From: Gerald A. Levy (Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM)
Date: Fri Sep 10 2004 - 09:42:00 EDT
Re: [OPE-L] (OPE-L) RE: the intellectual origins of 'sHi Paul C. I asked Rakesh: > What > do you think about the argument advanced by Chris in The New Dialectic > and Marx's Capital, p. 19-21 (beginning with the questions near the > bottom of p. 19: "Does the model work conceptually? Could the > law of value really obtain its 'classical form' at such a postulated stage > of development of commodity exchange?") ? To which you asked: > Does not Ian Wrights work indicate that this is possible? I'll reproduce part of this reference below and Ian, you and others on the list can determine for yourselves whether Ian's work represents a response to that perspective. Fair enough? In solidarity, Jerry "In truth, it does not make sense to speak of value, and of exchange governed by a law of labour value, in a pre-capitalist society, because in such an imagined society there could be no mechanism to enforce such a law; price in such a case would simply be a formal mediation, allowing exchange to take place, but without any determinate value substance being present. According to Marx the law of value is based on exchange in accordance with socially necessary labour times, but in the case of simple commodity production there is no mechanism that would *force* a given producer to meet such a target or be driven out of business. When all inputs, including labour-power itself, have both a value form and production is subordinated to valorisation, then an objective comparison of rates of return on capital is possible and competition between capitals allows for the enforcement of the law of value. The point of simple commodity production and exchange is to produce a good in the hope of exchanging it for a different one. While there are constraints, consequent on limit conditions, to such exchanges, there is no possibility of precise determination of the ratios of exchange concerned. Capitalist commodity production is the production of a value in the hope of exchanging it for the purpose of acquiring more value; therefore capital is forced to pay close attention to all the value determinations such as socially necessary labour times. 'The product wholly assumes the form of a commodity only as a result of the fact that the entire product has to be transformed into exchange value and that also all of the ingredients necessary for its production enter it as commodities -- in other words it wholly becomes a commodity only with the development and on the basis of capitalist production.' (Marx) Any attempt to ground value in 'simple commodity production' must covertly rely on Adam Smith's original argument that the only consideration affecting the choices of individuals is avoidance of 'toil and trouble': equal quantities of labour are always 'of equal value to the labourer' he claimed, This *subjective* hypothesis has little to do with Marx's argument that there exists in capitalism an *objective* law which makes exchange at value necessary. 'If the value of commodities is determined by the necessary labour-time contained in them', said Marx, 'it is capital that first makes a reality of this mode of determination and continually reduces the labour socially necessary for the production of a commodity.' Thus starting *historically* with the commodity would *not* mean starting historically with value in Marx's sense, because under the contingencies operative in underdeveloped forms of commodity exchange we would have price, to be sure, but not yet labour values (unless one means something relatively indeterminate by value) for, as Marx says, 'the full development of the law of value presupposes a society in which large-scale industrial production and free competition obtain, in other words, modern bourgeois society.'" (emphasis in original, JL)
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