Re: AUT: still more questions

[chris wright <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I apologize for any errors.  I am doing this off the top of my head.  I
really should dig up that page in Capital and find my study notes, but I
think Sabrina has them in Chicago.  Oh well, here goes.

Nate said:
Hi all,

Chris says:
Hi Nate.

Second, deeper confusions, to me more important, on Marx.
A friend and I are puzzling our way through volume two of Capital and
I'm starting to think I didn't understand volume 1 at all. What's this
whole 'value' thing anyway?

Page 39, volume 1 (International Publishers edition, Moscow Approved!)
"the substance of value is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one
uniform labour power... the values of all commodities produced ...
[count] here as one homogeneous mass of human labour-power, composed
though it be of innumerable individual units", and each unit "is the
same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average
labour-power of society, and takes ... no more time than is needed on an
average than is socially necessary ... under normal conditions of
production and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent
at the time."

Value has several aspects:
1.  It is a form of social relations, and as such is very much NOT a
thing.  But...

2.  Because value is a form of human social relations in which relations
between people take the form of relations between things, the value-form
does thingify labor or rather is the quantified/quantifiable freezing of
labor into something beyond a use-value, beyond an article of utility.
In that sense, an object becomes an object independent of us in so far
as it is an exchange value, ie is a Value for our purposes here.

Nate say:
That makes sense, I think. Value is socially necessary labor time,
right?

Chris say:
Not really.  Homogenous human labor is the substance of value, and
socially necessary labor time is the magnitude of value.  Abstract labor
is really the essence of value, even thought it appears as concrete
labor (this or that kind of labor).

Nate say:
The reason I ask is because of the examples Marx uses. In volume two
(same edition, picked 'em up real cheap at a CP-USA booksale if memory
serves) pages 36-37 Marx gives an example about yarn production. I'm
going to use the dollar sign because I don't know where the british
pounds sign is on my keyboard.

10,000 lbs of yarn consist of $372 value of means of production used up
(raw materials, wear and tear on machinery) and $50 outlay for the
purchase of labor power. He says that in the spinning process "new value
of $128 has been created, the yarn has a value of $500, which is
expressed in its price of the same amount."
$372 plus $50 equal $422 total cost to the capitalist. The yarn's value
is $500, so (assuming value and price are identical) its sale will net a
surplus of $78. All of this makes sense to me, except -
where did he get these number from? Just made them up, right?
Particularly the "new value of $128", where did that come from?

Marx gives this formula (does anyone have advice on how to stop hating
and love the formulas?

M-C(Mp+L)...P...C'(C+c)-M'(M+m)

M is outlay of money, purchasing, commodities consisting of means of
production and labor power. So far so good. Then production (...P...)
happens, where C' different commodities result, which are then sold for
more M', a higher quantity of money.


Marx is saying at least in the example that C' has more value than the
initial C (the final yarn has value $500, which the capitalist spent
$422 to acquire). Is this because more labor time is invested in them,
regardless of whether or not the sale (the dash between C'-M') occurs?
Okay, I guess I could go along with that, but what guarantees that value
and price will actually correspond and if for some reason they don't
(say the trend for this type of yarn wanes), then is there really this
stuff called value which price falls below and if so how is value
actually determined? Am I totally off base, rushing ahead? What's the
deal here?

Chris say:
Several different issues here.
Firstly, the sale does matter, but Marx is here assuming the sale
happens because he is concerned with other aspects of the problem.  If
exchange does not take place, however (and this is what the sale is),
the value is lost.  This is why unsold goods become such a problem: a
loss of value takes place.

Secondly, there is no guarantee that price and value will match.  In
fact, for Marx, their discontinuity, their disequilibrium, is normal.
But again, Marx is here trying to isolate an aspect of the problem, to
see if the logic of political economy is sustainable on its own terms of
price/value equilibrium and a guaranteed sale.

Thirdly, in so far as value is the embodiment of expended labor power in
a commodity, it has a thing-like aspect.  It is a point around which
market price fluctuates, indicating the relative efficiency of
exploitation compared to other exploiters of labor power.

