What is Value?

[chlamor]

Found here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130327210 ... 52841.html

Kid of the Black Hole
08-31-2009, 08:35 AM

Value is one of the first things Marx discusses in Capital, and it is not something that he devised himself, but rather a tradition that began with Adam Smith and was handed down to students of political economy.

For openers, here is what Anaxarchos has written about it, some months back in a previous discussion:


Concrete, real labor makes use-values. "Abstract labor" (labor considered as a social average, abstracted away from it's concrete properties, degree of skill, individual intensity, etc.) makes "value". Commodities in exchange have many exchange-values. A bushel of corn trades for a yard of linen but also for a pound of salt. Commodities in exchange with the money commodity have a specific exchange-value ("price").

The exchange-value of commodities is based on their value. The use-value of commodities doesn't play at all except as a precondition to them becoming commodities in the first place (without "usefulness", they would not be "exchanged").

The social engine of Capital is driven by a single trait: the cost of labor (wages) and the value that labor produces are of two different magnitudes. The price of labor is the cost of its reproduction. The only complicating factor is that we describe "reproduction" in social terms. It does not necessarily coincide with "simple reproduction" in the basest physical terms. There are a set of factors for producing labor of a certain intensity and there are additional historical, political, and social factors which help to determine its "price" at any given moment and in any given locale (country), as well.

The difference between the value of the commodities produced and the cost of labor is surplus-value. The "cost of capital" doesn't count at all here because capital is merely the "dead labor" of the past come to life again as the "means of production". In the capitalist system, surplus-value is created in production but realized in circulation, in the form of profit, interest, and rent.

Nothing that I have said above is even remotely controversial, from a scientific or a historical standpoint (until later, that is). When Marx writes about this, he nearly perfectly mimics Ricardo who in turn more generally follows Smith. Marx is simply much more precise on abstract/concrete labor and use-value/value, and MUCH more precise and accurate (as might be expected) when it comes to surplus value. The rest of Capital is very much a re-derivation of the fundamentals of Political Economy based on this more precise underpinning. It is on this basis alone that those who want to "debunk" Marx, invariably find themselves at odds with "Classical Political Economy" as a whole.

Interestingly, the elements of "Classical Political Economy"are fairly well known even prior to Adam Smith. Quesnay certainly understands them in part. So does Ibn Khaldun, who I quoted at length on PopIndy. So do a whole raft of medieval and ancient scholars (not the least of whom is Aristotle). In fact, the basic understanding of this, in its component parts, is arguably understood and explained at the very beginning of human history (written history, that is).

The complicating factor, historically, is that the dominance of surplus-value is a relatively recent form of expropriation. The precondition is obvious and is identical to the "dawn of civilization" (pyramids don't get built by those merely sustaining themselves): human beings must be able to produce more than it takes to reproduce themselves, and the incidental "trade", which reaches well back into the million years of human existence, must become regular and routine enough to transform use-values in "surplus" of one type into a range of use-values. Both of those come with agriculture and with "animal husbandry" in particular. Given that, the rest is a given.

For a million years of human history, captives are either killed or adopted into the tribe. There is simply no basis for anything else. With the dawn of the herds, however, the Greeks, for one, take no time at all to see "surplus product" in potential. The social innovation is a third status for boys captured in war (with "war" about to be waged for the express purpose of capturing people). The herd-boys become "slaves", who work to maintain and increase the herds but have no call on the surplus that is produced. Social property is the innovation and its first fruits are class society (slaves and "free"), which in turn nearly immediately transforms itself into a society of several classes (slaves, women, freemen, slaveholders). For our immediate purpose, the form of expropriation is surplus-product. Though it appears that the slave is "owned", body and soul, nevertheless it is only the surplus-product of the slaves which is expropriated - otherwise slavery would die with the slaves in a single generation. Here, the expropriation of surplus-product is masked by the property relationship of the slave to the slave-master.

In Feudal times, the absolute ownership of one human being by another is largely superceded by serfdom or a free-holding peasantry in which the primary form of expropriation is as surplus-labor, with each producer obliged to contribute so many days of labor per year on the lands of their Lords and of the Church. The unending battle over "how much to each" tends to mask the fact that it is again feudal property that is the basis for extracting only surplus-labor (otherwise, feudalism would last only a single generation).

In our own times, of course, we have free labor which is free of all means of production and thus free to sell itself by the hour, not to one expropriator, but to any expropriator of their own choosing, provided that it occurs at the "prevailing rate". Here, the labor is paid for, "in full", at the point of production, but surplus-value accrues, as if by magic, only in circulation. The capitalist property relation appears in the ownership of the surplus products of labor transformed into commodities themselves.

