[lbo-talk] Definition of nation (was as if on cue)

Angelus Novus fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com
Wed Feb 16 11:06:28 PST 2011


Carrol:


> A question: Who if anyone on this list believes that value determines
> prices?

There are only two groups of people who believe this: adament enemies of Marx who disingenuously represent Marx as being the German Ricardo, and misguided "Marxists" who prize Marx as the "superior" bourgeois economist.

In a review of Edmund Wilson's _To The Finland Station_, CLR James wonders at the fact that such a refined Trotskisant intellectual like Wilson is unable to grasp Marx's value theory and hence rejects it, whereas James correctly ascertains that Marx's value theory is so simple that even a child could grasp it.

Value is a definite social relationship between human beings existing in a society where social labour is mediated by the act of exchange. Social labour exists only ex post facto in the exchange act, individually expended labour power only attains its validity, its social necessary character, when recognized in exchange. Only a universal commodity, money, is able to equalize various acts of privately expended concrete labour into a homogenous, spectral --abstract-- labour.

The first chapter of _Capital_ is a dart aimed at Proudhon and other utopians who thought one could do away with money while maintaining private commodity production, a petty bourgeois utopia of independent proprietors.

Now that the first published edition of Chapter One is available in English at Marxists.org, people should read what Marx has to say. Under the pressure of Kugelmann and Engels he got rid of some passages that they were afraid might not be understood by the workers they were trying to reach (the capitalization of "the" below is added by me, since italics don't work in email):

"In form III (which is the reciprocal second form, and is therefore contained in it), the linen appears on the other hand as the general form of the Equivalent for all other commodities. It is as if alongside and external to lions, tigers, rabbits, and all other actual animals, which form when grouped together the various kinds, species, subspecies, families etc. of the animal kingdom, there existed also in addition THE animal, the individual incarnation of the entire animal kingdom. Such a particular which contains within itself all really present species of the same entity is a universal (like animal, god, etc.)."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/commodity.htm



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