From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Wed Feb 28 2007 - 13:34:36 EST
Hi Ian,
I included this in the appendix to my
dissertation. These short reflections obviously
arose out of OPE-L exchanges.
Characteristic of social labor in capitalism, as
Paul Mattick, Jr., has put it, is that the
transformation of quantities of various forms of
concrete labor into homogeneous, abstract labor
or value (as Marx defined it) occurs precisely
through market exchange: value does not pre-exist
it. Though the work of production is in fact
social labor, "it is exercised under the control
and to account of individual enterprises; the
social character of production is thus undefined
until the products are sold. Only then can the
piece of work in social production be
measured-for only then does it have such a
place." In other words, value and abstract labor
can only be undefined except in relation to the
system of prices just as a beam of atoms is
undefined except after it has been passed through
a Stern- Gerlach magnet. There is in fact an
interesting analogy between value and quantum
measurements in terms of the exact meaningless of
what is being measured except as it is defined by
the process of measuring it.
Consider David Lindley's comments on measurement in quantum mechanics:
In classical physics, we are accustomed to
thinking of physical properties as having
definite values, which we can try to apprehend by
measurement. But in quantum physics, it is only
the process of measurement that yields any
definite number for a physical quantity, and the
nature of quantum measurements is such that it is
no longer possible to think of the underlying
physical property (magnetic orientation of atoms,
for example) as having any definite or reliable
reality before the measurement takes place...[I]n
quantum physics, it is only the conjunction of a
system with a measuring device that yields
definite results, and because different
measurements (applying a Stern-Gerlach magnet
with either up down or left or right
orientation, for example) produce results that,
taken together, are incompatible with the
preexistence of some definite state, we cannot
usefully define any sort of physical reality
unless we describe not only the physical system
under scrutiny but, also and with equal
importance, the measurements we are making of it.
This is no doubt baffling. We are through long
familiarity grounded in the assumption of an
external, objective, and definite reality,
regardless of how much or how little we know
about it. It is hard to find the language or the
concepts to deal with a 'reality' that only
becomes real when it is measured. There is no
easy way to grasp this change of perspective, but
persistence and patience allow a certain new
familiarity to supplant the old.
The analogy here would be that value, like
magnetic orientation, does not seem to be a
property of things unless measured. We should not
attribute any reality or credibility to them
before the measurement. Strictly speaking, we
cannot even claim they (value, magnetic
orientation) are indeterminate or indefinite
before measurement.
In short, at what point do commodities acquire
value? If commodities are not values before they
have, and are sold for, money price, then there
can be temporal or causal sense in which values
can be transformed into prices. In A
Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy, Marx pinpointed 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. Value, in short, may not exist as an
independent thing that can be transformed into
price.
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.
I have explored this analogy only to weaken our
intuition that the thing being measured must
pre-exist or exist independently of the
measurement. It should not simply be assumed that
if money price measures or represents value that
value pre-exists the measurement and can itself
be represented in a transparent way. Once this
assumption is relaxed, the whole problem of
transforming a transparent value scheme into
price scheme disappears. Rather all we have are
money prices and money profits (as well as money
rents and interest), the necessary forms of
appearance of value and surplus value. We can
infer from a price scheme what the underlying
value magnitudes, e.g. s/v, may be. And more
importantly we may infer from the differences in
price schema over time how labor time relations
must have changed or be changing and to what
future consequence. We may indeed find
explanatorily powerful an account of significant
secular changes in prices and money profit, as
well as morphological features such as the
centralization of capital, the crisis cycle, an
uneven division of labor, in terms of changes in
labor time relations. But there is always
inference to changes in the underlying labor
value magnitudes in a fetishistic economy, never
a transformation from transparent pre-existing
value magnitudes to price ones.
Paul Samuelson said in regards to just such a point:
One common misunderstanding of the inverse
transformation problem needs to be cleared up. It
is commonŠ[to] argue that only profits and prices
have a reality and that Marx in beginning with
values and rates of surplus value had already
performed the inverse transformation ; thus the
direct transformation merely brings him back to
his starting placeŠThis is simply
incorrectŠ[With] the Sraffa apparatus, or the
equivalent Leontief apparatusŠone can go from an
undiluted labor theory of value, in which the
direct plus indirect labor-hour requirement of
each goods and the subsistence can be reckoned in
physical terms to Marx's tableau of values. (237)
But this is simply incorrect. One cannot begin
with or "go from" knowledge of the technical or
physical norms of social production: these norms
are discovered exactly in and through sale at
money price. Monetary magnitudes are logically
and causally antecedent to physical production
data. Samuelson simply does not understand Marx's
most basic idea about commodity fetishism which
cannot be formalized after all in high faluting
algebra. In a fetishistic economy, i.e. an
economy in which social relations are mediated
only through commodities, it is only through sale
at money price that there is social validation
of private labor time and social determination of
what the modal techniques are. As de Vroey has
underlined, these are not known before the
establishment of prices: socially necessary labor
time exists only at the articulation between
value and price. We can thus no more start with
the technical conditions as specified in a
Sraffian framework than we can with values as
specified in von Bortkiewicz's equations. The
transformation problem is simply alien to the
Marxian conception of value as a category for the
understanding or more specifically as causal
mechanism retroduced for the purposes of
explaining changes, above all, in the average
rate of profit over time in the long run.
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