The extraction of "surplus" is the same but property relationships, how they are masked, and which point in the process they appear are all fundamentally different (so too, things as, "basic" as for example, "fundamental human nature", are vastly different as well).

The point of this last is to simply understand the context of "value", "exchange-value", "use-value", and "surplus-value".

[chlamor]

PinkoCommie
08-31-2009, 11:35 AM

What is it you see as "nuance?" I see fundamental elements where you are claiming minutia.

What is it that is confusing you? Are you mathematically inclined? If so, writing out these 'word problems' as equations may be more helpful.

Or you might even want to draw an evolutionary tree for value.

Or you may want to skip every other reference to linens and coats. I think sometimes Marx's propensity for repeating himself time and again is itself a source of reader confusion. Perhaps you thought you 'got it,' until reading another explanation that raised questions again.

It's not the stuff itself that is hard. It is the 150 year old prose and the fact that the 'stuff' is either something we've never thought about or it is diametrically the opposite of things we've been taught. For me anyway, the hardest thing about the first couple of chapters was in letting go of the context *I brought* to them.

Anyway, ask specific questions if you can cook them up. This is the discussion that will help others and, IMO, make plain the root from which every other political-economic conception springs (* or rather, would spring if peeps weren't suffering from "issues" overload, affluenza and "middle" class confusion).

I cannot any longer see how people who don't have a good grasp of the matter of LTV even have coherent view of conditions. But then, we who are somewhat slow are often zealots thataway...

[chlamor]

anaxarchos
08-31-2009, 12:02 PM

Because it is the meaning of life... seriously. Politics IS economics, as is history. Every attempt to abstract away from that has been a failure in explaining anything else comprehensively. Competing ideas sound good in the moment but never apply in the general case. Economics is the science of human social organization, the foundation of all others, because human beings are fundamentally social and because their social organization is above else, economic organization.

But again, "why value?" Because it is the atomic unit of economics. Without it, the remainder of economic life remains a mystery, describable only by the ripples on its surface. And here, a contradiction appears: if in order to understand social life, we must understand value, and if the creation and extraction of value is fundamentally based on exploitation and nothing more... then we have a problem.

This is Marx's contribution... the old bastard.

You don't have to "understand" value or economics. It is not "required"... but it sure don't hurt. On the other hand, if you want to walk through it, I'll be happy to help.

[chlamor]

anaxarchos
08-31-2009, 12:06 PM

There have been hundreds of attempts to make that section (which Marx reworked 3 times to make that obtuse) more reader friendly and it is still the original that everyone always goes back to. It's not easy to paraphrase the old fart, even when his book is open right in front of you.

[chlamor]

Dhalgren
08-31-2009, 12:25 PM

(I simply do not understand your comment, period) the problem is that they are allowed to become slaves. I cannot comprehend someone wanting to be a slave, but I would prefer living in a society where no one was ALLOWED to become a slave. Marxism is no more "dangerous" than anything else political/economic (and probably less dangerous than many others). "Boat floating" has it limitations - or should have - that all sounds a bit too libertarian for my tastes...

[chlamor]

TBF
08-31-2009, 12:36 PM

I think you're kidding yourself and putting the blame on individuals with that statement - sort of blaming the victim so to speak.

[chlamor]

RoseVann
08-31-2009, 12:38 PM

If someone wants to become a slave, they should be free to do so, and I see no reason to not allow it if they have made that choice. To not allow it would be to prohibit them from exercising their desires. We don't have to understand why they would wish to do that to themselves.

I was in downtown SF a few years ago and saw a few people with leashes around their necks walking around on all fours and barking like a dog. It wouldn't be something that would appeal to me, but I'm certainly not going to tell someone they can't live out their days acting like a dog if that's what they want to do. I realize that's not a perfect parallel, but it does speak to someone wanting to be something that I can't comprehend ever wanting to be. And I really don't view that as libertarian, that's just freedom to me.

[chlamor]

PinkoCommie
08-31-2009, 12:50 PM

A commodity is, in the first place, a thing that satisfies a human want; in the second place, it is a thing that can be exchanged for another thing. The utility of a thing makes is a use-value. Exchange-value (or, simply, value), is first of all the ratio, the proportion, in which a certain number of use-values of one kind can be exchanged for a certain number of use-values of another kind.

