From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Sun Aug 19 2007 - 05:50:18 EDT
Dear Prof. Germer, The core of your argument seems to be that: "But before capitalism social labor did not in general adopt the form of commodities and by way of consequence the form of value either. In this sense I think it can be said that your interpretation is a-historical, because you identify all historical forms of social labor to the form it has in capitalism, which is value." You obviously do not read what I say, because I have, like Marx, distinguished sharply between the "value" of "the product" (a product which is a use-value) because it is the product of human labour, and the "form" in which this value is expressed. Marx does not say that products have value because they are commodities, but instead that products have value because they are products of labour. It is completely clear and irrefutable. The value-form and its developing expressions cannot even come into being, if products of labour have no value to start off with. I don't actually know what you mean when you say vaguely "before capitalism social labor did not in general adopt the form of commodities", this has nothing to do with Marx. What Marx says is, that labour-power and means of production generally become tradeable commodities exchangeable for money in the capitalist mode of production, which they were not on any large scale before. I do not "identify all historical forms of social labor to the form it has in capitalism, which is value", whatever that means. To repeat, what I say is, that the fact that products of human labour have value, is something that has very different consequences and implications, depending on the given relations of production and exchange, i.e. it can take different forms in different historical epochs. But it has never been in doubt to workers in any era of history that their products have value, because it took work to make them. It is only a bourgeois prejudice that value originates in commodity trade, and naturally dogmatic Marxist orthodoxy follows the bourgeois prejudice with its occult mumbling about "value". Orthodox Marxism is anti-historical, in the precise sense that real economic history is rarely studied. If it was studied, then a lot of the garble it talks about "value" would vanish. Even so, you do not even engage with the textual evidence for Marx's own view, which I provided. Well it is there, if you care to look at it. If I produce products for my own consumption, I know jolly well that those products have a labour-value, which I can express in terms of my own labour-time and which indeed I can compare with the hours of labour which it would take other people I know of to accomplish. No commodity trade is necessary for the latter at all, just a working knowledge of how long, on average, a task takes for people to perform. In fact, under certain conditions my very survival would depend on that knowledge. You write: "I think Marx's concept is that value is the social form of the products of labor in a society where labor is not distributed according to a social plan". It sounds very radical, very orthodox, very profound. But in reality, you again conflate the form of value with the substance of value, even although Marx takes great pains to distinguish between them across many pages of his book. In feudalism or many other precapitalist societies, "labor is also not distributed according to a social plan". Yet you want to argue that value did not exist in those societies! All this seems to be a dispute about subtleties, but in reality the false theory of value you propose caused the ruination of many workers' lives in Soviet-type societies. It was thought "value is the social form of the products of labor in a society where labor is not distributed according to a social plan" which effectively meant that, since there was now a social plan, workers became expendable in the execution of the plan. Jurriaan
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