In other words, whether the labour is productive or unproductive it is itself a commodity, and thereby “deserves its reward”. Its value is equal to its own cost of production. In reality, Smith is in error here, because it is not labour which is a commodity, but labour-power. What the worker sells is their capacity to perform labour.
“Labour itself, in its immediate being, in its living existence, cannot be directly conceived as a commodity, but only labour-power, of which labour itself is the temporary manifestation.” (TOSV 1, p 171)
Smith's conception is wrong for two reasons. Firstly, he conceives only that labour to be productive which is embodied in a material product, whereas labour creates value just as much in the production of non-material products, such as services, transport and so on. Secondly, his concept of the embodiment of labour within the commodity, implies an embodied labour theory of value, whereby it is the concrete labour employed in the production which fixes this value within it, rather like that concrete labour fixes the use value into the product.
This concept leads to a false view that the value of the commodity is somehow intrinsic to it, rather than being merely a reflection of a social relation. In other words, it encourages commodity-fetishism.
“The materialisation, etc., of labour is however not to be taken in such a Scottish sense as Adam Smith conceives it. When we speak of the commodity as a materialisation of labour—in the sense of its exchange-value—this itself is only an imaginary, that is to say, a purely social mode of existence of the commodity which has nothing to do with its corporeal reality; it is conceived as a definite quantity of social labour or of money. It may be that the concrete labour whose result it is leaves no trace in it. In manufactured commodities this trace remains in the outward form given to the raw material. In agriculture, etc., although the form given to the commodity, for example wheat or oxen and so on, is also the product of human labour, and indeed of labour transmitted and added to from generation to generation, yet this is not evident in the product. In other forms of industrial labour the purpose of the labour is not at all to alter the form of the thing, but only its position. For example, when a commodity is brought from China to England, etc., no trace of the labour involved can be seen in the thing itself (except for those who call to mind that it is not an English product). Therefore the materialisation of labour in the commodity must not be understood in that way. (The mystification here arises from the fact that a social relation appears in the form of a thing).” (TOSV 1, p 171-2)
For Smith, the commodity appears either as past objectivised labour embodied in a physical commodity, or else it appears as labour-power itself. But, the commodity is never living labour, i.e. the actual performance of labour.
“Productive labour would therefore be such labour as produces commodities or directly produces, trains, develops, maintains or reproduces labour-power itself. Adam Smith excludes the latter from his category of productive labour; arbitrarily, but with a certain correct instinct—that if he included it, this would open the flood-gates for false pretensions to the title of productive labour.” (TOSV 1, p 172)
For Smith, a commodity is a material product, which has required the expenditure of labour-time. It would include a machine produced by a manufacturer not for sale, but for their own use, in the production of other commodities for sale. In this case, the machine is sold bit by bit, as its wear and tear is transferred to the end product. But, likewise for Smith, the actor does not produce commodities but only immediate use values, even though they sell a commodity, their labour-power to the theatre owner.
“... the fact that their purchaser cannot sell them to the public in the form of commodities but only in the form of the action itself would show that they are unproductive labours.” (TOSV 1, p 172)
As Marx points out, the commodity is the most elementary form of bourgeois wealth, and so Smith's second definition of productive labour as that which produces these material commodities is itself a more elementary definition than his first, as that labour which produces capital.
Every commodity is money, because it is a representative of a certain quantity of social labour-time. Like the money-commodity, it is a claim to a quantity of social labour-time, in exchange for it. But, in re-establishing this centrality of value, Smith himself falls back into a Mercantilist concept of permanence, of a concept of the embodiment of labour within the commodity, which thereby establishes exchange value as a relation between things – embodiment of labour – rather than as a relation between people. Consequently, the concept of the commodity itself becomes restricted to only physical products.
Marx refers back to “A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy”, in which he criticised Petty's view “... where I quote from Petty’s Political Arithmetick) where wealth is valued according to the degrees in which it is imperishable, more or less permanent, and finally gold and silver are set above all other things as wealth that is “not perishable”.” (TOSV 1, p 174)
Marx quotes from Adolphe Blanqui's Histoire de l’économie politique, commenting on Smith.
““In restricting the sphere of wealth exclusively to those values which are embodied in material substances, he erased from the book of production the whole boundless mass of immaterial values, daughters of the moral capital of civilised nations,” etc.” (TOSV 1, p 174)
No comments:
Post a Comment