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/v/a.htm#value

"Use-value" is the value of a commodity as a consumable.

"Value" as used in Capital means abstract human labor and in describing the "Value" of a commodity, it means the congealed abstract labor time embodied within said commodity.

"Exchange-value" is nothing more than a measure of magnitude of value.

Abstract labor time in the form of a commodity's value is unknown and unquantifiable until the moment of exchange. At that moment, in comparison to the universe of other commodities, the one in your (the seller) hand finally shows the magnitude of its value, i.e. its exchange value.

Upthread, BP talks about linens and coats - items that Marx refers to repeatedly in his presentation. If we know that ten yards of linen = 1 coat, then we have an exchange value that has its magnitude expressed in terms of one other commodity.

As Marx says in Ch 1., "To the owner of a commodity, every other commodity is, in regard to his own, a particular equivalent, and consequently his own commodity is the universal equivalent for all the others." This then is what we could call the one commodity that, unlike that of the owner mentioned in the quote, acts as the 'universal equivalent' not just for others, but for ALL commodities. That is of course, money.

So another quote:

"Use-values are only produced by capitalists, because, and in so far as, they are the material substratum, the depositories of exchange-value. Our capitalist has two objects in view: in the first place, he wants to produce a use-value that has a value in exchange, that is to say, an article destined to be sold, a commodity; and secondly, he desires to produce a commodity whose value shall be greater than the sum of the values of the commodities used in its production, that is, of the means of production and the labour-power, that he purchased with his good money in the open market. His aim is to produce not only a use-value, but a commodity also; not only use-value, but value; not only value, but at the same time surplus-value."

Surplus Value as defined on Marxists.org:

"The measure of value is labour time, so surplus value is the accumulated product of the unpaid labour time of the producers. In bourgeois society, surplus value is acquired by the capitalist in the form of profit: the capitalist owns the means of production as Private Property, so the workers have no choice but to sell their labour-power to the capitalists in order to live. The capitalist then owns not only the means of production, and the workers’ labour-power which he has bought to use in production, but the product as well. After paying wages, the capitalist then becomes the owner of the surplus value, over and above the value of the workers’ labour-power.

In all societies in which there is a division of labour, there is a social surplus; what is different about bourgeois society is that surplus value takes the form of capital, and surplus value is in fact the essence of production in capitalism.– Only productive work, i.e., work which creates surplus value, is supported. All “unproductive labour” is eliminated.

The capitalists may increase the amount of surplus value extracted from the working class by two means: (1) by absolute surplus value – extending the working day as long as possible, and (2) by relative surplus value – by cutting wages.

Attempts by individual capitalists to increase their profits by introducing machinery or speeding-up production by technique fail as soon as their competitors copy the new technique and restore their market share. The end effect of these improvements in production may be to increase the productivity of labour, but unless the rate of surplus value is increased proportionately, the rate of profit will actually fall.

Having been accumulated as capital, surplus value must then be distributed to landlords, bankers and other parasites, and expended via taxes on the various expenses of maintaining the social fabic."

[chlamor]

RoseVann
08-31-2009, 12:58 PM

We need to go back to how I framed my original statement; that is, Anarchy. Were anarchy the way of life, there would of course be no "wages' as we think of them today. The individual could exchange the works of their hands or their mind or whatever they determine for something another has to offer of which they have both determined is an equatible exchange. If someone were to exchange themselves as a whole (slave) in return of someone else seeing after their needs, and the parties reached an agreement on how this exchange would be equitable, then who would object and why?

I highly doubt anyone would sell themselves as a slave, so this subject has taken a turn I never intended except as an example of freedom to do as one pleases. But people succombing to serfdom (unless its self-imposed) would be less likely IMO if anarachy were the way of life as opposed to various economies.

[chlamor]

Kid of the Black Hole
08-31-2009, 01:08 PM

the means of production -- the way that humans create their own lives -- are much, much too big to be deployed on an individual basis. And there is no way you could undo this development without also introducing massive depopulation.

Your example makes it seem as though you've forgotten which century and even which epoch you live in

If you are really suggesting that people could produce their own lives in an isolated fashion I think that is some kind of utopia nostalgi on your part.

But regardless, everything is social and, what really undoes your argument, is that there is nothing BUT anarchy now. There is no real guiding plan on what is produced or in what quantities except for whether it is expected to turn a handsome enough profit for the capitalist owners. I challenge you to describe a system that is more "chaotic" than the one that currently exists (and remember, we have "overproduction" of food globally right alongside severe and persistent famine)