| This question <103|48> overall <326|328> Hans: <326|328>. |
| Exam Question 54: Why must every individual commodity be considered as an average sample of its kind? |
| [327] Hans: What to do with my responses I am sending you my comments to Snowman's resubmission of his midterm answer [313-1] to Question 278 (which is similar to 54, and for the present purposes we can ignore the differences). Snowman's resubmission was never sent to the list, but I hope my response is understandable on its own, and that you learn a little bit more from it about the structure of capitalism, and also about what you are expected to do with my responses, and how to best prepare for the second quiz. |
| Snowman, you copied your own answer [48] to Question 54, but you either misunderstood or ignored my response [85] to you, and you ignored the further discussion of this Question in [91] and [103]. |
| Let us see what you made of my response to your [48]. Your first paragraph says that value is determined by labor because labor is the only input which enters all commodities. My response was that there are many other inputs which enter directly or indirectly all commodities, and that the determination of value is a social and not a technological affair. |
| My reasoning here was very similar to the reasoning often applied by Marx: it depends on the society, on the structure of the social relations of production, whether things have values or not. In some societies things are not exchangeable etc., although these societies still have a technology. Therefore it is wrong to try to derive value from technological principles. |
| You apparently thought that I meant: since there are more than one input to production entering every product, it is a matter of social convention to pick labor and no other input. In the in-class quiz you wrote: |
| Though Labor is not perhaps the only constant variable in the production of commodities it is the best suited to be used as a constant variable, |
| and in your resubmission you deepen the argument by saying: |
| it is the best suited to relate values, because of its relation to the society as a whole, most other inputs merely serve to increase or decrease the productivity of this one variable. |
| This reasoning is still too much based on technological arguments, and on the implicit assumption that it is somehow agreed on by society to value commodities by labor content. In Marx's view, capitalist society simply does this, and the market is the mechanism which forces the participants in the economy to abide by it, but it is not the result of an agreement (just as it is not the result of a decision of the frog to be green and have four legs). |
| Regarding your second paragraph, I had written in [85]: “Snowman explains correctly what it means to be considered an average sample of its kind”, and then I asked: “Now why is this so?” Perhaps I was too polite; I should have reminded the reader more clearly that Question 54 had asked “why”, and that Snowman's [48] did not give a reason “why”. In the homework submissions I am often satisfied with partial answers working themselves in the right direction, but in the quiz I want complete answers, i.e., you should be able to recognize whether the homework answers which you are citing are complete or not, and to fill in the missing parts. |
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