| This question <124|124> overall <123|125> Fred: <63|164>. |
| Question 248: The armchair socialist (Kathedersozialist) Adolf Wagner wrote that Marx “finds the common social substance of exchange-value … in labour.” Marx, in his Notes about Wagner, [mecw24]534:1, strenuously objects. What, if anything, is wrong with Wagner's formulation? |
| [124] Fred: Value is a Complex Thing. I liked what Marcellus said in [103]. According to Marx, value is created by “the ‘value-forming substance’, the labour, contained in the article.” (Marx, 129). This value at the exchange level is not representative of the whole picture of the source of value. Wagner is failing to see the dual nature of Value that Marx pointed out with Use-Value and Exchange Value, two different things that cannot be derived one from the other. |
| The value of the product at the exchange level is from an “abstract labor”. I admit I have had a hard time wrapping my head around these ideas, but it seems that Marx is basically saying that Value is not a straight forward representation at the market. Value is a complex thing. When a product rises to the level of exchange, the value it takes on is from an “abstract labor”. This must occur because the market is “equalizing” the products' Value. The problem is that the Value in the product represents the labor used to produce it. But this value is not returned to labor. This is what Marx is objecting to. If as Wagner says the common social substance of exchange-value is found in labor, he is not seeing that there is more to value than just exchange, or the sources of value. Use Value and Exchange Value contain different labor, and only this abstract labor is manifest at the market, so there is a disparity. This disparity in value is not returned to the laborer, but accumlates to the few (owners of production) and away from the many (labor). If what Wagner is saying were true, the manifestation of value at market would be reflected back to labor, and there would be no disparity as labor would be completely part of the exchange process at market. There would be no exploitation of labor. Clearly, Marx disagrees with this, strenuously. |
| Hans: You are arguing, like Scott [39], that commodities are not traded at their values because the workers do not get the full equivalent of the value they produce. But these two things are not necessarily connected. If the worker does not get a full equivalent, this simply means that the cost to the capitalist is lower than the value, i.e., he can sell the commodity at a profit. |
| Marx's complaint with Wagner was about a much more subtle point: labor does not determine exchange-value but labor determines value, and exchange-value is the form in which value makes itself felt on the surface of the economy. Marx objected that Wagner went from labor directly to exchange-value. I do not understand why Marx was making such a fuss about this. |
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