What Was The Purpose(s) Of Marx's Capital?

Your post wasn't long enough.

Maybe. I think he tried to improve the acessibility and transparency multiple times (the different editions of and appendices to Capital; the abridged version by Most), but to no great success. Marx had great expectations about the theoretical uproar his work would cause (already when writing A Contribution), but these hopes were in vain – even his German socialist friends were clueless about why A Contribution could be important when it was published. I think this caused a lot of frustration on Marx's part.

Yes, I agree with this. The commodity (and the two "factors", use-value and exchange value) he starts with basically goes back to Aristotle, and of course to Smith and Ricardo. (The first chapter in Ricardo's Principles is similar to Marx's).

44 wrote:

What kind of proof would you expect to hear? Or maybe you can say what you think the labor theory of value claims?

The labor theory of value is misunderstood in many ways. First, it does not claim that only labor is required to produce a commodity. Its not an explanation of the production processs as a technical process in which goods are produced. Marx never said that nature and machines are superfluous for producing goods. Nonsense! Second, the labor theory of value also doesn’t say that the price of a commodity is a correct manifestation of the amount of labor expended to produce that commodity. That’s why he calls it average labor, which is the outcome of competition. Thirdly, the labor theory of value doesn’t ignore the impact of demand, as some economists say. When Marx speaks of socially necessary labor, he is referring to the fact that the labor expended to produce a commodity counts only in respect to the ability of the commodity to find demand, purchasing power. The final test of how much labor expended creates value is in the market place where commodities compete against each other.

I'm not taking issue with the theory, I'm asking why you think Marx presented it the way he did. You said Marx was unaware of "all the economics that came after him". My point is that the letter to Kugelmann proves that the "chatter about the need to prove the concept of value" goes back all the way to the publication of Vol. 1; it's not something that emerged with the rise of marginalism and only gained traction after Marx's death. So I asked you if you believed that during the decade or so that Marx spent writing Vol. 1 there was no "chatter about the need to prove the concept of value" (or that at least the theoretical assumptions that would lead to this "chatter" weren't well established within bourgeois economics), and that these criticisms sprang into existence immediately upon its publication. If you don't believe that (and you probably don't), then why, to return to my initial question, do you believe Marx chose to present the opening chapters in purely logical terms? Was there any practical, pedagogical reason for it? Or do you think his intellectual vanity and literary ambitions got the better of him? Why doesn't Vol. 1 begin with the propositions that "any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish" and that "the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour"? Why not this more grounded, immediately transparent argument, instead of simply the dubious, spurious logical argument left to stand on its own? Marx's contention that this is something "every child knows" looks pretty absurd after a century-and-a-half of confusion among Marxists, bourgeois economists and laypeople alike.

Interesting questions. I think we need to keep two things in mind-- first, that the work is a critiqueof political economy. The foremost political economists, that is to say, exponents of capital, were (and still are) Smith and Ricardo. Both, each, had, or had constructed a labor theory of value, Smith in moving beyond the Physiocrats; Ricardo in moving beyond Smith. To that extent a labor theory of value wasn't the point of contention...which leads us to the second point.

The point of contention is/was how/why labor is expressed as a commodity, as value creating; how the condition of labor generates value. We are never far from either or both of two points with Marx-- the substance of history, and the reproduction of classes. I think that's what his direction is in Capital-- to take us to the point where the capital, value, relation is a specific, transient relation, and the "laws" of the bourgeois economy are nothing but the reproduction of that relation between classes

Mmm. Depends what you mean by "foremost" here. If you mean as judged by the merits of their attempts at internal rigour and clarification, then that was certainly Marx's judgement. But if you mean "foremost" in terms of actual impact on the dominant discourse of political economy of the time, then Ricardo was actually very little directly read. By far the "foremost", in the latter sense, of the Victorian political economists of the second half of the 19th C, would be J. S. Mill's Principles.of Political Economy. In answer to 44's question, scepticism or doubt about the classical "labour theory of value" was already in public circulation in the 1820s. To answer the question of why is chapter 1 written in this abstruse Hegelian form, I would say that it's not intellectual vanity or hubris, but a genuine attempt by Marx to clarify the hugely confused questions around value, particularly caused by lumping different levels of analysis (levels of abstraction) into the same pot. To give you some idea of the then "conventional" alternative, here is J.S. Mill's Principles, Book III (Exchange) where, after having divided the economy into separate spheres of Production (Book I) and Distribution* (Book II), and claiming no necessary connection between the two, he then opens the question of exchange with this gem on value:

Gutenburg: J. S. Mill Principles

You see the problem? Compared to the above, the logical progression from relative form, expanded relative form and then to the general form - and the drawing of attention to how the general form is different from the expanded relative form, not only quantitatively, but qualitatively - is a much clearer starting point for dissecting the hopeless confusion and entanglement of the above.

