RE Steve K's [5202]: > I actually focus on all three words too: > "intrinsically incommensurable > magnitudes". I emphasised the final one only to make the point that, at > least once in Capital I, Marx explicitly stated that use-value could be a > magnitude. It seems that you've accepted that point, so let's now check the > phrase itself out. No, my point (which I'll draw out now) is that one can notice that a quality can increase or decrease even though it isn't itself a magnitude. [Mushy stuff follows:] Hath thou ever been in love, perchance? If so, then you know that love is a quality which does not have a magnitude (i.e. it is not quantity), yet we can be able to make perfectly valid statements like "I love her MORE THAN I used to" or "My love for her has DIMINISHED". If something really has magnitude, though, then it should be able to be measured in some uniform way (and there is no generally agreed upon socially valid way of "measuring" love). > Your take is quite feasible: it could be, for instance, that exchange-value > is measured in tonnes of steel, while use-value is measured in volts. Exchange-value, where e-v forms part of the totality of the commodity, is measured in money. What lies behind this measure, though, is value. Thus, e-v is a necessary form of appearance of value. This requires that value must come to take the money-form. > However, we know that the unit of measurement of exchange-value which Marx > used (and which I accept as a measurement tool) is units of socially > necessary abstract labor. Yet, this social relation (value) is necessarily linked to the money-form. *This means that we can only determine with certainty if a product has value EX POST, i.e. after it passes the 'test' and is sold*. Thus, it is the act of exchange which socially validates the value and shows with certainty that what was *presumed* to have u-v and be value does *in fact* have u-v and is value. (You might recall that we discussed these issues once in a long thread called "Ideal vs. Real Value"). Your quotes from Marx seem to be directed towards Mike W, so I'll let him (or someone else) discuss them ... eventually. > From my point of view, Marx's characterisation of labor-power as a > commodity *in the first volume of Capital* is entirely understandable. I > believe that in the intended volume on Wage Labor, Marx would have shown > what happened when one dropped this supposition, and treated labor-power as > both a commodity and a non-commodity. In other words, there is a further > dialectic which means that the rules which apply to strict commodities > (products which are produced for a profit using other products) do not > apply in toto to labor-power. On this point: have you read Mike L's _Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class_ (NY, St. Martin's Press, 1992)? > One clear consequence of this is that the > wage would normally *exceed* the value of labor-power, since if workers > only received their means of subsistence in return for labor, they would be > treated as no more than commodities. Yet, paradoxically, in the context of capitalist production, workers do come to be treated as no more than commodities. Indeed, it is part of the value-form imperitive that *everything*, including that which are not commodities, comes to be treated *as if* they were commodities. Thus, within a capitalist society even an intangible quality such as love comes to be intimately connected (pun intended) to the value-form. Just about everything, thus, under capitalism has a price even if it isn't itself value. As for the value of labor-power, this encompasses both physiological needs amd socially necessary needs. The latter (socially necesary needs) are established by custom and habit. And, of course, class struggle plays an important role in *establishing* custom, habits, and social needs. From Marx's perspective, thus, the wage equals the value of labor-power ON AVERAGE. Yet, this average is itself a VARIABLE that is subject to change as customs, habits, and social needs change. Furthermore, not only can there be a WIDE dispersion of wages where only a small minority of wage-workers receive wages equal to the value of labor power but the VLP (as well as wages) are constantly changing. Moreover, there are wide REGIONAL and INTERNATIONAL disparities here largely due to the inter-regional and inter-national variation in habits, customs, social needs and, relatedly, histories of class struggles. In solidarity, Jerry
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