Roberts commits another fundamental error, noted above, in confusing the production of new value, and the production of surplus value. He says,
“Marx says that new value is only created by human labour-power - but not all labour. Productive labour for capital consists of those sections of labour that create new value for the owners of the means of production.”
I have dealt with Roberts' confusion and conflation of labour with labour-power, but the rest of his comment, here, is wrong, almost in every word. Its true that Marx does not say that all labour, or as Roberts would have it, labour-power/wage-labour, creates new value, but not for the reason Roberts attributes to him, here. Marx says that labour only creates new value if it is purposive labour, i.e. produces use-value. For example, in a society of direct producers, the labour that the individual labourer undertakes, to meet their needs is purposive labour to that end. They only expend their labour in the production of use-values, because the end product is, indeed, a use-value, something that provides them with utility. It is value-creating labour.
When society develops, and, begins to exchange these products, and, then, starts to deliberately produce them for the purpose of exchange, i.e. they become commodities, this inextricable unity of value and use-value, contained within the product, is broken apart, and, now, for the labour expended to be purposive labour, and, so value-creating, it must result in the production of a commodity, which represents use-value for someone else. Again, this was the error that was made by Proudhon, and by Duhring (as well as by Mill, Say and Ricardo [Say's Law], as Marx sets out in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 17, and 20). Engels gives a good account of precisely this issue, in relation to the error of Proudhon, in his Preface to The Poverty of Philosophy. And, in Anti-Duhring, he and Marx note, in the same vein.
“The value of a product of labour is determined by the labour-time necessary for its production; and we knew that long ago, even without Herr Dühring. Instead of stating the fact simply, he has to twist it into an oracular saying. It is simply wrong to say that the dimensions in which anyone invests his energies in anything (to keep to the bombastic style) is the immediate determining cause of value and of the magnitude of value. In the first place, it depends on what thing the energy is put into, and secondly, how the energy is put into it. If someone makes a thing which has no use-value for other people, his whole energy does not produce an atom of value; and if he is stiff-necked enough to produce by hand an object which a machine produces twenty times cheaper, nineteen-twentieths of the energy he put into it produces neither value in general nor any particular magnitude of value.”
In other words, for labour to be value-creating, it must be purposive labour and result in the production of a use-value. In the case of a product, that is inherent, because the producer only expends the labour, to produce something that provides them with utility. But, labour expended on the production of a commodity is only value creating, if that commodity is a use-value for a potential buyer.
If, as Marx and Engels set out above, the suppliers of commodity X, in aggregate, overproduce X, i.e. supply more of it than the demand for it, at its market value, the oversupply has no value, the labour expended on that excess supply was wasted, was not value-creating. This again, illustrates the absurdity of Roberts position, and of the TSSI, in relation to negative new value, and the confusion of value with surplus value. If a wage worker is employed to produce say, a Sinclair C-5, the historic price of the materials and wear and tear of fixed capital, has already been paid, as have the wages of the workers. Yet, if there are no buyers of the C-5's produced, the labour expended in their production, was not value creating, it was wasted labour. The result would be that the capital would make a loss, which, in the TSSI interpretation, amounts to the creation of a negative new value!
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