[PEN-L:2425] Re: The V-word

[Gilbert Skillman <gskillman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Alan  writes:

> Value: a simple challenge
>
> I found Jim Devine's posts [PEN-L 2305;9 Jan,PEN-L 2323/4:11
> Jan] thought-provoking and agreed with much of them. I
> haven't been taking part in what seems an interesting PKT
> discussion and didn't go to the ASSA. But the discussion
> with Gil is not new to me so I hope no-one objects to my
> horning in.

[Although it may not clear from Jim Devine's posts, Alan, the
discussion might yet  be new to you, to the extent it aspires to be
relevant to my ASSA paper, since the issues raised there connect
only indirectly to those addressed in our earlier PEN-L exchange and in the
session with Andrew at the URPE summer conference.  That said, I
for one welcome your "horning in."]

> I pose a simple question:
>
>    (i) does value exist? Is there such a thing?
>
> If participants in this discussion could say where there is
> agreement or disagreement on this simple question maybe we
> could get onto a more substantive discussion:

>    (ii) what is it? what are its axioms?
>
> or, if they think it doesn't exist
>
>    (iii) what can we do without it?

I suspect that answering a question as broad as (i), even though I
affirm it emphatically, can establish only the ground of probable,
perhaps even necessary, disagreement as to its role in political
economy.  To explain why this is true I have to start at a level more
general than the strictly economic context I think Alan intends.

At the most basic level, value is what induces or compels each of us
to structure the world in a particular way.  To make a distinction is
to exercise a judgment concerning value.

_Once made_, any such structure of differentiation appears to conform
to certain regularities; this is the essential point made in LAWS OF FORM
by George Spencer-Brown.  However, _which_ structure of differentiation
is imposed, i.e., which value judgment is exercised, is to some
degree individual-specific and thus indeterminate.  This assessment
is argued by Gregory Bateson in MIND AND NATURE.

Not *totally* indeterminate, of course, because we are social beings,
so values are to some extent formed, transmitted, and thus shared, on
the basis of social interactions.  But nothing guarantees that this
social transmission process eliminates individual, or by extension,
class variations in conceptions of value and the constructions they
imply.

This is Mannheim's point in IDEOLOGY AND UTOPIA,
though he also argues that to some extent intellectuals can  transcend
this limitation by constructing an appropriate synthesis of  competing
class-specific viewpoints.  He didn't, alas, spell out the criteria
for "appropriateness" of such syntheses, or explain why intellectuals
wouldn't impose their own class biases in selecting such criteria.
However, even if the standard of appropriateness is not clear, I
think one can still insist, based on commonly identifiable social experiences,
on the relevance of such concepts as class.  [That's why, despite the
foregoing comments, I'm not a post-modernist.] [But the foregoing
does indicate why I don't entertain any presumption that I can convince a
post-modernist that s/he is "wrong."]

Applying these considerations to the narrower category of value
understood in an economic sense, I'd say there is necessarily
agreement that value exists, but probably, perhaps necessarily,
disagreement as to its essential content or relevant manifestations.
There are any number of possible standards of value, some of which we
are familiar with:  socially necessary labor time; socially necessary
expenditure of energy; (marginal) utility.  Each approach illuminates
certain phenomena and ignores others.  The legitimacy of their
respective inclusions and exclusions is, of course, a value judgment
in the broader sense.

Even within a given tradition of defining value, there are
fundamental differences of interpretation, as illustrated for example
in ongoing debates over the "transformation problem."  To take a more
specific example, Alan and Andrew Kliman have expressed the value of
a commodity at some time t  as depending on the prices of input
commodities at time t-1.  This practice admits violations of Marx's
explicit stipulations concerning the definition of value (I, p. 130,
Penguin edition):

     "Commodities which contain equal quantities of labour, or which
can be produced in the same time, have therefore the same
value....The value of a commodity would therefore remain constant, if
the labour-time required for its production also remained constant."

