#value form

Marx’s theory of value (re divergence of value from price) explains the foundation of surplus profit, which is significantly related to the unprecedented wealth of contemporary moguls, and its association with technological advancements/ increased productivity— eg in industrial production, specifically improvements in machinery, more productive factories. With related technological improvements, more productive units become the measure of price (exchange value). But these technological improvements are not instantaneous — eg because all branches of production are not the same. Thus there are varying degrees of productivity. And the least productive initially influences market price/ exchange value. Hence surplus profits for higher productivity, while market price fluctuates above market value. However, after a certain point, surplus profits “equalize” with average profits via competition, market price gravitates closer to market value, and the rate of profit becomes the same for capitals across the board. Again.. this presupposes that re- production of means of subsistence/ labor/ society is determined by production of surplus value (profits / rent) and the “law of market value”.

But the point is, “not only that the different magnitudes of commodity values are measured by expressing the values in the use value of one exclusive commodity, but at the same time that they are all expressed in a form in which they exist as the embodiment of social labor and are therefore exchangeable for every other commodity, that they are translatable at will into any use value desired.” The labor contained in the commodities “must be represented as social labor, as alienated individual labor”. However, this is only necessary in a commodity producing society. Only in such a society does the labor of the individual have to represent itself “as its opposite, impersonal, abstract, general — and only in this form social” labor. Of course even a socialist society would have to “keep accounts” of the labor power at its disposal, and would therefore have to reduce individual labor to “simple average labor”. However, it would not occur to it “to express the simple fact that the hundred square meters of cloth required one thousand hours of labor for their production… in the oblique and meaningless way that they have a value of one thousand hours of labor”.

Capitalist production therefore reproduces in the course of its own process the separation between labor power and the conditions of labor. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the conditions under which the worker is exploited. It incessantly forces him to sell his labor power in order to live, and enables the capitalist to purchase labor power in order that he may enrich himself. It is no longer a mere accident that capitalist and worker confront each other in the market as buyer and seller. It is the alternating rhythm of the process itself which throws the worker back onto the market again and again as a seller of his labor power and continually transforms his own product into a means by which another man can purchase him. In reality, the worker belongs to capital before he has sold himself to the capitalist. His economic bondage is at once mediated through, and concealed by, the periodic renewal of the act by which he sells himself, his change of masters, and the oscillations in the market price of his labor. The capitalist process of production, therefore, seen as a total, connected process, i.e., a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces the capital-relation itself: on one the hand the capitalist, on the other hand the wage laborer.

Increased productivity and greater intensity of labor both have a similar effect. They both augment the mass of articles produced in a given time. Both therefore shorten that portion of the working day which the worker needs to produce his means of subsistence or their equivalent. The minimum length of the working day is fixed by this necessary component, which is however itself capable of further contraction. If the whole working day were to shrink to the length of its necessary component, surplus labor would vanish, something which is impossible under the regime of capital. Only the abolition of the capitalist form of production would permit the reduction of the working day to the necessary labor time. But even in that case the latter would expand to take up more of the day, and for two reasons: first, because the worker’s conditions of life would improve, and his aspirations become greater, and second, because a part of what is now surplus labor would then count as necessary labor, namely the labor which is necessary for the formation of a social fund for reserve and accumulation. The more the productivity of labor increases, the more the working day can be shortened, and the more the working day is shortened, the more the intensity of labor can increase. From the point of view of society the productivity of labor also grows when economies are made in its use. This implies not only economizing on the means of production, but also avoiding all useless labor. The capitalist mode of production, while it enforces economy in each individual business, also begets, by its anarchic system of competition, the most outrageous squandering of labor power and of the social means of production, not to mention the creation of a vast number of functions at present indispensable, but in themselves superfluous. The intensity and productivity of labor being given, the part of the social working day necessarily taken up with material production is shorter and, as a consequence, the time at society’s disposal for the free intellectual and social activity of the individual is greater, in proportion as work is more and more evenly divided among all the able-bodied members of society, and a social stratum is more and more deprived of the ability to shift the burden of labor (which is necessarily imposed by nature) from its own shoulders to those of another social stratum. The absolute minimum limit to the shortening of the working day is, from this point of view, the universality of labor. In capitalist society, free time is produced for one class by the conversion of the whole lifetime of the masses into labor time.

We have seen how the creation of money proceeds from the “contradiction between the particular nature of the commodity as a product and its general nature as exchange value”. In contrast to bourgeois economists, who see in money simply “a cunningly conceived expedient” designed to overcome the difficulties of simple barter, Marx derives it from the basic contradiction “which is contained in the existence of the commodity as the direct unity of use value and exchange value”. […] This contradiction, far from being a contrived “metaphysical” construction, represents, in fact, the most general form in which the real conditions of existence and developmental tendencies of the bourgeois social order are condensed. It is, in fact, only another expression for the fact that in a society of atomized private producers the labor of the individual is not directly social (nor can it be), but must prove itself as such by negating itself, by negating its own original character. For, although the universal dependence of producers on one another first becomes a fact in this mode of production, it lacks any form of unified social planning, and is subject to the blind forces of the market. “The total movement of this disorder is its order”.

Exchange is — the — key to Marx’s concept of value. To reiterate: “Value” only exists when there is an exchange of what labor produces. And, historically, the amounts exchanged have revolved around the embedded amount of labor. While capitalism is the “value economy” — one “primarily” based on commodity exchange and exchange value — this is not to say that value and an exchange of what labor produces did not exist at the margins or even more significantly “for 1,000’s of years”, or that Engels was “wrong” re the existence of value outside capitalism.