File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9710, message 95


Date: Mon, 13 Oct 1997 20:00:46 +1000
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: M-I: Value and Women's Unpaid Work


G'day Hugh and Sid,

This is the basic stuff I need to sharpen up on, leading to a topic always
close to my interests, so I'm inviting myself into the conversation.

I'm with Sid on

>The value of a commodity (once produced) is
>independent of whether it is realised in exchange or not. That is why
>Marx often refers to it as "congealed labor", a measure of which is
>the socially necessary labor time required to produce the commodity
>at *its time of production* not during its *realization or sale in the
>market*.
>
>If a commodity's value (labor time) is not realized as exchange value
>(its price) in the market, then its value simply falls out of the
>realm of circulation. Otherwise, we encounter the absurd situation
>that just because a commodity does not sell, it does not have any
>value (or has zero value) - that is, value is an ephemeral quantity
>whose existence depends upon the vagaries of the market.

but one could also agree with Hugh that:

>The "absurd situation that just because a commodity
>does not sell, it does not have any value (or has zero value)" is not
>absurd, because it's what happens in capitalism. To give any other
>interpretation to "value" is to fetishize it, mystify it, idealize
>producing things as producing value regardless. The circuit
>money-commodity-money *must* be consummated or the value is lost.

So let's distinguish between 'value', 'use-value' and 'exchange value'.
Sid's already defined 'value' as 'congealed labour'.  Fine.

When Hugh argues that, 'under capitalism, there is no production of value
that is not realized in the market', he's generalising.  Even under the
capitalism of today value is produced that is not exchanged (of which women
generate much).  Also, by the above definition, value must continue to
reside in that which is not exchanged.

Hugh would seem to support this when he argues: 'if they pay the equivalent
of the labour fixed in the commodity, they pay its value'.

And I've always (loudly and repetitively) agreed with the point that:

>as a particular
>sector of an economy becomes more and more automated, under monopolistic
>conditions (e.g., Microsoft Corp.), value will flow to it increasingly
>from the realm of circulation rather than the point of production, i.e.,
>from less developed (requiring more manual labor) sectors. This will hold
>both within a country and between countries. The reason for Bill Gates'
>billions should now be clear.

But my innocent explanation is a little more multidimensional.  It is to do
with:

1) the relational (ie. socially constructed, and therefore historical)
nature of use value.  Use value does not reside in a good, but is
determined by a particular moment of social relations.  Advertising and
marketing supplements/produces use values (eg. 'competitive edges' in
unexplained races to undisclosed goals via unarticulated modes - Veblen's
stuff on leisure classes and promoted 'exclusivenesses' comes to mind too).
Gates does that advertising and marketing.

2) Monopoly market power allows coerced production contracts (eg. with
Apple and, by another route, with IBM) and, naturally, price-making power.
Gates has that market power.  Exchange value is a lot more than either or
both a reliable reflection of congealed labour or use value.  It's also a
function of perceived scarcity.  A strong coercive state at one's back
allows favourable consumption contracts (eg. here the primary task is to
scarcify the objectively bountiful: information.  Hence, US public servants
enforcing the likes of GATS, MAI and favourable Intellectual Property
definitions in the setting of global IP standards).  Gates has such a state
at his back (witness China getting away with slaughtering dissidents in
their hundreds but not with copying CDs or Windows '95).

3) Automation remains crucial of course.  As I try to argue above, goods
with low congealed labour (variable capital) components and no objective
scarcity depend on a very particular set of relations ('mode of regulation'
as the nascent reg. schooler in me wants to term them - would this be
tenable, Bill?) to elicit a high exchange value.  Still, in this world,
high exchange values for 'low value' stuff like Windows '95 demand
corresponding 'high value' inputs from primary/secondary-based economies.
They do not necessarily undo the LTV, because the world as a whole still
has to come up with the labour to meet the contrived exchange value of the
relatively labourless commodity.

So I agree with Sid that Hugh

>made an error of gigantic proportion by tying
>the value of a commodity to its exchange value. Value is one
>determinant of exchange value (or exchange value presupposes value)
>but not vice versa.

If Marx's proposition is that commodities are exchangeable purely as a
consequence of the circumstances of their production, then we must be
broad-minded indeed as to what those circumstances entail (I have
tentatively added:
* a highly developed centralised advertising/marketing industry to
supplement, or even produce, use value [a magnitude nobody can rationally
determine because complete knowledge of the set of commodities is
unattainable and information-as-commodity implies one must actually pay,
sans knowledge, to discover the very information in question - as Marx
says, you only get to realise use value when you actually use the thing];
* the combination of monopoly status and sheer political economic magnitude
of the enterprise in relation to that of the host nation state;
* and that particular state's sheer political economic magnitude in
relation to the sum of other nation states).

Taken together, all this might suggest, and I hold that Marx did suggest
this, that *the exchange value is a social property with which commodities
are endowed before any exchange even occurs*.  The circumstances of
production, complicated as they are, fix the exchange value, more
independently than ever of whatever role contending theorists might grant
the 'consumers' (ie. the level of exchange).  The exchange value is the
'form', to use Marx's word, of this complex of circumstances of production.


This form meets Marx's LTV not in the particular (and minimal) labour
congealed in a Windows '95 disc, but in the value that must be created in
the world to support the exchange value Windows '95 commands in that world.

And when Marx refers to the accidental and multitudinous generation of
exchange value, he allows for just the sort of complexity outlined above.
'Multitudinous' still holds, but the best-placed capitalists have either
read their Marx or must act as Marx said they would, for the most powerful
of them are quickly getting a handle on taking the 'accidental' bit out.

I dunno if my convoluted argument does damage to the LTV.  It's just the
only way I can currently sustain it to the satisfaction of one who is,
after all, still a newcomer to theoretical Marxism.

Any comments?

Cheers,
Rob.


************************************************************************

Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

************************************************************************

'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

************************************************************************




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