This post is long but something well worth reading during the festive break.
As I mentioned in a recent blog, at the Historical Materialism conference in London in November, there was a book launch for Fred Moseley’s new book Marx’s Theory of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital: A Critique of Heinrich’s Value-Form Interpretation. Michael Heinrich and Winfried Schwarz (a German Marxist who is also critical of Heinrich’s interpretation) participated in the book launch.
Moseley’s book is an examination of Marx’s theory of value in Chapter 1 of Capital, almost paragraph by paragraph in Sections 1 and 2, and a detailed critique of Heinrich’s value-form interpretation of Chapter 1, as presented in his 2021 book How to Read Marx’s Capital, which is a translation of his 2018 book Wie das Marxsche Kapital Lesen?
Heinrich is a well-known German Marxist who has published widely on his value-form interpretation of Marx’s theory of value, and his work is influential not only in Germany, but also in the UK and other countries in Europe and around the world. He criticises the traditional interpretation of the labour theory of value, according to which the value of commodities is determined solely in production, and he argues that value is created only when it is converted into money through the sale of commodities on the market.
Moseley is one of the foremost scholars in the world today on Marxian economic theory. He has written or edited many books on Marxist theory. He reckons instead that Marx presented a labour theory of value according to which the value of commodities is determined solely in production by the socially necessary labor time required to produce the commodities. And Moseley argues in his book that the textual evidence in Chapter 1 overwhelmingly supports the labour theory of value interpretation of Marx’s theory of value.
The relevance and importance of this debate may seem obscure to many readers of Marx. So Fred Moseley kindly agreed to be interviewed on his new book and the controversy with Heinrich.
MR: How did this book come about?
FM: ”First of all, I want to thank you for the opportunity to discuss my book with you and your many readers.
Heinrich’s book cited above is a detailed textual study of the first seven chapters of Capital. Heinrich is not very well known in the US, but he is very influential in Germany and other European countries. He is something like a David Harvey of Europe. But I am convinced that Heinrich’s book is a fundamental misinterpretation of Marx’s theory, so I decided to engage critically with Heinrich’s book.
I started by writing a paper on Chapter 1, the foundation of Marx’s theory and Heinrich’s interpretation. I presented this paper in a Zoom conference in June 2021 sponsored by Gyeongsang National University in South Korea. An assistant editor of Palgrave’s Marx, Engels and Marxism series, Paula Rauhala, watched the my presentation and she contacted me and suggested that I write a longer version of my paper as a Palgrave Pivot book. A Pivot book is a new initiative by Palgrave of short books, with a limit of 50,000 words (which I exceeded by 10,000 words!). I am grateful to Paula for that suggestion and this little book is the result.”
MR: Please give us an overview of your book
FM: “My little book is a detailed textual study of Marx’s Chapter 1 and Heinrich’s interpretation of Chapter 1. The book consists of only 4 chapters.
Chapter 1 of this book presents my interpretation of Marx’s theory of value in Chapter 1 of Capital, including a section on each of the four sections of Marx’s Chapter 1. Chapter 2 presents Heinrich’s interpretation of Chapter 1 of Capital and my detailed critique of Heinrich’s interpretation 1, with the same four sections.
Chapter 3 is about a 55-page manuscript that Marx wrote in 1872 in preparation for the 2nd German Edition of Volume 1, which is mainly about Section 3 of Chapter 1, entitled ‘Additions and Changes to the First Volume of Capital’, which Heinrich has emphasised in his book and in previous works to provide textual support for his ‘value-form interpretation’ of Chapter 1. This important manuscript has not yet been translated into English. A translation of a 4-page excerpt of this manuscript is included in Heinrich’s book as an appendix. So Chapter 3 of my book presents my interpretation of this manuscript and a critique of Heinrich’s interpretation. A translation of this entire manuscript should be a high priority of Marxian scholarship.
My book is very abstract theory, about the most abstract part of Marx’s theory, the beginning of Marx’s theory in which he presents the foundation of his labour theory of value. Marx said in the Preface to the 1st edition of Volume 1 of Capital that “beginnings are always difficult in all sciences”, and that is certainly true of Marx’s theory. The best way to read my book is to have Heinrich’s book and Volume 1 of Capital close at hand.”
MR: How would you summarise the main conclusions of your book?
FM: “The main conclusions of my book are the following:
1. The subject of analysis of Chapter 1 is the commodity, not a separate, isolated commodity, but a representative commodity, a commodity that represents all commodities and the properties that all commodities have in common (use-value and exchange-value). In the Preface to the 1st edition, Marx described the commodity as the “elementary form” or the “cell form” of capitalist production. So Marx analyses the properties of a representative commodity similar to the way cellular biology analyses the properties of a representative cell. It’s like putting a commodity under a microscope and analysing its main properties.
Marx’s representative commodity in Chapter 1 is assumed to have been produced, but not yet exchanged. This is crucial for the critique of Heinrich’s interpretation. According to Heinrich, the subject of analysis of Chapter 1 is not the properties of a representative commodity, but instead is what he calls an “exchange relation” between two commodities, which he argues is the end result of two actual exchanges between the two commodities and money on the market.
2. The value of commodities is derived in Section 1 of Chapter 1 from the property of the exchange-value of the representative commodity (i.e. from the property that each commodity is equal to all other commodities in definite proportions). And this general relation of equality between each commodity and all commodities requires a common property that is possessed by all commodities and that determines the proportions in which different commodities are equal.
Marx argued that this common property of all commodities that determines their exchange-values is the objectified abstract human labour contained in commodities. And this is the result of the abstract human labour expended in production to produce the commodities.
According to Heinrich, on the other hand, the value of commodities is not derived from a relation of equality between all commodities, but instead is derived from an analysis of an “exchange relation” between two commodities, which he argues presupposes actual exchanges of the two commodities with money on the market.
3. The magnitude of the value of each commodity is “exclusively determined” (p. 129) by the quantity of socially necessary labour-time expended in production to produce each commodity. Heinrich argues, on the other hand, that the magnitude of value of a commodity depends in part on the relation between supply and demand for the commodity on the market. This is the best-known assumption of the value-form interpretation of Marx’s theory of value.
4. The labour that produces commodities has a dual character in production: both concrete labour and abstract labour are characteristics of the same labour process in production. Section 2 of Chapter 1 in particular presents very strong textual evidence to support this interpretation of the dual character in production of labour that produces commodities.
Weaving and tailoring are Marx’s two examples in Section 2. The labour process of weaving produces the use-value of linen, its dual character also being abstract human labour that produces the value of the linen. The same dual character is true of the labour process of tailoring (and all other particular labour activities). The values of the linen and the coat are compared by comparing the labour-time required to produce each one of them and nothing is said in this about exchange in this section.
Heinrich argues, on the other hand, that labour in production is only concrete labour and is not yet abstract labour. Abstract labour comes to exist only in exchange, and thus the dual character of the labour that produces commodities comes to exist only in exchange. According to Heinrich’s interpretation, tailoring and weaving (and any other labour process) possess only a single character in production, not a dual character. This interpretation is clearly contradicted by Section 2.”
MR: Please say more about Heinrich’s interpretation of “exchange relation”. That seems to be a central concept in Heinrich’s interpretation.
