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P. Dunn wrote: "And money does not equalise abstract labor?"
If by equalise you mean that money functions as a representative of the
commensurability of the abstract human labor already
materialized before two commodities are exchanged, then yes, money equalises
(expresses the equality of), quantitavely, the
abstract labor in those commodities. But this is not against what Hans says (so
it doesn't look like it's what you're saying),
which, as I take it, means that commodities are not commodities because they
are equalized by money, money is the outward
mode of expression of their commensurability which results from the action that
objectifies the value-form of the commodity,
which is the labor performed privately and independently. Commodities are
commodities before they are exchanged (before their
intrinsic potentiality is realized.)
By the same token, money does not equalize abstract labor in the sense that
labor becomes abstract because of the act of
exchange. Abstract labor is an aspect of the two-fold character of general
social labor and doesn't come into existence by the
action of money, the action is that of the producer of commodities. See more
below.
P. Dunn wrote: "It seems that "invisible values" can be calculated but not
measured in
any operational sense since the value of the sum of money for which the
commodity is sold is not equal to its intrinsic value."
If values can be "calculated but not measured" (whatever that means,) then how
do you know that "the value of the sum of
money for which the commodity is sold is not equal to its intrinsic value." By
the way, values are "invisible" because they have no
materiality, same could be said of prices.
P. Dunn wrote: "You cannot even tell if there is any value hidden away in there
since things can have a
price without having a value."
Really...how is that, how can things have a price without having a value?
appendix on abstract labor, from Guido Starosta and Axel Kicillof's 'On
materiality and social form: a political critique of Rubin's
Value-Form theory'
"What is at stake, in short, is the search for a consistent answer to the
following question: Where does the value-form of the product of labour,
which distinguishes commodities from any other form of social wealth, come
from? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to look closer at the
precise form of Marx’s argument in Capital.
The value-form of the product of labour is its power of general exchangeability.
Th is potentiality immanent in the individual commodity consists of the
aptitude to be transformed into any other commodity without the mediation
of any material transformation in its bodily existence. It is this power that
gives commodities such a mystical character, the genesis of which the critique
of political economy needs to explain. Without the slightest change in their
materiality, they can be transformed into another use-value through the
exchange relation. On the other hand, it is clear that such social power is
intrinsic to the object itself. In other words, it is neither a subjective
attribute
generated by the individuals carrying out the exchange process nor a relational
property of the object.
In effect, as the specific social attribute of the
commodity, the value-form is materially and individually borne by its generic
character as use-value,
this being the reason why it is ‘inseparably connected
with the commodity, inherent in it’.
Value cannot exist outside some use value,
the latter being its material bearer. What necessarily follows from this is
that the human action that posits value in the commodity must also be the
same action that posits its use-value. But, as stated above, the action of
exchange does not alter an iota of the materiality of commodities. Th us,
exchange is not the action that posits the use-value of the commodity and,
consequently, it cannot possibly be the action that posits its value either.
In Chapter 1 of Capital, Marx also takes another analytical path that turns
out to be impotent to account for the power of general exchangeability of
commodities. Th us, he considers the action of natural forces as the possible
source of that power immanent in commodities. Is it possible that purely
natural actions posit the value-form in commodities? As Marx’s exposition
shows, the answer must be negative. Qualitatively different natural actions
certainly intervene in the constitution of the distinctive material properties
of
each commodity which make them different use-values.
But the analytical process has already revealed to us that the exchange
relation, although
necessarily involving two different use-values, actually takes place on the
basis
of something that makes commodities identical (generally exchangeable
entities), so that, when in appropriate quantities, one is as good as any other.
In brief, it is not as results of purely natural actions that commodities
possess
the unity of exchangeable beings. As Marx states in the first edition of
Capital,
the unity or identity among commodities as exchangeable things ‘does not
arise out of nature but out of society’.
The analytical process must therefore
consider the only other option left: the realm of human actions. In actual fact,
the only human action whose result is the positing of the use-value of the
commodity is human productive action or productive labour. Th at is why
labour is the only possible common social substance of value.
