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Castree(1999:150) on Postone), and not because of the dull aside that all
commodities(as use-value and concrete labour) in their utter bareness are social
labour. It is precisely in these terms that the ‘social process of abstraction[(real
abstraction as opposed to conceptual abstraction)] to which the commodity form
refers also entails a determinate process of quantification’(Postone 1993:189-90).
Marxian concepts of ‘socially necessary labour time’ and ‘abstract labour’ are not,
therefore, about value as some technical coefficient, but about value as the ‘self-
mediating’ facet of commodities. Value as a self-mediating social category, in Marx,
is about the ‘social necessity’ of a self-mediating procedure of
quantification(foremostly, of labour time); and not about the fact that quantification as
such is a socially anachronistic or epistemologically impractical procedure.
What of value as such? Postone argues that ‘[a]lthough value ... is the objectification
of labour, it is an objectification of abstract labour’(ibid.:188). Thereby, since the
general quasi-objective basis for the self-mediating element in commodities in
capitalism is labour that (labour)time is integral to the socially mediating
quantification of value; or better said, ‘[b]ecause of the mediating character of labour
in capitalism, its measure has a socially mediating character as well’(ibid.:189).
Value of a commodity is basically its socially necessary labour time. The latter is the
average time socially necessary for the production of that commodity, but more
profoundly, abstract labour, and value as the objectification of that abstract labour, is
first about the social necessity of the quantification of labour on the basis of an
abstract temporality as opposed to some technical average or the technical procedure
for timing that average. Secondly, on top of the fact that labour time is the socially
determinate parameter of value, the category of ‘socially necessary labour time’
insinuates a determinate quantification of value. In more concise words, even when
labour time in the production of a commodity is in excess of the socially necessary
average, its value equals that of the unchanged average labour time in the production
of that commodity.
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