[Wellsy]

A wonderful analogy for the place of ideality within activity.
https://www.jhiblog.org/2023/11/20/evald-ilyenkovs-ecology-of-personality/

Collective thinking cannot be grasped by vulgar materialism; it is shaped by what Ilyenkov calls ideals. Ilyenkov compares the ideal to “the form of a jar growing under the hands of a potter.” This ideal is situated neither in the piece of clay nor the body of the potter. It arises from the activity of transforming the clay into a jar. Thinking does not occur “inside the head”—but through the interrelations of the hands, the clay, and the tools. Ilyenkov’s conception of transindividual thinking breaks up the divide between material and social.

Accordingly, we do not see through our eyes but with a thinking body that is the totality of social activity. Ideals are “transplanted” into our bodies not through our senses but our interrelations.

[Wellsy]

Review of Value of Value Fine and Harris.

Interesting assessment of how mainstream economists abstract circulation from production and a lot of Marxists abstract production and miss features of their unity.

If we consider the production and circulation of use-values the two spheres can be defined independently of one another : a certain determinate quantity of use-values is first produced and then exchanged one for another. However as soon as we consider the production and circulation of value, which is the basis for our understanding of the social form of production, it becomes impossible to consider production and circulation independently of one another. Labour time is expended in production, but this labour time is only socially validated in circulation, so value cannot exist prior to exchange, while surplus value depends on the relation between the result of two exchanges (of money capital for labour power and of commodity capital for money) . Thus value cannot be determined within production, independently of the social validation of the labour expended within circulation : circulation is the social form within which apparently independent productive activities are brought into relation with one another and have the stamp of value imposed on them . However value cannot be determined in circulation either, for circulation is the form in which the social mediation of private labours takes place and the latter provide the material foundation of the social determination of value . Thus to isolate production from circulation, even analytically, is to isolate independent productive activities from one another, and so to deprive production of its social form . To isolate circulation from production, on the other hand, is to isolate the social relations between producers from their material foundation. It is in this sense that production and circulation can only be seen as moments of a whole, as the development of the contradictory unity of value and use-value with which Capital begins. The argument holds with added force when we turn to surplus value, and so capital, which depends in addition on the commodity form of labour power.

The idea that the circuit of capital is a totality of which production and circulation are moments is not a metaphysical idea, although Marx does say that the commodity appears to be 'a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties' (Capital, I, p. 71, 1967 Moscow edition) . The totality is not simply a conceptual totality, an Hegelian idea imposed on reality, it is real and it has a concrete existence. Its reality is that of the class relation between labour and capital, and its existence is the everyday experience of millions of dispossessed workers. If we look only at the immediate forms of existence of the relation between capital and labour we cannot find a class relation .

Within circu lation capitalists and workers enter as individuals engaged in a free and equal exchange of commodities. Thus there are no class relations here. Within production again we find only individual relationships between individual capitalists and the group of workers under their command . Certainly workers have a common interest against their own capitalists, and workers have a common interest against capitalists as a whole . But a common interest is not sufficient to define an especially privileged class relation: thus workers in a particular branch of industry also have a common interest with the capitals which employ them but this does not define a class relation, nor does it undermine the priority of class relations . A class relation is not defined subjectively by the existence of a common interest, it is an objective social relation that exists independently of, and prior to, any particular interests.

The foundation of the social relation between capital and labour lies outside both production and circulation, thus outside the circuit of capital, in the separation of the labourer from the means of production and subsistence. Or rather this foundation lies not outside the circuit of capital, it suffuses the circuit as a whole. Thus the real foundation of the unity of the circuit of capital as the totality of the differentiated (economic) forms of the class relation between capital and labour lies in the separation of the labourers from the means of production and subsistence, a separation that is in turn reproduced only in the circuit of capital as a whole. Thus Marx does not discover the class relation between capital and laour in the sphere of circulation, but nor does he find it in the sphere of production, he only discovers it when he comes to consider the unity of production and circulation in the reproduction of capital, in part VII of volume I of Capital after he has considered the moments of the whole separately in the previous sections. In part VII of volume I, and in part I of volume II, Marx reassesses the results of the previous analysis by locating these apparently independent moments within the whole as forms of the class relation.

The class relation between capital and labour is quite distinct from other social relations because it is constituted prior to the circuit of capital, it is the social precondition for that circuit . Other social relations that develop on the basis of common economic interests are determined within the circuit of capital, and so presuppose the class relation between capital and labour. This applies to the relations between different capitals, between different sections of the working class, and to relations within which workers may even identify with capitalists . Moreover the disposession of the labourer is not only the basis of the workers' entire social existence, and so the basis on which workers enter not only production and circulation, but also engage in leisure activities, enter political relationships, and conceptualise their relationships with the social and natural conditions of their existence. Dispossession is thus a total social experience, an experience not only of exploitation, but also of social, political and even natural domination. The crucial feature of the capitallabour relation is not that it is defined in production, but that it is prior to both production and circulation as the social precondition for human existence within a capitalist society . Production and circulation are therefore in this very concrete sense moments of a totality, particular complementary forms of a single social relation.

