White has undertaken some more significant translation of Sieber related to Marx and offers some of his own thoughts. He is happy to have it distributed to the list. Note that White here addresses Chris Arthur's concern that Marx explicitly says that 'Labour is not itself value', in part by examining 1885 Sieber and in part by looking at another part of Sieber 1871 heretofore untranslated. Note also that Sieber's Chapter VII which White translates from below is in both Sieber's 1871 and 1885 editions almost unchanged (although the titling is changed). Paul *********************************************************************** Paul Zarembka, editor, RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY at ******************** http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka --- FORWARDED MESSAGE BEGINS --- Paul, The passage from Capital on value and labour that I had in mind actually came from the second edition. It is: 'Human labour-power in its fluid state creates value, but is not in itself value.' (Capital I, Penguin, p. 143). There is actually an earlier instance which I found in Theories of Surplus Value I, p. 135: 'A quantity of labour has no value, it is not a commodity, but is that which transforms commodities into values...' So Marx is bringing into his published text something he had already in his manuscripts. But, very interestingly, he presents it in terms of the contrast between fluidity and fixity (or materialisation, reification, crystallisation congelation etc.). This is a theme which runs through Marx's work and has its origin in Schelling's system. In Schelling too there is the idea that fluidity and motion represent the healthy state, whereas fixity is associated with Reflection (or as Marx has it 'fetishism') and externalisation. What does Sieber do? In his second edition he follows very closely Marx's second edition of Capital, and he translates verbatim Marx's paragraph containing the words 'Human labour-power in its fluid state creates value, but is not in itself value...'(p. 154). Then, as in his 1871 edition, he adds a commentary elucidating Marx's exposition. The first part of this is new, but its final section incorporates text from the earlier edition - including the statement 'Labour itself is value, says Marx'. (p. 230). At first sight it would appear that Sieber has got things in a muddle. But maybe he is not all that far out. You find Marx saying things like: 'Value has no other 'material' than labour itself' (M to E, 2 April 1958). And he continues: 'This definition of value, first worked out by sketchily by Petty, and clearly by Ricardo, is only the most abstract form of bourgeois wealth'. So Marx sees Ricardo as the economist who makes the classic statement of the labour theory of value. Marx returns to the subject in the section on Wages. There he says: 'Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but it has no value itself.' Sieber's chapter VII deals with this topic, and in it he gives prominence to the differences between Marx and Ricardo. Here is a passage I have translated from that section: 'Thus, wages constitute only one part of the product, and consequently also of the prices which replace it, and this part is not is not in accord with the productivity of labour. The scale of wages, like all other commodities, is determined on average by the quantity of labour expended on the production of the specific commodity - labour-power, in its individual moments - in its supply and demand. But in employing - after to Adam Smith - instead of the expression 'labour-power' the term 'labour', Ricardo opens up a wide field for objections to his theory and completely gratuitously diminishes its significance. "Mr Ricardo", says the author of an anonymous essay, "ingeniously enough avoids a difficulty which, on first view, threatens to encumber his doctrine, that value depends on the quantity of labour employed in production. If this principle is rigidly adhered to, it follows that the value of labour depends on the quantity of labour employed in producing it - which is evidently absurd. By a dextrous turn, therefore, Mr Ricardo makes the value of labour depend on the quantity of labour required to produce wages...This is similar to saying that the value of cloth is estimated, not by the quantity of labour bestowed on its production, but by the quantity of labour bestowed on the production of the silver for which the cloth is exchanged". In fact if one insists that the value of all commodities is determined by the labour expended on the production of these commodities and at the same time concede that the value of one commodity, exactly like the rest, by one's own categorical admission, is determined not by the same labour, but by another contained in wages - this is tantamount to destroying the general rule. Taken in its entirety, Ricardo's law leads to the following absurd tautology: The extent of a commodity's value is determined by the labour time contained in it. But how does one determine the degree of value of, for example, a 12-hour working day? By the 12 hours of labour time contained in the 12-hour working day. This contradiction is significantly aggravated by the fact that, in Ricardo's opinion, in the product or in its price is contained not just wages but profit. But if the value of labour depends on the quantity of labour employed in the production of foodstuffs to sustain the labour, then the product of labour and its value, or the wages, are two different magnitudes. Thus, it emerges that the level of wages coincides with the productivity of labour and that wages account for the whole product, leaving nothing for profit - a result completely at variance with what Ricardo previously maintained. Substituting for the term 'labour' everywhere that Ricardo understands by it an independent product the expression 'labour-power' or 'capability', the author of Das Kapital in the following way seeks to explain the misunderstandings created by Ricardo's theory.' (Sieber 1937, pp. 212-3) This passage in Sieber corresponds to the start of chapter 19 in Capital, and uses the essay by Bailey which Marx has in a footnote. It is not a straight translation, but an elucidation of how the approaches of Ricardo and Marx differ. At the end of this section Sieber says the following: '...we must note that distinguishing the different categories of 'labour' and 'labour power', or the capacity to perform labour, and 'labour' or the expenditure, the use of that capacity - obviously gives a completely new meaning, and one more consonant with reality, to the distinction Ricardo draws, between labour as a measure of value, and labour as a commodity in its own right. Labour as a commodity, or labour power, like every other commodity, purchases that quantity of goods which contain in themselves as much labour as it took to produce the labour power. But because labour power is objectified in a greater quantity of goods than that which went to produce it, the labour cannot, in Ricardo's expression, serve as a measure of the labour contained in the former.' Marx read all this and it is significant that in his endorsement of Sieber in the notes on Wagner he says that Wagner could have discovered from Sieber's work ' the difference between me and Ricardo, who in fact concerned himself with labour only as a measure of value-magnitude and on that account found no connection between his theory of value and the essence of money.' Since Marx's relationship to Ricardo seems really pretty crucial, it really does look as though the Marx-Sieber interchange is well worth exploring. Jimmy Dr James D White Department of Central & East European Studies University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8RS Tel. 0141 330 5585 Fax. 0141 330 5594Paul,
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