On the other hand, it is also evident that the action positing value and
usevalue
cannot be exactly the same action, since they are two different attributes
of the commodity. Were it exactly the same action, it would not be possible for
it to posit two different attributes. How can this paradox be solved? Basically,
by realising that human labour is an action which involves two different
aspects or, as Marx puts it, contains a two-fold character. On the one hand, it
is an action whose realisation entails a particular concrete form of application
of human capacities. It is as an expression of that concrete character that it
results in the particular use-value of the commodity produced. Marx calls this
aspect of the productive action of human beings concrete labour. But, if we set
aside that particular form in which human capacities are exercised, the fact
remains that any productive activity entails an expenditure of the human body,
of human vital energies. As such, human productive action can be termed
abstract labour. While, in the former aspect, the different kind of labours are
qualitatively different (hence, their objectification as different use-values),
in
the latter aspect they constitute a qualitatively homogeneous social substance
(which, therefore, can only be distinguished quantitatively). Th e value of
commodities is therefore the specific form in which objectified (or congealed,
in the words of Marx) abstract labour is represented in capitalist society. In
sum, the action that posits value is human labour in its abstract character.
Although this may have an air of simplicity surrounding it, it is systematically
forgotten not only by those who follow Rubin in claiming that labour becomes
abstract through exchange, but by all authors who claim that abstract labour,
the substance of value, is the specific kind of human labour in capitalism.
Because this analytical discovery of the substance of value does not only reveal
to us its purely material determination, but it also makes evident that concrete
and abstract labour are not two different kinds of labour but two different
aspects of the same human productive action. Now, to claim that abstract
labour is the specific form of human labour in capitalism means precisely to
see it as a kind of human labour in general instead of as an aspect of it.
In fact, most authors – Rubin included – generally derive it as such; abstract
labour is claimed to be the mode of existence of labour in capitalism.35
But this renders inexplicable the two-fold objectification of labour in the
commodity, which, as stated above, can only be posited by one and the same
human action. Or, alternatively, this would require abstract labour itself to
entail a double character, that of being concrete labour and that of being
abstract labour, with the absurd result of the latter being just an aspect of
itself
as a whole. In the particular case of Rubin’s argument, these problems are even
worse. Because it is to be noted that what the analytical discovery of abstract
labour as the substance of value shows is that it is not abstract labour in act,
but its objectification that is specifically represented as the value of the
commodity.
This might seem yet another obvious point, but it is clearly
overlooked by Rubin’s train of thought, which claims that value and abstract
labour are not presupposed by the actual exchange of commodities but come
into being through it. And this is something rather difficult, given that the
exchange of commodities does not entail any process of material production.
And the latter is the only moment at which (productive) labour can properly
exist; at least according to any meaningful definition of it. At the moment of
exchange, abstract labour is already materialised, therefore its existence is
compromised.
Finally, it is important to highlight that the objectification of the abstract
character of labour is socially represented in the form of value only inasmuch
as
it is socially necessary in a two-fold sense: first, it corresponds to the
normal
conditions of production, and, second, it satisfies a social need (this is
actually
implicit in the fact that value must be materially borne by a social use-value).
The whole confusion, we think, derives from the following fact. Marx’s
analytical discovery of abstract labour as the substance of value in the first
pages of Capital is not synonymous with his discovery of the specific mode of
existence of labour in capitalism. As any attentive reader can tell, the
analytical
process continues and it is only in the section on the dual character of labour
that Marx finally finds the specific social form of labour that produces
commodities and, hence, value. ‘Only the products of mutually independent
acts of labour, performed in isolation, can confront each other as
commodities’.
That is, the ‘labour of private individuals who work independently of each
other’, or private labour, which constitutes the historically-specific mode of
existence of social labour in capitalism. Alternatively, the analytical
reduction
of value to its substance does not answer the question about the ‘specific
social
character of the labour which produces’ commodities.
It only tells us what
the material determination is of that which is socially represented in the form
of value. Th is materiality underlying the value-form is that of being the
objectification of the abstract character of human labour.
What this stage of
the analytical process does not show, and that is why we need to carry on with
the search of the ‘formal determinants that it contains as a commodity and
which stamp it as a commodity’,
is what historical form of the process of
production of human life makes this generic materiality take the social form
of value. Th us, commodities certainly ‘possess an objective character as values
only in so far as they are all expressions of an identical social substance,
human
labour'
but not simply because of that. Th e confusion between these two
aspects of the question is what lies at the basis of both the abstract
naturalism
of classical political economy and the abstract formalism of those who identify
abstract labour as the historically-specific mode of existence of labour in
capitalism."
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