Labor and Value

Chris Burford cburford at gn.apc.org
Sun Aug 16 16:08:25 PDT 1998


At 01:45 PM 8/15/98 -0400, Andrew wrote:
>I will make no apologies for this post. I disagree with those
>who think that Ignorance is Strength ... and Slavery is Freedom
>and War is Peace.

Nothing wrong with taking another subscriber to task if it is in a good cause and it clarifies a point. And Value Theory is a good cause. I am not sure however if Andrew was seeing a closer connection than I had in mind between my post on the Gotha Programme and my delay in responding to the thread on whether value is transhistorical.


>Chris,
>
>First, there's a difference between saying "labor is value" and
>"labor is the source of all value." And neither of these phrases
>are sufficient to understand Marx's view.

Agreed. It is difficult to sum up Marx's position in any phrase.


>
>He held that LIVING labor is not value, but that DEAD labor *is*
>value. "Human labour-power in its fluid state, or human labour,
>creates value, but is not itself value. It becomes value in its
>coagulated state, in objective form" (_Capital_ I, p. 142,
>Penguin/Vintage ed.)

Yes, I have not thought about this recently, but it is a good point. I am not sure if there may be an issue here though that when a producer considers the suitability of a commodity for circulation, that is to some extent a guess, and subsequently the market decides whether a portion of the total social labour of the society goes on producing that commodity. I am attracted to the idea of value being a field, like gravity is a field which gives the mass of the object, weight. The mass is a property of the object. The weight is not. Value is analogous to weight.


>>What Marx is getting at with this distinction is that labor
>undergoes a transformation in the capitalistic production
>process. The labor is alienated from the worker and it takes on
>an autonomous existence. He held this view as early as his 1844
>Humanist Essays.
>
>Specifically, in the essay on "Alienated Labour," he argued that
>"The worker puts his life into the object, and his life then
>belongs no longer to himself but to the object. ... The
>*alienation* of the worker in his product means not only that his
>labour becomes and object, assumes an *external* existence, but
>that it [the labour] exists independently, *outside himself*, and
>alien to him, and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous
>power."
>
>Notice that the quote from _Capital_ affirms that LIVING labor
>creates value, i.e., is the source of value, to use another
>expression of Marx's. And he does hold that LIVING labor is the
>sole source of value. Hence, it does create all value.
>Cassidy's attribution of this view to Marx is 100% correct.

My position is that you are using the term "value" with 100 times more precision than Cassidy. I certainly assume Cassidy would not even differentiate between use-value and exchange-value, and few marxists understand the point you emphasise about the difference between exchange value and value. Cassidy was presenting a hollow sloppy phrase, not a scientific statement. I understand that the prevailing neo-classical view of value is of subjective utility of the commodity. I maintain that Cassidy would have been including use values in his concept of value. We may have to agree to disagree about our assumptions. At the end of the day, I made an assumption about this critic of Marx, which you do not share. I am not sure we can take that much further.


>
>I'm afraid you've misinterpreted Rubin as well.

If I have misinterpreted Rubin, I am not in the least afraid of having done so. I aspire to a a precision in understanding these things. I do not claim to have reached it. But how can we discuss these matters without trying?

On p. 111 of
>Rubin's _Essays ..._, two paragraphs above the one you've been
>quoting, he writes "This popular definition usually leaves
>unclear whether the value is *determined* by the labor or whether
>the value *is* the labor itself." Thus, in using Rubin's comment
>to criticize Cassidy, you've distorted its meaning. Rubin isn't
>trying to deny that Marx held that the magnitude of commodities'
>values is determined solely by labor-time, or (what is pretty
>much the same) that labor is the source of all value. He's
>merely trying to say that labor and value aren't the same thing
>(but he doesn't quite get the difference right; for instance, he
>implicitly denies that Marx held that dead labor IS value).

This subtlety escapes me. I doubt if Cassidy is worth analysing closely except as a type of Marxist critic. Rubin looks very well worth studying closely but I would like to understand his underlying biases. What is this charge against him about Hegelian idealism?


>
>What Cassidy is arguing -- but he's a mere reporter parroting the
>ubiquitous myth of the economists, Marxist and non-Marxist -- is
>that Marx's theory that the magnitudes of commodities' values are
>*determined* by the labor-time needed to produce them is
>internally inconsistent. This issue has nothing to do with what
>Rubin was talking about.
>
>And when you write "Cassidy was lumping together use-value and
>exchange value (probably as an internal inconsistency) ...," that
>is equally incorrect. I can't even see how you arrived at this.
>Cassidy writes, correctly, that in Marx's theory, (living) labor
>is the source of all VALUE. It was you who conflated this with
>the notion that labor is the source of all use-values (wealth),
>not Cassidy.
>
>
>Chris: "It is unwise, I submit, to talk about the LTV."
>
>I agree, and one reason is that Marx didn't use the term. In
>addition to "law of value," he consistently refered to the
>"determination of value by labor-time." But, when you say "The
>LTV is the classical theory," this isn't quite right. The
>problem is that the phrase is so imprecise, it can mean almost
>anything. Moreover, there was no one classical theory. Smith's
>and Ricardo's theories are radically different, for instance.
>Finally, none of them used the term either.
>
>
>Chris: "Marx and Engels never used the phrase. It is essential
>in understanding their theory of value that prices gravitate
>around the socially necessary labour time ...."
>
>To speak of "their" theory is wrong. Marx alone developed his
>value theory. Engels was quite distant from the whole process.


>
>Moreover, it is simply NOT the case that, in Marx's theory,
>"prices gravitate around the socially necessary labour time ...."
>What prices tend to gravitate around, and then only in the
>absence of monopoly, rent, etc., is production price.

I think our minds work differently. You bring a valuable degree of precision to what Marx was arguing. I understand the point that when closely examined there is no one classical school, and that it is arguable that Marx and Engels did not have exactly the same ideas. But I think it is also arguable that Marx's own thoughts went through a process of development.

Scientific (serious) knowledge to which we aspire necessarily makes approximations to the diversity of natural phenomena. The main point I wanted to make in the last para quoted, was the idea of gravitating around. I was thinking of special attractors.

A theoretical difference however is the emphasis you wish to put on the concept of alienation. I do not think there is a total gap between the early Marx and the later Marx, but there was evolution, and not all the currents of the early Marx were carried forward. I think above all people are alientated under capitalism because they do not own the means of production. But I think any type of production that is not subsistence could in a sense alienate the product. I do not see where this leads to. Industrial or land armies, as recommended in the Communist Manifesto, I would have thought could come to seem alienating. Perhaps you can say why you feel alientation is relevant to a rebirth of marxism.

Invevitably we have some different ideas, different experiences, and ways of thinking, and we read different things into Marx. I hope you do not experience this as the sort of elusiveness you complained about a couple of years ago on the old marxism list.

I think we both want to see Marx as a serious writer. You emphasise his external consistency, and attach a very high status to his actual words. I want to understand Marx in relation to other more modern scientific theories, eg self-organising systems.

Enough for one evening!

Chris Burford



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