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

U of Utah Econ 5080 2005fa 39
Value is “that social property which makes things exchangeable in a commodity society.”
Next, not for the trial test answer, I’ll take a shot at the relationship between value and
abstract labor:
Abstract labor is what goes into the material to turn it into a commodity. A commodity
itself is a social construct, raw material plus labor that adds use-value(s). Once it’s part of
the commodity, it’s value.
Hans: Imagine the following conversation. Your son asks you: “what is value?” and your answer is “value is that
social property which makes things exchangeable in a commodity society.” Then your son wants to know: “what is
that property?” and you elaborate: “the abstract labor content of the commodity”.
My point here is: “value is congealed abstract labor” is also a possible answer to question 72.
Message [574] referenced by [579]. Next Message by Bubba is [598].
[579] Xerho: What is value, test question response to Bubba. Bubba makes a very good
point in quoting the annotations in [574] for the definition of value, which is something I
certainly should have considered; sticking to the text. I failed to realize that many times a
simple definition is best. I chose to include the sentence following that quoted by Bubba
in the annotations were it reads, “Value...is not derived from worth, but from abstract social
labor.” (pg. 34)
It’s tough to know how far to go in a definition, but I liked how Bubba separated the two,
and wrote separately about the relationship between value and abstract labor. Thanks for
clearing that up further.
Next Message by Xerho is [643].
[673] Hans: Disentangling value and exchange-value. This question was not on the
test yesterday and will not be on the test on Monday. But it is something which needs
clarification in general. Let me begin with a trivial geometric example.
Think of all the circles in the world. If you take any two circles A and B, then it is either
possible to place A on top of B so that A completely covers B (i.e., so that B is completely
hidden by A), or it is not possible.
If it is possible, then I say “A covers B”. This is a relationship between circles: it can
only be defined if you have two circles.
Other things can be done with circles individually. You can compute the area of each
circle, and its circumference, etc. For this you don’t need more than one circle: each circle
has a well-defined area and circumference all by itself.
Thirdly, of course, we know that A covers B if and only if the area of A is greater than or
equal to the area of B. This fact is not as trivial as it seems because it reduces the relationship
between the circles to something which each circle has individually. Say circle A lives in
New York and B in San Francisco. It is no longer necessary for A to fly to San Francisco or
for B to fly to New York in order to determine whether A covers B or not. They both can
just measure their area, which is something that each can do without the other present, and
then they know who covers whom.
Now think commodities instead of circles, the cover relationship is their exchange value,
and the area is their value, i.e., the abstract human labor which was used up in the production
of these commodities. Then you understand what Marx means when he says
40 2005fa Econ 5080 U of Utah
exchange-value itself cannot be anything other than the mere mode of expression,
“form of appearance,” of some content distinguishable from it.
The area is the underlying concept; if A covers B it can do so because it has a bigger area
than B. The cover relationship is the mode of expression, the form of appearance, of the area
of the circles in the relationship between circles. Somewhere else, Marx says:
Wheat and iron, so far as they are exchange-values, must therefore be reducible
to this third.
I.e., if I only want to know whether circle A covers circle B, and none of their other
properties (their location, material, color etc), then all I need to know about them is the area
of each.
Adolph Wagner wrote a book in which he summarized Marx’s theory with the words
“the common social substance of exchange-value is labor.”
I bet that 90 percent of all Marxists would agree. But Marx himself objected vehemently:
Nowhere do I speak of “the common social substance of exchange-value”; I
rather say that the exchange-values (exchange-value, without at least two of
them, does not exist) represent something common to them, which is “quite
independent of their use-values” [i.e. here their natural form], namely
“value.”
Say our circles are knitted coasters. Then Marx simply says here that the process of
knitting (the living labor) does not generate the cover relationship between the coasters, but
it generates the area of the coasters.
Next Message by Hans is [705].
Question 73 is 39 in 1995WI, 48 in 1996ut, 47 in 1997ut, 59 in 1999SP, 65 in 2003fa, 74
in 2004fa, 86 in 2007SP, 86 in 2007fa, 87 in 2008fa, 90 in 2009fa, and 109 in 2012fa:
Question 73 Use-value is the quality of the commodity, and exchange-value is its quantity.
Right or wrong?
[78] Adamwest: I find the above statement to be correct. Marx makes it clear very early
on that useful things can be analyzed by their quality and quantity. On page 126 he states
“The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value”. So assuming that the higher an object’s
usefulness is in direct correlation to its use-value then we are correct.
Exchange-value can be looked at as the exchange rate from one item to another. Marx
presents this idea by saying “Exchange-value appears first of all as the quantitative relation
the proportion in which use-values of one-kind exchange for use-values of another kind”.
This shows that the exchange-value is found by looking at the use-value of the two items
that are to be traded. These use-values show us how many of item “a” is needed for one of
item “b”, or vice versa.
Hans: Did you mean to write: “So assuming that the higher an object’s quality is in direct correlation to its usevalue
then we are correct”?
Message [78] referenced by [81] and [94]. Next Message by Adamwest is [339].