FM: “Heinrich’s concept of “exchange relation” is completely original with him. No one else puts so much emphasis on this term and defines it the way he does. And it is a new concept in his interpretation; it was not included in his 2012 book Introduction to Marx’s Capital. And unfortunately, he does not explain this very well in this book, especially for such a fundamental concept. There is nothing in his Introduction about this concept; there are only 1½ pages in an appendix in the back of the book on the abstractions that result in this concept (which he doesn’t refer to once in the rest of the book) and 1½ pages in his first discussion of this concept on pp. 53-54. And from then on, he just presumes his interpretation of exchange relation and applies it to different passages in Marx’s text.
I am pretty sure that most readers of Marx (especially beginning readers) will not understand the meaning and significance of Heinrich’s concept of exchange relation in his interpretation. A young Marx scholar from Australia wrote a 2000-word review of Heinrich’s book for Marx and Philosophy and she didn’t mention the concept of exchange relation at all. I myself had to work pretty hard to understand it because it is so poorly presented.
Heinrich defines exchange relation as an exchange between two commodities. To take one of his examples that is borrowed from Marx:
1 quarter of wheat is exchanged for x boot-polish.
Heinrich comments that this definition seems like direct barter exchange between the two commodities, but he states that this is not so, because direct barter seldom actually happens in capitalism. Instead, Heinrich interprets the exchange relation between two commodities as the end result of two actual acts of exchange between the two commodities and money on the market. Thus…
1 qtr. of wheat is sold for 10 shillings and 10 shillings is used to purchase x book-polish
The important point is that Heinrich’s concept of exchange relation between two commodities presupposes actual exchanges between these two commodities and money on the market. Heinrich does not clearly specify whether these acts of exchange that are presupposed in his interpretation of the exchange relation are assumed to be actual acts of exchange on the market. However, they must be actual acts of exchange in order to be consistent with Heinrich’s general value-form interpretation, according to which commodities possess value only if they have been actually exchanged on the market.
Before actual exchange, according the Heinrich’s interpretation, commodities do not possess value (indeed, products are not even commodities) before exchange. Products of labour become commodities and commodities come to possess value only as a result of actual exchanges on the market. Therefore, since the commodities that Marx analyses in Section 1 (e.g. wheat and boot-polish) are assumed to possess value, in order to be consistent with Heinrich’s general value-form interpretation, he must also assume that these commodities have been actually sold and bought on the market. If the commodities have not been actually exchanged on the market, then these commodities would not possess value, according to Heinrich’s general value-form interpretation.
However, there is absolutely no textual evidence in any of Marx’s several drafts of Chapter 1 to support Heinrich’s idiosyncratic interpretation of the exchange relation between two commodities – that it presupposes actual acts of exchange between these two commodities and money on the market. This interpretation is Heinrich’s invention. He does not cite any other authors with a similar interpretation of exchange relation, because there are none. And the exchange relation is the most important concept in Heinrich’s interpretation of Chapter 1. If his fundamental concept of exchange relation is a misinterpretation of Marx’s theory, then the rest of Heinrich’s interpretation of Chapter 1 is a misinterpretation and is unacceptable.
I think it is clear that the subject of analysis of Chapter 1 is the commodity, a representative commodity that is used to analyse the properties that all commodities have in common – use-value and value. Chapter 1 is not about exchange at all. The commodity that is analysed in Chapter 1 has been produced, but not yet exchanged. Exchange is not considered until Chapter 2 (“The Process of Exchange”).
In recent weeks, while preparing for the HM conference and for this interview, I have come to realise more clearly that there is a fundamental contradiction in what Heinrich is trying to accomplish in his recent book. In his previous works, he has presented (many times and all over the world) a strong value-form interpretation of Marx’s theory of value, according to which the value of a commodity exists only as a result of an actual exchange on the market. Before exchange, a commodity does not possess value (it only possesses use-value). For the textual evidence to support this interpretation, he has used a handful of key passages that are taken from various texts in isolation and out of context. As we know, one can always find passages that seem to support almost any interpretation of Marx’s theory. And Heinrich is very good at this quotation game.
However, his most recent book is different; it is an attempt to interpret the first seven chapters of Volume 1, especially Chapter 1, as a value-form theory – and that Marx was the original value-theorist! Heinrich goes from page to page in Chapter 1 and consistently tries to interpret key passages in a value-form way. This is a very difficult task because there are so many passages in these chapters, especially Chapter 1, that contradict a value-form interpretation. Indeed, in my view, Heinrich’s task is an impossible task. My book follows his detailed commentaries point by point and exposes the errors in his value-form interpretation.”
MR: What was the main disagreement between you and Heinrich in your book launch at the recent Historical Materialism conference?
FM: “Not surprisingly, the main disagreement in the session was over the meaning of exchange relation in two paragraphs in Section 1. He argued that I misinterpreted Marx’s concept of exchange relation, not as an act of exchange between two commodities, but as a relation of equality between two commodities, and that I just substituted my meaning of exchange relation for Marx’s meaning in the two passages. And he argued that these two passages are proof that that Section 1 analyses individual commodities as part of an exchange relation.
But that is not true. I did not just substitute my meaning of exchange relation for Marx’s meaning in these paragraphs. Rather, I argued that the exchange relation in these paragraphs is a synonym for exchange-value. The exchange-value of each commodity is defined in the preceding paragraphs in Section 1 as the property of each commodity that is equal to all other commodities in definite proportions that are mutually consistent. That implies that all commodities possess a common property that determines the proportions in which different commodities are equal. Therefore, the exchange relation between two commodities in these paragraphs is also a relation of equality between two commodities, which implies the necessity of a common property possessed by each one of them.
Instead I argued that Heinrich is the one who misinterprets Marx’s concept of exchange relation with his strange definition as the end result of actual exchanges between the two commodities and money on the market,. There is absolutely no textual evidence to support this interpretation of actual market exchanges presupposed in Chapter 1. My interpretation of exchange relation as a relation of equality between commodities is much more reasonable and plausible than Heinrich’s complicated and idiosyncratic interpretation of the end result of actual exchanges between commodities and money on the market. “
MR: Are there other points that you would like to emphasise?
“I also want to mention Heinrich’s unusual interpretation of the word “common” in Marx’s derivation of value in Section 1 – that value is the common property of commodities that determines their exchange-values – because it is an important point in his interpretation that he has emphasised in all his writings, including in the book I am criticising.
Take the concluding paragraph of Marx’s derivation of value on p. 128: “All these things now tell us is that human labour-power is expended to produce them, human labour is accumulated in them. As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values – commodity values. ” I argue that Marx’s meaning of “common to them all” in this passage is the usual meaning of “common” , namely that the same property is possessed by each individual commodity by itself, on its own.
Heinrich argues, on the other hand, that the meaning of “common” in this passage and in other passages is ambiguous – i.e. it could also mean a property that each individual commodity possesses, not by itself, but only together with another commodity in an exchange relation (exchange relation again!), and this is what Marx means here and elsewhere when he says that value is a common property of commodities. According to Heinrich, outside of an exchange relation, an individual commodity does not possess the ‘common property’ of value.
However, I don’t think Marx’s meaning of “common to them all” is ambiguous at all; Marx states that the common property of commodities is the human labour accumulated in them as a result of the labour expended to produce them (each one of them), prior to and independent of its exchange with another commodity. Nothing is said about exchange and exchange relation in this key concluding passage.
Three paragraphs before the passage just quoted, Marx presents a geometric example of area as a common property of different geometric figures. Area is a ‘”common property” of each figure, independent of its comparison to the area of another figure. The similarity between the area of geometric figures and the value of commodities is that, in both cases, the objects possess a common property independently of a quantitative comparison between them. Heinrich does not comment on this illuminating geometric example which contradicts his interpretation that the common element of value is created in the exchange itself. Clearly, the area of geometric figures is not created by a comparison of their areas.
