This difference between individual value and social value is also recognised by Ricardo, who notes that its manifestation, as exchange-value, is only possible given certain historical preconditions.
“such commodities only as can be increased in quantity by the exertion of human industry, and on the production of which competition operates without restraint.” (p 60)
In other words, it requires large-scale industrial production and free competition “modern bourgeois society” (p 60) But, Ricardo then takes this bourgeois form of production, and bourgeois form of labour, and reads it backwards on to all previous modes of production. The individual commodity producer now becomes the model for all previous producers.
“Ricardo’s primitive fisherman and primitive hunter are from the outset owners of commodities who exchange their fish and game in proportion to the labour-time which is materialised in these exchange-values. On this occasion he slips into the anachronism of allowing the primitive fisherman and hunter to calculate the value of their implements in accordance with the annuity tables used on the London Stock Exchange in 1817.” (p 60)
Ricardo was unacquainted with any other mode of production than bourgeois production, and so unacquainted with any other form of value than exchange-value. He misses out, therefore, on all of this pre-history of the development of the product into the commodity, and of individual value into social value, as the basis of exchange-value along with it.
“Although encompassed by this bourgeois horizon, Ricardo analyses bourgeois economy, whose deeper layers differ essentially from its surface appearance, with such theoretical acumen that Lord Brougham could say of him:
"Mr. Ricardo seemed as if he had dropped from another planet.”” (p 60-61)
Sismondi emphasises the social nature of labour and even the basis of average labour, arising from The Law of Value, and competition, in respect of commodity production, to reduce it to only necessary labour-time. He says,
"the relation between the needs of the whole society and the quantity- of labour which is sufficient to satisfy these needs.” (p 61)
Where Boisguillebert railed against money as distorting the creation of exchange-value, by labour, Sismondi, instead, railed against money raised to its higher power, i.e. capital, and specifically large industrial capital.
“Whereas Ricardo’s political economy ruthlessly draws its final conclusion and therewith ends, Sismondi supplements this ending by expressing doubt in political economy itself.” (p 61)
In contrast to Ricardo's revolutionary optimism, Sismondi is characterised by pessimism and catastrophism, leaving him as a reactionary, who seeks to hold back development.
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