To Melvin

[MIYACHI <miyachi9@xxxxxxxxxx>]

To Melvin
Thanks to your reply
I comment two things.

Anyone that works themselves through the critique below (after my comments)
and explanation of value and Marx concept of "human labor in the abstract"
needs to be paid a kings ransom. The more enlightened comrades with a sense
of 
humor can e-mail me privately, get my bank account numbers and send me my
dough.

Here is how Karl Marx state matters:

"As values, commodities are social magnitudes, that is to say, something
absolutely different from their "properties" as "things."  As values, they
constitute only relations of men in their productive activity. Value indeed
"implies 
exchanges," but exchanges are exchanges of things between men, exchanges
which 
in no way affect the things as such. A thing retains the same "properties"
whether it is owned by A or by B. In actual fact, the concept "value"
presupposes "exchanges" of the products. Where labor is communal, the
relations of men 
in their social production do not manifest themselves as "values" of
"things." 
Exchange of products as commodities is a method of exchanging labor, (it
demonstrates) the dependence of the labor of each upon the labor of the
other (and 
correspond to) a certain mode of social labor or social production.

"In the first part of my book, I mentioned that it is characteristic of
labor 
based on private exchange that the social character of labor "manifest"
itself in a perverted form - as the "property" of things; that a social
relations 
appears as a relation between things (between products, values in use,
commodities). This appearance is accepted as something real by our
fetish-worshipper, 
and he actually believes that the exchange value of things is determined by
their properties as things, and is altogether a natural property of things.
No 
scientist to date has yet discovered what natural qualities make definite
proportions of snuff tobacco and paintings "equivalents" for one another.

"Thus he, the wiseacre, transforms value into something absolute, "a
property 
of things," instead of seeing in it only something relative, the relation of
things to social labor, social labor based on private exchange, in which
things are defined not as independent entities, but as mere expressions of
social 
production. 

"...Commodities express their exchange-value in money, first of all in the
price, in which they all present themselves as materialized forms of the
same 
labor, as only quantitatively different expressions of the same substance.
The 
fact that the exchange value of the commodity assumes an independent
existence 
in money is itself the result of the process of exchange, the development of
the contradiction of use-value and exchange value embodied in the commodity,
and of another no less important contradiction embodied in it, namely. That
the 
definite, particular labor of the private individual must manifest itself in
it's opposite, as equal, necessary, general labor and, in this form social
labor. The representation of the commodity as money implies not only that
the 
different magnitudes of commodity values are measured by expressing the
values in 
the use value of one exclusive commodity, but at the same time that they are
all expressed in a form in which they exist as the embodiment of social
labor 
and are therefore exchangeable for every other commodity, that they are
translatable at will into any use value desired. Their representation as
money - in 
the price - therefore appears first only as something nominal, a
representation, which is realized only through actual sale.


".... For its part, the development of capital already presupposes the full
development of the exchange value of commodities and consequently its
independent existence as money."

(Theories of Surplus Value Part III, page 129 last paragraph and 130.
Chapter 
XX Disintegration of the Ricardian School)

Marx further states:

"The fact that the value which has become independent acquires only a
relative expression in money, because money itself is a commodity, and hence
has a 
changeable value, makes no difference but is a shortcoming which arises from
the 
nature of the commodity and the necessity of expressing its exchange-value,
as distinct from its use value. Our author has made it abundantly clear that
he 
does "not know" this. This is shown by the kind of criticism, which would
like to talk out of existence the difficulties innate in the contradictory
functions of things themselves, by declaring them to be the result of
reflections or 
of conflicting definitions." (Page 132 first paragraph.)

>That is precisely what Marx called the fetishism of the commodity form. <

>Only a human being who grew up with the categories of the
commodity-producing society will recognize the hallucinatory property of
value/price in the first place, for it cannot be grasped on the material
level. <

>despite the fact that the real process has gone
by, the abstracted expenditure of human-social energy now appears  . . .  in
the form of money price.  However, since money as money
capital represents . . .
 
