An Incontestable Argument for the Law of Value
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You think that you are the new kid on the block, everything that you have published here is not new, all have been debunked by Andrew kilman, Paul mattick and Raya dunayeskaya, repeated arguments coming from bourgeoise economists
Just read the books of the writers that I have mentioned and you will educate yourself and will see that your arguments have been debunked by them. I think I have published some of their books in pdf in this thread.
Hey man, I asked you to oblige me by citing what you consider their MIGHTIEST argument against my view. I can see you’re evasive on this request of mine.
It appears that German intellectuals have been discussing the same subject:
This is another research made by Peter Hudis debunking all these Marx revisionists. This is a man who knows Capital pretty well and has been in the movement since he was a very young guy and he was a personal secretary of Raya Dunayeskaya. I have not read this book yet, but I already placed the order for the book.
https://brill.com/view/book/9789004229860/B9789004229860_002.xml
Read ‘this book’ and oblige me by making known what you consider the MIGHTIEST argument against my view of value and commodities, will you?
‘The “general alienation of labor” – wage labor – is the precondition for value.’
I’ve excerpted the above from the German intellectuals’ reflections on ‘Abstract labour’ (https://www.angryworkers.org/2022/04/25/mathematical-capitalism-and-romantic-anti-capitalism-thoughts-on-heinrichs-introduction-to-the-critique-of-political-economy/).
What follows is my response to it.
But, products of non-wage labour, such as the labour of peasants, co-op members, carpenters, sculptors, actors, singers, painters, freelancers, writers, etc., are also bought & sold like commodities. Their market-prices, like the market-prices of commodities, are determined by market forces too. And we know it’s the stuff called value that alone makes commodities exchangeable in the market. What makes the products of non-wage labour exchangeable like commodities? Both the products of non-wage labour and the commodities possess use-value apart from which every commodity possesses only one more stuff called value, the magnitude of which equals the quantity of the socially necessary labour-time expended to create or collect it. And it’s this value, and this value alone, that happens to be the stuff that makes commodities exchangeable with one another. If the magnitude of the value of a pen is x and that of a pearl ball is y, then the total value of y pens= xy= the total value of x pearl balls. Nevertheless, usefulness doesn’t make things exchangeable just because usefulness is Not measurable in terms of money or any other common, universal stuff. It’s really impossible to exchange a pen with a pearl ball on the basis of their usefulness, isn’t it?
In order to be exchangeable with each other or with commodities, products of non-wage labour each must have some value, and thus there seems to exist No basic distinction between products of non-wage labour and products of wage labour, as I see it. Evidently, the German Angry Workers’ view that ‘wage labor’ happens to be ‘the precondition for value’, which implies that non-wage labour cannot create value, sounds absurd.
Not an atom of matter enters into the reality of value. We may twist and turn a commodity this way and that way — as a thing of value it still remains unappreciable by our bodily senses.
“Evidently, the German Angry Workers’ view that ‘wage labor’ happens to be ‘the precondition for value’, which implies that non-wage labour cannot create value, sounds absurd.”
How then would you go about determining the relative contribution of different kinds of labour – skilled or unskilled – to value if labour power itself was not assigned a market price in the guise of a wage? This is the reduction problem in Marxian economics. In theory, skilled labour is reducible to units of simple or unskilled labour – the ratios of their respective contributions to value being reflected – in the long run – in the differential wages they attract. Money wages are thus a kind of rough proxy indicator of differences in the value of different kinds of labour-power and what is required to produce and reproduce such labour power. But in the absence of wage labour how would you tackle the reduction problem?
A further point is that the generalisation of commodity production upon which the law of value is dependent has to imply the generalisation of wage labour. Non-wage labour tends to imply that a substantial portion of what the worker consumes does not take a commodity form – for example, the self-provisioning farming of the peasant in which food is grown for direct consumption not for market sale. Agricultural surpluses may be sold under these circumstances but the connection with value (or socially necessary labour time) becomes tenuous if not impossible to determine
‘In order to be exchangeable with each other or with commodities, products of non-wage labour each must have some value, and thus there seems to exist No basic distinction between products of non-wage labour and products of wage labour, as I see it. Evidently, the German Angry Workers’ view that ‘wage labor’ happens to be ‘the precondition for value’, which implies that non-wage labour cannot create value, sounds absurd.’
Prakash – If you produce something exclusively for yourself or as a gift to another then it has use value but no exchange value. If you decide to sell it then its value is determined by the average amount of labour time that other similar objects in the market possess.
From the current issue of Jacobin magazine:
“But Cohen believed that rank-and-file socialists who think the LTV is obvious are moved by something other than Marx’s technical claims about value. Instead, what moves them is something like a “labor theory of things that have value,” which is very obviously true! Regardless of what value is, no commodity that has value has ever been the product of anything except some combination of (a) the nonhuman natural world and (b) human labor.”
https://jacobin.com/2022/06/karl-marx-labor-theory-of-value-ga-cohen-economics/
‘Not an atom of matter enters into the reality of value. We may twist and turn a commodity this way and that way — as a thing of value it still remains unappreciable by our bodily senses.’
Not a unit of your body cells Nor a jot of your labour enters into the use-value of an egg from your poultry. So what?
If this fact doesn’t make the use-value of the egg ‘unappreciable’, I can’t see why the ‘value’ of a commodity should be ‘unappreciable’ by senses of the sensible.Dear Mr Prakash
While I appreciate your attempts to defend my theory of value, I must point out that in that translation of a passage at the beginning of section 3 of Chapter 1 of Volume 1 of my major work, Das Kapital, I was talking about value not the use-value of a commodity.
Yours respectfully
Karl Marx
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