[Rugoz]

It was the continuing fall in birth rates that allowed wages to increase, that allowed the advances in science, technology and productive technique, as well as societies accumulation of capital to increase living standards after the 1830s.

That completely confuses cause and effect. UK birth rates didn't fall until after 1880. Economic growth took off long before that.

[Puffer Fish]

"If then we disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labour."

But more intuitively, we might think other properties fit the bill. The amount of labour used in producing a product (on average - but that's a complication I'm leaving aside just now) does seem intuitively connected to the value of something. If your firm, say, as put a certain amount of work into producing something, and someone comes along and proposes exchanging the goods for goods their firm produced, which they spent half the time on, you would naturally say, other things equal "Well, can't I have an amount of your goods which you used a comparative amount of human-hours to produce." If you end up having to accept the proposed deal, it's intuitive to say "I swapped those much below their value."

There are different factors that go into production of commodities. Labor, natural resources, capital, organization.

[Puffer Fish]

That completely confuses cause and effect. UK birth rates didn't fall until after 1880. Economic growth took off long before that.

It does get a bit complicated.
Lower birth rates can lead to higher wages, but higher wages can have various effects in different situations, sometimes increasing birth rates and sometimes decreasing them (a complicated subject which we can discuss in a different thread).

If we assume that higher wages increase wages, then we would expect an equilibrium to likely be reached as some point, where wages are constrained by population growing too fast.

[Crantag]

There are different factors that go into production of commodities. Labor, natural resources, capital, organization.

According to Marx's labor theory of value, labor is unique among factors of production and the sole source of capitalist profit. The key is surplus value. Natural resources and capital (machinery and what not) are also products of labor (natural resources through the process of extraction). These are purchased at cost, and don't contribute therefore to profit. Workers are paid a 'subsistence wage' (which is variable, based on societal conditions). The surplus value is that portion of labor power which is not remunerated.

Again, this is under pure capitalism (which doesn't genuinely exist anywhere, but which provides a proxy for analysis and for illuminating genuine extant conditions, through artful application of the theory.)

[Rugoz]

It does get a bit complicated.
Lower birth rates can lead to higher wages, but higher wages can have various effects in different situations, sometimes increasing birth rates and sometimes decreasing them (a complicated subject which we can discuss in a different thread).

If we assume that higher wages increase wages, then we would expect an equilibrium to likely be reached as some point, where wages are constrained by population growing too fast.

I would say there's consensus that higher per capita income and associated technological and sociological changes led to the lower birth rates in the industralized world. The birth rate's impact on population growth also depends on life expectancy by the way. The latter increased dramatically.

As for the impact of population growth on per capita income, it's not as big of a deal as some people seem to think. Basically, you have to maintain the per capita capital stock. The annual capital depreciation rate is maybe 10%. Better technology makes to capital stock obsolete to some degree, let's say by 2% per year. Add to that a population growth rate of 1% and that means you must invest 13% of your per capita capital stock to maintain it. If population growth changes from 1% to 2%, which is substantial, that means you must invest 14% instead of 13%, hence your gross savings must be ~8% higher, and consumption correspondingly lower. For example if your gross saving rate was 20%, it must now be 21.6%.

That's not so say it couldn't matter for a society living from hand to mouth, barely capable of saving enough to maintain the capital stock with a stagnant population. But I bet that didn't apply to 19th century Britain with its ample supply of hard-nosed capitalists who would reinvest their income instead of giving it away to the hungry masses.

[Puffer Fish]

I would say there's consensus that higher per capita income and associated technological and sociological changes led to the lower birth rates in the industralized world.

Yes, there is a "consensus", but it doesn't mean this consensus is right or can be accurately expressed with simple sweeping generalisation.

started a separate thread to discuss the specifics of that here:
"factors that affect fertility rates"
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=180229

[The Young Wizard]

I had another question also relating to the Labour Theory of value, but given this discussion still seems to be going, I think I might as well put it down here.

I've been trying to get straight on why Marx thinks that only human labour can create surplus value in capitalism.

On the face of it, animals which labour for us are kept well enough (if we are wise) for them to be able to complete their tasks. But there is nothing to rule us out managing to work them past the level that is necessary for them to sustain themselves. We might think that animals are in a similar position to slaves - owned by others. A surplus was produced by slave societies - if it wasn't they couldn't be class societies on the Marxist understanding. I suppose the Marxist response would be this is a surplus of use-value - i.e. useful goods.

As someone earlier mentioned, goods going into production are assumed to be bought at "cost price". In other words, they are exchanged between capitalists in such a way that none involved in the exchange make a profit on the exchange.

