An Incontestable Argument for the Law of Value
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“And if the minimum wages acts were revoked, their wages would, I can assure you, fall in no time below the subsistence level.”
So you think that, for example before 1998 when the minimum wage was introduced in the UK, the trend there was for wages to be below subsistence? And that wages are now above that level only because of this legislation?
Yes, slaves were ‘bought and sold outright’ by their masters while wage slaves are bought and sold on the daily basis by themselves. Neither group has got the freedom of not getting sold for survival. If a slave refused, after his master’s death, to work under (and thus sell his labour-power to) another master, he’d be deprived of the bare necessities (wages in kind) of life and have to die ultimately. The wage slaves too are left with No other option than to sell their labour-power daily to a capitalist for subsistence-level wages.
Wages (market-prices of labour-power) can hardly rise above the subsistence level since they’re determined by laws of supply & demand, and since the labour markets are in general flooded with labour-power.
From above, it clearly follows that the state of a wage slave is Not in essence significantly different from that of a slave.
‘So you think that, for example before 1998 when the minimum wage was introduced in the UK, the trend there was for wages to be below subsistence? And that wages are now above that level only because of this legislation?’
What do you think led the UK to introduce the minimum wages act ?
It’s not that simple. See this article about the interaction in Britain between the minimum wage (paid by employers) and “working tax credits” (paid to employees by the government):
“From above, it clearly follows that the state of a wage slave is Not in essence significantly different from that of a slave.”
There’s a technical term for this kind of statement. “Over egging the pudding”
This is the consensus about commodities on pre capitalist societies:
I have been in contact with different personalities and organizations within the Marxist Leninist Movement, Anarchists, and Marxist Humanists Movement
I spent great deal of time within the ML and MH and I inherited many concepts from them, some of them have changed their minds. due to new researches and they are more ideological matured. When I read volume 1 of Capital I was very young and immature, and some of us believed that commodities did not exist in a pre capitalist society.
They have responded to me, they have not said that they were mistaken, some have blamed the problems on somebody else or do not want to be frank with themselves, I have done my own research on the subject matter, but I am different, I recognized that I was wrong, and I do not blame it on somebody else
One Leninist surprised me by saying that commodities and the law of value will not exist in a socialist society. At the present time there are several organizations that are re studying Marx capital, and I was invited to one of those study on Capital and I am going back to the drawing board again, from volume 1 thru volume 3. I am also working on Marx ethnological notebooks.
‘There’s a technical term for this kind of statement. “Over egging the pudding”’
It’s No logic. Such statements only show that the respondent has exhausted his faculty of reason, I’m afraid to say.
This has already been done here. This from An ABC of Marxism on this site:
Commodity. Commodities are items of wealth that have been produced for sale. Commodities have been produced in pre-capitalist societies, but such production was marginal. It is only in capitalism that it becomes the dominant mode of production, where goods and services are produced for sale with a view to profit.
Under capitalism the object of commodity production is the realisation of profit when the commodities have been sold. These profits are mostly re-invested and accumulated as capital. Commodities must be capable of being reproduced, and this includes the uniquely capitalist commodity of human labour power. Reading Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism and Commodity Production, 2018
Paper at Conference on Friedrich Engels—Die Aktualität eines Klassikers, February, 2020 Engels on Post-Capitalist Society:
Continuity or Discontinuity with Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism?
By Peter Hudis
A comparison of Engels and Marx’s views of post-capitalist society may seem to be the sort of subject that one relegates to a footnote in a scholarly work, but the ongoing resurgence of interest in socialism, including in places like the U.S., suggests that a closer look at the issue may be in order. This is because after a hundred years of aborted and unfinished revolutions, the very meaning of socialism remains unclear even as a new generation seeks its renewal. Is socialism about redistributing wealth and value more equitably, or is it about transforming social relations of class, race and gender that treat people as a mere source of economic value and profit? What is required to uproot a system that treats the augmentation of value, or wealth in monetary form, as an end in itself? Is it even possible to abolish value production, or is it a transhistorical feature of human existence that we must ultimately accommodate to?
