working link: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00422620/document
Kolja Lindner. The German Debate on the Monetary Theory of Value: Considerations on Jan Hoff’s Kritik der Klassischen Politischen Okonomie. Science & Society, 2008, 72 (4), pp.402-414.
Lindner
Engels takes as his premise the notion that there was a historical period in which money and commodities existed without capital: 'the Marxian law of value holds generally, as far as economic laws are valid at all, for the whole period of simple commodity production–that is, up to the time when the latter suffers a modification through the appearance of the capitalist form of production' (ibid.). The political consequence of this dissolution of the conceptual bond between commodities, money, and capital is that Engels takes simple commodity production as the model for not only the pre-capitalist, but also the post-capitalist period.
Recognising the law of value in SCP doesn't lead to the political position of market socialism. Diquattro is an example of a market socialist who firmly rejects the law of value in SCP. Not only that, but it seems he even buttresses his market socialism precisely by rejecting the law of value in SCP, characterising it instead as a "moral economy":
The Labor Theory of Value and Simple Commodity Production. Arthur Diquattro. Science & Society Vol. 71, No. 4 (Oct., 2007), pp. 455-483.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40404443?seq=1#fndtn-page_scan_tab_contents
(And of course Engels himself wasn't a market socialist.)
--
For some references to the Italian debate en passant, see this article originally published in 1984 (taking the anti-Engels position, and the author probably by that time already defined himself not as a Marxist):
MARCELLO MESSORI
The Theory of Value Without Commodity Money? Preliminary Considerations on Marx's Analysis of Money https://www.jstor.org/stable/40470701
The political consequence of this dissolution of the conceptual bond between commodities, money, and capital is that Engels takes simple commodity production as the model for not only the pre-capitalist, but also the post-capitalist period. In Anti-Dühring, he affirms that society, too, from the moment it 'enters into possession of the means of production and uses them in direct association for production' (Engels, Anti-Dühring), must know 'how much labour each article of consumption requires for its production' (ibid.). In short, the political goal is the realization, at last, of freedom and equality, that is to say, equal exchange. The sole difference is that, for Engels, equal exchange will not be based on private property.
Anti-Dühring by Frederick Engels 1877
Engels' Notes
[Referring to what he said and anti exchange- which was Duhring’s neo Proudhonist position]
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
What that means is that in communism we will still wish to minimise the amount of labour time required to produce a ‘useful effects’.
stuff
As we will be faced with an array of options or possibilities to produce something often with multiple potential components produced in different ways it will be necessary to calculate the amounts of labour time required using the different options.
In order to make the optimal decision of the production process etc.
Calculating the amounts of labour time required is calculating, albeit probably approximately, value.
Capital Vol. III Part VII
Revenues and their Sources
Chapter 49. Concerning the Analysis of the Process of Production
Secondly, after the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, but still retaining social production, the determination of value continues to prevail in the sense that the regulation of labour-time and the distribution of social labour among the various production groups, ultimately the book-keeping encompassing all this, become more essential than ever.
If in free access communism and there is Canadian Ice wine and glugging industrially mass produced plonk in a bottle on the shelves.
Which do I choose if they both taste the same to me and get you pissed?
The one that takes 2 hours to produce or the one that takes 10 minutes?
There is nothing more bourgeois than not thinking or caring at all about how much effort it takes to make something (its value) that you want to consume and only how much you have to pay for it.
And naturally what follows is; if you don’t have pay you don’t have care about anything at all including its 'value'.
I'm not sure who, if anyone, first claimed that SCP does not even exist. I think the argument of the "anti-traditional marxists" was just about Marx's method in Capital, eg:[quote=Rubin ]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. [/quote] (also quoted by Perlman in his introduction)
But from the same chapter it is clear that Rubin thinks SCP is a real thing:
In the simple commodity economy, the value of commodities is expressed by the formula: C = c + (v + m).1
The craftsman subtracts the value of the means of production which he used, namely c, from the value of the finished product, and the rest (v + m), which he added by his labor, is spent partly for his own and his family's subsistence goods (v) and the remainder represents a fund for the expansion of consumption or production (m).
craftsmen are not some abstraction...
The following passage leaves no doubt that Rubin believed that SCP was real historically and that it transitioned into capitalism:
Marx reaches the same conclusion in a different way. He uses the method of comparison which he often uses to explain the characteristic properties of the capitalist economy. In the given problem, the question of the average rate of profit, he compares the developed capitalist economy to 1) a simple commodity economy, and 2) an embryonic or hypothetical capitalist economy, which differs from developed capitalism by the absence of competition among capitals in different spheres of production, i.e., each capital is fixed within a given sphere of production.
Diagram No. 2 is not a picture of an embryonic capitalism which existed in history, but a hypothetical theoretical schema derived from Diagram 1 (simple commodity economy) by means of a methodological procedure which consists of changing only one condition of the schema, all other conditions remaining the same. In schema No. 2, compared to No. 1, only one condition is changed. It is supposed that the economy is not run by petty commodity producers but by capitalists.
....
In our opinion, the transformation of the intermediate logical link, schema 2, into a picture of an economy which existed in history as a transition from simple commodity production to developed capitalist production, is erroneous.
So while Rubin claims Diagram 2 was just a theoretical scheme of Marx, he also says that it was derived from Diagram 1 (simple commodity economy), ie something real.
1C means the value of the commodity; c = constant capital; v = variable capital; k = the whole capital; m = surplus value; m' = rate of surplus value, p = profit; p' = rate of profit. The categories c, v, and m are relevant only when they are applied to the capitalist economy. We use these categories in a conditional sense when we apply them to a simple commodity economy.
Some time ago on the Christianity thread Khawaga claimed that there can be no evidence for simple commodity production. I basically replied that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; an ordinary peasant selling his surplus produce would unlikely leave an archeological trace, unlike say market transactions of the big and mighty (kings etc. recorded in histories).
A simple commodity producer is someone who owns his means of production (or land) and who sells part of his produce on the market (this includes barter).
I gathered quotes here that attempt to show that simple commodity production was quite widespread, perhaps even dominant, in Europe for 1500 years, except possibly for a couple of Medieval centuries, up to the beginning of the modern time.
I will select some highlights:
Even when economies "revert to barter," as Europe was said to do in the Middle Ages, they don't actually abandon the use of money. They just abandon the use of cash. In the Middle Ages, for instance, everyone continued to assess the value of tools and livestock in the old Roman currency, even if the coins themselves had ceased to circulate.
Banaji points to [Dopsch, who] never accepted the theory of a reversion to natural economy in the third century which then supposedly dominated the whole subsequent epoch till well into the Middle Ages.
[One popular view is] that medieval feudalism emerged as a fully formed system out of the villas of the Roman Empire as aristocrats settled peasants on their land as ‘colloni’ under their control. [Wickham] shows that, although the colloni existed, in many regions they were a minority among free ‘allodial’ peasants. It was not until half a millennium after the collapse of the empire that feudal exploitation became so widespread as to be near-universal. There was no simple continuity between what existed in the 5th and the 11th centuries.
In the greater part of France, the Rhineland, the Low Countries, England, Italy, and Spain, free holdings, usually known as allods, ... formed so many inviolable and independent lordships in the midst of the seigniorial estates. By means of intimidation, threats, persuasion, force, the feudal powers set themselves to bring about their disappearance and transformation into fiefs. They were only partially successful in Germany, Spain, and Italy, but they succeeded more effectively in England, the Low Countries, and France.
In Germany free properties diminished in number in the Rhineland, but survived in a large measure in Switzerland, the Tyrol, Upper Bavaria, Swabia, Thuringia, Saxony, Frisia, and Holstein ... In Northern Spain, in the shelter of their wild valleys, the communities of the Pyrenees, groups of foresters and shepherds owned their own woods and pastures ... In the Basque provinces of Alava, Guipuzcoa, and Vizcaya, and even in Castile, whole territories, the behetrias, were peopled with freemen owning their own lands ... Even in other parts of Northern Spain groups of free landowners were to be met with. ... In Italy free proprietors also survived from place to place, particularly in Lombardy and Tuscany, where they were known as ahrimanns, and in the two Sicilies, where the Normans called them alleutiers, after the French fashion.
..
In other parts of the West, where feudalism was more strongly organized, or where the struggle was more difficult for the small proprietors, it usually ended to their disadvantage. In France the allod maintained itself sporadically in Normandy, where the legendary kingdom of Yvetot is a survival of it, and where burgage tenure (tenure en bourgage) seems to have been a form of free property, as was that of the vavasours. The same thing happened in Nivernais, Brittany, Auvergne, and, above all, in Aquitaine, Guienne, Gascony, Béarn, Bigorre, Dauphiné, and Languedoc, where the allodial owners sometimes formed themselves into defensive associations. In the Low Countries, Zeeland, Holland, Frisia, maritime Flanders, Campine, and Eastern Brabant, free property persisted by reason of the energy of their population of sailors and pioneers, and of their isolation in the midst of marsh and heath. But everywhere else victory went to feudal property, such a victory as was won in England after the Norman Conquest, which, indeed, only completed the work of the Anglo-Saxon period. In 1086, the Norman terrier, Domesday Book, recorded only 44,531 free landowners out of a total of 1,500,000 inhabitants in the Anglo-Norman kingdom. ...
As the thirteenth century approached, the absolute freedom of these small properties tended to disappear throughout the West, and the allodial estate tended to approximate either to noble land or to peasant land (terre roturière), to some of the obligations upon which it was already bound.
--
Prussia under the Teutonic Knights in the thirteenth and in the first half of the fourteenth centuries; .... [had] an exceptionally wide and early resort to the use of money ... The economic links between town and country in Prussia are well-authenticated and provide an explanation of how peasants could make money payments.
To every hide there belonged a house plot with yard
and garden in the village itself. These hides were distributed by lot
to the newly arrived Franconian (Rhenish Franconian and Dutch),
Saxon and Frisian colonists; in return the colonists had to render
very moderate, firmly fixed dues and services to the founder, i.e.
the knight or baron. The peasants were hereditary masters of
their hides as long as they performed these services.
... This was the average condition of the German peasants from the Elbe to
East Prussia and Silesia. And this condition was on the whole
considerably much better than that of west and south German
peasants at the time, who were already then engaged in a violent,
continually recurring struggle with the feudal lords for their old
hereditary rights
--
The late medieval social crisis, triggered by catastrophic population collapse resulting from the arrival of bubonic plague in the mid-fourteenth century, enabled the peasantries of the Mediterranean, Western European, English, and western German regions to shed (or, at any rate, greatly loosen) the legal bonds of medieval serfdom. Mostly this was a negotiated process, but in part it entailed peasant revolt (as in the late fifteenth-century Catalan revolt, or the German Peasant War of 1525 and its regional antecedents). Seigneurialism in these regions of Europe slowly turned into a landlordism that itself underwent commodification, falling frequently through sale or lease into non-noble bourgeois or gentry hands.
..
Outside the realm of central and east European commercialized manorialism – that is, in France, England, the Low Countries, western Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Spain, Italy, and the Balkans – the post-medieval family farmer possessed the advantage, ideal-typically, of having escaped servile status’s worst economic disabilities and vulnerabilities. In many cases he had attained a personal freedom upon which landlordly powers could impinge only through the exploitation of local monopolies, as of lower court jurisdiction, milling, or hunting. To village lands formerly held under longstanding customary, often servile, tenure, a regime of fixed money rents now commonly applied, whose long-term erosion through price and monetary inflation favoured tenants. Sometimes these farmers gained virtual allodial (or undivided) property rights in such holdings, as widely occurred in France and England, though in law they qualified only (though still favourably) as hereditary leaseholds. ...
[full-holding family farmers might be de facto freeholders. ... They ] were the dominant rural social group in Switzerland and Scandinavia. Across the countryside of western, central, and southern Germany, post-Reformation state policy sought to maintain such farms as the pillars of their fiscal systems, tolerating a residual and fossilized noble landlordism, but blocking the path to the bourgeois purchase of village farms. What proportion of Europe’s landed peasantry belonged to such a yeomanry or large-holding family farmer stratum on the eve of 1789? In East Elbian Europe, including Russia, probably half the villagers holding arable farms possessed full holdings yielding them and their dependents, in peaceful times, a socially acceptable standard of living and liquid assets or otherwise transferable surpluses (as of livestock and other farm capital) adequate to launch the next generation into marriage and house-holding. There were many village patriarchs who died with coin-filled strongboxes and long lists of debtors.
In Balkan Europe, heavy post-sixteenth century Ottoman taxation and local power struggles among elites, both Muslim and Christian, converted increasingly numerous village farmers into hard-pressed and vulnerable tenants of chiftlik (market-supplying) landlords. Yet surplus- harvesting full holders and independent, market-oriented pastoralists, alongside a politically protected frontier peasantry, were nonetheless numerous.
Other past opponents here of the notion of simple commodity production like Ocelot, jura, Angelus Novus, or now perhaps Craftwork, are welcome to state if they revised their positions now (nothing wrong with that).
It seems like the essence of the debate is the relation between theory and history. Engels primary claim is that Marx's Capital is essentially history "stripped of the historical form and diverting chance occurrences." (Review of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) The article given at the start seems keen to emphasise the 'logical' development of Marx's categories, asserting that Engels' view of Marx's method, for example, implies some disconnect between commodity relationships and capital which engenders a notion of the possibility of some form of market socialism.
Now, obviously on the one hand this is a total fabrication of Engels' political outlook, and I think it's hilarious how groups who pride themselves on such close textual readings of Marx can be so cavalier whenever it comes to Engels, foisting all the evils of 20th century Marxism on the latter.
But what there is also no discussion of is the link between theory and history in Hegel's Logic. Hegel's Logic after all, presents us with a process of the development of philosophical concepts. And many of the stages of the development bear a striking resemblance to definite phases in the history of Western philosophy, resemblances which Hegel himself confirms.
To take a key example - the first volume on the 'Objective Logic' concludes with absolute substance, whose relational mode is necessity. This viewpoint of absolute substance bears a striking resemblance to the philosophy of Spinoza. But more than that, Hegel confirms in the preface to the second volume that it is essentially the doctrine of Spinoza, and that the sublation of that stage of the Logic and the transition to the stage of the Concept constitutes the true refutation of Spinozism.
This is because for Hegel, philosophy is not a collection of various opinions that people have about various broadly defined subject matters. It is the activity of Thought with a capital t. Philosophers appear as merely the vehicles for the inner activity of the absolute Spirit. And the content of philosophy itself as expressed in the Logic, and the history of philosophy, are essentially the same thing - "the study of the history of Philosophy is the study of Philosophy itself" - only the former is the presentation of the inner essential relationship, while the latter is the presentation of external forms.
An extended quote in which Hegel brings out the essential identity between the Logic and the histor of philosophy:
Hegel
"Now in reference to this Idea, I maintain that the sequence in the systems of Philosophy in History is similar to the sequence in the logical deduction of the Notion [Begriff] - determinations in the Idea. I maintain that if the fundamental conceptions of the systems appearing in the history of Philosophy be entirely divested of what regards their outward form, their relation to the particular and the like, the various stages in the determination of the Idea are found in their logical Notion [Begriff]. Conversely in the logical progression taken for itself, there is, so far as its principal elements are concerned, the progression of historical manifestations; but it is necessary to have these pure Notions in order to know what the historical form contains."
I think all of this bears on Marx's Capital, because I think that Marx saw that Hegel's conception of an absolute Spirit which accomplished it's aims in spite of the real agents who actually constituted bore striking parallels with his own conception of capital as an 'automatic subject' which has a logic separate from that of the aims and intentions of the agents who constitute capitalist society. I think Marx saw his book as doing for alienated labour in the form of wage-labour what Hegel saw his Logic as doing for philosophical activity (a form of activity which Marx in his 1844 manuscripts also analyses as a form of alienated activity). I think the relation between theory and history in Capital can be understood in reference to the relation between theory and history in Hegel's Logic, and since the latter presents the logical development as history stripped of it's contingency I think - here the comes the corker - that Engels was right in his evaluation of Marx's method.
This is all pretty rushed thought, it's a brief summation of some things I've been pondering over the last few weeks without being able to fully work out.
My question for anyone that opposes the idea that Marx's development contains an element of historical progression is this:
(1) How do you conceive the relation between theory and history in Marx's Capital?
(2) How do you conceive the relation between theory and history in Hegel's Logic?
(3) How do you conceive the relation between the Logic and Capital, in other words, what constitutes the dialectical method, the nexus that links Marx and Hegel?
Other past opponents here of the notion of simple commodity production like Ocelot, jura, Angelus Novus, or now perhaps Craftwork, are welcome to state if they revised their positions now (nothing wrong with that).
My "position" is that the first three chapters of Capital on "simple circulation" contain something like a general theory of pure commodity production. And of course commodity production has existed for centuries. However, I don't think there's any evidence that there ever was a pre-capitalist mode of production based purely on commodity production ("based" in the sense that most use-values produced and consumed in those societies were produced for the market). In pre-capitalist societies, commodity production was embedded in other kinds of relations of production.
So while some elements of the theory of "simple circulation" may be useful in understanding some aspects of what was going on in pre-capitalist commodity production (the nature of exchange-value/money, fetishism, functions of money, debtor-creditor relations, the spontaneous emergence and expansion of impersonal relations etc.), I'm very sceptical towards the idea that value regulated economic life in pre-capitalist societies, or even that socially necessary labor time regulated commodity production in these societies. I just don't see the regulating "mechanism" – other than Engels' conscious calculation of averages, which I think is a silly idea that runs counter to the whole fetish-argument.
Edit: Maybe a good way of putting it is that the "pure" theory may partially correspond with commodity production in pre-capitalist societies (i.e., with certain aspects of it), but only fully corresponds with bourgeois society (or rather its "surface"). Any (empirical) claims on the validity of Marx's theory of value for precapitalist modes of production would have to be backed with data on prices as well as a description of the mechanism through which socially necessary labor time regulated these prices.
On the relation of theory and history, I don't think the question really is whether the progression of (some) categories in Capital corresponds roughly to historical development. I think the correspondences are numerous. One only need to look at the ordering of absolute and relative surplus value, or the chapters on cooperation, manufacture/divison of labor and machinery. I think the debate about the "logical-historical" method is much more specific than that and boils down to empirical claims about precapitalist societies (5000 years of value and all that) and the emergence of a general rate of profit.
Edit: But generally speaking, the idea that there's a neat chronological progression is misleading. Marx starts with a commodity without a price. There's no such thing (I think Marx even explicitly says that barter is not the exchange of commodities, and that the two things confront each other in barter as use-values, not as values). Marx didn't do this to mirror some chronological progression ("commodity – money – price-determined commodity"), but to solve certain conceptual problems (what is price, what is money etc.). Also, Marx quickly moves to industrial capital and only shows its historical origins in primitive accumulation much later. He only mentions the two preceding forms of capital, merchant's and usurer's capital, in passing and does not develop industrial capital out of the former two. Quite the contrary, the modern forms of the former two are later developed out of industrial capital (in Volume 3). There are more examples of the progression in Capital being the converse of the historical progression.
of course commodity production has existed for centuries. However, I don't think there's any evidence that there ever was a pre-capitalist mode of production based purely on commodity production ("based" in the sense that most use-values produced and consumed in those societies were produced for the market). In pre-capitalist societies, commodity production was embedded in other kinds of relations of production.
So if simple commodity production does not imply that all products are marketed (and all "traditional" Marxists themselves have stressed that it exists in combination with different modes of production), you have no problem to say that simple commodity production existed for centuries?
Jura
I'm very sceptical towards the idea that value regulated economic life in pre-capitalist societies, or even that socially necessary labor time regulated commodity production in these societies.
There shouldn't be an "or" in your sentence; the first claim (which nobody makes) is totally different from the second.
I just don't see the regulating "mechanism" – other than Engels' conscious calculation of averages, which I think is a silly idea that runs counter to the whole fetish-argument.
Here we come already to the substantial question, but which in a zeal (or panic) to rule-out any discussion of, has led some here to the adoption of the position that SCP never even existed. It's as if were one to admit that simple commodity production/exchange exists, this by itself already strongly implies that it is regulated by the law of value. Actually this collapse of two different questions into one makes sense, because according to what other logic would exchange in SCP occur than the law of value; was it perhaps rather based on pure chance much like marginal utility?
So if simple commodity production does not imply that all products are marketed (and all "traditional" Marxists themselves have stressed that it exists in combination with different modes of production), you have no problem to say that simple commodity production existed for centuries?
At this point I'm not even sure what it implies. Engels used the term to describe a precapitalist mode of production in which producers exchange commodities for prices which express, pretty directly (disregarding fluctuations in supply and demand), the labor time socially necessary to produce them. I don't think this existed, although I'm open to being persuaded by evidence. I'm sceptical, though, as I don't see how it would have worked (i.e., what is the mechanism).
Noa Rodman
There shouldn't be an "or" in your sentence; the first claim (which nobody makes) is totally different from the second.
And? "Or" is a connective that you can use to connect totally different claims. I think it actually works best with different claims, as opposed to "It will rain or it will rain".
Noa Rodman
It's as if were one to admit that simple commodity production/exchange exists, this by itself already strongly implies that it is regulated by the law of value. Actually this collapse of two different questions into one makes sense, because according to what other logic would exchange in SCP occur other than the law of value; was is perhaps rather based on pure chance much like marginal utility?
I'm not sure I understand the argument here. Are you taking a step back first ("well it's not necessary for the law of value to regulate it"), to then take a step forward ("it clearly must have been regulated by the law of value")?
Anyway, as I said, I think the first three chapters contain a theory of simple circulation. That theory makes certain claims about prices and values and their relations. To me, these claims only make sense when connected to some other claims in Volume 3. I don't see how these claims would work without certain mechanisms described in Volume 3. So if we take the theory of simple circulation as a whole, I don't see how it's empirically applicable to precapitalist societies (on it's own, the theory is incomplete even with relation to capitalism). I think the idea that it's a theory of some precapitalist society out of which capitalism developed is wrong. But as I said, I think you can take some elements from chapters 1-3 and use them to describe and explain what was going on in commodity production in precapitalist societies.
In a sense, socially necessary labor time always regulates production. Every society must produce and allocate time to production and there's always only so much time. But Marx's theory of value makes a much more specific claim that in capitalism, this necessary labor time takes the form of a property of things. This happens, ultimately, because people do certain things, like "invest" "capital" into different branches of production based on "profitability". At the bottom of all this, we eventually arrive at relations of production in which immediate producers are separated from means of production. I don't think people were supposed to do that and be like that in precapitalist commodity production as described by Engels. And in precapitalist commodity production as described by historians, there always seem to be these outside factors intervening, like price controls, impediments on mobility, a great deal of autarky (exchange of surpluses), habitual behavior, etc. Hence I don't see how the same sort of regulation through SNLT described by Marx for capitalism would work in precapitalist commodity production.
Noa, do.you also have evidence for a historical stages of simple reproduction? Anything Marx puts simple in front of is a logical construction he uses to progress in his presentation of categories; a didactic tool if you will.
Sure, commodities had to exist prior to capitalism, but from page one of Capital Marx is analyzing the capitalist MoP in a logical unfolding. There's a reason why the historical stuff is at the end, all of which is explained in the appendix (i.e. the immediate results stuff). It's also, as Zanthorus points out, heavily endebted to Hegel.
At this point I'm not even sure what it implies. Engels used the term to describe a precapitalist mode of production in which producers exchange commodities for prices which express, pretty directly (disregarding fluctuations in supply and demand), the labor time socially necessary to produce them. I don't think this existed, although I'm open to being persuaded by evidence. I'm sceptical, though, as I don't see how it would have worked (i.e., what is the mechanism)
The point was that it's not a MoP where all products are exchanged, and it always existed in combination with other MoPs (eg consumption for own use). You cannot seriously maintain that Engels perhaps implied that SCP was the only mode of production before capitalism and that it covered the whole of production. So again, you hurriedly move on to the different question of whether the law of value applied to it.
And? "Or" is a connective that you can use to connect totally different claims. I think it actually works best with different claims, as opposed to "It will rain or it will rain".
"It rained, or it did not rain" are claims about the same question. Your sentence was like: "It rained, or the rain season occurs in March-August".
I'm not sure I understand the argument here. Are you taking a step back first ("well it's not necessary for the law of value to regulate it"), to then take a step forward ("it clearly must have been regulated by the law of value")?
The error here committed of conflating two different questions is so obvious, that it is difficult to understand why intelligent blokes as yourselves even make it. I speculate the reason is that once you admit to A (existence of SCP), you secretly fear that B (SCP was governed by the law of value) automatically, like a slippery slope, must follow (which it doesn't), but you're right that once we discuss B on its own, your arguments do run the risk of being more easily challenged (i.e. without me having to be distracted by A, which acts like your defensive wall). So I was being a bit dialectical, not only pointing to the error, but what causes the error. I feel I still have to get that definitively out of the way first, before we can have a proper discussion on the question of the application of the law of value in SCP.
I think the first three chapters contain a theory of simple circulation. That theory makes certain claims about prices and values and their relations. To me, these claims only make sense when connected to some other claims in Volume 3. I don't see how these claims would work without certain mechanisms described in Volume 3. So if we take the theory of simple circulation as a whole, I don't see how it's empirically applicable to precapitalist societies (on it's own, the theory is incomplete even with relation to capitalism).
The "mechanism in volume 3" doesn't apply to SCP, the point being that the law of value in SCP is not the same as in capitalism (where exchange is regulated by price of production). And the claims in the first chapters make sense on their own. Despite posing as a defender of a purely logical reading, in your view the forms of value even "logically" don't make sense – iirc you are inspired by Castoriadis's critique.
I think the idea that it's a theory of some precapitalist society out of which capitalism developed is wrong.
Nobody claims that. Rather the exposition of forms of value is a theory of how money developed from barter. It disproves exactly that exchange was something eternal, and that money always existed.
But as I said, I think you can take some elements from chapters 1-3 and use them to describe and explain what was going on in commodity production in precapitalist societies.
That "element" being the commodity (and money), i.e. the whole point. Marx explicitly writes in chapter 6:
Marx
Had we [..] inquired under what circumstances all, or even the majority of products take the form of commodities, we should have found that this can only happen with production of a very specific kind, capitalist production. Such an inquiry, however, would have been foreign to the analysis of commodities. Production and circulation of commodities can take place, although the great mass of the objects produced are intended for the immediate requirements of their producers, are not turned into commodities, and consequently social production is not yet by a long way dominated in its length and breadth by exchange-value. The appearance of products as commodities pre-supposes such a development of the social division of labour, that the separation of use-value from exchange-value, a separation which first begins with barter, must already have been completed. But such a degree of development is common to many forms of society, which in other respects present the most varying historical features.
.
Jura
But Marx's theory of value makes a much more specific claim that in capitalism, this necessary labor time takes the form of a property of things.
If commodities/money existed before capitalism, so did commodity fetishism.
This happens, ultimately, because people do certain things, like "invest" "capital" into different branches of production based on "profitability".
Commodity fetishism is not caused by investment decisions, not that you'd disagree (I hope).
At the bottom of all this, we eventually arrive at relations of production in which immediate producers are separated from means of production.
In SCP the producers are not yet separated from the means of production.
I don't think people were supposed to do that and be like that in precapitalist commodity production as described by Engels.
Engels is not making a normative claim that the law of value "should" apply in SCP. But the law of value does happen to be a "just" norm:
[quote=Dunaevsky]The best illustration of the historical veracity of the position of Engels: the numerous "statutes" of magistrates, regulating the relations of production of the craft of a city, and the economic doctrine of the canonists, summarising the real economic relations of their time. The teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas about "Justum pretium" (just price) is devoted to the proof of the need to maintain relations of equality of commodity producers. In legal and ethical form the doctrine of "Justum praecium" presented the commitment of exchange on the basis of equal equivalents and equality of the subjects of exchange. [/quote]
Moreover, for Marx still in the first stage of communism the logic of the law of value applies, even more than it did in capitalism, namely the actual producers get a share of the social product equal to their labour (or closer to it than in capitalism).
Jura
And in precapitalist commodity production as described by historians, there always seem to be these outside factors intervening,
Of course, but so there are monopolies, state intervention, etc. in capitalism.
Khawaga
Noa, do you also have evidence for a historical stages of simple reproduction?
1500 years in Europe, see my post #5. But if you mean evidence in Marx, see eg my quote from chapter 6.
Sure, commodities had to exist prior to capitalism, but from page one of Capital Marx is analyzing the capitalist MoP in a logical unfolding.
He is analysing the commodity. If you believe it's capitalism then you believe exchange/money=capitalism, so naturalising capitalism for all past epochs like bourgeois economists.
Oh come on, the first fucking page says that in societies in which the capitalist MoP prevail,.wealth takes on the form of an immense accumulation of commodities and therefore the analysis must start with this form, which is also the germ or cell.from which all other forms/categories are.derived. You know, dialectics and all that Marx coquetted with.
The point was that it's not a MoP where all products are exchanged, and it always existed in combination with other MoPs (eg consumption for own use). You cannot seriously maintain that Engels perhaps implied that SCP was the only mode of production before capitalism and that it covered the whole of production. So again, you hurriedly move on to the different question of whether the law of value applied to it.
Whatever, Noa. The point about the law of value in precapitalist societies still stands. This is the key question. I'm not disputing the existence of commodities and money before capitalism. I don't remember ever disputing that. I don't think a literate person can do that. But the key issue is what regulated precapitalist commodity production: Was it the law of value? Was abstract labor the form taken by the individual labors of producers? How was value constituted, or was it at all? How did all this work without the competition of capitals? It's up to proponents of "simple commodity production" (if they want to go beyond "there were commodities before capitalism" which, duh, was never under dispute) to solve these questions.
The usual interpretation is that in simple commodity production, long-term price = value, i.e., value regulates prices. Only with the competition of capitals and the formation of a general rate of profit do prices deviate from values, and long-term prices are regulated by prices of production which somehow express values. I don't know if this is in Engels' preface to Volume 3 (or whatever it was) and I can't be bothered to go check now. But I take this as the standard interpretation. Without a description of what made prices reflect socially necessary labor time, I'm not willing to seriously consider it as more than a fairy tale.
BTW I don't care what Marx wrote about this in this or that manuscript. He was often lazy and inconsequent. Let's take a scientific approach. The theory in Capital makes some empirical claims about capitalism. It provides a description of a mechanism that has considerable explanatory power and enables you to see why these other claims are true or at least plausible. All of this holds for capitalism. Moving to precapitalist commodity production, we have to take away the mechanism, because the conditions were different. If you want to make similar claims, you have to provide a description of another mechanism.
