> Rurbulo:
> The trouble with discussions about value theory, in my experience, is that
> they try to take in too much too fast. Let's keep things simple and start
> with the very thing you name, namely price. What is it? An equation of a
> commodity with money.
>
>
> WS:
> I think the problem with the concept of value is that, to paraphrase Marx,
> repeat history but this time as a farce - specifically, the philosophical
> debate about the existence of the so-called universals. The crux of the
> debate is whether the so-called "universals" or "essences" that individual
> things share (and thus what defines them) exist in things themselves, or in
> the human mind that perceives them. The realist position, shared by
> Platonists and Aristotelians is that they exist in things themselves, the
> conceptualist position is that they exist as abstract concepts in human
> mind, whereas the nominalist position is that they exist merely in the
> language, as words without empirical meaning. The problem with this debate
> is that it is pure metaphysics - it depends solely on philosophical
> assumptions one makes and cannot be decided one way or another by empirical
> facts.
>
> The concept of value unwittingly reintroduces that debate which had been
> passé since Kant. Equating value with price is tantamount to nominalism -
> i.e. it is a claim that value or "economic essence" of things is merely a
> function of the intercourse system in which they are used, but there is
> nothing intrinsicly valuable in things themselves. To illustrate it with an
> example, if people were paying money for bags of air sold on ebay - there
> would be a value changing hands but there would be no material "vector" of
> that value at all, and the value of the product would be created literally
> out of the thin air, but the exchange system alone - just like words and
> their meaning are created by verbal intercourse.
>
> Marx, being a closet Aristotelian, assumed that economic essence i.e. value
> resides in things themselves - because only then it requires an explanation
> of its origins. The nominalist position does not require any explanations
> other than referring to pure convention - in fact seeking an "explanation"
> whether there is a causal relation between a name and what it denotes is an
> interesting philosophical speculation which nonetheless does not get very
> far (cf. Wittgenstein).
>
> More importantly, taking the realist position on the notion of economic
> value had certain political usefulness - it provided ontological grounds for
> the notion of exploitation i.e. as something being taken unjustly away.
> >From the nominalistic perspective, when workers get pennies for what they
> produce, nothing is being taken away from them, they are merely not getting
> in the system of exchange as much as they would hope to. The concept of
> exploitation can still have currency, but it would require additional
> ethical assumptions that would differentiate between just and unjust systems
> of exchange.
>
> By contrast, the concept of exploitation as taking something tangible away
> had a much stronger propagandistic value as well as the appeal to the
> feelings of the masses who were unable to comprehend more sophisticated
> aspects of ethical discourse. For them, if they felt wronged, and if that
> feeling was to be justified, it would need to be demonstrated in some
> ostensible and tangible way, e.g. as something of their being taken away
> from them. The same reasoning, btw, underlies many third-worldist
> ideologies which claim that the North is rich because it stole something
> tangible form the South.
>
> So Marx faced an uneasy task of reconciling a primitive populist notion of
> exploitation which had political currency among its constituents, with a
> more sophisticated and more defensible notion that lacked that currency.
> LTV was a conceptual device (a problemshift as Lakatos would call it) that
> allowed marrying both. It retained the more concept of "exchange value"
> being a product of the system of exchange, and introduced the concept of
> "use value" which was embedded in the properties of the things themselves,
> and from there it maintained that the use value was that "something tangible
> that was stolen" even though the "exchange value' was ser by a more or less
> consensual process.
>
> I think it was a very clever rhetorical trick that served the cause of labor
> well - but its usefulness expired when the labor was able to obtain better
> terms of employment, and the power struggle between labor and capital
> shifted to new dimensions. The realist notion of value i.e. is something
> embedded in things being exchanged rather than a mere product of the system
> of exchange is not tenable -as it can be easily demonstrated that that
> things whose material properties are indistinguishable from those of others
> things have nonetheless a greater value than those other things (which is
> what makes the fashion industry possible). The proposition that the rich
> are rich because they stole something tangible from the poor is silly and
> can be easily debunked. There are more effective and defensible ways of
> criticizing systems of exchange that produce gross inequalities or wasteful
> use of resources. So LTV should be but to the museum of human thought.
>
> Wojtek
>
>
>
>
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I think you're quite mistaken in assuming that Marx excogitated his theory of value as part of some strategy to prove that the working class is expoited. The labor theory is established independently of the idea of surplus value, and is deeply grounded in his view of humans as uniquely social, i.e. the notion of species being first elaborated in the Paris Manuscripts and developed further in a number of places.
Which ties in neatly with the realism/nomonalism controversy. While Marx's thinking may be indebted in many ways to classical philosophy, he is certainly too much of a naturalist to believe in the notion of "universals" inhering in all things. He does think, however, that people are uniquely "essential" or "universal" beings in that they alone are not only members of a species, but are conscious of the fact that they are, and act on the basis of that consciousness. This gives them the singular ability to take themselves as other, and the other for the self, and to engage in the social labor indispensable to their existence. Commodities are exchangeable because they are products of social labor. Their common essence, if you like, results from the fact that they have been produced by human beings, not from their existence as things in nature. I think any debate about the underlying assumptions of Marx's value theory would logically take pace on the plane of philosophical anthropology, not metaphysics. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20050412/46998f87/attachment.htm>