* As a reponse to Thompson's challenge over Distribution in the Inquiry, as it happens. Hence all the stuff about socialism and communism at the start of Book II.

I meant as Marx evaluated political economists.

Ocelot, the comparison with Mill was very useful, thanks for that. On the other hand, Ricardo's 1st chapter is very clear and includes important caveats, like the one where he says we're dealing with mass-produced commodities and not works of art etc. (One could argue that Marx makes the same point by requiring us to treat the commodity as an "average exemplar" of its kind, but it's buried beneath a lot of other stuff and not exactly crystal clear – and of course many people miss it and go on to criticize Marx using examples like artworks or vintage baseball cards.)

Hmm. On checking, the version of Mill's Principles that Gutenburg offers is in fact an abridged version produced as a textbook for the US college market in 1885. The non-abridged version at econlib is probably a better resource for anyone with an interest. Having said that, that version is based on the 1870 edition, the last one Mill prepared before his death - there were 7 editions from 1848 to 1870 (inclusive), so presumably Marx was using an earlier version.

For instance, this passage is excluded from the abridged version above (after second to last sentence quoted, ending "...similar depressing cause".

You can almost see (albeit retrospectively, i.e. anachronistically) a groping towards a distinction between the relative form and the general form - a distinction Mill, of course, never fully makes.

44 writes:

If you find Marx's argument “dubious, spurious,” perhaps you could say what argument that is? Or, if you agree with it, say it in other words?

Marx does not present the opening chapters of Capital in “purely logical terms.” There is nothing Hegelian or abstract about use-value and exchange-value. These categories express something real about the real world. Marx was not interested in proving things that exist in reality. He starts his analysis from simple, observable facts about economic life. The reason Marx has been so misunderstood is not because his thinking was so complicated; it is certainly difficult, but that is because what he is trying to do is so theoretically ambitious. And if his arguments are difficult, the results are quite clear, and have not been lost on bourgeois economics. Bourgeois economists have a clear interest in misinterpreting (and misrepresenting) Marx’s arguments by assuming the opposite of what Marx said. Leftists also read Marx in a false way: they think the labor theory of value is important because it shows that labor is important and should be better treated. But Marx was not arguing for fair wages, but to explain what a terrible role labor plays in producing value. He was not making a moral critique of capitalism. This unites the “Marxists” with his bourgeois critics: one makes a moral criticism of capitalism, the other a moral justification of capitalism.

So we'd have to say that by Marx's own standards, which he claims were primarily pedagogical (and even populist), his critique of political economy was a colossal failure.

But isn't this in contradiction to the fact that Ricardian theory had been under attack for decades and the marginalist revolution was already kicking up? That is, the drive to develop a coherent theoretical perspective that didn't give the impression of 'privileging' labour was well underway when Marx was working on Capital, and while he does engage with the likes of Senior and Say, he never decisively engages with this trend the way he does in the letter to Kugelmann.

Well, you're sort of just ignoring my question now and going on about stuff I haven't even taken issue with.

The dubious argument I referred to was Marx's claim that the only thing heterogeneous use-values have in common is that they are products of labour. His critics are right: the statement is false. And the way the argument is presented in Vol. 1, this step in the logical sequence is crucial, it stands alone, practically begging to be rejected, and it's not at all surprising that nearly everyone for 150 years has stopped and thought, "Hang on..." And it seems from that moment whether one decides to give him the benefit of the doubt or reject his whole crackpot theory comes down to a matter of personal inclination. People don't read Marx casually or indifferently - mostly they read him wanting him to be right or wanting him to be wrong. His mode of presentation certainly hasn't helped the former.

You're right of course, he doesn't present the argument in "purely logical" terms, more precisely he presents it as a highly abstract form-analysis (and use-value and exchange-value are certainly highly abstract categories). What I meant by "purely logical" was that there is no historical dimension to the analysis - and that's precisely what I've been asking: why not? That is, if the concern that the book be "accessible to the working class" is in fact the "consideration which to [Marx] outweighs everything else." The better introductions and walkthroughs (like Heinrich's) start with talk of precapitalist societies, they talk about the origin of capitalism, and so on, because it's much more intuitively understandable.