"valorization of value" . . . the concrete activity of the productive human
relationship
to nature takes place from the beginning merely with regard to the
abstraction, which has literally become real in the property of value
and money. "<


I believe I agree with this presentation - in the general sense, as I
understand its language and starting point, despite the fact that bourgeois
property 
relations is not distinguished for what it is. Nevertheless, it is certainly
true that a). Commodity production - the value form, and b). The bourgeois
property relations have evolved enough during the past century to radically
separate these two interactive components of the production process, in a
manner not 
possible during the radical transition from agriculture to industry and the
political revolution of the past century.

"(T)he concrete activity of the productive human relationship to nature
takes 
place from the beginning" (here is my confusion because your staring point
was not clear in my reading) on the basis of producing use-values. The
exchange 
relationship as a society force or the evolution of the exchange value form
as 
a societal force is based on a certain development of the material power of
production exclusively.

That is to say "a certain development of the material power of production"
that gives rise to - create, what we call social production.

Allow me to ignore what is called the fetish that attaches itself to
commodity production for a moment and a previous theory dispute over the
concept 
"class as entity" and define the meaning of social production. Marx uses the
words 
"social production" in a fluid way and it's meaning is determined by the
context he is describing. For instance in Marx famous passage in his Preface
to a 
Contribution to A Critique of Political Economy it is stated:

""In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations
that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of
production 
which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material
productive forces."

Here Marx uses social production outside of a defined stage of development
of 
the material power of production or in our case the commodity form of the
social product or the value form. This is not the meaning of social
production in 
our usage. Social production for us means the emergence of individual
producers - private producers, and the evolution of the exchange value form
as a 
societal force or what Marx call "social labor." Private producers in their
exchange relations manifest the social connection that is social labor.
Social 
production means the connection between producers as buyers and sellers as
it arose 
on the basis of one owning their instruments of production and offering it
for exchange. It seems you capture this mean by starting your reply with
labor 
in quotes ("labor").

  Please wait! This argument needs comments. Marx says;"As a general rule,
articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of
the labour of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on
their work independently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all
these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the
producers do not come into social contact with each other until they
exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer's
labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange."
  in other words, in capitalist society, we don't work as"social laborer".
We are laborer of private producer. If we work as " social laborer", product
of our production needs not receive the form of commodity.  Capitalist
production is mediated social production, and the mediator itselsf becomes
things( commodity, money and capital) On the contrary, in communism, social
production is immediate social production, so the product of its production
need not to receive the form of commodity.

    

Marx point of view is that society is inescapably headed along the path of
communist society and he defines this society as a transition in the mode of
production and after bourgeois property relations have been fundamentally
abolished.  Why is it that a section of our revolutionary intelligencia
attach 
important to "human labor in the abstract" outside the sphere of social
labor as it 
arose on the basis of individuals owning private means of production and the
evolution of the societal connection that is the form of value called
exchange 
value? After all it is this private ownership of means of production that
evolves into modern bourgeois relations of production with all its
consequences. 
That is to say that bourgeois property relations is the antagonism - not
just 
contradiction, that has to work itself out as the class struggle. Resolution
of 
antagonism doesn't resolve contradiction but changes the form of resolution
of contradiction when the difference is grasped by the masses - advanced
revolutionaries. 

Please describe the bourgeois property relations as distinct from the
commodity form and its various value forms.

 Melvin, please consider the private character of bourgeois production. It
is not social labor, and social production. It is charactered by private
labor, private production.

Please. Also may I ask for your insight into the role of gold in developing
the value form and the break of the system of landed property as the primary
form of wealth of society?
 
 I cannot answer your question, especially landed property. But as for role
of gold, please read carefullly Capital's part of form of value, in which
Marx unveils the secret of money, This part is the critical point Marx
writes and rewrites untill "Capital" is completed, in fact in first edition
of Capital(not yet translated into English), this part is very different
from our fourth edition(Engels Edition)


Peace. 

Melvin P. 