One other point I want to mention. In working on this book, I noticed for the first time that Marx repeatedly used the phrase the “own value” of an individual commodity in Section 3 of Chapter 1 (seven times); for example, the “own value” of 10 yards of linen or the “own value” of a coat (see pp. 100 and 104-06 of my book). The own values of the linen and the coat are compared and equated, but nothing is said about exchange. These passages are clear and unambiguous textual evidence that each individual commodity possess its “own value”, independent of acts of exchange between commodities and money on the market. This directly contradicts Heinrich’s interpretation that an individual commodity possesses value only if it has been actually exchanged with money on the market. Heinrich quotes only 3 of these 7 ‘own value’ passages and presents little or no commentary on any of them. Twice he quotes the adjoining sentences, but not these revealing sentences.”
MR: What difference does this debate over the details of Marx’s value theory make in the bigger picture?
FM: “I think it is important to get the details of Marx’s theory of value straight, because it is the foundation for Marx’s theory of surplus-value as a theory of exploitation in Volume 1. And the theory of value is also the foundation of his theory of the falling rate of profit and crises that you have presented so well in your own work. In the Preface to the 1st edition of Capital, Marx stated: “To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms [the commodity-form of the product of labor and the value-form of the commodity] seems to turn upon minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but so does microscopic anatomy.” Microscopic anatomy is necessary for the understanding of organic bodies, and similarly Marx’s theory of value is necessary for an understanding of the capitalist economy.
My book is specifically about Heinrich’s book, but it applies to the value-form interpretation of Marx’s theory in general. And my conclusion is that Marx’s theory of value cannot be reasonably be interpreted as a value-form theory. I think that is an important conclusion. We should move on from the value-form interpretation of Marx’s theory.
I worry about Heinrich’s influence on the understanding of Marx’s theory. His interpretation is very influential in Germany and elsewhere in the world, especially among young people. And I am convinced that it is a fundamental misinterpretation of Marx’s theory. So I think it is important to engage with his popular but mistaken interpretation. I hope that my book will be read especially by young people and it will encourage them to make a deeper study of Marx’s theory of value in Chapter 1 of Capital and beyond.
Let me add my pennyworth to what I think are the wider issues arising from this debate between Heinrich and Moseley (MR).
Marx put it this way: “As the commodity is immediate unity of use value and exchange-value, so the process of production, which is the process of the production of a commodity, is the immediate unity of process of labour and process of valorisation.” So, for Marx, it’s the process of production, the exertion of human labour that creates value. As Marx once put it: “Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish. And every child knows, too, that the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour.”
The value-form approach of Heinrich is implicitly a simultaneist approach. Its characteristic feature is the belief that value comes into existence only at the moment of realisation on the market. Consequently, production and realisation are collapsed into each other and time is wiped out. But the process of production and circulation (exchange) is not simultaneous, but temporal. At the start of production there are inputs of raw materials and fixed assets from a previous production period. So there is already (constant or ‘dead labour’) value in the commodity before exchange. Then production takes place to make a new commodity using human labour. This creates ‘potential’ new value, which is realised later (in a modified quantity) when sold.
But why does all this matter? For me, Marx’s value theory is about showing the fundamental contradiction in capitalism between production for social need (use-value) and production for profit (exchange value). Under capitalism, units of production are commodities that have a dual character which epitomises this contradiction.
For Marx, money is a representative of value, not value itself. If we think that value is only created when selling the commodity for money and not before, then the labour theory of value is devalued into a theory of money. Then, as mainstream neoclassical economics argues, we don’t need a labour theory of value at all because the money price will do. Money prices are what mainstream economics looks at, ignoring or dismissing value by human labour power – and therefore the exploitation of labour by capital for profit. It removes the basic contradiction of capitalist production.
Also, it leads to a failure to understand the causes of crises in capitalist production. It is no accident that Heinrich dismisses Marx law of profitability as illogical, ‘indeterminate’ and irrelevant to explaining crises and instead looks to excessive credit and financial instability as the causes. Heinrich even claims that in later years, Marx dropped his law of profitability although the evidence for that is non-existent.
If profits (surplus value) from human labour disappear from any analysis to be replaced by money, then we no longer have a Marxist theory of crisis or any theory of crisis at all.
Michael Roberts Blog 
Two questions come to mind. First, is Heinrich’s reading of the law of the tendency of the general rate of profit to fall as “indeterminate” not just implicitly simultaneist but also implicitly an equilibrium theory? That’s why the price at exchange is an equilibriums price and that’s why that’s the one that counts.
Second, should Jack Rasmus’ interventions be read as Heinrich-influenced?
Excellent interview. I strongly recommend reading Moseley’s works. He’s one of the anglophone Marxians who understand Marx’s philosophy.
Heinrich’s problem is very clear for everybody to see: he does not (cannot?) think dialectically. He has to “translate” Marx’s thinking process into a linear, set of variables, cause-and-consequence Neokantian system in order to read or understand Marx. If this is a result of Cold War era propaganda; of Western Europe’s historically specific domestic and political necessities of its native social-democrat consensus; or simply of his educational (and, therefore, of Germany’s) deficiency; or a combination of all the above, I let for scholars of the area to take care of.
So, in the example given, Heinrich cannot fathom the commodity as a dialectical unity of a contradiction between concrete and abstract labor. He has to posit an intermediary phase, the phase of “exchange relations” so that concrete labor must be converted into abstract labor. But since this process is purely idealistic (ex nihilo), he has to posit another idealist category — that of supply and demand –, because, with this idealist conversion of Marx’s dialectic, he gets rid of the essential category of socially necessary labor time (as Moseley correctly noted in the beginning of the interview). He must get rid of this aforementioned category because, for whatever reason, he cannot fathom the historical specificity of capital (and, by extension, capitalism; capital hegemonic): for him, there must be an universal (idealist) force, a natural force that must “give birth to” the category of “supply and demand” (which he postulated, idealistically). The problem with this is that, to solve this problem logically, he must explain supply and demand back with the (equally postulated idealistically) category of “exchange relations”. That’s circular logic.
“If profits (surplus value) from human labour disappear from any analysis to be replaced by money, then we no longer have a Marxist theory of crisis or any theory of crisis at all”
Right. And we no longer have an explanation for class struggle.
The fallacy of automating everything is that you can’t! Where will the surplus value come from? Not from machines, we know this. Robot workers? Science fiction and any robot smart enough to work like a human will soon be striking! (See Karel Kapek’s ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’, written in the 1930s. The word robot is his from the Czech. And in any case, machines only replace humans under two conditions: 1) where it’s cheaper to use machines but only as adjuncts to human labour (or should that be humans as adjuncts to machines?) and 2) for control of workers, see David Noble’s ‘Forces of Production’.
It’s a slip road off a motorway which leads to a different sort highway, that of marginal utility and all that nonsense. It also reminds me of Althusser’s attempt to use formal logic to attempt to explain the method employed by Marx with something made up (a neologism) because Althusser had no grasp of dialectics.
Absolutely fascinating discussion.
Well done for pointing out the consequence of Heinrich’s misrepresentation of value when it comes to the issue of profitability. Mistakes always have consequences.
