Re: Marx and value--a potential critique.

[kls@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Hinrich Kuhls)]

At 19:47 07.05.1996 EDT, boddhisatva <kbevans@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>       The problem is with the interpretation and use of the Labor Theory of
>Value.  People want to go from the axiom that "all value is created by labor"
>to an incorrect converse that "all labor creates value".  All labor does is
>tire people out.  The fact is that the value of their labor cannot be known
>until after they have done it, and is therefore an independent event. 
>Consumers define value, that is also axiomatic. The producer makes a guess as
>to what his labor will be worth to his fellow worker, and his fellow worker
>takes a guess how much he should really pay for the product.  These 
>decisions are independent. although the consumer and producer are 
>interdependent.

Karl:

On the surface of bourgeois society the wage of the labourer appears as the
price of labour, a certain quantity of money that is paid for a certain
quantity of labour. Thus people speak of the value of labour and call its
expression in money its necessary or natural price. On the other hand they
speak of the market-prices of labour, i.e., prices oscillating above or
below its natural price.

But what is the value of a commodity? The objective form of the social
labour expended in its production. And how do we measure the quantity of
this value? By the quantity of the labour contained in it. How then is the
value, e.g., of a 12 hour working-day to be determined?. By the 12
working-hours contained in a working-day of 12 hours, which is an absurd
tautology.

In order to be sold as a commodity in the market, labour must at all events
exist before it is sold. But, could the labourer give it an independent
objective existence, he would sell a commodity and not labour.

Apart from these contradictions, a direct exchange of money, i.e., of
realized labour, with living labour would either do away with the law of
value which only begins to develop itself freely on the basis of capitalist
production, or do away with capitalist production itself, which rests
directly on wage-labour. ... This equalization of unequal quantities not
merely does away with the determination of value. Such a self-destructive
contradiction cannot be in any way even enunciated or formulated as a law. ...

In the expression "value of labour," the idea of value is not only
completely obliterated, but actually reversed. It is an expression as
imaginary as the value of the earth. These imaginary expressions, arise,
however, from the relations of production themselves. They are categories
for the phenomenal forms of essential relations. That in their appearance
things often represent themselves in inverted form is pretty well known in
every science except Political Economy.

Classical Political Economy borrowed from every-day life the category "price
of labour" without further criticism, and then simply asked the question,
how is this price determined? It soon recognized that the change in the
relations of demand and supply explained in regard to the price of labour,
as of all other commodities, nothing except its changes i.e., the
oscillations of the market-price above or below a certain mean. If demand
and supply balance, the oscillation of prices ceases, all other conditions
remaining the same. But then demand and supply also cease to explain
anything. The price of labour, at the moment when demand and supply are in
equilibrium, is its natural price, determined independently of the relation
of demand and supply. And how this price is determined is just the question.

Or a larger period of oscillations in the market-price is taken, e.g., a
year, and they are found to cancel one the other, leaving a mean average
quantity, a relatively constant magnitude. This had naturally to be
determined otherwise than by its own compensating variations. This price
which always finally predominates over the accidental market-prices of
labour and regulates them, this "necessary price" (Physiocrats) or "natural
price" of labour (Adam Smith) can, as with all other commodities, be nothing
else than its value expressed in money. In this way Political Economy
expected to penetrate athwart the accidental prices of labour, to the value
of labour. As with other commodities, this value was determined by the cost
of production.

But what is the cost of production - of the labourer, i.e., the cost of
producing or reproducing the labourer himself? This question unconsciously
substituted itself in Political Economy for the original one; for the search
after the cost of production of labour as such turned in a circle and never
left the spot. What economists therefore call value of labour, is in fact
the value of labour-power, as it exists in the personality of the labourer,
which is as different from its function, labour, as a machine is from the
work it performs. Occupied with the difference between the market-price of
labour and its so-called value, with the relation of this value to the rate
of profit, and to the values of the commodities produced by means of labour,
&tc., they never discovered that the course of the analysis had led not only
>from the market-prices of labour to its presumed value, but had led to the
resolution of this value of labour itself into the value of labour-power.
Classical economy never arrived at a consciousness of the results of its own
analysis; it accepted uncritically the categories "value of labour,"
"natural price of labour," &tc.,. as final and as adequate expressions for
the value-relation under consideration, and was thus led, as will be seen
later, into inextricable confusion and contradiction, while it offered to
the vulgar economists a secure basis of operations for their shallowness,
which on principle worships appearances only.

