Well, Charles... We've made a mess of the issue. So forgive me if I don't
answer every question. I'll try to get to the heart of it... Let's keep in mind that,
as you say "The issue is correspondence with reality, the scientific standard."
>CB: OK that's part of Marx's definition. But the main thing is that exchange-
>value is the labor time in a commodity. I guess from the Marxist standpoint,
>that part of the definition is not compromisable. Otherwise, you just have a
>different idea going than Marx did.
Forget one minute that you read Capital. You're just beginning to read it, in fact.
Marx talks about commodities. He talks about use-value and exchange-value.
What do you understand? You understand that he's talking about usefulness
and price, right? Then, he proceeds to analyse what's in the exchange-value
and THEN he says that "exchange-value is the labor time in a commodity". As
I understand it, his exchange-value concept is a way to link price and labor
time. He starts wisely by the end of the concept one can observe (exchange-
value is the value expressed by the price) rather than by the one which is NOT
observable directly (exchange-value is made of labor time).
So when I talked about exchange-value and asked you to look at the
exchange-values of things in the world to see if Marx is right or not, I of course
was talking about the observable mercantile value, not about incorporated
labor time. So I think that I have the same idea going that Marx had,
eventhough I have a different conclusion.
>CB: ... I think my answer here is
>that a natural resource is susceptible to having exchange-value , not
>because of its being scare or non-scarce , as you define scarcity below, but
>due to, as you say in your parenthesis above, THE FACT THAT THE
>EXPLOITABILITY OR CONSUMABILITY OF ITS USE-VALUE CAN BE
>RESTRICTED AND NOT FREELY AVAILABLE TO ANYONE. ...
Good! We're making progress. You recognize that a natural resource can
have exchange-value and you rightly correct me.
I was thinking too much like a mainstream economist (maximising agents with
no monopoly). Even if a resource is underexploited, it's use can indeed be
restricted and the right to use it can be sold.
>I can't quite get my mind around "not underexploited". I think of scarce as
>not enough available for everybody.
The "not underexploited" criteria was meant to give you a tool to observe what
was going on in the world and classify resources as scare or nor. It's hard to
say whether a resource is "enough available for everybody", especially when
you look at resources which are not directly fulfilling the needs of people but
are used as inputs in production.
The correction you made invalids my criteria. It's only valid where there's a
free market of the resource.
>It is not the fact that there is not enough
>of a resource available for everybody that makes it renderable as an
>exchange-value.
You're right. It's either that or a social limitation on the use of the resource
which creates the potential for the resource to have exchange-value. Whether
it will actually have exchange-value or not in depends on whether it is
commodified or not.
>It is that you say in parethesis, that its availability to use or exploit can
>be restricted such that you have to get it from someone else, and can't just
>use it like air.
Yes. But if the resource is not scarce, it's hard to restrict its availability
usually.
People will easily be organized against such a restriction.
Do you agree that in the uncommon cases where a non-scarce resource has
exchange-value, it's because the scarcity has been socially created?
BTW, what I meant with the parenthesis is that whenever and wherever there is
"tragedy of the commons" conditions, Marx's value theory holds. (And the
mirror consequence of this might be that any attempt to make an economy
work strictly by Marx's value theory will have the same bad ecological results.
I've made this argument in more detail earlier on the list, I think.)
>I don't think Marx said that resources are never commodified. Food is a
>resource, and it is commodified.
This comment about food makes me doubt that we reached the agreement
that I thought we had. Food is not a resource! Fertile land is a resource, f.ex.
When food is grown, hunted, or at least gathered to be exchanged it's already
processed by human labour. Forgive me if I'm wrongly misusing English, but
my dictionary is not clear on this.
As to what Marx said, this is the beginning of the last paragraph of Capital, 1:1...
"A thing can be a use-value, without having value. This is the case whenever
its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural
meadows, &c." How do you interpret that? I do interpret it as saying that
resources are never commodifed, notably because of the examples he uses.
Julien
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