====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
Philip Dunn writes: > It is widely thought that things can have a price but no value. It is > not a simple issue. However, within the scope of value theory, I would > be extremely reluctant to admit it. It is, of course, a non-trivial > issue what the scope of value theory is. The fact that some things have a price and no value at all, and other things have prices depending on value in a somewhat indirect fashion is nothing new to Marx, and---as Marx sees it---it does not mean that value theory has only a limited scope of validity. Let me explain this in more detail: (1) With the development of commodity circulation---after more and more different commodities produced by human labor could be bought with money---things got swept into circulation which did not contain labor but which became purchaseable with money because money was so powerful to purchase everything else already. Marx's main example was that it became possible to bribe people with money. (2) If a commodity is in high demand and therefore has a higher value than would be justified by its labor content then Marx says that this excess value is an expression of the demand for the good. But this high demand brings forth higher supply, therefore in the long run the price will be adjusted to the labor content. (3) In a bubble economy prices rise above their value foundations and sometimes a crisis is necessary to bring prices back to their value fundamentals. (There is a famous passage by Lipietz about this.) For many other things, the link between value and price is from the beginning indirect. Perhaps the most famous example are of course the prices of production which are no longer proportional to value but which are ultimately reducible to value. Philip brings other examples: > To take one example, "for instance, uncultivated land may have a price, > though it has no value, since no human labor has been incorporated in > it." Nevertheless, the ownership of land---just as the ownership of means of production---is necessary for the extraction of surplus-value, and the price of land is determined by the role of land in securing surplus-value for its owner. I.e., there is a link to labor, but it is an indirect link. If you look at the whole of the sentence from Marx quoted by Philip, you see that this is exactly what Marx meant with this sentence: > On the other hand, the imaginary price-form may also conceal a real > value-relation or one derived from it, as for instance the price of > uncultivated land, which is without value because no human labor > is objectified in it. (MECW35 p.112; MEW23 p.117; Vintage/Penguin p.197) Philip concludes: > Here it is the assumption that all value is embodied labour value > that causes the problem. Marx did not see this as a problem. On the contrary, in the manuscript "Results of the Immediate Process of Production" he wrote a passage which is a little stronger than the final published version of *Capital*, namely there he tried to argue that *every* price must be reducible to value: > Every *price* must be reducible to a *value*, because price, in and > for itself, is nothing but the monetary expression of value. The > circumstance that the actual price of a commodity may stand above or > below the level corresponding to its value does not alter the fact > that prices are an expression of the values of the commodities, even > though the expression is in this case *quantitatively* too large or > too small---quantitatively incongruent. But here in the *price of > labor* the lack of congruence is *qualitative*. (MEGA II/4.1 p. 15, > or the appendix of the Vintage edition p. 1072/3) Philip brings additional examples: > Similarly, it is questionable whether the value of money and the > value of labour-power are best understood as embodied labour. The value of labor-power is not labor embodied in the worker, but labor embodied in the consumption goods the worker needs. I.e., it is one step removed---which has important implications for relative surplus-value. The value of money at Marx's time was automatically determined by the production cost of gold. Nowadays I think the value of money is determined by monetary policy. I.e., we no longer have a gold standard but a policy standard. I think policy makers are doing exactly what is necessary to preserve the role of the dollar as a measure and representation of value---as described in section 3 of chapter One of Capital. Here the link to labor is quite indirect, but I still think it's there. In Marx's view all social laws are tendential (not only the falling rate of profit)---they can be inhibited temporarily by other influences. Marx was not disturbed by it, and he did not try to hide it. He wrote: > That in their appearance things are often presented in an inverted > way is something familiar in just about every science, except in > political economy. (Chapter 19) I think Marx considered labor to be the only *enduring* influence having an effect on prices which cannot be gotten rid of, and which continues to be effective after all the other effects have worn off (as long as a mode of production based on abstract labor persists). Hans. Hans G. Ehrbar http://www.econ.utah.edu/~ehrbar ehr...@economics.utah.edu Economics Department, University of Utah (801) 908 6937 260 Central Campus Drive Rm 343 (801) 581 7481 (econ office) Salt Lake City UT 84112-9155 (801) 585 5649 (FAX) ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
