From: Howard Engelskirchen (howarde@TWCNY.RR.COM)
Date: Wed Sep 15 2004 - 15:34:27 EDT
Re: [OPE-L] (OPE-L) RE: the intellectual origins of 'sHi Jerry,
My lowly farmers market example in an accompanying post I think responds to part of Chris' argument.
More fundamentally, in the passage quoted Chris writes that in order for someone to find value in underdeveloped forms of commodity exchange, that person would have to "mean something relatively indeterminate by value." He goes on to add, quoting Marx, that "the full develoipment of the law of value presupposes a society in which large-scale industrial production and free competition obtain, in other words modern bourgeois society." The significance of this quote from Marx is clear, but it is a long and contestable way from there to Chris's conclusion that "starting historically with the commodity would not mean starting historically with value in Marx's sense."
First, what IS the commodity without value in Marx's sense?
Second, the idea that someone who finds the value form in pre-capitalist economic formations must "mean something relatively indeterminate by value" needs to be situated in the context of the overall presentation of the concept of value in The New Dialectic: Chris's argument suggests that the concept as presented by Marx in his early chapters is necessarily insufficient, inadequate and immature. It is an abstraction, pure form, that becomes determinate and concretely grounded only as a result of the full conceptual development of the capital form. Hence the argument about value as indeterminate and the appeal to the "full development" quotation of Marx. In fact, exchange value is explicitly considered to be abstract the way "Being" is abstract at the beginning of Hegel's Logic.
It is possible instead to think that in the first chapter of Capital Marx studied a real, not an abstract, conceptual object; that is, that the value form can be studied from the start as concrete, adequate, and causally efficacious. Assuming Marx did so, then if he found social relations in the ancient world that corresponded to social relations fully developed in the modern world, he would recognize the relevance of his analysis to them and show it through the use of a common scientific vocabulary, categories of analysis, etc.
Scott Meikle in the Cambridge Companion suggests that Marx's metaphysics was Aristotelian. But Aristotle thought that if you started with "pure being" or "being in general" you were making a platonist error. Instead, Aristotle studied a thing to find its intrinsic nature, and the common properties that accounted for what a dog or a person or a social composite were he considered to be the causally potent essence instantiated in the thing. It was this inner structure that could account for the way a thing behaved.
As a scientific matter, we have to account for why markets persisted in the ancient world and why money developed. There's nothing indeterminate about these phenomena. In my view Marx would argue that we need to find the concrete structural form of laboring individuals in relation to nature and to each other that can account for the emergence and persistence of these things. He would look for potent structures, not conceptual abstractions. In this respect his work prefigures, as does that of Aristotle, contemporary scientific realism. A scientific realist would look for dispositional properties, powers instantiated in a thing or process, that account for how it maintains itself as the kind of thing it is. You look at the ancient world and find structures broadly common to those you find in the contemporary world. With the advantage of hindsight, you can understand earlier structures to be common even though they are not fully developed. You recognize also that the incipient structures of value tend to be obscured by an avalanche of other causal structures. But nonetheless you recognize that value structures were powerful enough in their own right to generate the money form, no small event, merchant capital, etc., and you appreicate the contribution this makes to your ability to understand. You recognize, for example, how value explains the dissolution of important social bonds or how it explains both the emergence and limits of the contract form in the ancient world. To call all this "indeterminate" just appeals to a different problematic that I think is, well, problematic.
Howard
----- Original Message -----
From: Gerald A. Levy
To: OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU
Sent: Friday, September 10, 2004 9:42 AM
Subject: [OPE-L] (OPE-L) RE: 'simple commodity production'
Hi 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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