I agree with Fred though I have my differences with him later on when he tackles the transformation of market value into market prices of production. Fred quotes from Marx: “beginnings are always difficult in all sciences”, to which I would add, that finding the beginning is even more difficult as can be seen when reading the Grundrisse. Scientific beginnings can only be detected by the process of abstraction when investigating phenomena in motion subject to change. Simply put what abstraction seeks to identify are the qualities which are both unique and general to a phenomenon. Unique and general sounds so simple, like brake and accelerator, but anyone who has driven a car knows driving is much more complicated. By unique, abstraction separates out the phenomenon from all other phenomena, and by general it ensures that all the features which gives structure to the phenomenon are included.
The human face is an example. If we abstract too far we submerge the human face into the animal world as most animals have two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth and so on in common with the human face. We have over-generalized. And if we don’t abstract far enough we end up with a human face with distinct features, such as a specific nose or skin colour and so on, a face which has not been shorn of all its concrete or specific features, one which has not been sufficiently generalized.
One can write critical books about Heinrich but what he is guilty of is an elementary mistake – forced abstraction – one which either goes too far or not far enough, and because the resulting starting point is wrong, there is no road back to the concrete. He simply does not understand the nature of abstraction. For Marx the starting point is the commodity, the cell form, the elementary form, the structural origin of capitalist production. But not only this, we need to connect this observation with the opening paragraph in Volume 1, that the commodity is also the general form. The commodity is not unique to capitalism, but what is different about the capitalist mode of production is that the commodity has become its ever present form.
And commodities have to first be produced. Evolutionary biologists recognise that elementary life began as a single cell. That life proceeded to multi-cells which then had to interact. But the cell preceded the interaction just as with the commodity, before it can be exchanged it has to first be produced. And life begins in the cell not between cells. So it is with value. It does not begin between commodities but with the commodity because it is labour that gives life to the commodity in the first place. The labour of the individual in a capitalist society assumes the value form only because it needs to be exchanged before it can become part of the labour of society. And because commodities are value, they regulate the market and give money its purpose.
Heinrich is a fad and fads don’t last. The sooner he is forgotten the better.
If value is created only when a commodity is exchanged for money on the market, the capitalist who cannot profitably sell his value-free product on the market (say a car) loses nothing if he mothballs its and eventually sells it well under the price he expected–but, no problem! No value (cost of production) expended, no value(abstract labor time) lost. His loss is all gain! Heinrich has discovered a bankruptcy/crisis free, eternal form of capitalism!
Michael Lebowitz’s recent article shares some ground with Heinrich.
( https://monthlyreview.org/2023/09/01/what-every-child-should-know-about-marxs-theory-of-value/ )
He thought it is about money. I won’t go further because these discussions are usually above my ken, but I’d be interested in your reaction to Lebowitz’s interpretation.
http://www.avg.com/email-signature?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail Virus-free.www.avg.com http://www.avg.com/email-signature?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail <#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
A very interesting discussion. I agree with the interpretation or yourself and Mr. Moseley. However, I would appreciate your comments on one area where Mr. Heinrich’s ideas seem relevant and that is in the debate between Marxism and the women’s movement about the legitimacy of the demand for wages for housework. I’m sure you are familiar with it, but to restate what I see as the core of the debate: some radical feminists argue that since women in the household produce enormous amounts of value, this value should find reflection in wages paid to them (by the state) for the enormous value which they produce (to the benefit of the state). Marxists have argued that while it is true that value has been created, since it is not offered on the market, it is essentially the creation of use value only. On the same level as a man building his own bookshelves.
How would the analyses of the two sides of this debate (Heinrich and Moseley) answer this contested area of social policy? I appreciate your many blogs and the enormous amount of economic information that is presented, interpreted and assessed. Very useful in today’s world of misinformation. Jeanne
David Christian wrote: “Many early economists understood perfectly well that the wealth traded by and generated by capitalists really represented control over compressed sun light, over energy flows through the biosphere. That is why so many subscribed to a labor theory of value; labor, after all, was energy” Origin History. A Big History of Everything, p. 249. Value = Energy. It is non-paid energy that produces surplus value.
Hello, I had recently bought Heinrich’s book thinking that it would help me tackle Capital (you should consider me a beginner even though I am 76 and have taken Marxism courses over the years and some time ago).Keeping that in mind can you suggest a “reader ” to help me get a better understanding. Thanks, Marianne Roy Québec, Canada Envoyé de mon appareil Samsung de Bell via le réseau le plus vaste au pays.
Hi Marianne,
My advice to You:
If you don’t want to write a doctoral thesis on Marx, then just read on: after the first volume, the second volume and after the second volume, the third volume. This will solve many questions for you that are very difficult to solve just by reading the first volume.
Wal Buchenberg, Hanover Germany
The product of the year is a collection of goods and services that each took a certain number of hours to produce. Each good and service contains a percentage of the total hours, and the sum of the percentages is 100%. The abstract labor in each commodity is these hours. *** With this beginning, Marxist economics explains how a capitalist economy works, consistently and correctly for everything we see happening in the economy. This is science in action. It is too bad that debate over what Marx really said gets away from this science.
A commodity’s value is created in production but if it isn’t exchanged, it loses its value. That may seem obvious but the frequent destruction of value due to lack of exchange should have been mentioned.
And what exactly is the ‘value-form theory’? There seem to exist different definitions.
It is important to clarify the confusion synthesized in this comment because it arises an interesting philosophical question that is shared by Heinrich, and which arose in this comment section in many comments by now.
Value is a purely social relation. It is not “created” in the hard sciences sense of the word. If I were a Kantian, I would say (wrongly) that value only exists in humanity’s “imagination”. But there is no absolute quanta of value: you cannot hire a chemist or an experimental physicist to look at a commodity under the microscope and find the elemental particle of “value”. There is no Higgs boson in the world of Humanities.
So, what’s the difference between positing value as an absolute unit (even if “imaginary”) and not doing it? It makes all the difference, because, albeit subjective, value is real — as real as anything we can observe in the universe.
E.g. — A given commodity produced at some point in time has five hours of socially necessary labor time in it. If, between the point in time it goes into circulation in the world market (free market) and the point in time it is sold (profit realization), the shoe sector socially determines that the necessary labor time for this same pair of shoes (from the point of view of use value, not necessarily of its literal material characteristics) is four hours, then the value “crystalized” in that unsold pair of shoes falls to four hours — even if, objectively, it literally took five hour of socially necessary labor time to produce. So, value is never absolute, even in a finished commodity, even if it is sold.
Why does this not result into a random fluctuation of prices, thus making capitalism “natural”? Because the key word here is “socially”. Humans created capital/capitalism, not vice versa. Capital is not a natural law of biology that governs humanity, but a historically specific mode of social reproduction the homo sapiens came out with in order to exist in given historical circumstances at a given point in time of its historical timeline. As such, humans cannot simply invent in any direction — they must do so towards a very specific direction, which is the development of the productive forces. And here, in the case of the isolated commodity, the material anchor of this process is clear and evident: use value. Humans will always need something to wear in order to walk, and humans will always want to produce more of those and not less, and humans (society) will always want to do that with less and not more work from themselves.
So, value can rise, fall or be destroyed. Circulation (exchange) is a necessary process of this, but is not necessary to explain value itself — at the micro level, it is just one of the many “variables” (forces) involved. Selling a commodity realizes profit but not value. Profit is surplus value by another name, from another relation (total capital x variable capital). The only thing that changes value is value itself and the greater forces of nature (cataclysmic events, extinction events).
