Some thoughts and quiries regarding what constitutes value from reading chaps 1-3 in capital

Hiya, xslavearcx, thanks for naming me again, so I that get dragged into this mire again!

On the above, it seems to me that you're confusing Marx's 'society' with the marginal utility theorists' 'individual', when it comes to 'value'. Marx talks of 'society's need', not 'individuals' needs'. The ODE quote you've used makes this clear with "the addition to an individuals utility...".

Don't forget, if the 'socially necessary labour time' to produce a given commodity falls, then all previously produced commodities of that type lose 'value'. 'Value' is measured by what is 'necessary' now for society. 'Value' is a social relationship, not something in a commodity.

Remember my analogy about HMS Dreadnought? Day before launch, British navy had dozens of powerful battleships; day after launch, British navy had one powerful battleship and dozens of floating scrap metal candidates. 'Naval Power' embodied in those ships had diminished, because 'Naval Power' is measured against current standards.

And so it is with 'value' - that's why I call it 'social-value'.

Let's leave it to the experts to explain properly, eh? I know I'll get told-off for forgetting some obscure passage in Volume 7, written in Serbo-Croat by a good friend of Engels' mother-in-law, who discovered the lost manuscript in.... snore

If I could only give one single tip to help out somebody just starting with Capital and trying to make sense of Marx's value theory, it would be this:

Don't approach things from the assumption that Marx starts out dealing with something called "value" and then tries to "prove" that labor is its substance.

Do approach things from the perspective that Marx is trying to explain how the allocation of society's available labor occurs in capitalist society, and that for Marx the key is that labor takes the form of value.

CLR James once succintly stated that it would be more accurate to refer to Marx's value theory as a "value theory of labor". Keep in mind what I said on the other thread: while abstract labor-time is the "substance" of value, it can't be measured directly with a clock: the value-form analysis at the end of Chapter One is Marx saying -- contra some other socialist thinkers of the time -- that money is necessary as its measure.

In addition to the above, if I were to give an additional tip, I would strongly emphasize that for Marx, the distinction between abstract labor and concrete labor is absolutely crucial. The fact that most Capital introductions don't adequately address this distinction is one of the main reasons why I think Michael Heinrich's book is superior to all others. (I.I. Rubin's book is also good, but it isn't so much an introduction to Capital as rather an extended commentary on Marx's value theory).

Yeah, I think you're spot on here, Angelus. After all the effort you and the others have put in to helping me to understand the first chapters of Capital, I finally think that I can at least express an opinion.

But I think Marx was wrong to use the term 'value': it's unnecessarily confusing to everyone who's been brought up in capitalist society, and are brainwashed into the central organising concepts of 'the individual', and 'value' as a psychological category which an individual determines for themselves.

I think xslavearcx is still struggling to overcome this conditioning, going by the OP and its quote from the ODE on 'utility', which xslavearcx is confusing with 'value'.

Marx should have called his concept something like 'Social-Glue', rather than 'value'.

Perhaps we should have a contest to see who can come up with the best new term for 'value'; I still like 'social-value', but it's probably better that the word 'value' is entirely absent.

The opening line of Capital should say "Value is nothing to do with value". And then discuss the meaning of that apparently contradictory statement.

We're nearly 150 years into this, and still it hinders rather than helps workers.

Nah, I'm just using you as an excuse - I'm really just like a fly that can't stay away from shit.

Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say "purely dependent", because I just know there's something waiting to ambush us in Chapter 3 somewhere, but, yeah, I think that's what I understand so far.

I have to keep using caveats, because, rather than help us to imperfectly understand the concepts, as an initial step to later enlightenment, many posters seem to me to be just keen to prove their version of 'what Marx really meant' and, as a consequence, simply add to our learners' confusion.

Personally, I couldn't give a fuck about what 'value' eventually really means after 3 whole volumes, I just want an approximate understanding based on chapters 1-3.

The problem is, I'm beginning to suspect that chapters 1-3, as well as being terribly poorly written, are actually logical bollocks, which is why all our other 'helpers' have to constantly go outside of them to try to explain.

