[OPE] Understanding value (reply to Michael Heinrich)

No Jerry, products of labour (Cap. 1, p. 166 et seq, Penguin ed.). In fact
from the very beginning Marx makes it clear that commodities are products of
labour. Products become commodities through being traded on a regular basis,
to the point where their trading value is taken into account in their very
production and it begins to reshape the whole production process according
to commercial principles.

The issue is simply this: a product has been produced with a certain labour
effort; it therefore a certain normal economic value to the people who
produce it (after all, it was their labour effort) and in society, and it is
economized on that basis. But how large is that value, exactly? What exactly
is that type of product worth, in real terms? This boils down to the
question: how does the labour effort in making it compare to other labour
efforts, and how does the product compare to other products in value? Maybe
that question does not occur to a Marxist intellectual tyrant, but it occurs
to workers around the world everyday. Then Marx argues that it is only by
being traded regularly, that the products of labour begin to acquire an
objective value which is "socially uniform" (standardized), and exists quite
separately from their specific use-value.

Alienable objects can however be commodities (more precisely,
pseudo-commodities) without having values, as Marx also says, because they
are not products of labour, or because they are traded very rarely, or are
so scarce, that an objective general value for them cannot be formed. In
that case, what they are worth, is only what people are prepared to give in
exchange for them, or what people are prepared to trade them for.

The New Marxist Exploiting Class, the bureaucrat class, has no knowledge of
business and cannot really understand the historical process of the
formation of commodity values, or what Capital Vol. 3 is really about. It
has no brains, historical curiosity or imagination, only fixed, literal
concepts and formal, fixed definitions. The evil capitalist commerce and the
evil law of value fell out of the air one fine day in England in 1750 or
thereabouts. Clunk!! Commodity production fell out of the air one day.
Clunk!! Then the Marxist intellectual tyrant class stick all the categories
of capitalism in neat and tidy little boxes, earn a Phd with it, and proceed
to demonstrate in a catechism how each category is derived from each other.
That is their Marxist-bureaucratic "knowledge". But it has nothing to do
with Marx, or with human history. As Marx himself acknowledges, commodity
trade and wage labour existed for thousands of years - long before the
ignorant Marxist academics proceeded to deny it.

Jurriaan

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Received on Sat May 2 06:50:04 2009