Jim Devine wrote:> > ... 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:
No, value reflects the fetishism of commodities just as much as price. Value and price are identical with respect to commodity fetishism. Value measures things which are qualitatively different as simply differing quantitatively on a numerical scale. This is one feature of commodity fetishism. And it's not an accident that Marx's beautiful passage on commodity fetishism occurs in Chapter 1 of the First Volume of Capital, which deals with value, not in the Third Volune of Capital that deals with the deviation between value and prices of production. Value simply explains the underlying laws concerning capitalist categories such as price: it doesn't provide a correction for it. At one time, it was common to believe if everything, including labor-power, was bought at its true value, then there would be no exploitation. One of the main points of "Capital" is to refute that. Exchange according to value results in exploitation of labor and devastation of the environment. Along theory that gained traction was that socialist planning should use value, or the labor-content of goods, as its planning unit. But the attempt to do this would result in duplicating, to one extent or another, the sins of capitalist exchange. Nowadays it is common to believe that if one corrects prices to correspond to the "true value" of things, a true value corrected for carbon content, this will solve the problem of restricting the emission of greenhouse gases and contribute strongly to saving the environment. This is simply not true. And it is not a Marxist view. It is instead a view that harmonizes with the commodity fetishism of bourgeois economics and that justifies neo-liberal environmental measures, such as cap-and-trade and the carbon tax, measures which are doomed to fail. -- Joseph Green _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
