitalist production the law of value suddenly changes. That is, that the law of value, which is abstracted from capitalist production, contradicts capitalist phenomena. And what does he put in its place? Absolutely nothing but the crude, thoughtless, verbal expression of the phenomenon which has to be explained.

“In that early period of society”

(that is, precisely when exchange-value in general, the product as commodity, is hardly developed at all, and consequently when there is no law of value either)

Note that the "early period of society" is a supposed period (hypothesized, here, by Torrens) with individual producers who own their means of production and exchange their products in proportions governed by the labor expended – i.e., a past utopia, a "paradise lost" of a "pure" law of value unspoiled by wage labor, shared by classical political economy and Engels.

Similarly, in A Contribution, criticizing Smith's idea of a pre-capitalist law of value:

Marx

Although Adam Smith determines the value of commodities by the labour-time contained in them, he then nevertheless transfers this determination of value in actual fact to pre-Smithian times. In other words, what he regards as true when considering simple commodities becomes confused as soon as he examines the higher and more complex forms of capital, wage-labour, rent, etc. He expresses this in the following way: the value of commodities was measured by labour-time in the paradise lost of the bourgeoisie, where people did not confront one another as capitalists, wage-labourers, landowners, tenant farmers, usurers, and so on, but simply as persons who produced commodities and exchanged them.

(http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch01a.htm)

You are a bourgeois utopist, Dave B.

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 9, 2012

And the passage in German
http://www.dearchiv.de/php/dok.php?archiv=mew&brett=MEW263&fn=K20_64.263&menu=mewinh

Dies also das Verdienst T[orrens]', daß er diesen Ausdruck hat. Was schließt er daraus? Daß hier ¦¦784¦ in der kapitalistischen Produktion ein Umschlag im Gesetz des Werts stattfindet. D.h., daß das Gesetz des Werts, das aus der kapita- listischen Produktion abstrahiert ist, ihren Erscheinungen wider- spricht. Und was setzt er an die Stelle? Absolut nichts als den rohen gedankenlosen sprachlichen Ausdruck des Phänomens, das zu erklären ist. "In der frühen Periode der Gesellschaft" (also grade, wenn der Tauschwert überhaupt - das Produkt als Ware - kaum entwickelt ist, also auch das Gesetz des Werts nicht)

He speaks of a change of the law of value; The point is that this change happens with the introduction of capitalism. It's a tautology to say that the law of value exists only in capitalism. The mistake of Smith was to reject the law of value based on the alteration it undergoes in capitalism.

On this particular passage though, I would translate it less categorically, as: "when exchange value in general - the product as commodity - hardly is developed, consequently, also the law of value is hardly developed."

Dave B

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on June 9, 2012

That was better Jura

The law of value, and I will take the following for arguments sake, says;

Most generally, it refers to a regulative principle of the economic exchange of the products of human work: the relative exchange-values of those products in trade, usually expressed by money-prices, are proportional to the average amounts of human labor-time which are currently socially necessary to produce them

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_value

The problem was or is that in capitalism commodities do not exchange according to their value, they exchange according to their prices of production, the law breaks down as Fred reiterated with hyperbole in the supplement.

Commodities exchange at above or below their values according to whether their production ‘requires’ more or less capital, for simplicity, in the form of fixed (eg machines) and constant (eg raw material or ‘working stock’).

Commodities only exchange at their values if they so happen to have the average amount of capital or organic composition of capital.

Where I work and at Redcar steel works for example the organic composition of capital is about a 1000 which is probably highish. It would be lower in a call centre.

The problem is thus how can you abstract a law of value from capitalism that says things exchange at their value when they generally don’t?

This was the subject of the Torrens dialogue in chapter 20.

As just as how could you develop a Newtonian theory of gravity by dropping falcon feathers and hammers on earth with the interfering affects of an atmosphere?

Well you rig the experiment or abstract away the irritating ‘reality’ of air resistance and look to the celestial purity and paradise of the idealised heavens.

It was no accident that the law of value was ‘noticed’ and developed when (or just before) the affects of differing and large capitals on the ‘exchange value’, or the prices of production were only just beginning to have an effect.

The basic underlying truth of the law of value in capitalism still prevails; as does the Newtonian law of gravity on earth with its atmosphere.

However sticking with the law of gravity as a ‘fundamental working truth’, as opposed to a ‘universal physical picture’, leads to an understanding of air resistance, Reynolds numbers and Stokes' drag, on earth.

An absolutely essential if you want to design or understand why plane to flies and why the falcon feather falls more slowly.

Or as Feuerbach, Karl’s mentor and one of the the first philosophers of the scientific method said.

The scientific object eg the abstraction of Newtons’s law of gravity becomes an object of scientific investigation itself.

Thus leading to an understanding of why and how it doesn’t work when it is interfered with, here.

The dropping of the falcon feather and hammer on the moon was an ironic scientific joke against ‘philosophy’.

But scientists never called Reynolds numbers and Stokes drag a ‘transformation problem’.

I sometimes wonder how lucky we were; unravelling the scientific Rosetta Stone of the ideal gas equation could be a real headache on other planets.

Just being a bit flippant in case there are any other scientist on this thread, but I doubt it.

If you mean by Utopianist that I am some kind of ‘Kropotkinist’ then I am flattered.

Bourgeois means an interest in the “I” and the “me” as opposed to the “we” and the “us”; and as a moralising humanist reciprocal altruists as well as an economic ‘Kropotkinist’ I am neither.

A bourgeois Utopianist would be a Proudhonist who really did want to return to Smith’s lost paradise.

Khawaga

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Khawaga on June 9, 2012

The problem is thus how can you abstract a law of value from capitalism that says things exchange at their value when they generally don’t?

That's the whole point with notions such as simple commodity circulation. It's an abstraction away from how capitalism concretely function. Marx's makes the assumption that commodities exchange at their value for the purpose of analysis. In Vol. 3 he rocks with these assumption and tries to account for how capitalism operates from the point of view of the capitalist (and bourgeois economics), i.e. price. The law of value still functions behind the backs of capitalists, and they are compelled to act accordingly since the law is enforced through competition.

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 9, 2012

I think Das Capital is a curse. And as an impenetrable and dense book it attracts elitist intellectuals to it like flies to a dung heap.

At least we know why you're making such a fuss about this-- because you never understood the first three chapters; you feel aggrieved that the work is not "simple" or rather simple minded enough; and anyone who actually grasps that what Marx is providing is the immanent critique of capital makes you feel inadequate.

Dave B

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on June 10, 2012

For the people who cannot or do not want to read, who, even in Volume I, took more trouble to understand it wrongly than was necessary to understand it correctly — for such people it is altogether useless to put oneself out in any way.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/supp.ht

jura

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by jura on June 10, 2012

Dave B, please take that advice and spare us :).

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 10, 2012

Dave B

For the people who cannot or do not want to read, who, even in Volume I, took more trouble to understand it wrongly than was necessary to understand it correctly — for such people it is altogether useless to put oneself out in any way.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/supp.ht

The above might have some significance if Engels had been referring to those who in fact grasped the first 3 chapters as an examination of the facets, the relations, of value, embodied in capitalist commodity production.

But he was not.

Here's what Engels wrote:

The third book of Capital is receiving many and various interpretations ever since it has been subject to public judgement. It was not to be otherwise expected. In publishing it, what I was chiefly concerned with was to produce as authentic a text as possible, to demonstrate the new results obtained by Marx in Marx’s own words as far as possible, to intervene myself only where absolutely unavoidable, and even then to leave the reader in no doubt as to who was talking to him. This has been deprecated. It has been said that I should have converted the material available to me into a systematically written book, en faire un livre, as the French say; in other words, sacrifice the authenticity of the text to the reader’s convenience. But this was not how I conceived my task. I lacked all justification for such a revision, a man like Marx has the right to be heard himself, to pass on his scientific discoveries to posterity in the full genuineness of his own presentation. Moreover, I had no desire thus to infringe — as it must seem to me — upon the legacy of so pre-eminent a man; it would have meant to me a breach of faith. And third, it would have been quite useless. For the people who cannot or do not want to read, who, even in Volume I, took more trouble to understand it wrongly than was necessary to understand it correctly — for such people it is altogether useless to put oneself out in any way. But for those who are interested in a real understanding, the original text itself was precisely the most important thing; for them my recasting would have had at most the value of a commentary, and, what is more, a commentary on something unpublished and inaccessible. The original text would have had to be referred to at the first controversy, and at the second and third its publication in extenso would have become quite unavoidable.

See? He's referring to those who prefer an "interpretation" as opposed to reading and comprehension.

"A man like Marx has the right to be heard himself"

Doesn't exactly square up with Dave B. characterization of Capital as a "dung heap," does it?

You, Dave B., are about as dishonest as they come.

bzfgt

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by bzfgt on June 10, 2012

Noa Rodman

He speaks of a change of the law of value; The point is that this change happens with the introduction of capitalism. It's a tautology to say that the law of value exists only in capitalism. The mistake of Smith was to reject the law of value based on the alteration it undergoes in capitalism.

He says "within capitalism" or "in capitalism," not "with the introduction of capitalism." Plus how does that interpretation square with your claim that it is tautologous that the law of value exists only in capitalism?

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 10, 2012

the quote from Felix; Marx

the law which applies to commodities qua commodities, no longer applies to them once they are regarded as capital or as products of capital, or as soon as there is, in general, an advance from the commodity to capital. On the other hand, the product wholly assumes the form of a commodity only—as a result of the fact that the entire product has to be transformed into exchange-value and that also all the ingredients necessary for its production enter it as commodities—in other words it wholly becomes a commodity only with the development and on the basis of capitalist production.

and the next paragraph (bold mine)
Marx

The proposition regarding the influence of the separation of “capital and labour” on the determination of value—apart from the tautology that capital cannot determine prices so long as it does not as yet exist—is moreover a quite superficial translation of a fact manifesting itself on the surface of capitalist production. So long as each person works himself with his own tools and sells his product himself the necessity to sell products on a social scale never coincides with production carried on with the producer’s own means of production>, his costs comprise the cost of both the tools and the labour he performs. The cost to the capitalist consists in the capital he advances—in the sum of values he expends on production—not in labour, which he does not perform, and which only costs him what he pays for it. This is a very good reason for the capitalists to calculate and distribute the (social) surplus-value amongst themselves according to the size of their capital outlay and not according to the quantity of immediate labour which a given capital puts in motion. But it does not explain where the surplus-value—which has to be distributed and is distributed in this way—comes from.

oneworker

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by oneworker on June 12, 2012

Abstract labor is the equality of all kind of labor under the specific capitalist mode of production. That is the way capitalism operates objectively, like or not. The capitalist mode of production is a geralized commodity production society based on private property of all means of production and their products. No society before it had made everything a commodity including the labor capacity of the human beings. Only in a society where everything is a commodity, and also human labor power, an abstract labor may appear as a general law.
It is the only way in which the total production of independent private producers and owners of these mass of products can relate in exchange in the market. And since the products are so physically different it is imposible to exhange them base on their use value (Physical properties). The exchange value (sociallly necessary abstract labor power whith nor regard to its specific characteistics) is what is equal in all of them, that is abstract labor. Talking about individuals separate from a concrete set of material productions relations and out of any history is the surests way to be as confused as a bird, a mean, as LBird.

LBird

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by LBird on June 12, 2012

oneworker

...the surests way to be as confused as a bird, a mean, as LBird.

The tragic thing, oneworker, is that the overwhelming majority of workers are confused by the concept of 'value', not just me.

I've tried to have a discussion that helps to explain this important concept, on this and other threads, so that we can help build up a wider body of workers who have at least some understanding, and can thus explain to yet more workers.

I think that this is a useful task.

But here we seem to be assailed by the cognescenti who don't want to actually explain anything, but just swap quotes (and not just in English!) to apparently prove their personal erudition.

And so we have endless threads of mostly unread snipes and personal quarrels, between those who apparently already know what 'value' is, in their opinion.

It's a shame isn't it? You'd think that LibCom would be a model for learning by workers, rather than an arena for obscure academic debates, which no doubt will have their value in the future.

But first, we need to discuss, ask questions, learn, understand, and then be able to pass on our Communist ideas to a wider audience.

Good luck.

Malva

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Malva on June 12, 2012

This is why someone needs to publish a translation of Anselm Jappe's Aventures de la marchandise. It is a really accessible text on these fundamental and more 'esoteric' aspects of Marx.

Angelus Novus

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Angelus Novus on June 12, 2012

Malva

This is why someone needs to publish a translation of Anselm Jappe's Aventures de la marchandise. It is a really accessible text on these fundamental and more 'esoteric' aspects of Marx.

Nah, this is why Monthly Review Press is publishing Michael Heinrich's Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital, which presents a rigorous account of Marx's critique, including the more "esoteric" aspects of Marx, but without Jappe's sloppiness and casual disregard for Marx's categories.

Out soon!

The best and most comprehensive introduction to Marx’s Capital there is. It is written in a most accessible style and provides an admirably clear explanation of complex ideas. In contrast to other Introductions to Marx’s Capital, it offers a sophisticated commentary on all three volumes of Capital, provides an excellent critical commentary on the secondary literature, and includes pertinent case studies to illustrate the contemporary relevance of Capital, including an excursus on anti-Semitism, globalization, and imperialism. Its scholarly treatment of Capital is at once accessible, comprehensive and contemporary. I do not know of any better introduction to Capital for undergraduate students and non-specialist readers.

Werner Bonefeld, Department of Politics, University of York

ocelot

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ocelot on June 12, 2012

I think the problem can be investigated without quoting one set of authorities against another.

The key is the contradiction between the law of value and the rate of profit.

The law of value, taken to be the reduced claim that exchange values of commodities are proportional (with some wriggle room) to the amount of socially necessary labour required for their production.

The rate of profit being the ratio of surplus value (s) embodied in a product in one cycle of production, to the value of the variable (v) and constant (c - includes fixed and circulating) capital inputs to production. Expressed as s/(v+c).

Even if we dispense with the cost of fixed capital means of production (machinery, plant, etc) and propose a hypothetical petit bourgeois utopia where all tools of production are owned by the producers, who in turn own the whole product of their labours, we still have a constant capital element for all people working in the non-primary industries - for e.g. blacksmiths and goldsmiths (you see right away where I'm going with those examples, I'm thinking...).

At modern day prices, gold is 2,000,000 times more expensive than iron (~40,000 euros per kg, compared to 0.02 euros per kg of iron). Obviously that enourmous discrepancy is in many ways the product of our highly developed globalised capitalism. But even in pre-capitalist artisanal production, we could easily see gold as being worth 1000 times the exchange value of iron.

Say our blacksmith works 12 hours a day turning 10 kgs of iron into horseshoes or agricultural tools. Say our goldsmith also works 12 hours a day turning 100 grammes of gold into rings. Let's make the unjustifiably anachronistic (for a pre-capitalist economy) of saying that there is an established value of labour of 6 hours 'necessary' labour, and further that the wages of the two smiths are equal. So each of their working days embodies 6 hours necessary labour and 6 hours surplus labour into their materials. Let's say the 10 Kgs of iron represent 12 hours of miners and forgers labour. The gold, as previously assumed, although a 10th of the mass, is a 1000 times more valuable, pound for pound, so 100 grammes represents 120 hours of labour. Hence rate of profit for the blacksmith = 6/(6 + 12) = 1/3 or ~0.333. ROP for the goldsmith = 6/(6 + 120) = 0.047.

(Bear with me). The problem can be looked at another way, through the iterations of a chain of production. Lets say a primary producer (farmer, miner, hunter) produces a raw material embodying 12 hours of labour. Assume (again unrealistically in pre-capitalist relations) necessary labour of 6 hours. So primary ROP = 6/(6 + 0) = 1.

Now I'm going to make a totally unrealistic assumption, that I'll relax later, for the sake of illustrating the argument. That is, the output of one days product of the previous stage in the chain, exactly matches the required input materials to combined with one days work of the next stage in the chain.

