Marx's use of value in Capital

[KC]

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[Muzk]

Value, as defined by Marx, is the amount of socially necessary abstract labour time

abstract? value =money? why is it abstract?

[KC]

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[Die Neue Zeit]

Were David Harvey's lecture videos of any help to you?

[The Vegan Marxist]

This guy will surely help if all else fails for you: http://www.youtube.com/user/brendanmcooney

[ZeroNowhere]

Regarding exchange-value and value, Marx actually defines value as the thing that, say, 1 coat and 20 yards of linen have in common if one is the exchange-value of the other.


Because of this, it is quite obvious that every product of human labour contains some kind of value. An object need not be a commodity to have value."Every product of labour is, in all states of society, a use value; but it is only at a definite historical epoch in a society’s development that such a product becomes a commodity, viz., at the epoch when the labour spent on the production of a useful article becomes expressed as one of the objective qualities of that article, i.e., as its value."

From Theories of Surplus Value, when arguing against a person who saw value as a property of things:

"As values, commodities are social magnitudes, that is to say, something absolutely different from their “properties” as “things”. As values, they constitute only relations of men in their productive activity. Value indeed “implies exchanges”, but exchanges are exchanges of things between men, exchanges which in no way affect the things as such. A thing retains the same “properties” whether it be owned by A or by B. In actual fact, the concept “value” presupposes “exchanges” of the products. Where labour is communal, the relations of men in their social production do not manifest themselves as “values” of “things”. Exchange of products as commodities is a method of exchanging labour, the dependence of the labour of each upon the labour of the others [and corresponds to] a certain mode of social labour or social production.

"In the first part of my book, I mentioned that it is characteristic of labour based on private exchange that the social character of labour “manifests” itself in a perverted form—as the “property” of things; that a social relation appears as a relation between things (between products, values in use, commodities). This [I]appearance is accepted as something real by our fetish-worshipper, and he actually believes that the exchange-value of things is determined by their properties as things, and is altogether a natural property of things. No scientist to date has yet discovered what natural qualities make definite proportions of snuff tobacco and paintings “equivalents” for one another."
Incidentally, the section d (Samuel Bailey) whence that came may be useful. It's here (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch20.htm).


Then there's a passage from the Critique of Political Economy that goes like this:

"Or let us take the services and dues in kind of the Middle Ages. It was the distinct labour of the individual in its original form, the particular features of his labour and not its universal aspect that formed the social ties at that time. Or finally let us take communal labour in its spontaneously evolved form as we find it among all civilised nations at the dawn of their history. In this case the social character of labour is evidently not effected by the labour of the individual assuming the abstract form of universal labour or his product assuming the form of a universal equivalent. The communal system on which this mode of production is based prevents the labour of an individual from becoming private labour and his product the private product of a separate individual; it causes individual labour to appear rather as the direct function of a member of the social organisation. Labour which manifests itself in exchange-value appears to be the labour of an isolated individual. It becomes social labour by assuming the form of its direct opposite, of abstract universal labour."
Colletti explains that thusly:


"In short, in the first case, individual labour is an integral part, without any mediation, of the overall social labour - and it is such in its own natural form as 'concrete' or 'useful' labour (spinning, weaving, ploughing, etc.). That is to say, just as social labour is here the whole, the link between the various kinds of individual labour, so too the social or general product is nothing other than the sum of the use-values produced - meaning by this last term that which is produced are labour-products in their form as objective, physical or natural objects.

"In the second case, it is just the opposite, since there is lacking the presupposition of a community that would distribute the overall work that must be carried out among its individual members, and would assign to each of them what he must produce (ie. there is lacking a 'plan'). Thus the labour of the individual, i.e. labour in its natural form as useful or concrete labour, "becomes social labor only by taking on the form of its direct opposite, the form of abstract universal labour", i.e. the form of abstract labour; just as its product, in its turn, becomes a social product by taking on the form of its opposite, i.e. value - within the body or form that it, qua use-value, has as a natural object. And one must bear in mind that the term 'value' is to be understood in the sense of a 'coagulation' or objectification of undifferentiated human labour-ower, as "crystals of this social substance common to them all", and therefore as non-sensuous, non-material objectivity - or as Marx refers to it, a "ghost-like" objectivity ("not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of value"), which is nothing but the social unity itself in its hypostatized form.

