Re: (OPE-L) is value labour?

From: Howard Engelskirchen (hengels@ZOOM-DSL.COM)
Date: Fri May 09 2003 - 23:53:52 EDT

I think Jerry is right to hesitate at taking literally the idea of value as
embodied or crystallized labor, but not because there is anything
particularly strange about activity being materialized.  The problem, as has
been mentioned, is that labor embodied is still concrete labor so our
understanding of abstract labor as value has not advanced.

We could say that abstract labor is just a way of keeping accounts, a
conceptual average, a thought category we use to think about the concrete
labors to which it refers.  But that doesn't seem to be Marx's meaning at
all.  He rejects the idea, for example, that buyers and sellers set the
price of things through the give and take of exchange; instead he considers
value causally efficacious in determining price.  But then it is something
more than a conceptual category.  Yet if there is nothing empirical about
it, what kind of reality does it have?  That IS an ontological question.
The alternative seems to be to think of value as part of the non-empirical
or non-actual real.  We make an ontological distinction between things we
experience through our senses and things, like gravity, that seem real, but
are nonetheless non-empirical.  We experience gravity's effects.

If the nature of value is that it is real but non-empirical or non-actual,
this goes some way in accounting for the difficulty of the first part of
Capital.  Marx faced a genuine semiotic problem.  A sign functions to bring
some other thing into awareness -- smoke is a sign of fire.  The thing to
which a sign refers doesn't have to be a material thing -- it could be
absent like a book missing from a desk or fictional like Don Quixote or
non-empirical like value.  But the sign has to be material.  It always
communicates materially and impresses itself on our senses.  So whether we
refer to a thing present or to one inaccessible to the senses, we use the
material body of one thing to refer to another.  This is what Marx does.  He
explains the sign action of commodities.  He shows how we take the body or
natural properties of one thing and understand it to refer to an intangible
economic form.

Another way to get at this is to ask what would constitute a 'real
definition' of value.  Science tries to identify causal structures of the
world and to give a reliable characterization of them as of a particular
kind.  We identify water as H20 and then consider anything with that
molecular structure water and anything without it not.  Or, depending on the
object of study, boundaries may be fuzzier.  In biology it is more common to
look for a cluster of causally efficacious properties usually present that
allow us to account for the nature of a thing and how it behaves.  So we can
ask what the nature of the thing is that accounts for the point around which
prices oscillate, or, in a different dimension, that accounts for the
features that characterize the juridical person.

Marx called society an ensemble of social relations because these are the
causal structures social science must give an account of.  While social
relations are certainly social constructions, they do not function
differently from the causal structures of nature in this fundamental
respect -- they function independently of us and we can change them only
insofar as we act causally on them.  Thinking about them doesn't change

What is the causal structure that defines value as a social relation?  The
social relation that generates the exchange of the products of labor as
values is the relation of autonomous producers producing products (useless
to them) independently for private exchange.  Any social formation where
such structures exist will tend to generate relations of value; any where
they don't, won't.  Given that social relation, producers are driven to
market to obtain by means of exchange the objects they need for their own
reproduction -- the structure is causally efficacious.  Confronting exchange
they must measure the proportion in which their products will exchange.  By
means of representation, semiosis, they are able to compare their labors and
tend to exchange them according to the proportion of aggregate social labor
expended in producing their respective products.

Does value exist prior to the fact of exchange?  Buyers and sellers, for
Marx, do not bring value into being by their interaction.  It looks as if
they do because the act of exchange is the first time that the social
character of labor is empirically manifest.  But it is the task of theory to
establish that in fact productive labor, though private in form, is directly
social labor in its production and that the prices at which goods exchange
are in fact derivative of the relationships, non-empirical, that gather the
aggreagate labors of producers  insofar as these take place within the
structure characterized by the value relation.

How do you pour a relationship into a commodity?  Think of the exchange of
money for commodities that takes place in exchange.  The easy way to read
this is to understand that you exchange a product with value "in" it for a
piece of gold with value "in" it.  But Marx says something a little
different -- the value remains with the producer but takes a different form.
We can make sense of this if we understand value to be an intangible
relationship of proportions of aggregate labor referred to first by a
natural product and then by money.  The first  way of thinking about it is
still a form of fetishism, ie tangible objects are the only real.


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