| This question <5|5> overall <7|9> Hans: <7|9>. |
| Question 39: How can one come to the conclusion that exchange value is not something inherent in the commodity? |
| [8] Hans: Exchange value: inherent in the commodity or relative? I like Veblen's careful approach in [5], trying to argue himself through a difficult question. The Webster definition of “inherent” is helpful. Veblen brings two arguments why exchange value might not be considered “inherent”: |
| (1) because commodities do not have stable exchange proportions. If the same commodity is being traded at wildly divergent exchange proportions at different locations and different times, this would suggest the exchange value is not inherent in the commodity, it is not determined by something inside the commodity (because the commodity is always the same) but by other circumstances of the exchange. |
| (2) Veblen also argues that exchange values are not inherent because they are attached to the use values. Apparently Veblen considers the use values as something subjective, each person has a different use value for a given commodity, one person needs it and another person does not need it at all. Marx's concept of use value is however not subjective at all. The word “use value” does not signify how much a commodity is needed by someone, but it denotes the menu of all possible uses. Use values may change historically: if society discovers at some point in time that a certain herb can be used as a medicine, then the use value of this herb undergoes a change; however this use value is not dependent on whether someone has the illness which is cured by the herb. With this objective concept of use value, the fact that exchange values are attached to the use values would indicate that exchange values are indeed inherent to the commodities. |
| At the end, however, Veblen argues that constancy of exchange proportions is not necessary for exchange value to be inherent. |
| However, it is my personal assertion that exchange value does not have to depend on stable proportion, but merely on its use value to other market participants. |
| I disagree with this assertion: if the exchange value depends on the use value to the buyer, then this means the exchange value is not inherent in the commodity but is something relative! We are all steeped in subjective value theory, therefore it is difficult to think of commodity value as something that is not subjective. But this is exactly Marx's point of view: the value of the commodity does not depend on what people think of it, but on its labor content alone. |
| Finally I'd like to say something about Veblen's last paragraph: |
| I would like to discuss one more issue; that of semantics. The attempt to distingish between the exchange value and use value of a commodity, seems to me a complete disavowal of the complete nature of a commodity, its cycle of life, so to say. It seems like an attempt to seperate two intrinsic qualities of an external object just to put them back together again. |
| Veblen says that use value and exchange value form an organic unity and should not be torn apart. Marx, on the other hand, says that use value and exchange value are very much different from each other and at odds with each other, and that it is necessary to keep them apart and study them separately in order to see what is really going on in a market economy. |
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