| This question <67|43> overall <108|110> Hans: <108|110>. |
| Question 56: How is the value of raw materials determined in Marx's theory? How does the scarcity of these materials influence their value? Is Marx's argument still valid in the case of an exhaustible resource, which is present only in finite supply? |
| [109] Hans: Value of raw materials Karl's answer [43] has a number of interesting thoughts. I will go through his answers to the three questions one by one. |
| The first question is: How is the value of raw materials determined? Although the raw diamond in the earth does not contain any labor, and therefore does not have value in Marx's usual definition, Karl says: |
| Because while it is a raw material the diamond should be thought of as a commodity in embryo. In class it was mentioned that a commodity held value regardless of exchange. The diamond as a raw material also holds no exchange, and therefore can only have value once it is required to be developed by a laborer or in other words, unearthed, cut, and polished. |
| This reminds me of Ricardo, and instead of analyzing Karl's thoughts I think it is more instructive here to show you how Marx analyzed Ricardo's thoughts. Here I am quoting from Marx's Theories of Surplus Value 2, p. 247-9, in German MEW 26.2, p. 247-9, it is also somewhere in MECW 31. First Marx gives a (not quite literal) quote of Ricardo: |
| The logger who paid for the right to fell trees in the forest, paid in consideration of the valuable commodity which was then standing on the land and actually repaid himself with a profit. |
| Marx has several quibbles with this: |
| (1) the word “valuable” is out of place here; the trees have use value, but not value. |
| (2) It is wrong of Ricardo to ask what the logger's purpose was when he paid money for the right to fell trees. (“He paid in consideration of...”) Marx does not say this here, but this would be an attempt to explain the economy from the sphere of competition, compare my [103] about this, in response to Question 54. |
| (3) The relevant question is: out of which fund does the compensation plus profit come which the logger receives from the sale of the trees after they are felled? And Marx argues they come from the workers' unpaid labor. The price paid for natural resources is therefore the share of the social surplus value which those who control access to the natural resources can claim for themselves. |
| Let us go to the second question, how scarcity affects value. Karl does not mean natural scarcity (gold is valuable because there is not much of it), but an excess of demand over supply. Karl is not always using the right terms, he does not distinguish value and exchange value clearly enough, but he seems to say the following: in the statement that exchange value is a representation of value, Marx leaves it open that factors other than value may find their representation in exchange value as well, and scarcity is one of them. This is totally correct, with respect to the kind of scarcity Karl is talking about. |
| Also with respect to the third question, value of exhaustible resources, Karl makes a valid point. I am really taken by the way Karl is thinking, is is quite similar to Marx's thought processes, although someone not trained in reading Marx will probably not understand Karl's reasoning. Karl writes: |
| If I was in the desert, with a supply of water to exchange, that product is exhaustible. Once used, that particular material is relatively exhausted. |
| By “relatively”, Karl apparently means: disregarding the fact that one can make the trip back and get more water from outside the desert. For here and now, water is exhaustible. Karl's next sentence is very interesting: |
| But to the purchaser of the resource it makes no difference if it is exhaustible, only that it is scarce or limited to a finite supply as addressed earlier. |
| Excellent point. Value is a social relationship attached to the product, and it is impossible to see, just by looking at the product, whether it is exhaustible or not. If you buy a can of Anchovis in the store, you do not see whether this is the last Anchovis ever fished out of the ocean. The only thing you see is whether there are many or few cans of Anchovis on the shelves. But this can be very misleading: the last school of fish can be detected by satellite and “harvested” as cheaply and easily as a school of fish with thousands others around. |
|
|
|||||