You initially tried to answer my question by appealing to Marx's unawareness of "all the economics that came after him". I notice you clipped my comment from the quote. As Ocelot mentioned, the 'labour theory of value' (a tautology that originated among bourgeois economists, I'm pretty sure, as a means to conflate two senses of the word 'value') was under attack immediately upon the emergence of the organised labour movement in the 1820s - which is why Marx said that political economy as a science had become impossible by 1830, success as an economist stopped being judged in scientific terms, and economists became "hired prize-fighters". Vol. 1 was published right at the dawn of the marginalist revolution, right as the 40-year crisis in political economy was resolving itself, right between Jevons' and Menger's contributions.

To put this all another way: how did it happen that a private letter to Dr Kugelmann became such a pivotol piece of Marxology? If this content is so important, why isn't it in Capital? And I mean in that concentrated sense, not in the diffuse sense of being exploded into the entirety of the analysis at every level throughout.

People may be interested in Paul Cockshott's critique of Michael Heinrich which is based in part on the interpretation of the letter to Kugelmann. Just published here: http://spiritofcontradiction.eu/paul-cockshott/2013/02/15/new-age-marxism

Thanks for that Ocelot, very helpful. Why do you think Marx doesn't engage with the controversy around value? (Last question in the above post.)

44 wrote:

No, that is not what Marx says in the passage you are referring to. He is not talking about use values, which are all different, but exchange value; and he is talking about abstract labor, which is something else entirely than the labor that creates use value:

Marx not the idiot that the "marginalist revolution" would make him out to be. He was well aware that nature and science were components of use values. In his “Critique of the Gotha Programme” he explicitly criticized the early Social Democrats for praising the labor of the working class: “Labor is not the source of all wealth” – just as important are nature and the state of science and technology. “The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor,” as they are the beneficiaries of the labor that creates value.

Correct, but the point still stands. The argument that the only property of commodities left in common once you abstract from use-value (i.e., from the material features or the "body" of the commodity, Warenkörper) is that they are "products of (abstract) labor" is simply invalid. Like I said, I don't think it really matters at that point, because it's not supposed ot be a "proof" of value, but the argument itself is not a valid argument. In other words, there are other "non-physical" (not related to the "body" of the commodity) features that commodities have in common.

The precise sentence I'm referring to is this:

"If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour."

This statement is false, and it has been targeted as an obvious fallacy for 150 years, most famously by Bohm-Bawerk, but see the quotes from 'sociological Marxist' Erik Olin Wright on the previous page.

Marx constantly vacillates between two senses of the word 'use-value'; sometimes the commodity is a use-value, and sometimes it has a use-value. Even in that passage, in the same sentence: "If we make abstraction from its [the product's] use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product [it] a use value". So blame Marx or blame the translations (I don't speak German), but yes, that is exactly what Marx says in that passage. The only property that is common to heterogeneous use-values is that they are products of labour.

Leaving out of consideration the particular "use-values of commodities" is the exact same thing as finding the common property of heterogeneous "use-values as commodities": making abstraction from their use-values (useful qualities). In other words, making abstraction from the use-values of use-values (the usefulness of particular commodities).

To your last paragraph, once again, you're going on about stuff I haven't even taken issue with. Again: I'm not taking issue with the theory, I'm asking why you think Marx presented it the way he did. But you seem to be even less interested in answering my question than I am in arguing obtuse Marxological semantics with you.

Marx’s argument hasn’t been well understood. I’ll try to sketch it:

Marx (along with the classical political economists) noticed that exchange occurs with certain regularities, in patterns. What is the content that regulates the exchanges over time? What determines it? Marx showed it can’t be use value. What does use value mean? It satisfies a need. A car and a hamburger are both use values, but their special qualities satisfy different purposes. Their use values can’t be compared because they satisfy desires that are qualitatively different. The need for a hamburger is different than the need for a car. It doesn’t make any sense to quantitatively compare them: does the hamburger satisfy desire more or less than a car? Is a car less satisfying of a desire than a hamburger – no, because different purposes are satisfied by them. Marx says: so what is common to them can’t be their use values. They differ according to the wants and needs they satisfy. There’s just no such thing as utility in the abstract (as Jevons said – such nonsense never even occurred to Marx).

