What is Value?

[chlamor]

anaxarchos
09-03-2009, 12:46 PM
The remainder of Section 1 is housekeeping. Marx nails down that which we have already introduced, though he will also do so again in more detail, later:

1. How do we measure the magnitude of the labor embodied in each commodity? We measure it by its duration - time.

2. But, does that mean that the less productive labor produces more value? No. The abstraction of labor we are considering here counts as a social average, what Marx calls, "socially necessary labor time". The value of one commodity is to the value of any other, as the labour time necessary for the production of the one is to that necessary for the production of the other.

3. Apart from variations among workers, many other forces work to change the socially necessary labor time crystallized in each commodity. The introduction of machinery is one prominent change which reduces the amount of socially necessary labor in each commodity by increasing the productiveness of the producers. There are many other such factors:

"The value of a commodity would therefore remain constant, if the labour time required for its production also remained constant. But the latter changes with every variation in the productiveness of labour. This productiveness is determined by various circumstances, amongst others, by the average amount of skill of the workmen, the state of science, and the degree of its practical application, the social organisation of production, the extent and capabilities of the means of production, and by physical conditions. For example, the same amount of labour in favourable seasons is embodied in 8 bushels of corn, and in unfavourable, only in four. The same labour extracts from rich mines more metal than from poor mines. Diamonds are of very rare occurrence on the earth’s surface, and hence their discovery costs, on an average, a great deal of labour time."

4. "In general, the greater the productiveness of labour, the less is the labour time required for the production of an article, the less is the amount of labour crystallised in that article, and the less is its value; and vice versâ, the less the productiveness of labour, the greater is the labour time required for the production of an article, and the greater is its value. The value of a commodity, therefore, varies directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productiveness, of the labour incorporated in it."

5. And finally:

"A thing can be a use value, without having value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, etc. A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use values, but use values for others, social use values. (And not only for others, without more. The mediaeval peasant produced quit-rent-corn for his feudal lord and tithe-corn for his parson. But neither the quit-rent-corn nor the tithe-corn became commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others. To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange.)[12] Lastly nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value."

Congratulations... when we are done discussing the above, we have finished with Section 1 of Capital. This is farther than we have gotten before...

The good news is that as one gets more familiar with Marx, and the material above, it gets a lot easier to continue on one's own.

PM me if you are in the mood to continue at once to Section 2. I am traveling for a short while next week so it will be the end of the week, unless I find I can get on-line. This thread has gotten long so I will start a new one on Section 2, when you are in the mood.

[chlamor]

blindpig
09-03-2009, 05:36 PM
Concerning #5:

http://www.crapfromthepast.com/favorite ... etrock.jpg

This was the easy stuff, linen and coats is where I lose my thread. I'll give it another shot in preparation. A new thread is in order, this suckers getting unweildy.

You do this very well, I look forward to phase II.

[chlamor]

Dhalgren
09-04-2009, 07:53 AM
just struck me like a brick. It is from Section Two:

"Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor. But coats and linen, like every other element of material wealth that is not the spontaneous produce of Nature, must invariably owe their existence to a special productive activity, exercised with a definite aim, an activity that appropriates particular nature-given materials to particular human wants. So far therefore as labour is a creator of use value, is useful labour, it is a necessary condition, independent of all forms of society, for the existence of the human race; it is an eternal nature-imposed necessity, without which there can be no material exchanges between man and Nature, and therefore no life."

That is such a clear statement and so illuminating.

[chlamor]

anaxarchos
09-04-2009, 12:13 PM
We (BP and I) will continue to walk through this at the end of next week or when I am back on line, whichever is sooner. We'll start a new thread beginning with section #2. Are you gonna walk along with us?

[chlamor]

anaxarchos
09-04-2009, 12:15 PM
...the in-house cartoonist for UE for decades, and one of UE's "secret weapons". Some of his stuff was reproduced on PopIndy and there is lots more on the web.

[chlamor]

Terwilliger
09-06-2009, 12:49 PM
how do you turn fat, happy individuals into radical activists who stage work stoppages and hunger strikes?

[chlamor]

anaxarchos
09-10-2009, 08:19 AM
You don't "turn fat, happy individuals into radical activists who stage work stoppages and hunger strikes".

No posible... not possible.

People don't fight back without cause.

