>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 09/21/00 12:22PM >>>
Charles Brown wrote,
>Though most of the book "value" is used. But "value" can be used to refer
>to "use-value" too. Value in the sense of "wealth" is in the form of
>commodities, and commodities are bundles of exchange-value and use-value.
Remember, though, "A commodity appears at first sight an extremely
obvious, trivial thing . . . so far as it is a use-value there is nothing
mysterious about it . . . [j]ust as little does [this mystical character]
proceed from the nature of the determinants of value [the expenditure of
labour power] . . ."
"Whence, then, arises the enigmatic character of the product of labour, as
soon as it assumes the form of a commodity? . . . The mysterious character
of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the
commodity *reflects* the social characteristics of men's own labour as
objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the
socio-natural properties of these things."
Yes, then, exchange-value expresses value but it does so in an "inverted",
"mysterious" form -- as a relationship between things (e.g., linen and
coats) rather than as the relationship between people -- the weaver and
the tailor -- that it fundamentally is.
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CB: I agree with this, but in this first Chapter, Marx is dispelling the mystery.
After you read it , value shouldn't be so mysterious in any of its forms. We get a
clear picture of use-value and exchange=-value as concrete labor and abstract labor ,
a unity and struggle of opposites bundled up in a commodity. A commodity is the unity
of two contradictory forms of labor. Commodities are exchanged based on the
commensurability of the abstract labor embodied in them , not on the basis of
comparison of the concrete labor embodied in them.
The mystery exists for those who don't read this Chapter, that is most people.
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Elsewhere (e.g. in the Grundrisse and in the Critique of Political
Economy), Marx makes a fundamental distinction between "value", which is a
characteristic of the commodity form and "wealth", which is not. That
distinction is so crucial that I'll have to reserve comment on it until
I have a bit more time to elaborate.
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CB: Agree. In the societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails,
wealth presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, which consist of
exchange-value ( "value") and use-value.
Other socieities (non-capitalist) have a lot of non-commodity forms of wealth. Their
use-values are mostly not bundled together with exchange-value in commodities.
Commodities are mostly exchanged BETWEEN societies, around the edges and borders of
socieities. Most production is for use, not exchange, in these pre-capitalist
societies, so their wealth is in a different form.