[Wellsy]

This identity yet not complete identity is an interesting point. They are essentially linked but not the same.


https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/development-concept.htm

My Japanese Maple tree is not my Japanese Maple tree because it resembles others of my trees or any such thing, or because of any contingent attributes of the vision from my window; it is what it is because of the specific identity of Particular, Universal and Individual described above.
It doesn’t matter whether you have in mind a material object of which someone has a thought within some formation of consciousness, or you have in mind the thought of that object as constituted within that formation of consciousness. In either case, the same relations of Individual, Universal and Particular apply: an object thought of, or the thought of an object. This is not to say that the object and a thought of it are the same, but such a distinction is indicative of movement and contradiction within the formation of consciousness. Such contradictions are manifested in the non-identity of universal, particular and individual.
In fact, Individual, Particular and Universal never completely coincide. There is always a degree of dissonance between them. The meaning of a word is never quite the same from one context to another, what people do is never quite normative, people never quite manage to say what they mean or do what they say. So when we say that a concept is the identity of Particular, Individual and Universal, we recognise that such an identity never exists. So a concept is always to one extent or another imperfect and riven with contradictions.

[url]digamo.free.fr/elson79-.pdf[/url]

To summarise: in the argument of Capital, labour-time, value, and
exchange-value (price) are not three discretely distinct variables, nor are
they identical with one another. There is a continuity as well as a
difference between all three. The relation between them (in any combi-
nation) is not posed in terms of an independent variable determining
a dependent variable.

[Wellsy]

As a young adult or emerging adult, I experienced an issue of being verbose, of overthinking things that have not immediate or practical use-value and just being an kid with his head in the clouds wanting to think through theories and make sense of things for my own satisfaction.
Now as a father and husband with greater responsibilities, especially interpersonal ones, there is a detriment of such a tendency to overthinking and being the airhead because it comes as neglect of my family.
People online tend to take me as being smart and thoughtful, often attributing to me some sort of experienced and wise age beyond my actual years, but in reality, the same qualities that bring such an impression and typically as praise, also present themselves as the negative qualities that are seen as selfish, self-indulgent, negligent and a waste of time.

Would I be better off without such an inclination? A simpler or less ruminating mind? It is mental leisure really and such leisure is more so the vocation of men who do not support others while their wives and female relatives undergo the manual and mental labor supporting everyday living, and especially so for those with the wealth to purchase such labor of others.
But it tends to make me sad that I can't dive into things and learn freely, to go where my mind wants to wander at length.


The tension I feel is that while the critique of neglect to everyday life is valid, I feel a desire to also resist the collapsing of my mind ventures in part because what I feel is pressure from existing as a worker in a class society. That I am meant to be instrumental and productive with no other existence beyond as such. Only lip service to having any inclination beyond it, where even my private life becomes one of being time efficient and productive in order to have basic needs met so as to be productive at work.
That it is the infection of a way of life, or a suppression of one's existence to reproduction of one's existence but never the pleasures of being human.

As academia gets more and more integrated into the market and the instrumental reason of corporate pragmatism and professionalization, efficiency and technocratic specialization become the privileged, if not absolute, standards of value, the humanities and particularly disciplines such as literature or philosophy are perforce due to find their relevance put under serious question.

The well-rounded individual tends to be those well-off enough to leisurely pursue knowledge, experiences, and reflection at length. To learn and want to know more for myself and not simply be told but to explore should be of some value, but not for the likes of me.

[Wellsy]

I am now digging into how the concrete universal that is foundational to the unfolding of some specific subject has telological implications because it becomes the cause of itself by transforming preconditions of it's own existence into it's own cause, so the anomlous effect becomes the cause of itself.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/determinism.htm

Hegel showed that causality is extremely limited in its explanatory capacity, because the invocation of causation leads to an infinite regress. Efficient causes are always of interest, but a phenomenon is only understood when it is grasped as a cause of itself (a causa sui), that is, the relevant process is seen to create and recreate the conditions for its own existence. But even then, explanation often takes the form of Reciprocity of cause and effect. Hegel (1831) grants that “to make the manners of the Spartans the cause of their constitution and their constitution conversely the cause of their manners, may no doubt be in a way correct,” but still explains nothing. But Reciprocity is as far as Causality can go. The understanding of a process as a cause sui means grasping it as a concept and usually incorporates an investigation of its origins and development.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Ilyenkov-History.pdf

The essential task then in the study of history is to determine the germ cell of the present day, most advanced formation. It was in Evald Ilyenkov’s chapter on abstract and concrete in the same work I have referred to that we find an exposition of how once the germ cell is isolated, its further concretisation can be traced as it colonises, so to speak, all the other elements of the social formation, and in the process of merging with other relations the cell is itself modified, ultimately able to reproduce itself out of conditions which are its own creation. But as the germ cell develops, its inner contradiction, formerly enclosed by the relations it builds around itself, breaks out, and it is at this point that revolutionaries have the chance to determine the course of events.
...
The way an institution which is becoming the dominant relation in society transforms existing, more ancient institutions, into subordinate organs of itself, such that the developing formation becomes self-reproducing. It is in this sense that logic works in the opposite direction to history in as much as the most ancient forms prove to be derivative forms of the central formation.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/articles/universal.htm

The real case-history of economic (market) relations testifies, however, in favor of Marx who shows that the “form of value in general” has not at all times been the universal form of the organization of production. Historically, and for a rather long time, it remained a particular relation of people and things in production although occurring haphazardly. It was not until capitalism and the “free enterprise society” came into being that value (i.e., the market form of the product) became the general form of inter-relationships among the component parts of production.