With wage-workers it's different. They sell their own labour, but not in such a way that it's a truely equitable exchange. If they exchanged at "cost price" with their employer, the employer wouldn't receive any surplus from them.

Of course, either of these things can happen. Capitalists can fail to exchange at cost between themselves (and eventually some may go bankrupt due to this), and capitalists can exchange at cost with the workers - but then need to extract profits from some other part of the economy. But if the latter became the norm, it wouldn't be capitalism - at least not capitalism ruled by the Capitalists.

I'm still confused on how animals and slaves are distinguished from wage workers. They can certainly still be exploited - as slaves are in slave societies. Is it that, if you get an increased use-value surplus from your animals or slaves, then you just get more goods. But an increase in goods doesn't mean the value of the goods continues to be the same. It might be expected to decrease with the increase in supply. But why does that determine anything for Marx - he thinks that the average socially necessary labour time for a product determines its value.

I'm either confused or something doesn't add up here. What is it? Surely there was a clearer way he could have laid this stuff out!

[Wellsy]

Not to elaborate too much but think of the relationship with an animal or slave. You don’t pay them a wage, you buy them and their yours and automatically what they do is yours. Their cost is their maintenance like with a machine in its wear and tear.
The same relation doesn’t exist in the working day between a wage worker and capitalist where there is that everyday gap between necessary labor which reproduces the equivalent value for the works reproduction (though Marx analysis doesn’t apply to an individual case as many workers can be empirically below subsistence) and surplus labor which becomes the source of surplus value and underpins profit.

So you seem to get that but onto your part about capitalists trading not at cost value and this seen as them losing out. Marx in some parts assumes the equal exchange of value and treats price and value as the same for the simplicity in some abstractions to illustrate a point.
However, when he does consider an unequal exchange this doesn’t create value it only shifts it. So if when it comes to trade, you might be able to shift greater value around but how does value actually increase?


And while Marx notes exploitation in the difference between wages and labor performed, he doesn’t contradict the idea of equal exchange in his analysis. Its Ricardian socialists who say that workers aren’t getting a fair wage but Marx’s distinction between labor and labour power, as the capitalist can’t own a workers labour unless they owned them as a slave and thus wouldn’t need a wage to entice them to work, is that workers are paid the relative equivalent value of their labour power. Its an illusion to think they were paid for their labor in the first place. Ricardian socialists call for workers to be paid in full, Marx never aims for this. He is more radical in his critique and is about the abolition of capitalism and commodity exchange which underpins the value-form.

And you of course note that many create use-values and that slaves and animals aren’t given money as wages. Where as the worker deprived of a means of subsistence is dependent on commodity exchange. I think its not that they aren’t exploited but not in the way peculiar to capitalist production. Marx’s analysis is i formed by capitalisms distinction to other forms of production but is focused on the particular qualities inherent to capitalism. So commodity exchange pre-exists capitalism but this doesn’t contradict the point that commodity exchsnge is the underpinning factor i. Understanding capitaism and existence of the value-form. Because things are qualitatively changed when the features of commodity exchange become the essential or dominant factor of production. Commodity exchange can be said to be accidental and peripheral to earlier modes of production until it become the essence of modern economies.

However what is fruitful here is slavery in the Americas and particularly the US even as a basis for surplus value.
https://monthlyreview.org/2020/07/01/marx-and-slavery/

In this sense, slavery under capitalism was far more brutal, in Marx’s view, than anything ever seen before in human history. As “the export of cotton became of vital interest to those states [the Southern United States], the over-working of the Negro, and sometimes the consumption of his life in seven years of labour, became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products [as in earlier more patriarchal forms of slavery], but rather of the production of surplus-value itself.”34
...

Key to Marx’s whole understanding of slave-based accumulation in the U.S. South was his notion that, under slaveowner capitalism in its most developed form on “American plantations,” the “entire surplus-value” produced by the slaves “is conceived as profit.… [As] the price that is paid for the slave is no more than the anticipated and capitalized surplus-value or profit that is to be extracted from him” over his working life.53 Unlike the “free wage worker” who has “no value” (as opposed to the value of the worker’s labor power), the “slave…has exchange value, a value” and represents a future stream of value, “a piece of capital.”54 The economics of this meant that the working of slave labor was regulated, as in machinery, in terms of capital consumption, its “wear and tear,” its availability, and the cost of replacements. Nevertheless, the slave, whose initial price was based on a working life of twenty years, was often “overworked,” that is, consumed as a working instrument in seven years, as opposed to twenty, in order to maximize the slave’s production of surplus value in the shortest time. It was also common in this system, Marx emphasized, for slave owners to borrow money upon their slaves as capital assets, hence securities on which to obtain, and to rent them to other capitalists.55 “What Marx…understood,” as Ransom and Sutch pointed out,

was that the slave holding existed to make a profit for the owner. The entire labor product of the slave and family, above whatever provision for food and other necessities the owner cared to make was expropriated. That residual was the owner’s profit and the expectation of a continued flow of such returns made slave property an earning asset. The price paid for a slave reflected the consensus of the buyer and seller concerning the potential value of the continuous stream of profits that could be extracted from the slave and, in the case of a female, from her descendants as well.56