Marx himself thought long and hard about these questions, and as I have argued elsewhere,1 his reflections produced a distinctive understanding of the transcendence of capitalism that takes on new importance for our time. Capital, according to Marx, is self- expanding value, and value is the expression of a specific kind of labor—abstract or alienated labor. The value of a commodity is not determined by the actual amount of time taken to produce it but by the socially necessary labor time required to do so. This social average is imposed upon producers irrespective of their will, as technological innovations increase the productivity of labor. As multiple acts of labor are forced to adhere to this social average, they take on an
2
increasingly homogenous form. Concrete labor—the varied kinds of labor employed in making use-values—becomes increasingly dominated by abstract labor. Abstract labor is the substance of value and socially necessary labor time is the measure of value. Value, as an economic category,2 may be a rather abstract notion, but it expresses a very real kind of activity: labor that is constrained by an abstract time determination outside of the workers’ control.
Although Marx refrained from speculating about the future, he made it clear that socialism represents the annulment of value production. As he put it in one of his last writings, “I do not divide value into use-value and exchange-value as opposites into which the abstraction ‘value’ splits up” since “value has nothing in common with [use value], except that ‘value’ occurs in the term ‘use value.’”3 Use-value refers to material wealth; it is not a form of “value,” which is the (abstract) measure of material wealth. It would be more precise to refer to the commodity as the unity-in-difference of use-worth and value.4 Marx hits out against the “professorial confusion between ‘use-value’ and ‘value,’ just because both have the word ‘value’ in common”5 throughout his work. He does this to stress the historical specificity of value. All societies, including socialism, employs use-values, but only in capitalism do they become bearers of exchange value. On these grounds he insisted, “In my investigation of value I have dealt with bourgeois relations, not with the application of this theory of value to a ‘social state.”6
Nevertheless, this hardly served as the conceptual ground of Marxism after Marx. The Marxist movement exhibited a striking lack of unanimity, or even clarity, concerning the need to surmount value production. Critiquing capitalist formations was one thing; envisioning a viable alternative to them has proven to be far more difficult. This paper will explore the roots of this problem by discussing whether Engels, Marx’s closest collaborator and follower, adhered to the conception of a post-capitalist society that is found in Marx’s work or instead departed from it.3
Although Engels was far too modest to claim that he made a decisive contribution to the development of the Marxian critique of capital, there is no question that Marx never ceased to express his debt to such works of Engels as The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) and Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1844). The latter proved especially crucial in assisting Marx’s turn to “material matters” following his break from the Young Hegelians and conversion to communism. This is not only because of its discussion of economic categories like value, exchange value, and price but also its delving, however provisionally, into the form of life that will arise after capitalism. In a communist society, Engels writes, “The community will have to calculate what it can produce with the means at its disposal; and in accordance with the relationship of this productive power to the mass of consumers it will determine how far it has to raise or lower production, how far it has to give way to, or curtail, luxury.”7 Nowhere in the Outline does Engels suggest that capitalistic categories like commodity exchange and value production continue to exist under socialism or communism.8
Over the next fifteen years Marx and Engels carried on an active correspondence on political economy, which no doubt proved of assistance in the development of Marx’s Poverty and Philosophy (1847) and The Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). Nevertheless, when it comes to Das Kapital, what is striking is how tangential was Engels’s contribution. Its central categories—the distinction between labor and labor power, abstract and concrete labor, surplus value and profit, value and value-form—are all Marx’s creation. The same goes for such concepts as socially necessary labor time. Perhaps most striking is that Engels was not even directly aware of the content of Volume One of Capital until Marx sent him the galley proofs shortly before its publication in 1867.4
Engels’s initial reaction to Chapter One of Capital is revealing. He urges Marx to provide “more extensive historical evidence for the conclusions you have reached dialectically,” since it would demonstrate “the need for the development of money and the process by which this takes place.” He adds, “In these rather abstract elaborations you have committed the great mistake [!] of not making the sequence of thought clear by a larger number of small subsections and separate headings.”9 Marx responds by ignoring Engels’s advice to arrange the chapter in a historical sequence and agrees only to add some headings and an appendix on the forms of value. He says he does so to “behave dialectically.” Chapter One of Capital is dialectical insofar as it begins with the “simplest” or most immediate form of appearance of the commodity in highly- developed capitalist society and proceeds to trace out its immanent contradictions and determinations. The most immediate—the commodity as it presents itself to present-day consciousness—is then shown to be “abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”10 As in Hegel’s Logic, the object generates its own categories of knowledge. The latter is neither imposed upon history nor reduced to a one-to-one expression of it.
