Classical/Marxian Labor theory of value for dummies

[FONT=Univers]I think that we have to deal with the dialectics in which the labor theory of value is also a value theory of labor. I mean, there would be no surplus value to talk about if labor would not be reducible to only a money issue (i.e. if labor would not be a commodity) and if money would not be only a fetish, an unacknowledged unredeemable symbolic debt. [/FONT]

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Yes, this is probably an insight. What is labour, and is it transhistoric (was what feudal serfs did "labour"?), or is it a category that only makes sence within the capitalist frame?

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I mean, there would be no surplus value to talk about if labor would not be reducible to only a money issue (i.e. if labor would not be a commodity)

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Labour is not a commodity.

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and if money would not be only a fetish, an unacknowledged unredeemable symbolic debt.

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What is a "symbolic debt", how is money such a thing, and how/why is it unredeemable?

Luís Henrique

[FONT=Calibri]Labor force is certainly a commodity because there is a labor market.[/FONT]

Indeed, and labour power is not the same as labour - which is not a commodity.

Luís Henrique

There's a marx quote somewhere saying how terrible it would be if capital owned your 'labor' rather than labor power.

It's important to make the distinction though. Luis isn't yanking your chain.

[FONT=Calibri]Money is, in fact, only social relations and any social relation is ultimately based on one not killing the other: we cannot redeem the debt we have towards those (our fathers say) who have only performed on us a symbolic murder instead of a real one.[/FONT]

[FONT=Calibri]There is no reason to distinguish labour from labour-power because capitalist exploitation of workers has to be explained dialectically, i.e., labour didn’t exist prior to surplus labour, it is surplus labor that retroactively created a phony concept of labour.[/FONT]

This is probably correct, though I think it deserves an in-depth discussion rather than a simple unexplained assertion.

It doesn't seem to follow, though. Labour cannot be a commodity, because if it was there would be no possibility of surplus value at all. Indeed, it is probably the most widespread confusion among capitalism supporters in OI:

"The apples are mine, because they are the result of your labour, which I paid for when I paid your wage" (My arse; you didn't pay me for my "labour", you paid me for the expense of my labour power, which is a completely different thing).

Luís Henrique

Well, money is the expression of social relations, no doubt. But there are many other social relations, which either are not fetishes, or are fetishes but not unacknowledged "symbolic debts", so your reasoning seems to miss something here.

This looks like Rousseau, not Marx, and is of course false, unless we deem that whatever is going on when a criminal is sentenced to death and executed are not "social relations".

Besides, if that were to be true, your reasoning about labour being not transhistoric would fall apart: we didn't kill each others in a feudal or primitive communist society too, societies where money either didn't exist or had a much smaller role, by no means being the fetish of all social relations. "Not killing each others" is a transhistoric ontologisation of "society". But money is a historic phenomenon.

It doesn't seem to follow. If you are right about any social relation being ultimately based on not killing each others, then we evidently can repay such debt by not killing them in turn.

So, was that a fact, or merely an opinion of our fathers?

Luís Henrique

Surplus value exists because labour power is a commodity.

And it is false to say that primitive societies "rejected" the commodity form; you cannot reject what has not been ever put up for your consideration.

Social relations are or are not reducible to money, depending on what society we are talking about; in a feudal (and consequently not exactly sane) society, for instance, social relations are not reducible to money (they are, perhaps, reducible to loyalty, which is a different organisational principle).

What is a "sane" society, anyway? Is there a pathology of societies? What absolute, transhistoric, principle is involved in classifying societies as sane or insane?

How does a society ackowledge an unredeemable symbolic debt?

And again, what is an irredeemable symbolic debt?

Luís Henrique

[FONT=Calibri]Pre-capitalist societies including the feudal societies were saner societies than our societies precisely because they were still able to take into consideration that formality is just... a formality (a form and not a commodity at all)! [/FONT]

I don't think so; this is a-historically superimposing our own reasonings into them.

Luís Henrique

[FONT=Calibri]I'm a revolutionary, I’m liberating the past.[/FONT]

If you do so, you enslave the future.

Luís Henrique

[FONT=Calibri]In dialectics, a future is a liberated past.[/FONT]

Yes? How?

Another thing. If you are talking about "unredeemable debts", you are actually "enslaving" the past to the logic of commodification, and treating money as a transhistoric category.

Luís Henrique

[FONT=Calibri]Our "Original sin" cannot be erased.[/FONT]

It's confused. His pal Bohm-Bahmwerk's critique regarding time incommensurability is (for non-TSSI interpretations) much stronger and can really only be answered by empirical validation that the (or a) Marxian value theory is useful in predicting and describing reality (which proponents of value theory, like anything else, should be obliged to advance anyway.)