OK, so the next secondary stage in the chain takes the primary output and adds to it 12 hours of their own labour. Now ROP = 6/(6 + 12) = 1/3. Next the finishing producer takes that output and adds a further 12 hours of their labour. ROP = 6/(6 + 24) = 1/5. Finally the retailer adds 12 hours of fetching, carrying, stocking and selling, and we get ROP 6/(6 + 36) = 1/7. That is, the further up the "value added" chain you get, the lower the rate of profit.

So, is that result maintained if we relax the assumption of one-to-one correspondance between output and input quantities? Clearly if the quantity required as input for one days work by the next stage is actually greater than the output of one days work by the previous stage, the result is maintained (aggravated even). However, what if the finishing producer, rather than taking the whole of the secondary output (value 24), takes only half of it, or less? In that case ROP would be the same as the previous stage, or even higher if only a third of the previous stage's output could be worked by the next stage. I leave it to the reader as to which is the more common case in practice. Note also how this result deviates from the profitability rates of the different stages in the value chain in the present-day (e.g. farmers, food producers, warehousing & logistics, Tescos...)

OK, so rate of profit declines with the increase of the value of the constant capital input, regardless of whether the producer is owner of his/her own tools and whole product of his/her labour. So what?

The contradiction between the rate of profit and the law of value is this: that we can expect the flow of available money capital to be away from areas of low profit rate (high productivity, capital intensive) towards areas of high profitability (low productivity, labour intensive).

NOW here we have to be very careful. In the context of capitalist relations, the flow of capital towards low productivity areas (or "bottlenecks" as we call them) actually helps in the development of the productive forces. That's because the capitalist in charge of production can use those funds to sack productive workers and replace them with machinery and thus increase the productivity while gaining a temporary, locally profitable, advantage over competitors (even if potentially* contributing to a lowering of the aggregate profit rate overall).

BUT, that presupposes the separation between the persons of the owner-vendor of the results of commodity production and the persons of the direct producers (who would get sacked). In our petty bourgeois utopia, the owner-vendor and the producer are united in the same person who is not going to ruin his/her right hand in order to enrich their left one. Further the other pole of the flow, the movement of finance away from higher productivity areas, will punish any advances made by individual owner/producers. The net result of the dynamics of financial flow from lower to higher profitability, under the conditions of non-capitalist commodity production, is to limit and block the development of the productive forces, rather than promote them.

This is why I have a lot of time for the rejection of the "commercialisation model" by the "political marxist" tendency (Brenner, Woods, Teschke). The dynamics of capitalist commodity production cannot arise directly out of pre-capitalist commodity production, the dynamics of the latter are all the wrong way around. This is why artisans formed guilds and friendly societies in the pre-capitalist era. Secondly, I would argue, (and this is not directly connected to main line of argument here but it is relevant) the main obstacle to the development of productive forces in an era dominated by peasant production, is the relative inelasticity of demand. There's no point revolutionising productivity and massively expanding the scale of commodity production is the vast majority of your population have either no, or at best marginal interaction with the commodity market. Guilds and the like, existed for the self-preservation of artisanal commodity production in societies where demand for their products was fundamentally limited - almost regardless of price.

So, what was the point of all that? The point is that the contradiction between the law of value and the profit rate is not external to the former, but innate to it. This is what neither Smith nor Ricardo could get their heads around. For them, coming from a classical logic background, the idea that a law not only could operate in conjunction with it's contradiction, but could only operate with it, was just too much. Ricardo tried to theorise it as "exceptions" to the law of value. Smith tried to posit a bourgeois paradise (of hunter-gatherers, primmos eat your heart out) where a pre-lapsarian law of value had gambolled free, until the evils of modern-day capitalism twisted and perverted its workings. Engels apparently, for all his penchant for putting himself forward as some kind of authority on "dialectics", had the same problem.

The point is that the law of value cannot establish its own dynamics - the reduction of concrete labour to abstract labour, the establishment of "socially necessary" measures of productivity, the commodification of labour, etc - except in the conditions where the separation between the owner-vendor of the commodity and its producer has already been effected and the mechanisms for the equalisation of the rate of profit are already in operation.

* let's not get into that one right now

LBird

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by LBird on June 12, 2012

Angelus Novus

Nah, this is why Monthly Review Press is publishing Michael Heinrich's Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital, which presents a rigorous account of Marx's critique...

On an earlier recommendation of yours, I've had this on pre-order since February, but it hasn't turned up, yet. It was published on 6th June, wasn't it?

Let's hope it helps, eh?

[edit]

Just seen that it's been put back to 1st August.

andy g

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by andy g on June 12, 2012

well put, ocelot! I seem to remember John Weeks making a similar argument against the "historical interpretation" of value in "Capital and Exploitation". Was too lazy to look it up though :roll:

Angelus Novus

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Angelus Novus on June 12, 2012

LBird

Just seen that it's been put back to 1st August.

Whoa, where did you see that? Last I heard from the publisher, it's already been sent to the printer and will be out soon.

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 12, 2012

I think ocelot is onto something very, very important, something that Marx is driving at in volume 3-- the identity and opposition of the law of value with the development of the general or average rate of profit and the distribution of profit in proportion to the size of the capitals employed.

Short version: the expression of the law of value through the totality of exchanges of commodities at their prices of production.

LBird

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by LBird on June 12, 2012

Angelus Novus

LBird

Just seen that it's been put back to 1st August.

Whoa, where did you see that? Last I heard from the publisher, it's already been sent to the printer and will be out soon.

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Introduction-Three-Volumes-Karl-Marxs-Capital-Michael-Heinrich/9781583672884

ocelot

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ocelot on June 12, 2012

Amazon tells me my pre-ordered copy is due to be dispatched tomorrow. Happy days. :)

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 12, 2012

I'm not sure how ocelot's post goes against the historical interpretation, andy. Nobody is saying that the law of value operates in the sense of like equalizing rates of profit for branches with different fixed capital. What Engels means by law of value is that products exchange in proportion to their labour value, so when Ocelot writes: "But even in pre-capitalist artisanal production, we could easily see gold as being worth 1000 times the exchange value of iron." - that's what the so-called historical interpretation means.

Smith was aware of the historicity of the "law of value" in the sense which ocelot takes it:
[quote=Marx]Here Adam Smith very acutely notes that the really great development of the productive power of labour starts only from the moment when it is transformed into wage-labour, and the conditions of labour confront it on the one hand as landed property and on the other as capital. The development of the productive power of labour thus begins only under conditions in which the labourer himself can no longer appropriate its result. It is therefore quite useless to investigate how this growth of productive powers might have influenced or would influence “wages”, taken here as equal to the product of labour, on the hypothesis that the product of labour (or the value of this product) belonged to the labourer himself.[/quote]

Angelus Novus

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Angelus Novus on June 12, 2012

Noa Rodman

What Engels means by law of value is that products exchange in proportion to their labour value

How? As a conscious decision, or as a blindly operating law?

If it's a conscious decision, then a) it doesn't square with Marx's conception of the law of value operating blindly behind the backs of producers, and b) it isn't a "law" anyway.

If it is supposed to be a blindly operating law, then how does this law operate without the equalization of profit rates across industries?

ocelot

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ocelot on June 12, 2012

Noa Rodman

I'm not sure how ocelot's post goes against the historical interpretation, andy. Nobody is saying that the law of value operates in the sense of like equalizing rates of profit for branches with different fixed capital. What Engels means by law of value is that products exchange in proportion to their labour value, so when Ocelot writes: "But even in pre-capitalist artisanal production, we could easily see gold as being worth 1000 times the exchange value of iron." - that's what the so-called historical interpretation means.

Er. No. Remember the accidental form of exchange value? As in the natural accident of the relative abundance of iron ore relative to gold bearing ores? The fact that there was money and exchange before capitalism does not imply the existence of the general form of value.

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 12, 2012

Noa Rodman

I'm not sure how ocelot's post goes against the historical interpretation, andy. Nobody is saying that the law of value operates in the sense of like equalizing rates of profit for branches with different fixed capital. What Engels means by law of value is that products exchange in proportion to their labour value, so when Ocelot writes: "But even in pre-capitalist artisanal production, we could easily see gold as being worth 1000 times the exchange value of iron." - that's what the so-called historical interpretation means.

Uhh....no, that's what this whole discussion has been about. It's only a "law" if all of social production is organized on that basis. It's only a law if labor itself is organized as value, and value-producing, as, in short, labor in the abstract.

andy g

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by andy g on June 12, 2012

thank fuck for that! was starting to think i had lost it for a sec!

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 12, 2012

I know the feeling... You feel like screaming "Hey, hold on just a sec. Get a grip. That looks like my own tail I'm chasing. We've come full circle."

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 12, 2012

Ocelot, you mention the general form of value, which I think Engels didn't mean. I think he meant just value. Perhaps the debate between Bernstein and Kautsky can clarify this. Bernstein relies on Parvus's critique of Engels, which is found by clicking on this. By the way, Parvus uses Dave's analogy of the theory of gravity abstracting from air resistance, in order to show how Marx reasoned (i.e. in the abstract). But here is Eduard Bernstein:

[quote=Berstein]In this way, as far as single commodities or a category of commodities comes into consideration, value loses every concrete quality and becomes a pure abstract concept. But what becomes of the surplus value under these circumstances? This consists, according to the Marxist theory, of the difference between the labour value of the products and the payment for the labour force spent in their production by the workers. It is therefore evident that at the moment when labour value can claim acceptance only as a speculative formula or scientific hypothesis, surplus value would all the more become a pure formula – a formula which rests on an hypothesis.

As is known, Friedrich Engels in an essay left behind him which was published in the Neue Zeit of the year 1895-96, pointed out a solution of the problem through the historical consideration of the process. Accordingly the law of value was of a directly determining power, it directly governed the exchange of commodities in the period of exchange and barter of commodities preceding the capitalist order of society.

Engels seeks to prove this in connection with a passage in the third volume of Capital by a short description of the historic evolution of economics. But although he presents the rise and development of the rate of profit so brilliantly, the essay fails in convincing strength of proof just where it deals with the question of value. According to Engels’ representation the Marxist law of value ruled generally as an economic law from five to seven thousand years, from the beginning of exchanging products as commodities (in Babylon, Egypt, etc.) up to the beginning of the era of capitalist production. Parvus, in a number of Neue Zeit of the same year, made good some conclusive objections to this view by pointing to a series of facts (feudal relations, undifferentiated agriculture, monopolies of guilds, etc.) which hindered the conception of a general exchange value founded on the labour time of the producers. It is quite clear that exchange on the basis of labour value cannot be a general rule so long as production for exchange is only an auxiliary branch of the industrial units, viz., the utilisation of surplus labour, etc., and as long as the conditions under which the exchanging producers take part in the act of exchange are fundamentally different. The problem of Labour forming exchange value and the connected problems of value and surplus value is no clearer at that stage of industry than it is to-day.

But what was at those times clearer than to-day is the fact of surplus labour. [/quote]

I think simply commodity production by definition means not on a general social scale; the Marx-quote on which Engels bases himself speaks only of exchange between separate communities. Be that as it may.

I think Kautsky's reply (here at the bottom and the next page) indirectly (apropos Buch's theory) speaks on this [interesting also that Rubin got in trouble when responding to Buch, see Dashkovskij's critique which btw deals exactly with the topic of the thread]. Kautsky states that Marx differentiates value "as such" and relative value. Labour-value, or individual value as Marx calls it in V.3, is different from market-value or market-price. Buch thinks value is determined by the wage of labor (Arbeitslohn). Now here Kautsky says that value is an economic category which existed before capitalism, so what determines the value of products not produced by waged laborers? He asks another rhetorical question: what is the wage of labor other than the sum of product-values, exchanged for the equal amount of labor-power? I think this presupposes (correct me if I misinterpret Kautsky here) that money has to have value; that is, be a commodity e.g. gold. Buch ends up in the following circle: first value is determined by wage of labor, and then the wage of labor is determined by value!
Kautsky asks then again rhetorically; is the value of labor-power also determined by the wage of labor?

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 12, 2012

Dave, perhaps you can make sense of Kautsky here. I tag you.

ocelot

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ocelot on June 13, 2012

Noa Rodman

Ocelot, you mention the general form of value, which I think Engels didn't mean. I think he meant just value.

No. He talks of the law of value, not just value. Therein lies the nub of the matter. Does the law of value determine the magnitude of value trans-historically for 7 thousand years, back to the pyramid builders of ancient Egypt, or is it historically specific to the social relations of production proper to capitalism? There is a clear divide between the "trans-" and "specifist" positions.

My view is that the "trans" position is based on an ideological revulsion to the existence of the law of value in the mode of being contradicted, which then seeks to speculatively project backwards, a golden era of "pure law" exchange, when commodities really did exchange at values in proportion to the SNLT* embodied in them. I'm arguing that not only did such an era never exist, historically, but that it never could have existed and, most importantly, that it never could be made to work in the future.

I've been scolded before by comrades here for positing too direct an association between these questions of value theory and political partisanship of particular post-capitalist alternatives. But still, for me, this last point above is the real bone of contention. Throughout the history of the socialist movement, group after group, tendency after tendency, keep re-inventing the same basic programme - the ending of the rule of the impure, "perverted" law of value, twisted by capitalism, and its replacement, in one form or another, of a system of distribution according to deed not need - a "purified" law of value (however much the advocates, which range from Lenin, through the GIK, to Parecon & co today, deny it). This, to me, is the poison in the "trans" position - if the law of value is tran-historically valid, then there is no harm in trying to construct a post-capitalist society on its basis. That, for me as a communist, is the line that must be drawn and fought over.

Noa Rodman

Perhaps the debate between Bernstein and Kautsky can clarify this.[...]

Yeah. Well. Perhaps not. Not for me, anyway. Firstly my German is too poor (even if Fraktur didn't give me migranes) to follow debates in back issues of Die Neue Zeit. Secondly, while I appreciate the need for some people to mine through even the most unpromising legacies of the past, for myself, philistine that I am, what Kautsky, Bernstein, Parvus, Rubin, Buch, Dashkovskij and the rest of the lads have to say on the question, is a matter of total indifference. I am more than happy to leave the entirety of German socialdemocratic orthodox Marxism in the rubbish bin where history has so deservedly consigned it. I'm more than happy that enthusiasts and scholars are willing to root around in there looking for salvageable stuff, but don't expect me to climb in there with you. :hand:

* and again, I reiterate, the process of "value discovery" that actually determines how much labour time actually is socially necessary, presupposes the general form and the commodification of labour.

yourmum

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by yourmum on June 13, 2012

Throughout the history of the socialist movement, group after group, tendency after tendency, keep re-inventing the same basic programme - the ending of the rule of the impure, "perverted" law of value, twisted by capitalism, and its replacement, in one form or another, of a system of distribution according to deed not need - a "purified" law of value (however much the advocates, which range from Lenin, through the GIK, to Parecon & co today, deny it). This, to me, is the poison in the "trans" position - if the law of value is tran-historically valid, then there is no harm in trying to construct a post-capitalist society on its basis. That, for me as a communist, is the line that must be drawn and fought over

nailed.

LBird

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by LBird on June 13, 2012

ocelot

Throughout the history of the socialist movement, group after group, tendency after tendency, keep re-inventing the same basic programme - the ending of the rule of the impure, "perverted" law of value, twisted by capitalism, and its replacement, in one form or another, of a system of distribution according to deed not need - a "purified" law of value (however much the advocates, which range from Lenin, through the GIK, to Parecon & co today, deny it).

If 'value' is an emergent property of relations of exploitation, how can 'value', either 'perverted' or 'purified', form the basis of Communism?

To me, you seem to be on the right track, ocelot.

Free-access Communism is the death of value.

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 13, 2012

for myself, philistine that I am, what Kautsky, Bernstein, Parvus, Rubin, Buch, Dashkovskij and the rest of the lads have to say on the question, is a matter of total indifference. I am more than happy to leave the entirety of German socialdemocratic orthodox Marxism in the rubbish bin where history has so deservedly consigned it. I'm more than happy that enthusiasts and scholars are willing to root around in there looking for salvageable stuff, but don't expect me to climb in there with you.