>The term "labor" is a constitutive element for all modern societies in
two respects, namely, in an economical-structural and in an
ethical-moral sense.  Enlightened liberalism secularized and integrated
the Christian masochism of suffering. The Protestant work ethic thus
found its place in Marxism as a bourgeois legacy. Similarly, the
classics of bourgeois economics (and later, Marx) incorporated the
positive Protestant category of labor in their theories. This was not
merely a speculative theoretical postulate, but rather the theoretical
counterpart of the unfolding capitalist mode of production. In this
historically limited conception, "labor" (i.e. the expenditure of human
energy for the purpose of social (re)production) emerges as the
substance of economic value. In turn, the discernible form of the
substance of value is money (the selected "universal commodity"). That
is, considered as objects of labor, commodities are objects that
"contain" value and have money prices.  This is a positive and
internalized connection, from the standpoint of bourgeois
subjectivity. And in so far as Marx himself argues within an affirmative
context of modernization, this "positivation" shows up in his work as well.
When 
one reads the Marxian work in this sense, it turns out to be a descendant of
liberal ideology and classical economics. This descendant kills its
progenitor 
on the one hand, but still carries its birthmarks on the other. It is
exactly 
this positivistic side of Marx which forms the "exoteric" Marx of the labor
movement and class struggle. The emphasis on surplus-value as the capitalist
form of "unpaid labor" and the implied, structurally determined
"exploitation" of 
workers by capitalists, recommends somehow the need to claim "the entire
value" for the "working class." By the same token, value and "labor" as
categories 
of form and substance of capitalist society are "positivized" (made
positive) 
into ontological, transhistorical conditions of human existence.  Social
contradiction thus dissolves into subjective relations of intent, since the
structural categories become a neutral, positive, ontological, and silent a
priori. 
Consequently, it seems that the essence of capitalism is that one class is
the 
subject of domination and oppresses another class - the "working class",
which is the subject of labor - for the benefit of material wealth and
well-being 
of the "ruling class". However, albeit fuzzy and inconsistent in its terms
and 
presentation, the deeper dimension of the Marxian Theory implies a totally
different interpretation. In this reading, "labor" suddenly no longer
appears to 
be a positive substance but rather a negative one; and accordingly, value
represents the form of a negative mode of social reproduction
(Vergesellschaftung). The appearance of labor as the substance of value is
real and objective,
but it is real and objective only within the modern commodity-producing
system. 
The practical activity of society within the "metabolism of nature" (Marx)
has, in no other mode of production and mode of living, assumed the
substantial 
status of the socially-general (all-embracing) abstraction of "labor" and
dominated the whole process of reproduction in the form of value.  Within
this 
system, money is the tangible form of the appearance of value, which is
linked to 
itself. In the self-expanding movement of capital, which breeds money out of
money, money becomes to a relentless and restless end-in-itself. But if
"labor" 
is the substance of value, and thus the substance of money, one therefore
has 
to describe labor too as an end-in-itself: it is the self-referring and
permanent
alienated expenditure (Entäußerung) of human energy. The mediating
character of "labor" in the "metabolism with nature" and the mediating
character of money in the social metabolism of society transformed into
an end-in-itself and thus determine the actions of the empirical
subjects. It is precisely this tautological, systemic self-reference
that renders "labor" to "labor" and money to money. Marx calls this
paradoxical and irrational achievement of independence of the means (or
medium) the "automatic subject" of the modern age.  Far from being the
subjects of the story, the owners of capital and, likewise, the
managers, prove to be mere functionaries of the "automatic subject,"
which operates beyond their aims. Incidentally, the gratifications for
the members of the so-called "ruling class" seem to be almost derisory
in relation to the strains they experience, their "luxury" lags far
behind that of all pre-modern elites, and, moreover, has become more and
more 
stupid and scanty along capitalist development. This conception of the
capitalist mode of production and mode of living strongly suggests the
notion of 
(objectified) "utilization" of the capacity-for-labor, rather than the term
of 
"exploitation" (subjectively perceived, and sociologically restricted).
Wage-labor is not withheld directly from its own social product. Rather, the
social 
production of wealth itself is subordinated to the systemic restrictions of
the 
monstrous end-in-itself.  Following from the self-referentiality of the
quasi-independent means ("labor") or medium (money), paradoxical "social
relations 
between things" (Marx) arise wherein the humans interact not directly but
