File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/marxism.Jul12-Aug17.94, message 131


Date: Wed, 27 Jul 1994 02:48:56 +0700
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (donna jones)
Subject: Labor, surplus value


Dear Steve,
I am a tyro at this stuff (a graduate student where there has been no
sustained treatment of Capital), so I may well be wrong.  Indeed your
papers look very interesting, and I shall read them.  Perhaps after ten
days or so, I'll be able to get back to you.  As I understand the dialectic
between use-value and exchange value, it is the discovery of that
contradiction within the commodity itself which enables a solution to the
problem that surplus value must be found both within and outside of the
circulation process. That problem is resolved by the special commodity of
labor-power--its consumption as a use value, i.e., the actual process of
labor, is more productive of value than its exchange value.   In other
words, Marx's distinction between labor-power and labor. This distinction
allows Marx to isolate the source of surplus value and to hold independent
it of the many forms in which it appears:profit, rent, interest.  
Carchedi's point here is that as price mechanism redistributes value from
certain capitals to others (he is very precise here about the mechanism of
distribution), the illusion may be fostered that fixed capital creates
value. 

There have been of course much more subtle treatments of this. If you get
tired of all the china that I am breaking, you could turn to Martha
Campbell's fine essay in Economics as Worldly Philosophy, ed. R Blackwell.
d jones



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