In my previous post I argued that labour was the sole source of value. This may have caused some rather strange looks. So I'm going to quickly set out why this is so.
In classical economics it is often asserted that it is demand, or more accurately Utility, that sets prices and therefore determines the value of an item. This is correct, if we hold all things as constant and ignore the possibility for commodities to change. If we are simply exchanging apples, nails and wood and doing nothing with them then the utility generated from possessing and consuming theses items will determine their exchange value. But what if we say that there is a fourth value, labour, and we also allow for items to be used and combined, making new items; such as a chair or more apples. When we exchange again we suddenly haver a more complicated system where labour can be consumed to create more items and the sole difference between these items and the previous items is the labour imbued in them. So a chair is more valuable than the nails and wood. Here labour is the sole commodity that can be consumed at the same time as producing more.
From this it is clear that it is from labour and labour alone that value is created (assuming that desires do not change - even then a change in desires will simply change the values once and the values can go up and down. Only labour has a constantly positive effect)
In short value (prices) are determined by many things but only labour can increase overall value in a system or the value of a set of items.
It is from this that Marx draws his most important concepts of SNLT and surplus labour and exploitation
No comments:
Post a Comment