In so far as individual human activities are not directly linked to one another, they can be related to one another as integral parts of the overall social labour only on condition that each of them is reduced to abstract 'undifferentiated human labour' i.e. to labour as it presents itself when it is considered apart from the concrete subjects who carry it out. This means that in order to count as social labour (given the fact that it is not so without mediation), individual labour must here negate itself and transform itself into its opposite, i.e. represent itself not as individual labour but as the 'labour of no single individual', as abstract labour ("The labour-time represented by exchange value is the labour-time of an individual, but of an individual undistinguished from other individuals in so far as they perform the same labour [...] It is the labour-time of an individual, his labour time, but only as labour-time common to all, regardless as to which particular individual's labour-time it is.") And here it is obvious that the subject is now work in the abstract, and man is the predicate. For, as Marx states, "labour, thus measured by time, does not appear in reality as the labour of different individuals, but on the contrary, the various working individuals rather appear as mere organs of labour; or, in so far as labour is represented by exchange values, it may be defined as human labour in general. This abstraction of human labour in general virtually exists in the average labour which the average individual of a given society can perform."" He goes over the same theme in this (http://libcom.org/library/intro-Marx-early-writings-Colletti), in case the above was unclear due to only being an extract from his book. There, he links it to Marx's analysis of the political state, alienation (as should be evident from the above), and critique of Hegel. It's worth reading, I think, though not all of it is about the subject at hand, so it's your choice.

As regards the value-form, or form of value:
"The analysis of the commodity has shown that it is something twofold, use-value and value. Hence in order for a thing to possess commodity-form, it must possess a twofold form, the form of a use-value and the form of value. The form of use-value is the form of the commodity’s body itself, iron, linen, etc., its tangible, sensible form of existence. This is the natural form (Naturalform) of the commodity. As opposed to this the value-form (Wertform) of the commodity is its social form."

The first part of 'Capital' is pretty complex, so good luck with that, and hopefully the above helped somewhat.

[mikelepore]

Value, as defined by Marx, is the amount of socially necessary abstract labour time

abstract? value =money? why is it abstract?

No -- Marx defined value as the ratios for which a commodity exchanges with other commodities. He asserted that it is _determined_ by the socially necessary labor time.

[ZeroNowhere]

^
"We see then that that which determines the magnitude of the value of any article is the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour time socially necessary for its production. Each individual commodity, in this connexion, is to be considered as an average sample of its class. Commodities, therefore, in which equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced in the same time, have the same value. The value of one commodity is to the value of any other, as the labour time necessary for the production of the one is to that necessary for the production of the other. “As values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed labour time."" (Marx was quoting himself there.)

If they were equivalent, the above would not make much sense.

[KC]

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[mikelepore]

In Marx's writings, in every case I've seen, any use of the word "value" without any adjective in front of it refers to "exchange value." Where he means "use value" he says that. As far as I know, those are his only two uses for the word "value." If you know of exceptions, please point them out.

[ZeroNowhere]

No, that would be Ricardo.


A simple geometrical illustration will make this clear. In order to calculate and compare the areas of rectilinear figures, we decompose them into triangles. But the area of the triangle itself is expressed by something totally different from its visible figure, namely, by half the product of the base multiplied by the altitude. In the same way the exchange values of commodities must be capable of being expressed in terms of something common to them all, of which thing they represent a greater or less quantity.
We have seen that when commodities are exchanged, their exchange value manifests itself as something totally independent of their use value. But if we abstract from their use value, there remains their Value as defined above. Therefore, the common substance that manifests itself in the exchange value of commodities, whenever they are exchanged, is their value. The progress of our investigation will show that exchange value is the only form in which the value of commodities can manifest itself or be expressed. For the present, however, we have to consider the nature of value independently of this, its form.I don't think it would make much sense if Marx was writing that value was expressed in... Value. Or that value could be investigated independently of value.

Finally, from the 'Notes on Wagner':


De prime abord, I do not proceed from “concepts,” hence neither from the “concept of value,” and am therefore in no way concerned to “divide” it. What I proceed from is the simplest social form in which the product of labour presents itself in contemporary society, and this is the “commodity.” This I analyse, initially in the form in which it appears. Here I find that on the one hand in its natural form it is a thing for use, alias a use-value; on the other hand, a bearer of exchange-value, and from this point of view it is itself an “exchange-value.” Further analysis of the latter shows me that exchange-value is merely a “form of appearance,” an independent way of presenting the value contained in the commodity, and then I start on the analysis of the latter. I therefore state explicitly, p. 36, 2nd ed.: “When, at the beginning of this chapter, we said, in common parlance, that a commodity is both a use-value and an exchange-value, we were, precisely speaking, wrong. A commodity is a use-value or object of utility, and a ‘value’. It manifests itself as this twofold thing which it is, as soon as its value assumes an independent form of appearance distinct from its natural form—the form of exchange-value,” etc. Thus I do not divide value into use-value and exchange-value as opposites into which the abstraction “value” splits up, but the concrete social form of the product of labour, the “commodity,” is on the one hand, use-value and on the other, “value,” not exchange value, since the mere form of appearance is not its own content.
He might just as well have said that “exchange-value” is discarded by me because it is only the form of appearance of value, and not “value” itself, since for me the “value” of a commodity is neither its use-value nor its exchange value. Incidentally, he also uses chemical value (ie. valency) when mocking Wagner over his theory, basically being that value is equivalent to use-value because man values things. Also, I'm not sure that the use of 'value' in both 'value' and 'use-value' ('value in use' in Smith, who also talked of 'value in exchange') is all that significant, given that Marx refers to them as opposites.