Labour is where workers are robbed to secure future profits and market share and have to work to survive (hence the need for the SNLT). The price market is where capitalists try to make sales and deprive others of market share.
Prices do not determine the NLTS. Prices only determine the amount of work paid to the worker. Of course, the process ends up killing itself because the workers don’t have enough money to buy the products they mak.
What remains to be determined is what is “Socially Necessary”?
Michael Roberts, for some reason, on these kinds of issues keeps collapsing the distinction, IN A CAPITALIST SOCIETY, between the immediate production process (which is PRIVATE) and SOCIAL production (which in a capitalist society is mediated by exchange of the products of labour as commodities). Yes the production process is a “process of valorisation” but the value produced (social labour) has not been ‘realised’ – it is *still* NOT actually social labour.
Michael Roberts has a habit of quoting this sentence from the passage from the letter to Kugelmann – “the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour” – yes but the capitalist FORM of “society’s aggregate labour” is NOT *immediately* social. It still requires exchange BEFORE “the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs” are matched up with “differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour”.
And Michael Roberts always quotes this passage out of context. In fact Marx makes it clear IN THE SAME PARAGRAPH (actually the very next sentence) that the passage quoted by Roberts applies to ALL societies – it is not about the production of value but the production of USE-VALUES – “that this necessity of the distribution of social labor in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance, is self-evident. No NATURAL LAWS can be done away with” (my emphasis). It is, alas, not “self-evident” for Michael Roberts. He continues to believe that the sentence above which he quotes out of context refers to the social form of labour under capitalism (i.e. abstract labour/value) – NOT SO – the “proportional distribution of labor” is a “natural law”, the specific social form of this “natural law” under capitalism, “where the interconnection of social labor is manifested in the PRIVATE EXCHANGE of the individual products of labor, is precisely the EXCHANGE VALUE of these products” (Marx’s emphasis).
Please take note, Michael, the social form of value producing labour “is precisely the exchange value of these PRODUCTS” (my emphasis).
You’re twice wrong.
First, it is not value that is realized, but profit.
Second, everything produced in capitalism is immediately social. There is no ante-social process in capitalism, because capitalism itself is a historically specific mode of production. This is not Psychology or a dating app — socialization doesn’t mean humans interacting with each other face-to-face. A society must only and always produce the social, this is a definitional truth; the fact that labor is fully alienated in capitalism may give the illusion (appearance) that production is not immediately social, but appearance is not truth.
In fact, you enter in contradiction with yourself on #2, because you stated that “It still requires exchange BEFORE “the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs” are matched up with “differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour”.” Well, but the fact is the production process itself depends on constant (if not greater) exchange than the end user free market: the immense amounts of fixed and constant capital of any given individual capital is the commodity exchanged from another individual capital — among other factors, precisely because labor is fully alienated in capitalism, so a single, universal line of production is impossible in capitalism [and that’s why one should never skip Book II].
To say that labour is immediately social–does that mean socially determined in the sense that the social structure of production–even private labour in a capitalist factory–is socially determined–is of course true. However, to imply that labour is immediately social in the sense that the labour is transformable into any other form is patently false. Labour that is performed in a capitalist factory is not social immediately; otherwise, there would be need for money and no possibility of crises (Say’s law coming into effect).
Furthermore, the possible difference between concrete and abstract labour leads to the possibility of a difference between a capitalist obtaining a surplus profit and an average profit, does it not? And with this, changes in technology. If there is no possible difference between the concrete labour expended by a set of workers in a particular firm and the amount of labour expended in the branch, then what would be the point of innovating for a capitalist? Or does not the possibility of obtaining a superprofit arise from such a difference (and despite everything being “socially determine?”
In the abstract, “perfect,” sale of the commodity, it is the value that is realized, value being made up of the value embedded in the commodities from the consumption of constant capital and variable capital ( cost price) and the “free” surplus value. Profit is that portion of surplus value after the recovery of the capital advanced minus the deductions from the surplus value for rent and interest.
Heinrich’s been at this for awhile, no? I remember in 2013 Heinrich then tilting at the windmill of his own making– claiming that those who agreed that there was a tendency of the rate of profit to fall a) “perverted” the tendency into the sole explanation for capitalist crisis b) using the TFROP as Marx’s own explanation for capitalist crisis. Of course, Heinrich’s target was not really the “exclusivity” afforded the TFROP, but the existence of such a tendency to exist period. MH trotted out the usual suspects–Engels’ editing of Marx, Marx’s own “rethinking,” Marx’s own inability to complete his critique etc etc etc.
Then with the ROP and now with the existence of value only in exchange, MH’s target is the labor theory of value; or more accurately the labor-time theory of value. After all it is the LTV that underpins Marx’s critique of capital; the embodies the developing conflict between the means and relations of production; that compels the working class to struggle against the expropriation of their labor time by the bourgeoisie, that identifies the proletariat, the class of wage-laborers as the key to the accumulation of capital and to the revolutionary struggle for the abolition of capital.
The movement of Marx’s analysis from the critique of political economy to the necessity for revolution is interrupted and thrown backward.
Dear Biswadi,
thank you for telling me to ‘take note’ of my ‘habit’. Marx’s quote that you refer to shows that it is only human labour that creates value -without that nothing is produced of value to humans, even natural resources, the wealth of planet must be picked up by humans.
Yes, Marx is basically referring to use value to humans. But the very point of Marx’s view of capitalist production is that there is production by human labour of products that are now commodities. And commodities have a dual character in value (both use value of different products that humans need) and exchange value (the abstract labour of human labour measured in labour hours and realised on sale in the market). BOTH use value and exchange value are produced before exchange for money and BOTH use value and exchange value are realised in sale. They cannot be separated in the capitalist mode of production, as both are incorporated into the commodity, the economic cell of capitalism. Indeed, this dual character in the value of a commodity explains the inherent contradiction in capitalism between social needs (use value) and profit (exchange value).
Your comment suggests that you agree with Heinrich over Moseley in the interpretation of Marx’s view of value in a commodity. You say exchange has to take place to realise value. Yes, but the debate is about whether there is value being produced before exchange or not – in Marx’s view. I say again, if you accept Heinrich’s interpretation, then the dual character of value in a commodity disappears, There is use value (but no exchange value) in production and then only exchange value in exchange. The commodity no longer has a dual character. Exchange value is then measured in money, with no connection with hours of abstract labour time. I repeat (my habit), money is NOT value but a representative of value (which is abstract socially necessary labour time).
I am unsure what the claim that money is NOT value but is only “a representative of value” means. When I worked at a capitalist brewery, by chance, the beer that we produced was then sold across the street by workers for the same company. The beer, before it was sold, has value to the extent that the labour bestowed on the production of the commodity (tied for the moment to the use value called beer via the concrete labour which we expended) but value itself has no immediate being in the beer as beer. A further process becomes necessary–an exchange process. The being of the value of the beer is expressed in another commodity, and that other commodity becomes the form of value of the beer; it is not merely a representative like a symbol but requires an exchange for value to function as value; it is like a spirit being embodied in the wrong person and needing to find the right person (Jesus) to actually function as value.
Since value is not immediately social, it requires a further process for it to BE value, and the exchange process is certainly necessary for commodities to actually function as value. When they cannot, then a kind of crisis arises.
Why otherwise is it necessary to have money at all? What characteristic of value requires money to exist if the labour expended is immediately social? Did not Marx want to develop the genesis of money via the nature of abstract labour? Merely saying that money is a representative of value does not link up the need for money with the the nature of abstract labour.
