Thanks to everyone who responded to my question about value. I have a question responding to James Devine's answer.
I wrote:
> >In other words, labor is the only source of that by which we can pay a
> fair price for something in a market.<
And on Mon, 24 Aug 1998, James Devine wrote:
> Marx doesn't talk about "fair prices" at all. The closest he comes in
> CAPITAL is to _assume_ that products sell at their values, which is the way
> things work in a largely hypothetical system of simple commodity production
> (where self-employed producers sell only to each other). Most economists
> (of his day and today) have the idea of simple commodity production stuck
> in their heads and it sort of plays the role of determining what they mean
> by "fair prices" (no monopoly, etc.) though they don't use that term.
> (Rather, they talk about "Pareto optimality" and the like.) One of the
> points of CAPITAL is that capitalism is _not_ a system of simple commodity
> production.
Isn't it saying the same thing to say "this commodity sold at its value" and "this commodity sold at a fair price"? Saying the same thing in ordinary speach, that is, not in Marx's vocabulary, which as you say doesn't include the expression "fair price." And since we can use Marx to rewrite the first statement as "the price it sold at is its the expression of its value in money," can't we say that "fair price" means the expression of the commodity's value in money"? That at least was my reasoning.
More to the point though, my phrase "that by which we can pay a fair price" was an attempt to come up with an equivalent to "something we might value," but applying to value rather than use-value. But perhaps it is important to think of value as something that has cut loose from any such common-sensical explanation, just as abstract labor has cut loose from the very specifically qualified labor of the simple commodity producer. Is that your point in the last of your sentences that I've copied above?
Thanks,
Tom
Thomas Waters twaters at usit.net 1021 East Oak Hill Avenue, Knoxville TN 37917 Dig And Be Dug In Return