From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Thu Oct 06 2005 - 11:41:24 EDT
If I am following Chris, embodiment metaphor fails because things do not possess value until and unless they commensurated in the act of exchange. I think it is misleading to say that they do not have value at all until this point, and have several times urged a return to metaphysical distinction of potentiality and actuality to understand value. Marx made the return in Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. One of the other main reasons embodiment metaphor fails is labor congealed is determined by time society is allocating to the re-production of that commodity. It matters not what time was actually expended, even the socially average labor time already expended. Value is determined by the the labor time society is allocating for its reproduction. So in the Crusoe example I gave: he inherits tools with which to work; their value is determined by the time he will have devote to their replacement. Society signals to itself the labor time that it will devote to tool reproduction by those tools becoming things of a determinate quantity of value--that is, by valuing those tools and understanding them to possess value as they possess weight, resilience, etc. There is no other way for society to know the labor time it has to allocate to tool replacement without the tools mysteriously allowing ghosts to enter into them. If this is true, value cannot be the labor actually expended or embodied or congealed in the production of the commodity. Now does this mean that inherited commodities which are being displaced by innovation have no value? No it means that their value is determined in relation to the innovative commodity which is replacing it. That commodity has a value, and if this inherited tool can only do half of what the new one can, it will have roughly half the value, no matter the labor time actually expended in its production. Rakesh
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