Word.

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 13, 2012

On Parecon, etc. this is the point of Mattick's criticism of Rubin:

[quote=Mattick]The theoretical development of Marx's concept of value is equated by Rubin with the in the capitalist system currently dominating law of value. If Marx, with reference to the historical materialism assumed "human labor" as well, with regards to capitalism he meant capitalist wage labor. And if Marx derived the value from the exchange ratios and made this clear for an imaginary "pure commodity production", these cannot be separated from the actual capitalist relations of production. But Rubin's adherence to value exclusively given by the exchange, is explained by his view of the law of value as a balance mechanism. "In the unplanned production of commodities," he writes, the by abstract labor determined law of value plays "the role that socially equated labor plays in a deliberate planned socialist economy." Thus the law of value for Rubin is an unconscious regulation of the economy which, while under socialism comes to an end, is replaced by a plan which makes conscious what is taking place unconsciously in commodity-production.[/quote]

Dashkovskij makes a related criticism [quote=Dashkovskij]The point is that the theory of Rubin leads straightly to a depiction of the value of labour power, as the pay for labour, i.e. to the confusion of the nature of the worker's wage with its outward false appearance, against which Marx sent the sharpest arrows of his critique. If the worker's wage is the pay for labour, then the entire theory of exploitation is suspended in the air. The viewpoint of Rubin is a return to classical economy, which in fact did not differentiate the concepts "labour" and "labour power" and precisely therefore could not go beyond the range of bourgeois ideology. "The social-historical specificity" of abstract labour leads us, in this way, further and further away from genuine marxism.[/quote]

It seems Rubin repeated Buch's error, as shown by Kautsky.

ocelot

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ocelot on June 13, 2012

Sorry but the quality of the translation makes that Mattick piece entirely indecipherable. And from "Buch's error, as shown by Kautsky" I know nothing...

Perhaps a more useful thing would be if you just gave us your ideas on the subject? It's a crazy plan, but it might just work...

andy g

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by andy g on June 13, 2012

oh ocelot, you and your daft ideas! why express yourself when you can quote Kautsky? whatever next....

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 13, 2012

I suppose that the point is that labor-power has value prior to capitalism, even though it's not exchanged.

Khawaga

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Khawaga on June 13, 2012

I suppose that the point is that labor-power has value prior to capitalism, even though it's not exchanged.

How on earth can something have value if it's not exchanged?

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 13, 2012

Exchange with another object gives exchange-value, not value as such I think.

jura

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by jura on June 13, 2012

Category fail, Noa :).

Dave B

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on June 13, 2012

If actually think in order to progress with this we would need to go back to basics and even non Marxist David Hume basics about the scientific method, what is a Law, what is a scientific theory and relationship between a Law and scientific theory etc.

But I suspect it is hopeless.

But returning for the moment to what Fred said in the supplement.

I put that Bernstien post up at post 167 and I said;

On Fred’s supplement to volume III, which is ‘consistent’ with the stuff in the preface on the law of value going back to the beginning recorded history etc I think that was exaggeration to illustrate a point or hyperbole and he goes a little bit too far therefore for me.

http://libcom.org/forums/theory/abstract-labor-vs-concrete-labor-06042011?page=5

I also said the same thing in August 2005

Fred goes further than I would dare on this.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/WSM_Forum/message/27653

Rubin is basically attacking Fred’s supplement position in his chapter 18 as well.

I suspect that the controversy over the supplement rumbled on after Bernstien in 1899 and Rubin just joined in.

I also think Rubin just took that Surplus Value quote of Karl’s from somebody else partaking in the debate and that the quote had probably been passed around through a few languages and became a bit scrambled in the process.

Not that all that matters much, just context.

I am not trying to trash das Capital I think it is good and well thought out. and stands up etc.

On the Scientific Method

A scientific law is basically an experimental observation of a ‘correlation’ with an implication of causality or interdependence.

Eg Gay-Lussac's law which says basically if you increase the temperature of a gas in a container the pressure goes up.

That is a law not a scientific theory.

Just as the law that the value of a commodity goes up if the amount of labour time required to make it goes up is not a scientific theory.

It is an observation of fact by Smith initially backed up by interminable amounts of data going back to the beginning of records itself in the 14th century.

Understanding the causality or interdependence is a scientific theory.

As an example of a scientific theory; the one behind Gay-Lussac's law or the theoretical explanation was that the gas molecules when heated up moved around faster with greater momentum and pounded away with greater vigour on the inside of the wall of the vessel and that was what pressure was etc.

There is a problem to start of with of deriving a law, like a law of value, from a situation were it doesn’t fully operate as in capitalism never mind deriving a scientific explanation of it.

Although it has been done before.

However it doesn’t mean you can’t at all, there is something intuitively obvious and law like, that expensive things take longer to make or involve more labour even in capitalism, which is the attraction of the theory.

If you think you are onto to something with a Law you proceed in a particular kind of way if you want to develop and explanation or scientific theory.

First you focus on the area where the law works perfectly and purely . Then develop a scientific theory from that.

And then keep and take that scientific theory into the domain where the law works imperfectly and try to figure out why it doesn’t work with the hope that it leads to some other understanding and other laws with their own explanations or scientific theories.

And test them out and so on.

There is a scientific theory behind the law of value where it is supposed to have worked perfectly without awkward interference , in supposed simple commodity production.

Rubin gave it.

For the simple commodity producer, the difference in the conditions of production in two different branches appear as different conditions for the engagement of labor in them. In a simple commodity economy, the exchange of 10 hours of labor in one branch of production, for example shoemaking, for the product of 8 hours of labor in another branch, for example clothing production, necessarily leads ……….. to different advantages of production in the two branches, and to the transfer of labor from shoemaking to clothing production.

Assuming complete mobility of labor in the commodity economy, every more or less significant difference in the advantage of production generates a tendency for the transfer of labor from the less advantageous branch of production to the more advantageous. …………..In conditions of simple commodity production, equal advantage of production in different branches presupposes an exchange of commodities which is proportional to the quantities of labor expended on their production.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/rubin/value/ch11.htm

I don’t really know how to simplify that.

In capitalism there is the law of value and the law of the rate of profit. The law of the rate of profit does not ‘contradict’ the law of value it just acts as modifying force in a potentially different direction.

The net result, like a parallelogram of forces, lies in between , you could argue that the law of the rate of profit is subservient in the sense of a derivative of the law of value.

The fact that if you let go of a helium balloon it goes up rather than down doesn’t contradict Newtonian laws of gravity.

In fact the balloon goes up because of the law of gravity, it is just you need Archimedes' principle of floatation to explain it.

There is no shadow of doubt by the way in Gabriels Deville’s Capital for dummies completed in 1883 after the active encouragement of Karl to write it that the taylor and linen weaver were not capitalists or that their commodities were capitalistically produced.

And that Karl was first focusing on the area where the law works perfectly and purely and then developed a scientific theory of it from that; which he took into an analysis of capitalism

Even as perhaps an even more abstract from reality ‘thought experiment’.

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 13, 2012

Noa Rodman

I suppose that the point is that labor-power has value prior to capitalism, even though it's not exchanged.

Sure it does, it has a use value. The point being it does not have an exchange value based on its loss, or lack, of usefulness to the laborer(s)prior to capitalism.

Labor does not exist as value. The labor process is not at one and the same time, the valuation [or valorisation, which I think is a poor choice of words]process. Labor is not organized around the expansion of exchange value.

How many times do we have to shoot this zombie before it dies?

andy g

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by andy g on June 13, 2012

crap explanation of scientific method too....

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 13, 2012

Noa Rodman

Exchange with another object gives exchange-value, not value as such I think.

Huh? Sounds to me that rather than proving the supra-historicity of the law of value, you've just chucked it, and the bath water, and the baby-- the baby being the labor theory of value-- out the window.

Remember old Fred's comments to the effect... unless we believe that the [producer] was so stupid as to exchange 9 hours of labor for 1 hour of labor...? Something like that.

Brilliant defense.

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 13, 2012

I also agree with Dave about Engels bending the stick a bit; the editorial comment in the Neue Zeit indicated that Engels wrote this when suffering great pain.

RedHughs

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by RedHughs on June 13, 2012

While Ocelot's overall summary seems OK, this statement is little weird:

The contradiction between the rate of profit and the law of value is this: that we can expect the flow of available money capital to be away from areas of low profit rate (high productivity, capital intensive) towards areas of high profitability (low productivity, labour intensive).

Hmm,

I'd like to see some real world evidence for this.

I mean as I would understand the situation, the capitalists see their profits in terms of the differences of wage and various prices of production and this, combined with the tendency of the rate of profit to equalize, means that the capitalists aren't going to be seeing a given high-capitalization industry as unprofitable (if an industry was unprofitable, why would capitalists invest in it). I could randomly mention GE, Intel or Ford as an example of companies that are highly capitalized and at least a reputation for high profits. If I'm wrong, feel free to correct me with some data.

Going from a Marxian model to specific statements about how companies are going to behave is a minefield and one should be very careful about doing so.

Dave B

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on June 13, 2012

Shall write to you shortly about Lassalle’s war plans and your theory of rent,; though I must say I'm by no means clear about the existence of ‘absolute’ rent — for, after all, you have to prove it first.

I've got frightful piles and can’t go on sitting down any longer.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1862/letters/62_08_08.htm

This time my piles have afflicted me more grievously than the French Revolution. I shall see what I can do next week. The state of my posterior does not permit me to go to the Library yet.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/letters/52_01_24.htm

RedHughs

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by RedHughs on June 13, 2012

Ocelot

I've been scolded before by comrades here for positing too direct an association between these questions of value theory and political partisanship of particular post-capitalist alternatives. But still, for me, this last point above is the real bone of contention. Throughout the history of the socialist movement, group after group, tendency after tendency, keep re-inventing the same basic programme - the ending of the rule of the impure, "perverted" law of value, twisted by capitalism, and its replacement, in one form or another, of a system of distribution according to deed not need - a "purified" law of value (however much the advocates, which range from Lenin, through the GIK, to Parecon & co today, deny it). This, to me, is the poison in the "trans" position - if the law of value is tran-historically valid, then there is no harm in trying to construct a post-capitalist society on its basis. That, for me as a communist, is the line that must be drawn and fought over.

Here I actually agree strongly with you. I believe this is a crucial line (among other crucial questions, it relates strongly to the nature of the Soviet Union).

I would even say that this ultimately comes down to whether communism is a theory of the correction of injustice or whether it is a theory of fundamentally incomparable social systems. It seems plausible that communist theory being a theory of justice would imply the new society would involve a new calculus of distribution and vice-versa.

The thing about this is that after all the actually rather enlightening for me discussions of the last year here, it is hard for me to see Marx himself as unambiguous on this statement.

Just look at the long discussion where Artesian described how Marx, in Chapter 25 of volume I showed that capitalism was a system of something like real inequality, apparent equality. Going to read Chapter, Artesian is right about the development of the argument but it seems like the final direction seems to be that Marx is describing capitalist social relations as unjust. My long discussion with Jura over productive versus unproductive labor seemed to boil down to the same point. Debunking the "Trinity Formula" is necessary to show capital is irredeemably unfair. I suppose you could call this an imminent critique in the sense that "we don't believe in justice but capital does and yet they violate it". But it seems more plausible that these points in Capital are arguing for a juster system.

One might see the "communization" position as being the argument that communism is only about a new social system and that one must jettison all considerations of justice.

And indeed, perhaps the traditional Left Communist position say instead that had communism succeed in the 19th century, we might have slowly negated justice but today we must dispense with it immediately.

Fortunately or unfortunately, my comrade make no effort to argue me out of my various "flights of fancy". I'll let y'all be the judge of their value.

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 14, 2012

OK, so the transhistorical theory of the law of value actually reduces itself to Engels' hemorrhoids? Is that what's being claimed?

So all those people Dave B cited, Kautsky to Bukharin and move... they all had hemorrhoids?

WTF?

andy g

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by andy g on June 14, 2012

s artesian : of course they did! the strain of wrestling with the "knotty" problem of an indefensible position when on the throne was obviously the cause....

LBird : not wishing to speak for ocelot - who is more than capable of that himself - I'm guessing he was employing the standard assumption Marx used when considering the formation of the average rate of profit (uniform rate of surplus value) in constructing his argument. the actual inpact of technological change in a given firm is evidently more complex, with innovators realising super-profits until new technologies are generalised, the impact of changes in relative surplus value become effective etc etc

has no impact on the substantive argument tho - value only becomes the regulator of production, i.e. imposes itself as a "law", when labour power itself becomes a commodity as its operation is precisely through the distribution and re-distribution of labour-power between branches of production in response to "the market".

ocelot

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ocelot on June 14, 2012

Noa Rodman

Exchange with another object gives exchange-value, not value as such I think.

Yes, but the two categories are neither synonymous nor completely separate. So you can have exchange value without the general form of value. But you cannot have the general form without exchange value. The relation between the two is that exchange value is the necessary but not sufficient precondition for the emergence of the general form of value - abstract labour. And abstract labour, and only abstract labour, produces abstract value - the substance of capital.

I suppose that the point is that labor-power has value prior to capitalism, even though it's not exchanged.

OK, that helps, with that I think I now get the point of your earlier reference to Kautsky

Now here Kautsky says that value is an economic category which existed before capitalism, so what determines the value of products not produced by waged laborers? He asks another rhetorical question: what is the wage of labor other than the sum of product-values, exchanged for the equal amount of labor-power? I think this presupposes (correct me if I misinterpret Kautsky here) that money has to have value; that is, be a commodity e.g. gold.

Although, again, it's still not very clear.

In any case, I think a fatal confusion is being made between exchange value, "value as a common language concept" and the general form of value as socially necessary labour time.

The value of labour-power for me presupposes the commodification of labour (the proletariat). As mentioned at the top, I take it that the fixing socially necessary labour time required to reproduce labour power, requires that labour-power be for sale on the market and the means of reproduction also be commodities produced by wage labour.

The problem of finding the value of labour-power in a pre-capitalist peasant economy seems unsurmountable. The majority of the working population are peasants, tied to some land, from which they obtain their subsistence through their own labour. How many hours of SNLT does this take? Who knows. Who could know? To a degree it depends on the accident of the richness of the land, the abundance or scarcity of water, etc. From these peasants, a portion of their produce is abstracted by direct appropriation by their political overlords. The beadle in the manor may keep scrupulous accounts of how much grain, etc, each peasant has paid in tribute. But as to what proportion of the peasant's production this represents, or how many hours of labour it represents - there is simply no clue. This has a knock on effect to the whole economy. Apprentices are generally not paid, they are given room and board, and maybe some pocket money on market or feast days. But even the non-peasant labour of the town is dependent for their subsistence on the produce of the peasantry, whose SNLT value, we have already seen, cannot be calculated*. The price of bread is set by tradition (and possibly statute) yet the vagaries of good and bad growing years, the marauding of armies, create shortages which result in price hikes, responded to by the traditional bread riot, after which the local guardians make the necessary interventions to alleviate supply shortages and restore the traditional price and thus restore order (or, alternatively, order breaks down into Jacquerie, civil war, or plague and famine). But nowhere in any of this is the operation of the "blind laws" of value/price discovery through the market. Commerce in the pre-capitalist world, consists mainly of leveraging geographical unevenness in supply - to transport things from where they are available, to where they are scarce. There is no commensuration between productive labours producing the same good in the same locality, so as to competitively commensurate their use of labour time, so as to establish a socially necessary labour time (Polanyi is good on this iirc).

* edit: actually "calculated" is misleading here, as it implies that the law of value functions as the measure or "calculation" of the labour time embodied in individual production processes, which is not my understanding at all - but that's another discussion.

ocelot

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ocelot on June 14, 2012

RedHughs

While Ocelot's overall summary seems OK, this statement is little weird:

The contradiction between the rate of profit and the law of value is this: that we can expect the flow of available money capital to be away from areas of low profit rate (high productivity, capital intensive) towards areas of high profitability (low productivity, labour intensive).

