| This question <91|327> overall <102|104> Hans: <102|104>. |
| Exam Question 54: Why must every individual commodity be considered as an average sample of its kind? |
| [103] Hans: Commodities must represent what they are I like Slacker's answer [91] to Question 54. Slacker's first sentence is: |
| The commodity must be considered to be an average sample of its kind if it is to reflect the socially neccessary labor time that it embodies. |
| Here is my take, how I would write this sentence and how I would interpret it. This may not be the same as Slacker had in mind, but it was certainly inspired by Slacker's response. Each of us gets a glimpse of a different aspect of it, and then when we compare notes, we may be able to put things together in a coherent way. |
| Socially neccessary labor time is only the quantitative aspect of it, I would write “abstract labor” in order to get away from the emphasis on quantity. In Contribution, Marx wrote “abstract general labor”. I don't know why the “general” was de-emphasized in Capital, to me this seems relevant. (“General” means: the question of who is working is disregarded, extinguished.) Anyway, throw in the “general” too. |
| Now we can use an argument given at the beginning of Section 3 of Chapter One: a commodity is something twofold, the product of concrete useful labor and the product of general abstract labor, and it must reflect what it is. Its being an average sample of its kind is the reflection of the general nature of the abstract labor in it. |
| This may seem a very abstract argument why a commodity must always be considered an average sample of its kind, but I think it is the right way to go. I hope that things will become clearer as we discuss Section 3 of Chapter One, which is central to Marx's argument, but which is generally not very well understood. |
| After his first sentence, Slacker switches to a different argumentation: |
| It is also average in that the consumer cares not whether the commodity was produced by the most expediant worker, giving the lowest cost, or the slowest worker, giving the highest cost. The consumer pays the average of these two. In other words the consumer pays according to the socially necessary labor time required to produce the commodity. |
| Marx would call this kind of argumentation an argument located in the “sphere of competition”. It takes appearances as given without identifying the forces that create this appearance. Marx says that by their competition on the market, the agents force each other to conform with the laws of capitalism, but one cannot infer these laws themselves from competition. |
| In the last sentence, Slacker switches back to a derivation of the appearances from the essence (here the “essence” being that the quantity of value is determined by “snalt”): |
| If the commodity was not sold according to snalt (socially necessary abstract labor time) then indeed the lazy and slow worker would recieve a higher price for the commodity that s/he produces. |
| My argumentation probably seems fuzzy to you, and at this point I am aware that it is fuzzy. But I am convinced that this is the direction to go in, and once we understand Marx better, we will be able to argue all this in a much more rigorous way. In my view, Marx has never been fully understood; the development of Marxism as a science is just now approaching the point where we may get ready to scale the same heights again which Marx had occupied in his lone mountain scale over a century ago. (And one of the “underlaborers” helping us to get there is Bhaskar). |
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