Engels’s letter indicates that he did not fully understand the mode of presentation employed by Marx in analyzing the commodity-form in the first chapter of Capital. It should be noted, however, that nowhere in the 1867 letter does he refer to “petty commodity production”— a term never used by Marx but which Engels claimed, after Marx’s death, to be the subject of Capital’s opening pages. His effort to read a historical sequence into a logical deduction may have opened the door to imposing the category of pre-capitalist petty commodity production onto Marx’s work after his death, but there is no evidence that he advanced such a claim before then.5
None of this, however, directly addresses whether Marx and Engels were in accord on the nature of post-capitalist society, since that was not the subject of their correspondence in 1867 or in other letters of the period. We can determine his view of this issue only by examining his direct discussions of the law of value, both before and after Marx’s death in 1883.
Engels wrote a series of reviews of Volume One of Capital shortly after its publication, which despite their popular style are not without theoretical significance. He cogently writes that “the substance of exchange value is abstract labor and its magnitude is the measure of time of abstract labor,” thereby explicitly positing the distinction between actual labor time (which does not create value) and socially necessary labor time, which makes possible the substance of value, abstract labor. This point is often missed; the failure to distinguish actual labor time from socially necessary labor time continues to define much of Marx scholarship to this day. Engels, in contrast, writes, “The process of exchange gives the commodity which it converts into money, not its value, but its value-form.”11 This is a crucial distinction. If the process of exchange gives the commodity its value, it follows that abolishing capitalism hinges on regulating or organizing the process of exchange. Marx’s insistence on distinguishing value from value-form directly pushes against such a notion. If exchange is not responsible for the creation or existence of value but for the form in which value appears, it follows that exiting capitalism hinges on abolishing that which exchange value is the phenomenal expression—production for the sake of augmenting value, as concrete labor is pounded into abstract labor through the hegemon of socially necessary labor time. As Engels puts it, “Money, as the measure of value, is the necessary phenomenal form of the measure of value immanent in commodities, i.e., labor time.”12
More telling than these reviews are what can be regarded as Engels’s most important theoretical work—Anti-Dühring (1878). In opposition to Dühring’s claim that Marx has a theory6
of “natural costs” that treat all historical eras as governed by an exchange of equivalent commodity values, Engels writes: “Marx is not discussing any of these things, but only the value of commodities: and that in the whole section of Capital which deals with value there is not even the slightest indication of whether or to what extent Marx considers this theory of the value of commodities applicable also to other forms of society.”13 He goes on to stress that value does not prevail before capitalism: “Commodity production, is by no means the only form of social production. In the ancient Indian communities and in the family communities of the southern Slavs…the members of the community are directly associated… Direct social production and direct distribution preclude all exchange of commodities, therefore also the transformation of the products into commodities (at any rate within the community) and consequently also their transformation into values.”14 The point could not be clearer: Engels’s position in Anti-Dühring is that commodity production and the law of value do not govern pre-capitalist societies.
To be sure, trade based on exchanging objects of equal worth existed before capitalism. However, this was restricted to the margins of society, in the trading zones between communities. Social relations within the community, as Engels notes, were not characterized by a drive to augment exchange value. For this reason, the ancients looked upon retail trade, commerce, and usury as “unnatural.” As they saw it, they were external impositions upon social existence rather than its operative law. It could not be otherwise, since the separation of the producers from the objective conditions of production and the commodification of labor power had not yet arisen. In contrast, in capitalism even the greatest minds tend to view production for the sake of augmenting value as natural, since it is the operative law of society. This naturalization of a social construction is reflected in the widespread view (shared, incredibly enough, by many “Marxists”) that value production characterizes all of human history. However,7
the law of value is a contingent product of a peculiar social form of labor—abstract or alienated labor. Once the latter is overcome, the law of value is annulled; where it persists, capitalism lives on, regardless of what name is given to the particular system.
