Re: value

[jinigo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Juan Inigo)]

Steve Keen supports his theory that, concerning Marx:

>Properly
>applied, his dialectical method establishes that all
>commodity inputs to production can generate a surplus for the
>capitalist, contradicting his view that labour power is the
>only source of value.

on two basis. The first one, and only one I will address in this post, is
Steve's "value/use-value dialectics." According to this dialectics,

>As to the role of the concept of use-value in discerning the sources
>of surplus value:
> ...
>[In other words, labor-power is purchased at its exchange-value
>and its use-value is transferred to the product. Logic correctly
>applied.]
>
>His foul-up in logic in deciding that non-labor inputs are
>not such commodities, and therefore not sources of surplus-value:
> ...
>[In other words, a machine is purchased for its exchange-value
>and its exchange-value is transferred to the product. Logical
>error--use-value neglected.]

And he adds:

>So "the daily cost of maintaining it", the depreciation of the machine,
>is its exchange-value; "its daily expenditure in work", the amount it
>contributes to production, is its use-value. As with labor-power, these
>are "two totally different things", and from that difference arises the
>possibility of surplus.

Lastly, Steve justifies his procedure by saying:

>My approach does indeed involve the quantification of the
>use-value of inputs to production. As foreign as this notion
>may seem, it is something which Marx does do.
> ...
>Incidentally, if this notion of Marx treating use-value
>(in productive consumption only!) as quantitative seems
>foreign to your impression of Marx, check out p. 506
>of Vol I (2nd last page of Ch. 19):
>
>"Exchange-value and use-value, being intrinsically incommensurable
>
>magnitudes..."
>
>Either that was an almighty slip of the pen by Marx,
>or the fact that it has been missed by his followers
>is an almight slip in their intprepretations.

I will completely leave aside here the specific question of Marx following
a logic or reproducing the real necessity in thought.

Just to begin with, does Marx treat use-value as quantitative "in
productive consumption only!"? Could use-value, being a real concrete form,
be a purely qualitative form that lacks a quantitative determination in
general? And, vice versa, could value, being a non less real concrete form,
be a purely quantitative form that lacks a qualitative necessity? What Marx
actually finds by following commodities in their development is quite
different from what Steve wants us to believe he says:

According to its qualitative determination, the use-value is the capacity a
real form has for being appropriated in the human process of metabolism,
that is, the capacity for being a means of human life. Which is use-value's
quantitative determination? The capacity for satisfying 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.

Now, what about the qualitative and quantitative determinations of value?

Above all, human life is a process of social metabolism. 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
allocation 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 their process of social
metabolism. These producers do not retain any social relation other than
being individual personifications of society's total capacity for
performing labor, society's total labor-power. This total capacity is, as
such, the capacity for 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 process of social metabolism. In it, society
allocates its total labor-power among the different concrete labor
modalities by representing the socially necessary abstract labor embodied
in the products of the concrete labors carried out by the independent
private producers, as the capacity of these products for relating 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 socially necessary
abstract labor materialized in the commodities and in that way represented,
becomes the value of commodities.

As a determined magnitude of materialized socially necessary abstract labor
that represents itself as the capacity of its product for relating 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.

Commodities develop insofar as the concrete unit of their natural form,
use-value, and their specific social form, their 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, on
developing the functions of money, 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) - which thus far isn't a means
for human life but a moment in the process of human metabolism itself -
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 to make the value of a certain quantity of this new
commodity (that is, the socially necessary abstract labor materialized in
it that represents itself as its capacity for relating with other
commodities, the abstract 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 of abstract
labor materialized in its product that represents itself as the capacity of
this surplus-product for relating 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. The
process of individual consumption by those who sell their labor-power is,
in itself, the process in which they produce the use-value in which their
general social relation is materialized and, therefore, the process in
which they produce their general social relation itself. Then the general
social relation is not exhausted with individual consumption, but it
reappears as the value of the workers' labor-power. From capitalist
society's specific point of view, the final consumption will only occur
when this labor-power becomes productively consumed, which here means,
consumed to produce surplus-value. In that moment, the value materialized
in the labor-power will actually disappear, and the new value created by
the performed living labor will be materialized in its product.

When it acts as living labor, that is, as it changes its own material form
as such into a newly produced use-value appropriate for the development of
the process of social metabolism, productive socially necessary labor
creates value. Obviously, by acting, living labor transforms the use-value
of the means of production it consumes into that newly produced use-value.
The labor materialized in these means of production (therefore, dead labor
by now) has once been confirmed as being socially necessary through the
realization of their value at the time they were purchased. Still, after
they are productively consumed by living labor, society has yet to confirm
that it is determined to allocate the labor originally performed to produce
them into the new concrete material form they have acquired. Therefore, the
abstract labor originally materialized in them reappears in the value of
the use-values produced by using them, as it is confirmed again as being
socially necessary. In other words, living labor maintains the value of the
means of production  it consumes (that is, the socially necessary abstract
labor materialized in them that has been represented as the capacity of
these means of production for relating in exchange as commodities) as the
corresponding part of the value of the new commodity it produces.

Surplus-value is then the historically specific social relation into which
the exchange-value of a quantity of any use-value produced in the
labor-time that exceeds from the abstract labor represented as the
exchange-value materialized in the mass of use-values that conform the
means of living of the labor-power (thus determining a certain amount of
labor-power's exchange value) develops.

Through this social relation, surplus-value, the capitalist appropriates
the corresponding share in the total social production. Still, the
valorization of each individual capital is only a proportional part of the
total social valorization process, that is, of the general regulation of
present-day human life, where only a quantitative difference in that which
has the quality of being an exchange-value matters. Individual capitals
produce different proportions of surplus-value in a given time according to
their organic composition and the turnover-rate of their variable part. So
the specific social relation surplus-value develops into its concrete form
of the average profit of industrial capitals, that is, the general social
relation through which all individual capitals appropriate an aliquot part
of the total social surplus-value.

Once showed the complete general determination of use-value and value in
present-day society, the former remains just as what it is, a material form
(of course historically determined to be an use-value), lacking any
capacity for becoming a social relation itself; at the same time, value has
never ceased to be a purely social relation, to turn itself into some sort
of use-value. On the contrary, only because it is such purely social
relation, it has determined a material form, labor-power, as an use-value.
When living labor acts upon an existing use-value, it does not "transfer"
any materiality from the original use-value to the newly produced one, it
gives this materiality itself a new form. When waged living labor acts upon
the means of production, upon dead labor, it preserves the value of this
means by giving them a new material form. When waged living labor acts, it
does not "transfer" its value to the new commodities it produces, but
productively consumes its own value as a waged labor-power and creates in
this very production the value of the new commodities. 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.

Marx's "errors" concerning the source of surplus-value only exist in
Steve's fantasy, that has produced them in every sense. The results of
Steve's logical "dialectics of value/use-value", whatever such a procedure
might be, suffice to show that it falls far from the dialectical method
used by Marx to discover the real determinations of use-value and value by
reproducing the development, not of course of the concepts of use-value and
of value as Steve following Wagner believes, but of actual commodities in
thought.

Juan Inigo
jinigo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx



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