| This question <83|244-1> overall <92|94> GoldenBear: <739|166>. |
| Question 128: The argument that the linen weaver's willingness to trade her linen for a coat is an expression of the value of the linen violates the principle that “bygones are bygones.” The labor is a thing of the past, it no longer concerns the weaver; all that concerns her is what exists in the present, which is the linen. Therefore the decision to trade the linen must be based on the linen itself and cannot be based on the labor used in the past to produce that linen. If the linen weaver trades coat for linen, she therefore reveals her preference of the use-value of the coat over that of the linen, and does not express the value of the linen. Is this a correct argument, and if not, where is the error? |
| [93] GoldenBear: Linen and Coats. The principle of bygones being bygones does not apply to this argument unless the person trading the linen for the coat is willing to exceed the amount of linen that he/she is giving to the person with the coat. This is because the linen is a raw material and the coat has linen plus abstract labor, which includes in the labor production of the linen to the coat: human nerves, brains, muscles, etc. that were used in order to complete the finished product. To say that “labor is the thing of the past” is wrong if you're going to trade linen for coats because you have to remember the abstract labor in the assumption. |
| Furthermore Marx states in 135:1/o that “In the values coat and linen, abstraction is made from the difference of their use-values; now we have seen that also in the labor that represents itself in these values, abstraction is made from the difference of its useful forms tailoring and weaving.” Coats have a different use-value than linen, but they are both used in some of the same ways. The coat's use-value exceeds that of the linen because as stated before it is the finished product. If “she therefore reveals her preference of the use-value of the coat over that of the linen” as stated in the argument, then one must take into account labor as part of the trade in order to make the trade fair. |
| You can let bygones be bygones if all factors and variables are added into the equaion to make it fair to both parties to maximize utility on both sides. In this case however, if one takes away the labor factor in the production of the coat, then one cannot make a correct assumption that both parties are treated fairly unless one trades enough linen to satisfy the labor that was used to weave or tailor the coat. This is where the error in the argument is made and where Marx's use-value theory also comes into play. |
| Their use-values are of different magnitudes and as Marx states in 136:1, “following our assumption, the coat is worth twice as much as the 10 yards of linen. Why is there this difference in value? Because the linen contains only half as much labor as the coat, i.e. labor power had to be expended twice as long to produce the second as to produce the first.” That is exactly where the values are different and have to be treated as such. |
| Hans: If you think the linen is the raw material for the coat you are making an error which I warned against in the Annotations, see also [2001fa:64]. The fallacy involved in the argument “bygones are bygones” was discussed not only in Catfish's [83] but also in my [79]. |
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