>under Marx's law of value, what's wrong with the following? > >"Can't machines produce surplus-Value? After all, capitalists hire or >rent machine-power (the use of a machinery during a specific period) >and can then use it to create machine services in production, more >than paying for the cost of hiring the machine-power. This creates >surplus-Value, right?"
There are layers here: 1. With respect to the circuit of capital M--C--M', Marx defines "surplus value" as the positive difference between M' and M, subject to the conditions that (a) this difference corresponds to the production of new value financed by the initial outlay of M, rather than merely a redistribution of existing value, and (b) this difference is appropriated by someone other than the direct producer of that value--that is, by the capitalist(s) who advanced M. 2. According to Marx's law of value, this new value must *by definition* correspond to the expenditure of productive labor, and furthermore labor embodied in the newly produced commodities must exceed the labor embodied in the wage goods paid to the workers. But then it can't be that machines produce surplus value, since "machine services" aren't labor, or to put it another way, the value that machines contribute to production is already embodied in the value that capitalists purchase with the initial outlay of M. This connection between surplus value and surplus labor, *within* a framework that defines commodity values in terms of labor, is reflected in the "Fundamental Marxian Theorem" (FMT), which asserts that when commodity prices correspond to their respective "prices of production" (prices determined by average production costs plus a markup determined by the economy-wide rate of profit), the rate of profit is positive if and only if there is surplus labor, understood in the above sense. In other words, the rate of profit is positive iff the rate of labor exploitation is positive. 3. But there seems to be a catch. Suppose that instead of defining commodity values in units of homogeneous labor time, we define them in terms of one of the commodities--say, steel, assuming machines were made out of steel. Then one can establish an alternative to the FMT asserting that the rate of profit is positive if and only if the steel value of steel--that is, the difference between the steel embodied in final output and the steel embodied in the payment to sellers of steel--is positive. In other words, the rate of profit is positive iff the rate of steel exploitation is positive. One can establish a similar result using any other commodity as the basis for defining and measuring commodity values. This result has been established by several different authors; John Roemer labels his version the "generalized commodity exploitation theorem" (GCET). What to make of this result? Two conditions need to be met for something like the FMT or the GCET to obtain in a given market economy: the system must be capable of producing a surplus product, net of the payments to all the suppliers of tangible inputs (i.e., of labor and intermediate goods expended in production), and capitalists must somehow appropriate this surplus in the form of profit. Note that these two conditions correspond to conditions (a) and (b) in Marx's definition of surplus value summarized in point 1. However, neither the FMT nor its generalization (understood in an accounting rather than an explanatory sense) in the GCET provides any insight into how these two conditions, and particularly the second one, come about. One might ask whether the needed explanation distinguishes labor power and its use value, labor, in some *qualitative* way from other potential inputs (say, "machine-power") and their respective use-values (say, "machine services") 4. It does. The mathematical theorems used to establish the FMT or GCET are based on assumed properties of given input-output matrices (and corresponding wage vectors) for given multi-commodity economies, but don't investigate what systemic conditions give rise to these conditions. Such an investigation would reveal this qualitative distinction between labor power and, say, machines: to purchase a machine is pretty much equivalent to securing its productive services, so long as one knows how to run (and maintain, etc.) the machine. There's no prospect that the machine might say "no, I'm not going to provide these services to you." In contrast, to purchase labor power is not tantamount to securing labor. [So, for example, the "direct labor" coefficients in the above-named input-output matrices *presume* some translation of labor power into effort per labor hour, labor hours per worker, and workers per production process, and thus treat as exogenous what is, at the level we're now discussing, necessarily endogenous.] Marx addresses the question of how capital has translated labor power into labor via the circuit of capital in what I've called his "historical" (as opposed to "value-theoretic") account of surplus value, which includes his analysis of the "subsumption of labor under capital." 5. But you don't need a labor *theory of value* to investigate how labor power is translated into labor (and into surplus value and profit) in capitalist economies, and it's a judgment call whether such a theory is even particularly useful in telling the required story. I tend to think it isn't, for a number of reasons, but don't think that point is worth (re-) arguing over here. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