If use-value doesn’t explain exchange ratios, because they just have different features, they do all have expended labor. But what kind of labor? The kind of labor that creates exchange value can’t be concrete because the labor producing a car and the labor producing a hamburger are qualitatively different. So the exchange of commodities has something to do with labor that abstracts from the concrete form of the labor: time. Labor time is the substance of the exchange ratio. This was common sense to Ricardo and Smith. This understanding that exchange takes place around labor hours was not a big issue; that’s why Marx doesn’t go into it. It takes more time to produce this than that. This is the substance that is represented in a certain way in value.

But here’s where it gets interesting. Marx used the theory in a different way than Smith and Ricardo: the labor theory of value is correct, but what kind of labor is this? It’s labor in which the quantity of labor defines the value of the product, so working more and more creates more and more wealth. Wouldn’t it be more rational if the measure of wealth was disposable time? Or the use value provided by the labor? Marx asked: what kind of wealth is it where the expansion of more and more labor creates wealth? Where work augments wealth according to the degree of toil that ruins the health and life of the worker?

Then Marx explains: if this is the case, the basis of this type of wealth is poverty. If working harder and harder is the substance of wealth, then this is only explainable if those who work and those who benefit from the work are separate. If an independent producer works all day, then at a certain point he says: enough, more work doesn’t make sense. He would stop working, more time spent working would just wear him out and he already has enough to consume. A wealth that is based on expanding hours and intensity of labor only makes sense if there’s a separation between the workers and those who benefit from it because they own the product of labor. Marx showed that a form of wealth based on working harder and more intensely doesn’t make sense without poverty and exploitation. That’s the logical conclusion of the labor theory of value.

Its simple why bourgeois economists took issue with this. They asked: if value is created by labor, what is the justification for profit and rent? Bohm-Bawerk even said in a famous quote: we have to come up with an alternative “subjective theory of value” (one that favors subjective evaluations of consumers) because Marx turned the labor theory of value into a weapon against capitalism.

Jura wrote:

Do you really think that what makes a Mercedes Benz and sneakers exchange in certain ratios is that they both have expended calories in them? That nations compete by trying to get calories expended on their territory? That China rises in the world market because it produces things with calories in them? That’s quite a theory!

44 wrote:

Your question is dishonest. Instead of saying you don’t understand what Marx was doing with the labor theory of value or that you aren’t convinced by it, you say Marx did something wrong. “Wouldn’t it have been better if Marx wrote it dfferently” – as if you knew what Marx had to say.

Marx said that if people don’t understand the substance of a matter it doesn’t help to tell them stories about it. And you will actually find plenty of historical material in Capital if that is what you are looking for – eg, the history of the working day is a perfect illustration of the creation of value by labor. But ok, if you are still unsatisfied, how would you develop the theory by referring to history?

And you accuse Marx of being confusing?

Do you see what you did there?

I'll try one last time. We are looking for a predicate that any two commodities have in common which is not a physical property. Marx's says it's "being a product of labor". But there are other predicates that commodities have in common which at the same time have nothing to do with use-value. So strictly speaking, Marx's argument that leaps straight to abstract labor is invalid. He could as well have identified one of the other predicates.

Now, any argument can be used to various different purposes. Had the purpose of that argument been to prove that the substance of value cannot be anything but abstract labor, or had it been the only single justification of that fact in Capital, then Marx's project would have been a colossal failure. Since the purpose of the argument hadn't been that, it's not such a big problem. In fact, it's not a problem for the theory at all. However, it does make the readers of Capital, especially those not familiar with the state of political economy as a discipline in the 19th century, confused. And it gives Marx's critics something to work with (although, like I said, these criticisms can be done away with in three sentences).

Maybe the problem is with the term "invalid argument". It doesn't mean "bad", at least not in logic. It means "the conclusion is not entailed in the premises", i.e. there may be a case where the premises are all true and the conclusion is false. Or if you wish, substitute "non-deductive" for "invalid". Marx makes a non-deductive argument there. Such an argument may have a true conclusion, even though the conclusion is not entailed in the premises.

The question is not what I think, but what are the possible conclusions of the argument. In absence of other considerations, i.e., if you only work with the premises that Marx uses in the first one or two pages of Capital where he makes the argument, "being a product of human labor" is just as good a candidate as "being subject to supply and demand", "being scarce", "being an object of human intentionality", "being the result of calories expenditure".