Please note that I never said anything about "all" products being exchanged, only "most".
Noa Rodman
"It rained, or it did not rain" are claims about the same question.
OK, now you even misquoted what I wrote and turned it into a tautology. Anyway, it's perfectly possible to use "or" with propositions that are about different things. "Noa did not built an arch or Dennis Rodman was a basketball player" is a perfectly normal sentence (and true, by the way). I mean, look at any textbook in propositional logic. What do you think those truth tables would be for if "or" could only be used with equivalent sentences?
Noa Rodman
I speculate the reason is that once you admit to A (existence of SCP), you secretly fear that B (SCP was governed by the law of value) automatically, like a slippery slope, must follow (which it doesn't), but you're right that once we discuss B on its own, your arguments do run the risk of being more easily challenged (i.e. without me having to be distracted by A, which acts like your defensive wall). So I was being a bit dialectical, not only pointing to the error, but what causes the error. I feel I still have to get that definitively out of the way first, before we can have a proper discussion on the question of the application of the law of value in SCP.
OK, before you go all dialectical on me, as I said, I have no problem admitting that commodity production existed before capitalism. I won't call it "simple commodity production" for terminological reasons.
Noa Rodman
The "mechanism in volume 3" doesn't apply to SCP, the point being that the law of value in SCP is not the same as in capitalism (where exchange is regulated by price of production). And the claims in the first chapters make sense on their own. Despite posing as a defender of a purely logical reading, in your view the forms of value even "logically" don't make sense – iirc you are inspired by Castoriadis's critique.
Well if there's some "law of value" in precapitalist commodity production, it's up to the proponents of "simple commodity production" to specify its operation. I've hardly ever read any Castoriadis, so that would have to be a coincidence.
Noa Rodman
Nobody claims that. Rather the exposition of forms of value is a theory of how money developed from barter. It disproves exactly that exchange was something eternal, and that money always existed.
I don't think the analysis of the form of value is about barter at all, but I guess that's a different discussion. Barter is not a case of exchange of commodities. In barter (in a society without money), the products of labor are not commodities at all (not according to Marx, see chapter 2).
Noa Rodman
That "element" being the commodity (and money), i.e. the whole point.
Not at all. Without a specification of 1. how socially necessary labor time actually emerges and 2. how it regulates production, the theory in the first three chapters is mostly descriptive and tells you next to nothing about the "laws of motion" of the society in question. Marx provided an account of points 1 and 2 in Volume 3, but it only works for capitalism.
The quote from the unpublished chapter only "confirms" what we already know (i.e., there had been commodity production before capitalism, a point I don't dispute). There's a similar passage in chapter 4 (in the original numbering), so no need to dig up the manuscripts.
Noa Rodman
If commodities/money existed before capitalism, so did commodity fetishism.
I meant something else. I mean that prices ("properties of things") come to express socially necessary labor time, and hence regulate the way in which a society allocates labor. I.e., "the law of value" operates. This is executed in capitalism through the formation of a general rate of profit, the competition of capitals etc. You can't refer to these things in precapitalist commodity production. So either the law of value did not operate, or you have to specify some other way through which it was executed, or you have to define the law of value anew (but then it won't be the law of value).
Noa Rodman
The teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas about "Justum pretium" (just price) is devoted to the proof of the need to maintain relations of equality of commodity producers. In legal and ethical form the doctrine of "Justum praecium" presented the commitment of exchange on the basis of equal equivalents and equality of the subjects of exchange.
Equivalents, as in equal amounts of abstract labor? Or individual labor? Was it through conscious calculation? How do you square that with fetishism, i.e., the law of value operating behing the backs of producers? Or it wasn't labor but something else altogether? How can you tell? Where's the evidence? Where are the mechanisms?
Noa Rodman
Moreover, for Marx still in the first stage of communism the logic of the law of value applies, even more than it did in capitalism, namely the actual producers get a share of the social product equal to their labour (or closer to it than in capitalism).
I don't think this is relevant to the present discussion at all, unless you want to suggest that precapitalist commodity production was consciously and socially planned.
Noa Rodman
Of course, but so there are monopolies, state intervention, etc. in capitalism.
Sure, and the operation of law of value is therefore more or less deformed. But at least we know there's a mechanism (including the competition of individual capitals) and there are obstacles to it. But what's the mechanism in precapitalist commodity production?
That the development of the value form shows how money developed out of barter is utter nonsense; read the first paragraph in the section on money as means of circulation where Marx explains how contradictions are resolved. Reading the genesis of money as historical is completely missing the point of Marx's analysis of the value form.
But the key issue is what regulated precapitalist commodity production: Was it the law of value? Was abstract labor the form taken by the individual labors of producers? How was value constituted, or was it at all?
Yes the law of value (not law of price of production), or else you must conclude that there can be commodities/money without value (=socially-necessary labour time), and consequently the labour theory of value will be a mere noumenon, an unprovable, unknowable thing, just a pretty hypothesis. So permit me the very naive question: is it possible for commodities and the value-form to exist without value?
How did all this work without the competition of capitals? It's up to proponents of "simple commodity production" (if they want to go beyond "there were commodities before capitalism" which, duh, was never under dispute) to solve these questions.
...
Without a description of what made prices reflect socially necessary labor time, I'm not willing to seriously consider it as more than a fairy tale.
At one point you already accept the existence of socially necessary labor time in SCP, the question becoming simply: did prices reflect (/oscillate around) it? Even if you hold that prices didn't oscillate around value, you'd have implicitly accepted a value to make the comparison, though we're far from actually constructing/presenting historical market/production data to argue whether prices did reflect value, or didn't. At another point, as a dogmatic axiom, you seem rather to reject even the possibility of there being empirical proof that exchange in SCP happened according to the law of value. Though you open the door a bit for the possibility that the law of value in SCP could exist as a simple fact (indeed, would anyone exchange his cow for a chicken or make other obvious unequal exchanges?):
Well if there's some "law of value" in precapitalist commodity production, it's up to the proponents of "simple commodity production" to specify its operation.
only to shut it again by insisting that it's impossible to explain without the competition of capitals. For the record, I asked you first: explain what then regulated exchange in SCP? It's fine if you reject the law of value, but then you present no explanation instead (which you should, if you sincerely care about the subject).
Anyway, it's perfectly possible to use "or" with propositions that are about different things.
Yes, I just wanted to stress they are different questions.
the theory in the first three chapters is mostly descriptive and tells you next to nothing about the "laws of motion" of the society in question.
The reason he doesn't talk yet about the mechanism of prices of production is because he's analysing the commodity, which existed also in pre-capitalist society. And a rather weak defense of a purely logical reading it is to say that the first chapters are mostly "descriptive".
I don't think the analysis of the form of value is about barter at all, but I guess that's a different discussion. Barter is not a case of exchange of commodities. In barter (in a society without money), the products of labor are not commodities at all (not according to Marx, see chapter 2).
The simple form of value starts from barter and then historically (hence the name's reading) moves progressively onward to the establishment of an exclusive product that functions as the measure of value, money. Or to quote from chapter 2:
Marx
The historical progress and extension of exchanges develops the contrast, latent in commodities, between use-value and value. The necessity for giving an external expression to this contrast for the purposes of commercial intercourse, urges on the establishment of an independent form of value, and finds no rest until it is once for all satisfied by the differentiation of commodities into commodities and money. At the same rate, then, as the conversion of products into commodities is being accomplished, so also is the conversion of one special commodity into money.
...
Nomad races are the first to develop the money-form, because all their worldly goods consist of moveable objects and are therefore directly alienable; and because their mode of life, by continually bringing them into contact with foreign communities, solicits the exchange of products.
...
In proportion as exchange bursts its local bonds, and the value of commodities more and more expands into an embodiment of human labour in the abstract, in the same proportion the character of money attaches itself to commodities that are by Nature fitted to perform the social function of a universal equivalent. Those commodities are the precious metals.
...
We have seen how the progressive development of a society of commodity-producers stamps one privileged commodity with the character of money.
And barter can continue even after the existence of money, it's just that money need not be present as actual coin but merely as unit of account.
Jura
The quote from the unpublished chapter only "confirms" what we already know (i.e., there had been commodity production before capitalism, a point I don't dispute).
It confirms more than just that, ie it confirms that his analysis of the commodity in the first chapter applies also for the commodity in SCP, still a very modest point perhaps. It simply follows that all the things about SLNT, abstract labor etc. he wrote there apply as well to the commodity in SCP.
[prices] regulate the way in which a society allocates labor. I.e., "the law of value" operates. This is executed in capitalism through the formation of a general rate of profit, the competition of capitals etc. You can't refer to these things in precapitalist commodity production.
So either the law of value did not operate, or you have to specify some other way through which it was executed, or you have to define the law of value anew (but then it won't be the law of value).
The law of value undergoes a fundamental change in capitalism, so yes the form of the manifestation of the law of value is modified. Actually this is a point of criticism that Dunaevsky directs at Rubin in the article I translated.
Also here's a link to an earlier discussion on redmarx (btw I actually went to the trouble to find the Loria passage that originally prompted Engels to write the controversial addendum to Capital 3).
Yes the law of value (not law of price of production), or else you must conclude that there can be commodities/money without value (=socially-necessary labour time), and consequently the labour theory of value will be a mere noumenon, an unprovable, unknowable thing, just a pretty hypothesis. So permit me the very naive question: is it possible for commodities and the value-form to exist without value?
I don't know what the "law of price of production" is. Prices of production are simply the mode of expression of socially necessary labor time in capitalism. I don't think there's a "law of price of production" separate and different from the law of value.
And yes, commodities surely can exist without value. There are plenty of examples even in capitalism. A thing can have a price ("exchange value" expressed in a money commodity) without having value. And a thing can be exchanged for an amount of money that has nothing to do with the labor time socially necessary to reproduce it. My guess is that precapitalist commodity exchange, always embedded and relatively limited as it was, was a mixture of controlled prices, habitual prices, "political" markups and prices based on unique opportunities, "profit upon alienation" and simple cost accounting + markups. I guess there weren't any principled "laws of motion". To the extent that competition developed, obstacles were removed and the market grew to include more and more basic goods, there may have been a movement towards prices as expressions of SNLT. But at that point, I think you would find that early capitalist development in agriculture was already under way. But who am I to guess, I'd be more interested in seeing what theory of regulation of precapitalist commodity production the proponents of SCP propose (aside from "conscious calculation"). So far we've only seen dialectics (in the original Greek sense).
Noa Rodman
At one point you already accept the existence of socially necessary labor time in SCP, the question becoming simply: did prices reflect (/oscillate around) it?
In a sense, socially necessary labor time always exists, even for Robinson. All societies apportion total social labor within definite limits. The real question here is whether SNLT assumes the form of a property of things, which are then exchanged, the result of which itself co-determines SNLT, and also the decisions of producers, and hence regulates this apportioning. This is more or less how commodity production works in capitalism. The question is whether this is how precapitalist commodity production operated, as things can be exchanged for money or bartered without any of that having to happen.
Noa Rodman
Even if you hold that prices didn't oscillate around value, you'd have implicitly accepted a value to make the comparison, though we're far from actually constructing/presenting historical market/production data to argue whether prices did reflect value, or didn't.
What I meant is that I don't see the mechanism that would make precapitalist commodity prices have any necessary connection to socially necessary labor time (which, in principle, is "always there", even if only as something that a planning committee arriving by a time machine could have calculated).
Noa Rodman
At another point, as a dogmatic axiom, you seem rather to reject even the possibility of there being empirical proof that exchange in SCP happened according to the law of value. Though you open the door a bit for the possibility that the law of value in SCP could exist as a simple fact (indeed, would anyone exchange his cow for a chicken or make other obvious unequal exchanges?):
I don't reject the possibility. I'm simply saying that I won't be convinced unless proponents of SCP actually do some empirical work rather than parrot Engels. Asking about a cow and a chicken is not empirical work, that's a thought experiment.
Noa Rodman
only to shut it again by insisting that it's impossible to explain without the competition of capitals. For the record, I asked you first: explain what then regulated exchange in SCP? It's fine if you reject the law of value, but then you present no explanation instead (which you should, if you sincerely care about the subject).
This is preposterous. You are a true believer: there's a hypothesis by an authority (Engels), and although it is not backed by anything (empirical work, nor any real theoretical work on how it could have operated), you accept it, since people who critize the lack of evidence for that hypothesis don't have a better hypothesis. I guess not even the "wealth" of interesting historical work that the SCP-hypothesis has produced so far (in, what, over a 120 years?) will convince you.
Noa Rodman
The reason he doesn't talk yet about the mechanism of prices of production is because he's analysing the commodity, which existed also in pre-capitalist society. And a rather weak defense of a purely logical reading it is to say that the first chapters are mostly "descriptive".
I'm not defending anything. You seem to have this crazy fixation on philological debates. I don't care much about all that anymore. Marx's theory is either an empirical theory or it isn't. The only way it works as an empirical theory is as a theory of capitalism, because the "surface implications" are only fully (well, technically not fully) worked out in Volume 3. Like I said, you are welcome to accept Chapters 1-3 for precapitalist commodity production and work out the rest (how it actually operated). But without this step, you are left with an very incomplete theory that makes a lot of promises but doesn't cash them out. It simply postulates what value is (a quantity of socially necessary labor time), but it doesn't even show how it is decided which labor time will count as socially necessary. We know that in capitalism this aren't always the most efficient producers. Marx could afford to do that because he knew he would be writing beyond Chapters 1-3, and he knew he was writing a theory of capitalism. But if you cut this rest off, you're left with definitions and also some claims whose connection to experience is dubious.
Noa Rodman
The simple form of value starts from barter and then historically (hence the name's reading) moves progressively onward to the establishment of an exclusive product that functions as the measure of value, money. Or to quote from chapter 2:
OK, I'm not interested in this discussion and won't engage in it beyond this post as it's tangential. I'm not interested in any of this W. F. Haug stuff. I was referring to this from Chapter 2:
Marx
Let us look at the matter a little closer. To the owner of a commodity, every other commodity is, in regard to his own, a particular equivalent, and consequently his own commodity is the universal equivalent for all the others. But since this applies to every owner, there is, in fact, no commodity acting as universal equivalent, and the relative value of commodities possesses no general form under which they can be equated as values and have the magnitude of their values compared. So far, therefore, they do not confront each other as commodities, but only as products or use-values. In their difficulties our commodity owners think like Faust...
Noa Rodman
It confirms more than just that, ie it confirms that his analysis of the commodity in the first chapter applies also for the commodity in SCP, still a very modest point perhaps. It simply follows that all the things about SLNT, abstract labor etc. he wrote there apply as well to the commodity in SCP.
As I said above, you can pretend they apply, but unless you (or Marx) can show how it worked, I don't see why anyone should be interested in that. How can you say some empirical claims apply to something without really having a way to test those claims? At this point, you can at most say that Marx himself thought they apply. But that is philology.
Noa Rodman
The law of value undergoes a fundamental change in capitalism, so yes the form of the manifestation of the law of value is modified.
Well, again, you can talk about fundamental changes, the three laws of dialectics or whatever, but it doesn't mean anything to anyone outside philological circles. Specify the two laws clearly, show the transformation, point to the evidence. I really can't be bothered to look at the links.
And yes, commodities surely can exist without value. There are plenty of examples even in capitalism. A thing can have a price ("exchange value" expressed in a money commodity) without having value. .
I have in mind reproducible products, but even for things without value, the money itself has a value (or represents a value).
And a thing can be exchanged for an amount of money that has nothing to do with the labor time socially necessary to reproduce it.
But then it has a value, the price simply doesn't match with it.
My guess is that precapitalist commodity exchange, always embedded and relatively limited as it was, was a mixture of controlled prices, habitual prices, "political" markups and prices based on unique opportunities, "profit upon alienation" and simple cost accounting + markups. I guess there weren't any principled "laws of motion".
I too guess that there weren't any principled "laws of motion".
The claim (/"postulate/ "definition") is just that the exchange happened more or less on an equivalent labour basis. It should be possible to empirically reject or verify it, so indeed let's not get lost in philological debates. It's still a better claim than "pure randomness" in exchange relations.
there's a hypothesis by an authority (Engels), and although it is not backed by anything (empirical work, nor any real theoretical work on how it could have operated), you accept it, since people who critize the lack of evidence for that hypothesis don't have a better hypothesis. I guess not even the "wealth" of interesting historical work that the SCP-hypothesis has produced so far (in, what, over a 120 years?) will convince you.
If you demand just empirical work, I consider this a fair point, but it applies to everyone. The detractors of the law of value in SCP have not either done any historical work. As I casually noted before, we're both far from constructing/presenting data (/estimates). This hasn't anything to do with a fault in anyone's hypothesis, just a result of lack of data.
To sum up, there's no reason as of now to believe in the existence of the standard version of "simple commodity production" as I described it above, i.e., an epoch of several thousands of years in which actual or long-term average prices of commodities were equal to the labor time socially necessary to produce them.
What the balance of exchange was – whether it was symmetric – between pastoralists and eg grain producers (to take a fundamental specialization) or between the latter and urban craftsmen, is something for anthropology to study. It's unreasonable to expect here "hard evidence".
Dunaevsky mentioned e.g. the 'just price' of Aquinas, and this is found back in (Jewish) antiquity:
Jacob Neusner (Brill, 2002), The Mishnah: Social Perspectives. I will spare you excerpts of Talmudic tractates, just give some points by the author.
In denying the notion of an objective or absolute or intrinsic value,
Schumpeter calls that notion "a metaphysical entity most welcome to
people with philosophical propensities and most distasteful to people
of a more positive' type of mind." In due course, we shall see how
that notion comes to expression in the economics of Judaism. There,
the conception of a true value is not murky or obscure but expressed
in simple and plain words: concrete rules, which people (merchants
in the market) had to observe.
.
The principles that all transactions are really acts of barter, that money has no meaning other than an instrument of barter, and, consequently, that money (e.g., silver, gold) is merely another commodity—all these conceptions express in detail the substitute, within distributive economics, for the notion of the market as the mechanism of exchange. And not one of them will have surprised Aristotle, who, as we recall, firmly maintains that money merely substitutes for grain or beasts in barter. Accordingly the initial statement of the economics of Judaism imagined a barter-economy and provided for the mechanism of the barter of commodities of an intrinsic value in equal measure from one party (no longer buyer) to the other (no longer seller). For that purpose, as Aristotle, but not Plato, will have understood, coins serve only as a bushel of corn served, as matters of intrinsic, not merely symbolic, worth.
.
This brings us to the complementary question: what sorts of things lack a true or intrinsic value? Given the logic that imposes upon all transactions the fiction that a barter of equal value has taken place, we should anticipate that things that are not subject to barter will lack, also, an intrinsic value. Commodities are bartered, because we can measure (so it is imagined) the intrinsic worth of things. But what has no intrinsic worth, such as a piece of paper, or what has no worth readily treated as standard for purposes of measuring equivalency, such as a person, or what is not a commodity at all, such as real estate, or what is not subject to a this-worldly evaluation as something accessible to human utilization at all, such as what has been sanctified to heaven—these will not be subject to barter and therefore also will not be given the status of commodities bearing intrinsic value for purposes of exchange.
Sure, there are plenty of examples of reflections on "just" exchange and the "proper" uses of money in antiquity. I think there must have been plenty of normative ideas around which stated what the "proper" proportions should be. This what I meant by "habitual" prices. Come to think of it, it's an element of planning that was probably in place to secure the reproduction of producers (i.e., them not falling into debt etc., but we know how that usually turned out). You can also see in the quotations that some things were treated as inherently non-commodities, i.e., land. I'm pretty sure we could find other examples. This shows how limited and embedded precapitalist commodity exchange was. And I think that the more limited it was (either to particular kinds of commodities, or to surpluses, or geographically etc.), the more "random" (not literally random) the exchange proprotions were.
But anyway, the quotations mention the equivalence of values, but say nothing about what determines these values. In principle it could be just about anything. The first vague hints at a labor theory of value appear in Aquinas, I think. That's 13th century, not that far from the emergence of capitalism.
And I think that the more limited it was (either to particular kinds of commodities, or to surpluses, or geographically etc.), the more "random" (not literally random) the exchange proprotions were.
Surpluses already attest to development. Exchange relations are "random" only at the most primitive level of barter.
Neusner in a footnote writes, that the value of the worker's work [though we as marxists know this expression doesn't make sense] is clearly taken into account by the Mishnah. Elsewhere he mentions the discussion against usury in Baba Mesia 5: Mishnah Ten:
1) One may say to his fellow, Help me weed and I will help you weed or Help me hoe and I will help you hoe.
a) But one may not say, Help me weed and I will help you hoe, or Help me hoe and I will help you weed.
2) All days of the dry season are accounted alike, and all days of the rainy season are accounted alike.
a) One may not say to another, Help me plow in the dry season and I will help you plow in the rainy season.
Section one: Reuven is allowed to make an arrangement with Shimon that one day he will work for Shimon and the other day Shimon will work for him, as long as both are doing the same work. If, however, Reuven helps weed and Shimon helps hoe or vice versa, and one of the labors is more difficult than the other, the bargain is forbidden because of usury. The problem is that the one who does the work for his friend second may do a more difficult type of labor in return for having his work done first. This is a form of usury, since one person will get back more in return for waiting to be paid for his work.
Section two: Just as two different types of labor may not be exchanged for one another, so too the same labor may not be exchanged for the same labor if they are done during different seasons. Since working in one season may be harder than working in another, if the one who does the work for his friend second does the work in a harder season he is in essence repaying the loan of his friend's work with interest.
The first step made by an object of utility towards acquiring exchange-value is when it forms a non-use-value for its owner, and that happens when it forms a superfluous portion of some article required for his immediate wants.
...
The proportions in which they are exchangeable are at first quite a matter of chance. What makes them exchangeable is the mutual desire of their owners to alienate them. Meantime the need for foreign objects of utility gradually establishes itself. The constant repetition of exchange makes it a normal social act. In the course of time, therefore, some portion at least of the products of labour must be produced with a special view to exchange. From that moment the distinction becomes firmly established between the utility of an object for the purposes of consumption, and its utility for the purposes of exchange. Its use-value becomes distinguished from its exchange-value. On the other hand, the quantitative proportion in which the articles are exchangeable, becomes dependent on their production itself. Custom stamps them as values with definite magnitudes.
In the direct barter of products, each commodity is directly a means of exchange to its owner, and to all other persons an equivalent, but that only in so far as it has use-value for them. At this stage, therefore, the articles exchanged do not acquire a value-form independent of their own use-value, or of the individual needs of the exchangers. The necessity for a value-form grows with the increasing number and variety of the commodities exchanged.
.
Jura
The quotes you provide sound more like exchange of activities rather than exchange of commodities.
Just the last one, as an illustration that they addressed the problem of equating different kinds of labor. Besides, services are also a product.
btw, Neusner gave some valid criticisms of the work of Yu. A. Solodukho (Юдель Солодухо 1877—1963), the English translation of which he edited: Soviet Views of Talmudic Judaism: Five Papers (Brill, 1973).
These are of course normative ideas, not actual history. Perhaps Dave B, if he is not busy with important matters like trolling Christian forums, can provide us with interesting anthropological studies.
Anyway, I don't find the argument convincing against Marx that two different things could be equated through many common substances (eg the expended fossil fuel energy on them, their marginal utility, etc.), and not just labour.
It's one thing if people accept a norm that none should work longer and harder than the other in providing favors. This is a rule for organizing direct interpersonal conduct. This need have nothing to do with commodity exchange. Flatmates can agree on this without producing commodities and being involved in commodity exchange (it's still "exchange" in the sense that each does something for the other, but surely we need to distinguish this clearly from commodity exchange; otherwise even sex or the use of language would collapse into "exchange").
It's another thing to suppose that this somehow transforms into an impersonal mechanism regulating transactions between multiple persons who hardly know each other, which is what commodity exchange would be. Or, if it does, I'd be interested in a description of that mechanism.
Also worth noting is the fact that in proper commodity exchange of commodities A and B (goods or services), it is not individual labor times that are compared and equated. Rather, both A and B are reduced, behind the backs of the people involved, that is, without any conscious calculation on their part, to qualitatively homogeneous social labor. The real question is how the individual labor times would be reduced to social labor time in precapitalist commodity exchange, in the absence of the mechanisms that Marx describes as essential for this reduction in capitalism.
Anyway, I don't find the argument convincing against Marx that two different things could be equated through many common substances (eg the expended fossil fuel energy on them, their marginal utility, etc.), and not just labour.
I'm not making an argument against Marx. I'm saying that the impersonal process of "equating" need not have occurred at all in precapitalist commodity exchange because important ingredients for that process were missing. In fact, that "equating" process as we know it is a result of the movement of capital. Again, there's nothing to "equate" to unless there's a mechanism that determines which is the socially necessary labor time. Marx describes this in Ch10 of Volume 3, IIRC.
It's one thing if people accept a norm that none should work longer and harder than the other in providing favors. This is a rule for organizing direct interpersonal conduct. This need have nothing to do with commodity exchange. Flatmates can agree on this without producing commodities and being involved in commodity exchange (it's still "exchange" in the sense that each does something for the other, but surely we need to distinguish this clearly from commodity exchange; otherwise even sex or the use of language would collapse into "exchange").
Barter of goods (and up to the full monetary transaction) is also "direct interpersonal conduct" in the sense that both do it for the use-value (C-M-C). And services can be paid in kind (e.g. a singer at a party is paid with food), so there's no neat dividing line between barter in goods or in services. Your example of flatmates is about one and the same household and the particular service e.g. of taking out the trash is difficult to commodify. If we take painting a neighbour's fence (in exchange for doing your garden), work that can be easily commodified, such things are still not production/life necessities. But if you earn your living as a painter and I as a gardener, so when our work is not done we starve, then when we exchange services, yes this can be considered a commodity exchange.
The real question is how the individual labor times would be reduced to social labor time in precapitalist commodity exchange,
You might understand SNLT differently than I. I consider it just the average time it takes to make/do something. If the product of A can be normally made in 5 hours, but A took it easy working 10 hours on it, then B will be willing to give a product in exchange worth just 5 hours (knowing that A could have done the work in that time). I don't think SNLT was absolutely unknowable.
(for some French marxist anthropology literature on barter see Anne Chapman 1980, she criticises Marx btw)
Barter of goods (and up to the full monetary transaction) is also "direct interpersonal conduct" in the sense that both do it for the use-value (C-M-C). And services can be paid in kind (e.g. a singer at a party is paid with food), so there's no neat dividing line between barter in goods or in services.
Well, OK, in this sense, everything is direct interpersonal conduct. Even a capitalist hiring a worker. So the distinction collapses. Not a very useful approach in my view.
The key issue here is what regulates that conduct. Are there transparent, habitualized norms, or an invisible social mechanism that operates behind our backs? Mere equivalence (of labor times, individual or average ones) does not necessarily imply commodity exchange. It's the mechanism that makes it what it is.
Noa Rodman
Your example of flatmates is about one and the same household and the particular service e.g. of taking out the trash is difficult to commodify. If we take painting a neighbour's fence (in exchange for doing your garden), work that can be easily commodified, such things are still not production/life necessities. But if you earn your living as a painter and I as a gardener, so when our work is not done we starve, then when we exchange services, yes this can be considered a commodity exchange.
OK, the way I understand the quotation we're talking about here is that it is about two peasants, probably living in close proximity (not unlike the two flatmates; why should it matter whether it's a household or a village?), who are not part of a rigid system of division of labor. They both do similar activities throughout the year. The norm is about how "favors" should be made, i.e., they should be reciprocal and equal. It's more similar to the situation when parents instruct their children to share toys than to commodity exchange.
Noa Rodman
You might understand SNLT differently than I. I consider it just the average time it takes to make/do something.
Well, OK, but this is different from Marxian SNLT. Your SNLT is just the arithmetic average over individual labor times. The "L" in your SNLT is not abstract labor.
Noa Rodman
If the product of A can be normally made in 5 hours, but A took it easy working 10 hours on it, then B will be willing to give a product in exchange worth just 5 hours (knowing that A could have done the work in that time). I don't think SNLT was absolutely unknowable.
OK, so no fetishism, then, no law asserting itself similarly to the law of gravity, no opaque system of division of labor... but conscious calculation on the part of agents. Why would they bother with commodity exchange, then?
And do note that the example of Reuven and Shimon even forbids activities A and B that are "exchanged" to be different or even to be performed in different seasons. Not very much like C - M - C or C - C where the C's are always of a different kind. In the Reuven-Shimon example, the equivalence between A and B is already there, because the activities and conditions are the same and Reuven and Shimon's labor is from the start presupposed to be of the same intensity and productivity. All the "work" of reducing and equating that is done objectively, through the market, in commodity exchange is already done here ex ante by the norm. This example is completely irrelevant even to a discussion of precapitalist commodity exchange. It simply isn't what you take it for.
Well, OK, but this is different from Marxian SNLT. Your SNLT is just the arithmetic average over individual labor times. The "L" in your SNLT is not abstract labor.
The commodity that is most universally accepted represents abstract labor (which is identical as its concrete labor). So in this intermediate stage between barter and the settled full value-form (money), which we are discussing (roughly 7000 years of human history), e.g. the labor for cattle, salt, or copper, etc. would have been (closest to) abstract.
OK, so no fetishism, then, no law asserting itself similarly to the law of gravity, no opaque system of division of labor... but conscious calculation on the part of agents. Why would they bother with commodity exchange, then?
They bother because there's already some division of labor, but not so complex that it becomes opaque. The point Engels made about fetishism is that it is caused by the usually foreign origin of precious metals, so that local people don't know how much labor went into it. Though I think there were also local mines where people did have an idea. In any case if it happens that A and B don't know what the other's product is worth (its SNLT), then they could still compare it to a third product that they do know, eg cattle, which acts as proto-measure of value (hence the supposed difficulties of barter are often overstated).
And do note that the example of Reuven and Shimon even forbids activities A and B that are "exchanged" to be different or even to be performed in different seasons.
It's not forbidding exchange of different labors per se, just that the principle of equality should be applied (i.e. work of the same difficulty/intensity).
All the "work" of reducing and equating that is done objectively, through the market, in commodity exchange is already done here ex ante by the norm. This example is completely irrelevant even to a discussion of precapitalist commodity exchange. It simply isn't what you take it for.
The point is that they were already aware that different labors can have different intensities.
The commodity that is most universally accepted represents abstract labor (which is identical as its concrete labor). So in this intermediate stage between barter and the settled full value-form (money), which we are discussing (roughly 7000 years of human history), e.g. the labor for cattle, salt, or copper, etc. would have been (closest to) abstract.
