Yeah. I'm not exactly sure how that would fit into Laibman's argument (the only persuasive argument in favor of the LoV I've seen). I guess you could say that the commodity expresses the social relation which is relevant to its reproduction (in this case, the labor process which would be used to reproduce it)?
So I guess what I am wondering about now is how the labor process necessary for its *reproduction* would be the socially necessary one, rather than that which the given firm would reproduce it for. On pgs. 129-30 of the Penguin edition of Capital 1 Marx explains why value is the socially necessary labor rather than that actually performed or will be performed. However, I found this explanation confusing (Chapter 1 was the most difficult part of the book for me). Hans Ehrbar's annotations say that "What did we overlook? We committed the error of reductionism, i.e., we tried to explain a social relation by a physiological fact. The physiological equality of all labor is the material basis, the condition, for the social relation of abstract labor, but it is not that social relation itself. In other words, the fact that all labors are the expenditure of human labor makes it possible to equalize all labors, but is by itself not yet this equalization." So, plugging it into Laibman's argument, perhaps the social relation being expressed by the commodity is the capitalist control over social labor. This would make sense as the capital relation is one between capital and labor, only appearing in fragmented form with different capitals and laborers. Would it make sense to say "the control over a portion of social labor by the capitalist (defined as the labor socially necessary for the production process) takes the indirect form of the exchange of commodities" But then the question is why is what capitalists control the social labor necessary for reproduction rather than the actual labor they will use for reproduction? I am still unsure of how to integrate socially necessary labor into Laibman's argument, which I copied below for all to see. I hope some of the marxologists here can help me with this, because I really like Laibman's argument. We begin with the essential elements of the post-Sraffa Marxian critique (Steedman, 1977; Steedman, et aI., 1981; Bandyopadhyay, 1984-85; cf. Laibman, 1984-85; Fine, ed., 1986). We see how far we can get without a theory of value. Given: a capitalist economy, in which labor power is sold to property-owning capitalists by propertyless workers. There is a historically evolved technique of production in each sector, and a wage basket or general standard of living. Theseneed not be thought of as "given" prior to the onset of capitalist social relations, but rather as intimately determined by those relations as they have developed over time. Now Sraffa and his followers have shown that prices and the rate ofprofit are fully and uniquely determined, at least given broadly competitive conditions (see chapter 2). Anything that really happens in the economy, it is argued-technical change, workplace struggles, impacts of fiscal and monetary policy, crises-can be analyzed in this framework, without recourse to some substance called "value" that lies beneath equilibrium exchange values or prices. The nature of capitalist power, however, must be explained carefully. We need to know why the rate of exploitation and the rate of profit are positive: that is, why capitalists are able to draw income from their ownership and control ofcapital. The difficulty of this question is revealed if we proceed to answer it in terms of the obvious, above-the-curtain, realities of capitalist life. Capitalists have a monopoly of the means of production; they have legal ownership of the means of production. Workers have no alternative but to workfor one capitalist or another, and are, therefore, not free not tQ sell their labor power. This introduces a hidden element of coercion into what is ostensibly an uncoerced exchange agreement between worker and capitalist. The whole thing is reinforced by the reserve army of unemployed, and in general the functional role of unemployment, poverty, social disorganization, racism, and sexism, in keeping the balance of power tilted toward the capitalists, so that wage pretensions of the workers are held in check and the profit rate is adequate. While this descriptive approach is useful as far as it goes, it does not amountto an adequate theory of how the power of capitalists to exploit is reproduced.The reserve army mechanism, for example, depends on the inability of workers to escape, to find alternatives to selling their labor power to the capitalists, so it boils down to the prior formulation, the monopoly of the means of production. Leaving aside for the present the issue of "primitive accumulation," or the process by which this monopoly came into existence historically (see chapter 13), the central question in the theory of capitalist exploitation is, how is the monopoly maintained? Two lines of thought emerge at this point. First, the class monopoly of productiveproperty may be maintained by force: military and police power. This is Ihe "force theory" of Eugen Diihring, classically dispatched by Engels. It is close to theoretical anarchism: the idea that property income is ultimately guaranteed by the military apparatus of the state essentially merges class power with statepower. The force theory often appears in subtler forms: without calling out the troops, capitalists may exercise power as pure authority. They appear hegemonic, with sole access to