Of course, there are strong reasons for rejecting all these other candidates, but Marx does not state these reasons at the beginning. In other words, you have to read all of Capital to see why only "abstract labor" makes sense as the substance of value. That's why the argument cannot be taken (and wasn't meant) as a "proof" of value. But that does not make it a valid deductive argument.

The question is why did Marx present the argument as he did, and I think the answer is clearly for "political reasons,'' for reasons of class. In exposing the relative, expanded, general forms of the world of commodities his goal is to present capital as a specific historical organization of labor, without, at the outset, giving a historical analysis of the source, causes, evolution of that specific relation of labor to the conditions of labor.

Marx's identification of the commonality to commodities is meant to be the identification of the relation that creates exchange. Now we can say that commodities share certain characteristics other than labor-- i.e. energy; but energy is not an unmediated organizing principle of society, no more than any other aspect of nature is an unmediated organizing principle. The mediation is labor, in its social expression, that is to say in its objectified condition... in its property.

Marx thinks he has a "shortcut" to apprehending that critical relation simply in stating that the exchangeability of commodities in capitalist society is the result of labor that is itself a commodity, avoiding thus the necessity, for several chapters, of explaining the process by which labor is forced to present itself as a commodity [which, oddly enough, kind of parallels what he criticizes the classical political economists for avoiding-- the fact that they never question why, how it is, that labor presents itself as a value in exchange for the laborer, and a use value for the capitalist]. Marx thinks he will do this by "logic" so to speak, rather than by historical materialism, thinking in a way that ontology recapitulates phylogeny.

I personally find this a bit odd, since it is exactly that exploration, explication, and expansion of the process and ramifications of dispossession in all its iterations that so pervades, and resonates, throughout his Economic Manuscripts 1857-1864-- including of course, the Grundrisse.

Don't know if that satisfies RC or 44 or Jura.... it's just my take on why the presentation is as it is informed, I'm sure, by the fact that I'm in the middle of re-reading the Grundrisse.

RC, I don't know why I'm bothering to respond to you considering how disingenuous and obtuse you're being, clipping my posts so that you can cause me to repeat myself endlessly.

I do understand it and I am convinced by it, as I have said several times.

But *gasp* - I say Marx did something wrong? Karl Heinrich Marx??

You're obviously a cultist who can't countenance that idea - not even that he did something theoretically wrong, but pedagogically.

Here's a fact for you, repeated for the dozenth time: Marx stated that his primary consideration in writing Capital, the concern that outweighed everything else, was that it be accessible to the working class. Instead, the very first chapter of Capital has caused not only workers and laypeople, but generations of Marxists, bourgeois economists, philosophers, and so on, to totally fail to understand him - so much so that it has become necessary for an obscure personal letter that Marx wrote to Dr Kugelmann to be elevated to the status of key piece of the Marxological puzzle, which many popularisers find indispensible in explaining Marx's theory.

Given this fact, surely it would have been wiser to include these premises in Capital in the direct and concentrated way in which they appear in the letter, if indeed Marx's concerns were what he said they were.

He also said the concern that outweighed everything else was educating workers.

And this is beside the point anyway - the point is that the presentation of the real premises in the letter to Kugelmann has helped many people to understand wtf is going on at the beginning of Capital. So if you think that's what Marx meant by "stories" then there's another thing he was wrong about, because telling that particular "story" has helped, which is why it pops up so frequently in introductions and walkthroughs.

I have been exclusively talking about the opening chapter.

Similarly to Heinrich - precapitalist societies, origin of capitalism, denaturalization of existing social relations, etc. As I've said, and as many writers of guides and walkthroughs tend to do, because, as I've said, it's much more intuitively comprehsnible than an abstract form-analysis.

Yes, I do, because his vacillation between the two senses of the word potentially, but never actually, results in such a phrase.

This was what caused you to misunderstand my other post.

I demonstrated that this vacillation takes place in the space of a single sentence. That was in a part of my post that you conveniently clipped. Notice how I've responded to all of the content of your post despite that fact that it has required me to do nothing but repeat myself.

Hello??

