#objective value

"C.S. Lewis had marked how, in [Jane] Austen's novels, 'the great abstract nouns of the classical English moralists are unblushingly and uncompromisingly used: good sense, courage, contentment, fortitude, 'some duty neglected, some failing indulged,' impropriety, indelicacy, generous candour, blameable distrust, just humiliation, vanity, folly, ignorance, reason.' This list does not cover exactly the ethical laws outlined in the appendix of [The Abolition of Man], but it comes somewhere near, and the unyieldingness of these standards signifies their objectivity ('the hard core in Austen's mind, the Johnsonian element, the iron in the tonic'). Furthermore, by finishing this list on the note of reason, Lewis emphasizes the fact that Austen's heroines would all accept these standards 'when they are most rational.'

Thus the law of value becomes a low of motion for a definite type of social organization based upon the production of commodities… We are thereby led, in the most striking contrast to the outlook of the psychological school, to regard political economy as a part of sociology, and sociology itself as a historical science. Böhm-Bawerk has never become aware of this contrast of outlooks. The question whether the “subjectivist method” or the “objectivist method”... Thus it happens that Böhm-Bawerk, unfailingly carrying on the controversy from his subjectivist and psychological standpoint, discovers contradictions in the Marxist theory which seem to him to be contradictions solely because of his own subjectivist interpretation of the theory.

The Marxist law of value starts from this, that commodities exchange at their values, this meaning that commodities exchange one for another when they embody equal quantities of labor. The equality of quantities of labor is solely a condition for the exchange of commodities at their values. Böhm-Bawerk, entangled in his subjectivist interpretation, mistakes this condition for a condition of exchange in general. But it is obvious that the exchange of commodities at their values, while one the one hand it merely constitutes the theoretical starting point for a subsequent analysis, one the other hand directly controls a historic phase of the production of commodities, a phase to which a specific kind of competition corresponds.

The discovery of an objective law of value, no matter how it may be formulated, can never be consciously intended [by the Austrian school], because the individual will only follow the impulses of individual interest. The only question is whether, by the individual will doing this, by all the individual wills doing this, an objective law can (and indeed must) unconsciously and unintentionally arise, a law of value as envisaged by the classics of political economy, to whose rule all the individual acts of exchange are subject... whether these really operative psychological factors preclude the existence of an objective law of value or whether, on the contrary, they permit its existence or even presuppose it as a necessary consequence. The examination will be somewhat tedious, because we must begin with abstract isolated persons, as postulated by the barren arbitrariness of this school of psychologists.

The Austrians have the character not so much of theoretical explanation as of justification for capitalist society… These explicit social sympathies on the part of the Austrian economists, together with the fundamental peculiarities of their theoretical position — replacement of the capitalist form of economy with “pure economic activity” in general; transformation of a society consisting of specific classes into an aggregation of individual Robinson Crusoes; the idea that the moving forces of the economy are the psychological experiences and motivations of separate individuals as consumers; transfer of the research focus from the sphere of production to the sphere of consumption; ignoring the dynamics of the economy and its tendencies of development — all of these attributes characterize their doctrine as a theoretical tendency that corresponds with the ideology of the bourgeoisie in the epoch of capitalism’s decline, a time when any objective study of the tendencies of social development leads to the conclusion of capitalist economy’s inevitable destruction.

Let us for a moment interrupt our recapitulation of Böhm-Bawerk’s criticism by a brief interpolation calculated to throw light upon the psychology no less than upon the leader of the psychological school… Having ceased for me to be a use value, it matters nothing to me that it has a use value for others, possesses utility for this or that person. I do not exchange it until the moment arrives when it has ceased to possess a use value for me. This applies literally to the production of commodities in its developed form… It is a precondition to the exchangeability of commodities that they should possess utility for others, but since for me they are devoid of utility, the use value of my commodities is in no sense a measure even for my individual estimate of value, and still less is it a measure of an objective estimate of value.

The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.