| This question <78|85> overall <78|80> Hans: <73|88>. |
| Question 112: In Contribution, p. [mecw29]270:1, Marx writes: “Although use-values serve social needs and therefore exist within a social context, they do not express a social relation of production.” Why not? |
| [79] Hans: It won't happen a second time. Eatsono [78] is arguing something slightly different than what was asked in the question, namely, that a commodity cannot express a social relation of production. Eatsono says: once a commodity is on the market, all that matters is its use-value. Everything that has to do with its production can be forgotten at this point, and the buyer usually does not even know anything about what it took to produce this commodity. This is the neoclassical view that “bygones are bygones.” If this were true, then it would be inexplicable how the labor content of the commodity could affect its exchange relations---and mainstream neoclassical economics in fact holds that it can't. |
| This argument is a fallacy because it forgets that production relations are ongoing relations. There is one particular person who knows exactly what it took to produce this commodity, and who also cares about it: the producer. If he gets less in return for this commodity than for other commodities that can be produced with the same costs, then he is likely to switch his labor-power into producing the other thing. Or if he gets a lot in return this will induce others to produce the same thing. Both situations lead to price adjustments, until at the end prices are proportional to labor content. |
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