Gil asks in 6402: > > >Is the commodification of labor power *essential* or *incidental* to the >process of transforming money into capital, according to Marx's account in >Volume I of Capital? > It is indeed essential in Marx's account (though not in reality) because in his "account", i.e., his theory of a pure advanced capitalism, Marx rules out by assumption the putting out system or some variant thereof (you give examples of usury and merchant capital,right?); he assumes that workers have been expropriated and that we are on free wage labor island and then concludes that despite appearances free wage workers cannot be alienating their labor time in exchange with Mr Moneybags if money is being transformed into capital. Marx's claim is not that surplus value MUST be produced and CAN ONLY be produced by free wage labor (Marx as you know himself recognized otherwise, and jairus Banaji had a round of debates on this long ago which I don't believe you cite); Marx's claim is that free wage labor can only produce surplus value if it is LABOR POWER, rather than LABOR TIME itself, that it gives up in exchange. Marx's claim is that one cannot explain the systematic increase in surplus value on the free wage labor island by assuming that workers give up the commodity that they exchange at less than value. You have your claims of necessity all mixed up! Marx arrives at this conclusion by first postulating PVE, so that we can see that surplus value does not depend on the thing (and a peculiar thing it indeed is) that free wage laborers do exchange having sold below its value; he later tells us that the wage is in fact often driven below the value of labor power. As I understand you, you are arguing that the putting out system (or some like system) is a form of surplus value production that depends on exchanges that violate PVE. You say that it is fine for Marx to argue that circulation in itself cannot yield surplus value, but it's illegitimate to jump from that (tautologous) conclusion to postulating PVE as an essential condition for the explanation of surplus value. I understand you to be arguing that Marx gives no reason other than this purely arbitrary postulate of PVE (which does not follow logically from the tautology that circulation cannot itself increase the value in circulation) why surplus value has to be produced via the exploitation of free wage labor rather than through something like the putting out system. Gil, is this what you are saying? And I say again that the historical logic of why one form of surplus value production became the dominant form is not at all Marx's dominant concern in vol I (again I agree with you against others on this list that the putting out system and modern plantation slavery were in fact systems of surplus value production); the mysteries of the free wage labor system as it appears in an advanced and fully developed capitalism is Marx's concern. Marx's method is not logico historical. Marx is NOT in vol I attempting to explain why one form of surplus value production came to dominate historically over other forms. He assumes the free wage labor form. This is already the mystery that confounds the free wage-laboring class in its daily life. And the exploitation of free wage labor does not depend on violations of PVE--you seem not to think that this is a theoretical clarification of the greatest importance--but Marx never says that the exploitation of free wage labor is in fact carried out in accordance with PVE. You insist that surplus value does not have to be produced via the exploitation of free wage labor (and I am one of the few people on the list who agree with you!) and that Marx gives no convincing reasons why it has to be produced this way. And again and again I insist that you are completely misreading Marx's intent. Marx already assumes that surplus value is produced through the exploitation of free wage labor (he says that he is confining himself theoretically to what Mr Moneybags is confined to practically) but to understand how this is possible requires getting beneath the fetishism of the free wage labor form which allows Marx to discover the distinction between labor power and labor. In getting beneath that form, Marx assumes that whatever workers exchange is exchanged at its value (at this point in the argument we do not understand that this entails the wage being at the prices of production, rather than the values, of the wage goods that enter into the workers' reproduction). Rakesh
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