I think you're evading the issue. Suppose you're correct and there's a commodity M for which concrete labor is immediately social labor. The real issue is how do you reduce the different concrete labors (and labor times) producing any commodity A to the concrete and immediately abstract labor producing commodity M. There are varying labor times (productivities and intensities) for commodity A. Which one do you pick? I don't think you can say we simply calculate the arithmetic average because you don't know the input values – unless you suppose that these peasants kept records of labor times of all their "competitors" and then used arithmetic to calculate the average labor time. They'd have to do this for all commodities which they exchange. I think it's much more reasonable to suppose that it was hit and miss, with lots of "political", extra-economic intervention, habitual pricing and sheer theft/usury/racketeering going on (all of which fits well into the image of precapitalist societies we have).
(I'm disregarding here the fact that socially necessary labor time isn't simply average labor time – the quantities produced and the amounts the market can stomach also matter, so it's more like a "weighted average".)
Noa Rodman
They bother because there's already some division of labor, but not so complex that it becomes opaque. The point Engels made about fetishism is that it is caused by the usually foreign origin of precious metals, so that local people don't know how much labor went into it. Though I think there were also local mines where people did have an idea. In any case if it happens that A and B don't know what the other's product is worth (its SNLT), then they could still compare it to a third product that they do know, eg cattle, which acts as proto-measure of value (hence the supposed difficulties of barter are often overstated).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to suppose that somehow there was a division of labor that naturally led to development of the market, which the peasants willingly turned to as an "opportunity", as some little medieval or ancient NEPmen, which then led to more market expansion, the division of labor becoming more opaque etc. This is very much like the "commercialization" model in Smith and some marxists. I think this is very problematic, as shown by the research done by Brenner and his followers.
Noa Rodman
It's not forbidding exchange of different labors per se, just that the principle of equality should be applied (i.e. work of the same difficulty/intensity).
I think the text it's pretty clear on this:
"Just as two different types of labor may not be exchanged for one another, so too the same labor may not be exchanged for the same labor if they are done during different seasons."
Noa Rodman
The point is that they were already aware that different labors can have different intensities.
Surely that's a fact of basic experience which predates even class society.
……..The real question is how the individual labor times would be reduced to social labor time in precapitalist commodity exchange, in the absence of the mechanisms that Marx describes as essential for this reduction in capitalism……..
Answer from Rubin;
.
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 (if the shoemaker and clothesmaker are equally qualified) 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. This tendency remains until the less advantageous branch is confronted by a direct threat of economic collapse and finds it impossible to continue production because of unfavorable conditions for the sale of its products on the market.
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.
this whole chain of phenomena, which was not adequately examined by Marx's critics and was elucidated by Marx's theory of value, refers equally to a simple commodity economy and to a capitalist economy. But the quantitative side of value also interested Marx, if it was related to the function of value as regulator of the distribution of labor. The quantitative proportions in which things exchange are expressions of the law of proportional distribution of social labor. Labor value and price of production are different manifestations of the same law of distribution of labor in conditions of simple commodity production and in the capitalist society. [9] The equilibrium and the allocation of labor are the basis of value and its changes both in the simple commodity economy and in the capitalist economy. This is the meaning of Marx's theory of "labor" value.
how do you reduce the different concrete labors (and labor times) producing any commodity A to the concrete and immediately abstract labor producing commodity M.
It's the same as asking how to compare concrete labors, since the reduction of concrete labor of A to abstract labor of M, is nothing but the same as the comparison of concrete labor of A to concrete labor of M. As you wrote, it is "a fact of basic experience" that different labors can have different intensities, so I guess by custom some proportion was established.
There are varying labor times (productivities and intensities) for commodity A. Which one do you pick?
Mind you, we're not talking about vastly different (or, in composition of capital), rapidly changing production methods. There was only one kind of way often in use for many centuries by everyone.
I don't think you can say we simply calculate the arithmetic average because you don't know the input values
We all are pretty average, no need to calculate it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to suppose that somehow there was a division of labor that naturally led to development of the market, which the peasants willingly turned to as an "opportunity", as some little medieval or ancient NEPmen, which then led to more market expansion, the division of labor becoming more opaque etc. This is very much like the "commercialization" model in Smith and some marxists. I think this is very problematic, as shown by the research done by Brenner and his followers.
I guess so, but don't know why it's problematic. Simple commodity producers basically = free peasants. In post nr. 5 I gave a summary of 1500 years of European history documenting their existence.
Assuming complete mobility of labor in the commodity economy
Well there you go.
If I'm not mistaken Rubin thought that the "simple commodity economy" he describes is a theoretical tool, not a particular historical period. I'm OK with that. I think the first three chapters of Capital describe a pure commodity economy. The description corresponds to the surface of bourgeois society. I don't think it corresponds to anything much before capitalism, although, like I said, it can be used to an extent to make sense of commodity production without capitalism.
Edit: Turns out Rubin does indeed view the "simple commodity economy" as a theoretical abstraction of capitalist relations:
Rubin
In capitalist society this average price is not proportional to the labor value of the product, i.e., to the quantity of labor necessary for its production, but is proportional to the so-called "price of production," which equals the costs of production for the given product plus the average profit on the invested capital. However, to simplify the analysis we can abstract the fact that the cloth is produced by the capitalist with the help of wage laborers. Marx's method, as we have seen above, consists of separating and analyzing individual types of production relations which only in their entirety give a picture of the capitalist economy. 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. 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.
It's the same as asking how to compare concrete labors, since the reduction of concrete labor of A to abstract labor of M, is nothing but the same as the comparison of concrete labor of A to concrete labor of M. As you wrote, it is "a fact of basic experience" that different labors can have different intensities, so I guess by custom some proportion was established.
I think you're confusing two things. Labors A and B producing the same product can have different intensities. One of the laborers simply puts in more effort. This is an observable fact, and one can tell which of the two labors is more intensive. By measuring output (during equal labor times), one can even calculate how much more intensive.
Labors A and M producing different products are qualitatively heterogeneous. You can measure the individual labor times and "compare" them, but essentially you're comparing apples and oranges. These labors may require different skills, one is more difficult for most people than the other, they are simply labors of a different type. We know that in capitalist commodity production, such labors are routinely reduced to homogeneous abstract labor. This happens in competition, through the mobility of capital (and labor), through pressures towards economy in the use of commodified inputs etc. How does it work in precapitalist commodity production without capital, with extremely limited mobility of labor, with limited competition and with non-commodified inputs into the labor process?
Noa Rodman
Mind you, we're not talking about vastly different (or, in composition of capital), rapidly changing production methods. There was only one kind of way often in use for many centuries by everyone.
How do you know that? There were some advances in the productivity of agricultural labor in medieval times. Also, there are always natural differences the fertility of land, in skill etc.
It would actually be interesting to look at what was commonly traded and by whom. I guess interregional and international trade was much more important than the internal one.
BTW, here are historical nominal prices of grain in Britain from 1270 to 1620. Here's a paper which constructs various price indices for agricultural products from the 1200s to 1914.
Noa Rodman
I guess so, but don't know why it's problematic. Simple commodity producers basically = free peasants. In post nr. 5 I gave a summary of 1500 years of European history documenting their existence.
You can have free peasants with little commodity exchange, as long as there's relative autarky and access to the commons. I think E. M. Wood's book on the emergence of capitalism is a good critique of the commercialization view. It concentrates specifically on England and shows that the turn to the market and commodity production was not free peasants taking advantage of an opportunity (and gradually evolving into capitalists), but a rupture in which dispossessed peasants were forced by rapidly changing conditions to lease land or work directly for protocapitalist tenants. But I guess you've read that.
they are simply labors of a different type. We know that in capitalist commodity production, such labors are routinely reduced to homogeneous abstract labor. This happens in competition, through the mobility of capital (and labor),
In capitalism they're reduced to abstract labor (of the money-commodity, gold) but which is still also concrete labor, so effectively concrete labors are compared to one concrete labor. The concrete labor of gold production is "reduced" (or better, is simply identical) to the abstract labor of gold production. This is not due to competition, but already due to the (pre-capitalist) emergence of the value form (money).
How do you know that? There were some advances in the productivity of agricultural labor in medieval times.
True, as Harman noted (in his book, now deleted from the libcom library), but still obviously it didn't happen as fast as in capitalism.
I guess interregional and international trade was much more important than the internal one.
That was Marx's guess too, but elsewhere he also wrote that the relation among simple commodity producers can be regarded as one between foreign communities.
You can have free peasants with little commodity exchange, as long as there's relative autarky and access to the commons. I think E. M. Wood's book on the emergence of capitalism is a good critique of the commercialization view.
Yes, but in my post I also presented quotes that support the hypothesis that commercialization among them was more wide-spread than the mainstream believes. (for the authorship of the quotes, see comments in this thread).
And commercialization is something different from the emergence of capitalism. I don't argue that commercialization leads to capitalism. The historical reading of Marx's first chapter is that the increase of commerce gradually leads to the value-form money. The first chapter is not about the emergence of capital.
Noa, thanks for the debate. However, I don't see the point of posting any more unless we move to discussing what I think is the key issue, i.e., how the law of value would have operated in a context of limited competition (and even a limited extent of the market in terms of the relative numbers of agents and kinds of commodities), absence of labor mobility, non-commodified inputs in the production process, and perpetual extraeconomic interventions. The question is what particular social forces cause the prices to reflect socially necessary labor time and how these forces appear to the producers. In other words, how did the "real abstraction" operate in precapitalist commodity production. Relating something to money and exchanging that thing for money is one part of the process. I guess it's a necessary condition but not a sufficient one. The other part is the mechanism that operates behind the backs of the producers. I think this is also a necessary condition. I'm asking about this mechanism.
After this discussion one could look at the evidence and try to find traces of that mechanism and its operation.
how the law of value would have operated in a context of limited competition (and even a limited extent of the market in terms of the relative numbers of agents and kinds of commodities),
Not sure what you mean by the mechanism of unlimited competition ("behind the back"). Free competition in supply and demand can actually lead to artificial monopoly.
Marx
For prices at which commodities are exchanged to approximately correspond to their values, nothing more is necessary than 1) for the exchange of the various commodities to cease being purely accidental or only occasional; 2) so far as direct exchange of commodities is concerned, for these commodities to be produced on both sides in approximately sufficient quantities to meet mutual requirements, something learned from mutual experience in trading and therefore a natural outgrowth of continued trading; and 3) so far as selling is concerned, for no natural or artificial monopoly to enable either of the contracting sides to sell commodities above their value or to compel them to undersell. By accidental monopoly we mean a monopoly which a buyer or seller acquires through an accidental state of supply and demand.
Is the situation Marx envisages here then one of competition according to your definition?
absence of labor mobility,
The absence of the mobility of means of production is the condition for the "pure" law of value in SCP (as against price of production in capitalism):
Marx
Apart from the domination of prices and price movement by the law of value, it is quite appropriate to regard the values of commodities as not only theoretically but also historically prius to the prices of production. This applies to conditions in which the labourer owns his means of production, and this is the condition of the land-owning farmer living off his own labour and the craftsman, in the ancient as well as in the modern world. This agrees also with the view we expressed previously that the evolution of products into commodities arises through exchange between different communities, not between the members of the same community. It holds not only for this primitive condition, but also for subsequent conditions, based on slavery and serfdom, and for the guild organisation of handicrafts, so long as the means of production involved in each branch of production can be transferred from one sphere to another only with difficulty and therefore the various spheres of production are related to one another, within certain limits, as foreign countries or communist communities.
Or e.g. do you mean by competition that the SNLT will eliminate producers whose productivity falls below the average, thereby strengthening the domination of the standard? Or is it the abstract drive of profit for its own sake (M-C-M)? I wonder, because your argument is that the mechanism for the law of value can only be competition, there was no competition, ergo no law of value.
perpetual extraeconomic interventions
We can abstract from extraeconomic interventions, just like we can abstract from other modes of production that existed alongside SCP (something Parvus didn't understand in his 1895 critique of Engels when he pointed to the feudal lord's exploitation of his subjects, whereas Engels had in mind free peasants or craftsmen). Btw, in the first chapter Marx does not construct some pure model of SCP (where all society's labour is involved in simple commodity production). Again, SCP occurs alongside other modes of production (e.g. production for own use).
If it is possible to estimate the labor time that went into a product on an individual basis, then comparisons can be made, and if producers want to exchange it on a equal principle, and they're both free men, they will do so.
The absence of the mobility of means of production is the condition for the "pure" law of value in SCP (as against price of production in capitalism):
I meant the absence of mobility of labor. If producers can't move between branches of production easily, then they can't really respond to signals from the market properly and thereby execute the law of value practically. This is also related to what you've pointed out, i.e., the elimination (or lack of it) of less efficient producers in the sense that they move to a different branch or withdraw from production entirely.
Noa Rodman
We can abstract from extraeconomic interventions, just like we can abstract from other modes of production that existed alongside SCP
This is a good point. I guess if we do that, we end up with an abstraction of pure commodity production and exchange governed by the law of value (with full labor mobility, competition within branches and between branches), i.e., that which is described in chapters 1 - 3. As long as there is no pretense to historical and empirical accuracy with regard to precapitalist societies (or commodity production within these societies), I have no problem with this. I still won't call it "simple commodity production" for terminological reasons.
There was no reserve army, but there was mobility of labor between branches. Free peasants can choose what they will grow/breed. (or to take a more extreme example, the return to the country side by many Petrograd workers following the October revolution).
As long as there is no pretense to historical and empirical accuracy with regard to precapitalist societies (or commodity production within these societies), I have no problem with this.
Any investigation must make abstractions. Similarly, like I said before, in the analysis of capitalism we can abstract from monopoly, state intervention etc.
There was no reserve army, but there was mobility of labor between branches. Free peasants can choose what they will grow/breed. (or to take a more extreme example, the return to the country side by many Petrograd workers following the October revolution).
You'd have to show that there was indeed free choice. I very much doubt it, given that (I assume) a larger part of their production was for subsistence and mostly surpluses were traded. Well, maybe if we assume they were ready to eat pretty much anything. But I think agricultural production was pretty rigid in this sense. And I guess there would have been many other barriers, like the quality of land, the skills required, the means of production necessary etc. Another problem is that it would have been difficult to extend existing production in response to market signals, given the limited market (and limited fertility, as well as productivity) in land in many precapitalist societies.
Edit: Major advances in agricultural productivity and the whole discourse on "improvement" only came about as a result of the emergence of capitalist relations in the countryside. They were the result of market pressure towards efficiency (i.e., the law of value in operation) in competition and the producers (I mean the capitalists in agriculture) didn't have much choice other than to follow the trend. On the other hand, the development of labor productivity in agriculture in precapitalist societies was rather slow. I think this could be interpreted to mean that market pressures in these societies were generally pretty soft, i.e., the operation of the law of value was curtailed by the availability of other avenues to producers.
But this (the supposed mobility in a particular precapitalist society) is at least a hypothesis one can test.
Noa Rodman
Any investigation must make abstractions. Similarly, like I said before, in the analysis of capitalism we can abstract from monopoly, state intervention etc.
The nature of these abstractions does matter, though. In precapitalist societies, non-commodity production was dominant (as I think you'd agree). So when we abstract from the influence of non-commodity production and the related institutions in precapitalist societies on commodity production in these societies, we are in fact abstracting from the dominant causal factors in that society. Hence what you end up with is a less realistic abstraction, with regard to commodity production in precapitalist society, than when you abstract from state intervention or monopoly in a capitalist society, where these factors (I think we may assume) are subordinate to (capitalist) commodity production.
If I'm understanding the discussion correctly, the contentions are this;
1. Primarily, whether or not Simple Commodity Production corresponds to some set of historically extant social relations. It is manifestly apparent that commodities were produced in exactly the way Noa quotes Marx; if I'm not mistaken, Roman agriculture engaged in the production of olives and olive oil (to name one) which was exported in exchange for grain. The dominant production relations were based on antique slavery, and to an extent so were distribution relations; never the less you have a "community" as marx put's it, exchanging with another.
2. Is Simple Commodity Production a MoP? I'd argue no in the sense of Antique, Feudalism, Capitalism. It might be better explained as the germ form of capitalism in these prior societies. Or it might refer to a set or relations in these societies that eventually grew into capitalism.
3. By what mechanism(s) does the law of value operate in SCP? Well, what would the law of value need to operate? Jura is arguing that labor mobility is necessary. I'm not sure. The thesis presented by Noa, based on Dunaevsky and some quotes from Marx and Engels is that the Law of Value operates in *some* form where commodity production obtains; and operates in a specific form in capitalism (via prices of production). There is a certain and reasonable logic there. Arguably, all you need for the law of value to operate is a surplus and the existence of exchange, no? Especially as a division of labor based on specialization occurs you are apt to have a dynamic where the ability to secure necessities by their purchase with money gotten as a result of the production of some useful object is in play, whether or not the production utilizes slave labor, family labor, or wage labor.
Appreciate the exchange. A minor note; I feel that Rubin, and by way of him, Heinrich and VFT theory promotes a sort of anti-political marxism as a result of their kind of metaphysical reading of value. By exorcising history, they exorcise the unfolding of class struggle and the relevant political implications. I don't think this is intentional but I think it has a result in their strawman critique of "world view" marxism etc.
It is manifestly apparent that commodities were produced in exactly the way Noa quotes Marx; if I'm not mistaken, Roman agriculture engaged in the production of olives and olive oil (to name one) which was exported in exchange for grain.
This is not a point of contention at all. Of course commodities were produced long before capitalism. The debate here is about how this commodity production was regulated. My position is basically that prices weren't equal to values.
Pennoid
It might be better explained as the germ form of capitalism in these prior societies. Or it might refer to a set or relations in these societies that eventually grew into capitalism.
I don't think Noa believes this. I certainly don't. This is basically the commercialization model.
Commodity production was a necessary condition for the emergence of capitalism, but not a sufficient one, and it didn't naturally "grew into" capitalism. Commodity production, even very developed, existed in multiple countries before the emergence of capitalism. Only in Britain did capitalism actually develop (at first, in agriculture) and the decisive factor was the disposession of peasants (which itself was a result of other factors). EM Wood's The Origin of Capitalism is an excellent exposition of this view, including the critique of the commercialization model.
Pennoid
Arguably, all you need for the law of value to operate is a surplus and the existence of exchange, no? Especially as a division of labor based on specialization occurs you are apt to have a dynamic where the ability to secure necessities by their purchase with money gotten as a result of the production of some useful object is in play, whether or not the production utilizes slave labor, family labor, or wage labor.
There are many hidden assumptions here. For example,that necessities are acquired on the market. Was there really an internal market in necessities in precapitalist Britain? Did peasants, even free peasants routinely acquire necessities on the market? Did they acquire most of their means of production on the market? Well, if I remember correctly, Brenner, Wood et al. show they didn't, they show that an internal market in food only emerged as a result of capitalism in agriculture, and this internal market was a necessary condition for the emergence of industrial capitalism.
(Nevertheless, I still fail to see how what you've describe leads to prices which reflect socially necessary labor time.)
Pennoid
A minor note; I feel that Rubin, and by way of him, Heinrich and VFT theory promotes a sort of anti-political marxism as a result of their kind of metaphysical reading of value.
Oh, please don't. I really don't like this sort of amalgamating of different things (Rubin, Heinrich and whatever "value-form theory" means to you). These are actually different positions. Also, the whole argument from "undesirable political consequences" is pretty weak. You can't reasonably judge a theory (if we agree that what we are dealing with here is a scientific theory) by its political implications. It's a bit like saying Lenin isn't worth reading because of Cheka arresting and shooting strikers. Wink, wink.
Also, it's just wrong. Arguably, one of the schools in "VFT theory" is Open Marxism, which is basically a merger of Italian workerism and the German "new reading of Marx". There's nothing anti-political or anti-class struggle about it. You may not like the politics (I don't know your preferences), but it certainly isn't anti-political. I don't think there's anything inherently anti-political about Heinrich, either. And Rubin was an academic economist and a Menshevik.
the development of labor productivity in agriculture in precapitalist societies was rather slow.
fwiw, quote from Harman's People's history of the world:
Chris Harman
In the 6th century a new design of plough, ‘the heavy wheeled plough’ capable of coping with heavy but fertile soil, appeared among the Slav people of eastern Europe and spread westwards over the next 300 years. With it came new methods of grazing, which used cattle dung to fertilise the land. Together they allowed a peasant family to increase its crop yield by 50 percent in ‘an agrarian pattern which produced more meat, dairy produce, hides and wool than ever before, but at the same time improved the harvest of grain’. One economic historian claims, ‘It proved to be the most productive agrarian method, in relation to manpower, that the world had ever seen’.
There were still more new techniques in the centuries which followed, such as the adoption of the central Asian method of harnessing horses—which allowed them to replace the much slower oxen in ploughing—and the use of beans and other legumes to replenish the soil. According to the noted French historian of the medieval peasantry, Georges Duby, the cumulative effect of these innovations was to double grain yields by the 12th century.
Such changes took place slowly. Sylvia Thrupp has suggested that ‘the best medieval rates of general economic growth...would come to perhaps half of one percent’. Nevertheless, over 300 or 400 years this amounted to a transformation of economic life.
Such advance depended to a very large extent on the ingenuity of the
peasant producers.
.
Pennoid
Is Simple Commodity Production a MoP? I'd argue no in the sense of Antique, Feudalism, Capitalism. It might be better explained as the germ form of capitalism in these prior societies.
In a passage in the Grundrisse Marx referred to it as an "intermediate species":
Marx
It will be seen in the course of the further development how capital destroys craft and artisan labour, working small-landownership etc., together with itself in forms in which it does not appear in opposition to labour – in small capital and in the intermediate species, the species between the old modes of production (or their renewal on the foundation of capital) and the classical, adequate mode of production of capital itself.
In German:
Es wird sich bei der weitern Entwicklung zeigen, wie das Kapital handwerksmäßige Arbeit, arbeitendes kleines Grundeigentum etc. und sich selbst vernichtet in den Formen, wo es nicht im Gegensatz zur Arbeit erscheint – im kleinen Kapital und den Mittelgattungen, Zwittergattungen zwischen den alten Produktionsweisen (oder wie sie sich auf Grundlage des Kapitals erneuert haben) und der klassischen, adäquaten Produktionsweise des Kapitals selbst.
(this quote I got from 'Reconsidering the Early Modern Urban Economy: The Cases of Leiden and Lille' at jstor. The article argues that:
Small commodity production was, in fact, an endeavour
both to achieve a high level of output and to preserve critical
aspects of the urban community. As such, though destined never to
become the dominant system, it was not simply transitional or intermediate
but formed one of the "obstacles" to the rise of capitalism,
one which, because it was created in response to changing circumstances,
was resistant to many of the forces which had undermined
medieval craft production.
)
In Capital Marx referred to it like this (my emphasis):
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. ...
This mode of production presupposes parcelling of the soil and scattering of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so also it excludes cooperation, division of labour within each separate process of production, the control over, and the productive application of the forces of Nature by society, and the free development of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds.
In German:
Das Privateigentum des Arbeiters an seinen Produktionsmitteln ist die Grundlage des Kleinbetriebs, der Kleinbetrieb eine notwendige Bedingung für die Entwicklung der gesellschaftlichen Produktion und der freien Individualität des Arbeiters selbst. Allerdings existiert diese Produktionsweise auch innerhalb der Sklaverei, Leibeigenschaft und andrer Abhängigkeitsverhältnisse. Aber sie blüht nur, schnellt nur ihre ganze Energie, erobert nur die adäquate klassische Form, wo der Arbeiter freier Privateigentümer seiner von ihm selbst gehandhabten Arbeitsbedingungen ist, der Bauer des Ackers, den er bestellt, der Handwerker des Instruments, worauf er als Virtuose spielt.
Diese Produktionsweise unterstellt Zersplitterung des Bodens und der übrigen Produktionsmittel.
Sounds like SCP is synonymous with Brenner and Post etc.'s conception of "petty proprietorship". It is a sort of doomed set of social relations because what allows it to become legally predominant is precisely a set of legal arrangements which also allow for capitalist accumulation and the driving of these petit-bourgeois producers out of existence.
The quote from Capital provided above by Noa makes this clear.
You don't need wage labor to have a division of labor, exchange, markets, or commodity production. Forms of production for exchange based on different types of labor inputs will still have to account for the cost of those labor inputs. They may, given legal privileges, be able to go further in driving their producers to death, but would undermine their own enterprise if they failed to reproduce them. This might be thought of as a primitive form of the law of value.
You don't need wage labor to have a division of labor, exchange, markets, or commodity production. Forms of production for exchange based on different types of labor inputs will still have to account for the cost of those labor inputs. They may, given legal privileges, be able to go further in driving their producers to death, but would undermine their own enterprise if they failed to reproduce them. This might be thought of as a primitive form of the law of value.
Well, in a sense, "the law of value" in a very broad sense always operates. No society can produce more than the total available labor time allows given existing productivity, and in the long run every society must at least reproduce its conditions of existence. So social labor always has to be apportioned within these constraints, even in communism.
But I think that, even given commodity production, these constraints provide quite a lot of leeway in the sense that there are various ways in which the regulation and apportioning can actually be executed. I think the law of value in the narrow sense – that the labor of agents involved in commodity production is apportioned through an impersonal mechanism which appears to agents as "market signals" to which they respond – only works where most inputs are commodified (accounting for them in money becomes possible), means of subsistence are mostly commodified (producers must engage in a substantial amount commodity production to even reproduce), there is competition (pressure toward economy in inputs and methods), and the ability to respond to market signals (i.e., the ability to switch between outputs, which also includes the switching of inputs and methods of production).
I think it's problematic to suppose that these things simply were there before capitalism. A division of labor surely was there, but probably pretty rigid and based on long traditions. So you get difficulties with switching. I don't believe means of subsistence were commodified to any considerable extent. You had things like the commons, customary laws of access to means of subsistence etc. So there are alternative, non-market strategies that agents can pursue in response to market signals. Etc. etc. I don't want to give the impression that I know these things for sure, but it seems plausible to me. One would have to actually look at the evidence.
So all in all, I think the operation of the law of value (in the narrow sense) in precapitalist commodity exchange was more or less blocked by these sorts of things (these other factors involved in the apportioning of social labor within the constraints I mentioned).
BTW, what you describe, i.e., "someone's" "producers" being "driven" by that someone to do whatever, corresponds more to some form of domination by, e.g. merchant's or usurer's capital, as in the putting-out system. That would be more like an early form of formal subsumption of labor under capital. Of course these situations existed even in antiquity, but I don't think they correspond to what is traditionally understood as "simple commodity production" (i.e. a mode of production based on free private producers who own their means of production and are not exploited by a capitalist). I would be much more willing to concede the operation of the law of value in the narrow sense in situations like this. Even after capitalism in agriculture first emerged in Britain, obviously not all of Britain's social labor was apportioned through the law of value (in the narrow sense). It was like a mini-capitalism within a different mode of production that gradually grew (although not entirely "naturally" but with the help of a lot of extra-economic intervention) to encompass the whole economy. I think there could have been mini-capitalisms in ancient Greece and Rome or in late medieval Europe that were to a considerable extent regulated by the law of value in the narrow sense. But they were different from the supposed "simple commodity production".
I'm a bit loaded so take all of this with a grain of salt, lol.
Right, but things like tool production, or really whatever production of non-necessities became a sphere (perhaps outside the state?) of specialized production, and exchange takes place.
It's this way that I think you could read a concept like "Simple Commodity Production" but then this is quite abstract and already generalizes further than marx is willing in the quote noa presented. Though this does allow for a framework to investigate the hypothesis (and I agree an investigation would be necessary).
This would, it seems, lend to the ideas put forward by Marx about how forms of exchange have a logic to them; that they manifest socially for reasons people might not (And don't need to) fully grasp, on the basis of different social classes in different epochs, but never the less have a particular logic in each context.
I don't have a problem with the idea that SCP (as you describe it which departs from my more general conception of a broad or vague or kernal of the law of value developing) *can* be but is not always governed by the law of value. You're right that it depends on their market integration which in turn depends on their ability to produce their own necessities.
I guess it would make sense that specialized producers have to exchange for their necessities (unless state subsidy but thats another can of worms) meaning that they *would* be more subject to something like a primitive law of value, rather than independent petty proprietors who *don't* exchange for necessities.
These are from Capital Vol. 1, that I could remember.
Right in chapter one:
Every product of labour is, in all states of society, a use value; but it is only at a definite historical epoch in a society’s development that such a product becomes a commodity, viz., at the epoch when the labour spent on the production of a useful article becomes expressed as one of the objective qualities of that article, i.e., as its value. It therefore follows that the elementary value form is also the primitive form under which a product of labour appears historically as a commodity, and that the gradual transformation of such products into commodities, proceeds pari passu with the development of the value form.
We perceive, at first sight, the deficiencies of the elementary form of value: it is a mere germ, which must undergo a series of metamorphoses before it can ripen into the price form.
And for more relating of the 'abstract-theoretical' to the historical:
The forms A and B were fit only to express the value of a commodity as something distinct from its use value or material form.
The first form, A, furnishes such equations as the following: – 1 coat = 20 yards of linen, 10 lbs of tea = ½ a ton of iron. The value of the coat is equated to linen, that of the tea to iron. But to be equated to linen, and again to iron, is to be as different as are linen and iron. This form, it is plain, occurs practically only in the first beginning, when the products of labour are converted into commodities by accidental and occasional exchanges.
The second form, B, distinguishes, in a more adequate manner than the first, the value of a commodity from its use value, for the value of the coat is there placed in contrast under all possible shapes with the bodily form of the coat; it is equated to linen, to iron, to tea, in short, to everything else, only not to itself, the coat. On the other hand, any general expression of value common to all is directly excluded; for, in the equation of value of each commodity, all other commodities now appear only under the form of equivalents. The expanded form of value comes into actual existence for the first time so soon as a particular product of labour, such as cattle, is no longer exceptionally, but habitually, exchanged for various other commodities.
The first may be seen as occurring wherever DoL takes permanent hold, and the second wherever different types of societies, specialized (e.g. nomads based on cattle production?) come into regular contact with settled agricultural societies?
And from the oft-quoted Fetishism Section:
In all states of society, the labour time that it costs to produce the means of subsistence, must necessarily be an object of interest to mankind, though not of equal interest in different stages of development.27 And lastly, from the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labour assumes a social form.
Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities?
Clearly from this form itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products
That footnote 27 says:
Among the ancient Germans the unit for measuring land was what could be harvested in a day, andwas called Tagwerk, Tagwanne (jurnale, or terra jurnalis, or diornalis), Mannsmaad, &c.
