I think most quote the first page of the Critique of the Gotha Program for Marx asserting this:
"First part of the paragraph: 'Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture.'
Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. The above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that alone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission."
But the same proposition is in the first chapter of the first volume of Capital:
"The use values, coat, linen, etc., i.e., the bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements – matter and labour. If we take away the useful labour expended upon them, a material substratum is always left, which is furnished by Nature without the help of man. The latter can work only as Nature does, that is by changing the form of matter. Nay more, in this work of changing the form he is constantly helped by natural forces. We see, then, that labour is not the only source of material wealth, of use values produced by labour. As William Petty puts it, labour is its father and the earth its mother."
Wealth, for Marx, is not value. It is use values.
You can find many supposed critiques of Marx claiming that he is wrong for denying p. Yet Marx asserts p, and not in some obscure part of his writing. I suppose I also find socialists irritating who advocate for socialism on the basis of Marx by means of propositions that he explicitly denies or argues he transcends. Socialists who explicitly state that they base their arguments on pre-Marxian notions of, say, the labor theory of value are better.
I suspect much debate is obscured by terminology, including shifting between german, english and other languages (in particular latin and french). In the present case my view is:
ReplyDelete* The early classical political economists wondered about the growth that was happening around them.
* They mostly called it a growth in value or wealth, and tried to explain it in various ways.
* The early physiocrats believed that all "wealth" comes from nature, because only nature has multiplicative power (from 1 seed a corn stalk with many seeds).
* Some made explicit the difference between quantity and utility (which many called "ofelimity" for a while), as lots of coal and iron ore to make a shovel that however has an utility multiple of that of the much greater quantity of that coal and iron ore. Making the shovel created "value added", while at the same time shrinking quantity.
* It ended up with most "classical" political economists calling "value" what we call "value added". They called the fertility of nature "rent" and "value added" "plusvalue" or simply "value", mostly they equated "wealth" with "plusvalue" (for "economic" goods), and usually argued that "value added" was created by labour, but were not quite sure, at least for "economic" goods.
* That guy from Trier confused terminology greatly by *defining* "value" (and equivalently "plusvalue") as labour, and "surplus value" as the part of value added that did not go to laborers, and "use value" as utility, and "exchange value" as the determinant of "price" in currency.
By *defining* "value" as (socially necessary) labour that bearded man did not solve the two great problems of the "classical" economists:
* What creates value added (the problem of development).
* What divides value added between inputs (the problem of distribution).
But he solved a different problem: cost accounting of the production of "economic" goods in terms of labour effort, which gives valuable insights.
PS One of the great mysteries for me is why so many people who talk about "sur-plus-value" rarely use the matching term "plus-value", or even just "value added".
«But he solved a different problem: cost accounting of the production of "economic" goods in terms of labour effort, which gives valuable insights.»
ReplyDeleteAs to that Michael Hudson here talks about how important was cost accounting (in this case of capital) to Karl Marx:
https://michael-hudson.com/2010/07/from-marx-to-goldman-sachs-the-fictions-of-fictitious-capital1/#footnote-21
«It often surprises both ends of the political spectrum to learn that it was Marx who firmly established depreciation as an element of value theory. As Terence McCarthy wrote in his initial English language translation of Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value (which he translated under the title of A History of Economic Doctrines, New York: Langland Press, 1952, p. xv): ‘As a logical consequence of his examination of Physiocracy, Marx was led to a study of the Economic Theory of Depreciation. So complete is his analysis of this aspect of income formation that, if Capital has been called the bible of the working class, the History might well be called the bible of the Society of Cost Accountants. ... Over the whole society, failure to provide adequate depreciation reserves is, Marx implies, to negate economic progress and to begin consumption of that portion of the value of the product which Marx believes belongs neither to the labourers in industry, nor to their employers, but to the economy itself, as something which must be ‘restored’ to it if the economic process is to continue.’»