[OPE-L] Albritton on Arthur

["Hans G. Ehrbar" <ehrbar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris,

Your statement that use-value and value are not like north and south
echoes things Marx says in "Notes on Wagner".  Use-value and value
are not two aspects of the same thing.  The error to think they are
is sometimes called "central conflation."

This does not mean they cannot have a dialectical relationship
with each other.  Marx writes in "Notes on Wagner", MECW 24, p.544/5,
or MEW 19, p. 368/9:

 Thus I do not divide *value* into use-value and
 exchange-value as opposites into which the abstraction
 ``value'' splits up, but the *concrete social form* of the
 product of labor, the ``*commodity*,'' is on the one hand,
 use-value and on the other, ``value,'' ...

and in the First edition of Capital, MEGA II/5, p. 51, or
Fischer Studienausgabe p. 246, Marx says:

 The commodity is *immediate unity of use-value and
 exchange-value*, i.e., of two opposite moments.  It is,
 therefore, an immediate *contradiction*.  This
 contradiction must develop as soon as the commodity is not,
 as it has been so far, analytically considered once under
 the angle of use-value, once under the angle of
 exchange-value, but as soon as it is placed as a whole into
 an actual relation with other commodities.  The *actual*
 relation of commodities with each other, however, is their
 *exchange process*.

I.e., use-value and value develop a relationship with each
other only because they are combined in the commodity.  They
are like two strangers who have little or nothing in common
but who find themselves both stranded on a deserted island
and therefore start relating to each other.  (Of course this
metaphor limps in many ways, but I think it is sometimes
useful to think of it like that.)

Hans.