expertise, technical knowledge, public opinion. This version of the theory, however, shades over into the second line of thought, based on legitimation: a "power of ownership" theory. The legal status of the capitalist as owner confers power on him. After all, property rights are broadly legitimated in an exchange or commodity economy, and therefore the peculiar property rights of the capitalists are not questioned-even though they amount to the power to command huge armies of labor. The law and force approaches, however, cannot stand on their own: the power of the law-its hold over people-must have a material basis. Absolute monnrchies in precapitalist formations had great authority, which, however, was swept aside in times of revolutionary crisis. If the underlying process of capitalist exploitation were unsound, its legal superstructure would disintegrate. On the other side, the power of the state-its ability to function as an arm of the capital-Ist ruling class-is derived from the power of capital, not vice versa. Force or legitimation explanations of exploitation are ultimately circular: capitalists have the power to exploit because they have the power to exploit. Can we do better by invoking value-theoretic categories? A key requirement of a precise and rigorous theory is placing capitalism as one class-antagonistic mode of production among several, with capitalist exploitation seen as an instance of class exploitation in general, and at the same time grasping its unique features. To begin with the general: exploitation, in a sense appropriate for any class society, is the systematic exercise of power by one class over another. Power has many levels, from the ephemeral (accident, intellectual prowess, physical strength, charisma) to the fundamental. We want to isolate the latter. (control over the means of existence-the products of labor-is clearly the locus of fundamental power: "whoever controls the granaries controls Egypt." But there is a deeper level to this: if an army is posted around the granaries, that army must be fed, so the real object of control becomes the activity that continually replenishes the granaries. Control over the labor process is the defining feature of any set of production relations, and exploitation must, therefore, be defined in necessary and surplus labor and not merely necessary and surplus product. If the connection between power and labor is established in the context of general class exploitation, the further link to value appears when we specify capitalist class exploitation, which alone operates in and through commodity production. Social relations-whether between equal producers exchanging their labors and thereby rendering them social and abstract, or between capitalists and workers-take the indirect form of exchange of products. The "fetishism of commodities," an aspect of confinement of consciousness to the realm "above the curtain" in Figure 1.1, is not merely a matter of ideological mystification; it is a part of the mechanism of capitalist exploitation itself. The workers' experience of selling their labor power as free agents in a market process establishes the legitimation of capitalist power, since that power is realized through the same process. For this to be true, however, the power of capital, as Marx repeatedly emphasized, must take on a fragmented, atomistic form: it must appear as a series of separate powers of individual capitals. And the only way these powers can be separately validated is through the sale of commodities, in which valuerepresenting social labor time-is embodied. The role of labor-as-value and value-underlying-exchange value, then, turns on the precise characterization of the power to exploit, and the relation of that power to the exercise of power generally. Here, "power" is defined not to mean (necessarily) injurious or dominating action against the interests of another; it is the systematic process whereby the separate wills of individual agents are molded together into a stable social whole. In this sense, there is a deployment of social power whenever there is sufficient regularity in social life so that institutions, classes, systems, etc., can be defined. An important example of power in this sense is the mutual incentive of simple commodity producers to participate in the division of labor afforded by the market; in this case, the power in question is equal and reciprocal. Now if we wish to analyze society in terms of power so defined-the "gluey" force that ties human beings into consistent patterns of interrelationships- we must consider the hierarchy of levels at which that power exists, as described above. Going directly to the most basic level, we have control over the labor process; this is the positive argument linking power and labor. To connect these, in turn, to value, we may note that in systems organized by commodity production, the social interrelations in the labor process take the form of exchange relations among commodities. The power to command commodities possessed by commodities is what we call value. If the mutual relations among producers are in effect relations involving exchange and/or appropriation of labor, and if those relations are embodied in the power-to-command of commodities, then that power is established as based on quantities of labor. Exchange value is based on value because the power-to-command must be explained as a social relation; value is based on labor because it is an expression of the systematic cxcrcise of power. This is the positive argument linking labor and value'.
