> 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. / /But, if people exchanged ONLY bags of air for bags of money, there wouldn't be anything worth analysing. It is the mixed character of the market, involving both the stuff of subsistence and the mental constructs that makes it paradoxical.
> Marx, being a closet Aristotelian, assumed that economic essence i.e. value
> resides in things themselves
If he did he had a strange way of stating such an assumption: "a commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour."
A commodity is a "mysterious thing" and the labour theory of value, rather than being a basic "fact" for Marx is the most complete expression of the process of this mystification. The value resides not in the things themeselves but in the relationship between producers.
> reconciling a primitive populist notion of
> exploitation which had political currency among its constituents, with a
> more sophisticated and more defensible notion
Nice try. Primitive populist v. sophisticated and defensible. But did you really mean to say SOPHISTicated or was that a Freudian slip?
The Sandwichman