Hmm,

I'd like to see some real world evidence for this.

I mean as I would understand the situation, the capitalists see their profits in terms of the differences of wage and various prices of production and this, combined with the tendency of the rate of profit to equalize, means that the capitalists aren't going to be seeing a given high-capitalization industry as unprofitable (if an industry was unprofitable, why would capitalists invest in it). I could randomly mention GE, Intel or Ford as an example of companies that are highly capitalized and at least a reputation for high profits. If I'm wrong, feel free to correct me with some data.

Going from a Marxian model to specific statements about how companies are going to behave is a minefield and one should be very careful about doing so.

Red, my post was addressing the hypothetical situation of a pre-capitalist commodity economy where "simple" exchange took place on the basis of SNLT - i.e. without the modifications of prices of production. Of course there's more than one way to demonstrate the absurdity of this hypothesis, but my approach was to emphasise the extent to which the advocates of "the era of simple commodity production" wish to see the problem of the rate of profit as somehow external to the law of value, such that the latter could operate without the former.

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 14, 2012

andy g

value only becomes the regulator of production, i.e. imposes itself as a "law",

I don't think that that is what Engels meant by the law of value. Mattick also seems to object to Rubin's identification of Marx's development of the concept of value with the law of value dominating in capitalism.

As an aside, on the passage about Torrens (it was quoted last year by dave c on this thread already), it's ambiguous at the least. When Marx says that the law of value is "abstrahiert" by Torrens from capitalism, to me he states that for Torrens the law of value doesn't apply to capitalism; Torrens "takes out" the law of value from capitalism. For dave c, Felix, andy, etc. Marx is presenting Torrrens' unconscious way of reasoning; Torrens isn't aware that he is actually projecting the law of value backward. I think that the materialist reason for Smith's and Torrens' "error" (of rejecting the law of value instead of explaining its alteration in capitalism) is not that they imagined a non-existent simple commodity society (Marx makes this same "mistake" in the first chapter then!), but because they lived in times when commodity production took mostly the form of simple commodity production. In that sense I don't think Marx is mocking Rousseau and the Robinson Crusoe utopias (as if these bourgeois thinkers really thought that in the past each lived on a separate island or what).

Why does Marx writes that the serf knows he is exploited if he can't calculate or at least estimate the labor-time in products necessary to reproduce his labor-power (and his family), and compare it to the labor-time in the products he produces (+the labour-value in his tools and raw materials), etc.?

There is some average social productivity, and it can be known by tradition through the centuries. Not for every single exchange does the peasant needs again to make all these calculations to get a product of equal labour-value. But, to quote dave c; "This social average, would not, however, present itself as a regulative norm operating behind the backs of the producers."

ocelot

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ocelot on June 14, 2012

Noa Rodman

Why does Marx writes that the serf knows he is exploited if he can't calculate or at least estimate the labor-time in products necessary to reproduce his labor-power (and his family), and compare it to the labor-time in the products he produces (+the labour-value in his tools and raw materials), etc.?

That's a very strange question. The peasant knows he is exploited because he produces what he produces directly from the land to which he is tied, and then the lord or his factor comes along and takes a portion of his product away from him, through threat of force majeure, with no compensation or pretence of exchange. The exploitation is at once direct and personal. In this relation, there is not even exchange value, never mind the abstract kind.

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 14, 2012

Ocelot identifies the critical elements. The critical element that Noa, and Dave B., can't seem to identify is the transformation of surplus product into surplus value. That is the change that changes everything.

Product is no longer being expropriated from the direct producers, leaving them no way to satisfy their needs; rather the only way for producers to satisfy their needs is by selling their labor-power as a value, at its value [more or less], yielding not product as such, a "simple commodity," but surplus value, value expanded.

The expropriation of product from the direct producers, even for purposes of exchange, does not augment the accumulation of-- get ready-- the means of production, the expansion of value producing activity. Get it?

There is no "law of value" organizing production without that.

andy g

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by andy g on June 14, 2012

sheesh! as if the serf would ever consider his exploitation in those terms - talk about anachronism...

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 14, 2012

With the example of the serf I guess I should've asked the rate of exploitation; but better stick to simple commodity producers and the rate of profit. It's anachronistic to assume knowledge of necessary labour ocelot wrote, but apparently that is what is assumed by Marx when he introduces abstract labour and socially necessary labour time, before moving to the forms of value (or exchange value), right?

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 14, 2012

Noa Rodman

With the example of the serf I guess I should've asked the rate of exploitation; but better stick to simple commodity producers and the rate of profit. It's anachronistic to assume knowledge of necessary labour ocelot wrote, but apparently that is what is assumed by Marx when he introduces abstract labour and socially necessary labour time, before moving to the forms of value (or exchange value), right?

No, that's not correct. He begins Capital with the discussion of the facets of value, deriving from those facets the abstraction, or distillation, of labor as labor-time.

Once he has derived that shared aspect/universal attribute of all commodities, he then shows how that characteristic must be the result of a specific historical relation of labor to the conditions of labor, to the means of production.

He begins with the "logic" of the commodity, and establishes that this logic can only be the result of a socially specific relation of labor.

Does Marx ever argue anywhere that the law of value distributed the total available labor-time of society prior to modern capitalism? On the contrary, he points out that while all societies grapple with this allocation of labor to the needs of reproduction, only with modern capitalism do we encounter value as the means for effecting such allocations.

Dave B

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on June 14, 2012

Well actually the serf does know he is exploited and he can calculate very accurately the ‘labour-time in the products’ necessary to reproduce his labour-power (and his family), and compare it to the surplus labour-time.

In fact it was easier for him to work out what is surplus value, surplus product and surplus labour time than it is for us.

Ignoring the issue of straight-forward Mafia like extortion we need to take Karl’s paradigm of feudalism as ‘labour rent’.

What happens according to this way of thinking about it is that the labourer or peasant works three days a week on ‘their’ land. All the produce or product of that three days labour they keep as their ‘necessary labour’.

It is their necessary labour time,. Not only is that made simple in the 'palpable' formulation that Mondays to Wednesdays, as labour time, is their necessary labour time. But it is rammed home that not only that; it is actually also performed in a particular ‘space’ or place.

Surplus labour time is performed on Thursdays and Fridays in a different place or ‘space’.

And if that wasn’t obvious enough the ‘necessary product’ ie the stuff that the peasant produces to reproduce his labour power and that of his family on his own land can actually be differentiated from the surplus product that is produced by unpaid labour, in the fullest sense of the expression, on Thursdays and Fridays in a different place or space.

In fact it is so bloody obvious there doesn’t even seem much ‘need’ to even ‘analyse’ it.

But this identity of surplus-value with unpaid labour of others need not be analysed here because it still exists in its visible, palpable form, since the labour of the direct producer for himself is still separated in space and time from his labour for the landlord

.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch47.htm

Reading the whole section is probably required.

Theoretically the amount of surplus value that you can extract from a labourer, or possible rate of exploitation, is dependent upon how much more, generally or abstractly, a labourer can actually or possibly produce above what he requires himself to reproduce his own labour power.

And that depends to some extent on the technology and thus the productivity of labour power.

[this is I think one of the wobbly areas of Karls theory, the value of labour power. I am not convinced that people’s labour power would become so substantially impaired and that workers would be crippled and run down if they didn’t have flat screen tv’s and ipods]

But people with a capitalist outlook did, and can, not only take surplus value and the work over and above what a labourer could produce after he had produced ‘enough for himself’ without working himself to death or into a ‘crippled and impaired’ state, but took more.

Then the labour power of the workers, according to Karl, becomes ‘crippled’ and ‘impaired’ and you got less out of them in a law of diminishing returns.

Something that was understood sometimes better as regards horses than workers.

In fact there used to be a saying in the old days about being ‘whipped like a rented horse’.

Khawaga

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Khawaga on June 15, 2012

Dave B

Well actually the serf does know he is exploited and he can calculate very accurately the ‘labour-time in the products’ necessary to reproduce his labour-power (and his family), and compare it to the surplus labour-time.

In fact it was easier for him to work out what is surplus value, surplus product and surplus labour time than it is for us.

Sure the serf could calculate surplus labour time quite well, but all the calculations in the world would not transform his labour into value.

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 15, 2012

Khawaga

Dave B

Well actually the serf does know he is exploited and he can calculate very accurately the ‘labour-time in the products’ necessary to reproduce his labour-power (and his family), and compare it to the surplus labour-time.

In fact it was easier for him to work out what is surplus value, surplus product and surplus labour time than it is for us.

Sure the serf could calculate surplus labour time quite well, but all the calculations in the world would not transform his labour into value.

Exactly. And it shows how useless, nonsensical, the very notion of "simple commodity production" is, because feudalism qualifies as "simple commodity production" and consequently must have been organized under the dictates of the law of value, no?

andy g

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by andy g on June 15, 2012

Noa:

With the example of the serf I guess I should've asked the rate of exploitation; but better stick to simple commodity producers and the rate of profit. It's anachronistic to assume knowledge of necessary labour ocelot wrote, but apparently that is what is assumed by Marx when he introduces abstract labour and socially necessary labour time, before moving to the forms of value (or exchange value), right?

this is so far off the mark I don't even know where to begin.... luckily the others have done the business. the introduction of the seigneur-serf relationship into this relationship is deeply revealing of the underlying implications of your position. if we take Marx's statement in Capital v 3 seriously

The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers — a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity — which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state.

what is actually at stake here is retaining a meaningful concept of capitalism as a distinct mode of production. if you can even consider equating serf and wage labourer and their respective modes of exploitation you are on the slippery slope to effacing class analysis entirely...

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 15, 2012

Artesian

Does Marx ever argue anywhere that the law of value distributed the total available labor-time of society prior to modern capitalism? On the contrary, he points out that while all societies grapple with this allocation of labor to the needs of reproduction, only with modern capitalism do we encounter value as the means for effecting such allocations.

Could you please give some textual proof that the meaning you give the law of value as a distribution mechanism of labour is employed by Engels in the fateful supplement here:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/supp.htm#law

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 15, 2012

I don't think I claimed any such thing about Engels Noa. It is Dave B [and perhaps you] who claim that the law of value governed "simple commodity production," and pre-capitalist societies.

Now Marx explicitly points out that all societies face, confront, actually exist around the distribution of social labor time. And it is Marx's contention that value is the way capitalism organizes and distributes that.

If the law of value is "transhistorical" as Dave B [and perhaps you claim] pre-dates the organization of labor as value producing, then clearly the law of value should be governing the distribution of social labor time in these "simple commodity producing" societies, to which, according to you feudalism apparently belongs.

Just to be clear Part A of my claim is that Marx argues that the law of value is capitalism's specific expression of the problem and necessities of social reproduction, an expression based on a social relation which has a certain development of the production forces, of the society itself, as its basis.

If you disagree with that, then we can argue that.

Part B of my claim is if Dave B or Engels or Kautsky or you argue that the law of value is transhistorical, is an eternal [but mutable] principle of social reproduction, applying to pre-capitalist "commodity producers," inherent in your claim is the argument that the law of value governs distribution and allocation of the total socially available labor time to the different sectors of production.

And that's what we have been, and still are, arguing.

And we are also still arguing this, which you have not answered from that same post of mine:

No, that's not correct. He begins Capital with the discussion of the facets of value, deriving from those facets the abstraction, or distillation, of labor as labor-time.

Once he has derived that shared aspect/universal attribute of all commodities, he then shows how that characteristic must be the result of a specific historical relation of labor to the conditions of labor, to the means of production.

He begins with the "logic" of the commodity, and establishes that this logic can only be the result of a socially specific relation of labor.

Khawaga

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Khawaga on June 15, 2012

Marx

Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish. Every child knows, too, that the masses of products corresponding to the different needs required different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labor of society. That this necessity of the distribution of social labor in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance , is self-evident. No natural laws can be done away with. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws assert themselves. And the form in which this proportional distribution of labor asserts itself, in the state of society where the interconnection of social labor is manifested in the private exchange of the individual products of labor, is precisely the exchange value of these products.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68_07_11-abs.htm

Dave B

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on June 15, 2012

First of all a serf isn’t a wage labourer but it goes to show that ‘surplus value’ can be produced outside the capitalist mode of production.

We have had a problem with value before in an earlier debate.

Value is the amount of labour time it takes to make something, that is it; nothing more or nothing less.

It is something as a concept and reality that is deduced or manifests itself as a cause of the 'phenomena' of exchange relations.

It is so bloody obvious once you notice it; that Karl shouted it out to himself in Grundrisse ‘ PRODUCTS ARE LABOUR’.

Or as Gabriel Deville put it;

Chapter one section III

If value manifests itself in the exchange relation, it is not because exchange begets value; it is on the contrary, the value of the commodity which controls its exchange relations, which determines its relations with other commodities. A comparison will make this clear.

Then he does plain English paraphrase of Karl’s sugar loaf thing.

Which is basically that a balance or scale or weighing machine enables you to realise the existence of and think about weight or heaviness.

But existence weight and mass etc isn’t begotten by the existence of our weighing machines.

It is a great book by the way as Lenin said;

On Marx's economic doctrine, the outstanding books are the following: Karl Kautsky, The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx (many Russian editions)…………..; Gabriel Deville, Capital (an exposition of the first volume of Capital in Russian translation, 1907).

http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/KM14.html

In free access communism without exchange etc products will still contain labour, or be work, the amount of which will still be their value.

Which was why both Karl with his book-keeping in Volume III (and Fred in anti Durhing) said value would still exist as a concept in communism as long as it still meant something. Ie being concerned in one way or another about how long it takes to make something.

When it comes to the surplus product of the peasant; with an amount of surplus labour embodied in it and thus it’s surplus value.

Lets say timber, which was a common cash crop of Feudal Lords, and thus a major (as a type) economic ‘origin’ of commodities

The Feudal Lord was probably not necessarily driven as much by personal economic imperatives to exchange it at its value.

Or in other words a lot of commodities had been produced and were sold etc from peasant surplus labour or corvee labour.

And that is one of the reasons why I think Fred went overboard with in his supplement.

But then exchange value does not 'beget' value.

The peasants on the other hand who might in fact spent Wednesdays weaving or tayloring to produce commodities to sell for cash in order to buy other commodities from other peasants as use values to consume.

Or in other words C-M-C; and were therefore not capitalists.

Just as workers in capitalism sell their commodity labour power for money in order to buy commodities to consume them.

A capitalist by definition does M-C-M or more accurately M-C-M`

And also the weaving peasant will want to get the same amount of exchange value for his Wednesday work as the talyloring peasant gets for his Wednesday labour eg Rubin chapter 11.

That ‘truth’, scientific theory or explanation of albiet Proudhonist ‘bourgeois’, ‘social relations’ in simple commodity production carries over into capitalism as far as the workers are concerned with their own ‘bourgeois limitations’.

Where the lorry driver as a non capitalistic C-M-C-er wants to obtain the same buying power for his Mondays to Fridays commodity labour power as the computer programmer does for hers.

In fact I think the Deleonists had it as part of their practical theory.

Where they would regulate the division of labour in Socialist Industrial Unionism by allocating more or less labour vouchers for work done.

Thus if there were too many professors of philosophy and too much philosophy, and not enough coal being produced; labour vouchers would allocated accordingly.

To discourage one and encourage the other.

Khawaga

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Khawaga on June 15, 2012

Value is the amount of labour time it takes to make something, that is it; nothing more or nothing less

The substance of value is labour that is correct; so is that labour-time is the measure of value. But this holds only in the capitalist mode of production. The key point is that value is the form labour assumes in capitalism, which can only occur by labour becoming abstract when the commodity form is generalized.

LBird

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by LBird on June 16, 2012

Dave B

Value is the amount of labour time it takes to make something, that is it; nothing more or nothing less.

