----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2003 7:22
AM
Subject: (OPE-L) Re: is value
labour?
Paul C wrote on May 06:
> I would say that value is labour, and that value becomes
> manifest in commodity producing societies in the form of
> exchange value.
To begin with, value isn't labour because
labour is an activity
which creates value. Terminology such as
"objectified labour"
and labour in "crystalline" form seems to me to
be fundamentally
confused. One should differentiate
between the products of
labour and the activity of labour.
Perhaps Marx was influenced
by references in the sciences to petrified trees,
fossils,
crystalization, etc. -- if so it was a poor application of concepts
from the natural
sciences to the subject of political economy. Also,
for the same
reason, I think that the proposition that commodities
are "containers"
of value is misleading -- commodities _represent_
value rather than
"contain" value.
Additionally, I think the proposition that value
is labour
is mistaken because it fails to differentiate
among the_ forms_ that
labour can take: only labour of a quite specific
form (socially-
necessary-labor) can _create_ value.
Further, if value is labour, then what is
'not-value'?
> If one believes that there is a
unity of the process of
> capitalist production and
circulation then value is something
> specific to the nature of the
commodity-form
> Why? this is a non-sequitur.
How can ones belief about some
> particularity of the capitalist mode
of production - the unity of
> production and circulation ( whatever
that means ), lead to
> conclusions about other modes of
production - namely that value
> is absent from them.
> One might as well say that because I believe that all
>
capitalist economies use coin , coins do not
> exist in non-capitalist
economies.
I explained what I meant in the following two
sentences from my
previous post -- one indeed begins "In other
words".
My point did not fundamentally concern whether
there is or is
not value in non-capitalist modes of production
-- rather I was
trying to explain how the issue isn't "whether
one thinks that
value is essentially something specific to
exchange", but
rather how value in bourgeois
society requires the presence
of specific processes of production and
circulation and that
an analysis of the subject matter reveals the
necessary
and systematic connections between
these processes.
If we are committed ontologically to drawing out
these
connections then we see that value is "something
specific"
to the nature of the commodity produced in
bourgeois society
and hence we can observe that value _is_
something specific
to a particular _form_ of (capitalist)
production _and_
circulation (and hence
exchange).
In solidarity, Jerry