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At 11:22 09/05/00 +0100, Dr Michael J Williams wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>From: Paul Cockshott <wpc@dcs.gla.ac.uk>
>To: <ope-l@galaxy.csuchico.edu>
>Sent: Tuesday, May 09, 2000 10:23 AM
>Subject: [OPE-L:3059] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Simple Commodity Production
>
>Paul writes:
>
> > I would hold that commodities have exchange value independently
> > of whether their producers are wage labourers , free artisans or slaves.
> >
> > ... I am unable to see how one
> > can tell by looking at the process of sale of a commodity, the
> > legal conditions under which its producers worked. The seller
> > puts it up for sale and gets back a sum of money in all cases
> > except simple barter.
>
>In order to discover something about a social category such as value, we
>need to 'look at' instantiations of it as interconnected elements within the
>social system of which they are elements. Of course, since we cannot 'see'
>interconnected systems directly, we need the mediation of the abstraction
>and systematic conceptual presentation that Paul so often seems to find to
>be a diversion from the 'real science'.
>
In that case why does Marx start out with a purely formal analysis of
commodities that does not in any way logically depend upon assumptions
about wage labour?
I would suggest it is because he derives conceptes associated with wage
labour from logically prior concepts of value in order to attack the
Lockean presuppositions about private property. The Lockean argument
rests upon the right to property deriving from private labour under
simple commodity production. Marx demonstrates that what was,
under simple commodity production a veritable paradise of Bentham
and the Rights of Man, becomes its opposite once labour power
becomes a commodity.
This critique loses its point if value and exchange value do not
preceed the transformation of labour power into a commodity.
>In order to discover something about a social category such as value, we
>need to 'look at' instantiations of it as interconnected elements within the
>social system of which they are elements.
Note that the starting point of the analysis is not value, but commodities,
value is deduced as a generalisation of simple equivalence relations
between commodities. All of the logical steps towards deducing it in
chapter 1 are independent of the social relations under which labour
takes place.
Can you point to steps along the path to deriving the universal equivalent
form that logically depend upon the assumption that labour takes the
form of wage labour.
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