Saturday 13 July 2019

Theories of Surplus Value, Part III, Chapter 21 - Part 51

Whilst it may not be possible to build a house today with the actual bricks (use values) produced tomorrow, the bricks used in production today are simultaneously being reproduced today in the brickworks, and the value of these bricks, as commodities, is determined by their current reproduction cost. The value of the bricks laid today, whatever their value when they were produced, and whatever price the builder paid for them, can be no different to that of the identical bricks streaming out of the brickworks to replace them. To believe that they could be is to hold an extreme and bizarre form of commodity fetishism that is wholly contrary to, and undermining of Marx's theory of value. 

“Since the continuous, constantly repeated process of production is, at the same time, a process of reproduction, it is therefore equally dependent on the coexisting labour which produces the various phases of the product simultaneously, while the product is passing through metamorphosis from one phase to another. [Raw] cotton, yarn, fabric, are not only produced one after the other and from one another, but they are produced and reproduced simultaneously, alongside one another. What appears as the effect of antecedent labour, if one considers the production process of the individual commodity, presents itself at the same time as the effect of coexisting labour, if one considers the reproduction process of the commodity, that is, if one considers this production process in its continuous motion and in the entirety of its conditions, and not merely an isolated action or a limited part of it. There exists not only a cycle comprising various phases, but all the phases of the commodity are simultaneously produced in the various spheres and branches of production. If the same peasant just plants flax, then spins it, then weaves it, these operations are performed in succession, but not simultaneously as the mode of production based on the division of labour within society presupposes.” (p 279) 

The antecedent labour is always a precondition in providing the means of production as use values, required for current production. It is this fact that the capitalists themselves and their apologists emphasise in justifying the dominance of this dead labour over living labour. By also emphasising the role of the products of this past labour, as required for current production production, the proponents of historic pricing are drawn down the same path. 

“In production and circulation, on the other hand, the mediating social labour on which the [production] process of the commodity in each particular phase depends and by which it is determined, appears as present, coexisting, contemporaneous labour. The early forms of the commodity and its successive or completed forms are produced simultaneously. Unless this happened it would not be possible, after it has undergone its real metamorphosis, to reconvert it from money into its conditions of existence. A commodity is thus the product of antecedent labour only insofar as it is the product of contemporaneous living labour.” (p 280) 

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