re Howard's 5594
> Now
>how is aggregate social labor distributed to need in this form? It is
>produced as concrete labor in the form of private labor, but in fact
>embodies also different aliquot portions of the aggregate labor available.
>Do these expended portions of aggregate social labor constitute value?
>Except for those that never make it to market at all -- in which case they
>are not any proportionate part of a market society's aggregate social labor
>and thus do not fit the terms of the problem -- yes. Can we specify before
>the act of exchange the *quantity* (as distinct from quality) of value?
>No. In the value form hours and minutes of labor are measured by ounces of
>gold, not hands of a clock.
Bravo! Succinct to say the least. Paul C seems to criticize such an
interpretation because it does not hold out the possibility of
directly measuring labor time. But isn't this the point of Marx's
fetishism critique: we can't consciously measure and allocate social
labor time since it can only be represented by way of things?
Another question: what do we do now that the link to gold has been
broken? (There are two interesting and important Marxist analyses
thereof in a book by John Smithin, what is money? I think one is by
Steve Fleetwood; is the other by Michael Williams? Darn, my photocopy
of the book is already in a box.)
>
>In general the whole idea that value exists only in exchange ignores the
>distinction between what is real potential, and has the ontological status
>of real, and the kind of potential we speak of when we say "anything is
>possible." It is akin to our tendency to ignore the distinctoin between
>the existence of powers and their exercise. Hydrogen burns. If I keep
>hydrogen in a test tube it has the power to burn, but it is not burning.
>We don't say it is hydrogen only when its powers are being actualized. We
>say it is hydrogen because of its atomic structure whether it is burning or
>not. Similarly we say of labor that when it is the product of a particular
>economic structure, it is value, whether value is actualized or not.
>Labor's existence inthe value form exists as a qualitative matter prior to
>exchange, a fact shown by its nominal price -- and everything has a price
>-- but because the distribution of aggregate labor to need is an ever
>shifting process, its quantity can be measured only in exchange.
Bravo again. In a recent Historical materialism, I think John Weeks
(whose chapter on money in Capital and Exploitation I have come to
admire more than when I first read it) made a similar point as well.
Howard, before you joined the list, I bombarded it with a similar,
though not as well stated, argument. Of course you may find that I
lean too heavily on the side of actualization of value in exchange.
In short, at what point do commodities acquire value? In A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx did not evade
the difficulty:
But the different kinds of individual labour represented in these
particular use values, in fact, becomeŠsocial labour only by being
actually ex-changed for one anotherŠSocial labour-time exists in
these commodities in a latent state, so to speak, and becomes evident
only in the course of their ex-change. The point of departure is not
the labour of individuals considered as social labour, but on the
contrary the particular kinds of labour of private individuals, i.e.,
labour which proves that it is universal social labour only by
supersession of its original character in the exchange process.
Universal social labour is consequently not a ready made
prerequisite, but an emerging result. Thus a new difficulty arises:
on the one hand, commodities must enter the exchange process as
materialized universal human labor, on the other hand, the labour
time of individuals becomes materialized universal human labour time
only as the result of the exchange process.
In trying to understand how the propensity of a quantum system was
drawn out in different ways according to how it was surrounded by
measuring devices, Werner Heisenberg was led to think of the
system's potential as a "quantitative version of the old idea of
'potentia' in Aristotelian philosophy. It introduced something
standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual
event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between
possibility and reality." For Marx, value also seems to exist in
potentia; money measurement is thus more than the passive
ascertainment of a pre-existing property but rather the production of
a datum (value) through the active involvement of measurer and thing
measured. In other words, value seems to describe a system--the thing
being measured and the measurement being made--rather than being an
independent description of the thing being measured.
It would seem then that value is best understood not in terms of the
now outmoded distinction between primary and secondary qualities but
rather in terms of the contrast between possessed and latent ones.
Until the impact of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, it was
tenable to categorize attributes as primary and secondary (so thought
Anaxagoras, Galileo, Descartes, Locke); the former was supposed to be
a feature which an object possesses independent of an observer.
Classic examples were supposed to be mass, position or size. Primary
qualities, that is, were thought to be resident within their object;
inalienable from it and make up their essence. An observer simply
measured or read a primary quality, but the quality is in no sense
dependent upon the observer. Secondary qualities arise from the
interaction between the object and an observer. Taste and color are
typical of this type.
That distinction has broken down since with relativity theory: mass
for example does vary with the relative speed of the object and
observer. In short, if every quality is secondary, then the
distinction between primary and secondary is simply uninformative.
As already noted, Heisenberg tried to replace the old distinction of
primary and secondary attributes with the idea that qualities of an
object are either essential or potential; possessed or latent. With
the uncertainty principle latent qualities manifest themselves as
clearly present only upon measurement; that is, position and momentum
appear as latent qualities.