These conditions are not satisfied by the Freeman-McGlone formulation,
since variations in (t-1) prices can affect period-t values of
*individual* commodities, holding  socially necessary labor time constant.

By adopting this formulation, however, they are able to restore the
"invariance" properties that Marx asserts with respect to transformed values,
which are *in general necessarily violated* if one adopts his strict
definition of commodity values, and consistently transforms both
input and output values into prices (Marx recognized the formal need
to do this, but considered the omitted step in his Volume III
transformation a mere matter of detail; see III, pp. 264-5, Penguin
edition).  Similar considerations appear to motivate the less
extensive modifications introduced by the "new solution" to the transformation
problem; see e.g. Duncan Foley's 1982 RRPE article.

What's going on here?  The basic problem, as argued in a paper I'm
now struggling to finish, is that Marx asserts at least two
manifestations of the "law of value", at disaggregate and aggregate
levels respectively, which are in general mutually inconsistent given
his construction of a commodity's value.  Thus one must relax this
construction in some way (changing the definition of the value of
labor power, say, as in the "new solution" approach, or that for the
value of any commodity, as in the "single system" approach) to
eliminate the inconsistency.

[Related comment:  I suggest the reason that Marx is so casual in his
references to "value", seeming at some points to measure it in terms
of money rather than labor units, is because he believed--wrongly, as
it turns out-- that his disaggregate and aggregate notions of value were
mutually compatible. Just a suggestion.]

But these involve different conceptions of value based on different
value judgments concerning what really matters in political economic
explanation.  Neo-Ricardians, for example, see no particular problem
in the inconsistency of Marx's strict construction of value with his
invariance conditions, and thus see no need to adopt the
modifications outlined above.

Later in his post, Alan writes:

> My impression is that for some writers - certainly I have this
> feeling about what Gil has been saying - the real target is
> not particularly Marx's concept of value but any concept of value
> at all. I could be wrong, but in that case a little clarity
> would go a long way.

Granting that *any* concept of value may allow certain insights and
suffer from certain forms of blindness, I have made two particular
criticisms of Marx's concept of value:  the first concerns Marx's
claim that a particular conception of value--that based on socially
necessary labor time--can be derived from the mere fact of
(systematic) commodity exchange. [Related to this is the argument,
suggested above, that Marx holds mutually inconsistent views
concerning manifestations of the "law of value", but that argument is
still under construction).  The second concerns Marx's account
of capitalist exploitation, and the role played by the labor-labor
power distinction in that account.  These criticisms *are*
necessarily specific to Marx's conception of value.

> If value itself is to go  - this proposal is made seriously,
> not to hold any project up to ridicule - what should be done
> is to show how the whole of economics, not just one or two parts,
> can be reconstructed without the concept of value or any
> conceptual equivalent.

 I don't propose to let "value itself" go.

> But then we should settle accounts not with Marx, but the
> rest of the economics profession. Marx isn't responsible for
> the concept of value: all economists use it. All poor Marx
> does is examine the concept rigorously. Why single him out?

In my case, anyway, the purpose is not to "single Marx out" for
criticism or ridicule, but to show that, while certain of his
value-theoretic claims are false, he achieves other, more fundamental
insights which are most comprehensively and coherently understood in
terms independent of his understanding of the "law of value."

> And let's hear it from Gil: is there such a thing as value?

Well, you have my answer.  The bottom line, for me, is that there are
certain essential aspects of capitalism (such as the role of
subsumption in capitalist exploitation) which Marx's conception of
value is incapable of explaining, whether or not Marx asserted
otherwise.  At the same time, I believe that Marx has raised the
right questions about many of these fundamental issues, and thus that we can
best pursue his agenda by reconstructing his foundations (or perhaps,
just emphasizing and extending *his own*  historically-contingent
strategic foundations in preference to his faulty value-theoretic
one...).

In solidarity, Gil Skillman