Week 1, Jan 1-7, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 1 'The Commodity'

Vampire [any] · edit-2 6 months ago

Week 1, Jan 1-7, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 1 'The Commodity'

quarrk [he/him] · 6 months ago

I got hung up on that question as well, and so have many other people, especially critics like Bortkiewicz. It isn’t helped by David Harvey in his book saying that it is a “cryptic assertion” that the substance of value is abstract labor.

If value is an assertion, then it can be taken on faith or dismissed with as little reason.

First is recognizing that there must be a third thing if qualitatively different things, in different quantities, are compared quantitatively. In section 3 Marx cites Aristotle on this. Strictly speaking it is logically invalid to say “1 table is equal to 3 chairs” because they are different things. What is unsaid in that statement is “some common substance/property between 1 table and 3 chairs is present in equal quantity”. So it implies both qualitative equivalence (same substance) and quantitative equivalence of some third thing.

At this point it’s unclear why Marx singles out labor… let’s see what he thought about this “cryptic assertion”:

What Marx had to say about it

Link

”Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish. Every child knows, too, that the masses of products corresponding to the different needs required different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labor of society. That this necessity of the distribution of social labor in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance , is self-evident. No natural laws can be done away with. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws assert themselves. And the form in which this proportional distribution of labor asserts itself, in the state of society where the interconnection of social labor is manifested in the private exchange of the individual products of labor, is precisely the exchange value of these products.

Science consists precisely in demonstrating how the law of value asserts itself. So that if one wanted at the very beginning to "explain" all the phenomenon which seemingly contradict that law, one would have to present science before science.”

If the substance of value being labor was a speculative assertion, then someone else could suggest something else common to all commodities (and many have) such as that they all contain energy, or they are all abstractly useful.

But labor being that common thing is not speculation, it is a prerequisite for a society in which there is a division of labor among independent producers, where exchange of products mediates the exchange of private concrete labors.

Week 1, Jan 1-7, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 1 'The Commodity'

Week 1, Jan 1-7, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 1 'The Commodity'

Week 1, Jan 1-7, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 1 'The Commodity'

Discuss the week's reading in the comments.

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