Building on Chris A [6873] Geert R [6882]: 1. 'Value-form' is an abstract universal concept for the 'mode of association' posited by capitalism. Value-form is that which enables the existence of a form of production for exchange based on: 1) the 'dissociation' of production and consumption, and 2) the 'dissociation' of labour and means of production. A market for labour and a wage contract (for example) are successively more concrete determinations of the Value-Form. 2. 'Value' is an abstract universal concept for social 'forms' specific to capitalism. Commodities are values (in commodity form). Money is value (in money form). Ultimately, capital is value (in the capital forms) because success (valorisation) in a capitalist (monetary) economy is measured only by way of a comparison of capital with itself at different points in time. 3. Value in commodity form is 'ideal money' that has yet to be realised as actual on commodity markets, a transition that cannot be assumed unless all short run expectations of firms are met. 4. Labour power systematically produces 'actual' money only when it takes the wage-form; the wage form is a Value-Form (of labour) necessitated by the separation of workers from means of production. 5. The subordination of living labour (in production) under the aspect of time also presupposes the existence of the Value Form (a profit form dominated by the valorisation imperative). 6. This domination of form over content - of valorisation imperatives over technical processes and of time over living labour - demands the representation of value and socially necessary (abstract) labour in money. 7. The logical order is exactly the reverse of the Ricardian one in which labour time constitutes an immanent measure of value, constituted in production and autonomous of its 'phenomenal' monetary expression. On the contrary, the duration and productivity of labour acquire practical reality only because labour-power has taken on a Value-Form, wages, and is purchased by capitalists on the market as an input to production with the sole purpose of realising (after production) a higher money (capital value) than that initially advanced. 8. Conclusion 1: Capital and Money must be theorised in terms of capital's relationship with Labour. The capital-labour relation is necessitated by the logic of a Value-Form; i.e. by subordination of living labour to its quantitative aspects: labour time (in production) and wages (the market exchange of labour power for money). 9. Conclusion 2: Since labour is constituted as abstract in the capital-labour relation (a relation of production and exchange), the concept of 'exploitation' properly refers to the whole of the working day. ----------------------- Nicola Taylor Faculty of Economics Murdoch University South Street Murdoch W.A. 6150 Australia Tel. 61 8 9385 1130 email: n.taylor@stu.murdoch.edu.au
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