From: Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM
Date: Thu Oct 06 2005 - 07:44:42 EDT
> To respond briefly to Jerry's direct question to me. In previous posts I > have stressed that value abstracts from use value - and this is to > abstract from the natural materiality, the corporeality, of the > commodity. Marx was long aware of this (it is in the quote from TSV that > started this thread). That's why talk of 'embodiment' is absurd -- there > is no *body* of the commodity left. If we have embodiment (Ricardo) then > it is embodiment without a body !! .... [to my knowledge Patrick Murray > was first to put the contradiction in such a precise way] > All there is left, then, in value, is labour stripped of all > determinations except duration. Yet it is thing-like. It is 'out there', > a reality, one side of the two sided commodity. Hi Andy, Welcome back to the discussion. Thanks for the clarification. I think I understand your position better now, but (surprise) I don't agree with it. The starting point for Marx and us should not be value but should be the commodity. Use-value, Exchange-Value, and Value (and abstract labour and SNLT and Money) are all unpacked from an examination of the commodity. All of these are social forms necessarily associated with the commodity. For that reason, I think it is misleading to say that value "abstracts from use-value". It does not! If there is an abstraction here it is that value abstracts from a _specific_ use-value (similarly value abstracts from specific, concrete labour). Because value is linked to the commodity and has no meaning independent of the context of the commodity, it is highly misleading to think that in value there is an abstraction from use-value. One can see why if there is the _non-presence_ of use-value. Suppose a product has been produced with the intention of sale by a capitalist productively employing wage-labour. The product is a consequence of that labor (and expresses for you, "congealed labour"). If it is then determined that the product has no use-value, then it can not be a commodity. If it has no use-value, it can have no value. Thus, use-value and value (and exchange-value and hence money) are constituent forms of the commodity: it makes no sense to refer to value if one is referring to products without the presence of use-value. Furthermore, it is misleading to conceive of use-value as the "natural materiality" and "corporeality" of the commodity. Rather, use-value _itself_ is social. _Whatever_ the material form of the commodity, the stamp of approval that says a product is useful is _socially_ made and not given merely by reference to its physical/material characteristics (although, that can determine in some instances whether an individual product is truly a commodity: e.g. if grain is stored and then deteriorates to the point that it no longer has use-value, then it is no longer a commodity and also has neither value or exchange-value). What I object to, then, even more than your conception of value as expressing "congealed labour" is how within that formulation use-value itself vanishes as a major explanatory category and thus has an eerie, ghostly presence in your conception. Use-value, just like value, is 'out there': both are realities, they are both made realities through the reality of the commodity. As for your objection to "embodied", I think it is misleading. You say that in value "there is no *body* of the commodity left." Put within the context of my explanation above, there *is* a "body" to value: the "body" is the commodity. Value -- to repeat myself -- has no meaning without reference to the commodity, it is the body and value expresses a social relationship (although not the only social relationship -- see comments above on use-value) of that "body". > This > 'pure' labour, this 'ghostly substance' is all that can constitute > value, there is nothing else left. Yep, that's what happens when you start with value. When you start with the commodity, one sees that there is indeed something else left -- the commodity itself! -- and its not ghostly. I don't have it in front of me now, but I think that some of Marx's comments in the _Marginal Notes on Wagner_ are relevant to this point. In solidarity, Jerry
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