In this general direction it is admitted at least, that commodity production does of course unfold in ancient societies:
In the ancient Asiatic and other ancient modes of production, we find that the conversion of products into commodities, and therefore the conversion of men into producers of commodities, holds a subordinate place, which, however, increases in importance as the primitive communities approach nearer and nearer to their dissolution. Trading nations, properly so called, exist in the ancient world only in its interstices, like the gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia, or like Jews in the pores of Polish society. Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent.
This is contrasted with one (of the three I could find) of the instances in which the term "law of value" appears:
On the surface of bourgeois society the wage of the labourer appears as the price of labour, a certain quantity of money that is paid for a certain quantity of labour. Thus people speak of the value of labour and call its expression in money its necessary or natural price. On the other hand they speak of the market-prices of labour, i.e., prices oscillating above or below its natural price.
But what is the value of a commodity? The objective form of the social labour expended in its production. And how do we measure the quantity of this value? By the quantity of the labour contained in it. How then is the value, e.g., of a 12 hour working-day to be determined? By the 12 working-hours contained in a working day of 12 hours, which is an absurd tautology.1 In order to be sold as a commodity in the market, labour must at all events exist before it is sold. But, could the labourer give it an independent objective existence, he would sell a commodity and not labour.2
Apart from these contradictions, a direct exchange of money, i.e., of realized labour, with living labour would either do away with the law of value which only begins to develop itself freely on the basis of capitalist production, or do away with capitalist production itself, which rests directly on wage-labour. The working day of 12 hours embodies itself, e.g., in a money-value of 6s. Either equivalents are exchanged, and then the labourer receives 6s, for 12 hours’ labour; the price of his labour would be equal to the price of his product. In this case he produces no surplus-value for the buyer of his labour, the 6s. are not transformed into capital, the basis of capitalist production vanishes. But it is on this very basis that he sells his labour and that his labour is wage-labour. Or else he receives for 12 hours’ labour less than 6s., i.e., less than 12 hours’ labour. Twelve hours’ labour are exchanged against 10, 6, &c., hours’ labour. This equalisation of unequal quantities not merely does away with the determination of value. Such a self-destructive contradiction cannot be in any way even enunciated or formulated as a law
Although this points out that the law of value "develops freely" in capitalist society, not that value or the law has no role to play in non-capitalist society.
generally speaking, the idea that there's a neat chronological progression is misleading.
It's misleading with regards Hegel as well. Hegel's Logic begins with pure Being, whereas the actual course of Western philosophy began with Thales' water, and only later with Parmenides did the Greeks arrive at 'Being' in general as a metaphysical principle. The culminating movement of the Phenomenology and the Logic, Absolute Knowledge and the Absolute Idea, are things that can be found in Plato's dialogue Parmenides. Hegel treats Greek mythology and art in the Phenomenology after the Enlightenment and the French revolution.
Nevertheless, Hegel's method and overall system is obviously more engaged with history than say for example, someone like Spinoza who elaborated his philosophy as a series of supposedly universal axioms, propositions and deductions.
I suppose to think back upon one of the original questions I asked, there actually is no universal logical relation between theory and history. It's a connection that has to be decided on a case by case basis depending on the specific question that needs answering or the point that has to be brought to the fore. But that there is always necessarily some connection is I think implied in the fact that what is being examined is a form of activity (Mental production in Hegel's case, capitalist production in Marx's case), which always occurs in time, and therefore always has a history.
EDIT: I'm don't know if this is immediately relevant to the question under discussion in this thread, I was mostly reacting in my original post to the original article posted.
Reading Hegel is more fun than discussing Simple Commodity Production tho tbh
I think too much is sometimes made of the historically specific "all powerful" role of capital. It seems like if their is any geist on the historical development of humanity from a materialist perspective it would be located on the fact of an unfolding and complicating division of labor, taking many forms (Modes of production) as humanity develops. Capital is a social relationship between classes - a form of the division of labor.
Despite Dunaevsky's critique, I think at least elsewhere Rubin more clearly believed the law of value did apply in simple commodity production and the latter was historically real (and already apropos his main work he was condemned for this by Projekt Klassenanalyse in 1975). Some of these other texts (including his essay on money) are translated in the forthcoming Responses to Marx's Capital.
incidentally Jura, while searching for soviet commentary on this topic I stumbled on a Czech economist Josef Mervart (born 1927), who wrote on prices and international trade. One of his books (Význam a vývoj cen v mezinárodním obchodě, 1960) was translated into Russian: Ценообразование в международной торговле (1962). Couple of English translated articles in Czechoslovak economic papers 1959 on law of value on the world socialist market. Apparently last active in the 1990s when he wrote on the Czech banking sector.
Yeah, he was moderately famous. He led the economics department at the Institute of ML and also wrote a texbook on planning. The book you mention, or at least part of it, was also published in German, it seems.
Mandel's Traité d'économie marxiste volume 1 (downloadable online), page 68 onward gives anthropological/historical examples of labour time accounting, page 75 onward is about equal exchange, and pages 77–81 is specifically about SCP.
There's just a brief relevant for us section in English (also without the references given in the book): https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1967/intromet/ch01.htm#s4
Despite Dunaevsky's critique, I think at least elsewhere Rubin more clearly believed the law of value did apply in simple commodity production and the latter was historically real (and already apropos his main work he was condemned for this by Projekt Klassenanalyse in 1975). Some of these other texts (including his essay on money) are translated in the forthcoming Responses to Marx's Capital.
I'm sorry Noa, but I don't think you are accurate about Rubin on this thread. Earlier in the thread you claimed that there was "no doubt that Rubin believed that SCP was real historically and that it transitioned into capitalism", but Rubin makes it clear that he (and Marx) is using the category of simple commodity production as a theoretical tool in order to describe developed capitalism. He also makes it clear that he doesn't believe that the law of value existed before capitalism. He goes into these questions in some detail towards the end of Chapter 18 of his book.
Here are a few key quotes from that section:
Rubin
Thus the labor theory of value and the theory of production price are not theories of two different types of economy, but theories of one and the same capitalist economy taken on two different levels of scientific abstraction. The labor theory of value is a theory of simple commodity economy, not in the sense that it explains the type of economy that preceded the capitalist economy, but in the sense that it describes only one aspect of the capitalist economy, namely production relations among commodity producers which are characteristic for every commodity economy.
5. Historical Foundations of the Labor Theory of Value
After the publication of the third volume of Capital, opponents of Marx's theory of value, and to some extent its advocates, created the impression that the conclusions of the third volume demonstrated the inapplicability of the law of labor value to the capitalist economy. This is why certain Marxists were prone to construct a so-called "historical" foundation for Marx's theory of value.
(...)
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 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. 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.
(...)
Applying this conclusion to the question which interests us, we can say: labor-value (or commodity) is a historical "prius" in relation to production price (or capital). It existed in rudimentary form before capitalism, and only the development of the commodity economy prepared the basis for the emergence of the capitalist economy. But labor-value in its developed form exists only in capitalism.
(...)
The labor theory of value and the theory of production price differ from each other, not as different theories which function in different historical periods, but as an abstract theory and a concrete fact, as two degrees of abstraction of the same theory of the capitalist economy. The labor theory of value only presupposes production relations among commodity producers. The theory of production price presupposes, in addition, production relations between capitalists and workers, on one hand, and among various groups of industrial capitalists on the other.
Earlier in the thread you claimed that there was "no doubt that Rubin believed that SCP was real historically and that it transitioned into capitalism", but Rubin makes it clear that he (and Marx) is using the category of simple commodity production as a theoretical tool in order to describe developed capitalism.
But again, the question is not about the existence of SCP and that it preceded (or more strongly, transitioned into) capitalism. Everyone knows that commodity production existed prior to capitalism, and that it did not encompass the whole of the economy then as it does in capitalism. SCP is not just some "category", but a historical fact. The question is whether the law of value applied in SCP. Although Rubin says that he will not consider that question:
Rubin
Here we will not be concerned with the historical controversy over whether commodities were exchanged in proportion to the labor expended on their production before the emergence of capitalism.
nevertheless it appears that he is ill-disposed toward the notion that the law of value applied prior to capitalism:
Rubin
If the analyst finds that primitive tribes, who live in conditions of a natural economy and rarely resort to exchange, are guided by labor expenditures when they establish exchange proportions, he is prone to find here the category of value. Value is transformed into a supra-historical category, into labor expenditures independent of the social form of the organization of labor.
But that's just a slippery slope argument. It is as if acknowledgement of the fact that commodities existed prior to capitalism, would automatically lead to the position, that commodities are a supra-historical category present since the dawn of homo sapiens.
Really, do even bourgeois economists now believe that anymore? Perhaps yes, but surely it functions for them as some kind of simplistic model, but then in your view Marx used SCP only as a hypothetical model as well. Dunaevsky's critique is that it is theoretically inadmissible to regard the law of value in capitalism as a merely "more complex" version of it in SCP as Rubin does. Rather, there is a qualitative difference.
And if bourgeois economists believed the law of value applied prior to capitalism, why don't they then now all accept the LTV in capitalism? Actually, because the law of value undergoes a fundamental modification which they couldn't explain and hence the Ricardian school disintegrated.
In A contribution Marx gave a brief reference to the "general law which regulates corn prices" in the ancient world:
The sudden and forcible transfer of hoarded money from one country to another is a specific feature of the ancient world; but the temporary lowering of the production costs of precious metals achieved in a particular country by the simple method of plunder does not affect the inherent laws of monetary circulation, any more than, for instance, the distribution of Egyptian and Sicilian corn free of charge in Rome affects the general law which regulates corn prices.
But again, the question is not about the existence of SCP and that it preceded (or more strongly, transitioned into) capitalism. Everyone knows that commodity production existed prior to capitalism, and that it did not encompass the whole of the economy then as it does in capitalism. SCP is not just some "category", but a historical fact. The question is whether the law of value applied in SCP. Although Rubin says that he will not consider that question:
Rubin
Here we will not be concerned with the historical controversy over whether commodities were exchanged in proportion to the labor expended on their production before the emergence of capitalism.
That's the thing: When Rubin is talking about "simple commodity production", he is talking about a theoretical abstraction that is used to explain how capitalism works, he is not talking abut a historical period preceding capitalism. So the question to what degree actual pre-capitalist production fit into the model of "simple commodity production" isn't really relevant to the subject he is studying.
Like I said, I think from Rubin's other articles whose translation will soon be published, it is more clear that he did believe SCP was real and that the law of value applied in it.
Felix Frost
When Rubin is talking about "simple commodity production", he is talking about a theoretical abstraction
I too pointed out that SCP didn't exist for the whole of society, but always in combination with other modes of production, but that for the purpose of study it is permissible to abstract from those other modes. In that sense, sure, it is an abstraction that never existed. But simple commodity producers did exist for Rubin as any thinking person.
In my earlier post #4 I quoted Rubin's comparison of 3 diagrams: 1) SCP, 2) an embryonic or hypothetical capitalist economy, and 3) capitalism. Rubin stresses that only "Diagram No. 2 is not a picture of an embryonic capitalism which existed in history". But he didn't stress that No.1 never existed.
that is used to explain how capitalism works,
Again however, Dunaevsky's critique is that it is theoretically inadmissible to study the law of value under capitalism as merely a "more complex" version of it under SCP; they are fundamentally different.
Note also that Dunaevsky's critique was made in February 1928, which seems prior to the publication of the revised 3rd edition of Rubin's book upon which the English is based. I could not find this quote in it that Dunaevsky gave: 'Now that other works by Marx are available to us, – Rubin writes, – 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."
Maybe I just couldn't find it, but it's possible that Rubin deleted this in the 3rd edition (I'm practically sure he dropped certain passages in the wake of Dashkovskij's 1926 critique).
he is not talking abut a historical period preceding capitalism
Rubin's main focus is on capitalism, but that doesn't explicitly exclude that it also applies to a historical period preceding capitalism. One doesn't exclude the other.
So the question to what degree actual pre-capitalist production fit into the model of "simple commodity production" isn't really relevant to the subject he is studying.
But why did Engels bring it up – was it just out of the blue that he felt like making a fantastical claim? It was in the context of Loria's criticism.
The quote about Marx being "strongly opposed to the view that the law of value was in force in the period preceding the development of capitalism" is from the same section of the book that I quoted from earlier. Here he also briefly discusses why he thinks Engels and other Marxists made the claim about a historical reading of Marx's theory of value, and why he thinks they were wrong to do so.
The quote about Marx being "strongly opposed to the view that the law of value was in force in the period preceding the development of capitalism" is from the same section of the book that I quoted from earlier.
I mistook my own footnote in Dunaevsky there as referring to the Russian (since for some quotes I couldn't find the exact pages in the English, I gave the Russian). Yes, that passage refers to Marx's comment in Theories of Surplus Value (MECW 32, pp. 264–65) on Torrens. Dunaevsky's point is that Rubin misinterpreted that Marx-passage (which btw I also pointed out, years before I even knew of Dunaevsky's text).
Rubin
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.
.
Dunaevsky
In the by Rubin given quote we do not find his commentary. Why is Marx here criticising Torrens? Exclusively because 'Torrens reverts to Adam Smith,' who limited the action of the law of value to "the early period" of social development. Not a single line of Marx here refutes the action of the law of value in a society of equal commodity producers.
What is the course of Marx's arguments? Under capitalism, the commodity-form is the universal form of production relations. According to A. Smith and Torrens, the law of value 'is valid at the early stages of exchange.' Marx accuses them of inconsistency: if the law was valid under embryonic exchange relations, then how can it be invalid under capitalism, where the commodity form became the universal form of production relations.
See section titled Torrens’s Confusion in Defining the Value of Labour and the Sources of Profit, at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch20.htm
A scientific law is an empirical observation of a ‘correlation’ implying some causality and from which can be derived a theory and objective scientific ‘concepts’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_law
The law of value, which is that commodities exchange according to the amount of labour required, was originally derived by Adam Smith from ‘simply commodity production’ and not capitalism.
The theoretical concept that Karl abstracted from it was that of ‘abstract’ labour or human effort.
It would not have been possible to obtain a law of value from capitalism because as Karl noted it did not apply or work in capitalism.
Or in other words when calculating the exchange relations in capitalism using and applying the law of value derived by Adam Smith from simple commodity production; it did not work.
Thus;
This law clearly contradicts all experience based on appearance. Everyone knows that a cotton spinner, who, reckoning the percentage on the whole of his applied capital, employs much constant and little variable capital, does not, on account of this, pocket less profit or surplus-value than a baker, who relatively sets in motion much variable and little constant capital. For the solution of this apparent contradiction, many intermediate terms are as yet wanted, as from the standpoint of elementary algebra many intermediate terms are wanted to understand that 0/0 may represent an actual magnitude.
Classical economy, although not formulating the law, holds instinctively to it, because it is a necessary consequence of the general law of value. It tries to rescue the law from collision with contradictory phenomena by a violent abstraction. It will be seen later[2] how the school of Ricardo has come to grief over this stumbling block. Vulgar economy which, indeed, “has really learnt nothing,” here as everywhere sticks to appearances in opposition to the law which regulates and explains them. In opposition to Spinoza, it believes that “ignorance is a sufficient reason.”
The question then is do you throw the law of value overboard or can something be rescued from the theory or concepts that have been derived from it in simple commodity production?
Theorising that labour power becomes a commodity and, still, of all commodities exchanges at its actual value was the critical step forward.
And then capitalism, where the critical and all determinate commodity ‘in force and made general’ is labour power then “the specific development which the law of value undergoes with the formation of capital” can then be re-examined and analysed on that basis.
On Smith;
It is his theoretical strength that he feels and stresses this contradiction, just as it is his theoretical weakness that the contradiction shakes his confidence in the general law, even for simple commodity exchange; that he does not perceive how this contradiction arises, through labour-power itself becoming a commodity, and that in the case of this specific commodity its use-value—which therefore has nothing to do with its exchange-value—is precisely the energy which creates exchange-value.
Ricardo is ahead of Adam Smith in that these apparent contradictions—in their result real contradictions—do not confuse him. But he is behind Adam Smith in that he does not even suspect that this presents a problem, and therefore the specific development which the law of value undergoes with the formation of capital does not for a moment puzzle him or even attract his attention. We shall see later how what was a stroke of genius with Adam Smith becomes reactionary with Malthus as against Ricardo’s standpoint.
Pennoid, the law is fundamentally changed: in capitalism it is the production price, not value, which regulates the exchange relation. This led Smith to confine the law of value (as opposed to law of production price) to simple commodity production (though "even for simple commodity exchange" it "shakes his confidence in the general law").
Is it fundamentally changed or is it formally changed? I haven't dig through the discussions in all of marx's stuff on this, but I understood it to be somewhat similar to the "rain cycle" via snow; still precipitation but with longer and more complex steps where the preciptat takes different forms, never the less still at root governed by evaporation condensation etc.
Certainly it does imply more of a change than that between rain and snow, that labor regulates production prices (and thus disappears behind price altogether). But if that in turn is regulated by labor then it's still "constrained" as it were, by the law of value.
All of this a round about way of saying that concrete social reproduction requires a baseline amount of labor, expanded reproduction a surplus, and a lack of surplus implies contraction.
That's at the heart of the law of value as I understand it, which still holds in capitalism. Products have to exchange in line with the labor necessary for their production or else a market system could not be relied upon to meet the needs of regular let alone expanded social reproduction. Maybe I'm missing something.
I will select quotes from Dunaevsky's critique of Rubin, with my own emphasis in bold, which hopefully will make things clearer (this is primarily for myself). I leave out the footnotes:
In the exposition of the law of production price Rubin "distracts" from the basic conditions, under which the law of value can be realised in commodity society. He is silent on the central question: whether under capitalism, in one form or another, the very principle of the gravitation of the market price to labour value is preserved. Meanwhile, under what condition is the theory of value confirmed also for the capitalist society? When the study finds: the price of production – is modified labour value, variously fluctuating individual rates of profits represent a quantity of redistributed mass of labour value. Only then the law of production price will be that mechanism, through which the law of value exerts its action.
The reality of the latter under capitalism is confirmed for Rubin, evidently, by the one fact of the existing dependence of price changes, production prices – on changes of the level of labour productivity. But this dependence is manifested in the sphere of circulation. Its "empirical reality" is not denied by any representative of bourgeois economy, for whom, however, there exists no real trend of price movements toward labour value.
What does the noted dependence express by itself, if prices do not tend toward labour value? An exclusively functional dependence: labour productivity is considered as one of the factors of price formation, similar like the relation of demand and supply, "marginal utility," etc. If prices do not gravitate toward labour value, then the "basis" of the relation of demand and supply is not disclosed in the sphere of direct production.
Simple commodity and capitalist economy are studied [by Rubin] entirely independently, isolated from each other. Where is the source of this error? To what conclusions does the viewpoint lead, developed by Marx: simple commodity economy – is the historically real prius of capitalist economy? The conditions of realisation here of the law of value – are historically concretely defined. Under capitalism, commodity relations persist. That is, if the law of value takes place here, then must be preserved also the concrete-determination of the conditions of its realisation in the simple exchange society in the form of gravitation of price toward labour value.
...
For Rubin the formula of equilisation of labour in capitalist conditions comes out merely more complexly, than in simple commodity economy, namely, as derivative of the formula of equilisation of capitals. Equilisation in social production in the first case is set in accordance with the exchange proportions of the labour value of each industry. Equilibrium in the allocation of capital, – remarks also Rubin, – is reached under equilibrium of price by the prices of production, ie, under quantitatively inequal exchange proportions by market values, as they are driven by different organic compositions of capitals in equal-sized units in different industries. Under capitalism, therefore, the law takes a qualitatively different form of manifestation: prices tend toward prices of production, which correspond to an unequal market value.
..
The analysis of [Rubin's]Essays did not point to the fundamental question: in what ways under capitalism does value fulfill its function of social regulator of the distribution of social labour, if 'with the transformation of values into prices of production, the very basis for determining value is removed from view,' 'profit appears as something standing outside the immanent value of the commodity.' [Marx]
The solution to this problem is impossible without a study of the genesis of the average rate of profit. Errors in the formulation of the problem affect also the methods of its solution. The author of Essays does not point the research at the study of the character of the very process of the transformation of market values in different industries in specifically neat (отличные) prices of production.
What tasks does analysis face, apart from the obligatory quantitative determination of the law of value, if it directly can be derived from the mere fact of the dependence between changes of the labour productivity level and price movements? The entire study [according to Rubin] boils down, to trace: through what further additional links is established the above-noted dependence under capitalism, in comparison with simple commodity economy, what "complication" does the capitalist structure bring in the chain of these dependencies.
The entire problem is solved [according to Rubin] by the fact that a simple commodity economy has a 'four-term model of causal connection between the individual categories,' whereas in the capitalist economy – a six-term model, that 'the central links of the theory of the capitalist economy (price of production, distribution of capital) do not rule out the above mentioned links of the theory of value, but, on the contrary, under further analysis will inevitably lead to them, and together with them are included in a general theory of equilibrium of capitalist economy.
For Rubin it is entirely enough, that 'production price can only be explained by changes in productivity of labour or in the labour value of products.' The task of study for Marx is to prove, – that the price of production as such (an und für sich), represents a quantitative redistribution of labour value, that the basis of the origin of the average rate of profit – is the direct process of production of value.
...
In Essays is not displayed the very process of the formation of the average rate of profit.
...
'In our presentation of Marx's theory, – Rubin writes, – different rates of profit in different spheres do not serve as a necessary intermediate link for a theory of the average rate of profit.' 'We assume, – Rubin continues, – that in Marx's system the magnitude of the average rate of profit is derived from the mass of total surplus value and not from the different profit rates, as it may seem from a first reading of Marx's work.'
Rubin is not alone; a similar interpretation of the law of production price is very widespread.
...
How expresses in this regard the author of Capital? Marx derived the average rate of profit from the individual value rates. 'As a result of the differing organic composition of capitals, – Marx wrote, – profit rates prevailing in different production are originally very different. These different rates of profit are balanced out by competition to give a general rate of profit, which is the average of all these different rates.'
'These particular rates of profit in each sphere of production, – Marx strongly emphasises, – are to be developed from the value of the commodity. In the absence of such a development, the general rate of profit (and hence also the production price of the commodity) remains a meaningless and irrational conception.' 'Here, of course, in Marx, – correctly observes M. Smit, – it is not about a simple average of group averages, but about what in algebra is called the "general average," and in statistics is termed the "weighted average." The average rate of profit, for Marx, – is the weighted average of individual rates of profit, as they are given by the different organic (technical) composition of capitals. The role of weight plays 'that relative share of the total social capital swallowed up by each particular sphere of production.'
The opposition, conducted by Rubin [between the average rate of profit – and the average weighted individual value rate], is artificial and far-fetched! In the process of circulation only is redistributed the already produced mass of surplus value. The average rate of profit, "weighted" from the value rate, 'can not be anything other than the total mass of surplus-value, distributed between the masses of capital in each sphere of production in proportion to their size.'
...
Mechanical opposition of sphere of circulation – to sphere of direct production.
'The specific character of Marx's theory of production price, – writes Rubin, – consists precisely of the fact that the entire question of mutual relations between surplus value and profit is transferred from individual capitals to the total social capital.' The law of production price, social-objective patterns in general are realised in the sphere of circulation. In the sphere of production, in different industries – (there are) different organic compositions of equal-sized capitals. Only by mechanical cleavage of these fields of the economy, in the study of the law production price can be "distracted" from the individual value rates of profit. For the dialectics of Marx social-objectively analysis of the "universal" must disclose the main, typical patterns of the "individual." The patterns of social capital, for Marx, express the typical patterns of processes connecting, uniting individual capitals between industries and within each.
Rubin unacceptably opposes the formation of the average rate of profit, as a magnitude derivative of the mass of total surplus value, – to its formation from different rates of profit. The author of Capital did not resolve the question as Rubin proposes to solve it. Marx did not ignore, but studied the problem of the relation between surplus value and the rate of profit of capitals of different industries of production. For Marx the law of the formation of average rate of profit expresses the patterns of these relations, the tendency of individual rates of profit toward the average rate.
Still during the life of Engels C. Schmidt and Fireman tried to "resolve the contradiction" of market value and price of production on the grounds that the prices of commodities equal the sum of labour value, and, therefore, the average profit amount is derivative of the total mass of surplus value. How Engels related to such theories, the pages of his preface to the third volume of Capital reveal well enough. 'Fireman has indeed placed his finger on the salient point, – wrote Engels, – But the undeservedly cool reception of his able article shows how many interconnecting links would still be needed even after this discovery to enable Fireman to work out a full and comprehensive solution. And this is explained, – Engels emphasised, – not only by the incomplete form in which Fireman left his discovery, but also by the undeniable faultiness of both his conception of the Marxian analysis and of his own general critique of the latter, based as it was on his misconception.
Only the theorists of the "social school of distribution without values" deal in analysis – exclusively with the "social capital," "only" with the social aggregate product of labour, "only" with the results of processes in the sphere of competition.
... Essays goes past [ie skips over] the manifestation in social relations between individual capitalists of the process of the combination of the productive forces of individual businesses into a system of social production. That is why it also does not trace, how is reflected in the very law of production price the internal-contradictory process of combining individual capitalists into a single class.
Marx specially dwells on the fact that the organic composition of equal-sized capital here reflects the technical composition ('the conjunction of a certain number of workers to a certain amount of means of production'). The law of production price displays the law of motion of individual capitals in the direction of such a combination of the productive forces at equal-sized units, which creates an objective equal condition of exploitation (the rate of exploitation is everywhere the same). This pattern establishes objective intimate interdependence between individual capitalists, unites them in 'a veritable masonic fraternity in the struggle against the working-class, as a whole'.
..
---- [The following section in Dunaevsky is the most difficult to understand for me, so I couldn't shorten it properly: The price of production in the sphere of circulation and of direct production]
..
Patterns of change of technical, consequently, organic composition of capital in different branches can not be understood without examining the processes of the transfer of capital. In which periods is there a technical upgrade, massive re-equipment? When the long-term reduced demand for commodities of a given industry is not eliminated by a simple reduction in the production scale through outflow of capital into other sectors.
In its turn, the direction of capital transfers is incomprehensible if one distracts from the processes of the moves of commodity values from one industry to another. Capitals rushes only into those industries that are realising high conjuncture rates of profit. The movement of flows of commodity values reflects the process of the reallocation of the mass of labour from one industry of production to another. The realising individual rates of profit are determined by the conjuncture of the market, the ratio of social demand and supply for products in the given industry. The conjuncture rates of profit, of course, do not correspond with those rates that are given organic compositions of capital in different industries. Industries of high conjuncture realise not only the produced value rate of profit, but also attract to themselves the surplus value of other industries. The capitalists of other industries are forced to buy at the high market conjuncture prices. How does this circumstance affect the realised by them at themselves profits? The latter will decrease if the volume of demand for the given commodities remains unchanged, or does not proportionally increase.
The changed relation of demand and supply creates a relatively more favourable conjuncture once for one, then for another industry! It is easy to grasp the laws of the alternating fluctuations in the moves of social labour from one industry to another. Here occurs a steady trend towards the uniform distribution of realised surplus value per unit of capital. 'The general rate of profit only ever exists, – Marx emphasised, – as a tendency, as a movement of equalization between particular rates of profit' (1981, p. 488). The price of production in the sphere of circulation acts, as a prominent tendency in the process of the distribution of the mass of social labour, the redistribution of social total mass of surplus value.
The average rate of profit in the sphere of the market can not be anything else than the average-weighted level of profit, formed from a variety of value rates. Why? The general rate of profit in the sphere of the market 'is only a late result of a long series of fluctuations, spanning a very lengthy period.' The individual links of the process are affected by the action of demand and supply, deflecting realised profits from their value sizes. But the price of production is realised, in fact, under equilibrium of social demand and supply, under which the impact of competition is decreased, eliminated, paralysed and, therefore, can not determine and account for the absolute level of the average rate of profit in the sphere of circulation.
Insofar as the price of production is established irrespective of the influences of demand and supply, the source of the average profit must be found not in the market, but in the conditions of direct production of value. Pressure of competition deflects realised profits from their value rate. It also brings closer the market price to the price of production, the conjuncture profit to the average level, weighted from the various value rates.
Rubin limits the process of the formation of the average rate of profit only to the movement of capitals. However, the latter process is only a consequence of the processes of redistribution of commodity values. Capitals move into industries of high conjuncture after, as a result of a long series of acts of sale of commodities, the process of distribution of surplus value ensures there the realisation of more profit per unit of capital.
Rubin is looking for a unified response, essentially, on two different questions: 1) how is carried out the tendency to an equal rate of profit, and 2) in which form the process occurs of the redistribution of the mass of surplus value.
The first process takes place continuously by means of the regrouping of capitals. Without this process, the tendency towards an equal rate of profit would have been replaced by permanently fixed differential levels of profit in different industries.
The process of redistribution of the total mass of surplus value can occur only through the realisation of commodities on the market, simultanously with the movement of flows of commodity values. In what ways can this process pass through the regrouping of capitals? Because the redistribution of already produced mass of surplus value, i.e. under the already determined way of the redistributed capitals.
These places in Essays become verily a Sphinx's riddle! 'But if the relationship between the profits of two capitals engaged in different spheres of production does not correspond to the relationship between the living labors engaged by these capitals, – writes Rubin, – it does not follow that a part of surplus labor or surplus value "is transferred," "overflows," from one sphere of production to another!'
How does Rubin justify his commentary, refuting 'the representation, based on the literal interpretation of some expressions of Marx'? Let us give the word to Rubin himself: 'However, if value is not a substance which flows from one man to another, but a social relation among people, fixed, "expressed," "represented" in things, then the conception of the overflow of value from one sphere of production to another does not result from Marx's theory of value but basically contradicts Marx's theory of value as a social phenomenon.'
Here graphically, clearly the error in the definition of the object of studies affected a detachment of social equalisation of labour in the sphere of circulation from direct production. Does the movement of value not reflect the movement of a determined mass of labour? Must not the moves of the material products of labour with the stamp of commodity values be accompanied by processes of redistribution of the mass of surplus value from one branch to another? Are not all these processes manifested in the social relations of capitalists with each other? Do the real processes of redistribution of the mass of social labour through commodity values have anything in common with the absurd, caricatural representation of S. Frank of value, 'as some material substance, having the property of a liquid'? All this is very elementarily. The reader may rightly wonder why these real processes of redistribution of surplus value, such a major researcher-Marxist as Rubin is, considers to be a contradiction to 'Marx's theory of value as a social phenomenon.'
...