This is how you answered me at first: you said Marx wasn't aware of all the economics that would come after him, but (and at this point I'm just going to start quoting myself) "Ricardian theory had been under attack for decades and the marginalist revolution was already kicking up. That is, the drive to develop a coherent theoretical perspective that didn't give the impression of 'privileging' labour was well underway when Marx was working on Capital, and while he does engage with the likes of Senior and Say, he never decisively engages with this trend the way he does in the letter to Kugelmann."

"The letter to Kugelmann proves that the "chatter about the need to prove the concept of value" goes back all the way to the publication of Vol. 1; it's not something that emerged with the rise of marginalism and only gained traction after Marx's death. So I asked you if you believed that during the decade or so that Marx spent writing Vol. 1 there was no "chatter about the need to prove the concept of value" (or that at least the theoretical assumptions that would lead to this "chatter" weren't well established within bourgeois economics), and that these criticisms sprang into existence immediately upon its publication. If you don't believe that (and you probably don't), then why, to return to my initial question, do you believe Marx chose to present the opening chapters in purely logical terms? Was there any practical, pedagogical reason for it? Or do you think his intellectual vanity and literary ambitions got the better of him? Why doesn't Vol. 1 begin with the propositions that "any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish" and that "the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour"? Why not this more grounded, immediately transparent argument, instead of simply the dubious, spurious logical argument left to stand on its own? Marx's contention that this is something "every child knows" looks pretty absurd after a century-and-a-half of confusion among Marxists, bourgeois economists and laypeople alike."

Perhaps now that I've clarified what exactly I meant by the two bolded phrases (the only parts of this you responded to), you'd answer the question. Or perhaps not.

Thanks to Jura, Ocelot and Artesian for the thoughtful responses.

I tend to agree that there are good philosophical and/or scientific reasons for proceeding in the way that he does, but I honestly can see no good pedagogical reason for it, which conflicts with Marx's own claim about his primary motivation being pedagogical.

I don't know if RC speaks to normal people about capitalism or only to the 'converted', but I know I've never begun an attempted explanation of what capitalism is and how it functions with an abstract form-analysis. Usually I start by trying to explain that wage-labour is exploitation, and I usually begin with a comparison to feudalism, where the worker directly hands over the surplus product of his labour to his lord, get them to concur that this is class exploitation, and continue from there onto the distinction between necessary labour and surplus labour, often explained in terms of the origins of the first class societies, the genesis of surplus labour. These kinds of historical and anthropological frameworks are what most helped me to understand value theory.

I agree. As a a "tutorial" I can think of no more difficult way to introduce the critique of capital than the path Marx chose. And I think he might have chose that path because he "had the good fortune" to come across Hegel's Science of Logic when "sitting down" to write volume 1, which baffles me a bit, since the Economic Manuscripts, which include drafts for Capital, are all about the conflict between labor, and the conditions of labor, that condition being objectified labor, which objectified labor only exists as alienated labor, making that the focus rather than the "secret" to the commodity.

I don't want to argue about Hegel, but would you present the Science of Logic as an introductory teaching tool? Would you recommend to anyone that he or she study Hegel before studying Marx? I know I couldn't make sense of Hegel until I had read Marx, but that's probably my personal problem since I'm still not sure I make sense out of Hegel even now.

Anyway, I think it's important to struggle through the first three chapters, but I am more convinced than ever that the key to understanding is in........the Economic Manuscripts, the Grundrisse, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

Marx always refers to the immanent critique of capital, and quite simply that immanent critique, like all the laws of motion of capital, originates, and is reproduced, in the organization of labor-power as a commodity. The law of value, the laws of motion of capital, are the relations between classes.

I'd highly recommend reading Marx's Concept of Man by Erich Fromm if you don't want to read all the way through capital. The first 81 pages go over misconceptions on him then the rest of the book is abridged parts of his economic manuscripts. Its a very good, well-written and concise book.

nvmnd

I am just responding to a recent post by 44; I have not been following this one.

If we are talking seriously about this subject, then there is no such thing as scientific proof.

(You can only prove things in mathematics, or as some might contend ‘logic’)

What you have is the scientific; method, hypotheses, theories and evidence.

Theories are not proved they are tested.*

Karl does not invent the so called ‘labour theory of value’ he takes it as he finds it already well developed, in a crude form, by say Benjamin Franklin and Adam Smith.

And recognising, if you like, that that the ‘Law of value’ was running into trouble as the system of ‘simple commodity exchange’ passed ‘to exchange between capital and wage-labour’; and ‘that some flaw had emerged’.

