A product, therefore, comes into existence, early in human history, as soon as humans find that they must engage in some form of labour to survive, rather than being able to rely on the use values provided freely by Nature. And, this, then, raises the question, referred to by Marx in his Letter to Kugelmann, that these humans, as in the case of Robinson Crusoe cited by Marx, must then ask themselves the question of how best they can allocate their available labour-time, so as to maximise the number of these products at their disposal, to ensure their survival. The question itself is fairly straightforward, as Marx says. The amount of labour-time available to them is known. It is the amount of time, each day, each member of the tribe, can work, multiplied by the number capable of working. And each of the products they can produce, be it fish, rabbits, or nuts and berries, requires an average amount of time that they can determine in practice. Each product, therefore, has a value, the average amount of time it takes them to produce it. So, they can calculate how many fish they may catch in a day, compared to how many rabbits, or what quantity of nuts or fruits they might be able to collect. This calculation can still be seen being undertaken by primitive tribes, today, across the globe. Whether any of those involved in performing such calculations call the required labour-time “value” or not is irrelevant. What enables combustion to take place is the presence of oxygen in the air. Whether I identify the existence of such a gas, and give it the name oxygen, or not, does not change the fact that oxygen exists, and is the basis for combustion being able to occur.
And, indeed, Marx himself makes this same comparison.
“The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value – this fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered... The character of having value, when once impressed upon products, obtains fixity only by reason of their acting and re-acting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary continually, independently of the will, foresight and action of the producers.”
(Capital I, Chapter 1)
It amounts to a calculation between the value of each type of product, determined by the labour-time required, on average for its production, which the producers must then weigh against the use value they obtain from the particular products. For example, in primitive tribes, today, male hunters go out to hunt animals. The tribe ascribes a high level of use value to the meat, for the obvious reason that it provides variety to what would otherwise be a rather bland diet of fruits, nuts and vegetables, as well as providing protein. But, frequently, the hunters return empty handed. The value of the meat, i.e. the labour-time required for its production, is high. The time spent hunting may have provided a greater quantity of fruits, nuts and vegetables, which the women, and the elderly and young members of the tribe collect. This, as Marx sets out in his Letter to Kugelmann is the essence of The Law of Value, i.e. the time spent in one activity has the opportunity cost of a quantity of other use values that have to be foregone.
Ruth Bunzel in Frank Boaz “General Anthropology”, p 346, says primitive people consider only labour “scarce”. Initially, with the production of products, all labour is considered equal, in other words, there is no distinction between concrete and abstract labour. Because the product is produced for direct consumption, the concrete labour used in that production, immediately constitutes abstract labour, in this constrained environment. As with Robinson Crusoe, the labour of the tribe whether engaged in making pottery or collecting berries, is one and the same labour, until such time that it recognises the benefits of the division of labour. The concrete labour used in the production is both inseparable from the use value of the product, and from its individual value. The use value is determined by the nature/quality of the concrete labour, and its individual value is determined by the quantity of this labour expended. The value is inseparable from the product, because the producer produces the product specifically for the purpose of consuming its use value, rather than exchanging it for some other product.
On the tablets, inscribed in a Semitic language, found at Susa, the wages in the household of a prince are fixed uniformly at 60 qua of barley for the cook, the barber, the engraver of stones, the carpenter, the smith, the cobbler, the cultivator, the shepherd and the donkey man, according to Clement Huart and Louis Delaporte, “L’Iran antique”, p 83. It is only with the further development of production and exchange that different types of concrete labour-power become valued differently, and that concrete labour becomes reduced to abstract labour, as a consequence of the process of competition and exchange itself.
Neither the commodity, nor value, nor exchange-value spring into existence fully formed like Minerva from the head of Zeus. They are all the result of a long process of historical development. They are all in the process of becoming. The product becomes the commodity, whose high-powered form is capital. In other words, the product, becomes the commodity. The value of the product is determined by its individual value; the value of the commodity is determined by its social or market value; the value of the commodity, as capital, is determined by the average rate of profit. It commands more labour as capital than it does as a commodity.
Individual value, becomes social or market value, which, as a consequence of trade, becomes exchange-value. Exchange-value becomes money, as the universal equivalent form of value. It is exchange-value incarnate, completely separated from and independent of use value. The high-powered form of money is money-capital. As soon as capitalism arises, and an average rate of profit is formed, capital itself can be sold as a commodity. Its use value is its ability to obtain the average rate of profit. The value of commodities as capital is greater than their value as commodities. The value of capital is equal to the commodity value plus the average rate of profit. Its price is the average rate of interest. As soon as capitalism arises, and capital itself can be sold as a commodity, money itself becomes immediately potential money-capital, because, in being loaned, it has the power of expansion, via the payment of interest.
