In my previous post, I reprised Marx's argument that the
properties of the gold commodity as money cannot be explained, to use
Aristotelian terms, by the material substance (causa materialis) of
gold but rather by its form (causa formalis) as the universal
equivalent in the exchange relation. It would indeed be as misleading
to explain certain attributes of gold in terms of its material
substance as it would be to account for the most striking properties
of an exquisite statue in terms of its metallic content, rather than
its form . The puzzling attributes of gold obtain by the imposition
of the specific form of the universal equivalent on the determinate
substance of abstract labor. Marx's meta-science then seems to assume
at least at the semantic level the possibility of Aristotelian formal
causality; in other words, causality is not reduced to event
generation by the transfer of energy from one entity to another :
"The general relative form of value imposes the character of
universal equivalent on the linen, which is the commodity excluded,
from the whole world of commodities." (I, 159) Marx has replaced
gold with linen as a reductio ad absurdum criticism of the common
sense notion that the dazzling properties of money, viz., its
monopoly over direct exchangeability, derive from the metallic nature
of the money commodity rather than the form of the universal
equivalent:
If I state that coats or boots stand in a relation to linen because
the latter is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the
absurdity of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the
producers of coats and boots bring these commodities into a relation
with linen, or with gold or silver (and this makes no difference
here), as the universal equivalent, the relation between their own
private labour and the collective labour of society appears to them
in exactly this absurd form. (I,169)
But in this critique of the fetishism of money, Marx has
compromised the orthodox labor theory of value. Marx implies here
after all that 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.
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 invisible 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."
Value as commodified substance indeed goes through a change in
ex-change. Value does not persist unchanged in ex-change; the value
substance is not what it is in change that does not itself change.
Rather the commodity only pupates into the value substance in the
successful act of a monetary transaction :
Gold, as we saw, became ideal money, or a measure of value, because
all commodities measured their values in it, and thus made it the
imaginary opposite of their natural shape as objects of utility,
hence the shape of their value. It became real money because the
commodities, through their complete alienation, suffered a
divestiture or transformation of their real shapes as objects of
utility, thus making it the real embodiment of their values. When
they thus assume the shape of value, commodities strip off every
trace of their natural and original use-value, of the particular
kind of useful labour to which they owe their creation, in order to
pupate into the homogeneous social materialization of
undifferentiated human labour. (I, 204)
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, becomesocial labour only by being
actually ex-changed for one anotherSocial 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.
No less than 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 even "have"
extension until they are forced to adopt a particular value through a
measurement.*** 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.
Rakesh
***Simmel makes this very argument however:
the 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 theis 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. (Philosophy of Money, p.86)
It is difficult however not to think that the line has some
pre-existing property (extension?) to which we then *attribute*
length in measurement; the *attribute* of length is a conceptual
representation of the line's *property* of extension. The difficulty
with value, as with quantum superposition, is that there seems to be
no pre-existing property of which measurement yields a conceptual
representation. The property/attribute distinction I suggest however
may not be tenable, as has been suggested to me by Mattick, Jr. The
fact of the matter is that few philosopher scientists seem to find it
tenable (Bunge and Lewontin are exceptions).
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