As Marx set out, in his Letter To Kugelmann, explaining The Law of Value, that obviously does not mean that the law does not exist in these other societies, only that its form of manifestation is different.
“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.”
Once, commodity production and exchange disappears, exchange-value disappears, along with it, but value, and The Law of Value, continues. As, Marx put it,
“Secondly, after the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, but still retaining social production, the determination of value continues to prevail in the sense that the regulation of labour-time and the distribution of social labour among the various production groups, ultimately the book-keeping encompassing all this, become more essential than ever.”
Illustrating Duhring's confusion of labour and labour-power, Engels quotes his comment,
“Therefore the position is not,” Herr Dühring proceeds, “as in Herr Marx's nebulous conception, that the labour-time of one person is in itself more valuable than that of another, because more average labour-time is condensed as it were within it, but that all labour-time is in principle and without exception perfectly equivalent, and there is therefore no need to take an average first”. (p 254)
Engels mocks Duhring's assertion that an hour of labour-time of each labour is equivalent, saying,
“It is lucky for Herr Dühring that fate did not make him a manufacturer, thus saving him from fixing the value of his commodities on the basis of this new rule and so running infallibly into the arms of bankruptcy.” (p 254)
In the context of a society based on commodity production and exchange, including capitalism, it is quite clear that this assertion by Duhring is false, for all the reasons previously cited. Today, that is perfectly obvious, as I have described elsewhere. Is the hour of labour of a top class footballer, film star, and so on equivalent to that of an hour of a machine minder? Clearly not, which is why billions of labourers, across the globe are prepared to exchange multiple hours of their own labour in exchange for the former.
When in regular surveys consumers say that they don't think its right that footballers should be paid more than doctors or nurses, this is simply an expression of what they consider to be morally right. But, commodity production and exchange, and capitalism has no place for such moral considerations. When those same consumers come to exchange the money from their incomes for commodities, they demonstrate that, by handing over large sums to watch those same footballers, actors and performers, whilst baulking at any increase in taxes to fund the NHS, or to pay higher wages to doctors and nurses.
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