Still, I'll persevere for now...

You should be aware that Angelus Novus (AN) pedals a purely qualitative view of value, which leaves him unable to explain Marx's use of value in relation to price. For example, Capital Vol. 3 -- which Marx supposedly wrote prior to Vol 1. If you want to see a discussion, where he is brought to book, then go to: http://www.principiadialectica.co.uk/blog/?p=2683#comments. BTW, on PD, AN uses the name Negative Potential. To save time, it's probably better to read the comments, backwards, from the end.

AN is probably right in saying that Marx says he has gone beyond Ricardo's measurement of value in simple labour time (i.e. hours) to expressing it in money. Problem is, Marx doesn't then go on to explain how the long term average price is derived, if it isn't based on simple labour time.

I agree that there's an analogy to marginal utility. Not so much the marginal demand -- Marx distinguishes between supply and demand, and the underlying price determined by value (e.g. Vol 3, Ch 10) -- but that the value of a commodity to equivalent to the composite simple labour time needed, using current technology, to obtain that commodity. Leaving aside whether what Marx is saying makes any sense, in real world economics, Marx's uses of value are consistent with it being measured in simple labour time.

No, of the three manuscripts underlying the three published volumes of Capital, Vol. 3 is the oldest. Vol. 2 is the newest. Marx also revised Vol. 1 constantly throughout his lifetime, including some very key arguments in his revision manuscripts that support my interpretation which were not incorporated into any of the existing English translations, but which were incorporated into the French translation, which is the last version that Marx actually oversaw in his lifetime.

A lot of substantialists like to point to the "transformation problem" in Vol. 3 as "proof" that Marx's value theory is basically Ricardo's.

But if that's the case, then the value-form section and the fetishism section at the end of Chapter One have to be squared with this, since they are a criticism precisely of the notion of some directly measurable "labor time" without the mediation of money.

Marx's decision to use the term "value" has to do with the fact he was writing a critique of political economy, or, a critique of economic categories. The category of (labor) value (and a whole cluster of associated/similar categories, like "exchange value" or "natural price") had long before Marx been used as a means of scientific investigation of bourgeois society (with pretty impressive results, like Smith's materialist theory of society and history, and Ricardo's analysis of the relation between the three major classes in capitalism). I think Marx's usage of the term was quite appropriate and not surprising at all to 19th century readers who knew something about political economy. But I fully agree with you that today, the "psychological" (subjective) notions of value prevail, in mainstream economics as well as everyday ideology.

@Angelus Novus

Erm, if Vol 3 was completed prior to when Vol 1 was completed then it would be older.

Accepting that Marx didn't mean for his interpretation of value to be taken as being the same as Ricardo's, e.g. it is measured in money not time, then how does the money version derive the 'market value' around which the 'market price' fluctuates (Vol 3, Ch 10)? Or, perhaps is it more reasonable to assume that Marx had introduced his 'innovation' of value, measured as money, by the time he finally finished Vol 1 but forgot to check the practical implications on the transformation problem he had previously set out in Vol 3 -- that still being the Ricardo version which uses simple labour time to set the value and hence the average price?

Yeah, you're right, of course. In my frustration with the difficulties of getting other posters like xslavearcx to grasp 'value', I'm being completely ahistoric. Marx's usage at the time was completely appropriate.

That's the problem. isn't it? Can we reclaim 'value' in the same way we have to reclaim 'Communism' from the Stalinists?

Perhaps when the kids on the streets start spraying "Value!" on the walls during social disturbances, as a warning to the rich, we'll know then that "the times they are a-changin' ".

Anyway, back to the telly for tonight's events...

B_Reasonable, Marx distinguishes two measures of value – immanent measure, which is socially necessary labor time (SNLT), and external measure (äußeres Maß), which is money (more precisely, the money commodity in its function of the measure of values – of course, this leads to the whole "commodity money after Bretton Woods" debate). The relationship between them is analogous to the relationship of essence and manifestation (Erscheinung). This distinction is already present in the 1859 Contribution (even more explicitly than in Capital – which contradicts your suggestion that the "innovation of value" measured in money was only introduced Capital).

