Marx says of Bailey,
“His book has only one positive merit—that he was the first to give a more accurate definition of the measure of value, that is, in fact, of one of the functions of money, or money in a particular, determinate form.” (p 133)
Adam Smith sought some invariable measure of value. He uncovered value as labour, but conflated labour as the essence of value with the commodity labour-power. Hence arise all of the contradictions from attempting to measure values in terms of wages, or his use of corn as a proxy for wages, in measuring values. The other confusion here, which is continued by Ricardo, is to equate value with exchange-value.
The invariable measure of value is labour-time. But labour itself has no value, and is not a commodity. It is the attempt to embody the concept of value in a commodity, which acts as a measure of value, which leads to the contradiction, because every commodity is itself a representative of value, of social labour-time, but, as such, its value, relative to every other commodity is constantly changing. Money, as such a commodity, is not an invariable measure of value, because its own value constantly changes, as a result of changes in social productivity.
Not only is it not necessary that this measure of value be invariable, but, on the contrary, as Marx had established in “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”, it is inevitable that it must not be invariable. It must, like every other commodity share that same quality of being a bearer of value, a product of labour. And, because the value of every product, and consequently every commodity, changes, as a result of changes in social productivity, so too must the value of the money commodity. But, it is for this very reason that this general commodity can act as a measure of value for every other commodity. Because each commodity shares with every other commodity the quality of being bearers of value/representative of labour-time, each can be compared with, irrespective of their use value, on the basis of this single common equality of value. They only vary from one another on the basis of the quantity of this value that each represents.
The money commodity, thereby, measures these relative differences in this quantity of value. If a gram of gold is equal in value to 10 metres of linen, or to 10 litres of wine, this does not tell us what the value of gold, linen or wine is. But, it does tell us what the value of linen and wine is relative to gold, and in the process it also tells us what the value of wine is relative to linen. If the value of gold falls by 50%, this means that 1 gram of gold has the same value as 5 metres of linen or 5 litres of wine, but its relation to both linen and wine has thereby changed in the same proportion. As a measure of the relative value of linen to wine, therefore, nothing has changed.
This is why the idea that value, or the law of value, arises only with commodity production and exchange, or worse, only with capitalism, is preposterous. In order to have commodities, it is first necessary to have products, which start to become exchanged by communities, and thereby get turned into commodities. And, for the basis of the exchange of these commodities to be increasingly determined by their relative values, rather than by chance, it is first necessary that each of these products/commodities are values, or else there is nothing they have in common that can be compared, so as to calculate their relative values/exchange-values! Value is both historically and logically prior to exchange-value, and exchange-value, along with commodity production and exchange, goes back, as Engels describes, at least 7-10,000 years.
“... for commodities to express their exchange-value independently in money, in a third commodity, the exclusive commodity, the values of commodities must already be presupposed. Now the point is merely to compare them quantitatively. A homogeneity which makes them the same—makes them values—which as values makes them qualitatively equal, is already presupposed in order that their value and their differences in value can be represented in this way. For example, if all commodities express their value in gold, then this expression in gold, their gold price, their equation with gold, is an equation on the basis of which it is possible to elucidate and compute their value relation to one another, for they are now expressed as different quantities of gold and in this way the commodities are represented in their prices, as comparable magnitudes of the same common denominator.
But in order to be represented in this way, the commodities must already be identical as values. Otherwise it would be impossible to solve the problem of expressing the value of each commodity in gold, if commodity and gold or any two commodities as values were not representations of the same substance, capable of being expressed in one another. In other words, this presupposition is already implicit in the problem itself. Commodities are already presumed as values, as values distinct from their use-values, before the question of representing this value in a special commodity can arise. In order that two quantities of different use-values can be equated as equivalents, it is already presumed that they are equal to a third, that they are qualitatively equal and only constitute different quantitative expressions of this qualitative equality.” (p 134)
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