Sabri Oncu <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks Jim. you're welcome!
> I would like to continue further though, because I am very confused > about this topic. Put differently, I am still unclear about what value > is and I know that I am not alone as the history attests. > > Let us go back to Mesopotamia of 4000 to 5000 years ago. There was the > palace, the temple (temples and palaces, as Michael Hudson says), the > agricultural production (ignoring other things) and the land. The > palace and the temple were the financiers, agricultural workers were > the producers and I am not so sure who owned the land then (most > likely the palace and the temple, not the agricultural workers). > > How does this set up differ from a capitalist economy? > > Where is the rent and where is the profit (surplus value)? This describes a Tributary mode of production, in which the state/landowners (unified in the aristocracy, including the priestly caste, headed by a monarch) collect tribute from the direct producers. The tribute is like taxes and rent rolled into one. The tribute -- which could have showed up as a bunch of the agricultural product or as unpaid labor done for the state/landowners or even as a monetary tax -- is a lot like capitalism's surplus-value. The difference is that for capitalism, surplus-value is not only a product of labor but shows up as commodities that sell on the market. (For labor to produce "value," the product has to be realized in sale.) Capitalism is a type of commodity-producing society, where most products are sold on the market. Commodity production existed under Hammurabi, I believe, but what makes capitalism different is that labor-power (individuals' ability to work) is generally for sale on the market and is treated as if it were a commodity. Actually, we should turn things around. The popular view in Marx's day -- and even in 2011 -- was that the "market system" or capitalism was a natural state of affairs in which everyone is approximately equal in status, free, and not exploited. Marx's point was that if you delve beneath the surface -- the appearance created by the dominance of commodity exchange and competition -- capitalism is like the Tributary mode of production, involving exploitation of labor. > Why was Hammurapi so much worried about the debts becoming unpayable? I don't know. Maybe because he was a friend of the creditors? > Does the land add to "value" in any way? to Marx, uncultivated land and other direct gifts of nature (like air), had a use-value, but no value (since its creation was not done by labor). In the simple differential theory of rent, some land had the use-value of raising labor's productivity more than other land does. So the owners of the former land can sell their product at a market-value that exceeds the value that would be attached to their product if its production conditions were general. (The amount of labor-time needed to produce a unit on the good land is less than the amount of labor-time needed to produce the products that dominate the market and determine the market value or price.) So owning good land (or easily-accessible oil reserves) clearly produces value -- a rent -- for its owner. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