Engels addresses this in stating, “Labor ‘has’ no value; it creates value.”15 This is in direct contrast to the view of many Marxists, from Paul Sweezy to Ernest Mandel, who held that labor “has value.”16 “Labor” is of course not specific to capitalism: if “labor” “has” value, it follows that production for the sake of augmenting value is an intrinsic property of labor. A specific feature of capitalism—labor power that assumes a value-form—is treated as a transhistorical fact of human life. Engels correctly notes, “Though…labor as such can have no value, this is by no means the case with labor power. This acquires a value from the moment it becomes a commodity.”17 Engels sums up the issue as follows: “For socialism, which wants to emancipate human labor power from its status as a commodity, the realization that labor has no value and can have none is of great importance. With this realization all attempts…to regulate the future distribution of the necessities of life as a kind of higher wages falls to the ground.”18
The twentieth century was defined by many so-called “socialist” or “communist” regimes that sought to “regulate the necessities of life” though a “kind of higher wages.” It was summed up in the slogan, “From each according to their ability, to each according to their work!” Socialized or statified wage labor was posed as the “alternative” to “free market” capitalism, but it proved to be completely non-viable. Engels could not have anticipated such regimes, but his discussion speaks to their fate. He writes, “Once the commodity producing society has further developed the value form, which is inherent in commodities as such, to the money form, various germs still hidden in value break through to a generalization of the commodity form.”19 Do note that a “commodity producing society” is not the same as a society that exchanges commodities.8
Commodity exchange can exist on the margins of society, in trade between communities, without the communities themselves being governed by commodity production. No planner in the USSR or Mao’s China could claim that commodities only existed on the margins of society, even as they isolated themselves from the world market and tried to build “socialism in one country.” Commodity production was integral to their internal existence. Hence, it was inevitable that they would mutate sooner or later into full-blown market capitalism shorn of any “socialist’ pretenses, since, as Engels writes, the germs hidden in societies that maintain value production inevitably “break through to a generalization of the commodity form.”
Statist socialists and market socialists, please take notice—the Engels of Anti-Dühring is not in your corner. Throughout the book he takes issue with the notion that commodity production, money, and exchange value exists in socialism or communism. “With the seizing of the means of production by society,” he states, “production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer.”20 He acknowledges that “it will still be necessary for society to know how much labor each article of consumption requires for its production. It will have to arrange its plan of production in accordance with its means of production, which include, in particular, its labor powers.” But he goes on to say, “The useful effects of the various articles of consumption, compared with one another and with the quantities of labor required for their production, will in the end determine the plan. People will be able to manage everything very simply, without the intervention of much-vaunted ‘value.’”21 The distribution of the social product will be handled “far more simply,” he emphasizes, “if it used the natural measure of labor-time, with the labor hour as unit.”22 Indirectly social labor will be replaced by directly social labor once social relations are based on “their natural, adequate, and9
absolute measure, time”—that is, actual, not abstract, labor time.23 Engels concludes that “on the assumptions we made above, society will not assign values to products.”24
Engels is here restating Marx’s invitation to “imagine, for a change,”25 a post-capitalist society, voiced in the section on commodity fetishism in Capital and more extensively developed in the Critique of the Gotha Program. Marx writes in the latter, “Within a cooperatively organized society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor expended on the products appear here as the value of these products… Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society, after the deductions have been made, exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the societal supply of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor that he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.”26 Value production, according to Marx, is thereby abolished from the inception of the initial phase of socialism or communism.