Surely 'value' only exists within an exploitative socio-economic relationship?

To talk of 'labour time' without mentioning 'class' is ahistoric.

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 16, 2012

Artesian

He begins Capital with the discussion of the facets of value, deriving from those facets the abstraction, or distillation, of labor as labor-time.

Once he has derived that shared aspect/universal attribute of all commodities, he then shows how that characteristic must be the result of a specific historical relation of labor to the conditions of labor, to the means of production.

He begins with the "logic" of the commodity, and establishes that this logic can only be the result of a socially specific relation of labor.

So it is correct to say that he introduces the value aspect of the commodity, before its exchange-value. Exchange value is a definite social manner of expressing the amount of labour bestowed upon an object.

Felix Frost

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Felix Frost on June 16, 2012

Well, actually, Marx starts Capital with the opposition between use-value and exchange-value, and then proceeds to discover 'value' hidden behind exchange value. Not that I think that is particularly significant.

Also, to just focus on the quantitative aspect of value ('the amount of labour bestowed upon an object') is exactly what Marx criticised the classical bourgeois economists for.

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 16, 2012

Noa Rodman

So it is correct to say that he introduces the value aspect of the commodity, before its exchange-value. Exchange value is a definite social manner of expressing the amount of labour bestowed upon an object.

Facets of value. Felix has it right-- use value and exchange value; use value vs. exchange value.

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 16, 2012

In the notes on Wagner he says though: When, at the beginning of this chapter, we said, in common parlance, that a commodity is both a use value and an exchange value, we were, accurately speaking, wrong. A commodity is a use value or object of utility, and a value. It manifests itself as this twofold thing, that it is, as soon as its value assumes an independent form – viz., the form of exchange value.

Thus I do not divide value into use-value and exchange-value as opposites into which the abstraction “value” splits up, but the concrete social form of the product of labour, the “commodity,” is on the one hand, use-value and on the other, “value,” not exchange value, since the mere form of appearance is not its own content.

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 16, 2012

But he only corrects himself after going through the various iterations-- that the expression-- exchange value-- is in fact a moment of the identity of the commodity as value.

Either way, since Marx continues to utilize exchange value in his analysis of capital, in his critique of its reproduction, it really doesn't change anything about our disagreement.

We can say, yes commodities exist prior to capitalism; no, there is no such thing as simple commodity production; no, there is no such thing as the law of value organizing social production prior to the organization of labor itself as a commodity, as possessing both a use-value and expressingan exchange value; there is no law of value organizing social production prior to the organization of labor itself as a value.

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 16, 2012

ocelot, when you wrote some days ago that "the fact that there was money and exchange before capitalism does not imply the existence of the general form of value" - how does that square with your disagreement with the Parecon folks? ;)

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 18, 2012

They say that despite there being exchange, money (they're not Proudhonists in that sense) and commodities, the "law of value" will not dominate in a parecon as it did in capitalism. You disagree with them, but for non-wage commodity production you claim the same thing as they do for their market-socialist system; there is no domination by the "law of value". So the pareconists can respond to your objection/fear (about the law of value nevertheless reasserting itself if money is retained in their system); so you think that capitalism was an inevitable result/logical outcome of history from the moment the first commodity appeared.

I think Engels uses the law of value in the sense of economy of time, which people in every mode of production were interested in. In that sense also this "law" will remain in communism (it's first phase at least).

[quote=Engels to Kautsky]Means of production as such, extraneous to society and without influence over it, exist no more than does capital as such.
But how the means of production, which, at earlier periods, including that of simple commodity production, exercised only a very mild domination compared with now, came to exercise their present despotic domination, is something that calls for proof and yours strikes me as inadequate, since it fails to mention one pole, namely the creation of a class which no longer had any means of production of its own, or, therefore, any means of subsistence, and hence was compelled to sell itself piecemeal.[/quote]

LBird

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by LBird on June 18, 2012

Noa Rodman

They say that despite there being exchange, money (they're not Proudhonists in that sense) and commodities, the "law of value" will not dominate in a parecon as it did in capitalism.

But if there are 'exchange, money and commodities', which are related to individual production, then it is not Communism, which is social production. Under Communism, free access obviates the need for those things.

NR

I think Engels uses the law of value in the sense of economy of time...

Surely, if this is true, then Engels used the notion of 'value' incorrectly, because it is related to 'exploitation' in a class society, and is nothing to do with 'economy of time'. Your quote doesn't prove your claim about Engels.

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 18, 2012

free access obviates the need for those things.

It might not be communism, but from the little I've read on them, I understand that the pareconists claim the "law of value" wouldn't dominate in this system (free access to labor-power would be abolished), using your same anti-Engels argument; the mere existence of things like commodity and money doesn't prove the domination of the "law of value".

Surely, if this is true, then Engels used the notion of 'value' incorrectly, because it is related to 'exploitation' in a class society, and is nothing to do with 'economy of time'. Your quote doesn't prove your claim about Engels.

The quote was meant to show that Engels was aware of the historicity of the domination of the means of production over the producers ("law of value" in your sense). Artesian also refrained from trying to prove that Engels uses the term "law of value" in the supplement in a sense other than "economy of time". I don't know where Dave B claims that Engels uses "law of value" in a sense other than an economy of time.

ocelot

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ocelot on June 18, 2012

Noa Rodman

ocelot, when you wrote some days ago that "the fact that there was money and exchange before capitalism does not imply the existence of the general form of value" - how does that square with your disagreement with the Parecon folks?
[...]
They say that despite there being exchange, money (they're not Proudhonists in that sense) and commodities, the "law of value" will not dominate in a parecon as it did in capitalism. You disagree with them, but for non-wage commodity production you claim the same thing as they do for their market-socialist system; there is no domination by the "law of value".

I disagree with the notion that commodity production in pre-capitalist societies - i.e. ones where the bulk of the direct producers are mainly in subsistence mode - indicates the rule of the law of value.

Once the agricultural revolution has created a social economy where the large majority are dependent on the labour of others for their continued existence, then the distribution of the elements of social production via exchange, do indeed drive towards the (re)production of the law of value. My position is both historical AND materialist. To identify the relations of production with the mere presence or absence of particular formal elements like money, the commodity, credit, etc, is to miss the materialist and historical content of the level of development of the forces of production.

Having got to the condition of social production contradicted by private distribution, it seems to me that we only have two options (other than reproduction of the status quo - which will eventually become impossible) - either we go forward to a condition of social production with a social distribution of the product, or through a process of civilisational, environmental and social collapse, we regress to a post-apocalyptic stage of a renewed subsistence economy.

Noa Rodman

[...]; so you think that capitalism was an inevitable result/logical outcome of history from the moment the first commodity appeared.

No I don't. In fact a cursory examination of history (for example China) shows civilisations that have had minoritarian elements of commodity production and exchange for not just centuries, but millenia, without ever automatically developing into capitalism. I share PM's rejection of the "commercialisation model" as brain-dead and a-historical nonsense.

Noa Rodman

I think Engels uses the law of value in the sense of economy of time, which people in every mode of production were interested in. In that sense also this "law" will remain in communism (it's first phase at least).

But, as already discussed ad nauseam, the notion that pre-capitalist commodities exchanged at ratios determined by the labour time required for their production, is completely a-historical as well.

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 18, 2012

Artesian also refrained from trying to prove that Engels uses the term "law of value" in the supplement in a sense other than "economy of time". I don't know where Dave B claims that Engels uses "law of value" in a sense other than an economy of time.

I didn't refrain from anything, since I made no claims about what Engels said or intended, or how he intended to say something to use in a fashion other than what he intended. You and Dave B. make claims, interpolate, speculate about hemorrhoids, thresholds of pain, etc. and what Engels meant. I don't.

Let's try to stay on point, here, okay? The claim was made that there have existed societies based on "simple commodity production" pre-existing to capitalism, in which the law of valuewas the organizing principle.

Dave B. cites a whole bunch of people claiming such, but provides no evidence of any such society ever having existed. In fact the hypothetical society which he takes from Kautsky never did exist, and in fact, could not exist under conditions where the law of value governed production.

Marx did NOT mean, intend, say, or use "law of value" to mean "economy of time." He used "economy of time" to mean economy of time, to wit in his statement that "All economy is the economy of time." He exposes, and apprehends value as a specific historical and social expression of that general historical truism.

For the law of value to exist as the organizing principle of the labor process, Marx shows that labor itself has to be organized as a value, as a commodity, existing as both a use-value, and possessing an exchange value-- or more correctly, as a useful article and a value-- or even more correctly as a useful article and value-producing.

Such a transformation means that labor must be stripped of its peculiarities, its idiosyncrasies, and exist as time-- embodying a time of reproduction, necessary time, and a "free" time, surplus time.

Yes all economies are the economies of time, not all economies of time are economies of value.

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 18, 2012

carpenters in Roman Palestine: didn't exist

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 18, 2012

The law of value in Palestine didn't exist. Or maybe it did, and that whole thing about slavery in the Roman Empire?-- well hell the slaves were producing simple commodities, so they must have been laboring in accordance with the law of value.

But why pay attention to history, or even what people do say, when you can have so much more fun just making it up as you go along?

Which is what you should do, Noa. Run along.

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 18, 2012

(from the The Agrarian Question)
Kautsky

As with all the other major epochs of economic development, simple commodity-production has never prevailed in its pure form, but always mixed with other forms, such as natural economy, feudalism and guild-based monopoly. Likewise, under simple commodity-production, the law of value was only able to operate effectively where regular production by free and mutually competing producers for the market
managed to develop within the prevailing limitations.
Capitalist commodity-production superseded simple commodity­ production at a particular culminating point in development. Workers
ceased to own their means of production, became propertyless, and found
themselves confronted by capitalists, the owners of the means of
production. Unable to work directly for the consumer, the workers are
now compelled to work for the capitalist entrepreneur; by selling their
labour-power.to the capitalist,
the workers become wage-labourers.
Commodity-production has to await the arrival of this mode of
production before it can become the universal, or at least the dominant,
form of production. The natural economy then rapidly fades away,
feudal exploitation and the guild monopolies cease to be viable, to be
replaced by, in general, free and equal producers. However, in creating
the conditions under which the law of value can become universally
operative, this mode of production also allows an intermediary link to
emerge between value and market price which both obscures the law of
value and modifies its operation.

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 18, 2012

Is there any indication that Engels in the supplement meant to make a stronger claim than Kautsky does in the above passage?

andy g

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by andy g on June 18, 2012

oh sweet holy fuck, will this never end........ am off to lay my weary head on the collected works of kautsky....

ocelot

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ocelot on June 18, 2012

That Kautsky quote is typical Smithian Marxist denial. They feel that the law is just too perfect to have been born deformed, it must once have operated in it's pure, natural form, the way "it should be". Yet, if it is so bleeding obvious, how come no one notices it until the very stage of history where it only exists in its "deformed" condition? (to Dave B this is apparently an "irony")

Kautsky even obliquely admits it with "As with all the other major epochs of economic development [like capitalism and feudalism?], simple commodity-production has never prevailed in its pure form [admitted so as to be denied!], but always mixed with other forms, such as natural economy, feudalism and guild-based monopoly.".

Serriously, this is utter, utter horseshit. Replace SCP with another "major epoch of economic development" like feudalism - "[feudalism] has never prevailed in its pure form, but always mixed with other forms, such as [...] feudalism". It's almost postmodern in its contortion, the assertion of Second Internationalist orthodox Marxist uniliniear stageist theory of history, is dialectically transformed into its opposite, the utter contingency of stages that are diffuse, virtual stages or co-exist in precocious states of quantum superposition with the orthodox periodisations. Real reductio ad absurdam...

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 18, 2012

The fragment of an Engels letter to Kautsky I quoted is about a critique of Rodbertus (the German popular advocate of Ricardian socialism). Kautsky's article (1884) goes on about Rodbertus' illusion of the existence of small commodity society (abstracting from all historical 'contingencies'), Robinsonades, etc. so either he forgot that later on, or it's not mutually exclusive to his claim that while simple commodity production was not the natural state of things or a predominant mode, it did exist before capitalism and to the limited existent that it did, the law of value held. Engels seems to have left out these qualifications to his claim, perhaps because he expected his readers would be already familiar enough with his views and give it a charitable reading; a mistaken expectation evidently.

Dave B brought it up already a year ago, but I keep repeating it; Parvus critiqued Engels for his formulations in the supplement in the same year of its publication; Bernstein in his most famous book agreed with this critique of Engels; Conrad Schmidt and Werner Sombart held to the modern 'anti-Engels' theory of value: in other words there is no reason to pretend that we have discovered a new reading of Marx or one that adds any knowledge. Dave B further showed that Stalin denied that the law of value operates in small peasants economy (while Bordiga argued for the existence of the law of value in the USSR because agriculture wasn't nationalized). So there is no political significance either to this question.

Dave B

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on June 18, 2012

Justin Martyr (110-165) Dialogue with Trypho

Translated by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson.

Chapter 88 (dated around 135 AD)

He was considered to be the son of Joseph the carpenter…………and he was deemed a carpenter (for He was in the habit of working as a carpenter when among men, making ploughs and yokes;

Although there is no suggestion that JC, his dad or the fisherman Peter etc were wage labourers working with the fixed capital and constant capital of capitalists and producing surplus value.

They would appear to have been selling their commodities for money to buy commodities for consumption or C-M-C as in a closed circuit rather than the self expanding or ‘augmental’ and capitalistic

M-C-M`

Or buying in order sell.

Although apparently there was quite extensive and novel agricultural wage labour in Palestine at the time following economic and legalistic changes after the full incorporation of the region into Roman empire circa 6Ad after the Census of Quirinius; according to fairly recent academic research.

The repeated mentioning of ‘wages’ in the gospel documents may be one of the first historical records of this new system.

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 19, 2012

So answer the question Noa and Dave B., did the law of value govern feudal production?

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 19, 2012

Although, I must admire the audacity of those who would offer the Roman Empire as an example of the simple commodity economy.

Breathtaking in its ignorance.

ocelot

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ocelot on June 19, 2012

Dave B

Value is the amount of labour time it takes to make something, that is it; nothing more or nothing less.

Wrong.

But mainly I wanted to come back to this:

Dave B

Or as Gabriel Deville put it;

Chapter one section III

If value manifests itself in the exchange relation, it is not because exchange begets value; it is on the contrary, the value of the commodity which controls its exchange relations, which determines its relations with other commodities. A comparison will make this clear.

[...]
But then exchange value does not 'beget' value.

Ah yes, the begetting.

Matthew 1:

1:2 Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas and his brethren;

1:3 And Judas begat Phares and Zara of Thamar; and Phares begat Esrom; and Esrom begat Aram;

1:4 And Aram begat Aminadab; and Aminadab begat Naasson; and Naasson begat Salmon;

Notice something? Exactly. In the begetting men father sons without the intervention of females at all. Yin produces yin without yang, the active, virile principle reproduces itself without being sullied by the impurity
of the "other", the weak, passive principle. This phallocratic fallacy, is metaphorically linked to the obtusity behind Deville's conception as value as directly embodied in the objects of production by the active, virile agency of the producer himself, free from any non-positivist social determinations. Like a child being born directly from its father's seed, without pregnancy in the womb, or the labour of birth, value merely "manifests" its objective pre-existence in the moment of exchange, reduced to the commodity equivalent of the "coming out party" or debs ball.

This phallocratic fallacy of value fails to see the fundamental contradiction between use value and exchange value in a system of social production by private labour under private property. Private labour can fashion the objects of labour into a material use-shape (Grebrauchsgewert) on the one hand. But private labour is powerless, on the other hand, to impart to the commodity it's social aspect - its value.
This can only be imparted by a social process that transcends the private nature of its production, the process of exchange, wherein the exchange value of the commodity is actualised, made real - the private concrete labour is transformed into socialised, abstract labour. If production is the father that plants the seed of value in the commodity, exchange is the mother that must bring it to term and give birth to it as really-existing value.

