[OPE-L:3459] Re: Re: Re: Re: measurement of value

[Paul Cockshott <wpc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 21:19 08/06/00 -0400, you wrote:
> Re3453
> Dear Andrew B,
>
>
> I do think Marx is building socially validated into his definition of
> value, so that while commodities may have an ideal price before sale, they
> precisely are not yet values. As values, they do not yet exist and they are
> yet not real, though they do in fact have an imaginary price.
>
> I just don't see any other way of reading the following:
>
> "in order therefore that a commodity may in practice operate effectively as
> exchagne value, it must divest itself of its natural physical body and
> become transformed from merely imaginary into real gold, although this act
> of transubstantiation may be more 'troublesome' for it than the transition
> from necessity to freedom for the Hegelian 'concept', the casting of his
> shell for a lobster,, or the putting oof the old Adam for Saint Jerome.
> THough a commodity may, alongside its real shape (iron, fi), possess an
> ideal value shape or an imagined gold shape in the form of its price, it
> cannot simultaneously be both real iron and real gold. To establish its
> price it is sufficient for it to be equated with gold in the imagination.
> But to enable it to render its owner the service of the universal
> equivalent, it must actually be replaced by gold.,," Capital 1, Vintage,
> p.193


I think that you are confusing value with exchange value here. To operate
effectively as an exchange value it must be sold, but it has value
independently
of being sold. Value and exchange value are not the same thing. Exchange
value is the form of representation of value to the economic agents, but is
not itself value.