Hi Jerry,

You asked: "Why does Marx identify the 'commodity-form of the product of
labour' with the 'value-form of the commodity'?"
That is quite a good question. And Marx was then also cited as saying:

> Every product of labour is, in all states of society, a
> use-value; but it is only at a definite historical epoch
> in a society's development that such a product becomes a
> commodity, viz., at the epoch when the labour spent on the
> production of a useful article becomes expressed as one of
> the objective qualities of that article.

I think that is also a pertinent quotation, because it explains that the
"use-value" or "the useful value" or ""utility" or "value in using", is an
attribute of the products of human work as such, and therefore is an
absolutely central category of economic science, as Rosdolsky acknowledged.
It means specifically:

 (1) that "use-value" is a human attribution to the objects which, because
of their intrinsic characteristics, can satisfÿ human needs, which human
beings must appropriate from nature in some way and expend energy in so
doing,
(2) that the category of use-value pre-exists the category of exchange-value
in human consciousness, because it pressuposes the conscious recognition of
a human need;
(3) that the use-value and exchange-value of objects may exist autonomously
of each other in highly contradictory ways,
(4) that the objectification of value, and the abstraction of labor, is an
inherent characteristic of the transformation of use-values into
commodities.

You then comment: "In this long sentence, Marx says (without putting
sufficient emphasis on it) that the historical conversion of the product of
labor into a commodity is driven by the exchange." I do agree that Marx
implies that, i.e. his text shows he was aware that more sophisticated
trading historically developed at the boundaries of otherwise selfsufficient
communities, who then exchanged different sorts of use-values. But really
for a real economist, this is only just one simple factor involved in the
transformation of a use-value into a commodity, because the other "driving
factors" happen to be:

(1) absolute and relative "scarcity" of supply,
(2) absolute and relative "surplus" of supply,
(3) "ownership relations" which permit exchange and appropriation
(4) social validation of expression and satisfaction of "human needs"
(including through exchange) within a context of socio-economic inequality.

We do not have to conceptualise these factors in the ordinary stupid,
ahistorical "neoclassical economics" (Hicksian) way of course, but their
existence is nevertheless essential to the transformation of use-values into
commodities (of course the category of "surplus" implies also the category
of "productiveness" of human work). Ignoring this reality, is the effect of
a fetishistic, reified economism by Marxists, which is incapable of
theorising exchange-relations as human relations. You then argued:

First, people exchange their goods, and then they modify
their production relations in order to produce for the
exchange.  I.e., those relations on the surface, which the
whole section 3 has identified as the form of value,
historically precede and stimulate the creation of that of
which they are the form.

With due respect, I don't think this is necessarily correct at all. It may
be a change in production relations, that impell the necessity for exchange
in order to cope with that change, or to sustain those production relations.
So, dropping the scholastic, schematic petty-bourgeois Hegelianism of
Marxist theorists, what socialists need to understand is that exchange
doesn't simply mean "having something to exchange and then swapping it", but
that it also presupposes the existence of socially recognised human needs,
ownership relations, scarcities and surpluses. Marx's careful dialectical
derivation of the objective value form summarises the value relations
involved in trade, only in their purest expression.

Ronald Meek's concept of Marx's "logical-historical" method is in some ways
appropriate, but Meek does not really understand that dialectics refers to
the "logic of change", which can only be understood historically, and that
therefore dialectics aims to explicate a non-arbitrary form of reasoning,
which includes variation in qualities, and not just variation in quantities
as mathematics does. Therefore Prof. Meek really rejects the possibility of
understanding the necessity of a developing human practice in dialectical
terms, and so he reduces dialectics to "an ideosyncratic approach to
formalisation" which aims to do justice to "an historical sequence of
events". Of course, Marx could have discussed all the types of commodity
trade there have been in the last ten thousand years or so, but in that case
he would not have formulated an economic theory about that trade. The
difference between a typology and a theory is like the difference between
(1) throwing objects into the air and watching them fall down, and (2)
formulating the law of gravity.

It is a trite verity to say that "It is true the evolution of the product of
labor into a commodity and the development of the form of value of that
commodity went hand in hand" but it does not explain the original question,
of why Marx identifies the 'commodity-form of the product of labor' with the
'value-form of the commodity'?". The value form exists because specific
social relations exist, that is the whole point of Marx's analysis.