Interestingly, people who are on the edge of starvation and in despair don't often "turn" into "radical activists who stage work stoppages and hunger strikes", either. Revolutionary times come from revolutionary circumstances and these are more complicated than simple, honest, misery. There are subjective factors which include a need for a political outlet, broad unity, and a sense of popular power.

Course, this is without discussing the question of whether anyone EVER "turns" anyone into anything, which I personally doubt very much.

[chlamor]

brother cakes
06-24-2010, 09:36 AM
I think this is sort of a neat story, as a real-life illustration of (1) the labor-machinery dialectic or reciprocal-conditioning, etc, and (2) the historical pattern under capitalism that a rise in wages is the mother of mechanization.


New minimum wage laws, a looser yuan and worker strikes like those affecting Honda Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. are raising costs at plants in China’s Pearl River Delta, leading to increased automation of assembly lines.

Foxconn Technology Group, Nissan Motor Co.’s Chinese venture and VTech Holdings Ltd. said they are investing in factory equipment to reduce their reliance on labor. Wages in the region called the world’s factory floor increased 17 percent in the past six months, according to a survey by the government- backed Hong Kong Trade Development Council.

Factory owners in China face declining profit margins from a rising yuan as the government drops a two-year policy that curbed the currency’s gain. Labor costs will probably bloat to 30 percent of gross domestic product in the next decade from 15 percent now, Morgan Stanley estimated this month. Higher wages in urban areas may cost companies about $1.5 trillion by 2015, according to Credit Suisse Group AG.

“Factories need to think seriously about how they produce more with less,” said Ian Spaulding, Hong Kong-based managing director at INFACT Global Partners, which advises plant owners on China work practices. “Factories need to begin to enhance their productivity so that they are in a position to remain competitive.”

[chlamor]

anaxarchos
06-24-2010, 07:54 PM
... the cheap labor of Birmingham plus machinery would displace the cotton spinners of India who toiled under much cheaper, subsistence wages, precisely through the increased productivity represented by a "superior" organic composition to English textiles.

The same thing happened in the 1960s in Africa, when the cloth of relatively well-paid Belgian textile workers displaced the local fabrics of virtually the entire continent of Africa, from Egypt to the Cameroons.

The difference today is that "globalization" has eliminated the reticence that previously haunted intensive capital export for manufacturing. Now, cheap labor is displaced by cheap-labor-plus-more-advanced-machinery without having to move the manufacturing site by even an inch.

Most of the factories described here are Western or joint-venture plants created for the "re-export" trade.

[blindpig]

About the law of value and its essence
No. 4/92.IV.2024

At one time, an article was written against the concept of the so-called law of use value. It offered a relatively brief dive into Marxist theory about the essence of value relations to support our argument. Since this topic often comes up and causes certain difficulties when studying Marxism-Leninism, below is a revised version of an extract from that old article, which can serve as an auxiliary aid for our readers. Important points in the text have been expanded and clarified, and some corrections have been made.

Nevertheless, in general, to master the material below, it is enough to have the most general understanding of the law of value at the level of an encyclopedia article. The disclosure of the issue goes from the most external ideas and primary definitions to the essence.

The law of value and its violation under capitalism
What is the law of value?

It is well known that the law of value is expressed in the fact that “ products of equal quantities of social labor are exchanged for each other ” (Engels).

This means that things are transformed into goods, and their exchange for each other, firstly , becomes possible due to the fact that they are all products of labor, and secondly , it is proportional to the amount of socially necessary labor time spent on production or their prey.

The law of value arose long before capitalism, along with the spread of exchange, and is not an economic law defining capitalism. Quite the contrary, the law of value under capitalism is constantly and systematically violated, and if it were impeccably observed, capital would be impossible.

Here it makes sense for the reader not immersed in Marxist theory to give three remarks.

1 . One should not understand the law of value too abstrusely. It is enough to imagine such a picture. People in different times and eras exchanged things with each other. The conditions, situations and scale of exchanges were different. However, in the gigantic totality of these exchange acts one can find certain patterns, primarily quantitative ones. They manifest themselves especially clearly today, when there is a market everywhere. The law of value answers the question: on what do the proportions of exchange of things different in their physical nature depend and how are they formed, around what does the pendulum of supply and demand revolve?

