| This question <10|10> overall <13|15> Hans: <13|19>. |
| Question 73: Marx argues that commodities are exchangeable only because they contain 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 any more than a thing can be distant in itself without reference to another thing.” . Comment. |
| [14] Hans: Prices versus Costs. Polo's [10] seems to be a response to my argument in [3] that it is circular to determine prices by cost. Polo says that it is not possible to reduce values to costs because different things have different inputs. Since the only input that is equal to all commodities is labor, commodity values must be based on labor. |
| This is a good argument. I only have a quibble with Polo's starting point. Polo has a commodity owner in mind who is trying to decide what to ask for his or her commodity. Marx, by contrast, looks at the whole market system and says: obviously, all commodities are reduced to one common denominator in the market, namely, money. Assuming that the market fits together with the organization of production -- otherwise production would not be mediated by the market -- Marx concludes that also in production, everything must be reducible to one thing. And the only thing that makes sense here is labor, for the same reasons argued by Polo. |
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