The real answer to the problem is, in truth, as follows: for Marx, economic
"value" refers to valuations made in the performance or expenditure of human
work to satisfy human needs, and as far as Marx was concerned, human
valuations about "economic value" are concerned with the relation of human
work to human needs. This means, that in Marx's critique of economic
science, the category of "economic value" therefore from the outset exists
separately and independently from exchange processes, because it refers to
the allocation of human worktime vis-a-vis the satisfaction of human needs.

As is acknowledged by the Japanese Marxian scholars, the substance of value
("value" as such) is not the same as the form of value ("exchange value").
The value-form refers to the way that human beings confer a "form" on
economic value (labor-time), with symbols and objects, in order to express
the economic value relations in a socially understood and accepted way, for
the purpose of exchange. The more purely this form is expressed, in an
objectified way, through money-prices, the better able economists are able
to define that form theoretically.

It is important to emphasise, that Marx's idea about value is not an
obscurantist Platonist view, or schematic, scholasticist pseudo-Hegelian
derivation, but refers to a definite material and social process. It is a
process in which:
(1) the economising (saving) of human work-time and expenditure of energy
becomes more and more influenced by exchange processes and exchange
relations;
(2) the valuation of work-time becomes influenced by the objectification of
value relations which it accomplishes, and
(3) the "distinctively economic" valuation of human work-time becomes
increasingly clarified, in terms of technical requirements for efficiency
and effectiveness, in contrast with other sorts of valuations of human
work-time, and separately from other valuations, because it becomes known
that a task takes simply "so many hours of work".

So it is not at all necessarily the case that "that the agents on the
surface of the economy consider the labor in these commodities as objective
properties of these commodities", as in a primitive Dobbsian theory of
value, it is rather that through exchange processes, commodities acquire an
objective value which exists regardless of particular labour expenditures
and particular human needs. This is the essential premiss of Marx's concept
of abstract labor, and not some kind of scholastic, obscurantist
pseudo-Hegelianism. It is this fact, that validates the abstraction that "a
commodity represents such-and-such amount of human labour", which Marx uses
for his exposition as a pedagogic device.

The actual process of "objectification" itself is rooted in the experiential
fact that the same object being traded, which is useful for me, has only an
exchange-value for you, and the object which is useful for you, has only
exchange-value for me. That is, use-value and exchange-value are mutually
exclusive, even although they presuppose each other, and to mediate this
contradiction, practically requires a subject-object (ontological) inversion
and a a means-ends (teleological) inversion. This is regrettably not
recognised by Istvan Meszaros, who therefore proposed a theory of alienation
which, however insightful it may be, makes it impossible to understand how
alienation can be transcended. If the inversions which really occur are not
theorised correctly in a dialectical way, then it is also not possible to
understand what must be revolutionised to enable human progress.

Paul Bullock for his part writes: "The  'cell form'  is necessary for the
existence of capitalism, but in the form of a  product it is not itself
sufficient to transform into capital, what is necessary for this is that
labour power itself  be forced to take on the commodity form as well." But
actually Marx's own text shows very explicitly that for Marx at least, this
is not true. The transformation of the commodity into capital requires only
the existence of money and the ability to trade in it, so that more money is
obtained from the trade. The transformation of capital into capitalism, does
not necessarily require that labour-power becomes a tradeable commodity
either, because it requires only that the surplus-product of that
labour-power can be appropriated and traded (i.e. the double appropriation
involved in capitalist accumulation can occur, that is, the appropriation of
use-value and the appropriation of exchange-value as capital - this is
explained more in my essay "Rescuing Marx from Marxist self-activity"). This
quote is then mentioned in the discussion:

> Every product of labour is, in all states of society, a
> use-value; but it is only at a definite historical epoch
> in a society's development that such a product becomes a
> commodity, viz., at the epoch when the labour spent on the
> production of a useful article becomes expressed as one of
> the objective qualities of that article.