Marx’s analysis thus led him to differ from other political economists and critics of slavery in his time, such as Adam Smith, who argued that slave labor was uneconomic and unable to compete with wage labor.57 In contrast, Marx pointed to the vast surplus labor expropriated from slaves, and the fact that the slaves themselves were a form of capital asset, forming the basis of fictitious or speculative capital.58 Therefore, there seemed to be little doubt, in his estimation, that the plantation economy of the antebellum South was, as far as economic concerns alone were considered, enormously profitable, including the market for the breeding of slaves. As Engels indicated in Anti-Dühring, the reason that only force could remove slavery from the slave breeding and slave consuming states of the South was that production on this basis paid, and thus it would not simply die of its own accord on economic grounds.59

In order to be profitable on a capitalist basis, slave production required a form of production suitable for slave labor.60 Marx explained that the essential element of slave labor was that it was based on force and required continuous external compulsion, requiring the whip of the overseer. Slavery was characterized first of all for Marx by what he called “a relation of domination.” As Patterson has commented in this respect, “Marx not only shows clearly that he understands that slavery, on an institutional level, is first and foremost a ‘relation of domination,’ but identifies the element of direct force which distinguishes it.”61 Because it was directly forced labor, Marx indicated, slaves were engaged in a constant, if not active, resistance. Their laboring conditions lacked their consent; more so under capitalist production where they were forced to work intensively and for inordinate hours, threatening their own corporeal existence. “Forced labour,” Marx wrote, “can never create general industriousness.”62 The resistance of slaves evident in all of their actions, extending at times to slave revolts, and the fear this engendered in their masters, were the primary reasons that it was prohibited to educate slaves, particularly in the South, which meant that they remained almost entirely unskilled labor.

These conditions combined to limit the forms in which slaves could profitably be employed, in comparison to wage labor. Wage labor, Marx argued, was distinguished from slave labor in its flexibility and versatility. Slave labor, in contrast, because continuous force was required, could only be effectively employed in certain forms of production.63 The key limit here, as Marx argued, following Cairnes, had to do with the costs of superintendence. “The greater this [class] opposition” and the greater the degree to which labor has to be forced, Marx wrote, “the greater the role that this work of supervision plays. It reaches its high point in the slave system” under capitalism. Indeed, “the overseer with his whip was necessary to production…on the basis of slavery.”64 Slave labor was uneconomical if dispersed in any way, due to the level of slave resistance, since it would be removed from direct coercion and the whip of the overseer. Nevertheless, slave labor was especially suitable to centralized large-scale production in gangs on monocultural plantations where the costs of the labor of superintendence could be kept down, and where only forced labor could be employed on that scale and with that physical intensity.

Ao it does seem that in colonial slavery rather than ancient because the world market is established they are producing commodities, not things strictly for use value. However their cost is their purchase to own them which is seen in relation to how productive they’ll be over their brief life time of being worked intensely with whip and constant supervision.
So we jave to consider the value of their purchase in relation to what they produce which no doubt is greater than free labor but with limitations also.
BUt then it seems as slaves are treated as objects like machines where there isn't a wage only the initial investment. But against those who deny slaves produces surplus value as in the context of colonialism, it doesn't seem to me that they don't based on quotes from Marx.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch04.htm

Within its process of circulation, in which industrial capital functions either as money or as commodities, the circuit of industrial capital, whether as money-capital or as commodity-capital, crosses the commodity circulation of the most diverse modes of social production, so far as they produce commodities. No matter whether commodities are the output of production based on slavery, of peasants (Chinese, Indian ryots). of communes (Dutch East Indies), of state enterprise (such as existed in former epochs of Russian history on the basis of serfdom) or of half-savage hunting tribes, etc. — as commodities and money they come face to face with the money and commodities in which the industrial capital presents itself and enter as much into its circuit as into that of the surplus-value borne in the commodity-capital, provided the surplus-value is spent as revenue; hence they enter in both branches of circulation of commodity-capital. The character of the process of production from which they originate is immaterial. They function as commodities in the market, and as commodities they enter into the circuit of industrial capital as well as into the circulation of the surplus-value incorporated in it. It is therefore the universal character of the origin of the commodities, the existence of the market as world-market, which distinguishes the process of circulation of industrial capital.

