Re: [Marxism] meaning of labor time in Capital

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

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Value as a historical thing

Capitalism, as a  commodity-producing system, is a Value system. Value 
describes the presence and  activity of human beings in the production of 
social 
life under specific  historic conditions. It is above all a social 
relation. It emerges in human  society at a particular stage of its 
development. 
Once the productive forces of  society have developed sufficiently, and with it 
the division of labor; exchange  and "the market" become possible. Once 
this occurs, the commodity emerges on the  stage of human history, and with it, 
Value: "This division of a product into a  useful thing and a value becomes 
practically important, only when exchange has  acquired such an extension 
that useful articles are produced for the purpose of  being exchanged, and 
their character as values has therefore to be taken into  account, beforehand, 
during production." (Marx, 1967: 78) Evidence of exchange,  and presumably 
production for exchange extends into pre-written history, and  played a 
substantial role in the pre-industrial era, although not in the same  
"predominating and characteristic manner as now-a-days." (Marx, 1967: 86; also  
see, 
e.g., Pound (1989), Frank (1998), Engels (1895))

With  production for exchange, the commodity is born, and with the 
commodity, Value,  and the subordination of human beings to things, the 
masquerading 
of human  relations as relations between things. In commodity production's 
most complete  and dominating expression, the capitalist system, labor power 
becomes a  commodity, and the Law of Value -- that commodities exchange on 
the basis of the  socially necessary labor contained in them[2] -- dominates 
and regulates the  economy and the lives of those bound up in capitalist 
production  relations.

A distinction should be made between "exchange", and  other methods of 
distributing social wealth, e.g., "sharing" or "contributing".  That is, there 
is a wide range of social production that takes place not for  exchange. This 
could include production for immediate use in the commune or  other 
relatively small social groupings, or at a much grander scale under  different 
production relations. In addition, there are areas of social life that  have 
historically been outside of commodity relations, although those areas are  
being rapidly levelled and commodified under capitalism today. This distinction 
 is important because it helps to delineate the possible roles of human 
beings in  the production of social life. These roles are historic ones, 
activity under  particular conditions, bounded by the dominant production 
relations. Terms like  "work", "labor", "the job" become imbued with particular 
meaning by social  circumstances. The buying and selling of labor power does 
not 
describe the  totality of possible relationships to production. Value does 
not encompass all  forms of the production of social life, and not all areas 
of human activity are  Value-producing. If goods are produced for use or 
immediate consumption, that  is, they are not produced for exchange; if the 
social division of labor is such  that the bulk of productive effort is not 
specialized or rather widely shared,  if the legal constructions of ownership 
are impractical or non-existent, Value  does not exist. Human activity 
continues, though not necessarily as the Value  relationship, and as a result 
not 
with the mantle of "job" or "work" a la  Maynard G. Krebs.

If Value has a historical beginning, and only  exists as a social relation 
under certain conditions, we can see, and theorize  conditions where it does 
not exist. A pre-Value world is a society of original  communism, where 
"communism" describes a form of economic organization based on  the organizing 
principle of from each according to ability, to each according to  need, 
under conditions of what might be described as "absolute scarcity". We can  
imagine also a communism based on "absolute  abundance."

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