Sabri: 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.
.********** There will continue to be confusion - though often the confusion generates discussion and debate thathas its own worth. My response will be rather different from any response which tries to answer it in terms of "economics," though it will be closely related to _some_ such respnses, radically different from others. Start this way. Value has nothing whatever to do with prices. Forget prices. (Value can only be _manifeste_ in prices, but that is a different matter.) Value is a social relation, a social relation which exists only under capitalism. A radically simplified example can, perhaps, give us a peek at it. You have a sum of money available for a luxury purchase, and at a store you pause between two possible items. Each alone is within your budget; both together are not. One of those items was produced by laborers in Paris. The other was produced by laborers in New Delhi. As you balance each against the other you are equating the labor of those in Paris with the labor of those in New Delhi. You can't do otherwise. Don't worry about calculating how many hours went into one, how many went into the other; how efficient or inefficient either process was, how productive the labor in one plant or the other. All these matters disappear as you relate the livinghuman activity of those laborers in Paris to the living human activity of those laborers in New Delhi. Value, then, is an attempt to make sense of Capitalist Culture; of the unique human relations which capitalism generates (and which no other social system does). That is a start. I think I mentioned an essay by Fredy [sic] Perlman on Commodity Fetishism in an earlier post. I don't know of a better introduction to Value as a social relation than that essay. Many Marxists (economists) do argue that Value can explain price; I don't believe it but undoubtedly some on this list can try to do that themselves or direct you to sources which can help you. The phrase "ideal average" of capitalism appears in Volume 3 as a description of Marx's purpose: that is, he does not describe the actuality of any actual capitalism (e.g., British liberal capitalsism of the 19th-c; Neo-liberalismt; etc.) He tries to get at the dynamic which drives those various actual capitalisms. Carrol This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