Why can’t we limit ourselves to the superficial idea that the proportions of things are the result of supply and demand? Because such an answer will not advance our understanding, but will only confuse it. Firstly, just as humanity’s abilities are primary in relation to its needs, in the “demand/supply” pair, supply is primary, not demand. In order for something to be in demand, it must exist in reality, be produced or carried out. I can create demand as much as I want, for example, for moving to Mars, but it will not create any supply until this is technically feasible. And even for such a demand, I need to know about the existence of the planet Mars. If supply is primary, then its balance with demand is conditional. Secondly, no matter how you look at supply and demand, it is unclear what unites all those things that become their subject; they do not explain the nature of value, only price fluctuations. Thirdly, supply and demand are directly related to money. When we say “demand” not in an abstract sense, we are always talking about effective demand. When we say “offer,” we are always talking about an offer to exchange goods for money. If we assume a non-monetary, natural exchange of some products for others in accordance with their supply and demand for specific subjects, then this will not advance us in any way to an understanding of value, that is, the possibility of exchanging any goods for each other. But in reality this is exactly the case.

Thus, the paired category of supply and demand shows only the external expression of price fluctuations around value. Let's say, if today the demand for a product has fallen catastrophically and its price has become lower than its value, this does not mean that the opposite cannot happen tomorrow. This only confirms that behind the price, behind fluctuations in supply and demand, there is something deeper in commodity relations.

2 . When we talk about exchange at this stage of our reasoning, we do not yet mean actual purchase and sale, specific acts of exchange through money. The fact is that the purchase or sale of something in real life is carried out not according to value, but at a price, which is the monetary expression of value and can deviate significantly from it. The law of value regulates the emerging proportions of things during exchange, to which the price of purchase and sale only approaches, based on the subjective desires of the participants in the exchange for profit.

The reason why it is necessary to look for deeper value bases in acts of purchase and sale, which are the only ones that exist in real life (and why it is impossible to equate value with price), is to clarify the social nature of exchange. In particular, there can be no other scientific explanation - things are exchanged between people solely because people find a common ground in them, namely, that they are products of labor. All other explanations offered by bourgeois science, for example, about the usefulness or rarity of goods as grounds for their exchange, are untenable. And the labor theory of value itself was discovered not by Marx, but by bourgeois economists, but when the conclusions from it became public, the bourgeoisie began to pay for alternative theories of value, which today are actively established in the so-called economic science. Price fluctuations and the influence of money are a separate important topic in theory, not directly related to cost.

In short, when considering value, it is first necessary to abstract from prices and focus on the very conditions under which the movement of things from one person to another through exchange occurs.

3 . In some isolated, exceptional cases, there may be an exchange of things that have little or no value. However, this does not refute the labor theory of value, since the social science that is Marxism does not apply to any individual and random acts. Marxism, considering society and its economic basis, establishes laws and patterns that determine the social movement as a whole. The law of value regulates billions and billions of daily acts of exchange and production—that is its essence. And individual outlier examples that may come to the reader’s mind are not important. At the same time, land and luxury goods as objects of exchange, which usually cause difficulties in the issue of emerging proportions of exchange, have a corresponding explanation from the point of view of Marxism, which the reader can read in more detail in Marx’s main work “Capital. Critique of Political Economy".

Let's continue further.

It is also known that under capitalism the law of value acquires “negative sides”, which inevitably cause imbalances and crises.

At first glance, the law of value is problematic in two respects.

Firstly , in the relationship between supply and demand in the consumer segment, when manufacturers, carried away by the pursuit of profit, overstock the market with products for which there is no corresponding effective demand.

Secondly , in the imbalance of agricultural and industrial production, when their ratio does not meet the needs of the development of society (for example, when developed countries with high-tech production are forced to purchase food; or in general, complex industrial production is developing rapidly, while 500 million people the planet is undernourished).

To these two aspects are added the consequences of the law of money circulation . Thus, at the highest imperialist stage of capitalism, corresponding to the largest production, the financial sphere, due to speculation and credit enslavement, turns into a “soap bubble” that dominates the production sector. Prices everywhere are turning into monopoly prices, which further aggravates the course of crises.

And thus we get a typical picture of the eternal economic problems of capitalism .

What do we see in the first two aspects? The fact that the law of value , that is, the very possibility of transforming all results of labor into goods for exchange and adjusting production to the sale of products on the market, is as primitive as possible . It does not take into account the specifics of specific production, nor the characteristics of society and markets, so capital, willingly or unwillingly, strives for the simplest method of circulation. It is the law of value, because of its primitivism and simplicity in the conditions of commodity production and the transformation of money into capital, that inevitably makes real production a secondary process to the production of profit .

