Lisa: In Marx's political economy, commodity production is a necessary condition for the creation of surplus value. That is because value as a concept and as a quantity (exchange value) is well-defined only for market economies. Surplus. of coursde, does not require markets. But in feudalism and slavery it does not take a value form. It is merely physical surplus. That is because there is nothing that makes the labor content of different products (or services) commensurable. All labor is concrete, i.e., incommensurable with other labor elsewhere, thus expressing value only in the abstract sense that its products are the result of human effort. It requires the existence of markets in which the products of labor are exchanged for the mere fact of these being the product of effort to become objective, that is, to make a difference in their production and exchange on a systematic basis. Or so Marx tells us. Services in a market economy can embody value just as products can. There is no analytical difference between them. They are commodities just like goods. They are sold, in the first approximation, at their cost of production mesaured in labor time. The issue of how skilled labor, like that of superstar actors (not a central example for Marx) is to be handled is rather knotty. Marx slides over the issue by treating all labora s abstract, i.e., unskilled, and taking skilled labor as a multiplicand of abstract labor. So in the case of actors, the idea is that the labor of de NIro or Pacino is valued an n times the labor of the hewert of wood or drawer of water. This is not veryu plausible. It was not even plausible in Marx's day. That is in part because it misses the particular contribution different incommensurable skills make to the economy. Back then this may have seemed less apparant because so much of the labor necesasry to run early capitalism was in fact unskilled. (Although that of engineers and other skilled workers was in fact essential even then.) Today this treatment is even more obviously inadequate. Various attempts have been made to deal with this problem. Perhaps Marx should best be understood as giving a model of an economy inw hich there really is no skilled labor. The purpose of this model, a simplified abstraction, is to answer the problem posed to which the special character of labor power as a unique source of more value than is necessary to create it is suggested as an answer. This problem is: if all commodities exchange at value, how is profit prossible? Answer: in virtue of the exploitation of labor power, because it alone produces surplus value. Unfortunately this approach is rather question-begging, partricularly if we face models onw hich profit is at least partly due to differential returm to skill. In addition, the general exploitation theorem shows that any commodity may be exploited in the relevant sense. Thus while profits are positive if and only if labor is expoloited, it is also mathematically true that they are positive only if corn, iron, etc. is exploited. To grasp this nontechnically, consider that labor power acts mathetmatically like any other commodity. Clearly the exploitatioon of labor has a moral and political significance that the exploitation of corn or iron does it, but from an austreley explanatory perspective as far as political economy goes, this creates difficulties for Marx's claim that labor power is a unique commodity. Well, I am sure that this will provoke discussion. --Justin
