Question 1 What did Marx mean with his formu - University of Utah

U of Utah Econ 5080 2007fa 39
Marx’s goal is not a wage high enough so that profits are eliminated, but his goal is the abolition of wage-labor.
Laborers should collectively be their own bosses rather than working for the capitalist, and production should be
for use-value rather than for exchange-value.
Message [42] referenced by [44].
[44] Hans: Class Relations and Commodity Trade. In [29], I briefly summarized
Marx’s theory of profits: profits are the residual because workers produce more value than
they get paid. Much more needs to be said here, but in a nutshell that’s the story.
Scott [39] and Yossarian [42], conclude from this that the labor of the workers cannot be
sold at its value. Scott brings very good prima facie evidence that the worker does not get
the full value he or she produces:
It is clear to see by the wealth that is gradually acquired by the owners over
time while the status of the workers, who initially produced the goods that
they became wealthy from, are in the same position as before or they are in
a worse position.
Over the years, the capitalist gets richer and richer, while the workers stays at the same
level. That is good evidence that the worker’s labor enriches the capitalist and not the worker.
Yossarian argues that this contradicts the laws of commodity trade. According to these laws,
Yossarian says,
the value added to a specific commodity through labor would go directly
back to those who added the value in the first place.
How would this play itself out in the competitive interactions between workers and capitalists?
If a worker does not get the full value of his labor from the capitalist, he will quit and
sell his own products, in this way he can be assured that he does get the full equivalent of
his labor. But there is a hitch: the worker cannot sell his own products, because he does not
have access to the modern means of production which would allow him to stay competitive.
Here you see how the separation from the means of production prevents the worker from
getting the full equivalent for his labor. Our separation from the means of production is a
very basic fact of capitalist society. It is so fundamental that we are usually not even aware
of it. It is a very artificial situation that all the wealth of this society is owned by a small
elite, and the great majority of people just have enough money to get by. No wonder Scott
calls the capitalists the “owners of the society.”
Next Message by Hans is [45].
Question 80 is 44 in 1997ut, 69 in 2004fa, 80 in 2007SP, 81 in 2008fa, and 99 in 2012fa:
Question 80 Marx says that as use-values commodities do not contain an atom of value.
Would he also say that the labor process does not contain an atom of abstract labor?
[48] Teight: It would be inaccurate to say that Marx believes that abstract labor isn’t
included in the labor process. Any labor process requires some sort of abstract labor. Labor
power consists of what a laborer uses to process a given commodity. For example, the
muscles a person uses, or the smarts it takes to produce a given commodity. The labor
power used by a laborer can be used in any labor process regardless of the commodity.
40 2007fa Econ 5080 U of Utah
Furthermore, the labor process is the cost of a certain labor power. Labor process by a person
is the labor power performed by that person which could have produced several million other
labor processes.
Hans: What you say is correct, but you should work on your formulations. Your last sentence, for instance, could
be reformulated as follows (if I understand it right): “Every labor process is performed by a person whose laborpower
could have performed several million other labor processes.”
Next Message by Teight is [127].
Question 82 is 84 in 2008SP and 83 in 2008fa:
Question 82 Is Marx’s concept of “value material” attached to commodities, but separate
from their physical material, a metaphor? Is it a phantasy, an invention, which Marx needs
to hold his labor theory of value together? Is Marx going overboard here? Or does it really
exist?
[54] Ozz: graded A Marx concept of “value material” is a metaphor. The value that is
added to a commodity is perfectly represented by the idea of presenting it as a metaphor.
The addition of value to a certain commodity from labor is real although it is not physical.
A similar metaphor would be saying the service a person gave you was a blanket of comfort.
The service could have been only that of a talk and not actually physical but the metaphor
helps one understand the value of that service.
Now if this is a fantasy, or if he is going overboard, I would have to say no. The line
that he describes materiality that I enjoyed was “The materiality of human labor that is itself
abstract, lacking further quality and content, is, of necessity, an abstract materiality, a thing
made of thought.” While in Mexico I remember seeing there little souvenirs and when they
told me that they made them from hand, even if that was a lie or not, added an amount
of value to that certain product, even though I knew I could get the same thing made by
machine. This value I feel is what Marx was trying to explain when he talked of the value
“made of thought.”
Hans: I like your first paragraph. This is probably how most Marxists view the issue, although I personally have a
different view, see my [58]. I don’t like your second paragraph as much. My critique formulated in [55] applies to
it, since the labor in the commodity enters your utility function, rather than having its own effects.
Message [54] referenced by [58], [163], and [2008SP:27]. Next Message by Ozz is [93].
[58] Hans: Are Marx’s Metaphors Really Metaphors? Ozz is not alone when he says
in [54] that the value material is a metaphor. His “blanket of comfort” is an excellent example
how a social interaction can metaphorically be equated to a thing. Most conventional
readings of Marx have a similar interpretation; they take much of what Marx says in these
early pages to be metaphorical.
Question 82 is a challenge to this conventional interpretation of Marx. I think that Marx
takes those issues much too seriously, and he treats them much too consistently, for them to
only be a metaphor. My Annotations try to take the concept of a social substance seriously.
We are entering here the area of philosophy of social sciences which asks “what is a
society?” Margaret Thatcher famously remarked that “society does not exist,” meaning that
the word “society” allows us to talk about all the individuals in society in an abbreviated
fashion, but there is nothing other than these individuals which this word refers to. This is
the methodological individualist point of view.