The erroneous commentary of the law of production price is overturned by the same Essays in those chapters where Rubin unfolds with great force the exposition of the problem of socially-necessary labour. Here is brightly, clearly shown the role of market value, as the "basis," on which rests the very relation of demand and supply, which explains the market oscillations of profit, as processes of the moves of the mass of social labour.
What determines according to Rubin the quantity of the "actually payed social need"? It consists of nothing more than a 'product of the unit value determined by the technical conditions of production, the number of units currently located at the given value.' This mass of value reflects the amount of labour, realised under proportionality in social production. Obviously, under an increase in the market price above market value, the given industry realises more labour than it actually employed. Obviously, these masses of "foreign" labour must have been taken from other industries. Obviously, there must occur a shifting of the mass of labour, and consequently, also surplus value. Again, the chapters of Essays itself overturn the original erroneous commentary of the law of production price.
Abstracting from market value, as "intermediate link" of the process, we are not in a position to understand the internal pattern of direction in the moves of capitals, under which value conditions is stimulated the contraction of capital in one or another industry.
The solution to the problem of socially-necessary labour, which is given in Essays, reveals to us market value, as "intermediate link" of the process of the formation of the average rate of profit. The scheme of this process can be expressed in such basic links: processes of change of the technical composition of capital – the tendency of different organic compositions of equal-sized capitals toward a "socially-average" structure – a reflection of the change in the organic composition of capital per the largest market value – processes of the redistribution of the mass of produced surplus value through the movement flows of commodity values – as a result of these processes, rearrangement of capital from one industry of production into another – the price of production in the sphere of the market.
The market value in each industry plays the role here of a peculiar "transmission apparatus." Through the change in the market value, changes in the organic composition of capital affect the redistribution of mass of labour, and consequently, also the total mass of surplus value. The changes of the organic composition of capitals under an everywhere equal rate of exploitation, cause changes of the magnitude of the market value in each industry.
For each industry the magnitude of "actually, socially payed needs" is changed. Is not all this reflected in the magnitudes of the redistributed mass of labour, does not the magnitude of the price of production itself change as a derivative of the new level of the value rate of profit? A different correlation must be established between the organic composition of different industries, that affects the regrouping of capitals.
The price of production in circulation, reflecting the laws of the redistribution of the mass of labour, thereby reflects the processes bringing closer the organic composition of capitals toward the socially-average level. Price of production should coincide with market value in industries of socially-average organic composition of equal-sized capitals, inasmuch as the tendency in technical progress under free competition constantly operates for a convergence of the individual composition of capital with the socially-average level.
Here the sphere of the market and direct production do not match, but "mutually-penetrate" into each other, their unity acts as a "unity of differences." ...
Marx attached great significance to the problem of the links between the distribution of capital and the distribution of labour. Without a proper understanding of this problem one can not study the internal laws of the curve of capitalist development.
----
...
The relation of free competition between capitalists, for Rubin, is incompatible with different value rates of profit in different spheres of production. The presence of competition, obviously, mechanically should ordain a permanent equality of individual value rates of profit to its social average rate.
Thus seems to us the logical chain of reasoning of Rubin. Its final link is a consequence of a mistakenly developed "starting position": if the average level of profit is derived from value rates, then the latter must be realised in selling prices. Drop the initial link and the whole chain is smashed!
For Marx – directly in the sphere of the market the individual value rates of profit, are not realised, the market price can not be identified with the price of production. The average level of profit in the sphere of the market corresponds with individual value rates only as the result of a complex process. The law of production price consists of nothing else than in the display of the patterns of the dialectics of this process.
..
The numerical patterns of the table of the third volume of Capital express determined economic patterns. The conditions of the numerical example of the tables of the ninth chapter reflect all the distinctness of "the forming principle" of the capitalist structure. The tables reflect the dialectics of the process of the formation of the average rate of profit, the process of converting value in a "newly determined form," in production price. The tables do not only not exclude, but presuppose the relation of free competition. The price of production displays the direction of the process of the moves of the mass of social labour, market value operates (as) "regulatory magnitude" of that amount of labour, that comes to the given sphere, an amount, which in capitalist society by no one is established.' These categories – are different moments of the internal-contradictory process of the redistribution of social labour. Rubin mechanically separates different columns of the tables, ignoring the "linking of their movement."
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Marx did not assume the realisation in commodity prices of the value rates of profit. The last column represents only a "starting point" of the process in the phase of direct production.
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...
Insofar as between all industries there is proportionality, the value rate of profit for each industry according to Ricardo coincides with the average general rate of profit. 'Ricardo identifies production price with value from the very outset, – Marx writes, – and does not see that this assumption is a prima facie contradiction of the law of value. Instead of solution he starts to forcibly derive the law from the contradictory phenomena of reality.
Scientific intuition tells Ricardo that the technical composition in different industries is different. But then also the value rate of profit in different industries is different. The metaphysical formulation of the question drives all study in a false, vicious, hopeless circle. Over which questions does Ricardo grievously rack his brain?
How to solve the great antinomy:
1) different individual value rates of profit constantly are realised in the selling prices;
2) in the selling prices is realised a constantly equal-for-all-capitals rate of profit?
By what ways can these individual value rates of profit coincide with the constantly realised in prices average profit? For metaphysics commodities are sold either at production prices, or at market values; commodities of equal-sized capitals are not exchanged at labour values, since the technical compositions of them differs, – in this form of an unresolved antinomy Ricardo left stand the labour theory of value.
...
Marx condemns Ricardo not for the attempt to derive the average rate of profit from individual value rates, but for the identification of these categories. He pounds on Ricardo because the great metaphysician does not understand that the unity of average profit in circulation is carried out by value rates, as a process, in which the latter operate only as necessary "intermediate links" of the process.
..
What is the logical consequential conclusion of the original position: the value rates of profit do "not serve as intermediate links" of the process of the formation of the average level? Study need not be interested about the organic composition of equal-sized capitals.
However Rubin, following Marx, gives decisively important significance in analysis to differentiation in the composition of capitals c and v, which reveals the secrets of the origin of surplus value. In this way, 'the distribution of capital, through the organic composition of capital,. – correctly notes Rubin, – bridges to the distribution of social labor.' In this way, 'by a visible process of emigration of capital is revealed the invisible process of the redistribution of the mass of social labour.'
But Rubin, obviously, is aware of his logical inconsistency. How can one "enter" in analysis of the organic composition of capitals and ignore therewith the by them caused value rates of profit? 'It is obvious – Rubin notes, – that different rates of profit in individual spheres are used by Marx only as numerical expressions, indicators of the organic composition of capital.'
The artificiality of the argument strikes the eye! Why can it not be also the reverse situation? Indeed only because then it is necessary to reject the initially presupposed commentary of the problem! Why under an everywhere equal rate of exploitation and other conditions being equal, can not the different organic compositions of capitals, on the contrary, serve as indicators of the rate of profit, produced in the given industry?
'The average rate of profit, – Rubin notes in one place, – is the result of the "redistributed between capitalists erstwhile total mass of surplus value.' But then, obviously, individual value rates of profit – are a "link" of the process.
It is just a mathematical formulation or expression of the connection between two observable data sets.
Often under certain prescribed, defined and narrow circumstances.
Thus with the gas laws;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_laws
The mathematical expression of the laws can be incidentally different.
Thus if the temperature of a gas is “doubled” and it pressure is allowed to remain the same its volume doubles,
Or if the pressure doubles the volume halves etc.
Actually it only works or is observed as such over a relatively narrow set of circumstances.
And from those narrow set of ‘ideal’ circumstances it was or is derived.
Eg relatively low pressures and with certain ideal or noble gases.
One might ask what is the point of creating a law or gas laws by cherry picking data from narrow sets of circumstances that are more unusual than applicably normal?
And that would apply equally to taking a law derived from simple commodity production when your interest is capitalism.
But by cherry picking gas law data led to, by extrapolating back, a concept of an absolute zero temperature and much more importantly the kinetic theory of gases.
Which actually led to chemistry and the development of the periodic table amongst other things.
But more importantly although you developed a theory from a ‘law’ derived from a highly selective and limited set of data.
That selective and limited set of data was real enough.
The fascination, interest and ‘bias’ for scientists is when the connection between two sets of data can be expressed in a neat mathematical formula.
Anyway you develop a theory and take it with you and plug it back in to normal situations to see if it can also explain how and why and when it doesn’t work.
Thus choosing another example before we return to Karl.
You could observe like maybe Galileo did that;
……….. stated that Galileo had dropped balls of the same material, but different masses, from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that their time of descent was independent of their mass. This was contrary to what Aristotle had taught: that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones, in direct proportion to weight……
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei
And move on from that to some interesting ideas?
But who is going to say that a falcon feather falls to the ground at the same speed as a hammer ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4_rceVPVSY
Although it wasn’t our case as things happened somewhat in reverse; one could ask why does the falcon feather fall as fast as the hammer on the moon but not on earth.
Like why does stuff exchange at its value in simple commodity production but not in capitalism?
Or in other words do you use the simple situation on the moon or the orbits of the planets etc to explain what goes on on earth with its interfering and modifying atmosphere and air resistance etc.
Or use capitalism with its interfering affects of rate of profit to make sense of the law of value in simple commodity production that has no such interference?
Karl did take forward ‘a’ theory or set of logical concepts derived from simple commodity production and applied them to capitalism.
Developing theories from laws derived from selective empirically observed data and applying them back to general situations can often go belly up; and it does more often than not.
And in fact scientist love it when it does.
Thus the orbit of mercury was doing anti Newtonian stuff but the Einstien theory of gravity fixed that.
Not that everyone dropped Newton’s ‘laws’ as it was still good enough for practical purposes just as you could argue the Law of value still has a general validity, albeit flawed in theoretical detail.
Going back to Karl and his C-M-C in simple commodity production.
Actually it is better doing.
C(1) –M – C(2)
So C(1) is a thing or use value like some linen that the owner and producer doesn’t want or have a use for.
What the owner and maker of C(1) wants is C(2) not M which is just a means to and end or the ownership and use of C(2) which he is going to consume and destroy or wear out in the process.
And they theoretically exchange at their value.
As far as it goes it is a closed circuit.
Actually in capitalism as far as the worker is concerned the same thing happens as in simple commodity production and nothing changes and the theory holds.
Except for the worker in capitalism C(1) isn’t an object or a piece of stuff that he has made it is his ability to work or labour power or a use value to someone.
Linen or labour power?
What’s the difference if they are both commodities?
He exchanges it, his labour power C(1) for M at its value, so still no problem and the theory abstracted from simple commodity production still works .
Then he buys C(2) which might be a coat with his M at its value.
The worker just like the simple commodity producer is only interested in a coat to wear and consume.
And again it is a closed cycle.
And the law of value still operates?
But for the capitalist it is somewhat different.
He takes his M and buys a special commodity labour power C(1) at its value.
But then the capitalist uses and consumes the C(1), labour power, which has a value and for which he has paid a full law of value price for, to create something with more value in it.
Which he sells at a higher value.
So he has 5 hours of money with which he buys 5hours of labour power.
Then he uses the 5 hours of labour power to produce something with 10 hours of value.
Or ;
M(5hours) – C(5hours of labour power)
But the 5hours of labour power works for 10 hours and produces a commodity with 10 hours of value in it.
So
M(5hours) – C(5hours of labour power)….C(10hours)
The C(10hours) belongs to the capitalist and all he needs to do sell it for more than M(5hours) to make a profit.
If C(10hours) sold at its value and according to the law of value then.
M(5hours) – C(5hours of labour power)….C(10hours) –M(10hours)
Then if he wanted to he could start again and double up.
But actually as the objective is to end up with more money than he started with the law of value doesn’t need to operate in the last transaction or;
C(10hours) –M(10hours).
As long as in the more general formula and objective for capitalism;
M –C ….C`– M`
M` > M
Holds.
Thus a capitalist enterprise can still work even if the ‘last’ transaction breaks the law of value.
Or if the capitalist produced commodity does not exchange at its value or say;
C(10hours) –M(8hours).
The regulation of the last transaction can or is invariably modified by the rate of profit.
Actually all the transactions in capitalism eg
M –C
Purchase of labour power or its ‘price’.
C ….C`
Which I suppose is like the rate of exploitation.
As well as;
C`– M`
Can change or break their own ‘models’ or whatever according to circumstances.
There are theories why commodities exchange at their value in simple commodity production and why labour power exchanges at it value.
But there is no doubt that they shouldn’t be scrutinised either.
Like I said, I think from Rubin's other articles whose translation will soon be published, it is more clear that he did believe SCP was real and that the law of value applied in it.
Now that this (Responses to Marx's Capital: From Rudolf Hilferding to Isaak Illich Rubin) has been published, let me just select some passages (from Rubin):
...It would seem that, with the complete prevalence of simple commodity economy, the sole purpose of production is already exchange-value, not consumption, yet Marx declares that the final goal of the circuit C– M–C is use-value. The seeming contradiction vanishes if we recall that a long process of historical development is involved, which begins with purely natural economy and ends with developed capitalism. This protracted process of historical development is characterised by exchange-value gradually squeezing out use-value as the motive and purpose of production. It is completely understandable, therefore, that any given stage, by comparison with the previous one, reveals the increasing prevalence of exchange-value while at the same time, when compared to the subsequent stage of development, it reveals an insufficient ascendancy of exchange-value. That is particularly the case with the intermediate place occupied by simple commodity economy. In the latter, the goal of production is immediately exchange-value alone, although ultimately, or in the final analysis, the goal of production is to satisfy the personal needs of the producer himself.
...
We know that a simple commodity economy previously existed, although it was not yet adequately developed, and that it represented a unity of productive forces and their social forms. In particular, there existed in the simple commodity economy, although not yet adequately developed, the social form of value. We know that, precisely due to pressure from development of material productive forces, the production relations between simple commodity producers grew over into production relations of the capitalist type. We know that this growing over was not merely quantitative but was also qualitative; it was an entire historical upheaval, a leap.
...
The unity and opposition of the two formulae of circulation, C–M–C and M–C–M, simply reflects the fact that the capitalist economy is simultaneously a further development and a negation of the simple commodity economy. It is a further development of the simple commodity economy because it arose historically from the simple commodity economy and at the same time operates on the basis of commodity and money circulation. On the other hand, however, the laws of commodity circulation, in the conditions of capitalist economy, acquire a form that is antithetical to the forms that distinguish them in a simple commodity economy. If simple commodity economy was based upon the exchange of equivalents, in capitalist economy we are dealing with the capitalist’s appropriation of the workers’ unpaid labour.
^ quotes taken from p. 485 ('Marx’s Teaching on Production and Consumption', 1930),
p. 744, pp. 789–90 ('The Dialectical Development of Categories in Marx’s Economic System', 1929).
Just another passage from Marx on SCP: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch47.htm
Peasant Proprietorship Of Land Parcels (bäuerliche Parzelleneigentum, Fernbach's translation: Small-scale peasant ownership)
The peasant here is simultaneously the free owner of his land, which appears as his principal instrument of production, the indispensable field of employment for his labour and his capital. No lease money is paid under this form.
..
This form of landed property presupposes ... that the rural population greatly predominates numerically over the town population, so that, even if the capitalist mode of production otherwise prevails, it is but relatively little developed, and thus also in the other lines of production the concentration of capital is restricted to narrow limits and a fragmentation of capital predominates. In the nature of things, the greater portion of agricultural produce must be consumed as direct means of subsistence by the producers themselves, the peasants, and only the excess above that will find its way as commodities into urban commerce. No matter how the average market-price of agricultural products may here be regulated, differential rent, an excess portion of commodity-prices from superior or more favourably located land, must evidently exist here much as under the capitalist mode of production. This differential rent exists, even where this form appears under social conditions, under which no general market-price has as yet been developed; it appears then in the excess surplus-product.
..
The assumption here is generally to be made that no absolute rent exists,
..
absolute rent presupposes either realised excess in product value above its price of production, or a monopoly price exceeding the value of the product. But since agriculture here is carried on largely as cultivation for direct subsistence, and the land exists as an indispensable field of employment for the labour and capital of the majority of the population, the regulating market-price of the product will reach its value only under extraordinary circumstances. But this value will, generally, be higher than its price of production owing to the preponderant element of living labour, although this excess of value over price of production will in turn be limited by the low composition even of non-agricultural capital in countries with an economy composed predominantly of land parcels.
...
This form of free self-managing peasant proprietorship of land parcels as the prevailing, normal form constitutes, on the one hand, the economic foundation of society during the best periods of classical antiquity, and on the other hand, it is found among modern nations as one of the forms arising from the dissolution of feudal land ownership. Thus, the yeomanry in England, the peasantry in Sweden, the French and West German peasants. We do not include colonies here, since the independent peasant there develops under different conditions.
The free ownership of the self-managing peasant is evidently the most normal form of landed property for small-scale operation, i.e., for a mode of production, in which possession of the land is a prerequisite for the labourer’s ownership of the product of his own labour, and in which the cultivator, be he free owner or vassal, always must produce his own means of subsistence independently, as an isolated labourer with his family. Ownership of the land is as necessary for full development of this mode of production as ownership of tools is for free development of handicraft production.
working link:
working link: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00422620/document
Kolja Lindner. The German Debate on the Monetary Theory of Value: Considerations on Jan Hoff’s Kritik der Klassischen Politischen Okonomie. Science & Society, 2008, 72 (4), pp.402-414.
Lindner
Recognising the law of value in SCP doesn't lead to the political position of market socialism. Diquattro is an example of a market socialist who firmly rejects the law of value in SCP. Not only that, but it seems he even buttresses his market socialism precisely by rejecting the law of value in SCP, characterising it instead as a "moral economy":
The Labor Theory of Value and Simple Commodity Production. Arthur Diquattro. Science & Society Vol. 71, No. 4 (Oct., 2007), pp. 455-483.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40404443?seq=1#fndtn-page_scan_tab_contents
(And of course Engels himself wasn't a market socialist.)
--
For some references to the Italian debate en passant, see this article originally published in 1984 (taking the anti-Engels position, and the author probably by that time already defined himself not as a Marxist):
MARCELLO MESSORI
The Theory of Value Without Commodity Money? Preliminary Considerations on Marx's Analysis of Money https://www.jstor.org/stable/40470701
This is just
This is just bollocks!
Anti-Dühring by Frederick Engels 1877
Engels' Notes
[Referring to what he said and anti exchange- which was Duhring’s neo Proudhonist position]
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
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/notes.htm#n*15
What that means is that in communism we will still wish to minimise the amount of labour time required to produce a ‘useful effects’.
stuff
As we will be faced with an array of options or possibilities to produce something often with multiple potential components produced in different ways it will be necessary to calculate the amounts of labour time required using the different options.
In order to make the optimal decision of the production process etc.
Calculating the amounts of labour time required is calculating, albeit probably approximately, value.
Capital Vol. III Part VII
Revenues and their Sources
Chapter 49. Concerning the Analysis of the Process of Production
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch49.htm
It has a flip side on consumption.
If in free access communism and there is Canadian Ice wine and glugging industrially mass produced plonk in a bottle on the shelves.
Which do I choose if they both taste the same to me and get you pissed?
The one that takes 2 hours to produce or the one that takes 10 minutes?
There is nothing more bourgeois than not thinking or caring at all about how much effort it takes to make something (its value) that you want to consume and only how much you have to pay for it.
And naturally what follows is; if you don’t have pay you don’t have care about anything at all including its 'value'.
I'm not sure who, if anyone,
I'm not sure who, if anyone, first claimed that SCP does not even exist. I think the argument of the "anti-traditional marxists" was just about Marx's method in Capital, eg:[quote=Rubin ]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. [/quote] (also quoted by Perlman in his introduction)
But from the same chapter it is clear that Rubin thinks SCP is a real thing:
craftsmen are not some abstraction...
The following passage leaves no doubt that Rubin believed that SCP was real historically and that it transitioned into capitalism:
So while Rubin claims Diagram 2 was just a theoretical scheme of Marx, he also says that it was derived from Diagram 1 (simple commodity economy), ie something real.
Some time ago on the
Some time ago on the Christianity thread Khawaga claimed that there can be no evidence for simple commodity production. I basically replied that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; an ordinary peasant selling his surplus produce would unlikely leave an archeological trace, unlike say market transactions of the big and mighty (kings etc. recorded in histories).
A simple commodity producer is someone who owns his means of production (or land) and who sells part of his produce on the market (this includes barter).
I gathered quotes here that attempt to show that simple commodity production was quite widespread, perhaps even dominant, in Europe for 1500 years, except possibly for a couple of Medieval centuries, up to the beginning of the modern time.
I will select some highlights:
Even when economies "revert to barter," as Europe was said to do in the Middle Ages, they don't actually abandon the use of money. They just abandon the use of cash. In the Middle Ages, for instance, everyone continued to assess the value of tools and livestock in the old Roman currency, even if the coins themselves had ceased to circulate.
Banaji points to [Dopsch, who] never accepted the theory of a reversion to natural economy in the third century which then supposedly dominated the whole subsequent epoch till well into the Middle Ages.
[One popular view is] that medieval feudalism emerged as a fully formed system out of the villas of the Roman Empire as aristocrats settled peasants on their land as ‘colloni’ under their control. [Wickham] shows that, although the colloni existed, in many regions they were a minority among free ‘allodial’ peasants. It was not until half a millennium after the collapse of the empire that feudal exploitation became so widespread as to be near-universal. There was no simple continuity between what existed in the 5th and the 11th centuries.
In the greater part of France, the Rhineland, the Low Countries, England, Italy, and Spain, free holdings, usually known as allods, ... formed so many inviolable and independent lordships in the midst of the seigniorial estates. By means of intimidation, threats, persuasion, force, the feudal powers set themselves to bring about their disappearance and transformation into fiefs. They were only partially successful in Germany, Spain, and Italy, but they succeeded more effectively in England, the Low Countries, and France.
In Germany free properties diminished in number in the Rhineland, but survived in a large measure in Switzerland, the Tyrol, Upper Bavaria, Swabia, Thuringia, Saxony, Frisia, and Holstein ... In Northern Spain, in the shelter of their wild valleys, the communities of the Pyrenees, groups of foresters and shepherds owned their own woods and pastures ... In the Basque provinces of Alava, Guipuzcoa, and Vizcaya, and even in Castile, whole territories, the behetrias, were peopled with freemen owning their own lands ... Even in other parts of Northern Spain groups of free landowners were to be met with. ... In Italy free proprietors also survived from place to place, particularly in Lombardy and Tuscany, where they were known as ahrimanns, and in the two Sicilies, where the Normans called them alleutiers, after the French fashion.
..
In other parts of the West, where feudalism was more strongly organized, or where the struggle was more difficult for the small proprietors, it usually ended to their disadvantage. In France the allod maintained itself sporadically in Normandy, where the legendary kingdom of Yvetot is a survival of it, and where burgage tenure (tenure en bourgage) seems to have been a form of free property, as was that of the vavasours. The same thing happened in Nivernais, Brittany, Auvergne, and, above all, in Aquitaine, Guienne, Gascony, Béarn, Bigorre, Dauphiné, and Languedoc, where the allodial owners sometimes formed themselves into defensive associations. In the Low Countries, Zeeland, Holland, Frisia, maritime Flanders, Campine, and Eastern Brabant, free property persisted by reason of the energy of their population of sailors and pioneers, and of their isolation in the midst of marsh and heath. But everywhere else victory went to feudal property, such a victory as was won in England after the Norman Conquest, which, indeed, only completed the work of the Anglo-Saxon period. In 1086, the Norman terrier, Domesday Book, recorded only 44,531 free landowners out of a total of 1,500,000 inhabitants in the Anglo-Norman kingdom. ...
As the thirteenth century approached, the absolute freedom of these small properties tended to disappear throughout the West, and the allodial estate tended to approximate either to noble land or to peasant land (terre roturière), to some of the obligations upon which it was already bound.
--
Prussia under the Teutonic Knights in the thirteenth and in the first half of the fourteenth centuries; .... [had] an exceptionally wide and early resort to the use of money ... The economic links between town and country in Prussia are well-authenticated and provide an explanation of how peasants could make money payments.
To every hide there belonged a house plot with yard
and garden in the village itself. These hides were distributed by lot
to the newly arrived Franconian (Rhenish Franconian and Dutch),
Saxon and Frisian colonists; in return the colonists had to render
very moderate, firmly fixed dues and services to the founder, i.e.
the knight or baron. The peasants were hereditary masters of
their hides as long as they performed these services.
... This was the average condition of the German peasants from the Elbe to
East Prussia and Silesia. And this condition was on the whole
considerably much better than that of west and south German
peasants at the time, who were already then engaged in a violent,
continually recurring struggle with the feudal lords for their old
hereditary rights
--
The late medieval social crisis, triggered by catastrophic population collapse resulting from the arrival of bubonic plague in the mid-fourteenth century, enabled the peasantries of the Mediterranean, Western European, English, and western German regions to shed (or, at any rate, greatly loosen) the legal bonds of medieval serfdom. Mostly this was a negotiated process, but in part it entailed peasant revolt (as in the late fifteenth-century Catalan revolt, or the German Peasant War of 1525 and its regional antecedents). Seigneurialism in these regions of Europe slowly turned into a landlordism that itself underwent commodification, falling frequently through sale or lease into non-noble bourgeois or gentry hands.
..
Outside the realm of central and east European commercialized manorialism – that is, in France, England, the Low Countries, western Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Spain, Italy, and the Balkans – the post-medieval family farmer possessed the advantage, ideal-typically, of having escaped servile status’s worst economic disabilities and vulnerabilities. In many cases he had attained a personal freedom upon which landlordly powers could impinge only through the exploitation of local monopolies, as of lower court jurisdiction, milling, or hunting. To village lands formerly held under longstanding customary, often servile, tenure, a regime of fixed money rents now commonly applied, whose long-term erosion through price and monetary inflation favoured tenants. Sometimes these farmers gained virtual allodial (or undivided) property rights in such holdings, as widely occurred in France and England, though in law they qualified only (though still favourably) as hereditary leaseholds. ...
[full-holding family farmers might be de facto freeholders. ... They ] were the dominant rural social group in Switzerland and Scandinavia. Across the countryside of western, central, and southern Germany, post-Reformation state policy sought to maintain such farms as the pillars of their fiscal systems, tolerating a residual and fossilized noble landlordism, but blocking the path to the bourgeois purchase of village farms. What proportion of Europe’s landed peasantry belonged to such a yeomanry or large-holding family farmer stratum on the eve of 1789? In East Elbian Europe, including Russia, probably half the villagers holding arable farms possessed full holdings yielding them and their dependents, in peaceful times, a socially acceptable standard of living and liquid assets or otherwise transferable surpluses (as of livestock and other farm capital) adequate to launch the next generation into marriage and house-holding. There were many village patriarchs who died with coin-filled strongboxes and long lists of debtors.
In Balkan Europe, heavy post-sixteenth century Ottoman taxation and local power struggles among elites, both Muslim and Christian, converted increasingly numerous village farmers into hard-pressed and vulnerable tenants of chiftlik (market-supplying) landlords. Yet surplus- harvesting full holders and independent, market-oriented pastoralists, alongside a politically protected frontier peasantry, were nonetheless numerous.
Other past opponents here of
Other past opponents here of the notion of simple commodity production like Ocelot, jura, Angelus Novus, or now perhaps Craftwork, are welcome to state if they revised their positions now (nothing wrong with that).
It seems like the essence of
It seems like the essence of the debate is the relation between theory and history. Engels primary claim is that Marx's Capital is essentially history "stripped of the historical form and diverting chance occurrences." (Review of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) The article given at the start seems keen to emphasise the 'logical' development of Marx's categories, asserting that Engels' view of Marx's method, for example, implies some disconnect between commodity relationships and capital which engenders a notion of the possibility of some form of market socialism.
Now, obviously on the one hand this is a total fabrication of Engels' political outlook, and I think it's hilarious how groups who pride themselves on such close textual readings of Marx can be so cavalier whenever it comes to Engels, foisting all the evils of 20th century Marxism on the latter.
But what there is also no discussion of is the link between theory and history in Hegel's Logic. Hegel's Logic after all, presents us with a process of the development of philosophical concepts. And many of the stages of the development bear a striking resemblance to definite phases in the history of Western philosophy, resemblances which Hegel himself confirms.
To take a key example - the first volume on the 'Objective Logic' concludes with absolute substance, whose relational mode is necessity. This viewpoint of absolute substance bears a striking resemblance to the philosophy of Spinoza. But more than that, Hegel confirms in the preface to the second volume that it is essentially the doctrine of Spinoza, and that the sublation of that stage of the Logic and the transition to the stage of the Concept constitutes the true refutation of Spinozism.
This is because for Hegel, philosophy is not a collection of various opinions that people have about various broadly defined subject matters. It is the activity of Thought with a capital t. Philosophers appear as merely the vehicles for the inner activity of the absolute Spirit. And the content of philosophy itself as expressed in the Logic, and the history of philosophy, are essentially the same thing - "the study of the history of Philosophy is the study of Philosophy itself" - only the former is the presentation of the inner essential relationship, while the latter is the presentation of external forms.
An extended quote in which Hegel brings out the essential identity between the Logic and the histor of philosophy:
Hegel
I think all of this bears on Marx's Capital, because I think that Marx saw that Hegel's conception of an absolute Spirit which accomplished it's aims in spite of the real agents who actually constituted bore striking parallels with his own conception of capital as an 'automatic subject' which has a logic separate from that of the aims and intentions of the agents who constitute capitalist society. I think Marx saw his book as doing for alienated labour in the form of wage-labour what Hegel saw his Logic as doing for philosophical activity (a form of activity which Marx in his 1844 manuscripts also analyses as a form of alienated activity). I think the relation between theory and history in Capital can be understood in reference to the relation between theory and history in Hegel's Logic, and since the latter presents the logical development as history stripped of it's contingency I think - here the comes the corker - that Engels was right in his evaluation of Marx's method.
This is all pretty rushed thought, it's a brief summation of some things I've been pondering over the last few weeks without being able to fully work out.
My question for anyone that opposes the idea that Marx's development contains an element of historical progression is this:
(1) How do you conceive the relation between theory and history in Marx's Capital?
(2) How do you conceive the relation between theory and history in Hegel's Logic?
(3) How do you conceive the relation between the Logic and Capital, in other words, what constitutes the dialectical method, the nexus that links Marx and Hegel?
Noa Rodman wrote: Other past
Noa Rodman
My "position" is that the first three chapters of Capital on "simple circulation" contain something like a general theory of pure commodity production. And of course commodity production has existed for centuries. However, I don't think there's any evidence that there ever was a pre-capitalist mode of production based purely on commodity production ("based" in the sense that most use-values produced and consumed in those societies were produced for the market). In pre-capitalist societies, commodity production was embedded in other kinds of relations of production.