@ The abolitionist
The beer has value beyond being a beer because, if it took an x amount of time beyond the socially acceptable, it would not be produced to begin with.
Humans calculate socially what is worth and what is not worth to produce, based on the socially necessary labor time to produce it. This doesn’t change from the point of view of the consumer: if a can of beer costs USD 2.00, I may find the use value of the beer worth my use, but if it costs USD 1 million, I may not find the use value of the beer worth my use. If it is distributed for free, it may find its use value to be worth the use of a person without any money.
On a deeper level, value (as a dialectical unity of value and use value) determines what capitalism can produce in the first place, e.g. to produce beer instead of a machine designed to gratuitously kill babies. The moment the capitalist thinks to be a capitalist, he or she already is thinking in value terms.
Esteemed Roberts, regarding this bit:
BOTH use value and exchange value are produced before exchange for money and BOTH use value and exchange value are realised in sale.
The ‘use value’ of the commodity is not realized in production or in exchange, it is realized in use, at home (Lebensmittel) or in the next industrial process (Produktionsmittel). The ‘value’ is ‘realized’ in exchange, sale. (I think one can use either ‘Verwirklichung’ or ‘Realisierung’ here. I would have liked it if Marx reserved the former for things as useful and the latter for the same things as values, but this isn’t borne out). Marx says this again and again.
In the 1857 methodological text, speaking of use values ‘transhistorically’, he even breaks out first in English then in Greek to say:
Das Produkt erhält erst den letzten finish in der Konsumtion. Eine Eisenbahn, auf der nicht gefahren wird, die also nicht abgenutzt, nicht konsumiert wird, ist nur ein Eisenbahn dunamei , nicht der Wirklichkeit nach. (brackets mark MEW explanations)
The product only receives the final finish in consumption. A railroad that is not being traveled on, that is not being used up, not being consumed, is only a railroad dunamei , not in reality/actuality.
In a sense the whole problem of the contradictory unity of the commodity is that it has two contradictory realizations or actualizations.
It seems Moseley does not pay much attention to his sources. Michael Heinrich’s work aside, even the Marx and Philosophy review which Moseley mentions does discuss the exchange relation in Heinrich’s book, very clearly too. See here https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/20392_how-to-read-marxs-capital-commentary-and-explanations-on-the-beginning-chapters-by-michael-heinrich-reviewed-by-ksenia-arapko/
Perhaps if Moseley took the time to read more attentively, Heinrich’s ideas would not seem so out of the ordinary. It is ok to revise our own ideas in light of new interpretations. Why Moseley refuses to do so is a mystery to many.
Thanks for your correction. The author does mention exchange relation once, but does not explain Heionrich’s specific interpretation of this concept. My main point is that Heinrich does a poor job of explaining this key concept in his interpretation, and I hope others will pay attention to it.
Heinrich’s glossary in “How to Read…” is hilariously unhelpful, unexplanatory and circular:
“Exchange-relation: The relation between two commodities that are exchanged, considered in abstraction from commodity owners. The exchange-relation is examined in chapter 1 of Capital.”
Ok, great, so, again, what is it? What’s the relation?
Heinrich’s ideas are out of the ordinary because he thinks price can’t be an expression of value prior to sale and because he thinks commodities don’t exist until sale, when Marx explicitly says even unworked land that has no value can be given the commodity form by being given a price (the land in question already being alienable property), that the division of labour, not an act of exchange, converts products into commodities.
He ignores the inseparable dual polarity of the value-form (relative and equivalent) by which both money commodity and non-money commodity have value before the exchange act due to price expression, and that price must be expressed for exchange to take place.
Those of you support Heinrich and the view that value emerges out of exchange would make appalling capitalists, and yet here you are discussing how to replace it. Let’s play a mind game. You are walking into a warehouse about to do a stock take at the end of the financial year. Before you are row upon row of unsold goods which you will be counting After you have become dusty and irritable you hand over your stock sheets to the accountancy department. In turn they aggregate all the items and then multiply them by the various cost prices to get the total price of the stock on hand. Eek. Those goods have not been sold but they already have a price. True it’s a cost price or what is the same thing it represents that element of value or labour which the owners have paid for, wages and inputs and depreciation. It represents the paid costs of production. Now of course if the bosses paid workers for all their labour, meaning they paid the actual cost of producing that item, guess what, the stock on hand would represent the value embodied in those commodities, and dammit, none have yet been sold. Imagine if the accountancy department valued this stock at zero because they have not been sold. They would be shown the door and so should you.
Really comrades this nonsense will not do. It was precisely this understanding of the relationship between prices that allowed me to develop the formula for circulating capital as Michael well knows.
And VK while I am at it you are critically wrong. The labour of the individual producer most definitely does not become part of the labour of society immediately and directly in a market economy. Marx points that out repeatedly, but more to the point this recognition allowed me for the first time to explain why the profit motive under Kosygin turned out to be counter-productive and had to be abandoned, because you see, after the first five year plan the labour of the Russian worker was IMMEDIATELY social labour. The profit motive requires exchange to work, or more precisely, it needs the unequal exchange it enables whereby the innovator benefits at the expense of competitors to compensate for their labour saving and shedding investments.
Michael and Fred are to be saluted for defending the substance of Marx’s categories without which we cannot move forward. Heinrich on the other hand is merely part of the academic circus.
I not an expert on Marx but surely, profit is the difference between the actual cost of production (raw materials, rent, overhead, labour and depreciation) and what the product actually sells for – is the profit, the surplus extracted from the workers labour, it’s the only place it can come from. But if the product doesn’t sell, there is no profit. I know it’s more complex because the capitalist can claim the cost of unsold products as a tax write-off or simply wait until it is sold. Isn’t this what capitalists do with unsold product, they reduce overhead, lay off workers and wait, or, they go bust. The capitalist owns CAPITAL, the worker doesn’t, all the worker has is his/her labour to sell to the capitalist. The key element is ownership of the means of production, isn’t this basic Marx or am I missing something here?
In a capitalist system, the capital invested – ‘potential’ value – must go through the entire A-M-A+ production cycle in order to make a profit – surplus value – which will be embodied in the price (parallel increase in the production of money tokens), Use value, exchange value and SNLT (C/V produces more than it costs) are only a moment in the valuation process, which may or may not be positive once the cycle has been completed.
For the capitalist, it is a gamble and a necessity to go through these different stages, but what sets the whole process in motion is a sum of money invested for profit (value).
From the point of view of productivity gains, the innovative capitalist will be able to acquire substantial market share and increase his rate of profit over a period of time.
If it is value, then it is automatically social, by definition.
To state value exists in a virtual state before becoming reality (in the world market) would be akin to giving capitalism supernatural powers, a status where it is, at the same time, a society and a non-society (i.e. a law of nature). This is not Quantum Mechanics: there is nothing like the Wave-particle duality in the social world.
What we can say is that labor, in capitalism, is strange to the worker itself. That is, the worker is alienated — which is not only true and observable empirically, but also an essential ingredient for the very viability of capital; but an alienated society still is a society: from the point you’re talking about a human as a worker, you’re already presupposing a social formation of humanity (because no human is born a worker: he or she becomes a worker through social imposition).
VK – for Marx, the only commodity which is a product of directly social labour is the money commodity. All other commodities are products of indirectly social labour, because they need to be exchanged against the money commodity.
