| This question <25|25> overall <26|29> Hans: <26|34>. |
| Question 57: Marx argues that commodities are exchangeable only because they have some common substance. Bailey denies this. He compares the exchange-value of commodities with the distance between points, which is not based on a commonality between the two points but is purely relative: “As we cannot speak of the distance of any object without implying some other object, between which and the former this relation exists, so we cannot speak of the value of a commodity but in reference to another commodity compared with it. A thing cannot be valuable in itself without reference to another thing” [mecw32]329, fn. Comment. |
| [27] Hans: Why the labor theory of value has fallen out of favor. Tuffy [25] poses the right question. What inferences can one make, by looking at market transactions, about the principles governing these market transaction? |
| In the assigned readings, Marx is taking exactly this approach, and his argument is, roughly, the following. The market equates commodities to each other. Each commodity represents a greater or smaller quantity of money, all other differences between the commodities are extinguished. Therefore, Marx says, that what drives the exchange must also be something equal in the commodities. And the only thing that commodities have in common is that they are products of human labor. Therefore the exchange proportions are governed by the labor content. |
| This simple and abstract argument generated a whole cottage industry of people trying to find faults with it. I don't think it is wrong, it merely needs a little bit of elaboration. I am trying to understand it along the following lines: the market reduces all commodities to a one-dimensional measure, namely, money. On the other hand, we also know that the market is the mediating agent through which production is organized. Obviously market-governed production is quite successful. It is spreading. More and more branches of production are subjected to the market. This success of the market would not be possible if the market would not somehow fit together with production. And indeed it does. Just as the market is one-dimensional, production is one-dimensional too. For it, the governing principle is human labor-time. Money is therefore the exterior representation of human labor-time. |
| Unsurprisingly, this theory has fallen out of favor in modern capitalist-dominated academia. Because according to this theory, the workers are the ones responsible for the capitalists' profit, not the capitalists themselves. This theory exposes the exploitation rampant in capitalism. Every worker knows in his or her bones that s/he is exploited, but you are not supposed to be able to go to the university and learn about how this exploitation is perpetrated, and why the capitalists get away with it. What is taught in the universities today is the utility theory of value, which says: capitalists are so rich because they have made so many consumers happy. This theory is much less dangerous to the capitalists. |
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