Similar transitions, of the “individual and accidental” into the universal is not a rarity, but rather a rule in history. In history – yet not exclusively the history of humanity with its culture – it always so happens that a phenomenon which later becomes universal, is at first emergent precisely as a solitary exception “from the rule,” as an anomaly, as something particular and partial. Otherwise, hardly anything could ever be expected to turn up. History would have a rather mystical appearance, if all that is new in it emerged at once, as something “common” to all without exception, as an abruptly embodied “idea.”

It is in this light that one should approach the reconsideration by Marx and Lenin of the Hegelian dialectical conception of the universal. While highly esteeming the dialectical tendencies in Hegel’s thought, Marxism furthers his conception in depth and in breadth, and thus, turns the category of the “universal” into the foremost category of the logic governing the investigation of concrete and historically evolving phenomena.

In the context of the materialistic conception of the dialectics of history and of thinking, the Hegelian formulas have different significance than in the language of their originator, being shorn of the slightest sign of mystical coloring. The “universal” comprises and embodies in itself “the entire treasure of particulars” not as an “Idea,” but as a totally real, special phenomenon which tends to become universal and which develops “out of itself,” by force of its intrinsic contradictions new but no less real, phenomena, other “particular” forms of actual progress. Hence, the “genuine universal” is not any particular form found in each and every member of a class but the particular which is driven on to emerge by its very “particularity,” and precisely by this “particularity” to become the “genuine universal.”

And here there is no trace of the mysticism of the Platonian-Hegelian breed.

This is also where dialectics is more advanced than mechanical materialism that crudely interprets idealism due to it's mystified fashion of the concrete universal.
https://www.academia.edu/50998713/Ilyenkov_and_Engels_on_the_Dialectics_of_Nature

Meanwhile, for Engels, a teleological account only means the absence of a proper scientific explanation for natural phenomena’ unanswered problems. 36 In nature, he says, “nothing happens as a consciously desired aim.” 37 But if that is Engels’ position, why do his detractors accuse him of pantheism and hylozoism 38 ? Because he conceives nature as a historical realm of active processes able to create higher (more concrete) forms of existence out of simpler interaction forms. 39 From the perspective of objective idealism, the spontaneous transition from an inferior to a superior state, e.g. from inanimate matter to living creatures, seems to be a miraculous violation of the famous ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from noting) principle. For there is nothing alive in chemical or physical interaction out of which one can derive a bacteria, let alone a human being; just as there was no alcohol or sweetness in the water out of which Jesus made wine during the marriage at Cana. Thus, it seems that every higher stage must have been conceived first in the form of a concept. This ideal design expresses itself through the lifeless matter, just as the pots form manifests itself in the mud shaped by the craftsman. Like the pot, an organism is not a product of a merely random (blind, unguided) combination of parts. How can we explain why our eyebrows seem to be designed with the purpose of preventing the sweat of our forehead from falling into our eyes without recourse to a designer’s purpose? Indeed, the incapacity to explain the spontaneous emergence of higher (not just new) forms of movement is the Achilles heel of mechanistic materialism. 4
...
For metaphysical materialism, the rejection of teleology meant that developments in nature, such as the evolution of the thinking brain, were pure aleatory events even if step-by-step causally determined. 46 Hence, although Engels disagree with the Stoics’ notion of the ‘everlasting recurrence’ 47 without the smallest variation in its numberless cycles, he is on their side when they claim that the mind is not a mere (expendable) accident within the flow of nature but an immanent and necessary attribute of it. This does not mean that the mind has to be present in each part of the world (panpsychism), but that nature, as a whole, must necessarily produce the mind at some random point in space and time. 48 But in what precisely does this ‘necessity’ consist? How is that the appearance of new and more complex forms of the organization of matter develop not just as happy coincidences but with ‘iron necessity’? And how this is realized without the intervention of a conscious guiding hand?

Dialectical thought found the answer to those questions in the category of interaction —“reciprocal action is the true causa finalis of things.” 49 And as we have seen with our billiard balls and our dismembered hand, such a category only can assume this (dialectical) role as internal interaction of a concrete totality. It’s true that Hegel’s dialectical conception of the concrete universal anticipates this brilliant solution. 50 However, he quickly buried it under his idealism. In Hegel, interaction is seen not mainly as an activity of matter but as that of objective judgments, purpose, concepts, and syllogisms expressed in matter. 51 That’s why Ilyenkov claims that only dialectical materialism offers “a rational explanation of the fact that any given stage of development (any state of affairs) contains within itself, as if in an ‘embryo,’ the objectively determined and therefore scientifically determinable future.” 52 In nature (i.e., without any conscious intervention), a newly emerged form of interaction archieves its universality by subordinating the preceding forms as its ‘moments,’ as subsystems demanded, and thus reproduced by, its peculiar development.

