David B. Shemano wrote: > I am truly curious -- do you (and others on
this list) really, really, reject that value is subjective? ...<
Mike Nuwer responded to this before (and did so very well), but here's
my (hopefully not too idiosyncratic) response.
It's clear that Marx believed that subjectivity was a crucial and
unavoidable part of "value." After, if people don't want to buy an
item (i.e., if it isn't a "use-value"), it cannot have value, using
his meaning of the terms.
More fundamentally, the answer to your question depends what one means
by "value." It also depends on what one means by "objective" and
"subjective."
A. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the dominant usage amongst
economists has been to equate the theoretical concept of "value" with
the empirical concept of (market) price. (Thus, Debreu titled his
novel THE THEORY OF VALUE.) Given that, the value = price is
determined by both subjective and objective factors. For mainstream
economists, in this context "subjective" means based on individual
preferences, social values, expectations, etc., while "objective"
means some sort of constraint of attaining subjective goals.
(Sometimes they confusingly refer to someone having an "objective
function" that summarizes their subjective goals, but let's leave that
usage aside.)
That is, the value of a consumer good or service = what Marshall
called the demand price. Ignoring the phenomenon of monopsony, demand
price the maximum amount that people in the market are (subjectively)
willing to pay for the quantity they buy, given their (objective)
ability to pay, i.e., their incomes and stocks of net worth.
In a perfectly competitive market, the equilibrium value = (demand)
price also equals Marshall's supply price which equals the minimum
price that suppliers are willing to accept for the quantity they sell.
This in turn is determined by their objective ability to produce the
item (reflecting the unit cost of production) and the subjective
calculation about whether it's better to sell now or later.
Some of the more "Austrian" folks interpret this story totally in
terms of subjectivity. It's true, the argument goes, that the cost of
producing cars depends on labor costs (among other things). But labor
costs reflect the subjective decision of workers to supply their time
(rather than leisure or to work at other pursuits). But there are at
last two major problems with this total sweeping away of the objective
sides of prices.
First, the availability of some "factors of production" like natural
resources are based in objective facts of life, i.e., what Nature in
her unconscious way has decided to give us. There are only a limited
number of hours in the day, etc. These limits cannot be wished away.
Second, we have to introduce time into the story. At time T, a worker
might decide to produce a car (so subjectivity plays a role). But at
time T+1, the car exists objectively. It exists independently of
anyone's perception if it. It cannot be wished away -- it can only be
gotten rid of via special effort to do so (using a sledge hammer).
The current supply of cars depends not only on the new flow of
production (reflecting current subjective decisions) but also the
(objectively) existing stock of cars in the showroom, etc.
Of course, as mentioned, the actual decision to sell (and the prices
seen as acceptable) depend on the subjective decision of the current
owner of cars. But that does not deny the objective component of the
scarcity of cars at any one point in time.
B. The pre-Marxian "classical" economists -- like Ricardo and his
school -- equated (market) price and value in a completely different
way. For Ricardo, the "value" of a commodity was the amount of labor
that was required to produce it, seen primarily as an objective
factor. (I'm far from being an expert on Ricardo, so I'd like to have
my assertions corrected if necessary.) In the long run, market prices
were seen as equaling Smith's "natural" prices, which in turn equaled
these values (if measured in the same units, natch). Or at least they
were equal 93% percent of the time.
In this view, the objective or cost side of the story determines
"natural" prices while the subjective or demand side determines the
quantity. In modern lingo, the long-run supply curve is horizontal, at
least in the relevant range. Ricardian labor values, existing
objectively "behind" markets determine prices in the long run (93% of
the time). You can see the location of the long-run supply curve as
determined by the current technology (which is objectively given at
any one time) and by wages. Since Ricardo took wages as given (by the
"iron law of wages"), they are objective factors too.
Of course, in the classical conception (and in Marx's later view), the
lonely hour of the "long run" is never reached. Instead, market prices
are always oscillating around the "centers of gravity" ("natural"
prices = values).
C. Marx, in my view, distinguished clearly between (market) prices and
values (the empirical concept from the theoretical one). Then he
confused everybody by _assuming_ that they equaled each other during
most of volumes I and II of his CAPITAL, distinguishing between them
only in the partly-finished and somewhat scattered volume III.
To Marx, market prices were in the first instance determined by supply
& demand, so that Marshall's story (limned above) was not in conflict
with Marx's. In most of CAPITAL, Marx ignored monopoly and he'd never
heard of monopsony. Mainly, however, he wasn't concerned with issues
of supply and demand and market prices, since he had bigger bear to
hunt: he aimed to gainan understanding of the "laws of motion" of
capitalism as a social system.
Many readers make the mistake of assuming that Marx was discussing
prices in the first two volumes, but as far as I can tell, prices were
unimportant to his theory there (except as seen below). Again, all he
did was to assume that (new) products sold at value. He wasn't
concerned with the price of antiques or virgin land -- for which that
assumption is radically wrong -- in those volumes. In my reading, that
assumption has a clear purpose, to which I turn next.
Marx wasn't concerned with prices but instead with social relations
between people. In fact, the main role for prices in all of CAPITAL
was that they obscure our vision of the social relations of production
that prevailed in society as a whole and in most microcosms. This is
his famous theory of the "fetishism of commodities": at first glance,
economy _seems_ to be nothing but commodities being exchanged for each
other, but that vision misses an extremely important part of the
picture. What's missing is the social relations amongst individuals
and between classes.
In this light, Marx assumed that values = prices to break through the
fetishism, so we could understand the hidden part of reality in terms
of the apparent part. He assumed that the shared characteristics of
newly-produced commodities (their values) were equal to their apparent
or phenomenal form (their prices). That way, the "essence" could be
seen directly: both the social relationships between commodity
producers and the class relationship between capitalists and workers
could be understood via empirical exemplars or microcosms.
As Mike Nuwer makes clear, in this view of capitalism, values are not
characteristics of the commodities themselves but instead reflect
their social context. The social organization of commodity production
and that of capitalism stand as objective structures, setting that
context. They exist independent of any individual's perception of it
at any specific point in time. Not only cannot it be wished away, it
takes more than a special effort to get rid of it. No sledge hammer
will do the trick. It takes a (large) group effort.
To Marx, there's another meaning to the term "objective." The
subjective view is from the inside of the structure, suffering from a
fetishized vision of the world. The objective view is the perspective
from the outside, from the perspective of society as a whole.
In these terms, I reject the very common view that Marx was following
Ricardo (rather than learning from him _and_ criticizing his theory
from top to bottom). Whereas Ricardo's concern was with the similarity
of prices with values, Marx's view _also_ included the deviation
between them.
Instead of somehow focusing on a story of mathematically translating
values into prices, so that the former "determine" the latter, I think
that the story is about the relationship between the whole (commodity
production, capitalism) and the parts. The objectively-existing whole
is understood in terms of values, while the partly
subjectively-determined parts are understood in terms of prices.
Of course, there is a connection between the two levels. For Marx,
these are that the sum of values for all of society = the sum of
prices (when measured in the same units) and that the sum or
surplus-value for all of society = the sum of profits, interest, rent,
and other property incomes (when measured...)
I've gone on much too long. See you tomorrow.
--
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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