It is much easier for a capitalist to produce products of mass demand than, for example, means of production - machines and equipment. For the latter, you need to master higher technology, the payback period is longer, larger investments are needed and profitability is lower. Therefore, with a certain accumulation of capital (money masses of profit in the hands of entrepreneurs, oligarchs, tycoons), an imbalance arises in the production of consumer goods and means of production in favor of the former. True, this is not the only or even the main cause of crises of overproduction, but nevertheless it also exists and is a consequence of the law of value. It's about the same with agriculture. It is much easier to turn some overseas territory into a kingdom of plantations and drag soybeans, potatoes and wheat across the oceans, although there is no objective need for this. This is an example of extremely irrational expenditure of labor and resources for the sake of making a profit.

In general, it would seem quite normal, if you look at small and local examples, the system of exchanging things for each other, as if according to the amount of labor expended, leads to unpleasant consequences. Already at this stage it is clear that building social production on the basis of the law of value is extremely unreasonable; the law of value is well suited only for tribes on the island living in a primitive economy.

In the examples of problems generated by the law of value, the reader will easily notice the strong influence of the value of one special commodity, without which economic movement under capitalism is generally impossible. This product is labor .

Everything that humanity is rich in is produced or mined by human hands. Consequently, since the participants in exchanges themselves, as a rule, do not produce anything with their own hands, some of them set in motion certain production complexes by combining them with living human labor in the form of the purchase of labor power. Thus, wage labor becomes the main source of value, and surplus value, for the sake of which production is turned into commercial activity (business), becomes a source of profit.

Even if someone simply speculatively resold a previously purchased product at a higher price, he became an indirect participant in the relations between capital and wage labor, namely, he redistributed in his favor the surplus value previously created by someone’s calloused hands. Profit does not come out of thin air, just like wealth in general. If the Central Bank simply printed additional money, it means that the value content in it decreased, that is, a redistribution of wealth occurred. This is how the universal connection between commodity production in its highest stage and the world market created by it is manifested.

The essence of the special commodity labor power (and wage labor) is that its actual value does not correspond to the value it delivers during production. There is no capitalist in the world who would pay workers a salary equal to the monetary value of the value they produce. The meaning of life for capitalists is to make a profit, and it can only be received as surplus value, that is, as a result of unpaid labor.

The first law of wage labor states that the capitalist must remain in the black, that is, the worker’s salary - the monetary expression of the value of the commodity labor - must be less than the value that he produces .

What then determines the cost of labor? Since the interests of the capitalist are directly opposed to the interests of his workers (the lower the salary, the higher the profit), he strives to pay the bare minimum necessary for survival.

Thus, in the process of wage labor we are talking about a violation of the law of value in the sense that the worker, instead of the equivalent of the social labor invested in production, is paid in the form of wages the cost of his reproduction as labor power .

The worker thus turns into an appendage of production and is equated with materials and raw materials. And production itself turns from the production of products into the production of profit for the capitalist, in which the production of products and services becomes only a side process. The entire money and commodity supply is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat ultimately finds itself unable to purchase the entire volume of consumer products it produces. As a result, the economy of capitalism acquires phases: from economic growth to a crisis of overproduction, then recession, recovery, growth again, crisis again, and so on ad infinitum until it is replaced by a higher mode of production.

But that's not all.

The law of value is constantly violated in the course of commodity exchange itself, firstly , due to the discrepancy between price and value, and secondly , due to the error inherent in any equalization of values, because absolutely equal amounts of social labor in goods are only an abstraction. In a real economy, someone is always cheating, cheating, and simply winning more in an exchange. And we return again to the causes of crises.

At a certain stage in the development of capitalism, these seemingly random inconsistencies and errors in exchange become manageable, for example, through chronic price increases. Large financial and banking institutions, for the sake of an insatiable thirst for profit, create a huge sector of speculative capital (loans, insurance, securities trading, currency games, etc.), which at the beginning of the overproduction crisis phase bursts like a soap bubble and aggravates the course of crisis processes. But at the same time, bankruptcy affects medium and small enterprises, and the largest monopolies are only strengthening their position in the market.

A little more about the fact that equal cost proportions are an abstraction.

Diamatics teaches that no two things in the universe are exactly alike. Consequently, socially necessary working time, the main characteristic of which is that it is the same for everyone at a given stage of development of social production, is an “ideal concept” expressing the desire of the subjects of exchange to equate the values ​​of various goods. On the one hand , socially necessary labor time exists objectively, on the other hand , it exists objectively only as a generalized expression of the productive forces of society.