This is how the new and higher form of interaction prevails in time as a relatively autonomous process that guides itself into existence, even if, at any time, it presupposes lower levels of reality as its preconditions. As with any concrete historical process, the appearance of a new and higher form of interaction always takes place based on specific preconditions created by the processes that precede it in time. However, its specificity is that this new form does not remain as the passive result of its preconditions; it becomes an active producer of such conditions that appear now as its means of existence. Thus, it spontaneously becomes the goal of the interaction between itself and its requirements. “Further process, from this point of view, looks like the transformation of this form of interaction from potentially dominant, potentially universal into actually dominant, actually universal.” 53

First, a higher level of development appears as an anomaly, as an exception to the (previous) levels. How does it become not just a casual, isolated event but a genuinely universal form? By producing and reproducing its own conditions, integrating and subordinating its constituents’ logic of functioning into its own. That’s why it’s contrary to dialectics to reduce the specific logic of the development and existence of a whole to the logic of its components. You cannot understand society by studying human individuals separately, let alone by the careful consideration of cells, molecules, or subatomic particles. Each of these levels has its specific logic of functioning that is integrated and subordinated by each higher form. This is why neuro-physiological reductionism is incapable of explaining thought. 54 Reductionism is unable to see in the whole anything else but an aggregate of parts externally (casually) interacting with each other. Dialectics sees in the whole a concrete totality in historical (directional) development, which poses itself as the law, as the goal, as the end of its subordinated (preconditional) forms of interaction. In this quid pro quo from outcome to source, from effect to cause, from efficiency to finality, from object to subject, lies all the secret of the ‘smartness’ of matter.

Crude or mechanical materialism allows Darwin's theory of evolution yet still has no proper place for understanding the qualitatively distinct nature of humans as from apes. There are definitely insights but manny place human consciousness as a mystical phenemonon and of course it remains mystified strictly within a mechanical materialist account and plays a God of the Gaps but with different place holders.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Article_on_Teleology.pdf

‘Emergence’ is the idea used by atheists to fill the gaps which religion fills with God – “I don’t know how this property of some complex organism is produced, it emerged naturally.” Emergence is a category of processes which includes a wide variety of intelligible processes which have little in common with each other, other than not being explicable solely in terms of causality. It is generally associated with processes which only occur when the number of individual components, causal iterations or level of complexity passes a critical level. It is then often falsely concluded that this complexity functions as the cause of the phenomenon concerned, being an efficient explanation for its occurrence under the relevant conditions. It should be noted that causality is not synonymous with intelligibility. In this sense, part of the role of ‘emergence’ is to restore ‘causality’ to its hegemonic role in positivist science. Another motivation is the problem in Analytical Philosophy as to how a collection of objects can exhibit a property which is not present in any one of the component objects individually, or in the precursor collections. For example, evolution proceeds for millions of years without any organism exhibiting consciousness, and suddenly homo sapiens ‘emerges’. Did God inject consciousness into Man, or did it ‘emerge’ naturally? Obviously the latter. However, to say that consciousness emerged at a certain point in evolution no more explains consciousness than does Divine intervention.

‘Emergence’ is also intended to counter the reductionist refusal to grant relative independence to sciences which rest on ‘emergent’ forms of motion. ‘Emergence’ means that ‘mental phenomena’ can be described and explained without any reference to ‘physical phenomena’ or explanation of the phenomena in physical terms. It is here that the concept of emergence acts specifically as a barrier to science because it functions to sanction the idea that there is no intelligible explanation for the ‘emergence’ since ‘emergence’ itself functions as such an explanation.

Darwin would hardly be remembered as a founder of modern biology if The Origin of Species had simply proclaimed that new species ‘emerged’ because biological processes were ‘complex’. He is remembered because he observed that off-spring resemble their parents, and formulated the idea of natural selection of variations in inherited characteristics. Even though it is evidently ‘directional’ in that it tends to produce more and more elaborate organisms, evolution is not teleological, because it does not act through consciousness. But nor is evolution causal, in that it relies on the random nature of variations and the accidental impact on survival of each mutation.

[Wellsy]

Marx seems to treat the average labor time as being based on the median average rather than the mean.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch02.htm#p136

The value (the real exchange value) of all commodities (labour included) is determined by their cost of production, in other words by the labour time required to produce them. Their price is this exchange value of theirs, expressed in money. The replacement of metal money (and of paper or fiat money denominated in metal money) by labour money denominated in labour time would therefore equate the real value (exchange value) of commodities with their nominal value, price, money value. Equation of real value and nominal value, of value and price. But such is by no means the case.

The value of commodities as determined by labour time is only their average value. This average appears as an external abstraction if it is calculated out as the average figure of an epoch, e.g. 1 lb. of coffee = 1s. if the average price of coffee is taken over 25 years; but it is very real if it is at the same time recognized as the driving force and the moving principle of the oscillations which commodity prices run through during a given epoch.