Dave B

In free access communism without exchange etc products will still contain labour, or be work, the amount of which will still be their value.

@Noa - this gives the lie to your assertion that "there is no political significance either to this question.".

The political significance of this question is the struggle by communists against the partisans of "the law of value under socialism", that has been going on since the birth of the socialist movement in the 1820s.

jura

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by jura on June 19, 2012

ocelot

Grebrauchsgewert

Is this from Das Capital? :)

ocelot

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ocelot on June 19, 2012

Sorry, should have been Gebrachsgestalt. My bad. :oops:

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 19, 2012

Artesian

Although, I must admire the audacity of those who would offer the Roman Empire as an example of the simple commodity economy.

Breathtaking in its ignorance.

Often for temporary work slaves were rented (a similar arrangement existed in the US, as Dave B mentioned). The claim which Kautsky makes though is that simple commodity production always existed in combination with(in) other modes of production. As you don't deny this (the existence of artisans in the ancient world), the disagreement comes to turn on the point that the Engels-position 'inherently' (you are thus the one speculating here) holds that the law of value entirely dominated all previous modes of production (I know that bringing up Engels' physical health was besides the point; it was just FYI).

Engels in fact made several caveats:

From the moment money penetrates into this mode of economy, the tendency towards adaptation to the law of value (in the Marxian formulation, nota bene!) grows more pronounced on the one hand, while on the other it is already interrupted by the interference of usurers' capital and fleecing by taxation; the periods for which prices, on average, approach to within a negligible margin of values, begin to grow longer.

People in the Middle Ages were thus able to check up with considerable accuracy on each other's production costs for raw material, auxiliary material, and labor-time — at least in respect of articles of daily general use.

prices gravitate towards the values fixed according to the Marxian law and oscillate around those values, so that the more fully simple commodity production develops, the more the average prices over long periods uninterrupted by external violent disturbances coincide with values within a negligible margin.

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 19, 2012

I'm not speculating about shit, Dave B is, get it? Do you even read what has been argued-- that the law of value "dominated simple commodity production" despite the absence of "abstract labor"?

So once again, you have refrained from answering the questions: did the law of value govern production in the Roman Empire?

Was feudalism an example of simple commodity production?

Did the law of value govern feudal production.

Is it possible for a law of value to organize production when labor itself is not organized as value producing, instead of product producing.

Is there a difference between expropriation of product, and expropriation of values? If so, what is that difference?

As for this:

prices gravitate towards the values fixed according to the Marxian law and oscillate around those values, so that the more fully simple commodity production develops, the more the average prices over long periods uninterrupted by external violent disturbances coincide with values within a negligible margin.

Care to provide the evidence; provide the evidence of an expansion of "simple commodity production" that does not become capitalist commodity production? that the more the average prices over long periods were uninterrupted by external violet disturbances, and if so undisturbed, the prices coincide with values, and that coincidence in fact governs the organization of production, the distribution of labor time????

Dave B

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on June 19, 2012

Well on value in free access ‘utopian’ communism; as people confound exchange value with value.

The better question would be; would the amount of labour time required to make something matter in free access ‘utopian’ communism?

I agree with Fred in anti-durhing that it would as regards each individual, and society as a whole, in balancing the use value of something with the amount of labour time required to make it; particularly at the point of consumption.

I would want to know in free access ‘utopian’ communism how much work had gone into something before I decided to ‘consume’ it. And would advocate putting that kind of information on the product label, like nutritional information.

To use a trivial example, I would not decide to consume a diamond or decide to get pissed up on Canadian ice wine when ‘cheap’ mass produced Spanish plonk would do the job just as well.

It would also affect how we should treat products, and just to start to off with, as a productive worker, I don’t advocate treating other peoples labour recklessly.

And I have as yet not managed to trash a keyboard.

But, for instance, when I first went on line I spilt a little bit of wine over someone else’s keyboard and went into a total flap over it imagining the thing was really ‘expensive’ or something.

I think when using things you need to have some context on just how carefully you need to treat it.

When I grew up it was constantly ‘beaten’ into my head that things that we consumed had been made by other people and it was other peoples hard work etc.

There was probably an element of encouraging us as reckless children not to ‘waste’ money and using it as a guilt trip argument to achieve the same effect, but it worked as a method.

I still think there is a culture of it within the productive working class. Workers in our place who are generally not concerned with the corporate profits are still ‘innately’ concerned with waste and accidentally trashing raw material, as somebody else’s work.

There is also a secondary argument on the reduction of Socially necessary labour time and value.

Thus you might want to consider what kind of raw material or method you would want to use to produce a product.

Selecting one kind or another according to the amount of labour time required to make it would be integral to reducing the Socially necessary labour time of the end product and thus the two things ie value and Socially necessary labour time are interrelated.

In fact that was I think the whole point of the Robinson Crusoe example in volume one, the meaning of value, when there is no exchange.

Robinson was balancing use value versus labour time required to make it and to some extent minimising his necessary labour time.

The begetting thing is more interesting.

So to follow on from Karl’s slightly flawed example on the iron and sugar loaf in the balance/scale .

What begets the relationship of the balance/scale?

Karl says weight, but he is wrong.

The sugar loaf and the iron have immanent mass they do not have immanent weight.

Gravity as a force acts equally on both the identical masses of the sugar loaf and the iron and that causes the relationship on the balance.

Try it out in outer weightless space and that particular relationship no longer works.

That doesn’t mean that things in outer space don’t have immanent mass.

Anymore than products outside the gravitational force of bourgeois, simple commodity or Proudhonist economics or in other words in free access communism don’t have value or a reality dependent upon it.

Immanent mass outside gravity still retains meaning as regards momentum and kinetic energy etc, ie if it is moving fast and hits you on the head, in space.

Weight as a phenomena or effect is a product of immanent mass and gravity; as exchange value is a phenomena or effect of a product of immanent ‘value’ in a particular kind of social relationship.

(It is just an analogy, and actually breaks down in detail; as there is a connection between mass and gravity and the gravitational force is a property of mass etc )

But in generally scientists didn’t say that weight relationships and balances/scales causes or begets mass.

They did say, as a working pragmatic model, that mass as an immanent irreducible (at the moment) property begets or causes weight and that weight relationships are manifested in balances and scales.

Gravity acts on mass to produce weight as social relationships act on value to produce exchange value.

Gravity and mass are real enough just as social relationships and value are; but weight and exchange value are phenomena or effects.

did the law of value govern feudal production?

The law of value formally only governs commodity production.

The mass of agricultural labourers in feudalism were probably spending a lot of their time producing things for there own consumption ie on Mondays to Tuesdays working on their own land as in Karl’s labour rent example.

On Wednesdays they would specialise a bit and one might do tayloring and another linen weaving.

They would take those products to Stourbridge market and exchange them at their value according to the economic paradigm of Rubin in chapter 11.

Thursdays and Fridays were Mafia protection racket days; but nevertheless produced a product as surplus value.

As the agricultural labourers could have managed quite well just working Mondays to Tuesdays for themselves and swapping there Wednesday work ‘socially’ between themselves.

The product of Thursday work may have been consumed directly by the Lord of the Manor.

The Friday work or product may have been sold or exchanged by the Lord of the Manor as a ‘commodity’ for other products produced outside the ‘village’ ie for Spanish armour and silks.

These products would be produced in the towns and under the monopoly guild system.

The products of this peasant Friday work would not have intrinsically exchanged at their value with the products of the monopoly guild system

The agricultural peasants probably and in fact did exchange some of their Wednesday work for the products of the cartel like monopoly guild system products; and were ripped off in the process.

Monopoly and cartel prices are not unique to the guild system so we have OPEC etc and even Karl and Fred talked about industrial cartels and monopolies in their time.

So in answer to the question, positing the arbitrary model; the law of value would have only affected or strictly governed say one day a week overall labouring power.

On the Roman thing I was quite interested in Christianity to start off with and later became even more interested in it when I started to read Marxist crap on it being a proto type workers communist movement ie Kautsky.

I have loads of stuff on this kind of thing and the following as not the best example was the just the first thing from my filing system under that topic.

Divided We Fall: The Roots of the Great Jewish Revolt against Rome
Robert Eisenberg

In the early first century CE, Judea was an economic backwater of the Roman Empire, and the Judeans relied heavily on small scale subsistence agriculture.

However, with the coming of direct Roman rule, the
Judean economy became integrated into the wider Mediterranean market system. This new system helped to bring about the decline of the small landowner class, resulting in a small number of wealthy Jewish landowners.

Many of these ex-farmers were forced into wage labour due to the loss of their land and the fnancial obligations imposed by both the Roman Imperial
taxes and the Temple tithes.

The onerous tax burden compelled the individual
farmer to borrow money from the wealthy in order to work his own land.

The failure to repay a loan resulted in the confiscation of land by the landowner and the creation of a “landless proletarian ripe for revolution”.

The loss of private land and the ensuing economic dependency was a direct result of the taxes imposed on the peasantry by the Judean upper class and by the Romans

This kind of thing is covered in basically the same way by Karl in volume III in passing, re Roman empire closer to home ie in Italy. With his small roman peasants, and something similar was going on in Russia post 1861.

In more detailed analysis of Roman Judea elsewhere they apparently had had quite strict Judaic disallowed laws or practices re the foreclosure of landed property on non payment of debt and a kind of entailment system.

It was the breakdown of that, as with the Mir system in Russia, that led to a dispossessed and land-less agricultural wage workers and the bloodsucking Kulaks etc

Note the attempt to avoid mumbo jumbo and self valorisation of abstract labour time

Khawaga

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Khawaga on June 19, 2012

Downvote x 10.

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 19, 2012

Re the above by Dave B: meaningless, nonsensical, speculative bullshit.

Was the Roman empire an example of simple commodity production? And if so, did the law of value govern the distribution of labor-time?

Same question for feudalism.

One Christ on a cross may be enough to characteize a religion. One Christ as a carpenter does not make a simple commodity economy.

LBird

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by LBird on June 20, 2012

Dave B

I would want to know in free access ‘utopian’ communism how much work had gone into something before I decided to ‘consume’ it.

Surely that should read 'before we decided to consume'. Y'know, Dave, Communism.

'Value' is a product of an individualised/splintered production process, but we will have no need of it under Communism because we will democratically organise production and consumption.

Or do you see Communism as the realisation of the ideal of 'Individual Consumption', a bourgeois aspiration made a reality for all?

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 20, 2012

I think it's clear that the claim is that simple-commodity production doesn't exist in pure form. It probably was most wide-spread between the decay of feudalism and the beginning of capitalist industrial development, i.e. the time when Daniel Dafoe wrote his marvelous book.

I doubt the demand for proof of the law of value in SCP is sincere if from the onset by definition it's declared that abstract labour cannot exist in SCP, but anyway this article might be interesting: Value, price, and simple commodity production: The case of the Zapotec stoneworkers

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 20, 2012

doubt the demand for proof of the law of value in SCP is sincere if from the onset by definition it's declared that abstract labour cannot exist in SCP, but anyway this article might be interesting: Value, price, and simple commodity production: The case of the Zapotec stoneworkers

Love it. Can't be sincere since we are disagreeing with Dave B. contention that the law of value governs simple commodity production if we point out that we disagree with the contention based on the fact that Marx develops his explication value from capitalist commodity production and identifies the distinction between capitalist commodity production and pre-existing modes in the specific organization of labor. Got it.

The sincerity of the "demand" of course has nothing to do with Dave B's claim that law of value does govern such modes of production since (1) his argument is that the law of value applies without that specific organization of labor (2) we do not declare that it is a matter of definition that determines the "law" function of the "law of value" but rather one of actual historical circumstance, that is to say, the relations of classes.

Yet another example of Noa's attempts at evasion, deflection, and misdirection.

Well as one insincere person to another, let me just state that I'd love to read the reference article but I can't come up with the $36 required to read that simple commodity.

Khawaga

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Khawaga on June 20, 2012

I think it's clear that the claim is that simple-commodity production doesn't exist in pure form. It probably was most wide-spread between the decay of feudalism and the beginning of capitalist industrial development, i.e. the time when Daniel Dafoe wrote his marvelous book.

Well, "simple commodity production" is an abstract category. Per definition it cannot exist in a "pure form".

ocelot

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ocelot on June 20, 2012

Gravity acts on mass to produce weight as social relationships act on value to produce exchange value.

No. Major category error.

Gravity acts between even isolated objects at pretty much a scale-free level (with the exception of what goes on at sub-atomic level, where we are currently still in the dark), based on material properties that are innate to those objects - and were so before the emergence of life in the universe.

Social relations are entirely different from either gravitational attraction or inter-personal relations. Social relations are emergent at the level of societies - that is large, interacting assemblages of people and objects (and intangibles such as science, culture and other knowledge, networks of communication, etc).

Social relationships do not act on value. Value is a social relationship. That is why commodities, as products of private labour, have to enter into a social relationship by being exchanged, in order to actualise value, via exchange value. Exchange commensurates commodities to give them exchange value which makes value - a socio-economic category with no material extension - real. Value is at one and the same time, through the same process, both a sign, a scalar metric, and an organising principle whose social function is the allocation of labour from one branch of production to another - not in the service of maximising human utility, but maximising the expansion of non-human abstract value. The law of value is not a law of physics, but a law of rule. Abstract labour is not a thing, it is a system.

ocelot

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ocelot on June 20, 2012

I would want to know in free access ‘utopian’ communism how much work had gone into something before I decided to ‘consume’ it. And would advocate putting that kind of information on the product label, like nutritional information.
[...]
That doesn’t mean that things in outer space don’t have immanent mass.

Anymore than products outside the gravitational force of bourgeois, simple commodity or Proudhonist economics or in other words in free access communism don’t have value or a reality dependent upon it

You put the law of value on a pedestal and call it communism.

Communism is the abolition of the law of value. The enemies of communism are two-fold. Those who openly declare their allegiance to capitalism and their hostility to communism. And those who proclaim their opposition to capitalism whilst promoting the very principle of capitalism - the law of value - to be the essence of communism.

In a communist society I will want to know how much a particular good cost in terms of rationed, non-renewable resources such as carbon release, freshwater consumption, arable land use, kW, etc. However much unremunerated time the people making it chose to invest in making it, is a matter for them. Labour we now have in abundance relative to non-renewable resources. It's blindingly clear which side of the labour/resources relation we need to economise on for the future - in order to even have a future.

There is also a secondary argument on the reduction of Socially necessary labour time and value.

Thus you might want to consider what kind of raw material or method you would want to use to produce a product.

Selecting one kind or another according to the amount of labour time required to make it would be integral to reducing the Socially necessary labour time of the end product and thus the two things ie value and Socially necessary labour time are interrelated.

Socially necessary labour time is not "interrelated" to value, it is value, at least its substance. In a communist society, the most effective incentive driving efficiency in labour time taken in the production of a particular output, will be the lack of any remuneration in proportion to the time taken to produce it.

If the longer you take to do something, the more you get paid, then the longer you will take to do it - in the absence of any antagonistic force of domination trying to reduce your labour time to "socially necessary" levels, through threat of violence (whether directly physical, or indirectly through poverty and starvation). "Socially necessary labour time" is established through violence and domination, necessarily in wage labour. Abstract labour is slave labour.

Khawaga

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Khawaga on June 20, 2012

ocelot

Socially necessary labour time is not "interrelated" to value, it is value, at least its substance.

Technically labour (as an activity) is the substance of value. SNLT is not the substance of value, but its measure. Marx was an Aristotelean (esp. in Grundrisse), so when he uses "substance" this should be understood in the Aristotelean way. Time is an "accident" of the substance.

ocelot

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ocelot on June 20, 2012

a real car crash ;)

jura

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by jura on June 20, 2012

I'm pretty sure there's a paper somewhere explaining how that account of SNLT leads directly to Stalinism, ocelot :).

Dave B

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on June 20, 2012

[quote=LBirdSurely that should read 'before we decided to consume'. Y'know, Dave, Communism.

