From: gerald_a_levy (gerald_a_levy@MSN.COM)
Date: Wed May 07 2003 - 08:22:24 EDT
Paul C wrote on May 06: > I would say that value is labour, and that value becomes > manifest in commodity producing societies in the form of > exchange value. To begin with, value isn't labour because labour is an activity which creates value. Terminology such as "objectified labour" and labour in "crystalline" form seems to me to be fundamentally confused. One should differentiate between the products of labour and the activity of labour. Perhaps Marx was influenced by references in the sciences to petrified trees, fossils, crystalization, etc. -- if so it was a poor application of concepts from the natural sciences to the subject of political economy. Also, for the same reason, I think that the proposition that commodities are "containers" of value is misleading -- commodities _represent_ value rather than "contain" value. Additionally, I think the proposition that value is labour is mistaken because it fails to differentiate among the_ forms_ that labour can take: only labour of a quite specific form (socially- necessary-labor) can _create_ value. Further, if value is labour, then what is 'not-value'? > If one believes that there is a unity of the process of > capitalist production and circulation then value is something > specific to the nature of the commodity-form > Why? this is a non-sequitur. How can ones belief about some > particularity of the capitalist mode of production - the unity of > production and circulation ( whatever that means ), lead to > conclusions about other modes of production - namely that value > is absent from them. > One might as well say that because I believe that all > capitalist economies use coin , coins do not > exist in non-capitalist economies. I explained what I meant in the following two sentences from my previous post -- one indeed begins "In other words". My point did not fundamentally concern whether there is or is not value in non-capitalist modes of production -- rather I was trying to explain how the issue isn't "whether one thinks that value is essentially something specific to exchange", but rather how value in bourgeois society requires the presence of specific processes of production and circulation and that an analysis of the subject matter reveals the necessary and systematic connections between these processes. If we are committed ontologically to drawing out these connections then we see that value is "something specific" to the nature of the commodity produced in bourgeois society and hence we can observe that value _is_ something specific to a particular _form_ of (capitalist) production _and_ circulation (and hence exchange). In solidarity, Jerry
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