https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/internationalist/pamphlets/MARX-on-Slavery-OptV5.pdf

In the second type of colonies-plantations-where commercial speculations figure from the start and production is intended for the world market, the capitalist mode of production exists, although only in a formal sense, since the slavery of Negroes precludes free wage-labour, which is the basis of capitalist production. But the business in which slaves are used is conducted by capitalists. The method of production which they introduce has not arisen out of slavery but is grafted on to it. In this case the same person is capitalist and landowner. And the elemental [profusion] existence of the land confronting capital and labour does not offer any resistance to capital investment, hence none to the competition between capitals. Neither does a class of farmers as distinct from landlords develop here. So long as these conditions endure, nothing will stand in the way of cost-price regulating market-value.

Maybe these sources might point to some possible sources of study.

[ckaihatsu]

I'm still confused on how animals and slaves are distinguished from wage workers. They can certainly still be exploited - as slaves are in slave societies. Is it that, if you get an increased use-value surplus from your animals or slaves, then you just get more goods. But an increase in goods doesn't mean the value of the goods continues to be the same. It might be expected to decrease with the increase in supply. But why does that determine anything for Marx - he thinks that the average socially necessary labour time for a product determines its value.

The key concept missing here is *productivity* -- we have to look at North vs. South in terms of which side prevailed in *volume*.

Industrial production (the North) is obviously far more productive than physical animal or human labor, and we saw the results of that productivity prowess in the U.S. Civil War, regarding the sheer force of industrially-made armaments.

Animals and slaves should be seen as *rentier*-type capital, meaning that they're paid-for raw *resources*, or assets, economically, like land or money. What does one do with a resource like land, money, or lemons -- ? One *squeezes* it to get as much use-value and/or exchange-value out of it as possible, because that's all there is to owning it. Once it's done, it's done -- it's squeezed out and hopefully you've gotten your money's worth.

Wage labor, on the other hand, is more like *equity* capital, and the labor-power being purchased can fluctuate and be undervalued or overvalued on a day-by-day basis, like any *other* leveraged commodity. There's no outright ownership of the underlying laborer / labor, so the focus shifts to working wage labor-power like any other commodity, to be bought low, and its productive values -- the finished product -- to be sold high, without regard to this-or-that actual wage worker as an individual person.

Wellsy notes that as the global market developed there was a constant circulation of exchange values, meaning that productivity could always find markets worldwide, no matter the sourcing, subject to capitalism's boom-and-bust cycle, of course.

[Wellsy]

Also, as a precipitating factor to determining that labor is the substance of value, one has to consider the inference of the existence of value based on the fact that commodities have many different exchange values against the argument that Marx assumes intrinsic value in order to conclude it.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2014/04/28/intrinsic-value/

Marx sets out to argue the exact opposite of Bailey. Marx argues that value is an intrinsic property of commodities and, at the same time, its also a relative concept. How is this possible?

The key theoretical move that makes this possible for Marx is to distinguish between value and exchange value. Value is intrinsic to commodities. It is the amount of labor time society requires to produce the commodity. If a widget takes 2 hours to produce then its value is two hours. Exchange value is the ratio in which one commodity exchanges for another. If a widget exchanges for 3 apples then 3 apples is the exchange value of the widget. If the widget exchanges for 30 pencils then 30 pencils is the exchange value of the widget. What then is the relation between value and exchange value?

Similar to Bailey’s conception each different pairing of the widget with a different commodity produces a different exchange value. However where Bailey sees in this nothing but random, fluctuating, relativist values, Marx argues that each of these exchange values is a reflection, a measure of an intrinsic value.

Marx’s argument is quite simple actually. If we say that commodity X is equal to commodity Y this means, by definition, that they both contain quantities of a common substance/property. Just as the comparison of physical properties like weight, volume and height is only possible if both objects share the same property, the comparison of economic value is only possible if both commodities possess an intrinsic value. [footnote: there are debates as to the validity of Marx’s argument. Kliman provides a stellar defense of Marx in his paper “The 4th thing on the 3rd Thing”. I will not repeat those arguments here.]

When we say that commodity X is equal to commodity Y this implies that they are both made up of the same substance, value, and that their values are of the same magnitude. We cannot see the value of X by looking at it in isolation. Commodities do not walk around with their values ‘stamped on their heads.’ Instead we only see the value of X when it stands in relation to Y. Y measures the value of X. X is worth so much Y. The same is true if we measure the weight of an object. A piano has a weight of its own that does not depend on other objects. But we can only measure the piano’s weight in relation to some standard unit of weight, a pound or kilogram. This unit of weight, the pound, is always defined in relation to an actual object, arbitrarily chosen to be the standard.

