[PEN-L:2389] Re: The V-word

[JDevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (James Devine)]

Responding to Alan Freeman, and paraphrasing Richard Nixon, I
want to make one thing perfectly clear: just because I find the
_phrase_ "theory of value" to be muddled in the literature and
in academic discussion, it doesn't mean that I reject the
concept and usefulness of value or theories of value. Alan and
I agree on the importance of clarity. My emphasis is on doing
the methodological groundwork before jumping into value theory.

I think the Marxian "meta-economic vision" or "problematic" or
whatever you want to call it almost automatically implies that the
concept of "socially necessary abstract labor time" (i.e., value)
is central to the political economy, helping us to address the
questions of the sort that Alan mentions.

If that's what's meant by the phrase "theory of value" or "the
law of value," I say: all power to it. But these phrases get
misused, so that one person's "labor theory of value" is a simple
theory of price determination applying matrix algebra to crank
out prices of production while another's is a theory of social
relations and yet another's vague whipping-horse for trashing
Marxism. The point is that I think that it's useful to talk about
"economic visions" _before_ getting to value.

Mike Meeropol writes that >>I still haven't been convinced that
[Marx] or his followers have made a good enough case for that
particular yardstick [human effort, value]. the biosphere, the
"gaia-given" resources make significant contributions and their
abuse changes the type of human effort needed to produce things
drastically over the eons!<<

I am pushed to ask: "yardstick for what?"  As far as I can tell,
Marx never used value as a _moral_ yardstick, at least not
measuring his own morality; "value theory" is not primarily a
normative theory. Obviously, for a normative theory as for a
positive theory, human society's impact on nature (and nature's
impact on humanity) is crucial.

My understanding is of "value theory" that, at a relatively high
level of abstraction, Marx was examining the political economy as
a societal division of labor, a process of people creating their
own history by producing goods and services, of course without
conscious central planning. Specifically, he focused on
commodity-producing society, including capitalism. In such a
context, value represents a "yardstick": in each production
process, workers contribute a certain amount of something to the
"societal factory." The actual value of that something depends on
the unconscious decision of society (or rather the unintended
consequence of many conscious decisions).

Of course, someone's contribution to the societal pool of value
seldom corresponds to his or her ability to claim parts of that
pool: thus we have exploitation. ("Exploitation" means either the
creation of a surplus-value, unequal exchange, a mere
redistribution of existing value or surplus-value, or direct and
simple rip-offs, as when the loan-shark uses his enforcer to
threaten to break your legs if you don't pay 100% interest per
week.)

Now one's ability to claim part of societal value depends on such
things as market prices, where issues of natural scarcity come in.
Further, of course, nature also helps us determine how much value
we produce -- as Mike points out and Marx never denied. (In the
sexist metaphor that Marx uses, nature was the mother, labor the
father.) Marxian value is a purely society-oriented concept or
yardstick, not one which measures what's good for nature or the
extent of harmony between society and nature.

Massimo De Angelis writes that in the "perspective of capital,"
machines and people "both are treated as inputs of production."
To that, I would add nature (to the extent to which it can be
appropriated).

This points to the fact that _under commodity production_, value
(or its form, price) ends up being the measure of all, the
"moral yardstick." Under capitalism, further, it is
surplus-value (or its form, profit) that ends up being the moral
yardstick. Capitalism is the ultimate modernist, the ultimate
essentialist, reducing everything to a single metric, dollars
and cents.

Of course, that "morality" is _immoral_ to those of us of the
socialist bent, who would see the contradiction between
use-value and exchange-value and stress _the former_ as a better
yardstick. This would include "coming to harmonious relations
with nature" which seems to be very difficult to quantify, to
actually turn into a yardstick.

According to Cornell West, Marx's main method of moral
argumentation was to contrast morality in theory with practice.
In CAPITAL, he seems to applied this strategy: using simple
commodity production's standard of morality of exchange at
value, he shows that profits are in effect "immoral,"
exploitative. (He also did a lot of _positive_ economic
theorizing, of course. As usual, it's damn difficult to separate
normative from positive.)

Of course, this is the morality of "bourgeois right" (in
CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAMME), of "from each according to
ability, to each according to work." The communist principle of
"from each according to ability, to each according to need"
seems more up Marx's alley.

(BTW, the CRITIQUE has a pocket summary of Marx's value theory in
part I.)

in pen-l solidarity,

Jim Devine   jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ.
7900 Loyola Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90045-8410 USA
310/338-2948 (daytime, during workweek); FAX: 310/338-1950
"Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way
and let people talk.) -- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A.