Phil,
Nobody is claiming that value as a social attribution to products is "caused" by the fact that norms of average labour effort exist in any society which will strongly influence how commodity trade will develop. It is just that, in evaluating what work or products are worth, those norms play a necessary role, and this is part of the process whereby market values are established.
The abstraction and generalisation of labour efforts and their results, their comparability and evaluation, does NOT depend on the occurrence of commodity trade, and on reflection, such an idea is terribly stupid. It would be like saying that people cannot even evaluate their own labor efforts.
What you can say is that commodity trade enormous develops this abstraction and generalisation, and reifies it. Even so, commodity trade is not yet capitalism.
According to NMEC theory, one day in England in 1750, the nasty landlords kicked the poor peasants off the land. The peasants emigrated to the city. The working class was then born. Next, the law of value dropped out of the air one day, and started oppressing the workers, whipping them and making them suffer. Finally, the nasty capitalists kept extracting more and more surplus value from the workers, causing the system to grow. Now the world is waiting for the international socialist movement to destroy the ruling class and the law of value, freeing the workers from oppression by property they do not own, and making sure there is no more surplus of any kind.
Anybody who believes that kind of stuff is just gullible and stupid. Rather than developing a "philosophy of exploitation", you are better off demystifying economic and social history.
Jurriaan
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Received on Tue Mar 10 11:18:08 2009
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