| This question <677|299> overall <51|53> Hans: <42|63>. |
| Question 102: The magnitude of value is not determined by the labor-time actually in the product, but by the labor-time socially necessary to produce the product, because on the market, a product made under exceptional circumstances is indistinguishable from a product made under normal circumstances. |
| Is this Marx's argument? If you think it is, don't answer this question but go back and re-read the text. If you agree that it is not, this question is for you: Why did Marx not make the above simple argument? |
| [52] Hans: Marx's Capital and the “sphere of competition” Isn't this alternative argument, as formulated in the question, much clearer than Marx's obscure mumblings about abstract labor and socially necessary labor-time? Isn't it obvious that the price which a commodity can fetch on the market is not determined by the individual circumstances under which this commodity is produced, but by the average conditions? After all, in the eyes of the buyer, all commodities are the same, and therefore the buyer will not pay more for one than for the other. |
| Marx is aware of this argument, he makes it himself quasi as a side-remark at the very end, but he does not make it the centerpiece of his argumentation. Why not? Because throughout the whole book Capital, Marx makes a clear distinction between the so-called “sphere of competition” and the laws of capital in general. Marx says that the laws of capital in general are enforced through the competition among capitalists and between capitalists and workers, but one should not look at the sphere of competition if one wants to understand why these laws are in place. |
| Perhaps the following example will make it clear why Marx is arguing this way. How would you explain that in the USA, all traffic is moving on the right side of the road, and not on the left? One naive explanation might be: if you drive on the left, then the cops will pull you over and give you a ticket. Marx would protest and say: this is not an explanation of the law, this is only the mechanism how this law is enforced. The rationale for the law lies much deeper: it is necessary that all traffic moves on the same side of the road, otherwise there would be chaos and even more traffic accidents than we already have. Whether it is the left side or the right side does not matter, but one of these two alternatives it must be. And for historical reasons, in the USA it is the right side. |
| Similarly, the labor theory of value argues that capitalism is a relation of production and not a phenomenon of circulation. The exchange proportions observed on the market are not generated on the market but they are generated in production. The market is only their “form of appearance.” Capitalist profits are therefore not due to the market savvy of the capitalists, but they are due to the work of the workers in the production process. Circulation only enforces the laws which originate in the production process. |
| This is why Marx is adamant about it that one should try to derive the laws of capitalism from looking how the capitalists interact with each other. If the labor time which one individual producer puts into a product is not rewarded the same as the labor time of other commodity producers, Marx does not explain this by the competition of the more efficient producers, but he says that the individual labor time as one can measure it with a stop watch is concrete labor, but the value of the product is determined by abstract labor. |
| Marx's whole development of the concept of socially necessary labor-time and the paradox of the lazy worker etc can therefore be viewed as his attempts to derive from first principles an outcome which is familiar to all of us as the competitive outcome in a market economy. |
| Warning: from now on, if someone answers question 89 suggesting that Marx or someone else made up the rules how to measure labor by considerations of efficiency or practicality etc., they will get a very bad grade -- despite the fact that such many such wrong answers have been submitted in this and previous Semesters. |
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