'Value' is a product of an individualised/splintered production process, but we will have no need of it under Communism because we will democratically organise production and consumption.

Or do you see Communism as the realisation of the ideal of 'Individual Consumption', a bourgeois aspiration made a reality for all?[/quote]

Well there are two proposals for how we would produce stuff in communism.

One would be that we would democratically decide what to produce, in abundance.

Another would be that we produce what people decided for themselve’s to consume and production would be driven to satisfy collective demand.

Although I would suspect it would be a combination of the two.

Thus for instance we would probably democratically decide not to produce diamonds and gold toilet seats.

I am not against the idea of letting what people want to consume to regulate what we produce; as opposed to the other extreme of a centrally planned Maoist type production process where we all wear the same type of clothes and have the same haircut.

If it is a demand orientated production system and each individual has different needs and wants then it would make sense to enable each of us make choices based on how much of somebody else’s effort went into it.

There is nothing bourgeois in that ‘demand’ driven system, of being concerned about what you are taking out of the collective pot as ‘abstract labour’ or human effort , and for that matter what you are putting into it as ‘abstract labour’.

I have said before elsewhere as regards to the potential problems in ‘utopian’ free access socialism, re regards luxury items that if we couldn’t manage to responsibly consume them.

And we had jostling, pushing and fights breaking out like a January sale and children fighting over the special toys.

We would be better not producing them at all.

Personally, for what it matters on consumption, I am a Buddhist ascetic compared to most people.

It is probably the ‘anarchist’ in me that prefers the idea of letting individuals responsibly decide what to consume and decide their own ‘needs’ rather that having it totally centrally planned by a ‘democratic tyranny’.

I am with the spirit of Fred’s take on it.

Anti-Dühring by Frederick Engels 1877, Part III: Socialism, IV. Distribution

It is true that even then it will still be necessary for society to know how much labour each article of consumption requires for its production. It will have to arrange its plan of production in accordance with its means of production, which include, in particular, its labour-powers. The useful effects of the various articles of consumption, compared with one another and with the quantities of labour required for their production, will in the end determine the plan.

People will be able to manage everything very simply, without the intervention of much-vaunted "value".

Footnote;

As long ago as 1844 I stated that the above-mentioned balancing of useful effects and expenditure of labour on making decisions concerning production was all that would be left, in a communist society, of the politico-economic concept of value. (Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, p. 95) The scientific justification for this statement, however, as can be seen, was made possible only by Marx's Capital.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch26.htm

In their day organising communist production or determining the plan, or having it determined from a demand driven perspective would have been impossibly complicated.

Capitalism with its computer driven stock control systems has provided the technology to integrate and organise production and consumption in fact better and more efficiently than the self regulating market of capitalist system.

We use it were I work, and it is quite fascinating how it operates.

In fact I know several people who have actually written these EPOS stock control/production systems from the early 1980’s , one of them is OCRing Deville for me right now.

I asked her what would happen if you set all the prices to zero, would it still work?

The answer was yes.

Not giving a damn how much of somebody else’s effort has gone into something before you decide to consume it is bourgeois; knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The road menders, as a paradigm of the brain dead labouring poor in Morris’s News From Nowhere, liked to wear psychedelically colourful waste-coats.

Each to their own as far as I am concerned, more of an anarchist than a Stalinist anyway

Anyway never mind having a pop at me.

Are we all free access ‘utopian’ Kropotkinist now?

Dave B

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on June 20, 2012

I can not do much if people continue to confuse the law of value with value.

The law of value states that things exchange or are bought and sold at their value, their will be no buying or selling in communism.

On pure simple commodity production.

It is a straw man argument and there never has been pure simple commodity production anymore than there has been pure capitalism.

As Rosa said in 1915 they co-existed together, personally I would take the opinion of a clever girl like Rosa familiar with eastern Europe in 1915 more seriously than people who don’t know what it is or have ever met one.

The apogee of simple commodity production in England was probably towards the end of the 18th century which was point at which E.P. Thompson started his book on the making of the English working class and Adam Smith wrote his stuff.

Examples of simple commodity producers would have at least been Samuel Bamfords parents as handloom weavers and shoe makers, and the likes of Silas Marner in George Eliots book.

She was no muppet by the way and translated Fuerbachs Essence of Christianity and was mixing in the same circles as Marx and Engels.

The orthodox view is that simple commodity production evolved out of both feudalism and to a certain extent primitive communism and into capitalism.

But arguing that no such thing ever existed is like arguing with the anti evolutionary Christian creationists

Dave B

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on June 20, 2012

As to the mutual gravitational attraction of masses I actually thought myself that I was being petty and cluttering up the post by inserting that you can take the analogy too far.

But the mutual attraction between the sugar loaf and the piece of iron on the scale in space need not complicate things too much.

Why didn’t you mention scales in free fall or Einstiens special theory of relativity and the raging debate in the scientific community, for some, as to whether gravity is a force at all?

ocelot

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ocelot on June 20, 2012

jura

I'm pretty sure there's a paper somewhere explaining how that account of SNLT leads directly to Stalinism, ocelot :).

I wrote it :D

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 21, 2012

On page 81 of Money And Exchange: Folktales And Reality (Sasan Fayazmanesh) there is a fair interpretation. It turns out both sides are wrong to one-sidedly claim a logical or an historical reading; I think the Engels side doesn't exclude the logical reading, but the real question is raised then (against this textually justified orthodox reading) was Marx a Smithian on this question (as Graeber claims) and should this not be quietly removed like it changes nothing for his overall argument (like the "new" commentators prefer, ever since Hilferding), or, Marx wasn't a Smithian and we can keep the "Engels" (actually also Marx) interpretation (but not one-sidedly historical, which tbh, I don't think Engels even did).

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 21, 2012

I can not do much if people continue to confuse the law of value with value

.

Absolutely knee-slapping, pants-pissing, hilarious. This from a man who refers to Capital as impenetrable, and compares it to a "dung heap."

jura

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by jura on June 21, 2012

Here's the full thing FFS.

http://www15.zippyshare×com/v/54168731/file.html

http://ifile×it/v4kmado

http://depositfiles×com/files/gq9unulvb

Edit: I mean Money and Exchange by Fayazmanesh.

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 21, 2012

None of the links work.

jura

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by jura on June 21, 2012

Sorry, you have to replace the × with a dot.

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 22, 2012

Apropos Rodbertus, Kautsky quotes this footnote (the sarcastic note by Marx is dropped in the MIA text):
By a wonderful feat of logical acumen, Colonel Torrens has discovered, in this stone of the savage the origin of capital. “In the first stone which he [the savage] flings at the wild animal he pursues, in the first stick that he seizes to strike down the fruit which hangs above his reach, we see the appropriation of one article for the purpose of aiding in the acquisition of another, and thus discover the origin of capital.” (R. Torrens: “An Essay on the Production of Wealth,” etc., pp.
70–71.)

Since the German word for “stick” is
“stock,” this “first stick” would undoubtedly also explain why “stock” is synonymous with “capital.”

[Aus jenem ersten Stock ist wahrscheinlich
auch zu erklaren, warum stock im Englischen synonym mit Kapital ist.]

Dave B

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on June 22, 2012

Hi Noa

As to this idea of identifying capital and ownership of means of production as some kind of primitive economic model.

I suspect it was circulating around in an almost identical form to the one you gave elsewhere.

I am taking the following basic model as it was put forward from memory, it wasn’t my dream I am sure.

I can’t remember its origin either by author or date but I suspect it is ‘derived’ from something Smith said in his opening chapter of his book and was contemporary to the middle of the 19th century.

It was used and argued somewhere as some kind of ‘natural’ endorsement and justification of capitalism.

Thus;

Our primitive ancestors say used to run around or hide in bushes with club in hand in an attempt to bash a deer on the head in order to get a meal.

And enough deer were obtained by this process to give us a bit of spare time.

Which some took advantage of while the rest and lazy chilled out.

They worked longer and made bows and arrows that meant that you could kill deer with less effort.

The owner of the bow and arrows ‘rents’ them out to one of the ordinary bods to catch deer.

With this wonderful invention the ordinary bod can catch 3 deer in less time than it would ordinarily take him to catch 1.

The ordinary bod is quite satisfied with the shortening of his working deer catching day, keeps one deer and hands the other two over as rent to the owner of the capitalist Hertz rent a bow and arrow firm.

The capitalist bow and arrow maker takes one deer for his own up keep using the rest to commission the production of more bows and arrows; and maybe branching out into other labour saving devices.

Thus anyway from Smith;

In a tribe of hunters or shepherds a particular person makes bows and arrows, for example, with more readiness and dexterity than any other. He frequently exchanges them for cattle or for venison with his companions; and he finds at last that he can in this manner get more cattle and venison than if he himself went to the field to catch them. From a regard to his own interest, therefore, the making of bows and arrows grows to be his chief business..."

There were about 75,000 simple commodity producing handloom weavers in England around 1795 with their handlooms as ‘capital’.

And they did quite well for themselves even managing like Silas Marner to accumulate a hoard of gold which he hid under the floorboards; as well as learning to read and write and becoming well educated etc.

However as the ‘value’ of that ‘capital’ as a means of production was not particularly high, relative to the average wage; or in other words the organic composition of capital, as a ratio was low.

Others got in on the act including Irish economic migrants.

By about 1820 there were about 250,000 handloom weavers but at that stage they were impoverished by competing with power looms, the ‘putting out’ system of the merchant capitalists and capitalist speculators.

Who used their money capital to buy up product in the periodic slumps when prices were low and dumping it on the market when prices went up.

And things were kicking off grand style at that time in Lancashire and Manchester as a result of all that.

Apart from the complete and 'pure' domination of ‘linen’ weaving by simple commodity production up until 1795; the tailoring industry remained almost ‘purely’ as simple commodity production or C-M-C, up until about 1850 and persisted even beyond that.

I think it was around that time that they came up with a machine that cut clothe to a pattern and around 1840 when industrial sewing machines became practical as capitalist industrial capital.

The exception in the tailoring industry was probably the luxury end of the market as in silk dresses and shirts for the ruling class were the cost of the raw material or constant capital was high enough to prevent the entry and exclude independent simple commodity production and led to piece work.

I keep using this C-M-C as a ‘logical category’ as I have something on that for later on perhaps.

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 22, 2012

Here's a discussion of the Smithian school in France (people should not refrain from reading it on account of whatever disagreeable things I've been saying here): http://libcom.org/library/necessary-rehabilitation-v-poznjakov

I give a quote where the author is rendering the views of Canard (whose book btw is contained in Ricardo's private library).

Poznjakov

"One must distinguish in human labor that which is necessary for his conservation, and superfluous labor" 21. The first is labor, expended on covering natural needs, without which it is impossible to exist; on the other hand, "superfluous labor" - is the labor, expended above the necessary; savages are confined only to necessary labor, preferring to spend all the remaining time in idleness. But can one use this "superfluous labor" either on the cultivation of land, or in skilled artisanry or craftsmanship, one also can use it on products, produced with this "superfluous labor," in turn to buy labor for its application either in treating land, or for the production of other products, - this labor becomes "demandable superfluous labor" 22. This "demandable superfluous labor" also becomes the source of rent, and likewise also of property. In essence this "demandable superfluous labor" represents of itself some pseudonym for the category of surplus value. The not yet developed French capitalist industry determined in him the confusion which we find even in this question. So, e.g., he proclaims this "demandable superfluous labor" the sole source of goods or commodities 23; this is fully normal, if one takes into consideration, that in an undeveloped commodity society commodities, as a general rule, are only surplus, and labor, necessary for the maintenance of existence, in general does not take the commodity form. But from the other side, under necessary labor he understands labor (more accurately, the labor, included in products), which is expended not only for maintenance of one's existence, of one's conservation, but also "for the exploitation of one's products" 24; under this he understands labor, expended on the renewal of fixed capital.

Later the views of Cournot are discussed and we learn that Cournot managed to get beyond the ahistoricism of the Smithian tradition (and yet; he nevertheless also slipped into vulgar economy).

I think fighting Engels is not the difficulty, responding to critics like Achille Loria should be the first concern. Try his critical review of the vol.3 of TSV:
http://www.literature.at/viewer.alo?objid=12621&viewmode=fullscreen&rotate=&scale=3.33&page=138

Or even worse, guys on our side who reject LTV as bullshit in toto, like Liebknecht!
http://marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/liebknechtk/1922/studien/marxkritik.htm

ocelot

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ocelot on June 23, 2012

In what parallel universe is Karl Liebknecht one of the "guys on our side"? I missed that meeting...

andy g

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by andy g on June 23, 2012

rejection of LTV and historical materialism aside(ahem)surely revolutionary opposition to WW1, social chauvinism etc is something worth identifying with?

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 23, 2012

Apart from the complete and 'pure' domination of ‘linen’ weaving by simple commodity production up until 1795; the tailoring industry remained almost ‘purely’ as simple commodity production or C-M-C, up until about 1850 and persisted even beyond that.

Really? What bullshit. The issue isn't if one sector of an economy lags behind others in the transformation from the formal to the real domination of capital; the issue most certainly isn't, deliberately, confusing petit-bourgeois producers and providers with "simple commodity production." The issue is the organization of the conditions of labor that govern the economy as a whole.

Now in 1795, and 1849, what was that organizing principle in Britain?

Dave B

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on June 23, 2012

How can you confuse petit-bourgeois producers and providers with "simple commodity production".

When "simple commodity production" is ‘petit-bourgeois producers and providers’.

Or in other words

‘as everyone knows…..numerous artisan and peasant enterprises which are engaged in simple commodity production’

Rosa Luxembourg Anti-Critique Chapter 1; The Questions At Issue

http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/anti-critique/ch01.htm

The argument or proposition is that capitalism, as a mode of production enters one sphere of commodity production after another, supplanting the previous economic mode of production of those particular commodities ie simple commodity production.

During that evolutionary process the ‘social and productive forms’ of simple commodity production ‘co-exist, and co-exist locally with capitalism’.

Capitalism and wage labour wasn’t created in seven days it evolved; perhaps it is no surprise that it is an American who is suggesting otherwise.

The central and original question is of course.

Was the opening chapter of volume, concerning tayloring and linen weaving, about simple commodity production?

Or in other words about ‘..numerous artisan and peasant enterprises’.

Where;

“The reader must note that we are not speaking here of the wages or value that the labourer gets for a given labour time, but of the value of the commodity in which that labour time is materialised. Wages is a category that, as yet, has no existence at the present stage of our investigation.”

Or about capitalist production and capitalist linen weaving and tayloring.

Karl could hardly have picked two worse examples for capitalist commodity types than flax/linen and tayloring could he?

Both being in fact ‘good’ examples of simple commodity production and of;

‘..numerous artisan and peasant enterprises’.

eg Irish Linen

http://www.intouch4u.com/cummiskey/flax.htm

[Cotton and cotton weaving, that he moved onto to later, would have been more problematic as the raw material as yarn (and cotton-depending on interpretation ) was produced capitalistically.]

In fact when I said that even within feudalism simple commodity production was done on Wednesdays that was not precisely true.

Agricultural production was seasonal and agricultural labourers would utilise the quiet periods and use it in producing commodities for sale and exchange.

They would take then their commodities to Stourbridge market to sell for money in order to buy other commodities as a means of subsistence.

Or;

C-M-C

There is though an economic gravitational whirlpool effect with the development of international capitalism.

Chapter Ten: The Working-Day

But as soon as people, whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave-labour, corvée-labour, &c., are drawn into the whirlpool of an international market dominated by the capitalistic mode of production, the sale of their products for export becoming their principal interest, the civilised horrors of over-work are grafted on the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, &c.

Hence the negro labour in the Southern States of the American Union preserved something of a patriarchal character, so long as production was chiefly directed to immediate local consumption. But in proportion, as the export of cotton became of vital interest to these states, the over-working of the negro and sometimes the using up of his life in 7 years of labour became a factor in a calculated and calculating system.