This reality is not merely of theoretical importance: it forms the basis of mercantile speculation, whose calculus of probabilities depends both on the median price averages which figure as the centre of oscillation, and on the average peaks and average troughs of oscillation above or below this centre. The market value is always different, is always below or above this average value of a commodity. Market value equates itself with real value by means of its constant oscillations, never by means of an equation with real value as if the latter were a third party, but rather by means of constant non-equation of itself (as Hegel would say, not by way of abstract identity, but by constant negation of the negation, i.e. of itself as negation of real value). [15]

In my pamphlet against Proudhon I showed that real value itself – independently of its rule over the oscillations of the market price (seen apart from its role as the law of these oscillations) – in turn negates itself and constantly posits the real value of commodities in contradiction with its own character, that it constantly depreciates or appreciates the real value of already produced commodities; this is not the place to discuss it in greater detail. [16]

Price therefore is distinguished from value not only as the nominal from the real; not only by way of the denomination in gold and silver, but because the latter appears as the law of the motions which the former runs through. But the two are constantly different and never balance out, or balance only coincidentally and exceptionally. The price of a commodity constantly stands above or below the value of the commodity, and the value of the commodity itself exists only in this up-and-down movement of commodity prices. Supply and demand constantly determine the prices of commodities; never balance, or only coincidentally; but the cost of production, for its part, determines the oscillations of supply and demand.

[Wellsy]

The source of profits are obscured by measures of GDP that make out that profits are created in exchange rather than in production in countries with an extremely disciplined work force and paid low wages.

https://monthlyreview.org/2012/07/01/the-gdp-illusion/

It is well known that the standard Mercator projection of the three-dimensional surface of planet Earth into the two-dimensional frame of a map stretches the northern hemisphere and shrinks the tropics. Standard data on GDP and trade flows produce a similar effect, diminishing the global South’s contribution to global wealth and exaggerating that of the imperialist countries. To see how this is done it must be remembered that, despite its claim to be a measure of “product,” GDP and trade data measure the results of transactions in the marketplace. Yet nothing is produced in markets, the world of the exchange of money and titles of ownership; production takes place elsewhere, behind high walls, on private property, in production processes. Values are created in production processes and captured in markets and have a prior and separate existence from the prices finally realized when they are sold. Yet these values “seem not just to be realised only in circulation but actually to arise from it,” an illusion that gives rise to the central fallacy underlying standard interpretations of economic data: the conflation of value with price.30 This matter will be returned to shortly; here it is only necessary to note that it is impossible to analyse the global economy without using data on GDP and trade, yet every time we uncritically cite this data we open the door to the core fallacies of neoclassical economics which these data project. To analyse the global economy we must decontaminate this data, or rather the concepts we use to interpret them.
…
As we have seen from our three global commodities, when a consumer buys a gadget, an item of clothing, or imported foodstuffs only a small fraction of its final selling price will appear in the GDP of the country where it was produced, while the greater part of it appears in the GDP of the country where it is consumed. Only an economist could think there is nothing wrong with this! Another even more startling example of the paradoxes produced by GDP statistics is that in 2007 the nation with the highest per capita GDP—that is, whose citizens are supposedly the most productive on earth—was Bermuda. This island tax haven leapt above Luxembourg to become the world’s number one when hedge funds needed a new home following the destruction of the World Trade Center in September 2001. Bermuda was given a further boost by Hurricane Katrina, which sparked a global rise in insurance premiums and a flight of hot money into the world’s reinsurance industry—of which Bermuda is one of the most important centres. Despite ranking as, size-for-size, the world’s most productive nation, virtually the only productive activity taking place in Bermuda is the production of cocktails in beach bars and the provision of other high-end tourist services.31 Meanwhile, 1,600 kilometers south-by-southwest of Bermuda lies another island nation, the Dominican Republic, where 154,000 workers toil for a pittance in fifty-seven export processing zones, producing shoes and clothing mainly for the North American market.32 Its GDP, on a per capita basis, is just 8 percent of Bermuda’s when measured in PPP (purchasing power parity) dollars, or 3 percent at market exchange rates; in 2007 it languished ninety-seven places below Bermuda in the CIA World Factbook’s global league table of per capita GDP. Yet which country, Bermuda or the Dominican Republic, makes a greater contribution to global wealth?

The comparison between Bermuda and the Dominican Republic is a special case, challenging us to recognize that the “financial services” that Bermuda “exports” are nonproduction activities that consist of teeming and lading wealth produced in countries like the Dominican Republic. If “GDP per capita” was a true measure of the actual contribution of hedge fund traders and workers in Caribbean shoe factories to social wealth, then their relative position would surely be reversed.
…

To see why this is so we must look more closely at GDP; it is, essentially, the sum of the “value added” generated by each firm within a nation. The key concept within GDP is therefore value added. Value added is defined as the difference between the prices paid for all inputs and the prices received for all outputs.34 According to this core neoclassical concept, the amount by which the price of outputs exceeds the price of inputs is automatically and exactly equal to the value that it has generated in its own production process, and cannot leak to other firms or be captured from them. Seen through the neoclassical lens, production is not only a black box, where all we know is the price paid for the inputs and the price received for the outputs; it is also hermetically sealed from all other black boxes, in that no value can be transferred or redistributed between them as a result of the competition for profits. Marxist political economy rejects this absurdity and advances a radically different conception: value added is really value captured.

It measures the share of total economy-wide value added that is captured by a firm, and does not in any way correspond to the value created by the living labor employed within that individual firm.

Indeed, Marxist value theory maintains that many firms supposedly generating value added are engaged in nonproduction activities like finance and administration that produce no value at all.

