Date: Tue, 23 Aug 1994 04:02:19 -0300 From: jinigo-AT-inscri.org.ar (Juan Inigo) Subject: Re: value On defending his theory that use-value changes into surplus-value, Steve Keen writes >I can find no "insistence" here by Marx that use-value is always >qualitative. Why, of course, how could use-value, being a real concrete form, be a purely qualitative form that lacks a quantitative determination? And, vice versa, how could value, being a non less real concrete form, be a purely quantitative form that lacks a qualitative necessity? Now, what about the qualitative determination of use-value? It is the capacity a real form has to be appropriated in the human metabolism process, that is, the capacity to be a means of human life. Which is use-value's quantitative determination? The capacity to satisfy a human necessity always belongs to a determined amount of the real form in question, e.g. one pair of shoes, four hours, or four minutes, of some Wagner's opera, etc. What about the qualitative (substance) and quantitative (magnitude) determinations of value? Above all, human life is a social metabolism process. The regulation of this process takes shape as the social relation among its members. The historically determined absence of a general direct coordination in the assignation and development of social labor determines individuals as private independent producers. Insofar as purely such, they have no way to get into relation by themselves to shape the social metabolism process. These producers do not retain any social relation other than being individual personifications of society's total capacity of labor. This total capacity is, as such, the capacity of human labor in general. The development of this capacity under its different concrete forms is, thus, the development of the general social relation among the private independent producers in an autonomously regulated social metabolism process. In it, society assigns its total laboring capacity among the different concrete labor modalities by representing the abstract labor embodied in the products of the concrete labors carried out by the independent private producers, as the capacity of these products to relate among themselves in exchange and, therefore, socially relate their producers. That is, the general social relation takes form in the determination of the use values produced by labor as commodities; and the abstract labor materialized in the commodities and in that way represented, becomes the value of commodities. As a determined magnitude of materialized abstract labor that represents itself as the capacity of its product to relate with other commodities, and therefore, necessarily taking shape in a determined quantity of a different use value, the value of a commodity becomes its exchange-value. The commodity develops insofar as the concrete unit of its natural form, use value, and its specific social form, its value form. In this development, the exchangeability of commodities negates itself as simply such, to affirm itself as the direct exchangeability only of the commodity that all of them detach as their general equivalent, of money. And, therefore, commodity production realizes its necessity by taking the production of this general representative of value, the production of the general social relation in its concrete manifestation, as its general object. Being value itself the general object of social production, the capacity to produce value (that is, the capacity to work as a producer of commodities, labor power thus historically determined) acquires the possibility of becoming a use-value, only for someone different from its natural owner. But this possibility still lacks a determination to become a realized possibility: general labor productivity must be high enough so as to make the value of a certain quantity of this new commodity (that is, the abstract social labor materialized in it that represents itself as its capacity to relate with other commodities, the labor socially needed to produce it) to be of a lower magnitude than the value its consumption as the specific use-value it is (productive consumption) is able to produce. The surplus abstract labor materialized in its product that represents itself as the capacity of this product to relate in exchange with other commodities, surplus-value, entitles its owner to the correspondent share in the total social product through the general social relation. The laborers realize the use value of the means of subsistence that they indirectly get in exchange for their labor power, through individual consumption. If this was just a production of commodities, individual consumption would bring then to a complete end the general social relationship materialized in those means of subsistence. But, as money transcends into capital, social production becomes a production of more value by means of value itself. This is no longer a production of use values regulated by the condition of these as values. It is not even a production of use values which is only a means for the production of substantive value. This is a production of value in itself that yields as its result the production of use values and, hence, of human beings. Then the general social relationship is not exhausted with individual consumption, but it reappears as the value of the workers labor power. The use value of the means of production (socially determined as constant capital) is consumed in a production process which is not the final step in the social metabolism process. So the portion of social labor materialized in them still remains in the process of assigning the total labor capacity of society among the multitude of its possible concrete forms. In other words, the abstract labor materialized in those means of production has still to complete its determination as a part of the social labor capacity that has produced use-values. As such, it reappears in the value of the use-values produced with them. In brief, use-value (the material determination of commodities) and value (their specific social determination) remain all along their development two qualitatively different real forms and, therefore, there is no way to relate them through their respective quantitative determinations. Not even an atom of use value, whether of simple commodities or of labor power, can be transformed into the value of a commodity. Now the question is: which is the social necessity that can only be satisfied by desperately looking for a theory that represents surplus-value, that is, a specific form of today general social relation (and as such, a purely human real form) as determined by the pure materiality (use-value abstractly considered from the viewpoint of the material production process in itself) of the means of production socially determined as capital? A final observation: the results of the 'dialectics of value/use-value', whatever this thing might be, suffice to show that Marx couldn't have followed such procedure to discover the real determinations of use-value and value by reproducing their development in thought. Juan Inigo CICP jinigo-AT-inscri.org.ar ------------------
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