So while some elements of the theory of "simple circulation" may be useful in understanding some aspects of what was going on in pre-capitalist commodity production (the nature of exchange-value/money, fetishism, functions of money, debtor-creditor relations, the spontaneous emergence and expansion of impersonal relations etc.), I'm very sceptical towards the idea that value regulated economic life in pre-capitalist societies, or even that socially necessary labor time regulated commodity production in these societies. I just don't see the regulating "mechanism" – other than Engels' conscious calculation of averages, which I think is a silly idea that runs counter to the whole fetish-argument.
Edit: Maybe a good way of putting it is that the "pure" theory may partially correspond with commodity production in pre-capitalist societies (i.e., with certain aspects of it), but only fully corresponds with bourgeois society (or rather its "surface"). Any (empirical) claims on the validity of Marx's theory of value for precapitalist modes of production would have to be backed with data on prices as well as a description of the mechanism through which socially necessary labor time regulated these prices.
On the relation of theory and
On the relation of theory and history, I don't think the question really is whether the progression of (some) categories in Capital corresponds roughly to historical development. I think the correspondences are numerous. One only need to look at the ordering of absolute and relative surplus value, or the chapters on cooperation, manufacture/divison of labor and machinery. I think the debate about the "logical-historical" method is much more specific than that and boils down to empirical claims about precapitalist societies (5000 years of value and all that) and the emergence of a general rate of profit.
Edit: But generally speaking, the idea that there's a neat chronological progression is misleading. Marx starts with a commodity without a price. There's no such thing (I think Marx even explicitly says that barter is not the exchange of commodities, and that the two things confront each other in barter as use-values, not as values). Marx didn't do this to mirror some chronological progression ("commodity – money – price-determined commodity"), but to solve certain conceptual problems (what is price, what is money etc.). Also, Marx quickly moves to industrial capital and only shows its historical origins in primitive accumulation much later. He only mentions the two preceding forms of capital, merchant's and usurer's capital, in passing and does not develop industrial capital out of the former two. Quite the contrary, the modern forms of the former two are later developed out of industrial capital (in Volume 3). There are more examples of the progression in Capital being the converse of the historical progression.
Jura wrote: of course
Jura
So if simple commodity production does not imply that all products are marketed (and all "traditional" Marxists themselves have stressed that it exists in combination with different modes of production), you have no problem to say that simple commodity production existed for centuries?
Jura
There shouldn't be an "or" in your sentence; the first claim (which nobody makes) is totally different from the second.
Here we come already to the substantial question, but which in a zeal (or panic) to rule-out any discussion of, has led some here to the adoption of the position that SCP never even existed. It's as if were one to admit that simple commodity production/exchange exists, this by itself already strongly implies that it is regulated by the law of value. Actually this collapse of two different questions into one makes sense, because according to what other logic would exchange in SCP occur than the law of value; was it perhaps rather based on pure chance much like marginal utility?
Noa Rodman wrote: So if
Noa Rodman
At this point I'm not even sure what it implies. Engels used the term to describe a precapitalist mode of production in which producers exchange commodities for prices which express, pretty directly (disregarding fluctuations in supply and demand), the labor time socially necessary to produce them. I don't think this existed, although I'm open to being persuaded by evidence. I'm sceptical, though, as I don't see how it would have worked (i.e., what is the mechanism).
Noa Rodman
And? "Or" is a connective that you can use to connect totally different claims. I think it actually works best with different claims, as opposed to "It will rain or it will rain".
Noa Rodman
I'm not sure I understand the argument here. Are you taking a step back first ("well it's not necessary for the law of value to regulate it"), to then take a step forward ("it clearly must have been regulated by the law of value")?
Anyway, as I said, I think the first three chapters contain a theory of simple circulation. That theory makes certain claims about prices and values and their relations. To me, these claims only make sense when connected to some other claims in Volume 3. I don't see how these claims would work without certain mechanisms described in Volume 3. So if we take the theory of simple circulation as a whole, I don't see how it's empirically applicable to precapitalist societies (on it's own, the theory is incomplete even with relation to capitalism). I think the idea that it's a theory of some precapitalist society out of which capitalism developed is wrong. But as I said, I think you can take some elements from chapters 1-3 and use them to describe and explain what was going on in commodity production in precapitalist societies.
In a sense, socially necessary labor time always regulates production. Every society must produce and allocate time to production and there's always only so much time. But Marx's theory of value makes a much more specific claim that in capitalism, this necessary labor time takes the form of a property of things. This happens, ultimately, because people do certain things, like "invest" "capital" into different branches of production based on "profitability". At the bottom of all this, we eventually arrive at relations of production in which immediate producers are separated from means of production. I don't think people were supposed to do that and be like that in precapitalist commodity production as described by Engels. And in precapitalist commodity production as described by historians, there always seem to be these outside factors intervening, like price controls, impediments on mobility, a great deal of autarky (exchange of surpluses), habitual behavior, etc. Hence I don't see how the same sort of regulation through SNLT described by Marx for capitalism would work in precapitalist commodity production.
Noa, do.you also have
Noa, do.you also have evidence for a historical stages of simple reproduction? Anything Marx puts simple in front of is a logical construction he uses to progress in his presentation of categories; a didactic tool if you will.
Sure, commodities had to exist prior to capitalism, but from page one of Capital Marx is analyzing the capitalist MoP in a logical unfolding. There's a reason why the historical stuff is at the end, all of which is explained in the appendix (i.e. the immediate results stuff). It's also, as Zanthorus points out, heavily endebted to Hegel.
Jura wrote: At this point I'm
Jura
The point was that it's not a MoP where all products are exchanged, and it always existed in combination with other MoPs (eg consumption for own use). You cannot seriously maintain that Engels perhaps implied that SCP was the only mode of production before capitalism and that it covered the whole of production. So again, you hurriedly move on to the different question of whether the law of value applied to it.
"It rained, or it did not rain" are claims about the same question. Your sentence was like: "It rained, or the rain season occurs in March-August".
The error here committed of conflating two different questions is so obvious, that it is difficult to understand why intelligent blokes as yourselves even make it. I speculate the reason is that once you admit to A (existence of SCP), you secretly fear that B (SCP was governed by the law of value) automatically, like a slippery slope, must follow (which it doesn't), but you're right that once we discuss B on its own, your arguments do run the risk of being more easily challenged (i.e. without me having to be distracted by A, which acts like your defensive wall). So I was being a bit dialectical, not only pointing to the error, but what causes the error. I feel I still have to get that definitively out of the way first, before we can have a proper discussion on the question of the application of the law of value in SCP.
The "mechanism in volume 3" doesn't apply to SCP, the point being that the law of value in SCP is not the same as in capitalism (where exchange is regulated by price of production). And the claims in the first chapters make sense on their own. Despite posing as a defender of a purely logical reading, in your view the forms of value even "logically" don't make sense – iirc you are inspired by Castoriadis's critique.
Nobody claims that. Rather the exposition of forms of value is a theory of how money developed from barter. It disproves exactly that exchange was something eternal, and that money always existed.
That "element" being the commodity (and money), i.e. the whole point. Marx explicitly writes in chapter 6:
Marx
.
Jura
If commodities/money existed before capitalism, so did commodity fetishism.
Commodity fetishism is not caused by investment decisions, not that you'd disagree (I hope).
In SCP the producers are not yet separated from the means of production.
Engels is not making a normative claim that the law of value "should" apply in SCP. But the law of value does happen to be a "just" norm:
[quote=Dunaevsky]The best illustration of the historical veracity of the position of Engels: the numerous "statutes" of magistrates, regulating the relations of production of the craft of a city, and the economic doctrine of the canonists, summarising the real economic relations of their time. The teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas about "Justum pretium" (just price) is devoted to the proof of the need to maintain relations of equality of commodity producers. In legal and ethical form the doctrine of "Justum praecium" presented the commitment of exchange on the basis of equal equivalents and equality of the subjects of exchange. [/quote]
Moreover, for Marx still in the first stage of communism the logic of the law of value applies, even more than it did in capitalism, namely the actual producers get a share of the social product equal to their labour (or closer to it than in capitalism).
Jura
Of course, but so there are monopolies, state intervention, etc. in capitalism.
Khawaga
1500 years in Europe, see my post #5. But if you mean evidence in Marx, see eg my quote from chapter 6.
He is analysing the commodity. If you believe it's capitalism then you believe exchange/money=capitalism, so naturalising capitalism for all past epochs like bourgeois economists.
Oh come on, the first fucking
Oh come on, the first fucking page says that in societies in which the capitalist MoP prevail,.wealth takes on the form of an immense accumulation of commodities and therefore the analysis must start with this form, which is also the germ or cell.from which all other forms/categories are.derived. You know, dialectics and all that Marx coquetted with.
Noa Rodman wrote: The point
Noa Rodman
Whatever, Noa. The point about the law of value in precapitalist societies still stands. This is the key question. I'm not disputing the existence of commodities and money before capitalism. I don't remember ever disputing that. I don't think a literate person can do that. But the key issue is what regulated precapitalist commodity production: Was it the law of value? Was abstract labor the form taken by the individual labors of producers? How was value constituted, or was it at all? How did all this work without the competition of capitals? It's up to proponents of "simple commodity production" (if they want to go beyond "there were commodities before capitalism" which, duh, was never under dispute) to solve these questions.
The usual interpretation is that in simple commodity production, long-term price = value, i.e., value regulates prices. Only with the competition of capitals and the formation of a general rate of profit do prices deviate from values, and long-term prices are regulated by prices of production which somehow express values. I don't know if this is in Engels' preface to Volume 3 (or whatever it was) and I can't be bothered to go check now. But I take this as the standard interpretation. Without a description of what made prices reflect socially necessary labor time, I'm not willing to seriously consider it as more than a fairy tale.
BTW I don't care what Marx wrote about this in this or that manuscript. He was often lazy and inconsequent. Let's take a scientific approach. The theory in Capital makes some empirical claims about capitalism. It provides a description of a mechanism that has considerable explanatory power and enables you to see why these other claims are true or at least plausible. All of this holds for capitalism. Moving to precapitalist commodity production, we have to take away the mechanism, because the conditions were different. If you want to make similar claims, you have to provide a description of another mechanism.
Please note that I never said anything about "all" products being exchanged, only "most".
Noa Rodman
OK, now you even misquoted what I wrote and turned it into a tautology. Anyway, it's perfectly possible to use "or" with propositions that are about different things. "Noa did not built an arch or Dennis Rodman was a basketball player" is a perfectly normal sentence (and true, by the way). I mean, look at any textbook in propositional logic. What do you think those truth tables would be for if "or" could only be used with equivalent sentences?
Noa Rodman
OK, before you go all dialectical on me, as I said, I have no problem admitting that commodity production existed before capitalism. I won't call it "simple commodity production" for terminological reasons.
Noa Rodman
Well if there's some "law of value" in precapitalist commodity production, it's up to the proponents of "simple commodity production" to specify its operation. I've hardly ever read any Castoriadis, so that would have to be a coincidence.
Noa Rodman
I don't think the analysis of the form of value is about barter at all, but I guess that's a different discussion. Barter is not a case of exchange of commodities. In barter (in a society without money), the products of labor are not commodities at all (not according to Marx, see chapter 2).
Noa Rodman
Not at all. Without a specification of 1. how socially necessary labor time actually emerges and 2. how it regulates production, the theory in the first three chapters is mostly descriptive and tells you next to nothing about the "laws of motion" of the society in question. Marx provided an account of points 1 and 2 in Volume 3, but it only works for capitalism.
The quote from the unpublished chapter only "confirms" what we already know (i.e., there had been commodity production before capitalism, a point I don't dispute). There's a similar passage in chapter 4 (in the original numbering), so no need to dig up the manuscripts.
Noa Rodman
I meant something else. I mean that prices ("properties of things") come to express socially necessary labor time, and hence regulate the way in which a society allocates labor. I.e., "the law of value" operates. This is executed in capitalism through the formation of a general rate of profit, the competition of capitals etc. You can't refer to these things in precapitalist commodity production. So either the law of value did not operate, or you have to specify some other way through which it was executed, or you have to define the law of value anew (but then it won't be the law of value).
Noa Rodman
Equivalents, as in equal amounts of abstract labor? Or individual labor? Was it through conscious calculation? How do you square that with fetishism, i.e., the law of value operating behing the backs of producers? Or it wasn't labor but something else altogether? How can you tell? Where's the evidence? Where are the mechanisms?
Noa Rodman
I don't think this is relevant to the present discussion at all, unless you want to suggest that precapitalist commodity production was consciously and socially planned.
Noa Rodman
Sure, and the operation of law of value is therefore more or less deformed. But at least we know there's a mechanism (including the competition of individual capitals) and there are obstacles to it. But what's the mechanism in precapitalist commodity production?
That the development of the
That the development of the value form shows how money developed out of barter is utter nonsense; read the first paragraph in the section on money as means of circulation where Marx explains how contradictions are resolved. Reading the genesis of money as historical is completely missing the point of Marx's analysis of the value form.
Jura wrote: But the key issue
Jura
Yes the law of value (not law of price of production), or else you must conclude that there can be commodities/money without value (=socially-necessary labour time), and consequently the labour theory of value will be a mere noumenon, an unprovable, unknowable thing, just a pretty hypothesis. So permit me the very naive question: is it possible for commodities and the value-form to exist without value?
At one point you already accept the existence of socially necessary labor time in SCP, the question becoming simply: did prices reflect (/oscillate around) it? Even if you hold that prices didn't oscillate around value, you'd have implicitly accepted a value to make the comparison, though we're far from actually constructing/presenting historical market/production data to argue whether prices did reflect value, or didn't. At another point, as a dogmatic axiom, you seem rather to reject even the possibility of there being empirical proof that exchange in SCP happened according to the law of value. Though you open the door a bit for the possibility that the law of value in SCP could exist as a simple fact (indeed, would anyone exchange his cow for a chicken or make other obvious unequal exchanges?):
only to shut it again by insisting that it's impossible to explain without the competition of capitals. For the record, I asked you first: explain what then regulated exchange in SCP? It's fine if you reject the law of value, but then you present no explanation instead (which you should, if you sincerely care about the subject).
Yes, I just wanted to stress they are different questions.
The reason he doesn't talk yet about the mechanism of prices of production is because he's analysing the commodity, which existed also in pre-capitalist society. And a rather weak defense of a purely logical reading it is to say that the first chapters are mostly "descriptive".
The simple form of value starts from barter and then historically (hence the name's reading) moves progressively onward to the establishment of an exclusive product that functions as the measure of value, money. Or to quote from chapter 2:
Marx
And barter can continue even after the existence of money, it's just that money need not be present as actual coin but merely as unit of account.
Jura
It confirms more than just that, ie it confirms that his analysis of the commodity in the first chapter applies also for the commodity in SCP, still a very modest point perhaps. It simply follows that all the things about SLNT, abstract labor etc. he wrote there apply as well to the commodity in SCP.
The law of value undergoes a fundamental change in capitalism, so yes the form of the manifestation of the law of value is modified. Actually this is a point of criticism that Dunaevsky directs at Rubin in the article I translated.
Also here's a link to an earlier discussion on redmarx (btw I actually went to the trouble to find the Loria passage that originally prompted Engels to write the controversial addendum to Capital 3).
Noa Rodman wrote: Yes the law
Noa Rodman
I don't know what the "law of price of production" is. Prices of production are simply the mode of expression of socially necessary labor time in capitalism. I don't think there's a "law of price of production" separate and different from the law of value.
And yes, commodities surely can exist without value. There are plenty of examples even in capitalism. A thing can have a price ("exchange value" expressed in a money commodity) without having value. And a thing can be exchanged for an amount of money that has nothing to do with the labor time socially necessary to reproduce it. My guess is that precapitalist commodity exchange, always embedded and relatively limited as it was, was a mixture of controlled prices, habitual prices, "political" markups and prices based on unique opportunities, "profit upon alienation" and simple cost accounting + markups. I guess there weren't any principled "laws of motion". To the extent that competition developed, obstacles were removed and the market grew to include more and more basic goods, there may have been a movement towards prices as expressions of SNLT. But at that point, I think you would find that early capitalist development in agriculture was already under way. But who am I to guess, I'd be more interested in seeing what theory of regulation of precapitalist commodity production the proponents of SCP propose (aside from "conscious calculation"). So far we've only seen dialectics (in the original Greek sense).
Noa Rodman
In a sense, socially necessary labor time always exists, even for Robinson. All societies apportion total social labor within definite limits. The real question here is whether SNLT assumes the form of a property of things, which are then exchanged, the result of which itself co-determines SNLT, and also the decisions of producers, and hence regulates this apportioning. This is more or less how commodity production works in capitalism. The question is whether this is how precapitalist commodity production operated, as things can be exchanged for money or bartered without any of that having to happen.
Noa Rodman
What I meant is that I don't see the mechanism that would make precapitalist commodity prices have any necessary connection to socially necessary labor time (which, in principle, is "always there", even if only as something that a planning committee arriving by a time machine could have calculated).
Noa Rodman
I don't reject the possibility. I'm simply saying that I won't be convinced unless proponents of SCP actually do some empirical work rather than parrot Engels. Asking about a cow and a chicken is not empirical work, that's a thought experiment.
Noa Rodman
This is preposterous. You are a true believer: there's a hypothesis by an authority (Engels), and although it is not backed by anything (empirical work, nor any real theoretical work on how it could have operated), you accept it, since people who critize the lack of evidence for that hypothesis don't have a better hypothesis. I guess not even the "wealth" of interesting historical work that the SCP-hypothesis has produced so far (in, what, over a 120 years?) will convince you.
Noa Rodman
I'm not defending anything. You seem to have this crazy fixation on philological debates. I don't care much about all that anymore. Marx's theory is either an empirical theory or it isn't. The only way it works as an empirical theory is as a theory of capitalism, because the "surface implications" are only fully (well, technically not fully) worked out in Volume 3. Like I said, you are welcome to accept Chapters 1-3 for precapitalist commodity production and work out the rest (how it actually operated). But without this step, you are left with an very incomplete theory that makes a lot of promises but doesn't cash them out. It simply postulates what value is (a quantity of socially necessary labor time), but it doesn't even show how it is decided which labor time will count as socially necessary. We know that in capitalism this aren't always the most efficient producers. Marx could afford to do that because he knew he would be writing beyond Chapters 1-3, and he knew he was writing a theory of capitalism. But if you cut this rest off, you're left with definitions and also some claims whose connection to experience is dubious.
Noa Rodman
OK, I'm not interested in this discussion and won't engage in it beyond this post as it's tangential. I'm not interested in any of this W. F. Haug stuff. I was referring to this from Chapter 2:
Marx
Noa Rodman
As I said above, you can pretend they apply, but unless you (or Marx) can show how it worked, I don't see why anyone should be interested in that. How can you say some empirical claims apply to something without really having a way to test those claims? At this point, you can at most say that Marx himself thought they apply. But that is philology.
Noa Rodman
Well, again, you can talk about fundamental changes, the three laws of dialectics or whatever, but it doesn't mean anything to anyone outside philological circles. Specify the two laws clearly, show the transformation, point to the evidence. I really can't be bothered to look at the links.
Jura wrote: And yes,
Jura
I have in mind reproducible products, but even for things without value, the money itself has a value (or represents a value).
But then it has a value, the price simply doesn't match with it.
I too guess that there weren't any principled "laws of motion".
The claim (/"postulate/ "definition") is just that the exchange happened more or less on an equivalent labour basis. It should be possible to empirically reject or verify it, so indeed let's not get lost in philological debates. It's still a better claim than "pure randomness" in exchange relations.
If you demand just empirical work, I consider this a fair point, but it applies to everyone. The detractors of the law of value in SCP have not either done any historical work. As I casually noted before, we're both far from constructing/presenting data (/estimates). This hasn't anything to do with a fault in anyone's hypothesis, just a result of lack of data.
To sum up, there's no reason
To sum up, there's no reason as of now to believe in the existence of the standard version of "simple commodity production" as I described it above, i.e., an epoch of several thousands of years in which actual or long-term average prices of commodities were equal to the labor time socially necessary to produce them.
What the balance of exchange
What the balance of exchange was – whether it was symmetric – between pastoralists and eg grain producers (to take a fundamental specialization) or between the latter and urban craftsmen, is something for anthropology to study. It's unreasonable to expect here "hard evidence".
I'm fine with qualitative,
I'm fine with qualitative, anthropological evidence, though.
Dunaevsky mentioned e.g. the
Dunaevsky mentioned e.g. the 'just price' of Aquinas, and this is found back in (Jewish) antiquity:
Jacob Neusner (Brill, 2002), The Mishnah: Social Perspectives. I will spare you excerpts of Talmudic tractates, just give some points by the author.
.
.
Sure, there are plenty of
Sure, there are plenty of examples of reflections on "just" exchange and the "proper" uses of money in antiquity. I think there must have been plenty of normative ideas around which stated what the "proper" proportions should be. This what I meant by "habitual" prices. Come to think of it, it's an element of planning that was probably in place to secure the reproduction of producers (i.e., them not falling into debt etc., but we know how that usually turned out). You can also see in the quotations that some things were treated as inherently non-commodities, i.e., land. I'm pretty sure we could find other examples. This shows how limited and embedded precapitalist commodity exchange was. And I think that the more limited it was (either to particular kinds of commodities, or to surpluses, or geographically etc.), the more "random" (not literally random) the exchange proprotions were.
But anyway, the quotations mention the equivalence of values, but say nothing about what determines these values. In principle it could be just about anything. The first vague hints at a labor theory of value appear in Aquinas, I think. That's 13th century, not that far from the emergence of capitalism.
Jura wrote: And I think that
Jura
Surpluses already attest to development. Exchange relations are "random" only at the most primitive level of barter.
Neusner in a footnote writes, that the value of the worker's work [though we as marxists know this expression doesn't make sense] is clearly taken into account by the Mishnah. Elsewhere he mentions the discussion against usury in Baba Mesia 5: Mishnah Ten:
1) One may say to his fellow, Help me weed and I will help you weed or Help me hoe and I will help you hoe.
a) But one may not say, Help me weed and I will help you hoe, or Help me hoe and I will help you weed.
2) All days of the dry season are accounted alike, and all days of the rainy season are accounted alike.
a) One may not say to another, Help me plow in the dry season and I will help you plow in the rainy season.
Explanation Mishnah Ten:
Section one: Reuven is allowed to make an arrangement with Shimon that one day he will work for Shimon and the other day Shimon will work for him, as long as both are doing the same work. If, however, Reuven helps weed and Shimon helps hoe or vice versa, and one of the labors is more difficult than the other, the bargain is forbidden because of usury. The problem is that the one who does the work for his friend second may do a more difficult type of labor in return for having his work done first. This is a form of usury, since one person will get back more in return for waiting to be paid for his work.
Section two: Just as two different types of labor may not be exchanged for one another, so too the same labor may not be exchanged for the same labor if they are done during different seasons. Since working in one season may be harder than working in another, if the one who does the work for his friend second does the work in a harder season he is in essence repaying the loan of his friend's work with interest.
Noa Rodman wrote: Surpluses
Noa Rodman
I'm not sure what you mean by "development". Some level of surplus must have been a feature of labor since the dawn of modern humnas.
The quotes you provide sound more like exchange of activities rather than exchange of commodities.
from chapter 2 again: Marx
from chapter 2 again:
Marx
.
Jura
Just the last one, as an illustration that they addressed the problem of equating different kinds of labor. Besides, services are also a product.
btw, Neusner gave some valid criticisms of the work of Yu. A. Solodukho (Юдель Солодухо 1877—1963), the English translation of which he edited: Soviet Views of Talmudic Judaism: Five Papers (Brill, 1973).
These are of course normative ideas, not actual history. Perhaps Dave B, if he is not busy with important matters like trolling Christian forums, can provide us with interesting anthropological studies.
Anyway, I don't find the argument convincing against Marx that two different things could be equated through many common substances (eg the expended fossil fuel energy on them, their marginal utility, etc.), and not just labour.
It's one thing if people
It's one thing if people accept a norm that none should work longer and harder than the other in providing favors. This is a rule for organizing direct interpersonal conduct. This need have nothing to do with commodity exchange. Flatmates can agree on this without producing commodities and being involved in commodity exchange (it's still "exchange" in the sense that each does something for the other, but surely we need to distinguish this clearly from commodity exchange; otherwise even sex or the use of language would collapse into "exchange").
It's another thing to suppose that this somehow transforms into an impersonal mechanism regulating transactions between multiple persons who hardly know each other, which is what commodity exchange would be. Or, if it does, I'd be interested in a description of that mechanism.
Also worth noting is the fact that in proper commodity exchange of commodities A and B (goods or services), it is not individual labor times that are compared and equated. Rather, both A and B are reduced, behind the backs of the people involved, that is, without any conscious calculation on their part, to qualitatively homogeneous social labor. The real question is how the individual labor times would be reduced to social labor time in precapitalist commodity exchange, in the absence of the mechanisms that Marx describes as essential for this reduction in capitalism.
I'm not making an argument against Marx. I'm saying that the impersonal process of "equating" need not have occurred at all in precapitalist commodity exchange because important ingredients for that process were missing. In fact, that "equating" process as we know it is a result of the movement of capital. Again, there's nothing to "equate" to unless there's a mechanism that determines which is the socially necessary labor time. Marx describes this in Ch10 of Volume 3, IIRC.
Jura wrote: It's one thing if
Jura
Barter of goods (and up to the full monetary transaction) is also "direct interpersonal conduct" in the sense that both do it for the use-value (C-M-C). And services can be paid in kind (e.g. a singer at a party is paid with food), so there's no neat dividing line between barter in goods or in services. Your example of flatmates is about one and the same household and the particular service e.g. of taking out the trash is difficult to commodify. If we take painting a neighbour's fence (in exchange for doing your garden), work that can be easily commodified, such things are still not production/life necessities. But if you earn your living as a painter and I as a gardener, so when our work is not done we starve, then when we exchange services, yes this can be considered a commodity exchange.
You might understand SNLT differently than I. I consider it just the average time it takes to make/do something. If the product of A can be normally made in 5 hours, but A took it easy working 10 hours on it, then B will be willing to give a product in exchange worth just 5 hours (knowing that A could have done the work in that time). I don't think SNLT was absolutely unknowable.
(for some French marxist anthropology literature on barter see Anne Chapman 1980, she criticises Marx btw)
Noa Rodman wrote: Barter of
Noa Rodman
Well, OK, in this sense, everything is direct interpersonal conduct. Even a capitalist hiring a worker. So the distinction collapses. Not a very useful approach in my view.
The key issue here is what regulates that conduct. Are there transparent, habitualized norms, or an invisible social mechanism that operates behind our backs? Mere equivalence (of labor times, individual or average ones) does not necessarily imply commodity exchange. It's the mechanism that makes it what it is.
Noa Rodman
OK, the way I understand the quotation we're talking about here is that it is about two peasants, probably living in close proximity (not unlike the two flatmates; why should it matter whether it's a household or a village?), who are not part of a rigid system of division of labor. They both do similar activities throughout the year. The norm is about how "favors" should be made, i.e., they should be reciprocal and equal. It's more similar to the situation when parents instruct their children to share toys than to commodity exchange.
Noa Rodman
Well, OK, but this is different from Marxian SNLT. Your SNLT is just the arithmetic average over individual labor times. The "L" in your SNLT is not abstract labor.
Noa Rodman
OK, so no fetishism, then, no law asserting itself similarly to the law of gravity, no opaque system of division of labor... but conscious calculation on the part of agents. Why would they bother with commodity exchange, then?
And do note that the example
And do note that the example of Reuven and Shimon even forbids activities A and B that are "exchanged" to be different or even to be performed in different seasons. Not very much like C - M - C or C - C where the C's are always of a different kind. In the Reuven-Shimon example, the equivalence between A and B is already there, because the activities and conditions are the same and Reuven and Shimon's labor is from the start presupposed to be of the same intensity and productivity. All the "work" of reducing and equating that is done objectively, through the market, in commodity exchange is already done here ex ante by the norm. This example is completely irrelevant even to a discussion of precapitalist commodity exchange. It simply isn't what you take it for.
Jura wrote: Well, OK, but
Jura
The commodity that is most universally accepted represents abstract labor (which is identical as its concrete labor). So in this intermediate stage between barter and the settled full value-form (money), which we are discussing (roughly 7000 years of human history), e.g. the labor for cattle, salt, or copper, etc. would have been (closest to) abstract.
They bother because there's already some division of labor, but not so complex that it becomes opaque. The point Engels made about fetishism is that it is caused by the usually foreign origin of precious metals, so that local people don't know how much labor went into it. Though I think there were also local mines where people did have an idea. In any case if it happens that A and B don't know what the other's product is worth (its SNLT), then they could still compare it to a third product that they do know, eg cattle, which acts as proto-measure of value (hence the supposed difficulties of barter are often overstated).
It's not forbidding exchange of different labors per se, just that the principle of equality should be applied (i.e. work of the same difficulty/intensity).
The point is that they were already aware that different labors can have different intensities.
Noa Rodman wrote: The
Noa Rodman
I think you're evading the issue. Suppose you're correct and there's a commodity M for which concrete labor is immediately social labor. The real issue is how do you reduce the different concrete labors (and labor times) producing any commodity A to the concrete and immediately abstract labor producing commodity M. There are varying labor times (productivities and intensities) for commodity A. Which one do you pick? I don't think you can say we simply calculate the arithmetic average because you don't know the input values – unless you suppose that these peasants kept records of labor times of all their "competitors" and then used arithmetic to calculate the average labor time. They'd have to do this for all commodities which they exchange. I think it's much more reasonable to suppose that it was hit and miss, with lots of "political", extra-economic intervention, habitual pricing and sheer theft/usury/racketeering going on (all of which fits well into the image of precapitalist societies we have).
(I'm disregarding here the fact that socially necessary labor time isn't simply average labor time – the quantities produced and the amounts the market can stomach also matter, so it's more like a "weighted average".)
Noa Rodman
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to suppose that somehow there was a division of labor that naturally led to development of the market, which the peasants willingly turned to as an "opportunity", as some little medieval or ancient NEPmen, which then led to more market expansion, the division of labor becoming more opaque etc. This is very much like the "commercialization" model in Smith and some marxists. I think this is very problematic, as shown by the research done by Brenner and his followers.
