From: Howard Engelskirchen (howarde@TWCNY.RR.COM)
Date: Sun May 30 2004 - 14:39:39 EDT
Hi Paul and others,
In the post below Paul asked "How can you justify Value within a C-M-C
context within Marx"?
I'd like to ask how you can have a C-M-C without value? And since C-M-C
does not require the buying and selling of labor power, how it can be said
that value has no pre-bourgeois existence?
Here's a way to pose the question: How can we give an account of Romans
"gulping salads of pearls"? Marx discusses this at 270 of the Pelican
edition of the Grundrisse (the Chapter on Capital, Notebook II, "Capital and
Labor"). He seems to argue that value had attained a sufficient state of
development to insist on itself as independent thus giving rise to the drive
inherent in its nature attained to independence to drive beyond its own
barrier. But since this independence is frustrate within a precapitalist
mode of production -- there is no significant economic form for value which
increases itself -- this leads to madness of one sort or another, pearl
eating being one absurd form. If we can't use the category value to explain
this, what account do we give?
Earlier in Notebook II ("Transition from circulation to capitalist
production"), p. 256, Marx argues that precapitalist trading peoples appear
"since the impulse for the activity of positing exchange values comes from
the outside and not from the inner structure of its production, then the
surplus of production must no longer be something accidental, occasionally
present, but must be constantly repeated, and in this way domestic
production itself takes on a tendency towards circulation, towards the
positing of exchange values. At first the effect is of a more physical
kind. The sphere of needs is expanded . . . The organization of domestic
production itself is already modified by circulation and exchange value."
If value is treated as a causally efficacious social relation then these
phenomena make sense -- as a social relation value generates trading
peoples, generates transformations of domestic production, etc. These are
causal tendencies blunted and overridden by the dominant mode of production,
but nonetheless tendencies which do change social life. Same question: if
we can't use the category value to explain this, what account do we give?
Paul also asked, "Where do you find in Marx that Value goes beyond a context
of labor in the abstract (is independent of the commoditization of labor
power), thus buying and selling of labor power . . . ."
Why doesn't this at p. 266 ("Capital and Labor," third paragraph) refer to a
form of abstract labor that does not depend on the buying and selling of
labor power?:
"In the first positing of simple exchange value, labour was structured in
such a way that the product was not a direct use value for the labourer, not
a direct means of subsistence. This was the general condition for the
creation of exchange value and of exchange in general."
First, that structuring of labor in "such a way" is the substantial *form*
of value, the form that generates C-M-C. Second, labor that I am
indifferent to because it has no direct utility to me, that I engage in only
as a means to some other end, the natural content of which I am indifferent
to -- why isn't that abstract labor? It qualifies as labor for which I
select only the features of 'produced independently' and 'useless to its
producer' for attention. But these features have causal consequences.
Since they're causal, and lead to behaviors such as eating pearls, I should
call them something.
Howard
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Zarembka" <zarembka@BUFFALO.EDU>
To: <OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU>
Sent: Tuesday, May 25, 2004 12:53 PM
Subject: Re: [OPE-L] on money
> 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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jun 02 2004 - 00:00:02 EDT