For example, the cost of one iPhone is equal to the cost of four tons of potatoes, that is, the amount of socially necessary labor time spent on the production of one phone is equal to the amount of socially necessary labor time to grow and harvest 4000 kg of potatoes. Obviously, such a proportion is conditional; it presupposes a certain scale of production, technology, productivity, access to raw materials, land, and so on. This does not mean that anyone can take an amount of money approximately equal to the cost of an iPhone and grow that many potatoes and vice versa. This is a certain convention, an approximate estimate of the costs of “social labor” that inevitably arises during exchange. No other measures of exchange exist and cannot exist; man measures the value of everything exclusively by his own labor, for labor is the essence of man in general.

In billions of acts of exchange, due to constant differences in conditions and details of labor costs, especially with the advent of money, errors and unevenness in exchanges accumulated in the hands of first merchants and then bankers. Banks were initially responsible only for the convenience of capital movement, but the development of money circulation gave them leverage for maximizing profits through loans, investments and other instruments. At the stage of imperialism, banking capital, when the level of development of production enlarged and centralized it, merged with industrial capital, forming financial capital . Finance capital has concentrated in its hands almost the entire money supply and almost the entire commodity supply, thus exercising dictatorship over society . He subordinates governments to his will, thereby ensuring the class character of state power, he buys the intelligentsia, pays for the media, and so on. All this is done in the interests of maintaining the economic and political system of capitalism. This nuanced picture is observed in all modern bourgeois countries. This will be discussed again below.

Next to the law of value.

If the law of value were strictly observed, then capitalism would not exist in principle. The dialectic of the origin and development of the law of value, and with it commodity production, is such that under capitalism it turns into its opposite, into wage labor and other systematic cheating, for example, into monopoly prices or profits from currency manipulation.

But what has been said above is only a description of the action of the law of value and its consequences, and we need to establish its content and essence, understand under what mandatory conditions it arises, how and why it is transformed into its opposite, therefore, under what conditions it ceases to operate at all and what comes it will be replaced under communism.

Value is a relationship between people
When speaking about the law of value, attention is usually focused on the exchange proportions of goods and the labor nature of their formation. Then they move on to commodity production and its highest form - capitalist production. However, practice has shown that considering the law of value in the abstract economic sphere often does not allow one to comprehend its meaning. Many people memorize definitions and dwell on external facts, ultimately missing the social nature of value and the law of value.

Value is not things or the value of things. Commodities are not things or properties of things. Value is a certain material connection between people that necessarily arises under certain conditions. And the law of value is the content of this connection, expressed in abstract scientific concepts. Value expresses the connection that arises in commodity production between different types of labor .

“Value is a relation between two persons - as an old economist said; he should only have added: an attitude covered with a material shell” (Lenin).

One specific person who has connected with other people in this way can ignore this connection, but when the relations of value capture all social reproduction, it is impossible to ignore them, because these connections begin to control the movement of huge masses of people.

What is the first thing that can be said about the essence of value? First of all, this is a form of production, that is, economic, relations regarding the products of labor created or adapted for exchange under conditions of private property. In other words, value is a specific form of interaction between people in social life, in the sphere of the economic basis.

What are the characteristics of economic relations related to value?

We can endlessly scrupulously study all the historical manifestations of value relations in different eras, in different countries and societies, but we will not find anything in common in them except anarchism. There is nothing at all in them except banal anarchism. Even if we talk about exchange in the spherical vacuum of libertarian manuals, subject A exchanges with subject B because they live in a meaningless world of disconnected subjects in order to survive separately. If subject A is able to exist independently, why should he exchange with someone? If subject A exists together with subject B, again, why exchange them? Exchange destroys the natural connection of human society, replacing it with anarchism devoid of rationality and a single goal, that is, the struggle of all against all.

Anarchism here means anarchy in the sense of the dominance of spontaneous, random, devoid of harmony on the scale of society varieties of human interaction in the course of production, distribution and consumption. Anarchism in economics is the chaos of general struggle .

At high stages of the development of capitalism, this chaos dialectically turns into the familiar system of economic structure, when three dozen global corporations pervert common sense, and 100 human subjects are declared the owners of 50% of the earth's wealth.

It is impossible to better understand the essence of value relations without understanding the essence of private property, in the system of which only these relations are possible.

