From: Paul Zarembka (zarembka@BUFFALO.EDU)
Date: Tue May 25 2004 - 12:53:33 EDT
On Tue, 25 May 2004, Howard Engelskirchen wrote: > Yes and no. We can give an independent verbal account of the social form > that constitutes the commodity as Marx does at the beginning of Capital, and > this does not require an account of the buying and selling of labor power. Howard, The first use of the word Value in Volume 1 comes right after describing labor in the abstract. So where do you find in Marx that Value goes beyond a context of labor in the abstract (is indepedent of the commoditization of labor power, thus buying and selling of labor power which he will discuss a bit later)? How can you justify Value within a C-M-C context within Marx (of course you may not explicitly find it and still interpret Marx as such or even offer an independent interpretation of the capitalist mode of production)? Recall that, before he had developed the concept of labor power, Marx wrote Engels in 1858: Value. This is reduced entirely to the quantity of labor; time as a measure of value.... Value as such has no other 'material' than labor itself. This definition of value ... is only the most abstract form of bourgeois wealth. It already presupposes 1. the destruction of natural communism (in India etc.); 2. the destruction of all undeveloped, pre-bourgeois modes of production which are not governed in their totality by exchange. Although it is an abstraction, it is an abstraction which can only be assumed on the basis of a particular economic development of society.... (Marx and Engels, 1948, p. 58). N.B.: "it is an abstraction which can only be assumed on the basis of a particular economic development of society", in this case, complete destruction of pre-bourgeois modes of production. Paul
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