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<CB: Marx differentiates use-value and exchange-value. Nature is a
source of use-values. It is not a source of exchange-values.>
I very much doubt that statement, Charles.
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CB: Your doubt will be instantly dissolved if you read about the first five pages of
Vol. I of _Capital_
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Try finding out the
difference in price between a piece of crop land with depleted soil, and
overgrazed into desert, and a fertile piece of property with adequate
water, that has been well cared for.
Or try this, a piece of land where pig sewage has been drained
into...... What happens to the exchange value to all the
surrounding area? Want to buy into that neighborhood? Or being
in the position of trying to exchange out?
Isn't capitalism currently destroying value by destroying nature?
What is the supposed difference in significance between 'use' and
'exchange' value?
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CB: The wealth of the societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails
presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities. Our first task is , then,
to investigate the commodity.
A commodity consists of two types of value: Use-value and exchange-value. So, your
discussion on this thread is confused because you are not differentiating those two
types of value.
Your several comments and questions above are clarfied by the further proposition that
an item cannot be a commodity, cannot be a carrier of exchange-value, unless it is
also a use-value, meaning it meets some type of human want. If land is polluted many
of its use-values can be destroyed. Those use-values cannot thereby serve as the
embodiment of exchange-value. So, the destruction of the use-values, which you
describe, can constitute an undermining of the exchange-value of that land as a
commodity. It may have some other use, but , by way of analogy, it is as if a wooden
wagon were broken into its wood pieces. It still has use as fire wood, but fire wood
is a different commodity than a wagon. So, the exchange-value recognized in the fire
would is only based on the labor of chopping, not the labor of building a wagon.
Polluting land may demote it from a "wagon" to " wood" as a commodity and thereby
demote the exchange-value of the land.
Of course the polluting of the land directly destroys certain use-values.
This is , roughly, how the examples you give might reduce both the exchange-value and
the use-value of the land in question.
However, note that in general it is capitalism's prime aim of producing
surplus-value, a form of value, that causes it to simultaneously destroy the natural
use-values you describe. So, capitalism is destroying "value" in its production of
"value".
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