From: Howard Engelskirchen (hengels@ZOOM-DSL.COM)
Date: Fri May 09 2003 - 23:53:52 EDT
I think Jerry is right to hesitate at taking literally the idea of value as embodied or crystallized labor, but not because there is anything particularly strange about activity being materialized. The problem, as has been mentioned, is that labor embodied is still concrete labor so our understanding of abstract labor as value has not advanced. We could say that abstract labor is just a way of keeping accounts, a conceptual average, a thought category we use to think about the concrete labors to which it refers. But that doesn't seem to be Marx's meaning at all. He rejects the idea, for example, that buyers and sellers set the price of things through the give and take of exchange; instead he considers value causally efficacious in determining price. But then it is something more than a conceptual category. Yet if there is nothing empirical about it, what kind of reality does it have? That IS an ontological question. The alternative seems to be to think of value as part of the non-empirical or non-actual real. We make an ontological distinction between things we experience through our senses and things, like gravity, that seem real, but are nonetheless non-empirical. We experience gravity's effects. If the nature of value is that it is real but non-empirical or non-actual, this goes some way in accounting for the difficulty of the first part of Capital. Marx faced a genuine semiotic problem. A sign functions to bring some other thing into awareness -- smoke is a sign of fire. The thing to which a sign refers doesn't have to be a material thing -- it could be absent like a book missing from a desk or fictional like Don Quixote or non-empirical like value. But the sign has to be material. It always communicates materially and impresses itself on our senses. So whether we refer to a thing present or to one inaccessible to the senses, we use the material body of one thing to refer to another. This is what Marx does. He explains the sign action of commodities. He shows how we take the body or natural properties of one thing and understand it to refer to an intangible economic form. Another way to get at this is to ask what would constitute a 'real definition' of value. Science tries to identify causal structures of the world and to give a reliable characterization of them as of a particular kind. We identify water as H20 and then consider anything with that molecular structure water and anything without it not. Or, depending on the object of study, boundaries may be fuzzier. In biology it is more common to look for a cluster of causally efficacious properties usually present that allow us to account for the nature of a thing and how it behaves. So we can ask what the nature of the thing is that accounts for the point around which prices oscillate, or, in a different dimension, that accounts for the features that characterize the juridical person. Marx called society an ensemble of social relations because these are the causal structures social science must give an account of. While social relations are certainly social constructions, they do not function differently from the causal structures of nature in this fundamental respect -- they function independently of us and we can change them only insofar as we act causally on them. Thinking about them doesn't change anything. What is the causal structure that defines value as a social relation? The social relation that generates the exchange of the products of labor as values is the relation of autonomous producers producing products (useless to them) independently for private exchange. Any social formation where such structures exist will tend to generate relations of value; any where they don't, won't. Given that social relation, producers are driven to market to obtain by means of exchange the objects they need for their own reproduction -- the structure is causally efficacious. Confronting exchange they must measure the proportion in which their products will exchange. By means of representation, semiosis, they are able to compare their labors and tend to exchange them according to the proportion of aggregate social labor expended in producing their respective products. Does value exist prior to the fact of exchange? Buyers and sellers, for Marx, do not bring value into being by their interaction. It looks as if they do because the act of exchange is the first time that the social character of labor is empirically manifest. But it is the task of theory to establish that in fact productive labor, though private in form, is directly social labor in its production and that the prices at which goods exchange are in fact derivative of the relationships, non-empirical, that gather the aggreagate labors of producers insofar as these take place within the structure characterized by the value relation. How do you pour a relationship into a commodity? Think of the exchange of money for commodities that takes place in exchange. The easy way to read this is to understand that you exchange a product with value "in" it for a piece of gold with value "in" it. But Marx says something a little different -- the value remains with the producer but takes a different form. We can make sense of this if we understand value to be an intangible relationship of proportions of aggregate labor referred to first by a natural product and then by money. The first way of thinking about it is still a form of fetishism, ie tangible objects are the only real. Howard
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun May 11 2003 - 00:00:00 EDT