From: Paul Bullock (paulbullock@EBMS-LTD.CO.UK)
Date: Wed Sep 08 2004 - 16:35:41 EDT
Jurrian,
you are right about Engles of course but omit the essential point.
That it is only when labour power itself becomes a commodity, when class
relations, at first slowly, take on a new social form, then the
commodity is produced capitalistically. Then the the 'law of value' has
to be shown to work its way out in a new way which is not at all intuitive,
requiring a scientific explanation, with correspondingly more subtle
concepts. Marx was able to show that the problems that Ricardo could not
overcome, eg the reconciliation of equal rates of profit on capitals of
different technical compositions, could be resolved by providing us with
his new method.
'The existence of money and monetary valuations', also occurred eons before
capitalism, it is not this that marks the change, nor will money as currency
disappear with socialism or communism .The point is, in the latter it will
not be allowed to take the form of capital. The capitalist class, defeated,
but for a period still latent, will have to be held down until there is self
evidently no room for such egoistic ventures.
Paul
----- Original Message -----
From: "A.B.Trigg" <A.B.Trigg@OPEN.AC.UK>
To: <OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU>
Sent: Tuesday, September 07, 2004 9:16 PM
Subject: Re: [OPE-L] (OPE-L) RE: the intellectual origins of 'simple
commodity production' ?
> This is very helpful Jurrian. In relation to your last paragraph, I
thought the key assumption is that there are no social classes under simple
commodity production. So we have individuals who are both producers and
consumers, and hence no divorce between sale and purchase. This would mean
that there no profits, only income that is paid in proportion to labour.
> Andrew T
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gerald A. Levy [mailto:Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM]
> Sent: Tue 07/09/2004 20:15
> To: OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU
> Cc:
> Subject: (OPE-L) RE: the intellectual origins of 'simple commodity
production' ?
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@hetnet.nl>
> Sent: Tuesday, September 07, 2004 1:57 PM
> Subject: Re: (OPE-L) the intellectual origins of 'simple commodity
> production' ('einfache Warren-produktion'] ?
>
>
> To my knowledge, Marx did not explicitly use the term "simple commodity
> production" (although one time I thought I found a locus in one of his
> German texts, I cannot find it back again right now), and the term, as a
> technical expression for a specific production circuit was first used by
> Engels.
>
> Marx generally talks about the simple exchange of commodities, or simple
> circulation, and one of his criticisms of the political economists was
that
> they did not appropriately distinguish between simple commodity exchange
and
> capitalist commodity exchange. In fact, as a Hamburg Marxian scholar
> (Girschner) pointed out to me, Ricardo's theory of foreign trade is really
> based on the idea of simple exchange.
>
> The more substantive point is that Engels never intended to suggest there
> had existed a society wholly and exclusively based on simple commodity
> production. He merely refers to the historical origins and growth of
> commercial trade, such as it develops within precapitalist societies, and
> consequently the formation of (new) markets.
>
> What Engels wants to argue is that the law of value, according to which
the
> relative exchange-values of traded labour-products are regulated by the
> average labour-time currently necessary to produce them, existed from the
> very beginnings of trade in labour-products. For those labour-products to
be
> traded, they had to be produced first, therefore simple commodity
production
> initially occurred. If the operation of the law of value in pre-capitalist
> trade was denied, Marx's value theory and theory of market formation would
> become incoherent, since in that case the law of value would have just
> fallen out of the air one fine day, which is hardly credible.
>
> The growth of market economy then means that more and more both the inputs
> and the outputs of production are traded commodities, but of course
> "production of commodities only by means of commodities" usually requires
> the existence of money and monetary valuations.
>
> When the latter occurs, Engels argues, then the law of value undergoes a
> new modification (acquires a new form of expression) since what regulates
> production of output in that case is production prices, i.e. the
regulating
> norm is the cost-price plus an average profit established through
> competition, which expresses itself as a given cost-structure of
production
> and a given range of market prices for outputs.
>
> Jurriaan
>
>
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Sep 09 2004 - 00:00:02 EDT