Bailey had argued that the value of X cannot change without also meaning a change in value for Y. Look at how Marx’s distinction between value and exchange value allows us to see the problem differently. Both X and Y have an intrinsic value. Let us imagine that the value of Y changes while X stays the same. This variation in the value of y produces different exchange values (x=y, x=2y, x=3y, etc.) The intrinsic value of X does not change but its exchange value does change! Various quantities of Y are expressing the value of X.

I believe that this way of understanding value is much more intuitive and inline with common sense. Consider the effect of inflation on the value of a widget. If I sell widgets for $10 and a decade later the value of the dollar falls by 50% I will adjust the price of the widget to $20. Has the value of the widget changed? Are widgets worth more to society? Not at all. All that has changed is the value of the unit by which we measure the value of the widget.

Marx’s argument that commodities have an intrinsic value is immediately followed by his argument as to what this value is and what determines the magnitude of this value. His answer is that value is objectified human labor and that living labor determines the magnitude of this value. Often discussion/debate immediately jumps to this issue of whether or not labor is the substance of value, skipping over the important implications of the notion of intrinsic value.

https://studylib.net/doc/7326890/the-fourth-thing-on-the-third-thing--a-response-to-james-...

Furner is probably right that the statement ‘the exchange-values belong to the wheat’ implies that the wheat possesses some intrinsic property (besides the properties that make it wheat). We say that vocal chords belong to the singer, but not that her fans belong to her; and we say that the door belongs to the refrigerator, but not that the carton of eggs it contains belongs to it. But ‘belong’ is Furner’s term. Marx writes that the wheat ‘has [hat] many exchange-values’.

When ‘has many exchange-values’ is considered within its larger context, I think there can be very little doubt that Marxmeant that the wheat has many relativevalues, values in terms of other commodities. This was the standard meaning of the term ‘exchange-value’––and of its synonyms, ‘value’, ‘value in exchange’, and ‘exchangeable value’19––that heinherited from the economists whose conceptions of value were under discussion at that point in the text. Adam Smith, for example, defined ‘value in exchange’ as ‘the power of purchasing other goods which he possession of [an] object conveys’.20Marx began his discussion of exchange-value with a similar but more precise definition: ‘Exchange-value appears first of all as the quantitative ratio, the proportion[das quantitative Verhältnis, die Proportion], in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind’.21The relative character of exchange-value is stressed also in the sentences that follow. ‘This ratio [Verhältnis]changes constantly with time and place. Hence exchange-value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently anintrinsic value . . . seems a contradiction in terms’.22Why would Marx then, in the very next paragraph, turn around and assume the opposite––that value is intrinsic as well as relative––without giving notice that he was doing so? And why would he just assumethe opposite when his aim was instead to demonstratethe opposite?

Moreover, Marx’s statement that the wheat ‘has many exchange-values’ is a reference to ‘x boot-polish, y silk or z gold, etc.’23These are relative values, values of the wheat in terms of other commodities, not intrinsic values. What Marx meant by intrinsic value is a ‘common element’, a single ‘third thing’.24The many exchange-values of the wheat do not fit the bill.25 But if ‘has many exchange values’ means ‘has many relative values’, then thebasis upon which Furner rejects the third thing argument disappears. It can no longer be said that Marx was ‘assuming A [the existence of intrinsic value] to prove B [the equality of commodities as exchange-values] and then taking B to prove A’.
...
What I actually claimed was that (1) it is a fact that commodities have exchange-values in some sense or senses other than that they are exchanged and that(2) the purchase of items that ‘are worth’ more than their sticker prices––in Furner’s terminology, the purchase of items whose ‘true prices’ exceed their ‘actual’ prices––is evidence that (1) is a fact.
...
As evidence that commodities have exchange-values apart from their actual exchange,I also mentioned the fact that we compute ‘the value of’ our assets before we exchange and whether or not we exchange.
...
Even if it were true that the price of something that is not being sold at this moment is unknown, this does not imply that it fails to have a price now. Moreover, it is not true, generally speaking, thatwe only can only know the prices of things that are being sold at this moment. I definitely know the price, at this moment (2:15 pm, Eastern Daylight Time, 26 June, 2008), of a share of Microsoft stock that is not currently being sold. It has a price of$27.96. The notion that things do not have prices unless and until they are sold, and the notions that they only have estimated,anticipated,or potential prices unless and until they are sold, are just contrary to how capitalism operates. It is true, of course, that the price at time of sale might differ from the current price. But how does this make the current price nonexistent, or only estimated, anticipated, or potential? The dent in my car might be fixed by the time I decide to sell the car. Does that mean that the dent is currently nonexistent, or only estimated, anticipated,or potential? No, at this moment the car has a dent––and a price.35
...
he reason why Marx did not bother to defend his premise that a commodity has an exchange-value (e.g., a price) is undoubtedly that he regarded it as an obvious fact to which no one, including followers of Bailey et al., would object. I, too, think it is tooobvious to require a 20 defence. What I defended was not this fact per se,but the factthat a commodity has an exchange-value in the sense that is required in order for the third thing argument to succeed: a worth independent of its actual exchange.Thisfact is not asobvious––not even to Marxists, now that value-form theorists have argued that commodities’ values (and, a fortiori, their prices) are actually established at the moment of exchange and by means of exchange.37Thus I pointed to evidence that commodities have prices even apart from and prior to any exchange:‘[E]ven apart from and prior to any exchange of our wheat . . . we think and saythat it ‘has a value (or price) of’, ‘is worth’, so much money. Moreover, we acton this basis . . . and we do so before we exchange and whether or not we exchange’.38