Noa Rodman
I think the text it's pretty clear on this:
"Just as two different types of labor may not be exchanged for one another, so too the same labor may not be exchanged for the same labor if they are done during different seasons."
Noa Rodman
Surely that's a fact of basic experience which predates even class society.
Not been following this one
Not been following this one but.
Post 28
Answer from Rubin;
.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/rubin/value/ch11.htm
if you don’t understand that I may bother to explain it later.
Jura wrote: how do you reduce
Jura
It's the same as asking how to compare concrete labors, since the reduction of concrete labor of A to abstract labor of M, is nothing but the same as the comparison of concrete labor of A to concrete labor of M. As you wrote, it is "a fact of basic experience" that different labors can have different intensities, so I guess by custom some proportion was established.
Mind you, we're not talking about vastly different (or, in composition of capital), rapidly changing production methods. There was only one kind of way often in use for many centuries by everyone.
We all are pretty average, no need to calculate it.
I guess so, but don't know why it's problematic. Simple commodity producers basically = free peasants. In post nr. 5 I gave a summary of 1500 years of European history documenting their existence.
Rubin wrote: Assuming
Rubin
Well there you go.
If I'm not mistaken Rubin thought that the "simple commodity economy" he describes is a theoretical tool, not a particular historical period. I'm OK with that. I think the first three chapters of Capital describe a pure commodity economy. The description corresponds to the surface of bourgeois society. I don't think it corresponds to anything much before capitalism, although, like I said, it can be used to an extent to make sense of commodity production without capitalism.
Edit: Turns out Rubin does indeed view the "simple commodity economy" as a theoretical abstraction of capitalist relations:
Rubin
I fully agree with this.
Noa Rodman wrote: It's the
Noa Rodman
I think you're confusing two things. Labors A and B producing the same product can have different intensities. One of the laborers simply puts in more effort. This is an observable fact, and one can tell which of the two labors is more intensive. By measuring output (during equal labor times), one can even calculate how much more intensive.
Labors A and M producing different products are qualitatively heterogeneous. You can measure the individual labor times and "compare" them, but essentially you're comparing apples and oranges. These labors may require different skills, one is more difficult for most people than the other, they are simply labors of a different type. We know that in capitalist commodity production, such labors are routinely reduced to homogeneous abstract labor. This happens in competition, through the mobility of capital (and labor), through pressures towards economy in the use of commodified inputs etc. How does it work in precapitalist commodity production without capital, with extremely limited mobility of labor, with limited competition and with non-commodified inputs into the labor process?
Noa Rodman
How do you know that? There were some advances in the productivity of agricultural labor in medieval times. Also, there are always natural differences the fertility of land, in skill etc.
It would actually be interesting to look at what was commonly traded and by whom. I guess interregional and international trade was much more important than the internal one.
BTW, here are historical nominal prices of grain in Britain from 1270 to 1620. Here's a paper which constructs various price indices for agricultural products from the 1200s to 1914.
Noa Rodman
You can have free peasants with little commodity exchange, as long as there's relative autarky and access to the commons. I think E. M. Wood's book on the emergence of capitalism is a good critique of the commercialization view. It concentrates specifically on England and shows that the turn to the market and commodity production was not free peasants taking advantage of an opportunity (and gradually evolving into capitalists), but a rupture in which dispossessed peasants were forced by rapidly changing conditions to lease land or work directly for protocapitalist tenants. But I guess you've read that.
Jura wrote: they are simply
Jura
In capitalism they're reduced to abstract labor (of the money-commodity, gold) but which is still also concrete labor, so effectively concrete labors are compared to one concrete labor. The concrete labor of gold production is "reduced" (or better, is simply identical) to the abstract labor of gold production. This is not due to competition, but already due to the (pre-capitalist) emergence of the value form (money).
True, as Harman noted (in his book, now deleted from the libcom library), but still obviously it didn't happen as fast as in capitalism.
That was Marx's guess too, but elsewhere he also wrote that the relation among simple commodity producers can be regarded as one between foreign communities.
Yes, but in my post I also presented quotes that support the hypothesis that commercialization among them was more wide-spread than the mainstream believes. (for the authorship of the quotes, see comments in this thread).
And commercialization is something different from the emergence of capitalism. I don't argue that commercialization leads to capitalism. The historical reading of Marx's first chapter is that the increase of commerce gradually leads to the value-form money. The first chapter is not about the emergence of capital.
Noa, thanks for the debate.
Noa, thanks for the debate. However, I don't see the point of posting any more unless we move to discussing what I think is the key issue, i.e., how the law of value would have operated in a context of limited competition (and even a limited extent of the market in terms of the relative numbers of agents and kinds of commodities), absence of labor mobility, non-commodified inputs in the production process, and perpetual extraeconomic interventions. The question is what particular social forces cause the prices to reflect socially necessary labor time and how these forces appear to the producers. In other words, how did the "real abstraction" operate in precapitalist commodity production. Relating something to money and exchanging that thing for money is one part of the process. I guess it's a necessary condition but not a sufficient one. The other part is the mechanism that operates behind the backs of the producers. I think this is also a necessary condition. I'm asking about this mechanism.
After this discussion one could look at the evidence and try to find traces of that mechanism and its operation.
Jura wrote: how the law of
Jura
Not sure what you mean by the mechanism of unlimited competition ("behind the back"). Free competition in supply and demand can actually lead to artificial monopoly.
Marx
Is the situation Marx envisages here then one of competition according to your definition?
The absence of the mobility of means of production is the condition for the "pure" law of value in SCP (as against price of production in capitalism):
Marx
Or e.g. do you mean by competition that the SNLT will eliminate producers whose productivity falls below the average, thereby strengthening the domination of the standard? Or is it the abstract drive of profit for its own sake (M-C-M)? I wonder, because your argument is that the mechanism for the law of value can only be competition, there was no competition, ergo no law of value.
We can abstract from extraeconomic interventions, just like we can abstract from other modes of production that existed alongside SCP (something Parvus didn't understand in his 1895 critique of Engels when he pointed to the feudal lord's exploitation of his subjects, whereas Engels had in mind free peasants or craftsmen). Btw, in the first chapter Marx does not construct some pure model of SCP (where all society's labour is involved in simple commodity production). Again, SCP occurs alongside other modes of production (e.g. production for own use).
If it is possible to estimate the labor time that went into a product on an individual basis, then comparisons can be made, and if producers want to exchange it on a equal principle, and they're both free men, they will do so.
Noa Rodman wrote: The absence
Noa Rodman
I meant the absence of mobility of labor. If producers can't move between branches of production easily, then they can't really respond to signals from the market properly and thereby execute the law of value practically. This is also related to what you've pointed out, i.e., the elimination (or lack of it) of less efficient producers in the sense that they move to a different branch or withdraw from production entirely.
Noa Rodman
This is a good point. I guess if we do that, we end up with an abstraction of pure commodity production and exchange governed by the law of value (with full labor mobility, competition within branches and between branches), i.e., that which is described in chapters 1 - 3. As long as there is no pretense to historical and empirical accuracy with regard to precapitalist societies (or commodity production within these societies), I have no problem with this. I still won't call it "simple commodity production" for terminological reasons.
Quote: I meant the absence of
There was no reserve army, but there was mobility of labor between branches. Free peasants can choose what they will grow/breed. (or to take a more extreme example, the return to the country side by many Petrograd workers following the October revolution).
Any investigation must make abstractions. Similarly, like I said before, in the analysis of capitalism we can abstract from monopoly, state intervention etc.
Noa Rodman wrote: There was
Noa Rodman
You'd have to show that there was indeed free choice. I very much doubt it, given that (I assume) a larger part of their production was for subsistence and mostly surpluses were traded. Well, maybe if we assume they were ready to eat pretty much anything. But I think agricultural production was pretty rigid in this sense. And I guess there would have been many other barriers, like the quality of land, the skills required, the means of production necessary etc. Another problem is that it would have been difficult to extend existing production in response to market signals, given the limited market (and limited fertility, as well as productivity) in land in many precapitalist societies.
Edit: Major advances in agricultural productivity and the whole discourse on "improvement" only came about as a result of the emergence of capitalist relations in the countryside. They were the result of market pressure towards efficiency (i.e., the law of value in operation) in competition and the producers (I mean the capitalists in agriculture) didn't have much choice other than to follow the trend. On the other hand, the development of labor productivity in agriculture in precapitalist societies was rather slow. I think this could be interpreted to mean that market pressures in these societies were generally pretty soft, i.e., the operation of the law of value was curtailed by the availability of other avenues to producers.
But this (the supposed mobility in a particular precapitalist society) is at least a hypothesis one can test.
Noa Rodman
The nature of these abstractions does matter, though. In precapitalist societies, non-commodity production was dominant (as I think you'd agree). So when we abstract from the influence of non-commodity production and the related institutions in precapitalist societies on commodity production in these societies, we are in fact abstracting from the dominant causal factors in that society. Hence what you end up with is a less realistic abstraction, with regard to commodity production in precapitalist society, than when you abstract from state intervention or monopoly in a capitalist society, where these factors (I think we may assume) are subordinate to (capitalist) commodity production.
If I'm understanding the
If I'm understanding the discussion correctly, the contentions are this;
1. Primarily, whether or not Simple Commodity Production corresponds to some set of historically extant social relations. It is manifestly apparent that commodities were produced in exactly the way Noa quotes Marx; if I'm not mistaken, Roman agriculture engaged in the production of olives and olive oil (to name one) which was exported in exchange for grain. The dominant production relations were based on antique slavery, and to an extent so were distribution relations; never the less you have a "community" as marx put's it, exchanging with another.
2. Is Simple Commodity Production a MoP? I'd argue no in the sense of Antique, Feudalism, Capitalism. It might be better explained as the germ form of capitalism in these prior societies. Or it might refer to a set or relations in these societies that eventually grew into capitalism.
3. By what mechanism(s) does the law of value operate in SCP? Well, what would the law of value need to operate? Jura is arguing that labor mobility is necessary. I'm not sure. The thesis presented by Noa, based on Dunaevsky and some quotes from Marx and Engels is that the Law of Value operates in *some* form where commodity production obtains; and operates in a specific form in capitalism (via prices of production). There is a certain and reasonable logic there. Arguably, all you need for the law of value to operate is a surplus and the existence of exchange, no? Especially as a division of labor based on specialization occurs you are apt to have a dynamic where the ability to secure necessities by their purchase with money gotten as a result of the production of some useful object is in play, whether or not the production utilizes slave labor, family labor, or wage labor.
Appreciate the exchange. A minor note; I feel that Rubin, and by way of him, Heinrich and VFT theory promotes a sort of anti-political marxism as a result of their kind of metaphysical reading of value. By exorcising history, they exorcise the unfolding of class struggle and the relevant political implications. I don't think this is intentional but I think it has a result in their strawman critique of "world view" marxism etc.
Pennoid wrote: It is
Pennoid
This is not a point of contention at all. Of course commodities were produced long before capitalism. The debate here is about how this commodity production was regulated. My position is basically that prices weren't equal to values.
Pennoid
I don't think Noa believes this. I certainly don't. This is basically the commercialization model.
Commodity production was a necessary condition for the emergence of capitalism, but not a sufficient one, and it didn't naturally "grew into" capitalism. Commodity production, even very developed, existed in multiple countries before the emergence of capitalism. Only in Britain did capitalism actually develop (at first, in agriculture) and the decisive factor was the disposession of peasants (which itself was a result of other factors). EM Wood's The Origin of Capitalism is an excellent exposition of this view, including the critique of the commercialization model.
Pennoid
There are many hidden assumptions here. For example,that necessities are acquired on the market. Was there really an internal market in necessities in precapitalist Britain? Did peasants, even free peasants routinely acquire necessities on the market? Did they acquire most of their means of production on the market? Well, if I remember correctly, Brenner, Wood et al. show they didn't, they show that an internal market in food only emerged as a result of capitalism in agriculture, and this internal market was a necessary condition for the emergence of industrial capitalism.
(Nevertheless, I still fail to see how what you've describe leads to prices which reflect socially necessary labor time.)
Pennoid
Oh, please don't. I really don't like this sort of amalgamating of different things (Rubin, Heinrich and whatever "value-form theory" means to you). These are actually different positions. Also, the whole argument from "undesirable political consequences" is pretty weak. You can't reasonably judge a theory (if we agree that what we are dealing with here is a scientific theory) by its political implications. It's a bit like saying Lenin isn't worth reading because of Cheka arresting and shooting strikers. Wink, wink.
Also, it's just wrong. Arguably, one of the schools in "VFT theory" is Open Marxism, which is basically a merger of Italian workerism and the German "new reading of Marx". There's nothing anti-political or anti-class struggle about it. You may not like the politics (I don't know your preferences), but it certainly isn't anti-political. I don't think there's anything inherently anti-political about Heinrich, either. And Rubin was an academic economist and a Menshevik.
Quote: the development of
fwiw, quote from Harman's People's history of the world:
Chris Harman
.
Pennoid
In a passage in the Grundrisse Marx referred to it as an "intermediate species":
Marx
In German:
(this quote I got from 'Reconsidering the Early Modern Urban Economy: The Cases of Leiden and Lille' at jstor. The article argues that:
)
In Capital Marx referred to it like this (my emphasis):
In German:
jura wrote: Also, the whole
jura
To be fair, that's one of the main arguments used in the original article in this thread.
Sounds like SCP is synonymous
Sounds like SCP is synonymous with Brenner and Post etc.'s conception of "petty proprietorship". It is a sort of doomed set of social relations because what allows it to become legally predominant is precisely a set of legal arrangements which also allow for capitalist accumulation and the driving of these petit-bourgeois producers out of existence.
The quote from Capital provided above by Noa makes this clear.
You don't need wage labor to have a division of labor, exchange, markets, or commodity production. Forms of production for exchange based on different types of labor inputs will still have to account for the cost of those labor inputs. They may, given legal privileges, be able to go further in driving their producers to death, but would undermine their own enterprise if they failed to reproduce them. This might be thought of as a primitive form of the law of value.
Zanthorus wrote: To be fair,
Zanthorus
Yeah, that doesn't make it stronger or relevant, though.
Pennoid wrote: You don't need
Pennoid
Well, in a sense, "the law of value" in a very broad sense always operates. No society can produce more than the total available labor time allows given existing productivity, and in the long run every society must at least reproduce its conditions of existence. So social labor always has to be apportioned within these constraints, even in communism.
But I think that, even given commodity production, these constraints provide quite a lot of leeway in the sense that there are various ways in which the regulation and apportioning can actually be executed. I think the law of value in the narrow sense – that the labor of agents involved in commodity production is apportioned through an impersonal mechanism which appears to agents as "market signals" to which they respond – only works where most inputs are commodified (accounting for them in money becomes possible), means of subsistence are mostly commodified (producers must engage in a substantial amount commodity production to even reproduce), there is competition (pressure toward economy in inputs and methods), and the ability to respond to market signals (i.e., the ability to switch between outputs, which also includes the switching of inputs and methods of production).
I think it's problematic to suppose that these things simply were there before capitalism. A division of labor surely was there, but probably pretty rigid and based on long traditions. So you get difficulties with switching. I don't believe means of subsistence were commodified to any considerable extent. You had things like the commons, customary laws of access to means of subsistence etc. So there are alternative, non-market strategies that agents can pursue in response to market signals. Etc. etc. I don't want to give the impression that I know these things for sure, but it seems plausible to me. One would have to actually look at the evidence.
So all in all, I think the operation of the law of value (in the narrow sense) in precapitalist commodity exchange was more or less blocked by these sorts of things (these other factors involved in the apportioning of social labor within the constraints I mentioned).
BTW, what you describe, i.e., "someone's" "producers" being "driven" by that someone to do whatever, corresponds more to some form of domination by, e.g. merchant's or usurer's capital, as in the putting-out system. That would be more like an early form of formal subsumption of labor under capital. Of course these situations existed even in antiquity, but I don't think they correspond to what is traditionally understood as "simple commodity production" (i.e. a mode of production based on free private producers who own their means of production and are not exploited by a capitalist). I would be much more willing to concede the operation of the law of value in the narrow sense in situations like this. Even after capitalism in agriculture first emerged in Britain, obviously not all of Britain's social labor was apportioned through the law of value (in the narrow sense). It was like a mini-capitalism within a different mode of production that gradually grew (although not entirely "naturally" but with the help of a lot of extra-economic intervention) to encompass the whole economy. I think there could have been mini-capitalisms in ancient Greece and Rome or in late medieval Europe that were to a considerable extent regulated by the law of value in the narrow sense. But they were different from the supposed "simple commodity production".
I'm a bit loaded so take all of this with a grain of salt, lol.
Right, but things like tool
Right, but things like tool production, or really whatever production of non-necessities became a sphere (perhaps outside the state?) of specialized production, and exchange takes place.
It's this way that I think you could read a concept like "Simple Commodity Production" but then this is quite abstract and already generalizes further than marx is willing in the quote noa presented. Though this does allow for a framework to investigate the hypothesis (and I agree an investigation would be necessary).
This would, it seems, lend to the ideas put forward by Marx about how forms of exchange have a logic to them; that they manifest socially for reasons people might not (And don't need to) fully grasp, on the basis of different social classes in different epochs, but never the less have a particular logic in each context.
I don't have a problem with the idea that SCP (as you describe it which departs from my more general conception of a broad or vague or kernal of the law of value developing) *can* be but is not always governed by the law of value. You're right that it depends on their market integration which in turn depends on their ability to produce their own necessities.
I guess it would make sense that specialized producers have to exchange for their necessities (unless state subsidy but thats another can of worms) meaning that they *would* be more subject to something like a primitive law of value, rather than independent petty proprietors who *don't* exchange for necessities.
(Quote Heavy) These are from
(Quote Heavy)
These are from Capital Vol. 1, that I could remember.
Right in chapter one:
And for more relating of the 'abstract-theoretical' to the historical:
The first may be seen as occurring wherever DoL takes permanent hold, and the second wherever different types of societies, specialized (e.g. nomads based on cattle production?) come into regular contact with settled agricultural societies?
And from the oft-quoted Fetishism Section:
That footnote 27 says:
In this general direction it is admitted at least, that commodity production does of course unfold in ancient societies:
This is contrasted with one (of the three I could find) of the instances in which the term "law of value" appears:
Although this points out that the law of value "develops freely" in capitalist society, not that value or the law has no role to play in non-capitalist society.
jura wrote: generally
jura
It's misleading with regards Hegel as well. Hegel's Logic begins with pure Being, whereas the actual course of Western philosophy began with Thales' water, and only later with Parmenides did the Greeks arrive at 'Being' in general as a metaphysical principle. The culminating movement of the Phenomenology and the Logic, Absolute Knowledge and the Absolute Idea, are things that can be found in Plato's dialogue Parmenides. Hegel treats Greek mythology and art in the Phenomenology after the Enlightenment and the French revolution.
Nevertheless, Hegel's method and overall system is obviously more engaged with history than say for example, someone like Spinoza who elaborated his philosophy as a series of supposedly universal axioms, propositions and deductions.
I suppose to think back upon one of the original questions I asked, there actually is no universal logical relation between theory and history. It's a connection that has to be decided on a case by case basis depending on the specific question that needs answering or the point that has to be brought to the fore. But that there is always necessarily some connection is I think implied in the fact that what is being examined is a form of activity (Mental production in Hegel's case, capitalist production in Marx's case), which always occurs in time, and therefore always has a history.
EDIT: I'm don't know if this is immediately relevant to the question under discussion in this thread, I was mostly reacting in my original post to the original article posted.
Reading Hegel is more fun than discussing Simple Commodity Production tho tbh
I think too much is sometimes
I think too much is sometimes made of the historically specific "all powerful" role of capital. It seems like if their is any geist on the historical development of humanity from a materialist perspective it would be located on the fact of an unfolding and complicating division of labor, taking many forms (Modes of production) as humanity develops. Capital is a social relationship between classes - a form of the division of labor.
Despite Dunaevsky's critique,
Despite Dunaevsky's critique, I think at least elsewhere Rubin more clearly believed the law of value did apply in simple commodity production and the latter was historically real (and already apropos his main work he was condemned for this by Projekt Klassenanalyse in 1975). Some of these other texts (including his essay on money) are translated in the forthcoming Responses to Marx's Capital.
Well good for him, that
Well good for him, that absolves him from the charge of exorcising history ;).
incidentally Jura, while
incidentally Jura, while searching for soviet commentary on this topic I stumbled on a Czech economist Josef Mervart (born 1927), who wrote on prices and international trade. One of his books (Význam a vývoj cen v mezinárodním obchodě, 1960) was translated into Russian: Ценообразование в международной торговле (1962). Couple of English translated articles in Czechoslovak economic papers 1959 on law of value on the world socialist market. Apparently last active in the 1990s when he wrote on the Czech banking sector.
Yeah, he was moderately
Yeah, he was moderately famous. He led the economics department at the Institute of ML and also wrote a texbook on planning. The book you mention, or at least part of it, was also published in German, it seems.
Mandel's Traité d'économie
Mandel's Traité d'économie marxiste volume 1 (downloadable online), page 68 onward gives anthropological/historical examples of labour time accounting, page 75 onward is about equal exchange, and pages 77–81 is specifically about SCP.
There's just a brief relevant for us section in English (also without the references given in the book): https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1967/intromet/ch01.htm#s4
btw Mandel asserts there was mobility of labour.
Noa Rodman wrote: Despite
Noa Rodman
I'm sorry Noa, but I don't think you are accurate about Rubin on this thread. Earlier in the thread you claimed that there was "no doubt that Rubin believed that SCP was real historically and that it transitioned into capitalism", but Rubin makes it clear that he (and Marx) is using the category of simple commodity production as a theoretical tool in order to describe developed capitalism. He also makes it clear that he doesn't believe that the law of value existed before capitalism. He goes into these questions in some detail towards the end of Chapter 18 of his book.
Here are a few key quotes from that section:
Rubin
Felix Frost wrote: Earlier in
Felix Frost
But again, the question is not about the existence of SCP and that it preceded (or more strongly, transitioned into) capitalism. Everyone knows that commodity production existed prior to capitalism, and that it did not encompass the whole of the economy then as it does in capitalism. SCP is not just some "category", but a historical fact. The question is whether the law of value applied in SCP. Although Rubin says that he will not consider that question:
Rubin
nevertheless it appears that he is ill-disposed toward the notion that the law of value applied prior to capitalism:
Rubin
But that's just a slippery slope argument. It is as if acknowledgement of the fact that commodities existed prior to capitalism, would automatically lead to the position, that commodities are a supra-historical category present since the dawn of homo sapiens.
Really, do even bourgeois economists now believe that anymore? Perhaps yes, but surely it functions for them as some kind of simplistic model, but then in your view Marx used SCP only as a hypothetical model as well. Dunaevsky's critique is that it is theoretically inadmissible to regard the law of value in capitalism as a merely "more complex" version of it in SCP as Rubin does. Rather, there is a qualitative difference.
And if bourgeois economists believed the law of value applied prior to capitalism, why don't they then now all accept the LTV in capitalism? Actually, because the law of value undergoes a fundamental modification which they couldn't explain and hence the Ricardian school disintegrated.
In A contribution Marx gave
In A contribution Marx gave a brief reference to the "general law which regulates corn prices" in the ancient world:
The sudden and forcible transfer of hoarded money from one country to another is a specific feature of the ancient world; but the temporary lowering of the production costs of precious metals achieved in a particular country by the simple method of plunder does not affect the inherent laws of monetary circulation, any more than, for instance, the distribution of Egyptian and Sicilian corn free of charge in Rome affects the general law which regulates corn prices.
-
I assume he means ancient Rome.
Noa Rodman wrote: But again,
Noa Rodman
That's the thing: When Rubin is talking about "simple commodity production", he is talking about a theoretical abstraction that is used to explain how capitalism works, he is not talking abut a historical period preceding capitalism. So the question to what degree actual pre-capitalist production fit into the model of "simple commodity production" isn't really relevant to the subject he is studying.
Like I said, I think from
Like I said, I think from Rubin's other articles whose translation will soon be published, it is more clear that he did believe SCP was real and that the law of value applied in it.
Felix Frost
I too pointed out that SCP didn't exist for the whole of society, but always in combination with other modes of production, but that for the purpose of study it is permissible to abstract from those other modes. In that sense, sure, it is an abstraction that never existed. But simple commodity producers did exist for Rubin as any thinking person.
In my earlier post #4 I quoted Rubin's comparison of 3 diagrams: 1) SCP, 2) an embryonic or hypothetical capitalist economy, and 3) capitalism. Rubin stresses that only "Diagram No. 2 is not a picture of an embryonic capitalism which existed in history". But he didn't stress that No.1 never existed.
Again however, Dunaevsky's critique is that it is theoretically inadmissible to study the law of value under capitalism as merely a "more complex" version of it under SCP; they are fundamentally different.
Note also that Dunaevsky's critique was made in February 1928, which seems prior to the publication of the revised 3rd edition of Rubin's book upon which the English is based. I could not find this quote in it that Dunaevsky gave: 'Now that other works by Marx are available to us, – Rubin writes, – 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."
Maybe I just couldn't find it, but it's possible that Rubin deleted this in the 3rd edition (I'm practically sure he dropped certain passages in the wake of Dashkovskij's 1926 critique).
Rubin's main focus is on capitalism, but that doesn't explicitly exclude that it also applies to a historical period preceding capitalism. One doesn't exclude the other.
But why did Engels bring it up – was it just out of the blue that he felt like making a fantastical claim? It was in the context of Loria's criticism.
The quote about Marx being
The quote about Marx being "strongly opposed to the view that the law of value was in force in the period preceding the development of capitalism" is from the same section of the book that I quoted from earlier. Here he also briefly discusses why he thinks Engels and other Marxists made the claim about a historical reading of Marx's theory of value, and why he thinks they were wrong to do so.
Felix, that's in Essays?
Felix, that's in Essays? Which part again ?
yes, it's chapter 18 Felix
yes, it's chapter 18
Felix
I mistook my own footnote in Dunaevsky there as referring to the Russian (since for some quotes I couldn't find the exact pages in the English, I gave the Russian). Yes, that passage refers to Marx's comment in Theories of Surplus Value (MECW 32, pp. 264–65) on Torrens. Dunaevsky's point is that Rubin misinterpreted that Marx-passage (which btw I also pointed out, years before I even knew of Dunaevsky's text).
Rubin
.
Dunaevsky
See section titled Torrens’s Confusion in Defining the Value of Labour and the Sources of Profit, at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch20.htm
A scientific law is an
A scientific law is an empirical observation of a ‘correlation’ implying some causality and from which can be derived a theory and objective scientific ‘concepts’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_law
The law of value, which is that commodities exchange according to the amount of labour required, was originally derived by Adam Smith from ‘simply commodity production’ and not capitalism.
The theoretical concept that Karl abstracted from it was that of ‘abstract’ labour or human effort.
It would not have been possible to obtain a law of value from capitalism because as Karl noted it did not apply or work in capitalism.
Or in other words when calculating the exchange relations in capitalism using and applying the law of value derived by Adam Smith from simple commodity production; it did not work.
Thus;
This law clearly contradicts all experience based on appearance. Everyone knows that a cotton spinner, who, reckoning the percentage on the whole of his applied capital, employs much constant and little variable capital, does not, on account of this, pocket less profit or surplus-value than a baker, who relatively sets in motion much variable and little constant capital. For the solution of this apparent contradiction, many intermediate terms are as yet wanted, as from the standpoint of elementary algebra many intermediate terms are wanted to understand that 0/0 may represent an actual magnitude.
Classical economy, although not formulating the law, holds instinctively to it, because it is a necessary consequence of the general law of value. It tries to rescue the law from collision with contradictory phenomena by a violent abstraction. It will be seen later[2] how the school of Ricardo has come to grief over this stumbling block. Vulgar economy which, indeed, “has really learnt nothing,” here as everywhere sticks to appearances in opposition to the law which regulates and explains them. In opposition to Spinoza, it believes that “ignorance is a sufficient reason.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch11.htm
The question then is do you throw the law of value overboard or can something be rescued from the theory or concepts that have been derived from it in simple commodity production?
Theorising that labour power becomes a commodity and, still, of all commodities exchanges at its actual value was the critical step forward.
And then capitalism, where the critical and all determinate commodity ‘in force and made general’ is labour power then “the specific development which the law of value undergoes with the formation of capital” can then be re-examined and analysed on that basis.
On Smith;
It is his theoretical strength that he feels and stresses this contradiction, just as it is his theoretical weakness that the contradiction shakes his confidence in the general law, even for simple commodity exchange; that he does not perceive how this contradiction arises, through labour-power itself becoming a commodity, and that in the case of this specific commodity its use-value—which therefore has nothing to do with its exchange-value—is precisely the energy which creates exchange-value.
Ricardo is ahead of Adam Smith in that these apparent contradictions—in their result real contradictions—do not confuse him. But he is behind Adam Smith in that he does not even suspect that this presents a problem, and therefore the specific development which the law of value undergoes with the formation of capital does not for a moment puzzle him or even attract his attention. We shall see later how what was a stroke of genius with Adam Smith becomes reactionary with Malthus as against Ricardo’s standpoint.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch03.htm
Dave B, I'm a bit confused;
Dave B, I'm a bit confused; it appears that the law of value holds; that the amount of labor time necesaary for production regulates production.
Certainly in what you quote Marx is implying that this law is developed in capitalism but nevertheless holds, no?
Pennoid, the law is
Pennoid, the law is fundamentally changed: in capitalism it is the production price, not value, which regulates the exchange relation. This led Smith to confine the law of value (as opposed to law of production price) to simple commodity production (though "even for simple commodity exchange" it "shakes his confidence in the general law").
Is it fundamentally changed
Is it fundamentally changed or is it formally changed? I haven't dig through the discussions in all of marx's stuff on this, but I understood it to be somewhat similar to the "rain cycle" via snow; still precipitation but with longer and more complex steps where the preciptat takes different forms, never the less still at root governed by evaporation condensation etc.
Certainly it does imply more of a change than that between rain and snow, that labor regulates production prices (and thus disappears behind price altogether). But if that in turn is regulated by labor then it's still "constrained" as it were, by the law of value.
All of this a round about way of saying that concrete social reproduction requires a baseline amount of labor, expanded reproduction a surplus, and a lack of surplus implies contraction.
That's at the heart of the law of value as I understand it, which still holds in capitalism. Products have to exchange in line with the labor necessary for their production or else a market system could not be relied upon to meet the needs of regular let alone expanded social reproduction. Maybe I'm missing something.
Sorry, not lack of surplus
Sorry, not lack of surplus but less than baseline.