Norman Levine (among others) have argued that Marx “rejected” what he calls “the Lassallean idea of labor certificates” and that Engels “deviated” from Marx in upholding it.27 However, the idea of certificates based on actual units of labor time—not to be confused with socially necessary labor time—derives not from Lassalle but Robert Owen. And Marx repeatedly praised Owen for the idea, writing in Volume One of Capital, “Owen presupposes10
directly socialized labor, a form of production diametrically opposed to the production of commodities. The certificate of labor is merely evidence of a part taken by the individual in the common labor, and of his claim to a certain portion of the common product [that] has been set aside for consumption.” What Marx opposed was Proudhon’s idea—later popularized by Lassalle—that labor tokens could be used in a society that maintains commodity production and socially necessary labor time.28 As Marx put it, unlike them, “Owen never made the mistake of presupposing the production of commodities.”29 Marx explicitly reiterates this in Volume Two of Capital: “With collective production, money capital is completely dispensed with. The society distributes labor power and means of production between the various branches of industry. There is no reason why the producers should not receive paper tokens permitting them to withdraw an amount corresponding to their labor time from the social consumption fund. But these tokens are not money; they do not circulate.”30 Levine is apparently unaware of these passages.31 No less remarkably, he is so obsessed with posing Engels as the total opposite of Marx on all issues that he claims that Marx “abandoned labor as the equation of distribution” when the text of his 1875 Critique clearly says the opposite.32
It is clear from this summary that Engels concurred with Marx that commodity production and the law of value is specific to capitalism and will be abolished in a post-capitalist society. Nor is there much evidence to suggest, at least as of the 1880s, that Engels held that value production prevails in pre-capitalist society.33 While Marx was alive, Engels took great pains to follow him on these issues (this did not mean he followed him on other ones). However, this still does not get us to the critical issue, since a new reality confronted Engels after Marx’s death—the need not just to be a follower but a continuator. The former is relatively easy, especially when Marx is there to guide you along. But what happens when the founder is no11
longer around and you must now continue the legacy not simply by repeating what Marx said but reconstituting his ideas in light of questions or realities that Marx himself didn’t face?
In the years immediately after Marx’s death in 1883 Engels continues to argue for the historical specificity of the law of value. In a letter to Karl Kautsky of September 1884 he critiques Rodbertus for “looking for the true, eternal content of things and of social relations of which, however, the content is essentially transient.” He then turns to critique Kautsky, stating “You do the same kind of thing in the case of value. [You contend that] present value is that of the production of commodities, but with the suppression of the production of commodities, value ‘changes’ or rather, value as such remains and merely changes its form. But in fact [as I see it] economic value is a category that appertains to the production of commodities disappearing with it, just as it did not exist before it. The relation of labor to product prior to and after production of commodities no longer expresses itself in the form of value.”34 Engels is issuing what may be one of the earliest critiques of a follower of Marx for implying that value prevails in socialism.35
However, near the end of Engels’s life things take a different turn. In response to Werner Sombart’s Zur Kritik des öekonomische Systems von Karl Marx (the first appreciative book on Marx by an academic), Engels writes in a letter to him in March 1895 that Marx had “very little to say” about the “very interesting” question of how the equalization of profit rates occurred historically. He tries to fill this gap as follows: “The concept of value…has, or had, more reality than you ascribe to it. In the early days of exchange when products gradually changed into commodities, exchanges were made in proportion to value…at that time, value existed in an immediate and real sense.” Prior to capitalism the prices of commodities immediately or directly reflect their value, whereas in capitalism they increasingly diverge. He adds, “A genuinely historical exposition of this process would be a most valuable pendant to Capital.”3612
In stepping out on his own to answer a question left unaddressed by Marx, Engels now claims that value production existed before capitalism—in contrast to his earlier view that “Direct social production and direct distribution preclude all exchange of commodities …and consequently also their transformation into values.”37 A day later he continues this line of reasoning in a letter to Conrad Schmidt, who held that the concept of value is a “necessary fiction” rather than a reality.38 Engels counters by stating that a historical approach would show that the law of value governs commodity exchange in both pre-capitalist and capitalist societies.
In a sense Engels’s approach is understandable: how better to counter a nominalist view of value as a “necessary fiction” than to show it is an actual historical reality.39 But at what price is such realism obtained? By stretching the value-theoretic categories of Capital beyond the framework employed by Marx, Engels risks posing value production as a transhistorical phenomenon. His effort to respond to the idea that value is a “fiction,” I contend, led him to claim, for the first time in his 1895 Preface to Volume Three, that pre-capitalist commodity production is the subject matter of the first section of Volume One of Capital. As C.J. Arthur showed many years ago, however, the term never appears in Marx’s work and has led to massive confusion when it comes to understanding the actual object of critique in Capital.40
Things get even worse from here, since in the last days of his life Engels proceeded to write a Postface to Volume Three of Capital which states, “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. Up to that time prices gravitate toward the values fixed according to the Marxian law and oscillate around these values… Thus, the Marxian law of value13
has general economic validity for a period lasting from the beginnings of exchange, which transforms products into commodities, down to the fifteenth century of the present…thus the law of value has prevailed during a period of five to seven thousand years.”41 This is a fantastic claim. Not only is it contradicted by Marx’s insistence that “The economic concept of value does not occur among the ancients…[it] wholly belongs to the latest political economy, because that concept is the most abstract expression of capital itself and of the production based upon it.”42 It is contradicted by Engels’s own earlier writings on pre-capitalist society!