[Wellsy]

I see summaries that take from Marx's first chapter in which value is compared to weight which emphasizes it's existence from the inference that they must be comparable and asking from what basis. And seems part of the inference is that things must have value in themselves beyond just the mere exchange ratios between them.
http://digamo.free.fr/elson79-.pdf

It is only in the critique of Bailey (in Theories of Surplus Value, Part 3, p. 124-159) that this distinction is explicitly discussed. The 'immanent' measure refers to the characteristics of something that allow it to be measurable as pure quantity; the 'external measure refers to the medium in which the measurements of this quantity are actually made, the scale used, etc. The concept of 'immanent' measure does not mean that the 'external' measure is 'given' by the object being measured. There is room for convention in the choice of a particular medium of measurement, calibration of scale of measurement, etc. It is not, therefore, a matter of counter-posing a realist to a formalist theory of measurement (as Cutler et al., 1977, suggest p. 15). Rather it is a matter of insisting that there are both realist and formalist aspects to cardinal measurability (i.e. measurability as absolute quantity, not simply as bigger or smaller). Things that are cardinally measurable can be added or subtracted to one another, not merely ranked in order of size, (ranking is ordinal measurability).

A useful discussion of this issue is to be found in Georgescu Roegen, who emphasises that:

'Cardinal measurability, therefore, is not a measure just like any other, but it reflects a particular physical property of a category of things.' (Op. cit., p. 49.)

Only things with certain real properties can be cardinally measured. This is the point that Marx is making with his concept of Immanent' measure, and that he makes in the example, in Capital, I, of the measure of weight (p. 148-9). The external measure of weight is quantities of iron (and there is of course a conventional choice to be made about whether to calibrate them in ounces or grammes, or whether, indeed, to use iron, rather than, say, steel). But unless both the iron and whatever it is being used to weigh (in Marx's example, a sugar loaf) both have weight, iron cannot express the weight of the sugar loaf. Weight is the Immanent' measure. But it can only be actually measured in terms of a comparison between two objects, both of which have weight and one'of which is the 'external' measure, whose weight is pre-supposed.

Thus when Marx says that labour-time is the measure of value, he means that the value of a commodity is measurable as pure quantity because it is an objectification of abstract labour, i.e. of 'indifferent' labour-time, hours of which can be added to or subtracted from one another. As such, as an objectification of pure duration of labour, it has cardinal measurability. This would not be the case if the commodity were simply a product of labour, an objectification of labour in its concrete aspect. For concrete labour is not cardinally measurable as pure time. Hours spent on tailoring and hours spent on weaving are qualitatively different: they can no more be added or subtracted to one another than apples can be added to or subtracted from pears. We can rank concrete labour in terms of hours spent in each task, just as we can rank apples and pears, and say which we have more of. But we can't measure the total quantity of labour in terms of hours, for we have no reason for supposing that one hour of weaving contains as much labour as one hour of tailoring, since they are qualitatively different.

t be labour-time, the argument that labour-time is the (immanent) measure of value entails that labour-time cannot be the medium of measurement. For we cannot, in the actual labour-time we can observe, separate the abstract from the concrete aspect. The only way that labour-time can be posed as the medium of measurement is by making the arbitrary assumption that there is no qualitative difference between different kinds of labour, an assumption that Marx precisely refuses to make with his insistence on the importance of the form of labour.

It is surprising that Cutler et al., 1977, who emphasise their critique of the supposed function of labour-time as a social standard of measurement in Capital, do not refer to Marx's distinction between 'immanent' and 'external' measure. Had they done so, they might have realised that it is money, and not labour-time, which functions as the social standard of measurement, in Marx's Capital, as in capitalist society itself. The reason that labour-time is stressed as the measure of value, is to argue that money in itself does not make the products of labour commensurable. They are only commensurable insofar as they are objectifications of the abstract aspect of labour

http://gesd.free.fr/shaikh77.pdf

But there is a deeper problem here. In order for me to measure the "worth" of corn in terms of gold, for instance, gold must also be "worth" something itself. Otherwise I cannot say how much gold is equivalent to a bushel of corn. It is just like my $aying that a stone "weighs" ten grams; what I mean is that on a scale it takes ten pieces of iron called gram-weights to equal the weight of the stone. But clearly, in order for me to carry out this operation, both stone and iron must already possess the property of being "heavy," of having "weight"; the gram-weights don't make stones "heavy," they only measure the already existing heaviness of stones.

Exactly the same conclusion applies to "quantitative worth." The factors which cause commodities to have "quantitative worth" in the first place must be carefully distinguished from the measurement of this "worth." Measuring the "worth" of corn in iron will give a different result from measuring it in gold; but neither measure causes corn to have "quantitative worth." Raiher, each merely expresses the preexisting "worth" of corn in terms of some particular commodity.

The quest on of exchange-value ("quantitative worth") is therefore really a twofold one: first, what is the cause of "quantitative worth"; and second, how is this "worth" actually expressed, measured, in exchange?

