DJP
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Prakash, I’m going to suggest that the problem here is with how you parsed the word ‘use-value’ in that sentence. You read ‘use-value’ to mean something like ‘individual concrete thing’ but that is not the way it was being used in this context. In ALB’s comment what is meant by ‘use-value’ is something more like ‘a type of thing that fulfils a particular use’.
In respect to you’re second point how else can you make another unit of a particular good apart from making another one? In this context this is all that ‘reproduce’ means. The prefix ‘re’ means something like ‘to do again’ – we produce something, then we produce it again – we ‘reproduce’ it.
Prakash, you still state that “we cannot reproduce anything concrete”. Ok, but when we have produced something can we not produce an equivalent unit of the same thing again? What would you call this act of producing an equivalent unit again?
I’ve just remembered a word that would be useful here. That word is “fungible”. When we have been talking about commodities being “reproducible” we have said this because we take every unit of a particular type of commodity to be as good as every other (excluding the possibility of faulty / spoilt goods) Eg when I want to buy a Mars bar I am not bothered about which particular bar I will buy as all the bars are taken as being equivalent to the others. This property is called “fungibiulity”
“Nevertheless, they reproduce something and keep on doing it, and that something is the same amount of value”
Given that you think that each commodity is a one-off since no other can be made of the same atoms etc. Why do you not think that the same applies to periods of labour-time? Since you cannot run the same day, hour, minute or second twice either.
When ALB said “production doesn’t create anything new” I guess he could have made it longer “production doesn’t create anything new *out of nothing*. It merely changes the form of materials that originally came from nature.”
If reproducing something means producing something which has *exactly all* the same physical characteristics as something else then it would be impossible to reproduce anything. But that is not what is meant by saying that a commodity is reproducible.
Again, I suggest you actually read the first two chapters of Capital before continuing. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, this shortened version doesn’t seem to bad:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/deville/1883/peoples-marx/ch01.htmI’m not sure why you chose to highlight this Jacobin piece, giving how many guides to Marx are already out there. The piece isn’t entirely bad but it does spread the misconception that The Critique of the Gotha Programme makes a distinction between “socialism” and “communism”
“From above, it clearly follows that the state of a wage slave is Not in essence significantly different from that of a slave.”
There’s a technical term for this kind of statement. “Over egging the pudding”
“And if the minimum wages acts were revoked, their wages would, I can assure you, fall in no time below the subsistence level.”
So you think that, for example before 1998 when the minimum wage was introduced in the UK, the trend there was for wages to be below subsistence? And that wages are now above that level only because of this legislation?
I can understand why you might say that wage labour is like slavery since for the time the wage worker is selling their labour power they are in the dominion of the employer. But this is just an analogy, made to bring out how wage labour is a relationship of domination rather than “free contract”.
To put it the other way around, to say that slaves are like wage labourers but they receive payment in kind and not payment in wages misses the essential thing about the condition of being a slave. Slaves are bought and sold outright, not paid a wage of any kind.
“Slaves were like wage slaves paid subsistence wages in kind, not in cash”
I don’t think it makes much sense to think of slaves as receiving wages of any kind. The slavery system treats slaves more like beasts of burden. Yes if you want your animals to remain productive you have to supply them with food and shelter, but this is not like a wage.
“Supposing the technique I used, which is backward today, was the most advanced technique once in the past when the ‘four’ hours was the SNL of that time, the chair I made should be twice as valuable, in that past era, as that made by you.”
Yes this is right, this is why as production techniques improve commodities get cheaper – it takes less labour to make them. So in our example, the move from 4 to 2 hours would mean that each new chair made now contains half as much value as it did in the past.
“More labour (e.g. the quantity of labour required to produce a useful thing using backward technology) than the SNL also creates value.”
Are you sure about that?
Lets presume that the socially necessary average labour time it takes to make a chair is two hours.
I make my chair in two hours, but you make yours in four. Does your chair contain any more value than mine? Or do the two chairs have the same value?
Another way to think about it is this:
Suppose society needs 1000 chairs but 4000 chairs are produced. Has the labour gone into producing the 3000 surplus chairs produced anything of use? Was the labour that made the 3000 extra chairs socially necessary?
But now we have another question.
How does society establish both how many chairs are needed and what the socially necessary average amount of time taken to produce each chair is?
What do you think the answer is?
“Value is an attribute of a commodity defined as a useful product of labour.”
Good. Now you see how this is different from what you said earlier; “Value is independent of the SNL”. Labour spent on making useless things is not socially necessary, hence not value creating. So value and socially necessary labour are linked.
But, in an exchange economy, how does society determine what is socially necessary?
I suggest you read the first two chapters of Capital to find out.
“The idea of becoming a millionaire by building sandcastles is too silly to deserve a response.”
Well, if as you say “Value is independent of the SNL as it’s just human labour that happens to be the source of value” then it’s not a silly idea at all.
If you do think it’s a silly idea then it must be because you do think value and social necessity are linked after all.
