Re Geert's 5577 Geert argues that there are two strands in Marx's thought, one pointing to a labor embodied theory and the other pointing to a value form theory, but that the amiguities are unresolved in his work. The problem I have with this critique is that when it comes down to examples I always wonder whether we aren't faced with what Hegel somewhere referred to as mechanical or one-sided dialectics. One takes a contradiction, and instead of grasping it as a unity of opposites that interpenetrate, the two poles are separated and held apart and treated as if they are only externally related. Take for example the question of whether value exists before exchange or exists only in exchange. This becomes a line in the sand. One is allowed one position or the other. Marx is read to lend support to either position, but irreconcilably so. So to get beyond the confusion, we have to reconstruct Marx -- in this particular case, if I understand correctly, by saying that although some texts point toward an analysis that value exists only in exchange, these insights are never fully disengaged from the persistence of embodied labor ideas of either the physiological or abstract labor sort. But this seems a classic example of interpenetrating opposites being forcibly ripped apart. Value exists meaningfully, though differently, both before exchange and, as it is actualized, in exchange, and much is lost by plumping for either solution without the other. To say that value only exists in the act of exchange seems a retreat to the economic equivalent of the contractarian view that before two wills meet in exchange there is no society but only the unruly chaos of the state of nature. In fact, Marx is quite clear that commodity production is, in the original disposition of agents of production to the means of production and to each other, a form of social production. This is an essential contribution of Marxism to social analysis still not fully exploited. But then we must actually look at the original disposition of agents of production to the means of production and to each other (and this, not the product as a commodity, is the analytical starting point of Capital, as Marx makes clear in Notes on Wagner). Because the agents of production produce independently use values that are useless to them, exchange is generated necessarily , and their labor is necessarily social production. In other words, if we deal not with historical origins but with an ongoing system, then the structure reproduces itself and the structure of production cannot be divorced from the structure of exchange: production generates necessarily exchange [the disposition of agents of production is causally efficacious] and exchange reproduces the original disposition of the agents of production to the means of production and to each other. Now how is aggregate social labor distributed to need in this form? It is produced as concrete labor in the form of private labor, but in fact embodies also different aliquot portions of the aggregate labor available. Do these expended portions of aggregate social labor constitute value? Except for those that never make it to market at all -- in which case they are not any proportionate part of a market society's aggregate social labor and thus do not fit the terms of the problem -- yes. Can we specify before the act of exchange the *quantity* (as distinct from quality) of value? No. In the value form hours and minutes of labor are measured by ounces of gold, not hands of a clock. In general the whole idea that value exists only in exchange ignores the distinction between what is real potential, and has the ontological status of real, and the kind of potential we speak of when we say "anything is possible." It is akin to our tendency to ignore the distinctoin between the existence of powers and their exercise. Hydrogen burns. If I keep hydrogen in a test tube it has the power to burn, but it is not burning. We don't say it is hydrogen only when its powers are being actualized. We say it is hydrogen because of its atomic structure whether it is burning or not. Similarly we say of labor that when it is the product of a particular economic structure, it is value, whether value is actualized or not. Labor's existence inthe value form exists as a qualitative matter prior to exchange, a fact shown by its nominal price -- and everything has a price -- but because the distribution of aggregate labor to need is an ever shifting process, its quantity can be measured only in exchange. To say that value exists only in exchange would seem to obliterate a key acquisition of Marx's analysis -- that value is in fact a form of labor whereby relations of producers in their reciprocal activities are represented or become manifest as relations of objects. Bailey's error was to miss this. He saw only the relation of objects and did not investigate the social relations underlying those object connections. Thus while Ricardo located labor as the common element of commodities but neglected to investigate the specific form in which labor manifested itself as that common element, Bailey, according to Marx, made the opposite error of emphasizing only the form in which the exchange value of the commodity showed itself. Marx showed the unity of the common element and its specific form. Comradely, Howard
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