The immanent measure is the quantitative aspect of abstract labor, i.e. its duration, SNLT. The problem with immanent measure is that it cannot be used empirically for measuring the value of individual commodities, precisely because it is social labor which manifests itself as value, and not the concrete labor of individual producers. (I'd like to leave the question of measuring aggregate vlalues open for now – Fred Moseley wrote some pretty convincing stuff on the possibility of doing that, at least in my view. Let's just say it is theoretically possible but not practically feasible to measure total value or surplus-value produced in an economy.)

An expression of value via the external measure is price. Already in the third chapter of Capital, Vol. I, Marx makes it very clear that prices do not equal values and that this is necessarily so. Even before, in the Theories of Surplus-Value, he clearly states that the contradiction between the determination of value by SNLT (in theory) and the average rate of profit (in empirical fact) is only an apparent contradiction, which Ricardo couldn't solve and which ultimately lead to the dissolution of the Ricardian school through vulgarization. And he also criticizes the Classics for confusing concrete and abstract labor. Thus, your suggestion that Vol. 3 of Capital presents "the Ricardo version" would mean that Marx reverted to a position he criticed in TSV, which I think is not very plausible.

This is my take on the whole subject of "value", that Marx was correct, it is about labour time, there can be noother criterion, callouses are witnesses to expenditure and the depletion of biological ligaments are the reasons for 'time' being a determinant in the valuation of labour, but there exist other intricate dynamics within some cultures, some that value stillness, and not labour, that intellectual input has a value that excedes crude mechanical toil, but these cultures, whether modern or primitive, because it ends up that the age of mechanical refinement of a culture does not put it into a specific prestigious state as far as social cultural values have evolved. There are primitive animistic cultures that givfe enormous value to the spiritual dimention, just as any religion does, but the 'pagan' version is more honest, it has not alienated nature or the biosphere, and value, in its total non-monetary sense, equates to faith and devotion to the collective. But these are subjectivities that make all society the canvas for creative expression. In the end, the good ol' worker and his loving partner have defined the values in whatever society, neanderthal of yuppie London!
How the hell do we educate these people so that they don't self-destruct from their own selfish religious ignorance?

No, that's a misleading way to phrase it, because you make it sound like he wrote Vol. 3 before writing Vol. 1. The point is that he was constantly revising Vol.1, whereas the Vol.3 manuscript stayed untouched. That's why it's more accurate to say that the manuscript is older. Vol. 3 was never "completed".

If they're anything like me and you, mate, even the class conscious ones will be spraying "Value?", rather than "Value!".

Yeah – but as you know, Marx openly admits there are such cases. What concerns Marx in Capital in the first place is how a capitalist society, understood in its "ideal average", reproduces. Social reproduction in general is impossible without labor; hence, the core concern is how labor is regulated in a capitalist society. Commodities which sell for a price but do not have value may be of significance socially, politically, ideologically, etc., but they do not constitute the core of social reproduction in capitalism. That is why Marx presupposes that the commodity he is talking about in Ch 1 - 3 is simply an "exemplar of its kind", i.e. it can be reproduced en masse.

By the way, this is something which in my experience always raises questions in a Capital reading group. People bring up counterexamples in which the socially necessary labor obviously has little to do with the actual exchange value or price (e.g. signed baseball cards). Apparently Marx did not consider it important to warn the reader. Here's what Ricardo says in this respect in his Principles (please excuse the long quote):

I guess Marx would have put it similarly, had he been more foresightful of the pending marginalist vulgar revolution. Or, again, maybe he thought such a warning superfluous, because he presupposed some familiarity with political economy on the part of the reader.

Well, yes, but why "purely about", as if that were not enough? What Marx's approach basically amounts to is the discovery of a mechanism which operates behind the backs of producers and regulates their economic intercourse.

