here's an e-mail I sent to a colleague. I presume that he prefers anonymity:
I don’t have time to comment on your paper in general. But I do like the methodological approach, along with the statement that “commodities have values and different forms of prices at the same time.” The way I think of that is that there are two distinct accounting systems: either prices and values can be used to describe capitalism, adding up all of its parts. The difference is that prices reflect the fetishism of commodities (treating capitalism as merely a dance of commodities being traded in markets) while values do not involve fetishism: capitalism – like other modes of production – is a system of people involved in production (doing labor) organized as a society (and seen in a microcosm an individual workplace). Capitalism is “one big factory” (a social factory) so the abstractions that focus on value are not wrong, even empirically. (The last section of chapter 1 of volume 1 of CAPITAL is thus crucial, perhaps the most important part of all of CAPITAL.) In this view, the deviation between values and prices is not a “problem” haunting Marx’s theory of value (to be “solved” or exorcised) but is instead just as important to the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production as is the connection between values and prices. The deviation is just one way of saying that capitalism’s normal workings involves commodity fetishism: because we focus on the prices paid, we don’t see the labor being done. As you say, this focus is not just a matter of “false consciousness”: fetishism is based on the view we have of capitalism from the inside, confronted with the actual dance of commodities. In general, those of us who live “in the belly of the beast” cannot see the totality, the way in which capitalist society is a unified whole. (If we could see the whole, by the way, that would severely undermine the system’s legitimacy. One of Marx's points was to show the existence of that whole, in order to undermine that legitimacy.) The price/value connection is at the macroeconomic or (better) macrosocietal level: total value = total prices and total surplus-value = total profits (property income), where both sides of the equations are measured in the same units (either as dollars or socially-necessary abstract labor-time) and aggregation are done in a way that avoids double-counting. The connection between micro (price) view and the macro (value) view can be summarized using the phrase that summarizes Engels’ analysis of capitalism in “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”: there’s a contradiction between socialized production (i.e., values: workers produce value and surplus-value) and individualized appropriation (i.e., prices: people are able to claim the product of labor if they have money, especially if they have enough money to hire labor-power). There’s a contradiction between the contributions to the societal pools of value and surplus-value and the individual claims on the pool. (The word "pool" suggests a real-world analogy: those who do the maintenance of a swimming pool at some exclusive pool (allowing it to be used) often do not have enough money to join the club and swim in the pool, just as often the servants who take care of the rich folks' houses in Malibu, CA, can't afford to live there.) My article in the 1990 volume of RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY presents the math for this interpretation http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine/JD-1990-UtilityofValue.pdf). Recently, I realized that this price vs. value contrast has a parallel in neoclassical economics: it’s price vs. social opportunity cost (the private cost of production, including “normal” profit, vs. the value of society’s resources used to produce something, including the effects of external costs). A vector of social opportunity costs cannot be derived mathematically from a vector of prices – and vice-versa. For some reason, nobody talks about a problem of “transforming” social opportunity costs into prices. This analogy helps explain Marx’s view: values are “social opportunity costs” from the point of view of society’s community of workers, representing the use of their labor in the “social factory.” Prices reflect merely private costs. Obviously, there currently exists no organized and democratic community of workers on the societal level. This is because we live in an alienated society: workers are separated from the means of production and from each other (and from their own potentials as human beings). One reflection of that alienation – or rather, one kind of alienation – is the fetishism of commodities. -- Jim Devine / "Living a life of quiet desperation -- but always with style!" _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