Labour is initially concrete labour. It is expended on the production of products for direct consumption. Labour is inseparable from the product, and from the use value of the product. Because the product is not exchanged, the concrete labour, within these confined conditions, is itself abstract labour, as the social labour of the commune. The value of the product is an individual value, determined by the labour-time expended on production. This social labour is immediately, itself, an abstraction, an average of the individual labours of the members of the commune involved in that production, each of which is different. As trade between communes expands, the individual labour/value of each commune becomes compared, and itself averaged, so that the individual values of products becomes a market value, an average of all these individual values, and the labour undertaken by each commune can no longer be measured as concrete labour, but only as a quantity of this average labour. When money arises, as the universal equivalent, the value of this labour is measured externally by the quantity of money it represents, and thereby the labour used in production of the money commodity becomes a proxy for abstract labour itself.
Exchange-value only takes on its fully mature form, when commodity production is itself generalised, and the majority of production is of commodities. But, that point also marks the end of the exchange of commodities at their exchange-value, because that only arises, when the majority of producers must obtain the means of their subsistence from the market, as commodities. That, in turn, only arises when the producers can no longer produce the means of their subsistence themselves, and must buy them as commodities, which requires that they become divorced from their own means of production. It means that labour itself must then assume the form of wage labour, as the producer must sell their own labour-power, as a commodity. It assumes that production has become capitalist production, but capitalist production means that commodities sell at their price of production, not their exchange-value.
If we look at the full text of Marx's letter to Kugelmann, rather than the extract from it, usually discussed, then it becomes clear that John Bridge's assertion that, in talking about the allocation of labour-time, in every society, Marx was not discussing value, or The Law of Value, is simply wrong. If we look at the full text of the paragraph about this allocation of labour-time, that becomes apparent. This is what Marx says,
“As for the Zentralblatt, the man is making the greatest possible concession in admitting, that, if one means anything at all by value, the conclusions I draw must be accepted. The unfortunate fellow does not see that, even if there were no chapter on "value" in my book, the analysis of the real relationships which I give, would contain the proof and demonstration of the real value relation. The nonsense about the necessity of proving the concept of value arises from complete ignorance both of the subject dealt with and of the method science. Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish. And every child knows, too, that the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour. It is self-evident that this necessity of the distribution of social labour in specific proportions is certainly not abolished by the specific form of social production; it can only change its form of manifestation. Natural laws cannot be abolished at all. The only thing that can change, under historically differing conditions, is the form in which those laws assert themselves. And the form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself in a state of society in which the interconnection of social labour expresses itself as the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products.”
So, its clear that in this letter to Kugelmann, Marx was explicitly referring to value and The Law of Value, and clearly associates value with this proportional allocation of labour-time that must be undertaken in every mode of production. What changes, as Marx says here, is the manifestation of this law in different modes of production. Under systems of commodity production and exchange, value takes the form of exchange-value, and on the basis of these exchange values, the allocation of available labour-time occurs via the mediation of the market. In fact, in this section, talking about the exchange of commodities by private exchange of individual products at their exchange-value, Marx is not even talking about capitalism. The private exchange of products at exchange-values occurs where the majority of production is undertaken by petty commodity producers, who own their means of production, as described in Capital III, Chapter 12.
In the same way that science only uncovered the existence of oxygen as a gas in the atmosphere, rather than in some way inventing it, or creating it, and so its discovery did not in anyway change nature, and the fact that oxygen has been silently getting on with its business behind Men's backs, prior to its discovery, so the whole point of science in political economy, is similarly to discover the underlying laws, and how they manifest themselves in different modes of production.
“The science consists precisely in working out how, the law of value operates.”
(ibid)
In order to take up these points, I wrote to the WW, setting out this argument, to illustrate that the problem with John Bridge's argument, is that he fails to understand Marx's concept of value, illustrated by his equation of value with exchange-value. My letter setting this out, provoked a further debate between myself and John Bridge, in the following weeks. My delayed response to these discussions, and the fact that my response, now, must unfortunately be protracted is due to still having a considerable amount of my own labour-time, consumed having moved house, which itself involves a balancing of value against use value. In Part 4, I will look at the further discussion with John Bridge.
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