See p. 150 of volume 1 :
“But because this concrete labour, tailoring, counts exclusively as the expression of undifferentiated human labour, it possesses the characteristic of being identical with other kinds of labour, such as the labour embodied in the linen. Consequently, although, like
all other commodity-producing labour, it is the labour of private individuals, it is nevertheless – labour in its directly social form. It is precisely for this reason that it presents itself to us in the shape of a product which is directly exchangeable with other commodities. Thus the equivalent form has a third peculiarity : private labour takes the form of its opposite, namely labour in its directly social form.”
p. 161:
“A single commodity, the linen, therefore has the form of direct exchangeability with all other commodities, in other words it. It has a directly social form because, and in so far as, no other commodity is in this situation.”
p. 188:
– “The question why money does not itself directly represent labour-time, so that a piece of paper may represent, for instance, x hours ‘ labour, comes down simply to the question why, on the basis of commodity production, the products of labour must take the form of commodities. This is obvious, because their taking the form of commodities implies their differentiation into commodities [on the one hand] and the money commodity [on the
other]”.
p. 230:
“It is true that the value of money varies, whether as a result of a variation in its own value, or of a change in the values of commodities. But this on the one hand does not prevent 200 ounces of gold from continuing to contain more value than 100 ounces, nor on the other hand does it prevent the metallic natural form of this object from continuing to be the universal equivalent form of all other commodities, and the directly social incarnation of all human labour.”
There are many more examples – just do a search on the PDF of volume 1 for “directly social”.
@ capital_logik
Read again all your quotations, carefully. They all confirm labor is always directly social (not money).
The key, again, is to understand the world dialectically. One has to understand dialectics.
P.S.: money is merely the commodity whose use value is to be immediately exchangeable for all other commodities. It has nothing to do with being the “Higgs boson” of all possible forms of society. This is clearly stated at the beginning of book I. You’re confusing the category of abstract labor with the category of money — and you are doing so because you can’t see the world dialectically.
vk, to carp that those who are disagreeing with you are not ‘thinking dialectically’ is pure abstraction and thus itself a complete rejection of ‘thinking dialectical’ in addition to being rude and unfruitful. The quotations capital_logik collects are making a distinction you simply refuse to elucidate, preferring your own meaning for ‘directly social’ to Marx’s.
@ Michael T
I explained why capital_logik is wrong in my previous comment: the quotations highlight the “role” of abstract labor, i.e. why abstract labor is not exchange. He assumed, from the quotations he published, that abstract labor = money, from which he concluded the only directly social labor = money. Which is objectively wrong.
But ok, let’s explain each quotation here, since it seems the burden of proof is only laid on me, not on the other commenters:
1. [p. 150 of volume 1] — “… this concrete labour, tailoring”, i.e. concrete as in opposite to abstract, not money (see the continuation of Marx’s reasoning right after this excerpt).
2. [p. 161] “…therefore” — that is, capital_logik is only quoting the conclusion of the argument, not the argument itself, but we know — because we also have access to Das Kapital — that it is referring, “in this situation” as its condition as abstract labor and not money (which is a separate commodity).
3. [p. 188] simply does not mention the social (or allegedly non-social) nature of labor. But even if we abstract that, we have that Marx clearly stated that “money commodity”, i.e. money is a commodity and not “the directly social”. Apart from that (which, alone already is enough to disprove capital_logik), we also has this very clear statement that “on the basis of commodity production, the products of labour must take the form of commodities”, that is, in the world of commodity production (i.e. society, the social), labor takes the [historically specific] form of commodities.
4. [p. 230] this is the most bizarre quote in the context of capital_logik’s argumentation, because the very first line already disproves it: “It is true that the value of money varies, whether as a result of a variation in its own value, or of a change in the values of commodities.” Well, if the value of money itself (which is a commodity) varies, how could it be, by capital_logik’s own analytical argument, be “directly social”?
–//–
The explanation for this confusion is this:
1. Money is a commodity.
2. Whose use value is to be the means of exchange (of all other commodities, including itself).
3. As a commodity, it has a value, which is determined by the socially necessary labor time to produce it.
4. As a result, the socially necessary labor time of the workers who work on the money industry (in Marx’s era, the gold mines) has the peculiarity that their labor time is also directly exchange value.
5. Being directly exchange value does not mean being directly social — either because that terminology doesn’t make any sense (because everything capitalist is social by definition) or because production is as essential as circulation for the very existence of capital(ism) (the movement of capital is (M –) M — C –… P …– C’ — M’ (– M’) (between brackets is the fictitious capital), which does include production (P).
It is very easy to visualize why #5 is true in our observable universe: take a worker. If this worker works directly, e.g. in the production of food (i.e. a farm), then it is obvious that his work is so essential (forget we’re in capitalism for a moment) that it could be interpreted that this work — in a primitive enough mode of production — that this work is an necessary interruption of socialization of this worker. It would still be the wrong interpretation, but it is human to think work is a necessary evil of our daily lives.
But humanity is not a giant Tinder app: socialization is not face-to-face human interaction, but the very manner humans organize between themselves to perpetuate as a species. So, for example, take a worker who, instead of producing food, produces a very unique piece that will fit in an airplane’s engine somewhere else in the world. This worker is certainly alienated: he doesn’t have any idea what he is producing at a social scale. But, without this (extreme) alienation, we don’t have airplanes, with all of its (social) implications — e.g. a member of the middle class has no idea how the airplane he or she takes weekly was produced and put to use and how does it fly, but he or she knows for sure it is essential for his or her existence as a middle class member, i.e. that it flies, and that he or she can and does use it to fly. That is a typical case where alienation is directly socialization even in the most crude sense of the word: without the alienation of the factory worker, the middle class worker cannot travel with his or her family.
VK
You are somehow not grasping that the quotations @capital_logik uses that speak of “direct sociality” are about weaving linen in distinction from all other forms of commodity production – which are all indirectly social. Linen is here a general equivalent and linen-weaving is what, with gold money, gold-mining becomes. It is the unique ‘directly social’ concrete form of labor. Any other concrete form of labor is ‘indirectly social’.
I agree that in some darker and philosophical sense, the privacy and separateness and reciprocal alienness of the various productive enterprises is itself also a form of ‘sociality’. The discussion of division of labor in society vs division of labor in manufacture makes all this clearer.
Do physicists argue over quotations from Newton? No, they just use his mechanics to solve problems. And they develop the science.
Marx put political economy on a scientific basis. His “abstract theory” of the commodity has been confirmed by a comparative historical experiment. The Soviet Union de-commoditized labor power. By so doing it industrialized without creating a capitalist class. (From Khrushchev on there were problems; no science can be allowed to stagnate.) The People’s Republic of China commoditized vast amounts of labor power from 1980 on – and industrialized by creating a capitalist class. Lesson learned: abolish the commodity character of labor power, or you will sink deep into the swamp of capitalism.
Marx’s political economy also explains a lot of historical phenomena, such as recurrent crashes and depressions. But since people can argue counterfactual history forever, the ideologists of capitalism will always have a different explanation of what already happened.
Could Lenin have explained imperialism without Marxist political economy? His explanation was certainly useful after World War One; communists observed that WW One did not resolve a key contradiction and therefore predicted and prepared for World War Two.
Has Heinrich done anything helpful in the way of a historical explanation or an important insight into what is coming?