Moreover, the argument fails even on historical grounds. Engels provides no explanation for how the split between concrete and abstract labor and socially necessary labor time can exist prior to labor power becoming a commodity. If the substance of value is abstract labor, value governs pre-capitalist societies only if abstract or alienated labor is their governing principle. In that case, the “peculiar social form of labor”43 that characterizes capitalism becomes enshrined as a veritable principle of human development. And how can a “law” of value exist in societies without a mechanism to enforce it, such as a world market that compels commodity producers “under penalty of death”44 to adhere to socially necessary labor time? Moreover, did Marx spend so much time and trouble delineating the logic of capital simply in order to point out that values and prices tend to converge before capitalism whereas in capitalism they diverge? Engels not only muddies the waters when it comes to understanding the logic of capital, he fails to provide anything close to a coherent explanation of the historical emergence and dominance of the law of value. The latter requires an extensive historical inquiry that cannot be shoehorned into a ten- page appendix to one of Marx’s greatest works, which Engels himself spent a decade preparing for the press. It isn’t that he was disloyal. It’s that he succumbed to a problem common to many14
talented followers—a failure to reconstitute a body of thought for new realities without losing the thread of continuity with its most unique (as well as unheralded) contributions.
The main problem with Engels’s late writings on political economy is that if the law of value has existed for “five to seven” thousand years, why presume it will disappear with the advent of socialism? The question becomes especially pertinent if it is assumed—as Engels himself did not—that “socialism” and “communism” represent distinct historical phases. But many Marxists after Engels’s death adopted this dubious notion,45 leading many to presume— right to this day—that value production persists in the initial stage of a post-capitalist society.
Engels have may inadvertently opened the door to such a conception, but he did not walk through it himself. Nowhere in any of his writings, including those of 1895, does he even hint, let alone assert, that the law of value operates in “socialism.” Nor did almost anyone else before the rise of Stalinism.46 But that changed in 1943, when Vasily Leontief, at Stalin’s bequest, proclaimed that the teaching of political economy in the USSR be changed to affirm the compatibility of the capitalist law of value and “socialism.” As Raya Dunayevskaya, who first broke the news of this revision in The American Economic Review in 1944 put it, “This startling reversal of Soviet political economy is neither adventitious nor merely conciliatory…[it is a] theoretical justification…for the continuance of a social relation that had no place in the conception of the founders of communism”—the persistence of alienated labor in a so-called “socialist” society.47 Its publication resulted in a vigorous debate between apologists for the USSR—Oskar Lange, Paul Baran, and Leo Rogin—and Dunayevskaya, who had developed the first Marxist economic analysis of the USSR as a state-capitalist society.48
That debate may now seem to be only of historical interest, but the appearance is deceptive. The 1943 revision in the law of value set the ground for how “socialism” was viewed15
in all of the so-called socialist and communist regimes of the twentieth century, whether it be the USSR, Mao’s China, or “revolutionary” regimes in the global South. It also shaped (however indirectly) the view of many independent Marxists. Engels’s last writings became a pawn in this debate. Leontief directly cited his 1895 writings on petty commodity production and the “five to seven thousand year” existence of the law of value in arguing that the latter operates in “socialism.” So did Oskar Lange, who called Stalin’s revision “a return to the original Marxian doctrine.”49 Neither, of course, cited Engels’s radically different views in Anti-Dühring and elsewhere. Engels, like Marx, was quoted selectively in creating a new form of statist domination that neither would have recognized as even remotely connected to their body of work.50
The collapse of these regimes and their transition into “normal” market capitalism does not mean the ideas developed to justify them have passed from the scene. Ideas live on, long even after their material embodiment has passed. It is seen in the number of anti-Stalinist, independent Marxists who today continue to claim that Marx held that abstract labor and value continue to exist in the initial phase of socialism or communism. As one recent discussion in Endnotes put it, Marx’s reference in the Critique of the Gotha Program to an “exchange of equal values” in the lower phase signifies the continuance of abstract labor.51 They base this claim on Marx’s statement that in this lower phase, “the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, insofar as this is exchange involving equal worth” [Gleichwertiger].52 However, the “same principle” refers not to the existence of commodity exchange but to the fact that a quid pro quo prevails, insofar as one receives goods equivalent to the actual number of hours of labor provided to the community. As Marx states in the previous sentence, “a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.” This is no way, shape, or form implies the existence of value, abstract labor, or16
socially necessary labor time, since what is referenced is the exchange of units of actual concrete labor time. Marx makes this clear just a few sentences earlier in writing, “just as little does the labor expended on the products appear here as the value of these products.”53 Either Marx is an extremely inconsistent and careless thinker, or such critics as Endnotes have it wrong. And they indeed have it wrong, since Marx does not speak of an “exchange of equal values” but of Gleichwertiger, an exchange of equal items of worth! All of the current English translations of the Critique obscure this by not informing the reader that wert can be translated as either value or worth and that in the passage under consideration Marx is exclusively referring to use-values.