This conceptual innovation is helpful in understanding Marx for
whom value is a kind of latent quality of commodities which manifests
itself as clearly present only upon successful monetary ex-change or
"collapse" onto the money price "vector" (of course not everything
which has assumed the commodity form and sold for a price possess the
quality of value, but no commodity which has not sold for a price is
a--or possesses--value). To extend the analogy: Monetary measurement
forces a collapse of commodities into one of two eigenstates: value
or no value. That is, a commodity undergoes a change from one state
to another in the process of measurement.
There are of course at least two places where the analogy breaks down:
(1) In quantum mechanics, measurement supplies a determinate value
for the observable while we are not supplied with such a determinate
value by money measurement. That is, we cannot go from the price at
which a commodity sells to its value.
(2) In quantum mechanics, we have definite probabilities for the
values measurement will
return.
However, like measurement in quantum mechanics, money measurement
seems to invert common sense: while the commodity only possesses the
quality of having value after that quality has been quantitatively
measured in a successful exchange, we would find it absurd that if
only after a quantitative measurement of a thing's quality ("it's
eleven feet") can we say that it in fact possesses the quality ("it
has extension"). It is as if objects do not "have" extension until
they are forced to adopt a particular value through a measurement.
The idealist philosopher Georg Simmel however suggested that this was
not very strange at all:
Šthe logical difficulty that two things can only be of equal value if
each of them has a value of its own seems to be illustrated by the
analogy that two lines can be equally long if each of them has a
definite length. But strictly speaking a line gains the quality of
length only by comparison with others. For its length is determined
not by itself--since it is not simply 'long'--but by another line
against which it is measured: and the same service is performed for
the other line, although the result of this act of measurement does
not depend upon this act of comparison but upon each line as it
exists independently of each other. Let us recall the category that
embrace the objective value judgement, which I termed metaphysical:
from the relationship between us and objects develops the imperative
to pass a certain judgement, the content of which, however, does not
reside in the things themselves. The same is true in judging length;
the objects themselves require that we judge them, but the quality of
length is not given by the objects and can only be realized by an act
within ourselves. We are not aware of this fact that length is only
established in the process of comparison and is not inherent in the
individual object on which length depends, because we have abstracted
from particular relative lengths the general concept of length--which
excludes the definiteness without which general length does not
exist. In projecting this concept onto objects we assume that things
must have length before it can be determined individually by
comparison.
It is difficult however not to think that the line has some
pre-existing property, viz. extension, to which we then attribute
length in measurement; the attribute of length is then a conceptual
representation of the line's pre-existing property of extension. The
difficulty with value, as with quantum superposition, is that there
seems to be no independently pre-existing property of which
measurement yields a conceptual representation. Indeed for
Heisenberg and Marx quantum potential (or quantum superposition) and
value, respectively, are kind of shimmering mirages of dream-like
reality, waiting to be awakened by the magical Midas touch of
measurement. While Heisenberg with his revived Aristotelian potenia
may have been trying to save an underlying reality when no such thing
may indeed exist, Marx seems to have located the actualization of
commodity value in the act of monetary measurement itself, not in
expended labor in the hidden abode of production, and thus to have
weakened the Marxist dogma that the expenditure of labor alone is
necessary and sufficient for the creation of value.
However, that value can only be actualized through sale for a money
price or, in quasi-Hegelian terms, that money price is the necessary
form of appearance of value has important implications for the
so-called transformation problem which putatively results from Marx
having transformed in the ninth chapter of the third volume of Das
Kapital only the outputs from a value form to those money prices
which gravitate around what he calls prices of production. Critics
have argued that in this transformation procedure Marx left the
inputs in the value form and that any completion of the
transformation exercise in which the inputs and outputs are both
transformed simultaneously by means of linear equations into
identical unit prices of production shows that the total value and
total surplus value in the value scheme cannot at once be the basis
of both aggregate prices and aggregate profits in the transformed
price scheme. Value has thus been dismissed as an aether like
substance and the complete transformation exercise, initially carried
out by Ludwig von Bortkiewitz, considered to be as destructive for
the postulation of value as the Michelson-Morley experiment was for
the existence of aether.
Of course the general equilibrium character of this criticism has
failed to impress many Marxists for whom the straightjacket of
timeless linear equations should have no place in the formalization
of a dynamic theory. But in terms of the argument developed here: if
it is Marx's theory that value can only be actualized in sale for
money price, then it is not possible that the inputs in Marx's
transformation tables are not already in price form; thus, the inputs
do not need to be transformed from values to prices by a putatively
more complete procedure. For Marx, it would make no sense to speak
of the valorization of value as parallel to the expansion of money
which is simply the necessary (and only) form of appearance of value
(though value is necessarily misrepresented by money price). Value
is necessarily represented in money; and value expansion can only
obtain in and through money. It follows then that Marx could not
have written a "price-free" transformation table demonstrating the
valorization of capital over one period in which the "inputs" would
be in the form of values rather than money- or cost-prices that
determined the initial sum of invested money capital. In short, there
is no need (strictly speaking) then to transform the "inputs" from
"values" to "prices".
The more important problems may remain in the nature of Marx's
deduction of abstract labor as the common substance or "third thing"
which commodities must share in the equivalent value form
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