I will select quotes from
I will select quotes from Dunaevsky's critique of Rubin, with my own emphasis in bold, which hopefully will make things clearer (this is primarily for myself). I leave out the footnotes:
In the exposition of the law of production price Rubin "distracts" from the basic conditions, under which the law of value can be realised in commodity society. He is silent on the central question: whether under capitalism, in one form or another, the very principle of the gravitation of the market price to labour value is preserved. Meanwhile, under what condition is the theory of value confirmed also for the capitalist society? When the study finds: the price of production – is modified labour value, variously fluctuating individual rates of profits represent a quantity of redistributed mass of labour value. Only then the law of production price will be that mechanism, through which the law of value exerts its action.
The reality of the latter under capitalism is confirmed for Rubin, evidently, by the one fact of the existing dependence of price changes, production prices – on changes of the level of labour productivity. But this dependence is manifested in the sphere of circulation. Its "empirical reality" is not denied by any representative of bourgeois economy, for whom, however, there exists no real trend of price movements toward labour value.
What does the noted dependence express by itself, if prices do not tend toward labour value? An exclusively functional dependence: labour productivity is considered as one of the factors of price formation, similar like the relation of demand and supply, "marginal utility," etc. If prices do not gravitate toward labour value, then the "basis" of the relation of demand and supply is not disclosed in the sphere of direct production.
Simple commodity and capitalist economy are studied [by Rubin] entirely independently, isolated from each other. Where is the source of this error? To what conclusions does the viewpoint lead, developed by Marx: simple commodity economy – is the historically real prius of capitalist economy? The conditions of realisation here of the law of value – are historically concretely defined. Under capitalism, commodity relations persist. That is, if the law of value takes place here, then must be preserved also the concrete-determination of the conditions of its realisation in the simple exchange society in the form of gravitation of price toward labour value.
...
For Rubin the formula of equilisation of labour in capitalist conditions comes out merely more complexly, than in simple commodity economy, namely, as derivative of the formula of equilisation of capitals. Equilisation in social production in the first case is set in accordance with the exchange proportions of the labour value of each industry. Equilibrium in the allocation of capital, – remarks also Rubin, – is reached under equilibrium of price by the prices of production, ie, under quantitatively inequal exchange proportions by market values, as they are driven by different organic compositions of capitals in equal-sized units in different industries. Under capitalism, therefore, the law takes a qualitatively different form of manifestation: prices tend toward prices of production, which correspond to an unequal market value.
..
The analysis of [Rubin's]Essays did not point to the fundamental question: in what ways under capitalism does value fulfill its function of social regulator of the distribution of social labour, if 'with the transformation of values into prices of production, the very basis for determining value is removed from view,' 'profit appears as something standing outside the immanent value of the commodity.' [Marx]
The solution to this problem is impossible without a study of the genesis of the average rate of profit. Errors in the formulation of the problem affect also the methods of its solution. The author of Essays does not point the research at the study of the character of the very process of the transformation of market values in different industries in specifically neat (отличные) prices of production.
What tasks does analysis face, apart from the obligatory quantitative determination of the law of value, if it directly can be derived from the mere fact of the dependence between changes of the labour productivity level and price movements? The entire study [according to Rubin] boils down, to trace: through what further additional links is established the above-noted dependence under capitalism, in comparison with simple commodity economy, what "complication" does the capitalist structure bring in the chain of these dependencies.
The entire problem is solved [according to Rubin] by the fact that a simple commodity economy has a 'four-term model of causal connection between the individual categories,' whereas in the capitalist economy – a six-term model, that 'the central links of the theory of the capitalist economy (price of production, distribution of capital) do not rule out the above mentioned links of the theory of value, but, on the contrary, under further analysis will inevitably lead to them, and together with them are included in a general theory of equilibrium of capitalist economy.
For Rubin it is entirely enough, that 'production price can only be explained by changes in productivity of labour or in the labour value of products.' The task of study for Marx is to prove, – that the price of production as such (an und für sich), represents a quantitative redistribution of labour value, that the basis of the origin of the average rate of profit – is the direct process of production of value.
...
In Essays is not displayed the very process of the formation of the average rate of profit.
...
'In our presentation of Marx's theory, – Rubin writes, – different rates of profit in different spheres do not serve as a necessary intermediate link for a theory of the average rate of profit.' 'We assume, – Rubin continues, – that in Marx's system the magnitude of the average rate of profit is derived from the mass of total surplus value and not from the different profit rates, as it may seem from a first reading of Marx's work.'
Rubin is not alone; a similar interpretation of the law of production price is very widespread.
...
How expresses in this regard the author of Capital? Marx derived the average rate of profit from the individual value rates. 'As a result of the differing organic composition of capitals, – Marx wrote, – profit rates prevailing in different production are originally very different. These different rates of profit are balanced out by competition to give a general rate of profit, which is the average of all these different rates.'
'These particular rates of profit in each sphere of production, – Marx strongly emphasises, – are to be developed from the value of the commodity. In the absence of such a development, the general rate of profit (and hence also the production price of the commodity) remains a meaningless and irrational conception.' 'Here, of course, in Marx, – correctly observes M. Smit, – it is not about a simple average of group averages, but about what in algebra is called the "general average," and in statistics is termed the "weighted average." The average rate of profit, for Marx, – is the weighted average of individual rates of profit, as they are given by the different organic (technical) composition of capitals. The role of weight plays 'that relative share of the total social capital swallowed up by each particular sphere of production.'
The opposition, conducted by Rubin [between the average rate of profit – and the average weighted individual value rate], is artificial and far-fetched! In the process of circulation only is redistributed the already produced mass of surplus value. The average rate of profit, "weighted" from the value rate, 'can not be anything other than the total mass of surplus-value, distributed between the masses of capital in each sphere of production in proportion to their size.'
...
Mechanical opposition of sphere of circulation – to sphere of direct production.
'The specific character of Marx's theory of production price, – writes Rubin, – consists precisely of the fact that the entire question of mutual relations between surplus value and profit is transferred from individual capitals to the total social capital.' The law of production price, social-objective patterns in general are realised in the sphere of circulation. In the sphere of production, in different industries – (there are) different organic compositions of equal-sized capitals. Only by mechanical cleavage of these fields of the economy, in the study of the law production price can be "distracted" from the individual value rates of profit. For the dialectics of Marx social-objectively analysis of the "universal" must disclose the main, typical patterns of the "individual." The patterns of social capital, for Marx, express the typical patterns of processes connecting, uniting individual capitals between industries and within each.
Rubin unacceptably opposes the formation of the average rate of profit, as a magnitude derivative of the mass of total surplus value, – to its formation from different rates of profit. The author of Capital did not resolve the question as Rubin proposes to solve it. Marx did not ignore, but studied the problem of the relation between surplus value and the rate of profit of capitals of different industries of production. For Marx the law of the formation of average rate of profit expresses the patterns of these relations, the tendency of individual rates of profit toward the average rate.
Still during the life of Engels C. Schmidt and Fireman tried to "resolve the contradiction" of market value and price of production on the grounds that the prices of commodities equal the sum of labour value, and, therefore, the average profit amount is derivative of the total mass of surplus value. How Engels related to such theories, the pages of his preface to the third volume of Capital reveal well enough. 'Fireman has indeed placed his finger on the salient point, – wrote Engels, – But the undeservedly cool reception of his able article shows how many interconnecting links would still be needed even after this discovery to enable Fireman to work out a full and comprehensive solution. And this is explained, – Engels emphasised, – not only by the incomplete form in which Fireman left his discovery, but also by the undeniable faultiness of both his conception of the Marxian analysis and of his own general critique of the latter, based as it was on his misconception.
Only the theorists of the "social school of distribution without values" deal in analysis – exclusively with the "social capital," "only" with the social aggregate product of labour, "only" with the results of processes in the sphere of competition.
...
Essays goes past [ie skips over] the manifestation in social relations between individual capitalists of the process of the combination of the productive forces of individual businesses into a system of social production. That is why it also does not trace, how is reflected in the very law of production price the internal-contradictory process of combining individual capitalists into a single class.
Marx specially dwells on the fact that the organic composition of equal-sized capital here reflects the technical composition ('the conjunction of a certain number of workers to a certain amount of means of production'). The law of production price displays the law of motion of individual capitals in the direction of such a combination of the productive forces at equal-sized units, which creates an objective equal condition of exploitation (the rate of exploitation is everywhere the same). This pattern establishes objective intimate interdependence between individual capitalists, unites them in 'a veritable masonic fraternity in the struggle against the working-class, as a whole'.
..
---- [The following section in Dunaevsky is the most difficult to understand for me, so I couldn't shorten it properly: The price of production in the sphere of circulation and of direct production]
..
Patterns of change of technical, consequently, organic composition of capital in different branches can not be understood without examining the processes of the transfer of capital. In which periods is there a technical upgrade, massive re-equipment? When the long-term reduced demand for commodities of a given industry is not eliminated by a simple reduction in the production scale through outflow of capital into other sectors.
In its turn, the direction of capital transfers is incomprehensible if one distracts from the processes of the moves of commodity values from one industry to another. Capitals rushes only into those industries that are realising high conjuncture rates of profit. The movement of flows of commodity values reflects the process of the reallocation of the mass of labour from one industry of production to another. The realising individual rates of profit are determined by the conjuncture of the market, the ratio of social demand and supply for products in the given industry. The conjuncture rates of profit, of course, do not correspond with those rates that are given organic compositions of capital in different industries. Industries of high conjuncture realise not only the produced value rate of profit, but also attract to themselves the surplus value of other industries. The capitalists of other industries are forced to buy at the high market conjuncture prices. How does this circumstance affect the realised by them at themselves profits? The latter will decrease if the volume of demand for the given commodities remains unchanged, or does not proportionally increase.
The changed relation of demand and supply creates a relatively more favourable conjuncture once for one, then for another industry! It is easy to grasp the laws of the alternating fluctuations in the moves of social labour from one industry to another. Here occurs a steady trend towards the uniform distribution of realised surplus value per unit of capital. 'The general rate of profit only ever exists, – Marx emphasised, – as a tendency, as a movement of equalization between particular rates of profit' (1981, p. 488). The price of production in the sphere of circulation acts, as a prominent tendency in the process of the distribution of the mass of social labour, the redistribution of social total mass of surplus value.
The average rate of profit in the sphere of the market can not be anything else than the average-weighted level of profit, formed from a variety of value rates. Why? The general rate of profit in the sphere of the market 'is only a late result of a long series of fluctuations, spanning a very lengthy period.' The individual links of the process are affected by the action of demand and supply, deflecting realised profits from their value sizes. But the price of production is realised, in fact, under equilibrium of social demand and supply, under which the impact of competition is decreased, eliminated, paralysed and, therefore, can not determine and account for the absolute level of the average rate of profit in the sphere of circulation.
Insofar as the price of production is established irrespective of the influences of demand and supply, the source of the average profit must be found not in the market, but in the conditions of direct production of value. Pressure of competition deflects realised profits from their value rate. It also brings closer the market price to the price of production, the conjuncture profit to the average level, weighted from the various value rates.
Rubin limits the process of the formation of the average rate of profit only to the movement of capitals. However, the latter process is only a consequence of the processes of redistribution of commodity values. Capitals move into industries of high conjuncture after, as a result of a long series of acts of sale of commodities, the process of distribution of surplus value ensures there the realisation of more profit per unit of capital.
Rubin is looking for a unified response, essentially, on two different questions: 1) how is carried out the tendency to an equal rate of profit, and 2) in which form the process occurs of the redistribution of the mass of surplus value.
The first process takes place continuously by means of the regrouping of capitals. Without this process, the tendency towards an equal rate of profit would have been replaced by permanently fixed differential levels of profit in different industries.
The process of redistribution of the total mass of surplus value can occur only through the realisation of commodities on the market, simultanously with the movement of flows of commodity values. In what ways can this process pass through the regrouping of capitals? Because the redistribution of already produced mass of surplus value, i.e. under the already determined way of the redistributed capitals.
These places in Essays become verily a Sphinx's riddle! 'But if the relationship between the profits of two capitals engaged in different spheres of production does not correspond to the relationship between the living labors engaged by these capitals, – writes Rubin, – it does not follow that a part of surplus labor or surplus value "is transferred," "overflows," from one sphere of production to another!'
How does Rubin justify his commentary, refuting 'the representation, based on the literal interpretation of some expressions of Marx'? Let us give the word to Rubin himself: 'However, if value is not a substance which flows from one man to another, but a social relation among people, fixed, "expressed," "represented" in things, then the conception of the overflow of value from one sphere of production to another does not result from Marx's theory of value but basically contradicts Marx's theory of value as a social phenomenon.'
Here graphically, clearly the error in the definition of the object of studies affected a detachment of social equalisation of labour in the sphere of circulation from direct production. Does the movement of value not reflect the movement of a determined mass of labour? Must not the moves of the material products of labour with the stamp of commodity values be accompanied by processes of redistribution of the mass of surplus value from one branch to another? Are not all these processes manifested in the social relations of capitalists with each other? Do the real processes of redistribution of the mass of social labour through commodity values have anything in common with the absurd, caricatural representation of S. Frank of value, 'as some material substance, having the property of a liquid'? All this is very elementarily. The reader may rightly wonder why these real processes of redistribution of surplus value, such a major researcher-Marxist as Rubin is, considers to be a contradiction to 'Marx's theory of value as a social phenomenon.'
...
The erroneous commentary of the law of production price is overturned by the same Essays in those chapters where Rubin unfolds with great force the exposition of the problem of socially-necessary labour. Here is brightly, clearly shown the role of market value, as the "basis," on which rests the very relation of demand and supply, which explains the market oscillations of profit, as processes of the moves of the mass of social labour.
What determines according to Rubin the quantity of the "actually payed social need"? It consists of nothing more than a 'product of the unit value determined by the technical conditions of production, the number of units currently located at the given value.' This mass of value reflects the amount of labour, realised under proportionality in social production. Obviously, under an increase in the market price above market value, the given industry realises more labour than it actually employed. Obviously, these masses of "foreign" labour must have been taken from other industries. Obviously, there must occur a shifting of the mass of labour, and consequently, also surplus value. Again, the chapters of Essays itself overturn the original erroneous commentary of the law of production price.
Abstracting from market value, as "intermediate link" of the process, we are not in a position to understand the internal pattern of direction in the moves of capitals, under which value conditions is stimulated the contraction of capital in one or another industry.
The solution to the problem of socially-necessary labour, which is given in Essays, reveals to us market value, as "intermediate link" of the process of the formation of the average rate of profit. The scheme of this process can be expressed in such basic links: processes of change of the technical composition of capital – the tendency of different organic compositions of equal-sized capitals toward a "socially-average" structure – a reflection of the change in the organic composition of capital per the largest market value – processes of the redistribution of the mass of produced surplus value through the movement flows of commodity values – as a result of these processes, rearrangement of capital from one industry of production into another – the price of production in the sphere of the market.
The market value in each industry plays the role here of a peculiar "transmission apparatus." Through the change in the market value, changes in the organic composition of capital affect the redistribution of mass of labour, and consequently, also the total mass of surplus value. The changes of the organic composition of capitals under an everywhere equal rate of exploitation, cause changes of the magnitude of the market value in each industry.
For each industry the magnitude of "actually, socially payed needs" is changed. Is not all this reflected in the magnitudes of the redistributed mass of labour, does not the magnitude of the price of production itself change as a derivative of the new level of the value rate of profit? A different correlation must be established between the organic composition of different industries, that affects the regrouping of capitals.
The price of production in circulation, reflecting the laws of the redistribution of the mass of labour, thereby reflects the processes bringing closer the organic composition of capitals toward the socially-average level. Price of production should coincide with market value in industries of socially-average organic composition of equal-sized capitals, inasmuch as the tendency in technical progress under free competition constantly operates for a convergence of the individual composition of capital with the socially-average level.
Here the sphere of the market and direct production do not match, but "mutually-penetrate" into each other, their unity acts as a "unity of differences." ...
Marx attached great significance to the problem of the links between the distribution of capital and the distribution of labour. Without a proper understanding of this problem one can not study the internal laws of the curve of capitalist development.
----
...
The relation of free competition between capitalists, for Rubin, is incompatible with different value rates of profit in different spheres of production. The presence of competition, obviously, mechanically should ordain a permanent equality of individual value rates of profit to its social average rate.
Thus seems to us the logical chain of reasoning of Rubin. Its final link is a consequence of a mistakenly developed "starting position": if the average level of profit is derived from value rates, then the latter must be realised in selling prices. Drop the initial link and the whole chain is smashed!
For Marx – directly in the sphere of the market the individual value rates of profit, are not realised, the market price can not be identified with the price of production. The average level of profit in the sphere of the market corresponds with individual value rates only as the result of a complex process. The law of production price consists of nothing else than in the display of the patterns of the dialectics of this process.
..
The numerical patterns of the table of the third volume of Capital express determined economic patterns. The conditions of the numerical example of the tables of the ninth chapter reflect all the distinctness of "the forming principle" of the capitalist structure. The tables reflect the dialectics of the process of the formation of the average rate of profit, the process of converting value in a "newly determined form," in production price. The tables do not only not exclude, but presuppose the relation of free competition. The price of production displays the direction of the process of the moves of the mass of social labour, market value operates (as) "regulatory magnitude" of that amount of labour, that comes to the given sphere, an amount, which in capitalist society by no one is established.' These categories – are different moments of the internal-contradictory process of the redistribution of social labour. Rubin mechanically separates different columns of the tables, ignoring the "linking of their movement."
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Marx did not assume the realisation in commodity prices of the value rates of profit. The last column represents only a "starting point" of the process in the phase of direct production.
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...
Insofar as between all industries there is proportionality, the value rate of profit for each industry according to Ricardo coincides with the average general rate of profit. 'Ricardo identifies production price with value from the very outset, – Marx writes, – and does not see that this assumption is a prima facie contradiction of the law of value. Instead of solution he starts to forcibly derive the law from the contradictory phenomena of reality.
Scientific intuition tells Ricardo that the technical composition in different industries is different. But then also the value rate of profit in different industries is different. The metaphysical formulation of the question drives all study in a false, vicious, hopeless circle. Over which questions does Ricardo grievously rack his brain?
How to solve the great antinomy:
1) different individual value rates of profit constantly are realised in the selling prices;
2) in the selling prices is realised a constantly equal-for-all-capitals rate of profit?
By what ways can these individual value rates of profit coincide with the constantly realised in prices average profit? For metaphysics commodities are sold either at production prices, or at market values; commodities of equal-sized capitals are not exchanged at labour values, since the technical compositions of them differs, – in this form of an unresolved antinomy Ricardo left stand the labour theory of value.
...
Marx condemns Ricardo not for the attempt to derive the average rate of profit from individual value rates, but for the identification of these categories. He pounds on Ricardo because the great metaphysician does not understand that the unity of average profit in circulation is carried out by value rates, as a process, in which the latter operate only as necessary "intermediate links" of the process.
..
What is the logical consequential conclusion of the original position: the value rates of profit do "not serve as intermediate links" of the process of the formation of the average level? Study need not be interested about the organic composition of equal-sized capitals.
However Rubin, following Marx, gives decisively important significance in analysis to differentiation in the composition of capitals c and v, which reveals the secrets of the origin of surplus value. In this way, 'the distribution of capital, through the organic composition of capital,. – correctly notes Rubin, – bridges to the distribution of social labor.' In this way, 'by a visible process of emigration of capital is revealed the invisible process of the redistribution of the mass of social labour.'
But Rubin, obviously, is aware of his logical inconsistency. How can one "enter" in analysis of the organic composition of capitals and ignore therewith the by them caused value rates of profit? 'It is obvious – Rubin notes, – that different rates of profit in individual spheres are used by Marx only as numerical expressions, indicators of the organic composition of capital.'
The artificiality of the argument strikes the eye! Why can it not be also the reverse situation? Indeed only because then it is necessary to reject the initially presupposed commentary of the problem! Why under an everywhere equal rate of exploitation and other conditions being equal, can not the different organic compositions of capitals, on the contrary, serve as indicators of the rate of profit, produced in the given industry?
'The average rate of profit, – Rubin notes in one place, – is the result of the "redistributed between capitalists erstwhile total mass of surplus value.' But then, obviously, individual value rates of profit – are a "link" of the process.
for pennoid A scientific law
for pennoid
A scientific law is not a theory.
It is just a mathematical formulation or expression of the connection between two observable data sets.
Often under certain prescribed, defined and narrow circumstances.
Thus with the gas laws;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_laws
The mathematical expression of the laws can be incidentally different.
Thus if the temperature of a gas is “doubled” and it pressure is allowed to remain the same its volume doubles,
Or if the pressure doubles the volume halves etc.
Actually it only works or is observed as such over a relatively narrow set of circumstances.
And from those narrow set of ‘ideal’ circumstances it was or is derived.
Eg relatively low pressures and with certain ideal or noble gases.
One might ask what is the point of creating a law or gas laws by cherry picking data from narrow sets of circumstances that are more unusual than applicably normal?
And that would apply equally to taking a law derived from simple commodity production when your interest is capitalism.
But by cherry picking gas law data led to, by extrapolating back, a concept of an absolute zero temperature and much more importantly the kinetic theory of gases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_theory_of_gases
Which actually led to chemistry and the development of the periodic table amongst other things.
But more importantly although you developed a theory from a ‘law’ derived from a highly selective and limited set of data.
That selective and limited set of data was real enough.
The fascination, interest and ‘bias’ for scientists is when the connection between two sets of data can be expressed in a neat mathematical formula.
Anyway you develop a theory and take it with you and plug it back in to normal situations to see if it can also explain how and why and when it doesn’t work.
Thus choosing another example before we return to Karl.
You could observe like maybe Galileo did that;
……….. stated that Galileo had dropped balls of the same material, but different masses, from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that their time of descent was independent of their mass. This was contrary to what Aristotle had taught: that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones, in direct proportion to weight……
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei
And move on from that to some interesting ideas?
But who is going to say that a falcon feather falls to the ground at the same speed as a hammer ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4_rceVPVSY
Although it wasn’t our case as things happened somewhat in reverse; one could ask why does the falcon feather fall as fast as the hammer on the moon but not on earth.
Like why does stuff exchange at its value in simple commodity production but not in capitalism?
Or in other words do you use the simple situation on the moon or the orbits of the planets etc to explain what goes on on earth with its interfering and modifying atmosphere and air resistance etc.
Or use capitalism with its interfering affects of rate of profit to make sense of the law of value in simple commodity production that has no such interference?
Karl did take forward ‘a’ theory or set of logical concepts derived from simple commodity production and applied them to capitalism.
Developing theories from laws derived from selective empirically observed data and applying them back to general situations can often go belly up; and it does more often than not.
And in fact scientist love it when it does.
Thus the orbit of mercury was doing anti Newtonian stuff but the Einstien theory of gravity fixed that.
Not that everyone dropped Newton’s ‘laws’ as it was still good enough for practical purposes just as you could argue the Law of value still has a general validity, albeit flawed in theoretical detail.
Going back to Karl and his C-M-C in simple commodity production.
Actually it is better doing.
C(1) –M – C(2)
So C(1) is a thing or use value like some linen that the owner and producer doesn’t want or have a use for.
What the owner and maker of C(1) wants is C(2) not M which is just a means to and end or the ownership and use of C(2) which he is going to consume and destroy or wear out in the process.
And they theoretically exchange at their value.
As far as it goes it is a closed circuit.
Actually in capitalism as far as the worker is concerned the same thing happens as in simple commodity production and nothing changes and the theory holds.
Except for the worker in capitalism C(1) isn’t an object or a piece of stuff that he has made it is his ability to work or labour power or a use value to someone.
Linen or labour power?
What’s the difference if they are both commodities?
He exchanges it, his labour power C(1) for M at its value, so still no problem and the theory abstracted from simple commodity production still works .
Then he buys C(2) which might be a coat with his M at its value.
The worker just like the simple commodity producer is only interested in a coat to wear and consume.
And again it is a closed cycle.
And the law of value still operates?
But for the capitalist it is somewhat different.
He takes his M and buys a special commodity labour power C(1) at its value.
But then the capitalist uses and consumes the C(1), labour power, which has a value and for which he has paid a full law of value price for, to create something with more value in it.
Which he sells at a higher value.
So he has 5 hours of money with which he buys 5hours of labour power.
Then he uses the 5 hours of labour power to produce something with 10 hours of value.
Or ;
M(5hours) – C(5hours of labour power)
But the 5hours of labour power works for 10 hours and produces a commodity with 10 hours of value in it.
So
M(5hours) – C(5hours of labour power)….C(10hours)
The C(10hours) belongs to the capitalist and all he needs to do sell it for more than M(5hours) to make a profit.
If C(10hours) sold at its value and according to the law of value then.
M(5hours) – C(5hours of labour power)….C(10hours) –M(10hours)
Then if he wanted to he could start again and double up.
But actually as the objective is to end up with more money than he started with the law of value doesn’t need to operate in the last transaction or;
C(10hours) –M(10hours).
As long as in the more general formula and objective for capitalism;
M –C ….C`– M`
M` > M
Holds.
Thus a capitalist enterprise can still work even if the ‘last’ transaction breaks the law of value.
Or if the capitalist produced commodity does not exchange at its value or say;
C(10hours) –M(8hours).
The regulation of the last transaction can or is invariably modified by the rate of profit.
Actually all the transactions in capitalism eg
M –C
Purchase of labour power or its ‘price’.
C ….C`
Which I suppose is like the rate of exploitation.
As well as;
C`– M`
Can change or break their own ‘models’ or whatever according to circumstances.
There are theories why commodities exchange at their value in simple commodity production and why labour power exchanges at it value.
But there is no doubt that they shouldn’t be scrutinised either.
Well; “that went well” As
Well;
“that went well”
As Neville Longbottom said in deathly hallows part one.
My hero!
I have got an 8 outcome ‘dialectical’ tree script here in front of me here scribbled on a side of A4, is that it?
Noa Rodman wrote: Like I
Noa Rodman
Now that this (Responses to Marx's Capital: From Rudolf Hilferding to Isaak Illich Rubin) has been published, let me just select some passages (from Rubin):
...It would seem that, with the complete prevalence of simple commodity economy, the sole purpose of production is already exchange-value, not consumption, yet Marx declares that the final goal of the circuit C– M–C is use-value. The seeming contradiction vanishes if we recall that a long process of historical development is involved, which begins with purely natural economy and ends with developed capitalism. This protracted process of historical development is characterised by exchange-value gradually squeezing out use-value as the motive and purpose of production. It is completely understandable, therefore, that any given stage, by comparison with the previous one, reveals the increasing prevalence of exchange-value while at the same time, when compared to the subsequent stage of development, it reveals an insufficient ascendancy of exchange-value. That is particularly the case with the intermediate place occupied by simple commodity economy. In the latter, the goal of production is immediately exchange-value alone, although ultimately, or in the final analysis, the goal of production is to satisfy the personal needs of the producer himself.
...
We know that a simple commodity economy previously existed, although it was not yet adequately developed, and that it represented a unity of productive forces and their social forms. In particular, there existed in the simple commodity economy, although not yet adequately developed, the social form of value. We know that, precisely due to pressure from development of material productive forces, the production relations between simple commodity producers grew over into production relations of the capitalist type. We know that this growing over was not merely quantitative but was also qualitative; it was an entire historical upheaval, a leap.
...
The unity and opposition of the two formulae of circulation, C–M–C and M–C–M, simply reflects the fact that the capitalist economy is simultaneously a further development and a negation of the simple commodity economy. It is a further development of the simple commodity economy because it arose historically from the simple commodity economy and at the same time operates on the basis of commodity and money circulation. On the other hand, however, the laws of commodity circulation, in the conditions of capitalist economy, acquire a form that is antithetical to the forms that distinguish them in a simple commodity economy. If simple commodity economy was based upon the exchange of equivalents, in capitalist economy we are dealing with the capitalist’s appropriation of the workers’ unpaid labour.
^ quotes taken from p. 485
^ quotes taken from p. 485 ('Marx’s Teaching on Production and Consumption', 1930),
p. 744, pp. 789–90 ('The Dialectical Development of Categories in Marx’s Economic System', 1929).
Just another passage from
Just another passage from Marx on SCP: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch47.htm
Peasant Proprietorship Of Land Parcels (bäuerliche Parzelleneigentum, Fernbach's translation: Small-scale peasant ownership)
The peasant here is simultaneously the free owner of his land, which appears as his principal instrument of production, the indispensable field of employment for his labour and his capital. No lease money is paid under this form.
..
This form of landed property presupposes ... that the rural population greatly predominates numerically over the town population, so that, even if the capitalist mode of production otherwise prevails, it is but relatively little developed, and thus also in the other lines of production the concentration of capital is restricted to narrow limits and a fragmentation of capital predominates. In the nature of things, the greater portion of agricultural produce must be consumed as direct means of subsistence by the producers themselves, the peasants, and only the excess above that will find its way as commodities into urban commerce. No matter how the average market-price of agricultural products may here be regulated, differential rent, an excess portion of commodity-prices from superior or more favourably located land, must evidently exist here much as under the capitalist mode of production. This differential rent exists, even where this form appears under social conditions, under which no general market-price has as yet been developed; it appears then in the excess surplus-product.
..
The assumption here is generally to be made that no absolute rent exists,
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absolute rent presupposes either realised excess in product value above its price of production, or a monopoly price exceeding the value of the product. But since agriculture here is carried on largely as cultivation for direct subsistence, and the land exists as an indispensable field of employment for the labour and capital of the majority of the population, the regulating market-price of the product will reach its value only under extraordinary circumstances. But this value will, generally, be higher than its price of production owing to the preponderant element of living labour, although this excess of value over price of production will in turn be limited by the low composition even of non-agricultural capital in countries with an economy composed predominantly of land parcels.
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This form of free self-managing peasant proprietorship of land parcels as the prevailing, normal form constitutes, on the one hand, the economic foundation of society during the best periods of classical antiquity, and on the other hand, it is found among modern nations as one of the forms arising from the dissolution of feudal land ownership. Thus, the yeomanry in England, the peasantry in Sweden, the French and West German peasants. We do not include colonies here, since the independent peasant there develops under different conditions.
The free ownership of the self-managing peasant is evidently the most normal form of landed property for small-scale operation, i.e., for a mode of production, in which possession of the land is a prerequisite for the labourer’s ownership of the product of his own labour, and in which the cultivator, be he free owner or vassal, always must produce his own means of subsistence independently, as an isolated labourer with his family. Ownership of the land is as necessary for full development of this mode of production as ownership of tools is for free development of handicraft production.