What economic agents see is price, and, to anticipate a bit, profit, wage and rent. Marx shows that these quantities of money have a deeper foundation (though not an immediate, direct one) in the quantities of abstract labor that a capitalist society expends in its reproduction. This allows him to explain a lot things that classical political economy could not explain. Around this, Marx builts a whole theory of how economic agents must behave if reproduction is to be sustained, how in such behavior they (intentionally or not) come into conflict with that very reproduction (on both the side of capitalists and workers), etc.

By the way, the "commensurability argument" in Ch 1 is, in my experience, a notorious problem and I don't think it should be taken too seriously. Marx's reasoning that the only thing that remains of two commodities when we abstract from their use-value ("material") aspect is that they are both products of labor is, from a logical point of view, fallacious. It either isn't a valid deductive argument or some important premises are only tacitly presupposed. The Austrian economist and one of the earliest critics of Marx, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, had shown that an equally plausible conclusion could be that what remains is not the property "being a product of labor" but "being scarce" (in the sense of there being always a certain limited amount of a commodity). Now, I disagree with B-B's criticism, but it points to an important thing, which B-B himself failed to notice.

The commensurability argument does not constitute a "proof" of Marx's theory of value in any sense. That the law of value really regulates the capitalist economy can only be conclusively shown at much later stages of the book, and even then only in a very indirect way through predictions of long-term trends in the development of capitalism etc. The argument of Ch1 is important as a sort of "guiding thread" or an axiom that guides further proceedings, but not much more than that.

I'm glad you find my posts useful. Ricardo's book is not that difficult to follow, most of the important theoretical stuff is in the early chapters, while the rest is mostly dedicated to practical policy implications. However, I don't think your reading of Capital will benefit much from reading Ricardo right now. His method of exposition is very different from that of Marx – he introduces some very complex concepts (like the distinction between fixed and circulating capital, or the rate of profit) quite early on, and sometimes gets caught up in his own contradictions. Combining that with early chapters of Vol. 1 of Capital could create quite a mess! So unless you have a lot of time on your hands or are interested in some pretty scholastic nuances (and wish to dig into the Theories of Surplus-Value for Marx's most explicit criticisms of Ricardo), I think you'd be better off reading some secondary literature first. Simon Clarke's Marx, Marginalism, and Modern Sociology is quite good. It is freely available from the author's website as a PDF, and especially Chapters 2 (on classical political economy) and 3 (on Marx's critique from the earliest writings to Capital) are relevant in this context (and quite palatable as well). I don't agree with everything Clarke says, but I've definitely learned a lot from that book.

Actually, as far as secondary literature is concerned, I agree with the consensus here that David Harvey's video lectures are useful (and probably more attractive than reading a book to help you read a book, dawg!). And I'm with Angelus Novus on the best reading guide – Michael Heinrich's How To Read Marx's Capital – unfortunately only available in German. However, Simon Clarke also produced a concise study guide (DOC) (52 pages) that covers material from all of the three volumes of Capital. Again, I do have disagreements with some of the things he says, but that guide still offers some solid ground to stand on when reading the early chapters (and developing one's own criticisms of Marx or Clarke), and it's actually much better than a lot of stuff you'd have to pay for.

About social reproduction – it's basically a fancy way of saying "the activity that a society has to undertake today in order to exist tomorrow". Hence, an analysis of reproduction of a specific type of society tells you why (and how) is it that that society – with its specific structure, relationships, dynamics, etc. – does not cease to exist overnight, but sustains itself ("simple reproduction") or even expands ("expanded reproduction"). Social reproduction in capitalism is what Marx tries to shed light on with his theory of value.

xslavearcx,

Just to jump in and add to Angelus and Jura's sound advice.
You might also find Hans Ehrbar's annotations to Capital helpful. (http://www.econ.utah.edu/~ehrbar/akmc.htm). They take you through Capital line by line, even providing hyperlinks to show how and where the different aspects of Marx's argument relate to each other. They also discuss the differences between the different editions of Capital and show where and how certain passages change between the different editions. Lastly, they also amend some translation issues and include relevant material in the Grundrisse etc. They're not perfect but I've found them helpful, especially when trying to understand the value form.