did not claim that commodities have prices or other exchange-values ‘even apart from and prior to any exchange’ because people commonly think that they do. I did not even claim that people commonly think thatthey do. I have little doubt that the overwhelming majority of humankind thinks that commodities have prices, but I also strongly suspect that the overwhelming majority has no beliefs, one way or another, about whether commodities have these prices ‘even apart from and prior to any exchange’. If the issue were put to them and they were asked for their views, I am not even confident that, if the issue were put to them and they were asked for their views, a majority of people would know what to think.

My claim was rather this: What people think and say––even apart from and prior to exchange––about value and price, and how people act on the basis of these thoughts––before they exchange and whether or not they exchange––is sufficient evidence that a commodity has an exchange-value in some sense(s) other than that it exchanges for other commodities. I cited ‘commonplace ideas’ not because they makeMarx’s initial premise a fact, but because they are evidence thatit is a fact.42

It mightbe objected, however, that this is not valid evidence, since it still pertains to what peoplethink (and what theysay and do on the basis of what theythink). Even though what peoplethink suggeststhat prices exist apart from the act of exchange, it might not really be true. This objection seems persuasiveat first, because it seems to appeal to the crucial distinction between what peoplethink is true and what is really true. But I have notclaimedthat peoplethink prices that exist apart from the act of exchange, and so the objection, in recognition of this fact,actually makes a different distinction, between what is suggested bywhat people think and what is really true. But to say that what people think suggeststhat something is trueis to say that what people think is evidencethat it is true. Thus the objection implicitly affirmswhat it ostensibly denies.43

So the only real issue is how strong my evidence is. I think it is very strong, because evidence about our thoughts, statements, and actions is the only kind of evidence that can exist in this case. Murray may be correct that there is other evidence for what he means by commodities havingexchange-values, namely ‘regularity to price fluctuations’.44But that is evidence taken from the sphere of exchange. It is therefore not relevant to the question of whether a commodity has an exchange-value in some sense(s) otherthan that it is exchanged. Theonly evidence that is relevant to this question is evidence as to whether a commodity has an exchange-value apart from the act of exchange. So what other evidence can there be? Prices and other exchange-values have no material existence. Their existence is ‘purely ideal or notional’.45In other words, they exist only in the thoughts and statements of human beings, and in second-order conceptualisations of our statements and actions. Thus the only evidence there can be as to whether a commodity has an exchange-value apart from the act of exchange is evidence that comes from what we think, say, and do apart from the act of exchange.
...
Since it now proceeds on the basis of one particular price, the ‘valid’ equilibrium price, its conclusions pertain only to that price. It can therefore no longer be said that the third thing argument demonstrates that a commodity has an intrinsic value if it has an exchange-value. It now demonstrates only that a commodity has an intrinsic value if it has an equilibrium price that regulates the commodity’s actualprices and around which theyfluctuate. This certainlyseems false in the case of commodities produced by monopolies and oligopolies, and I know of no evidence that it is true in other cases. Prices often fluctuate around a certain average price, but such evidence is entirely consistent with the hypothesis that theaverage price is only formed ex post, ‘simply as a matter of computation’.
...
Even if we assume that commodities do have ‘valid’ prices in his sense, Murray’sinterpretation faces another difficulty. His ‘valid’prices are not the actual prices at which the commodities are bought and sold, but only hypothetical ones, and I do not see how the third thing argument can succeed if it proceeds on the basis of hypothetical prices. In the passage quoted above, Murray suggests that Marx’sstatement that a commodity’s exchange-values are ‘of identical magnitude’ is not true in general; the only exchange-values that are of identical magnitude are the ‘valid’ but hypothetical ones. If this is correct, thenthe conclusions which follow from ‘of identical magnitude’ do not pertain to the general case, but only to the special, hypothetical case. The third thing argument would therefore prove only that some hypothetical exchange-values are ‘forms of appearance’ of a content distinguishable from them, while saying nothing about whether real-world exchange-valueshave such a content.