Thank you for the interview. In support of Moseley I will say that value and surplus-value are already essential determinations of the commodity in terms of value objectivity even before it is realized in circulation. And the eventual absence of realization does not change this at all, in that case the value character of the commodity is translated into the fact that it is absurdly thrown away instead of being consumed. which is only possible because its social essence consists a priori in the objectivity of value and not in the objectivity of necessity. Thus nefarious and irrational is the capitalist mode of production.
Please ask Professor Moseley when it will be published in Spanish.
Thank you and best regards .
M y m His brilliant reasoning 👏👏👏👏👏👏: without capitalist does not sell his merchandise, then in Heinrich’s reasoning, the capitalist would not lose anything, since according to him, value only arises in exchange.
Bravo, excellent interview, I think Moseley is right , but it strikes me a little odd -imho- not to use Marx’s passage about Aristotle in ch1,vol1 of Capital, for his argument. It seems enough to close the subject.I find this passage of great importance ,but unfortunately overlooked by many . Ok I am a Greek, I admit, so maybe I am wrong here and overemphasize.
Most producers set a price before a product goes to market. Usually on cost ( for Marx labour time)
Value Form ignores this simple fact
Thanks for to Fred for his scholarship in saving Marx from being characterized as an idiot
I think the contradition might be a question of creation or existence versus measuring.
The production of a commodity presupposes the expectation that it will become a value. Value of two sorts. It has to be expected that it will have some sort of use value when it is ready. That is necessary for it to be produced at all. And if it is to be produced also depends on expecting that it’s going to have an exchange value that is greater than the cost of material and labor etc., when selling it on a market. Otherways no capitalist is going to invest in its production. (But the same sort of thing or service may of course be produced anyway by individuals for their own use or for use within the family)
Both value-types are created when the commodity is produced, but neither of them can be measured until later. The exchange value cannot be measured until the selling of the comodity. That because of the uncertainty of what price supply and demand and other market effects will create. The use value, the commoditys ability to satisfy some human need can’t be measured until it is being used.
Have I understood the question right?
You’re thinking with the logic of the hard sciences.
There is no “expectation”: once the mode of production is presupposed, everything is everything they are at once, so to speak. There is no “original sin” or “Adam and Eve” moment in the humanities, because the universe observed by the Humanities sciences can only be studied seriously through dialectics.
The “step by step”, “cause and consequence” logic works in the world of the Hard Sciences because the universe they study is extremely simple: a physicist can just presuppose one single atom and assume every other atom will behave equally (i.e. by the same laws), in a way that can be replicated in a laboratory. That is not possible in the universe of the Humanities, because we cannot replicate, let alone isolate the variables, that make History.
So, for example, the capitalist. By the time you presuppose a capitalist, you already (“automatically”) presuppose a capitalist behavior, a person who thinks capitalistically and acts capitalistically — which is a class determination. You don’t have an intermediary phase of “expectation”, where a capitalist needs to go through in order to think and act capitalistically. That is true because the capitalist is a class, and this is true because capitalism is a mode of production, and this is true because, as a mode of production, it is historically specific.
My advices to everyone in this comment section are two:
1) think dialectically and not analytically, because dialectics is the true movement of the world we can observe;
2) always consider capitalism as a historically specific mode of production. There is no “the very beginning” of capitalism: it arose through a complex and vast movement of the European feudal world, from the inner contradictions of feudalism. There is no “fiat lux” moment in capital, both externally and interally — it is just a middle chapter of History, without beginning or end, and from which neither the beginning nor the end can be inferred.
I think everyday (late-bourgeois) economics and economists have a rather perverse relationship to mathematics. They seems to belive that when something can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist.
When one thinks like that, the value of a thing (i.e. a commodity) is nothing until its value can be measured. Within capitalism, the main method for measurement of the value of a thing is not as a thing for use, but as a commodity for exchange.
That way of thinking could explain how Heinrich could arrive at the rather absurd point of view that “value is created only when it is converted into money through the sale of commodities on the market.” A truer statement would be that exchange value (as this is measured within capitalism) cannot be measured (with the necessary precision, including the variations created by supply and demand and other artefacts of the market economy) except “when it is converted into money through the sale of commodities on the market”.
Markets seems to have been present already in Mesopotamia. 2 or 3 millennia before common era.
You miss only two necessary conditions of the capitalist mode of production: (1) that the means of production are prvately owned and already have value (dead labor) which is partially expended in use–machinery, infrastructures, etc), and (2) the alienated living labor, which ceates new value employing that dead labor during the production process….
….you miss the capital of capitalism.
It strikes me that many of you have never worked in industry nor commerce at any senior level and therefore are unfamiliar with departmental budgeting, forecasting and all the other cost systems in place which makes capitalism work. I can assure you capitalism is a mighty undertaking and if you are going to overthrow it don’t underestimate its achievements.
The capitalists may teach or distract their young things with the utility of measuring utility in universities but in practice they are obsessed with the cost of a thing because they are the present owners of the means of production and output. That their understanding of cost is necessarily partial as expressed through their dual pricing system: cost-price and selling-price, and by their inability to explain why the selling price is always higher than the cost price, is to be expected from an exploiting class.
Which brings us to the System of National Accounts. It is based on Volume 2 of Das Kapital, was brought to the west by two Russian emigres in the 1930s – Kuznets and Leontief – was almost banned by the CIA in the 1950s who considered national accounting to be too Soviet, but went on to be praised by the head of the US Commerce Department as it’s greatest achievement because it allowed them to see where the economy was going and how fast. To which I added, Marx may have wanted the head of the capitalist class but before that he gave the head, eyes.
Fundamentally the act of exchange is the moment when newly produced value is exchanged for legacy value in the form of revenue, resulting in the old revenue being extinguished while new revenue is created. That is why national accounting, which examines everything in aggregate, works. That is why on the one side we can have the value of final sales (output) and on the other, an equal, revenue or income side, comprising gross profits plus wages.
So what is being described is the temporal circulation of value. This is the problem with Heinrich, he does not understand value nor money. If we understand that the vast body of money denominates legacy value in the form of unspent revenues, then to go on to say that value only emerges through the act of exchange is to merely say that this value has been set by the amount of past value given up for the newly produced commodity, which means it’s value is set by the past not the present, and this only begs the question, how did this past value emerge in its turn. It’s loopy.
While I think UCBP overvalues (!) budgets, forecasting revenues etc he is absolutely correct in identifying the obsession of capitalists and their managers with costs. And those costs were calculated by the hour, just as value is measured. Time is everything, man is nothing. He is at most, time’s carcass said a young man from Trier.
In fact, the reason the bourgeoisie dismiss labor power as the source of expanded value is because the surplus value never appears as a cost. Surplus value is invisible to blind mice.
Also, Marx’s description of the way in which capitalists “assign” a price of production to the commodities to be offered is spot-on. The costs of production are captured and then comes a bit of internal discussion about what “the market will support”– meaning what is the average margin/mark up on the entire category of the commodity, and can our cost price + the price we want to receive per commodity get us to that average.
Click to access a_comment_on_bonefelds_abstract_labour_a.pdf
“What is needed is the proof that abstract labour is an observable expenditure of physiological and undifferentiated human energy”, says Carchedi. But whatever comes under observation or perception is individual, here and now; something that is striking the senses. But no individual case of labor is undifferentiated; each is either weaving, or spinning or etc. , i.e. something differentiated, particularized, determinate – something that takes is place somewhere in the division or partition or specialization of labor. It is odd to bring an Carchedi attack on a Bonefeld attack on Carchedi to bear on the matter, since it is more than likely that both are completely wrong.