[Wellsy]

Sam Williams asserts often that many Marxists, and in this case Kliman, misunderstand Marx’s theory of money and implications there of. That the first chapter isn’t merely to show the origins of money but that money in the form of gold is a universal commodity that is the price of everything else but is also a commodity with its ken value that is reflected in the price of everything else.
Want to keep this here so I can chew on it a bit and note whether it has interesting implications and whether its idiosyncratic but coherent.
https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/responses-to-readers-austrian-economics-versus-marxism/andrew-kliman-and-the-neo-ricardian-attack-on-marxism-pt-1/

When we talk about the prices of all commodities, we are by definition leaving one commodity out—the one commodity in the capitalist economy that does not have a price. And what commodity by definition has no price? The money commodity. Since the money commodity serves as the standard of price, it itself cannot have a price. Only if we imagine that money is not a commodity can we talk about the prices of all commodities. Let N equal the total quantity of commodities. The total sum of commodity prices will always leave one commodity out. We can add up the prices only of N – 1 commodities.
…

But once we take into account the value of the money commodity—the one commodity that has no price—the apparent creation or destruction of value in circulation disappears. It is a mere money illusion. Therefore, at the end of the day the value the capitalists get to consume, whether unproductively as items of personal consumption or productively as means of production, is nothing else but the surplus value produced by the working class minus the surplus product embodied in the gold that is used as money, since strictly speaking money is not consumed.
…

In reality, profits are measured in a physical unit but not in the physical units of commodities as a whole—imagine trying to perform such a calculation in the real world as opposed to the corn worlds of the “neo-Ricardian” dreamscape—but in the physical units of the money commodity—weights of gold.
…

Perhaps like many others, Kliman is confused by the fact that today’s paper dollars, unlike in the past, are not legally convertible into a fixed amount of gold. This gives rise to the illusion that the “real value of a dollar” derives from the commodities it circulates and not from its relationship to gold, the special money commodity. This is indeed the commonsense view defended by the upholders of “orthodox—neo-classical—political economy, but it is not the view of Marx.

According to Marx, money is a counter-value to the value of the commodity it is measuring and circulating. It must have a value of its own that is separate from the commodity whose value it is both measuring and circulating. This is why money must always be a commodity.

Therefore, there is always the possibility that the counter-value might differ from the value of the commodity that is circulating in any given case. Indeed, Marx in many places makes clear not only that this might be so, it almost certainly will be so in every real world case.

If we apply Marx’s concept of money and token money to a dollar bill, the apparent value of the dollar bill stems not from the commodities it purchases like our commonsense economists proclaim, but rather from the value of the amount of gold it actually exchanges for on the world market at this particular moment in time.

Thanks to the Internet, I can tell you exactly what the value of a dollar bill is in terms of gold at the very instant you are reading this and not the instant that I am writing this. The gold value is at this instant the reciprocal of the dollar price of gold found on the Web site kitco.com. That is, a U.S. dollar now represents 1/[the dollar price of gold as reported at Kitco.com] of an ounce of gold. Under the average current conditions of production now needed to produce this quantity of gold, a given amount of abstract human labor is required. The value a U.S. dollar bill represents is therefore exactly the quantity of abstract human labor that is necessary to produce 1/[dollar price of gold as reported at Kitco.com] of an ounce of gold under the prevailing conditions of production.

If the dollar price of gold were to be stabilized—the international gold standard were to be restored—the amount of gold that a dollar represents would cease to fluctuate. But the amount of abstract human labor that a dollar represents through the commodity gold would still fluctuate, though less than it does at present. The amount of human labor measured in some unit of time that it takes to produce the given weight of gold bullion that would define the dollar under the new international gold standard would continue to fluctuate in response to the ever-changing conditions of production in the gold mining and refining industries.

Unlike the MELT theory of non-commodity money, Marx’s theory of money contains the possibility—indeed the virtual certainty—that the sum total of money prices will not actually equal the sum total of direct prices at any given point in time. Indeed, Marx hints at this in the very first volume of “Capital.” In Volume I Chapter I of “Capital,” Marx writes, “Jacob doubts whether gold has ever been paid for at its full value.”

Marx does not indicate that he agrees with the now long-forgotten Jacob on this point, but he doesn’t indicate that he disagrees with him either. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that our Mr. Jacob was correct. If gold has never been paid for at its full value and if gold is the money commodity, this would mean that the sum total of commodity prices have always exceeded the sum total of values, or more precisely the sum total of direct prices.

Why does Marx even bring up the obscure Jacob’s opinion that gold has never been “paid for at its full value” in the very first chapter of “Capital”? Is it because the Jacob quoted was so well known? Perhaps he was in the 19th century when Marx wrote “Capital,” though I doubt it. Isn’t Marx warning us that though he will assume as a general rule throughout the first and second volumes that prices equal values—direct prices—and that therefore the sum total of all commodity prices equal the sum total of all direct prices, this in fact might not necessarily be true?

[Hakeer]

Sam Williams asserts often that many Marxists, and in this case Kliman, misunderstand Marx’s theory of money and implications there of. That the first chapter isn’t merely to show the origins of money but that money in the form of gold is a universal commodity that is the price of everything else but is also a commodity with its ken value that is reflected in the price of everything else.
Want to keep this here so I can chew on it a bit and note whether it has interesting implications and whether its idiosyncratic but coherent.
https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/responses-to-readers-austrian-economics-versus-marxism/andrew-kliman-and-the-neo-ricardian-attack-on-marxism-pt-1/

You might find this book interesting:
Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money

I wrote a whole book manuscript about it long ago.