This difficulty remains even if Murray’s concept of ‘valid’ exchange-valueis somewhat less restrictive than the equilibrium-price concept to which I think he was alluding. As long as there are ‘valid’ exchange-values, there must also be ‘invalid’ ones, and on his interpretation the third thing argument falis to apply to the latter.
...
his notion of ‘valid’ price is far more restrictive and bereft of an observational basisthan those discussed above, since neitherequilibrium prices norvalues remain constant over time. But the third thing argument does not require the constancy of prices. It is certainly true thatchanges in prices cause changes in the quantitiesof the commoditiesthat can indirectly exchange with one another. But the truth-value of Marx’s statement that ‘xboot-polish, ysilk, zgold, etc., must, as exchange-values, be mutually replaceable or of identical magnitude’ (see Steps 9 and13 of Table 1) in no way depends upon whether the quantitiesthat can be indirectly exchanged are ‘of identical magnitude’ over time. The statement is true just in case the exchange-values of unspecified quantities(x, y, z, etc.) of the commoditiesare ‘of identical magnitude’ at any given momentin time.

Once closeattention is paid to theterm‘exchange-value’ as it was employed in classical political economy, the third thing argument, though profound in its implications, seems to me to be easily understandable and ultimately simple. Given the standard meaning of ‘exchange-value’that Marx inherited, namely the ratioin which two kinds of use-values exchange––for example, w commodity A:1 quarter of wheat––one only needs to ‘take a baby step’ to arrive at the conclusion that the various quantities of commodities that can replace each otheron the left side of this ratio (w commodity A,x boot-polish, y silk, z gold, etc.), i.e. the wheat’s various exchange-values, are ‘of identical magnitude’. And after another baby step, one arrives at the existence of a third thing.Rather than trying to pull a rabbit out of the hat by deriving the equality of commodities from a non-quantitative relationship such as exchange, Marx was showing that one quantitative relationship implies another closely related one.

[ckaihatsu]

As evidence that commodities have exchange-values apart from their actual exchange,I also mentioned the fact that we compute ‘the value of’ our assets before we exchange and whether or not we exchange.

I was going to say '*potential* price'....

[Wellsy]

I was going to say '*potential* price'....

I’m yet to look into it but seems theres a tension in interpreting Value among TSSI and value form theorists.
http://www.copejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/patrick-murray-avoiding-bad-abstractions.pdf

[ckaihatsu]

I’m yet to look into it but seems theres a tension in interpreting Value among TSSI and value form theorists.
http://www.copejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/patrick-murray-avoiding-bad-abstractions.pdf

'Tension' -- ?

What happened to orthodox Marx, regarding 'value' -- ?

( Here's from you, from the other thread: )

Marx famously held three equalities to be true for the economy as a whole:

1. total value equals total price
2. total surplus value equals total profit
3. total value rate of profit equals total money rate of profit

viewtopic.php?p=15174391#p15174391

---


Also, I've made a diagram for it:


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show

[Wellsy]

'Tension' -- ?

What happened to orthodox Marx, regarding 'value' -- ?

( Here's from you, from the other thread: )

---


Also, I've made a diagram for it:


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show

Those aspects don’t address the disagreement about the state of value in production and exchange.

[ckaihatsu]

Those aspects don’t address the disagreement about the state of value in production and exchange.

Um, is this like some kind of academic cage-match for you? Don't you think you're seeing controversy where there doesn't need to be?

[Wellsy]

Um, is this like some kind of academic cage-match for you? Don't you think you're seeing controversy where there doesn't need to be?

Nope.
Just that the tension I stated between TSSI and value form people is a distinct disagreement within discussions on Marx’s value theory.
It being a very specific issue among those who are sympathetic to Marx but disagree in how they approach his work when it comes to value and how concrete labor transforms into abstract labor.

I know too little about value theory to have any significant stake other than sharing how there isn’t a total consensus in things.

[Rugoz]

Too many threads with too many walls of text.

With wage-workers it's different. They sell their own labour, but not in such a way that it's a truely equitable exchange. If they exchanged at "cost price" with their employer, the employer wouldn't receive any surplus from them.

