Julien Pierrehumbert wrote:
>
> 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".
False. I've lost interest in this debate since the anti-marxists in it take refuge
in word magic rather than show any interest in understanding the reality
of capitalism, but those who claim to be explicating Marx ought to be
minimally accurate at least at a verbal level.
Use value is the worth, the utility, the usability for human purposes, of any
object. Air has use value but neither value nor exchange value (though we
may yet see a change here as pollution increases).
Exchange value is the *form* of value, not value itself (and it does *not*
consiste in labor time). The exchange value of a commodity is the total
list of all the commodities in the world with which it may exchange. The
exchange may occur directly, or it may be performed indirectly with the
use of money. If I sell a chair for so many dollars and then buy four
digital disks with the money, the exchange value of a digital disk is
one-fourth of a chair. And so on. 1A = B/3 = 20C = 1058D =
1/1004E et cetera et cetera et cetera. No mention of value (labor time)
of price (the price is merely the appearance of the exchange value).
*Value* is social labor encased in a privately owned product.
So *Value* is determined by the magnitude of labor in an object.
Exchange Value is a relationship among commodities.
Carrol
P.S. Tom Warren thinks rainforests contain human labor -- that
they are utterly artificial. He is wrong, of course; humans are so
far utterly incapable of producing a rainforests, and since rain
forests are so essential to human life and since we cannot, as
Tom thinks, produce and sell them, we had better try to preserve
them.
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