If there is any chance that humanity will find a path out of capitalism, as its future existence clearly demands, much will depend on whether we clear away the debris that has blocked access to the liberatory vision of a post-capitalist society that lies embedded, though rarely studied or understood, in Marx’s critique of political economy. For this reason, the affinities as well as differences between Marx and Engels on this issue take on altogether new importance.PD I do not have any link it was sent to me in a word format
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-97138-0_17. This is the final book of this draftAlternative to capitalism, I prefer the analysis made by Adam Buick from the SPGB, both have their own merits.
PS: Peter is working on the 16 volumes of the complete works of Rosa Luxembourg. He can read Marx, Engels and Luxembourg in the original language because he is fluent in German, French and Spanish, he has a master degree in Latin American studies He is an American( USA ) with an open mind toward others cultures
I’ve already stated that by my view, a commodity is a useful thing with some human labour incorporated in it (#229859; #229892; #229912;). You contradicted this view on the grounds that it leaves out of account the condition of reproducibility of the commodity (#229400). I dealt with this objection in my reply #229816. I still stick to my position on this question. My main points are as follows.
1. The stuff all commodities have got in common is value.
2. The value is the product of useful human labour.
3. Value doesn’t originate during exchange.
4. No value means No market-value, hence No market-prices. Hence, only commodities can be bought & sold.
5. In order to be a commodity, a useful thing must possess some value; nevertheless, it (a pearl ball) doesn’t need to be reproducible by human labour.To the above, I’d like to add these:
6. Value (e.g. the value of a pearl ball or a poultry egg) is reproducible always, but a commodity (a pearl ball or an egg) is not reproducible.
7. If value doesn’t originate during the production of a commodity, it cannot originate during its reproduction.
8. In fact, No commodities are, as No pearl ball is, reproducible.As two glasses do Not contain the same water, i.e. the same molecules of water although each molecule of water happens to be an exact replica of another, two LED bulbs of equal wattage cannot be the same bulb with two bodies. I’m afraid you’ve mussed this point.
I’m not acquainted with any work by Paresh Chattopadhyay. Nevertheless, I’d like to know his main points in this regard.
If reproducing something means producing something which has *exactly all* the same physical characteristics as something else then it would be impossible to reproduce anything. But that is not what is meant by saying that a commodity is reproducible.
Again, I suggest you actually read the first two chapters of Capital before continuing. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, this shortened version doesn’t seem to bad:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/deville/1883/peoples-marx/ch01.htmhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1979/outline-capital/index.htm
This is another good outline of Marx’s Capital Volume 1
Production doesn’t create anything new. It merely changes the form of materials that originally came from nature. To say that something is reproducible doesn’t mean that the nature-given material from which it is fashioned has to be able to be reproduced (that’s impossible) but that it can be reproduced by using other material that came from nature.
It really is that simple to understand.
In the case of pearls, this doesn’t mean that humans have to be able to make them but that the work of getting them from nature (the bottom of the sea) — which is the productive labour involved in producing them for human use — can be repeated as long as nature produces pearls.
The point of this is that if something cannot be reproduced — such as a particular work of art or land in a particular location — then the labour theory of value does not apply to it, even if it is sold or produced for sale.
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