From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Mon Feb 21 2005 - 05:32:24 EST
At 10:16 AM +0000 2/21/05, Andrew Brown wrote: >Hi Jurrien, > >We are agree on 'value-added'. > >Of course 'price' is a more complex category than 'exchange value'. >This initial question Marx in fact poses is 'why do commodities have >a socially given (set of) exchange value(s)?': answer, because they >are commensurable as values. Yes, I agree. Marx argues that as commodities of every different kind can be exchanged against each other in the market, it is slowly recognized that this can only obtain if they all embody measurable quantities of the same substance--the human labor that produced them. Of course since in a bourgeois society capitalists are in a position to demand social recognition for what they imagine to be their their own efforts, commodities do not exchange at value as socially average abstract labor time but rather at value as prices of production which allow for social validation of the bourgeois self understanding that capitalists, too, have contributed to the fund of labor power which is society's common resource in all dealings with its environment. That is, exchange at price of production does not undermine the thesis that human labor is the common standard which allows for the equivalence obtaining among varying proportions of the the most diverse commodities. The human labor that any commodity represents is perforce socially mediated; in bourgeois society it is just further mediated and distorted by the power of the capitalist class. Perhaps the capitalist understands the value of the commodity as given not by its embodied labor per se but rather by the more general sacrifice embodied therein, as both waiting and labor are understood as sacrifice. But then the bourgeois common sense is not so different from the classical Marxian theory of value in that general commodity equivalence seems to imply a common substance--abstract human labor or embodied human sacrifice. We know from the beginning of Marx's Capital that commodity exchange implies a common substance; yet from the outset we are led to understand that the human labor that a commodity represents is socially mediated as sense certainty is in Hegel's dialectic--that is, value is a social result and a result of human activity. Value can only be understood in terms of a social and activist epistemology, not through an an individualist and passive view of the human mind in lonely struggle with a hostile external world. We realize in the third volume that the value of a commodity-- that is, the abstract labor that it embodies in a bourgeois society--is distorted by the power of the capitalist class. But this does not mean that a commodity does not exchange in terms of abstract labor that it socially represents. It just means that the abstract labor that it represents is mediated in and through a determinate kind of society, bourgeois society. Marx never leads his readers to believe that anything other abstract human labor is the common substance in terms of which the most dis-similar goods can be equated in exchange. I don't understand why Bohm Bawerk recently praised on this list thought there was a great contradiction between volumes 1 and 3. Rakesh
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