To exchange, you first need to isolate, usurp, alienate
The condition for any exchange is possession, possession of the object of exchange or that which acts in this capacity. The word "possession" in Latin looks like USURPATIO , that is, "usurpation". It is precisely usurpation, alienation, isolation of something from society that constitutes the content of private property relations. In this sense, historically, ownership (usurpation) first arises, then use (derivative of benefit) and, as a result, disposal, that is, the right of private property secured by violence (separation of a part from public wealth).

Moreover, in this case, it does not matter whether an object of private property is seized from the direct producer or not; even the possession of a thing by the direct producer is its isolation and usurpation from the rest of society.

A particular difficulty in the logical assimilation of the content of private property relations is caused by the fact that the majority does not know the category of public property and they do not realize that a person is a manifestation, a product of society . They do not understand the meaning of public property, therefore they perceive any fight against private property as redistribution not in their favor (“take away and divide”, “common means no one’s” and the like).

Social property is a system of production relations, covering primarily the means and instruments of production, that arise between people on the basis of an adequate understanding of their social essence, that is, on the basis of the understanding that a person can live and develop only in society and only together with society .

In the primitive era, this adequate understanding was ensured by the very conditions of life, because the clan community could survive only as a single, harmonious social organism. Deviations from this natural materialistic attitude towards society could not arise under those conditions. Or rather, all such deviations led to the death of people and entire communities.

In the coming era of communism, this adequate understanding will be ensured through the achievement of a scientific worldview by every member of society. It will become natural for every person to have a caring attitude toward society as a condition for its prosperity and development, and work, as we know, will turn from a burden into a necessity. Production and consumption will be scientifically, plannedly organized and aimed at the optimal development of each individual. Such a society will not need a system of law, a state or bodies of violence in general. But to achieve such a height of social development, not only a breakthrough in the field of increasing consciousness and culture is necessary, but also the destruction of the opposition between mental and physical labor.

At the very first stage of communism, when public property relations are just being established, displacing private property, this adequate understanding is achieved by promoting scientific knowledge, mobilizing the most advanced workers, but at the same time supported by state coercion. Here the system of law and organized violence are still preserved, and the political struggle for the destruction of class differences is in full swing. A certain part of society always resists progress because of their own interests in preserving private property, habits, traditions, ignorance, that is, “birthmarks” and class remnants.

Thus, it is clear that social property relations arise primarily in relation to the means and instruments of production, only when we are talking about planned, scientifically verified production in the interests of social progress . The laws that govern such production, that is, plannedness, proportionality, progressive growth, are scientifically established from the requirements of consumption - the development of each person. Accordingly, it is obvious that every means or instrument that is the subject of private capitalist property that could be involved in such production automatically becomes a withdrawal from public property, that is, it is isolated from society, usurped in private hands. The same applies to consumer goods, the distribution of which should optimally meet the needs of progress. The laws that govern how this or that object of private capitalist property will be used are anarchic, based on the mutual struggle of interests and even passions. Therefore, in modern bourgeois society, billions are spent on football, cinema, wine and casinos, while the solution to many of the most pressing social problems rests on the “lack of funding.”

Thus, private property relations are a type of production relations that arise between people due to the rejection of material and spiritual conditions of existence and development from each other .

Since private property relations divide people to the point of mutual struggle, their essential side is violence . This aspect of private property grows into organized violence, that is, the state and the legal system.

In other words, having emerged and strengthened, private property relations are gradually formalized into one or another system of objective economic relations, on the basis of which a political superstructure grows to support it - the state, law and ideology.

The market is the kingdom of total tyranny
As can be seen, private relations of value pit people against each other to a high degree of hostility. Those who usurp the means and instruments of production begin to live at the expense of the working majority. The torment, blood and sweat of some become a means for the idle prosperity of others.

The highest form of private property opposition of people in terms of sophistication is the same wage labor . The exchange of labor power for money, the purchasing power of which is approximately equal to the quantity and quality of goods necessary for the reproduction of the worker in his current proletarian form. In other words, this is hourly, shift, piecework slavery.

The entire labor force of society becomes a commodity, that is, it acts as the cost of reproduction of the proletarian when the capitalist mode of production (that is, the production of exclusively goods for sale) has established itself as dominant. Consequently, the dominant means of any economic movement becomes purchase and sale: everything is bought, everything is sold, everything is produced for the sake of sale. This state of the economy is known as a market.

