I think the mistake here is in thinking that for Marx, value is inherent to labour. But this is not the case. What he says is that value is the social form that labour takes in certain societal circumstances, namely where one’s labour is validated—such that it counts as socially necessary labour—only through exchange in markets.
So the choice is not between (1) value is inherent in labour, and (2) demand creates value. There is another option, which is that demand is how labour counts in society. Demand can only ever validate labour that was actually performed; it can’t conjure value from desire alone. No labour, no value—however much the thing is desired.
Well, that’s one of the things he was wrong about, as he came to realize after 1848.
Well, I don’t take the necessary labor time as literal, because it isn’t used literally. As he can decide that products that take one literal hour to produce, can cost many hours, because you went to school, and have a degree, and lots of people worked on that, and developing those skills took time. He even considers the labor time of parents, and other people in someone’s life to factor into how much necessary labor time should be allotted to a product, and not the literal time it takes to produce it. Which is why I suggested that it’s eye is ultimately on fairness. But the math is complicated, and contrived. Involving variables that are far from always easy to calculate. Fairness is important, I can agree with.
Well, the fairness is my interpretation, otherwise I cannot imagine where the idea is coming from. That skilled labor is given a multiplicative value of simple labor isn’t though. Not making that up.
“More complex labour counts only as intensified, or rather multiplied simple labour, so that a smaller quantity of complex labour is considered equal to a larger quantity of simple labour.” - Capital volume 1 chapter 1.
As for fairness. I can accept that he explicitly denied that, but then he frames it in the words of exploitation, and theft and coercion. He can claim he is being only objective and scientific, but it doesn’t sound like that to me, and I’m not when I worry about those things. I worry about fairness when I consider those things. But I should speak for myself.
No I agree with you there: Marxists over-emphasize Marx’s denial of the moral element of his thought. But what I’d deny is that the theory of exploitation etc. is just about fairness, or is nothing but a moral view dressed up to look scientific. That’s too reductive, and not dialectical enough.
As an aside, I am not a huge fan of dialectics. I read the society of the spectacle not too long ago, and the amount that the dialectical chiasmus is employed is pretty excessive. Worst overuse I’ve ever seen.
How much does Marx even really count as dialectics though? Lol. Concepts have opposites, or contradictions, but empirical objects don’t. There is no opposite of a rabbit. Rather you have to just portray things as oppositional, like rabbits and foxes. So, you are already doing something pretty different, inspired by dialectics.
Maybe this would be off topic. Just something I consider.
Dialectical contradiction isn’t a rabbit vs. the opposite of a rabbit. It’s contradiction within a thing: the commodity as both use-value and value, or capital needing wages low enough for profit and high enough for its goods to sell. Not two objects in contradiction, but one thing pulled apart.
As to whether this kind of analysis is even required, when we could just re-frame the contradictions as tensions and conflicts—that’s another issue. Some Marxists reject dialectics, others don’t.
I have to say, I was thinking more in terms of proletariat vs bourgeoisie. That “things” being ideas in his system, isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. My bad.
As I say, the classic example in Marx of a thing that contains contradictions is a commodity, and commodities are not ideas. A commodity is, shall we say, a social object. It’s in those objects that there are contradictions.
As for proletariat vs bourgeoisie, yes, that’s a candidate. In this case the object under examination is maybe production, or even capitalist society as a whole. And it contains contradictions: the proletariat and bourgeoisie have opposing interests and yet each is a condition for the other—they aren’t two independent groups in a fight, but one relation whose two sides constitute and undermine each other.
I find this dialectical framing the most natural and the most faithful to reality, though I don’t deny there are other ways to frame these conflicts.
Pretty much. At different times he did sketch or allude to solutions, even presenting a sort of plan in the Communist Manifesto. But that was a specific intervention, a programmatic statement for the Communist League on the eve of the 1848 revolutions. Later on in Capital, there’s nothing remotely like a blueprint for socialism. Others have had to draw those up—and they haven’t done a great job.
It occurs to me that Marx and Hayek are apples and oranges. Marx wasn’t very focused on mapping out the path to success. That’s exactly what Hayek was preoccupied with.
When he said “Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion”, he wasn’t talking about Marx at all. He was talking about what happened in the Weimar Republic during the rise of the Nazi Party. He meant that the common view of workers, that collectivism was the cure, helped the Nazis take over. People thought: oh, collectivism, this has got to be the right way!
None of this has anything to do with Marx, though some people at the time would have argued otherwise. That’s interesting.