remain primarily isolated from each other. Their social
interaction only takes place secondarily via the value-property of the
labor products. That is precisely what Marx called the fetishism of the
commodity form. The use of the natural and social resources does not
take place through the conscious mutual regulation by social
institutions in advance, but through the blind expenditure of
labor-energy for anonymous markets. This expenditure of abstract
labor-energy can prove itself to be socially coherent only a posteriori,
"behind the backs" of the acting subjects in a likewise blind,
objectified, and systemically conformed manner. Social coherence is
therefore never guaranteed (as is well known, Adam Smith acclaimed this
point with the topos of the "invisible hand," despite the evident
frictions of such blind social dynamics (Vergesellschaftung)).  With
this fetishism, where the social dynamics appear to be dynamics between
things (which is the essence of the "automatic subject"), a relation
between form and substantial content is established that is both real
and hallucinatory. The concrete human activity of transforming the
elements of nature remains unsocial (a matter of "business
administration"), although it is from the beginning not self-sufficient, but
aimed at a context of universal and mutual dependency. The merely secondary
social validation through the market necessitates two things:
firstly, that productive activity is stripped of every concrete
character, i.e., abstracted to pure "expenditure of human brains,
nerves, and muscles" (Marx) in order to make the qualitatively different
activities and goods commensurable in the exchange of
commodities. Secondly, despite the fact that the real process has gone
by, the abstracted expenditure of human-social energy now appears (in
the particular quantification of the respective level of productivity)
to be a social property and substance of the products and, in turn, this
substance acquires its expression by the selected "universal commodity"
(money) in the form of money price.  However, since money as money
capital represents the all-embracing and self-referential element in the
"valorization of value" (and to this extend it represents the point of
departure), the concrete activity of the productive human relationship
to nature takes place from the beginning merely with regard to the
abstraction, which has literally become real in the property of value
and money. Thus the reversal of means and end has its correspondence in
the reversal of concrete and abstract; now the concretum is merely the
expression of the abstractum, instead of the inverse. Hence, the
so-called "concrete labor" and the correlated spectrum of the
"use-values" represent not the "good", need-oriented side of the system,
but itself the mere concrete form of appearance of the real abstraction,
because the concrete operation of production appears on the social level
only as the medium of this abstraction. Concrete labor stands not for
itself, but is subject to the dictates of the "valorization of value,"
and, therefore, causes also irrational and destructive results on the
level of use-value in spite of the better judgement of all participants,
who remain fettered to the structural force of the system. Of course,
the value-property of the products, which serve as carriers of the
expended and abstract "labor-substance", is hallucinatory. This is
because, firstly, the aspect of abstract expenditure of human energy of
the producing activity can not really be removed from the
material-sensory character of "concrete labor". This process takes place
only in the "abstractifying" social unconsciousness as an implicit
automatism, albeit producing a material result: money. It is through
money that society encounters its own unconscious abstraction as an
independent, alienated power. Secondly, since it is a matter of a living
process, one can also not get hold of the producing activity as
abstracted matter sui generis in "congealed" form in the products. The
members of society who are socially isolated from each other, and are
being mediated by the products a posteriori, must thus hallucinate their
bygone respective "labor" as a property of the products (and, moreover,
with respect to the systemic feedback, they must already start the
respective activity of production under this abstract and hallucinatory
reification). Only a human being who grew up with the categories of the
commodity-producing society will recognize the hallucinatory property of
value/price in the first place, for it cannot be grasped on the material
level. However, this fetishistic hallucination is not an arbitrary and
accidental one: the socially valid amount of labor fitting to the
respective level of productivity must actually be expended. The
capitalist end-in-itself gains firmness and the ability of reproduction
only as a socially-hallucinatory relation of past, actually expended
quota of labor (in concrete-sensory form).  The Marxian analysis of the
capitalist deep structure, with its immanent fetishism, reveals the
negative character of the labor-substance and its value-form. This
crucial point has been ignored bashfully by the Marxism of the labor
movement, and has been dismissed by the official economic science as
"philosophical nonsense"