He then in chapter one scrutinises and reappraises the original hypothesis or theory to reformulate it on a more solid ‘logical’ basis in order to later test or verify it; which is the subject matter of the vast majority of the book(s).

The grandiose reformulation of the original theory being, put simply, that;

As ‘all’ things that are bought are use-values that required labour time to produce them, and are commodities etc.

And labour power or waged labour is bought.

‘Therefore’ labour power as well, is a use value that required labour time to produce it and is also a commodity.

And just as human labour power can produce more (surplus value and product) than it needs by working longer than necessary.

Labour power bought as a commodity can produce surplus value and product.

The synopsis of the opening chapters of volume one could be;

Theories of Surplus Value, Marx 1861-3 [Chapter III] Adam Smith

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch03.htm

On the logic of the commensurability thing; science assumes that when there is some kind of equivalence or exchange between two completely different things.

Lets say a 400g object falling one metre being used to raise the temperature of one milli-litre of water by one degree Celsius.

They say that that is a manifestation of an exchange of an immanent property ,‘energy’, from one to the other.

And that temperature and moving objects are manifestations of some other identical or common third immanent property ie ‘energy’.

Even though that is a sort of ‘abstraction’ as they don’t know what energy is.

Merely denominating the Joule as the universal equivalent and gold SI standard.

However they ‘do’ know why a bag of sugar weighs the same as a KG of iron ie because they both contain the same amount of baryonic matter (the sum total of neutrons and protons)

Iron and sugar, as far as ‘weight’ is concerned, were just different manifestations of and reducible to, a common immanent ‘third’ thing.

Although things are obviously moving along on that.

That is just a demonstration of the scientific method and approach of dealing with ‘equivalences’.

Thus to compare;

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm

The attraction of the labour theory of value which is basically that the ‘price’ or value of something depends on how much time/human effort it takes to make it is that it is intuitively obvious.

Whatever marginal utility is; it is subjective, relative and not quantifiable as an immanent reducible common ‘third’; therefore not scientific.

Other calorific ideas like the corn theory of value were better as they would be.

Because when workers could live on bread alone you could make an equivalence between bread and labour power.

According to that theory all surplus value originated from the ability of agricultural workers to produce more food than they consumed themselves.

But it hasn’t stood the test of time.

I thought that Eugen Böhm-Bawerk founded the Austrian school a bit late for Karl to criticise it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_B%C3%B6hm_von_Bawerk

Although Rudolf Hilferding did in 1904;

http://www.marxists.org/archive/hilferding/1904/criticism/index.htm

Karl argued with Ricardo mainly in his ‘Theories of Surplus value’ eg

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch15.htm

I agree that the feudal example of extraction of surplus value is so tangible and palpable that it could have been used early on. But it does fall outside the orbit and subject of commodity exchange.

Chapter 47. Genesis of Capitalist Ground-Rent

II. Labour rent

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

The Aristotle stuff on the commensurability of beds and houses and in chapter one is available below.

http://www.virtuescience.com/ethics5.html

Aristotle wrote some other interesting stuff on economics in his ‘Politics’ I think.

*[the scientific method begins with making scientific observations on relationships between things, and causes and effects etc.

Then proposing a hypothesis to explain it; possibly also based on prior scientific knowledge.

Then the new hypothesis is tested to see if is generally or universally applicable to the subject matter from which it was derived.

If so it might it might be promoted to a theory.

And if you are fortunate the theory itself will have accidental implications in other apparently unconnected areas of scientific observation.

Which may verify or falsify the original theory and be part of a process of further understanding.

A classic example being the falsified ‘theory’ of the Kelvin–Helmholtz mechanism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin%E2%80%93Helmholtz_mechanism

If you want a readable and lucid and original introduction to marginal utility you can’t do much better I think than

The Theory of Political Economy; Jevons, William Stanley (1835-1882)

http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Jevons/jvnPECover.html

Its is 'contemporary' to Das Capital but pre dates capital in English, can’t remember Jevons mentioning Marx although Engels makes some passing references to Menger and Jevons and brackets them or their followers with ‘Fabian socialists’

The so called Austrian School really goes from Jevons to Carl Menger to Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk.

Karl deals with all the essential points raised by Jevons especially in Volume III which Jevons could not be aware of.

I think it is well worth a read just because it lays out the ideas Karl addresses and criticizes more lucidly than Karl does himself.

Re; What Was The Purpose(s) Of Marx's Capital?