To this day it remains a mystery to me how Marxists think capitalists are supposed to make a profit in competitive markets.

The workers will get the entire output minus the cost of maintaining and replacing the machines. It can't be otherwise, because if a capitalist makes a profit, another capitalist will hire the worker at a slightly higher wage to capture the market and profit. A process that will continue until profits are zero.

[ckaihatsu]

Nope.
Just that the tension I stated between TSSI and value form people is a distinct disagreement within discussions on Marx’s value theory.
It being a very specific issue among those who are sympathetic to Marx but disagree in how they approach his work when it comes to value and how concrete labor transforms into abstract labor.

I know too little about value theory to have any significant stake other than sharing how there isn’t a total consensus in things.

Have you considered that you might be doing a *disservice* to Marx and Marxism by being so academic and irresolute?

Too many threads with too many walls of text.



To this day it remains a mystery to me how Marxists think capitalists are supposed to make a profit in competitive markets.

The workers will get the entire output minus the cost of maintaining and replacing the machines. It can't be otherwise, because if a capitalist makes a profit, another capitalist will hire the worker at a slightly higher wage to capture the market and profit. A process that will continue until profits are zero.

I agree with Marx (via Wellsy's posts) that the capitalist profit-making dynamic is *inevitable* -- and especially so given its *legal* sanction by the bourgeois state, and probably *without* it, too, as we saw during the time of Prohibition in the U.S., and currently despite the War on Drugs, FinCEN, etc.

Even if workers were magically granted full pass-through revenue value, minus capital depreciation, as you're indicating, with all capitalist-type white-collar corporate social-organization functions being normatively regular corporate salaried positions (no entrepreneurial 'ownership' and control), I think CEO-dom would still find a way to inevitably reassert itself somehow.

Perhaps one group of workers wouldn't want pure collectivism, and would delegate-off some executive functions to an administrative specialist, for a premium, thus reintroducing separatist executive functioning and CEO-dom all over again.

While you seem to think that a rock-star-employee dynamic would prevail, eroding profits, I happen to think the *opposite*, that the executive-tier ownership elite would continue to command and control, mostly due to existing historical inertia of private property ownership.

It would take a worldwide proletarian *revolution* to get off of the private property standard / norm, decisively, definitively, all-at-once, to situate permanent workers control of all social production everywhere at once, basically.

[Wellsy]

Have you considered that you might be doing a *disservice* to Marx and Marxism by being so academic and irresolute?

Perhaps if my goal here was to propagandize people, then yes such discussions can be too convoluted to help much.
But I use these forums more to clarify and be exposed to ideas.
If I wish to change minds I need more ongoing relationships with those around me, rather than relative strangers on the internet who if they're not like-minded already, will not trust me in order to be influenced by my views if they do have some merit.

I am not seeking to do an ongoing version of the communist manifesto.
And even my mention of such a disagreement between TSSI and value-form theorists in itself wasn't a point that I was seeking to discuss with anyone because I have no background in the debate and suspect many others don't either to even talk about such things. It's mention simply to draw attention to a conflict of interpretation on the nature of value should anyone want to dive into that. I think it worthwhile to emphasize where uncertainty and doubt exists as there is always thinking in such a space because one cannot settle for habitual or stereotypical conclusions.

[ckaihatsu]

Perhaps if my goal here was to propagandize people, then yes such discussions can be too convoluted to help much.
But I use these forums more to clarify and be exposed to ideas.
If I wish to change minds I need more ongoing relationships with those around me, rather than relative strangers on the internet who if they're not like-minded already, will not trust me in order to be influenced by my views if they do have some merit.

I am not seeking to do an ongoing version of the communist manifesto.
And even my mention of such a disagreement between TSSI and value-form theorists in itself wasn't a point that I was seeking to discuss with anyone because I have no background in the debate and suspect many others don't either to even talk about such things. It's mention simply to draw attention to a conflict of interpretation on the nature of value should anyone want to dive into that. I think it worthwhile to emphasize where uncertainty and doubt exists as there is always thinking in such a space because one cannot settle for habitual or stereotypical conclusions.

Hmmmm, well, I'll just note that the subject matter is about the real world, so varying approaches to it (TSSI vs. value-form) are either *correct*, or they're not.

I think people on the net these days are mature enough to know what to look for -- that which is veracious -- no matter *who* it's coming from: from you, or Marx, or me, or a commentator on Marx.

I don't think that information and knowledge is so interpersonal- and group-dependent, as you're making it out to be.

I guess I find it somewhat strange or odd that you're *providing* accurate descriptions of 'value', from Marx and Marxist commentators, but then you demur on subscribing to it yourself.