It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products. It was now a question of production of surplus-labour itself: So was it also with the corvée, e.g., in the Danubian Principalities (now Roumania). .........

The ratio of the corvée to the necessary labour 56/84 or 66 2/3 % gives a much smaller rate of surplus-value than that which regulates the labour of the English agricultural or factory labourer. This is, however, only the legally prescribed corvée.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm

As the;

‘the germ of what appears as profit under the capitalist mode of production’

germinates even within the corvée labour system.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch47.htm

The idea of there being one organising principle isn’t exactly dialectical is it?

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 23, 2012

How can you confuse petit-bourgeois producers and providers with "simple commodity production".

When "simple commodity production" is ‘petit-bourgeois producers and providers’.

I'm not. You are. You've practically built an online career it just such confusion.

As the;
Quote:

‘the germ of what appears as profit under the capitalist mode of production’

germinates even within the corvée labour system.

So good. Now answer the questions: Is feudalism an example of simple commodity production? Is the corvee labour system an abstract labor? Is the "germ" of what will appear as profit in capitalism actual production according to the law of value prior to capitalism?

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 24, 2012

I was wrong (in post #264) to say that the transition to "full" capitalism occurs with the move from the elementary to expanded form of value. Perhaps I could say that it marks a stage in the expansion of simple commodity production, which becomes "full" with the appearance of money. So exchange-value only properly comes into existence with money then. It seems to me that also money, as the highest form of value, existed prior capitalism, so value also existed prior to capitalism.

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 24, 2012

What becomes "full" with "appearance" of money... simple commodity production?

Exchange value only comes into existence with money? Ass backwards, IMO, money only comes into existence with exchange value.

And that money, which represents not the "highest form of value" but value as its own universal equivalent with capitalism existed before capitalism, does not mean that the law of valuegoverned exchanges and even the functions of money prior to capitalism.

Other than having everything wrong, you've got it all right.

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 24, 2012

I wrote exchange-value properly comes into existence with money, which in my view is the highest form of value. I mean, call it the universal equivalent if you like, but it's still a form of value and this form cannot exist without presupposing the existence of value (I'm not even speaking of law of value).

The orthodox periodization is right, because exchange existed millenia before money, but yeah, I would say that the development of SCP starts to take serious proportions only about the time of the emergence of money.

Though Engels also seems to claim a tendency toward the law of value in SCP before money, he says that from
[quote=Engels]the moment money penetrates into this mode of economy, the tendency towards adaptation to the law of value (in the Marxian formulation, nota bene! [meaning???]) grows more pronounced on the one hand, while on the other it is already interrupted by the interference of usurers' capital and fleecing by taxation; the periods for which prices, on average, approach to within a negligible margin of values, begin to grow longer.[/quote]

So it seems only when money appears in [a territory with] SCP, the tendency of the "law of value"[in the Marxian formulation??] begins "to grow more pronounced", while at the same time it is already getting interrupted... From the

practical point of view, money became the decisive measure of value, all the more as the commodities entering trade became more varied, the more they came from distant countries, and the less, therefore, the labor-time necessary for their production could be checked. Money itself usually came first from foreign parts; even when precious metals were obtained within the country, the peasant and artisan were partly unable to estimate approximately the labor employed therein, and partly their own consciousness of the value-measuring property of labor had been fairly well dimmed by the habit of reckoning with money; in the popular mind, money began to represent absolute value.

Isn't it better if you first try to disentangle what Engels is saying here and come to an agreement what he is or isn't claiming.

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 24, 2012

Nope. It's better if we refer to what Marx is saying, not someone's interpretation of it, even if that someone is Engels.

If what you are saying is based on Engels, so much the worse for Engels, for what you are saying is not what Marx said.

ocelot

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ocelot on June 25, 2012

Noa Rodman

I was wrong (in post #264) to say that the transition to "full" capitalism occurs with the move from the elementary to expanded form of value. Perhaps I could say that it marks a stage in the expansion of simple commodity production, which becomes "full" with the appearance of money. So exchange-value only properly comes into existence with money then. It seems to me that also money, as the highest form of value, existed prior capitalism, so value also existed prior to capitalism.

Wrong.

1. - the transition to capitalist social relations occurs with the shift from the expanded form of value to the general form. Marx explicitly draws attention to the qualitative transformation involved in the shift to the general form (see all the quotes from over a year ago in this thread). The law of value is the social effect of this qualitatively different form (which, inter alia, presupposes the existence of commodified labour power and means of production - see, again, ch. 1)

2. - depending on what you understand by "money" - i.e. the conventional numismatic identification of money with coins or other specie (medium of exchange), or alternatively, the unit of account as used by the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians, centuries before the invention of circulating currency - exchange value existed before the invention of money. Primarily in the form of accidental value (see for example the setting of official exchange rates of goods by order of the Pharaoh, etc).

3. - money definitely predates both capitalism and the general form of value - hence cannot, historically, be "the highest form of value". The general form is the highest form of value - money is merely an instrument for it's quantification (albeit that this process is ontologically essential). It is not a form of value in itself.

4. - that the accidental form of value predates capitalism, as already repeated ad nauseam, is not in question. The question is whether the general form, whose dynamics are described by the law of value, predates capitalism. Another way to frame the question, is to say is the general form and the accidental form of value effectively indistiguishable, with no qualitative difference between them? Marx says not.

5 - that money predates capitalism, presents us with the question of whether the use of pre-capitalist money
under capitalist relations represents merely the formal subsumption of money, opening the possibility of envisaging the emergence, through real subsumption, of a specifically-capitalist money? This in fact is what is proposed in Bryan & Rafferty's "Capitalism with Derivatives" - i.e. that derivatives represent a specifically-capitalist form of money in which the specifically-capitalist function of commensuration between term, risk and return are innately composed, rather than externally bolted-on to pre-capitalist commodity money (although, in passing, Graeber has persuasive arguments against seeing chartalist "fiat" forms of money as a creation of the modern or capitalist era).

In the middle of reading Graeber's "Debt" at the moment. Whatever other critiques I may have of it, reading the second chapter on "The Myth of Barter", reminded me that the whole notion of Simple Commodity Production, is simply the bourgeois notion of the barter economy going back to the dawn of civilisation, dressed up in Marxist language. It is the ideology of exchange that the forms of value specific to the historical stage of generalised commidity production, are eternal. To take this bourgeois mythos that Marx spent so much of his life combatting, and elevate it to a central principle of "Marxist" orthodoxy, is the ultimate sick joke against Marx.

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 25, 2012

the whole notion of Simple Commodity Production, is simply the bourgeois notion of the barter economy going back to the dawn of civilisation, dressed up in Marxist language. It is the ideology of exchange that the forms of value specific to the historical stage of generalised commidity production, are eternal. To take this bourgeois mythos that Marx spent so much of his life combatting, and elevate it to a central principle of "Marxist" orthodoxy, is the ultimate sick joke against Marx.

Says it all.

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 26, 2012

[quote=Engels]The most important and most incisive advance was the transition to metallic money, the consequence of which, however, was that the determination of value by labor-time was no longer visible upon the surface of commodity exchange. ... the peasant and artisan were partly unable to estimate approximately the labor employed therein, and partly their own consciousness of the value-measuring property of labor had been fairly well dimmed by the habit of reckoning with money; in the popular mind, money began to represent absolute value.[/quote]

[quote=Marx]The mode of production in which the product takes the form of a commodity, or is produced directly for exchange, is the most general and most embryonic form of bourgeois production. It therefore makes its appearance at an early date in history, though not in the same predominating and characteristic manner as now-a-days. Hence its Fetish character is comparatively easy to be seen through. But when we come to more concrete forms, even this appearance of simplicity vanishes. Whence arose the illusions of the monetary system? To it gold and silver, when serving as money, did not represent a social relation between producers, but were natural objects with strange social properties. [/quote]

There is passage in vol. 3 where Marx says that products in SCP are traded below their "value", because the peasant/artisan sells merely his surplus and isn't interested in getting full value for it. But on the other hand;
[quote=Kautsky]the prices of commodities [do not] always reflect the relation of commodity value and gold value. This is not true for single market transactions. Also it is not true, as an average, if we disregard the modification of the law of value by the adjustment of the rate of profit where we consider the pre-capitalistic methods of production. Marx says of gold: “Jacob doubted if gold was ever paid for at its full value. This is still more true of diamonds.” (Capital, I)

In other words, the commodity prices expressed in gold are always higher than should correspond with the full value of the gold. Marx has, unfortunately, not told us how this happens.

I see the under-valuation of gold, particularly in this, that it not merely displays a great amount of value in a small compass, but that the creation of such an amount of value is frequently a disturbing element.
[..]
the fact that gold does not exchange for its full value do[es not do] away with the law of value.[/quote]

[anybody have an idea who this Jacob is?]

jura

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by jura on June 26, 2012

Jacob, William (cca 1762 – 1851): English trader and writer, author of economic writings. Werke 23 adds to this: traveller.

In Vol. 1, Marx cites the following works by this dude:

- An Historical Inquiry into the Production and Consumption of the Precious Metals. In 2 vols. London 1831.

- A Letter to Samuel Whitbread, Being a Sequel to Considerations on the Protection Required by British Agriculture. London 1815.

Angelus Novus

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Angelus Novus on June 26, 2012

Noa Rodman

[anybody have an idea who this Jacob is?]

From the register of persons of MEW vol. 23:

Jacob, William (etwa 1762-1851) englischer Kaufmann, Reisender und Schriftsteller.

Get yourself some blue volumes, homes. The various appendices are great toilet reading.

Edit: Dr. Capital beat me to it.

jura

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by jura on June 26, 2012

Here's some more info from the amazing Marx-Engels Glossary by Hal Draper:

Jacob, William: English traveler, writer on economic matters, merchant in the S. America trade. Member of Parliament (1808–1812); comptroller of corn returns to the Board of Trade (1822–1842). Besides articles on agriculture and economics in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (7th edition) and reports on the condition of agriculture in northern Europe, he published a highly regarded Historical inquiry into the production and consumption of the precious metals (1831). Marx (1850–1851) excerpted this work, also his Considerations on the protection required by British agriculture (1814) and A letter... (1815).

S. Artesian

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on June 27, 2012

I just started rereading theGrundrisse, and look what I ran across in the opening chapter... as if Karl anticipated a certain current discussion, and a certain past but future distortion of his work by those who would prefer ideology to revolutionary critique:

Whenever we speak of production, then, what is meant is always production at a definite stage of socialdevelopment—production by social individuals. It might seem, therefore, that in order to talk about
production at all we must either pursue the process of historic development through its different phases,
or declare beforehand that we are dealing with a specific historic epoch such as e.g. modern bourgeois
production, which is indeed our particular theme. However, all epochs of production have certain
common traits, common characteristics. Production in general is an abstraction, but a rational abstraction
in so far as it really brings out and fixes the common element and thus saves us repetition. Still, this
general category, this common element sifted out by comparison, is itself segmented many times over
and splits into different determinations. Some determinations belong to all epochs, others only to a few.

[Some] determinations will be shared by the most modern epoch and the most ancient. No production
will be thinkable without them; however even though the most developed languages have laws and
characteristics in common with the least developed, nevertheless, just those things which determine their
development, i.e. the elements which are not general and common, must be separated out from the
determinations valid for production as such, so that in their unity—which arises already from the identity
of the subject, humanity, and of the object, nature—their essential difference is not forgotten. The whole
profundity of those modern economists who demonstrate the eternity and harmoniousness of the existing
social relations lies in this forgetting.
For example. No production possible without an instrument of production, even if this instrument is only the hand. No production without stored-up, past labour, even if it is only the facility gathered together and concentrated in the hand of the savage by repeated practice.

Capital is, among other things, also an instrument of production, also objectified, past labour. Therefore
capital is a general, eternal relation of nature; that is, if I leave out just the specific quality which alone makes 'instrument of production' and 'stored-up labour' into capital
. The entire history of production relations thus appears to Carey, for example, as a malicious forgery perpetrated by governments

And this:

But none of all this is the economists' real concern in this general part. The aim is, rather, to present production—see e.g. Mill—as distinct from distribution etc., as encased in eternal natural laws
independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the
inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded. This is the more or less conscious
purpose of the whole proceeding. In distribution, by contrast, humanity has allegedly permitted itself to
be considerably more arbitrary. Quite apart from this crude tearing-apart of production and distribution
and of their real relationship, it must be apparent from the outset that, no matter how differently
distribution may have been arranged in different stages of social development, it must be possible here
also, just as with production, to single out common characteristics, and just as possible to confound or to
extinguish all historic differences under general human laws. For example, the slave, the serf and the
wage labourer all receive a quantity of food which makes it possible for them to exist as slaves, as serfs,as wage labourers. The conqueror who lives from tribute, or the official who lives from taxes, or the
landed proprietor and his rent, or the monk and his alms, or the Levite and his tithe, all receive a quota of social production, which is determined by other laws than that of the slave's, etc. The two main points
which all economists cite under this rubric are: (1) property; (2) its protection by courts, police, etc. To
this a very short answer may be given:

to 1. All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific
form of society. In this sense it is a tautology to say that property (appropriation) is a precondition of
production. But it is altogether ridiculous to leap from that to a specific form of property, e.g. private
property. (Which further and equally presupposes an antithetical form, non-property.)

And this:

To summarize: There are characteristics which all stages of production have in common, and which are
established as general ones by the mind; but the so-called general preconditions of all production are
nothing more than these abstract moments with which no real historical stage of production can be
grasped.

Notice how Marx never once refers to a "law of value" being any part of a characteristic held in common by "all stages of production"-- and of course the Grundrisse itself demonstrates how incapable "general preconditions of production" are of apprehending the real historical stage of production.

It is the succeeding interpretations by Engels, and Kautsky that attempt to turn the "law of value" into a general precondition of production.

Compare, after all, these words of Marx to Engels' interpretation that barter and the exchange of goods between peasants and artisans were governed by a "fairly accurate" measure of "labor time." Or to his assertion that the "whole of commodity production" started with "this determination of value by labor-time...and with it the multifarious relations in which the various aspects of the law of value asserts themselves as described in Vol 1. of Capital."

Engels is attempting to give to Marx's revolutionary critique, Marx's exposition of the conflicts specific, an immanent to laws of motion of capitalism and capitalism alone, an "eternal life"-- as if those laws predates the very organization of labor that creates it. Engels in this attempt to bestow immortality on Marx's contribution , thereby only reproduces from the "left," the eternal life the political economists wish to breathe into market relations as the "natural" and "general precondition" for all production.

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 27, 2012

http://archive.org/stream/historicalinquir02jacouoft#page/101/mode/1up
"It is probable that in all ages those metals [gold and silver] have cost more in their production than their value ever repaid."

Noa Rodman

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on July 1, 2012

The reference to Jacob is in the first section. Then Marx refers to Eschwege and the claim that 80 years of diamond production were only worth about 18 months of Brazilian sugar/coffee export. The estimate of Eschwege starts in 1730. As white laborers merely had to spend a few days of work on a piece of fertile land to provide themselves the whole year, they had no incentive to go in the mines; slaves were imported (there were free-lance adventurers of course as well). It's an example of primitive accumulation, when wage labor is not yet the dominant form of production in capitalism. It also shows that his analysis, contra Luxemburg, includes 'non-capitalist' commodity production. Already in the first pages Marx makes a connection to the topic of the last chapters (from the Grundrisse it's clear that he takes the Eschwege example from Merivale's lectures on colonization).

The private property of the labourer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry, whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is an essential condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the labourer himself. Of course, this petty mode of production exists also under slavery, serfdom, and other states of dependence. But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its adequate classical form, only where the labourer is the private owner of his own means of labour set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso.

ButaneBoyz

11 years 4 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ButaneBoyz on November 23, 2012

Concrete Labour: Work activities as they really are with unique material qualities. Embodied in use-value.

Abstract Labour: Work activities treated as if they had no distinguishing qualities. Embodied in value.