Re Fred's 5867: I have been tearing my hair at my inability to keep pace with this debate as it has unfolded. Jerry said a good some time ago he hoped I was enjoying OPEL and I can say for sure that I would enjoy it a lot more if life did not interfere! Broadly I have supported Fred's positions in this exchange, particularly his defense of Chapter One and his insistence on labor as the substance of value. But I think also attention to form is enormously important and needs all the attention it can get. The main thing is I cannot get comfortable with the way the value form school handles the question of form. This can be difficult to disentangle, but Chris sent me earlier an article appearing in the May June issue of Radical Philosophy of this year called "The Spectral Ontology of Value." It contains a clear presentation of some critical points and one particular quote captures my difficulty. Chris argues that for value form theory "It is the form of exchange that is seen as the prime determinant of the capitalist economy rather than the content regulated by it." This has long been a basic question for Marxist social science and one that has appeared in many forms -- do we start with social relations of production or social relations of exchange. I think the question of form determination is first of all a question of the forms of production, not the form of exchange. The question can be approached this way: what is value as a social relation? What is value as a social relation of *production*? I take it for Chris (and for value form theory generally?) the question is nonsensical because it is exchange that brings about value as a form without any given content. It is the fact of being exchanged that unites things exchanged generically, not anything specific to what they are. So the problem Fred has with understanding Chris's use of Rubin is that for Fred there is a content, labor, given form, whereas for Chris there is a form which imposes itself upon things by virtue of their being subject to exchange. There is content, and it can be characterized as abstract labor, but it is determined in the end by mere exchangeability, a form without content. If I have misunderstood, I welcome corrections! In Notes on Wagner Marx presents his method as one that proceeds with constant attention to form: (1) he starts not with a concept of value, but with the labor product in the *form* in which it appears in the historical present; (2) he finds it to be in the *form* of a useful thing and a bearer of exchange value; (3) he finds that exchange value is only a *form* for the appearance of value; (4) he finds that value is a particular historically given *form* of the social character of labor, a form which may be compared with the historically determined forms in which labor appeared in other historical periods. He writes: "Hence he [Rodbertus] would have found that the 'value' of a commodity only expresses in a historically developed form, what exists in all other historical forms of society as well, even if *in another form, namely, the social character of labour,* so far as it exists as the *expenditure of 'social'labour power*." (Carver, Texts, p. 207). I take it value form theory rejects this because it is incompatible with the notion of value as pure form. What is the form of social labor that takes the value form? What is value as a social relation? This is explained in the first dozen pages of Capital, in the Contribution to the Critique, in the Grundrisse, in Notes on Wagner, the letter to Kugelmann, etc.: wenever production takes place separately (privately, autonomously) and produces use values useless to the producers, then the value form of production emerges. This is value as a social relation: value is the form social labor takes when it is produced by producers who produce independently, but for others, not for themselves. This is form determination as a form of production rather than exchange. This is a form of the distribution of working persons (remember human beings?) to nature and to each other. The form determination that Marx uses in the first Chapter of Capital is that which he describes in Pre Capitalist Economic Formations: he studies the historically specific forms of working persons in relation to nature and to each other. If producers are related to one another in this form of (reciprocally dependent) autonomy, then they are causally (not conceptually!) driven by the nature of their relationship with one another to market. Once there they have to figure out how to exchange the products of their labor. They find (in practice, not theoretically) that they can equate one tihng with another and exchange on that basis. Analysis notices that if two things are equal it must be in terms of some thing common to them. What is common is that they are products of labor. Much more careful analysis shows that one thing can be used as a form of apearance of the existence of another as a product of labor and in fact give expression to the other's "density" as a product of labor. ETc. Value is the historically specific form in which the social character of labor appears when production takes a particularly determined form. If value is taken as pure form, and money is simply a socially imputed power, then, as far as I can tell, we are back to the Aristotle of Chap. 1, sec. 3. This was essentially how he explained the exchange of beds and houses. One consequence of this argument, Fred, if it is correct, is that you cannot without a good deal of qualifying explanation easily identify money, price and exchange value as the form of value. I think you can defend that usage, but it invites the idea that value is a phenomenon of exchange and that exchange is decisive from the point of view of form determination. But it is a particular form of social labor which is value and so it is possible also to think of that form as a crucially important value form -- in other words the value form can refer to value as a historically determined form of labor, and in fact that usage is common. This emphasis on a determined form of laboring producers can be preserved with less confusion by referring to money, price and exchange value, plainly phenomena of exchange, as forms of appearance of something which is not exclusively a phenomenon of exchange. That is, we insist that these, which belong to exchange, refer to something beyond exchange to which they give expression. Comradely, Howard
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