| This question <88|127-2> overall <88|90> Hans: <85|90>. |
| Question 203: Marx implies that Ricardo should not have agreed with the following passage by Destutt the Tracy: “‘As it is certain that our physical and moral faculties are alone our original riches, the employment of those faculties, labor of some kind, is our original treasure, and it is always from this employment that all those things are created which we call riches ... It is certain, too, that all those things only represent the labor which has created them, and if they have a value, or even two distinct values (use value and exchange value), they can only derive them from that' (the value) ‘of the labor from which they emanate'” Are there any errors in this passage? What are they? |
| [89] Hans: Value comes from Labor, not from the Value of Labor Sprockets [88] picks out the right sentence where Marx describes Destutt's second error, overlooked by Brutal in [81]. Marx writes: |
| “The Frenchman does, in fact, say on the one hand that all things which constitute wealth ‘represent the labor which has created them,’ but he also says, on the other hand, that they acquire their ‘two different values’ (use-value and exchange value) from 'the value of labor.'” |
| But Sprockets doesn't quite get it why Marx is taking offense here. Marx's point is: the value of commodities does not come from the value of labor, but from labor itself. It would be circular to say it comes from the value of labor, because then we still don't know where the value of the commodity labor comes from. But vulgar economics, in its shallowness, does not realize that it is arguing in a circle. |
| Practically speaking this means: if you have a job which only pays 5 dollars per hour, this does not diminish the value which you create: you probably create between 15 and 20 dollars per hour, because the value depends on your labor, not your pay. |
| Coming back to Destutt, he says the right thing at the beginning when he says that all things which constitute wealth “represent the labor which has created them”, (they represent the labor itself, not the value of labor), but he says the wrong thing at the end when he says that things derive their value from that of the labor from which they emanate (here he should have said: they derive their value from the labor from which they emanate, instead of saying that their value comes from the value of this labor). |
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