[Wellsy]

You might find this book interesting:
Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money

I wrote a whole book manuscript about it long ago.

What is your main take aways from his work?

I have heard of Marxist's being influenced/intrigued by him but that the relationship between his work and Marx's is a bit distant even while there are asserted overlaps.
https://www.eddiejackson.net/web_documents/Philosophy%20of%20Money.pdf

But Simmel’s delineation of an exchange economy was one far removed from that of Marx since, as Blumenberg points out, ‘Simmel still postulated the concept of exchange for a “solipsistic economy, as it were”, that is, one in which the isolated person does not confront other persons but immediately confronts nature’.123 It would not be possible at this point to develop all the differences between the value theories of Simmel and Marx.

It must suffice here to suggest that one of the key aspects of Simmel’s critique of the labour theory fails to come to terms with Marx’s theory at all. Simmel’s argument on value obfuscates the distinction between use and exchange value with respect to labour power and hence any possibility of discussing commodity exchange rather than the exchange of goods. Secondly, Simmel’s critique centres around a number of examples of concrete labour without again confronting Marx’s distinction between concrete labour and labour power, between concrete and abstract labour. The discussion of money seldom takes up the relationship between money and capital that is symptomatic of Simmel’s lack of interest in the sphere of production as opposed to that of distribution and circulation. This can lead Simmel to argue that the sphere of exchange is just as productive and valuecreating as that of production itself and to view exchange exclusively from the standpoint of the consumption of use values.124

The origin of these differences between Simmel and Marx lies in the fundamentally divergent economic theories of the two writers. Simmel wrongly describes Marx’s theory of money as a theory of labour money—a theory that he expressly rejects both in Capital and, in more detail, in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. 125 In his critique of Marx’s theory, Simmel correctly points to the importance of the separation of intellectual and manual labour, but in the course of the discussion intended to preserve the freedom of the intellect and to assert that intellectual labour is free he confuses two notions of value. As Brinkmann argues,126

Simmel uses two concepts of value in an undifferentiated manner: on the one hand, his concept of value which…is orientated towards that of each individual valuation of an object…on the other, however, Marx’s concept of value which commences from abstract labour.

Brinkmann goes on to show that Simmel’s notion of an economic crisis too differs markedly from that of Marx. Simmel views an economic crisis not in terms of over-production but rather as a distorted relationship between the means of payment and the supply of goods. This is the result of a more basic difference between Simmel’s and Marx’s views on a capitalist economy since ‘whereas Simmel seeks to analyse the economy from the side of demand and thus from the side of consumption and distribution, thereby allowing supply to be more or less a function of demand, Marx starts out from supply, from production’.127 Of course, in this Simmel’s views do not differ markedly from those of many of his contemporary sociologists or, for that matter, from many writers today on social stratification.

It is however in Simmel’s analysis of the consequences of the money economy and of the division of labour that the affinities between his work and that of Marx appear to be greatest. It is at this level rather than in terms of Simmel’s theory of value that we must examine Goldscheid’s claim that The Philosophy of Money is an extension of Marx’s Capital or Lukács’s claim to have come to Marx’s work via Simmel. One recent commentator suggests that128

in the Philosophie des Geldes at least, the power of the analysis lies precisely in the constant return of the argument to the process of industrial production. In this context, Simmel rediscovered major moments of Marx’s theory of alienation that most interpreters (except Lukács in 1923) associated with Marx only after the discovery of the 1844 Paris Manuscripts.

In what sense is this true? It must again be pointed out that any affinity between Simmel’s analysis and that of Marx need not rest upon Simmel’s reading of Marx. Without in any way detracting from Simmel’s originality, many strands of Simmel’s analysis may be traced back to other writers. Arato has rightly suggested that Simmel’s discussion of rationality and, one might add, possibly his account of its relation to science, has its roots in Tönnies’s earlier work.129 It would be surprising if Simmel had not been impressed by the work of his colleague Schmoller on the division of labour.130 Similarly, many of the historical examples that illuminate Simmel’s analysis of the emergence of the money economy are probably drawn from such works as those of Knapp on agricultural workers.131 Yet having pointed to all these influences —and they are by no means exhaustive—it remains to examine what affinities do exist between Simmel’s and Marx’s analysis of the division of labour and alienation.

The biggest affinity seems to be in Marx's idea of alienation and what I see as Simmel's emphasis on the subjectivity of the individual to an objective culture in which money comes to dominate.

[Hakeer]

What is your main take aways from his work?

I have heard of Marxist's being influenced/intrigued by him but that the relationship between his work and Marx's is a bit distant even while there are asserted overlaps.
https://www.eddiejackson.net/web_documents/Philosophy%20of%20Money.pdf

The biggest affinity seems to be in Marx's idea of alienation and what I see as Simmel's emphasis on the subjectivity of the individual to an objective culture in which money comes to dominate.

The book very far-ranging. Simmel was a philosopher by profession but has been very influential in sociology, especially social psychology (my field). You seen more interested in economics, so you might be more interested in his analysis of the functions of money in the historical transition from barter economy to money economy. I strongly recommend you read the book for yourself, rather than secondary analysis of the book by people like Frisby.