Individual value is the manifestation of The Law of Value, in respect of direct production of products, whereas exchange value is its manifestation in respect of generalised commodity production and exchange, as Marx describes in his Letter to Kugelmann.
“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.”
Likewise, when society moved on from generalised commodity production and exchange by individual producers, to capitalist production, around the 15th century, exchange-value itself ceases to be the form of its manifestation, as The Law of Value now operates via prices of production. As Engels says,
“In a word: the Marxian law of value holds generally, as far as economic laws are valid at all, for the whole period of simple commodity production — that is, up to the time when the latter suffers a modification through the appearance of the capitalist form of production. Up to that time, prices gravitate towards the values fixed according to the Marxian law and oscillate around those values, so that the more fully simple commodity production develops, the more the average prices over long periods uninterrupted by external violent disturbances coincide with values within a negligible margin. Thus, the Marxian law of value has general economic validity for a period lasting from the beginning of exchange, which transforms products into commodities, down to the 15th century of the present era.”
(Capital III, Supplement, The Law of Value and Rate of Profit)
In systems of direct production, certain social relations also arise upon them. Direct production, in the primitive commune, is collective, giving rise to solidaristic, egalitarian and democratic social relations within it. When it dissolves it is because the very process of raising labour productivity, driven by The Law of Value, begins to make possible social surpluses, growing in size. That means that some individuals are able to consume without engaging in labour. They are able to devote time to study, to perform functions of leadership, or administration, to act as religious leaders and so on. They acquire slaves and servants, and where they engage in production, they can do so on a larger scale using more effective instruments of labour. As Marx says in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 9,
“although at first the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and even classes, in the end it breaks through this contradiction and coincides with the development of the individual; the higher development of individuality is thus only achieved by a historical process during which individuals are sacrificed for the interests of the species in the human kingdom, as in the animal and plant kingdoms, always assert themselves at the cost of the interests of individuals, because these interests of the species coincide only with the interests of certain individuals, and it is this coincidence which constitutes the strength of these privileged individuals.” (p 117-8)
Yet, in such societies where direct production and consumption still predominate, exchange continues to be predominantly between communities not within them. The mass of society continues to engage in direct production for its own consumption, handing over any surplus of its own to the rulers in various forms of tribute, depending upon the historically determined, specific, political forms such societies take, which itself is a function of specific material conditions.
As Engels put it in his Letter to Bloch,
“We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one. The Prussian state also arose and developed from historical, ultimately economic, causes. But it could scarcely be maintained without pedantry that among the many small states of North Germany, Brandenburg was specifically determined by economic necessity to become the great power embodying the economic, linguistic and, after the Reformation, also the religious difference between North and South, and not by other elements as well (above all by its entanglement with Poland, owing to the possession of Prussia, and hence with international political relations — which were indeed also decisive in the formation of the Austrian dynastic power). Without making oneself ridiculous it would be a difficult thing to explain in terms of economics the existence of every small state in Germany, past and present, or the origin of the High German consonant permutations, which widened the geographic partition wall formed by the mountains from the Sudetic range to the Taunus to form a regular fissure across all Germany.”
Some of these socio-economic systems, such as the Asiatic Mode of Production, become stagnant. They remain stuck in a regime of direct communal production, with surpluses handed over to a bureaucratic ruling caste. There is no competitive whip driving forward increased commodity production and exchange. It is only where these old communal relations dissolve that individual production and exchange develops, and begins, inevitably, to result in increased commodity production and exchange within the community. In place of the old solidaristic and egalitarian societies, and relations, now arises increased competition and inequality.
No comments:
Post a Comment