This may be oversimplifying, but I think of it this way: a capitalist
spends so much money on labor, raw materials, and machinery.  Depending
on the level of wages, degree of exploitation (V versus Surplus value),
etc., a commodity will have a certain value, taken relative to the
entire mass of other commodities (not taken in isolation, hence your
socially necessary magnitude.)  Once purchased, the value of the
machinery and the raw materials cannot be changed.  You can only get so
much yarn out of 10lbs of cotton and the spindle can only make so many
rotations at such and such a speed with a particular yarn. But people
can be made to work faster or resist and work slower, forced to work
more cheaply or fight to work more expensively, to have or not have
benefits, etc.  Labor power can also produce over and above its own cost
of reproduction.  Machinery and raw materials cannot.  That is Marx's
argument.  At that point, the Value created by labor is the vanishing
mediator around which price floats.  A price may drop below the value.
That may or may not deprive the capitalist of profits.  (Say Mp = 100, L
= 100 and S = 100, for a V of 300.  But if the price drops for whatever
reason and the capitalist can only sell for 280, S may still equal 80.
Less than V, but not bad.  But if our pal can only sell for 200, then no
S and no reproduction.  This usually results, in the long term, in
bankruptcy.  And say with a monopoly they get 350.  The S = 150, but
that 50 will have to come from somewhere and some less efficient capital
is paying the price for that monopoly, most likely.)

Nat say:
It seems to me that Marx is just asking we the reader to go along with
him at this point in the book, just asserting these numbers (which is
fine by me) so we get the basic point but my friend who I'm reading the
book with insists that this value is in the yarn somehow, that the yarn
has that value, regardless of whether it sells for that much or not,
that the value produced $128 is somehow an objective fixed thing. Can
this be the case?

Chris say:
No, it cannot.  The Value is only meaningful if it can be sold.  Marx is
quite clear on that point.  The capitalist can lose their investment for
having spent money on creating an exchange-value which cannot be
exchanged, but unless a Value finds money, the commodity cannot truly be
valorized.

Nate say:
It seems to me that the yarn is only worth the $500 if the capitalist
sells it for that much, something Marx assumes for the purposes of
argument but which is not actually guaranteed in the messy world. If the
yarn only fetches $490 then the new value produced is only $118, not
$128. My friend differs from me somewhat politically - he is very
interested in something called Marxist Economics and the Prophecy of the
Falling Rate - tells me that I am thinking of this via bourgeois
economics, which while perhaps true is none too enlightening. We went
round and round about it and ended up back in volume one trying to make
sense of the rate of surplus value extraction and making arcane diagrams
and formulae and it left me wondering if I've understood an ounce of
this stuff. Can someone lower a ladder to lift me from this confusion?
Any input is quite appreciated.

Chris say:
"Worth" is a funny word.  This is a technical discussion, so I will
decline that term. The commodity has a value of $500, but it may not
sell for that value and in some sense then the capitalist takes a loss.
How bad depends on how much, if at all, the commodity can be sold for.
If it can only find a price of $480, so be it, only $480 of value is
remunerated.  Not a very efficient or lucky capitalist.  And that could
be caused by a flood of a like commodity, among other things.

And in the long run, the capitalist cannot spend as much in reproduction
and so cannot expand in the next cycle at the same rate as the
capitalist who sold their commodity at its value.

However, by reifying these categories as he is doing, your friend is the
one playing at bourgeois economics, since all economics is bourgeois.
Instead of seeing Marx's discussion of value as a critique of the value
form, he sees value as 'objective' in the same way as classical
political economy.  Take him back to the 3 peculiarities of the
equivalent form in Vol. 1, Chapter 1.  I guarantee he believes that
social labor is the form of appearance of private labor under capital,
thereby reifying all labor as private labor, aka all labor as capitalist
labor.  But that to me is one of the first places that Marxis PolEcon
asserts itself, in the mis-translation of that text.

Cheers,
Chris



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