In this passage Marx already shows why the Dobbsian theory of value is
wrong: the labor "becomes expressed" as an objective quality, but this does
not mean the labor actually is "embodied" or "corporealised" in the
commodity. That is just a very odd idea. Because the Marxists do not
understand the centrality of use-value in political economy, to which Roman
Rosdolsky referred, and just keeping talking about "forms" like leftist
Hegelians, they made eight big mistakes:

(1) The Marxists could not make any sense out of real business practice, in
which businesspeople are very concerned with the use-value of the inputs and
outputs in which they trade, and not at all "indifferent" to them, and
consequently they could not make sense out of the dynamics and modalities of
capitalist competition;
(2) The Marxists could not understand the economic reproduction of total
social capital and they believed "the economy" consisted just of production
and circulation;
(3) The Marxists ignored completely the decisive conclusion which Marx, in
appraising the economic ideas of Rodbertus and John Locke, reaches in
drawing a dialectical distinction between "individual use-value" and "social
use-value", namely that the abstraction/objectification of labor is
accompanied also by the abstraction/objectification of use-value, depicted
abstractly in neoclassical economics as "demand" and "supply".
(4) The Marxists ignored that the objectification/reification of use-value
has truly devastating implications for the connection between the "law of
value" and the "law of entropy", and they ruled out climate from economic
science, even though Marx himself recognised the impact of soil fertility,
physical catastrophes and bad harvests on prices and economic values;
(5) The Marxists could not understand Marx's critique of the political
economy of consumption (this is explained more in my essay "Consumption: a
critique of political economy") and they cannot make a Marxian critique of
ecology (the "green factor" is just an "add-on" but it is not developed
consistently out of the critique of capitalist economy and Marx's value
theory - see e.g. Elmar Alvater, The Future of the Market, p. 188).
(6) The Marxists ignored (except for a few authors like Rubin, Rosdolsky,
Mandel, Itoh, Giussani, and Shaikh) Marx's category of "market-value" as
distinct from market-price and regulating production-price, and so therefore
they cannot correctly show what the links between values and prices really
are and what their importance is;
(7) The Marxists had reduced political economy to an obscurantist,
scholastic schematism, which is unable to create analyses which could
inspire real economic strategy, guide revolutionary politics, or show how
the socialist society can be formed (see my essay "The transformation of
capitalism into socialism, from Sraffa to Marx").
(8) They could not provide a Marxian explanation for "postmodernist"
culture, beyond talking endlessly about "commodification" (see my essay,
"The use-value of post-modernism and the post-modernism of use-value").

In Marx's own text, which I will translate rather literally, he actually
says "The usefulness (Nutzlichkeit) of a thing makes it a use-value
(Gebrauchswert). But this usefulness itself does not float in the air. Being
determined by the properties of the physical goods [literally
"commodity-bodies"], they do not exist apart from themselves. The physical
commodities themselves, like iron, wheat, diamonds etc., are therefore a
value in use or a good. Their character does not depend on whether the
appropriation of its physical attributes by people costs a lot or work or
little work. In appraising their use-value, their quantitative determination
is always presupposed, as in a dozen clocks, an ell of canvas, a ton of iron
etc.. The use-value of the goods supply the material with its own
discipline, the science of commodities  [Marx remarks in a note, about the
bourgeois doctrine of consumer sovereignity, that "in the bourgeois society,
the juridical fiction reigns that every person as commodity buyer has an
encyclopedic knowledge of commodities"].  Use-values realise themselves only
in being used, or in being consumed. Use-values form the material content of
wealth, whatever be its social form. In the social form we that have to
consider, they form at the same time the material bearers of exchange value.
The exchange value appears first as the quantitative relationship, the
proportion, in which use-value of one type exchange against use-values of
another type, a relationship which changes constantly according to time and
place. The exchange value seems to be something coincidental therefore and
purely relative, an exchange value which is intrinsic and immanent in the
commodity (valeur intrinsèque) and thus a contradictio in adjecto. Let us
look at the business more closely."

This passage actually clarifies that Marx himself was very well aware of the
subjective theories of value and the marginal utility-type arguments (which
had already been discovered centuries before Jevons, Walras and Menger), but
it also gives us clue about the real secret which creates the difficulty
about understanding economic value. Commodities are at the same time
use-values and exchange-values, but

(1) they cannot realise themselves at the same time as use-values and
exchange-values
(2) they cannot realise themselves as use-value other than by negating their
exchange-value, and vice versa.

Elmar Alvater therefore states that, for the market to exist at all, it
requires "a cultural and natural substructure" without which autonomous
individuals acting as economic agents could not even relate as social beings
at all. It is this "cultural and natural substructure" that is precisely the
target of the critique of the political economy of consumption, which
explains amongst other things why the neo-liberal theories are
gobbledygook - being neither "neo" nor "liberal".

Regards

Jurriaan