DJP
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Hi Prakash you said; “I don’t think I ever said anything that suggests that I think value is synonymous with wealth.” Can you please help me and tell me what you think “value” is?
“I also remember that Marx compared labour with the cosmic force called gravity and remarked that as gravity that creates weight but is weightless itself, the value-creating labour has got No value.”
I don’t recall a quote like this, do you have a reference?
I’ll try to answer your other points again, tommorrow.
“I think it’s a most serious issue which, if we fail to resolve it, is certain to lend credence to the capitalists’ claim that the concept of communism is fundamentally flawed.”
I think what’s going on here is the conflation of two different questions:
1. Where does wealth come from?
and
2. What form does wealth take in different types of society?
If you understand ‘value’ as being an ahistorical term always equivalent with ‘wealth’ then the question of whether ‘value’ is created (or realised) in production (or exchange) is one about where wealth comes from.
But if we understand ‘value’ as something historically contingent, as a form of wealth that only applies in certain historical conditions, then the question of whether ‘value’ is created (or realised) in production (or exchange) is one about the form that wealth takes.
The problem is that many critics, and proponents, of Marx’s theory don’t actually read him carefully enough to realise that, for Marx, ‘value’ is a historically specific form of wealth, not wealth in general.
“There have been many incarnations of ‘value’ within different cultures at different times”
Not sure what you mean here. Labour taking the form of ‘value’, as meant by Marx in Capital, can only occur in a society of generalised commodity production.
“I’ve always thought that ‘exchange value’ was based on the amount of socially necessary labour contained within it and that use value was a matter of utility or perceived utility?”
That’s not too widely off the mark, but in Capital (particularly the first two chapters) there is a further distinction between “value” and “exchange-value”. I’ve tried to explain it as well as I understand it in the comments above.
Prakash, I think you are understanding “value” to mean “wealth”. Is this correct? While it is true for *societies based on the capitalist mode of production* this is not true for all forms of society. It’s only in capitalist society that wealth takes the form of commodities (value).
I have found this quote from Marx; “Human labour-power in its fluid state, or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value.”
So labour (the living labour of the producers) creates value, is the “value-forming substance”. But commodities, as containers of “coagulated” / “crystalised” / “dead” (as in already spent) labour, *are* value.
Does this make sense? What is being said is that labour creates value (and wealth) but that this labour can only take the form of “value” in a commodity economy. (It’s the process of the exchange of products that reduces and equalises the labour into “value”). In other types of society “wealth” would just be use-values, labour doesn’t go through the transformationary stage that makes it appear as “value”.
“DJP – Things made for personal use may have ‘use value’ but not necessarily ‘exchange value’ whereas commodities must contain both use and exchange value.”
Well yes, obviously. But the distinction also has to be made between ‘exchange value’ (expressed in quantities of other things – a relationship between things) and ‘value’ (an amount of embodied social labour – a relationship between the thing and the producer).
“the abstract labour contained in the concrete labour that creates concrete use-values meant for self-use, Not exchange, fail to create value?”
I am having some difficulty parsing this statement.
“Abstract labour” isn’t contained in “concrete labour”. They are more like the same thing but looked at from different angles. I can perform a specific concrete act of labour, building a brick wall for example, but if I want to compare this act of labour to the labour of a person that makes bread I have to think about ‘labour’ as something more general – labour in the abstract. The way we do this is by reducing all types of labour to an abstract simple labour, to which all types of labour can be reduced and compared.
I think your question is “Why do things made for personal use not contain value?” The answer is because they are not commodities. Goods only become commodities due to the fact that they face each other in the market. It’s this process of market comparison that enables the labour that went into them to take the form of ‘value’. Without a market the labour cannot take the form of ‘value’.
“I can’t see how this classification of labour leads us to the view that commodities (concrete use-values) are reproducible.”
I just think this comes down to how you have been interpreting the word “reproducable”.
We say (for example) a chair is reproducible, we mean that it is something that can be produced by labour, and can be produced by labour again (so long as the materials necessary for its production that are provided by nature can continue to be sourced). *Re*produced just means “produced again”.
Prakash, you seem to be willfully misunderstanding but I’ll give it one more try.
Labour is ‘concrete’ in that it is an actual activity conducted by actual people, it is also ‘abstract’ in that we can think of it in a generalised / universalised / simple way, separate from the specific concrete instances of it.
Concrete labour produces use-values. Abstract labour is what forms ‘value’.
Concrete labour looks like an actual specific person doing an actual specific task.
Abstract labour is labour considered in a generalised or homogeneous way.
This is very basic.
“Are you sure that the term ‘use-value’ stands only for something abstract like the service of a doctor or the performance of a popstar, NOT something like an LED bulb or an apple ?”
Nobody said that ‘something abstract like the service of a doctor or the performance of a popstar’ was a use-value.
The actual the service of a doctor, or an actual performance of a popstar are examples of concrete labour anyhow, not abstract.
Prakash, I’m going to suggest that the problem here is with how you parsed the word ‘use-value’ in that sentence. You read ‘use-value’ to mean something like ‘individual concrete thing’ but that is not the way it was being used in this context. In ALB’s comment what is meant by ‘use-value’ is something more like ‘a type of thing that fulfils a particular use’.
In respect to you’re second point how else can you make another unit of a particular good apart from making another one? In this context this is all that ‘reproduce’ means. The prefix ‘re’ means something like ‘to do again’ – we produce something, then we produce it again – we ‘reproduce’ it.
Prakash, you still state that “we cannot reproduce anything concrete”. Ok, but when we have produced something can we not produce an equivalent unit of the same thing again? What would you call this act of producing an equivalent unit again?
I’ve just remembered a word that would be useful here. That word is “fungible”. When we have been talking about commodities being “reproducible” we have said this because we take every unit of a particular type of commodity to be as good as every other (excluding the possibility of faulty / spoilt goods) Eg when I want to buy a Mars bar I am not bothered about which particular bar I will buy as all the bars are taken as being equivalent to the others. This property is called “fungibiulity”
“Nevertheless, they reproduce something and keep on doing it, and that something is the same amount of value”
Given that you think that each commodity is a one-off since no other can be made of the same atoms etc. Why do you not think that the same applies to periods of labour-time? Since you cannot run the same day, hour, minute or second twice either.
When ALB said “production doesn’t create anything new” I guess he could have made it longer “production doesn’t create anything new *out of nothing*. It merely changes the form of materials that originally came from nature.”
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.htm
