Mark,
>Oil in the ground can form a capital value for the owner of the asset. But
>the capital is still only part of what has already been created. Its
>objective counterpart is idle labour and resources elsewhere in the system,
>that can potentially be mobilised to exploit the asset. Absent that, the
>asset has no exchange value.
I'll try two interpretations of what you say:
1) Do you mean that if the owner sells it to buy commodities, these
commodities and their exchange-values will have to come from somewhere,
namely from the buyer of the asset. So what? The asset still has echange-
value. The total "stock" of exchange-values is not related to the total "flow" of
commodities. Exchange-values can even be created out of thin air, as modern
monetary systems demonstrate without doubt.
2) Do you mean that the total value of all untapped natural ressources equal
the total value of all unused capacity and labour??? Is that observable in real
world price movements?
>It cannot be worth more than the labour it embodies during extraction,
>processing etc.
The untapped field embodies no labour. Yet it has a price. What am I
missing?
>Owners of raw materials, mines etc, get
>rent, and this rent is a subsidiary stream from the general flow of
>surplus-value created by the total production process.
Yes, raw materials are not paid for their participation to the process of
production and thus you can say that rent is a subsidiary stream from the
circulation of exchange-values. One could abolish it by nationalization f.ex. But
the actual source of this rent is the combination of the scarcity and the use-
value of the raw materials. This is because there is a potential use-value in
natural resources that can be found nowhere else and without which labour
generates less use-value. Resources play the same role as man-made
capital in expanding the production per worker and private property of these
resources generate the same results as private property of the man-made
means of production. This is why labour is not the sole source of value
eventhough there can be no value without labour.
Julien
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