The Russian word “market” goes back to the German RING , which simply means “boxing ring”. The word “market” does not express the common stupidity that two heterogeneous subjects meet in the market - the seller and the buyer, but, on the contrary, the truth that the participants in trade are homogeneous as commodity owners. The figure of a pure buyer, that is, a person with money coming from nowhere, was artificially introduced into liberal economic theory. To enter the market as a buyer, you first need to sell something, so all market participants alternately become sellers and buyers. And if in the pre-market eras of slavery and feudalism, tyranny was carried out by the “high-born” owners of land and slaves, then in the market era, tyranny is carried out by all owners of goods in relation to each other. Everyone becomes each other's competitors.

Accordingly, if a person has nothing to sell on the market in order to buy later, then he is forced to sell his ability to work.

Stable exchange gave birth to money - a special commodity, the task of which is to express in a universal form the value proportions of all other goods. Such goods were first gold and silver, then bank notes, and now mainly bank accounts.

“Where bourgeois economists saw the relationship of things (the exchange of goods for goods), there Marx revealed the relationship between people. The exchange of goods expresses the connection between individual producers through the market. Money means that this connection is becoming ever closer, inextricably connecting the entire economic life of individual producers into one whole. Capital means the further development of this connection: human labor power becomes a commodity” (Lenin).

Competition among commodity owners in the market leads to its monopolization, that is, the dominant position of a narrow layer of owners of a mass of money who have formed a “market above the market” - the financial (monetary) sphere of circulation. These financial monopolists, instead of putting real goods on the market, use various “financial instruments” to ensure the circulation of money itself, subordinating both real production and public consumption to the accumulation of their private wealth. Thus, the market in its developed form creates an inextricable connection between commodity owners, promising one-sided benefit to a handful of financial monopolists.

The essence of the capitalist market is the violation of the law of value, the unequivalence of exchange, that is, exploitation. Thus, the tyranny of all against all naturally degenerates into the total tyranny of an oligarchy .

As you can see, the opposition of people within the market is essentially no different from the opposition in the process of wage labor. It sometimes turns out to be more difficult to prove the degree of hostility of participants in market exchanges, although in the last decade many have become more aware of the diabolical essence of everyday kits, discounts, “promotions”, sales and loans, mortgages, currency speculation, and stock market games.

Cost is a kind of opposition between people to the point of hostility
So, the essence of value relations is the identity and opposition of subjects regarding material and spiritual goods that arise in the system of private property in the course of exchange. Value relations are private property relations in the conditions of commodity economy and turnover .

Value relations arise primarily because people do not understand the essence of social production.

Since value relations mediate the most important sphere of social life - material and spiritual reproduction - they form a special psychotype of behavior in the human mind. Under capitalism, people begin to measure everything by the proportions of not only value, but also prestige, favors, concessions, and so on. Today, value thinking “I give to you, and you give to me” is considered quite natural, and its bearers without a second thought strive to give less and get more, that is, they become egoists.

You don't have to look far for examples. Many modern people build friendly relationships according to the principle of the law of value - “you help me, I support you in the same force.” Many modern couples try to form relationships and create families on the basis of “compromises and concessions.” Many modern parents, based on the principle of the law of value, believe that their children are “investment projects.” All these social and everyday deformities are the product of thinking that reflects the commodity-money relations of the basis. Thus, value relations capture, after the basis, the spiritual life of a person. What emerges is a monstrous contradiction of the origins and objectives of social connections and their content, which is based on the principle of hostility and alienation of subjects from each other. Friendship, romantic relationships, family, parenthood turn in the practice of many people into a kind of partnership with a desire for profit.

The manifestation of value relations in the spiritual sphere is indirect, but their example quite clearly shows what these relations are in essence - anarchy and struggle with each other with a relative, sometimes forced unity of subjects.

So we traced how the seemingly innocent exchange of things between people in terms of the amount of labor invested is actually their opposition to a half-animal degree of hostility. How the law of value turns into its opposite - the tyranny of the oligarchy.

On the one hand, the development of exchange, commodity production, the emergence of the market and its transformation into monopoly became a form of society’s movement along the path of progress towards communism, on the other hand, all this is a consequence of ignorance and the form of private property relations, that is, usurpation. Today there is no more noble goal than the destruction of capitalism and the construction of communism without such atavism as private property relations .

A. Redin
04/28/2024

https://prorivists.org/92_value/

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