Let us next see how value (and price) of labour-power, present themselves in
this transformed condition as wages. ...

The wage-form thus extinguishes every trace of the division of the
working-day into necessary labour and surplus-labour, into paid and unpaid
labour. All labour appears as paid labour. In the corvée, the labour of the
worker for himself, and his compulsory labour for his lord, differ in space
and time in the clearest possible way. In slave 1abour, even that part of
the working-day in which the slave is only replacing the value of his own
means of existence, in which, therefore, in fact, he works for himself
alone, appears as labour for his master. All the slave's labour appears as
unpaid labour.  In wage labour, on the contrary, even surplus-labour, or
unpaid labour, appears as paid. There the property-relation conceals the
labour of the slave for himself; here the money-relation conceals the
unrequited labour of the wage labourer.

Hence, we may understand the decisive importance of the transformation of
value and price of labour-power into the form of wages, or into the value
and price of labour itself. This phenomenal form, which makes the actual
relation invisible, and, indeed, shows the direct opposite of that relation,
forms the basis of all the juridical notions of both labourer and
capitalist, of all the mystifications of the capitalistic mode of
production, of all its illusions as to liberty, of all the apologetic shifts
of the vulgar economists.

If history took a long time to get at the bottom of the mystery of wages,
nothing, on the other hand, is more easy to understand than the necessity,
the raison d' etre, of this phenomenon.

The exchange between capital and labour at first presents itself to the mind
in the same guise as the buying and selling of all other commodities. The
buyer gives a certain sum of money, the seller an article of a nature
different from money. ...

That this same labour is, on the other hand, the universal value-creating
element, and thus possesses a property by which it differs from all other
commodities, is beyond the cognizance of the ordinary mind.

Let us put ourselves in the place of the labourer who receives for 12 hours'
labour, say the value produced by 6 hours' labour, say 3s. For him, in fact,
his 12 hours' labour is the means of buying the 3s. The value of his
labour-power may vary, with the value of his usual means of subsistence,
>from 3 to 4 shillings, or from 3 to 2 shillings; or, if the value of his
labour-power remains constant, its price may, in consequence of changing
relations of demand and supply, rise to 4s. or fall to 2s. He always gives
12 hours of labour. Every change in the amount of the equivalent that he
receives appears to him, therefore, necessarily as a change in the value or
price of his 12 hours' work. This circumstance misled Adam Smith, who
treated the working-day as a constant quantity, to the assertion that the
value of labour is constant, although the value of the means of subsistence
may vary, and the same working-day, therefore, may represent itself in more
or less money for the labourer.

Let us consider, on the other hand, the capitalist. He wishes to receive as
much labour as possible for as little money as possible. Practically,
therefore, the only thing that interests him is the difference between the
price of labour-power and the value which its function creates. But, then,
he tries to buy all commodities as cheaply as possible, and always accounts
for his profit by simple cheating, by buying under, and selling over the
value. Hence, he never comes to see that, if such a thing as the value of
labour really existed, and he really paid this value, no capital would
exist, his money would not be turned into capital. ...

For the rest, in respect to the phenomenal form, "value and price of
labour," or "wages," as contrasted with the essential relation manifested
therein, viz., the value and price of labour-power, the same difference
holds that holds in respect to all phenomena and their hidden substratum.
The former appear directly and spontaneously as current modes of thought;
the latter must first be discovered by science. Classical Political Economy
nearly touches the true relation of things, without, however, consciously
formulating it. This it cannot, so long as it sticks in its bourgeois skin.

from: http://csf.Colorado.EDU/psn/marx/Archive/1867-C1/Part6/ch19.htm




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