Deciphering Capital by Callinicos Alex

Author:Callinicos, Alex
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bookmarks Publications

Production and exchange

One of the many respects in which Rubin is superior to contemporary value form theorists is in his insistence that ‘abstract labour, just as the value which it creates, does not only have a qualitative but also a quantitative side’:

The equality of two amounts of abstract labour signifies their equality as parts of total social labour—an equality which is only established in the process of social equalisation of labour by means of the equalisation of the products of labour. Thus we assert that in a commodity economy, the social equality of two labour expenditures or their equality in the form of abstract labour is established through the process of exchange. But this does not prevent us from ascertaining a series of quantitative properties which distinguish labour in terms of its material-technical and its physiological aspects, and which causally influence the quantitative determination of abstract labour before the act of exchange and independent of it. The most important of these properties are: 1) the length of labour expenditure, or the quantity of working time; 2) the intensity of labour; 3) the qualification of labour; and 4) the quantity of products produced in a unit of time.36

Rubin, like Heinrich, argues that ‘the social equality of two labour expenditures or their equality in the form of abstract labour is established through the process of exchange.’ As we have seen, Marx in the 1859 Contribution describes this as a ‘difficulty’, presumably because it seems to contradict the main thesis of the labour theory of value that value is created in production. Can both propositions be squared?

Let us first note that Rubin is mistaken to imply that the social equalisation of labour occurs solely in exchange. Because he treats the law of value as governing primarily a simple commodity economy, he fails to see how the domination of capitalist economist relations enables social equalisation of labour within production. As Lucia Pradella puts it, ‘with the industrial revolution, the reduction of individual to abstract labour achieves an adequate technical basis: the activity of the worker is emptied of content and becomes purely mechanical and formal, while manual and intellectual functions are split up’.37 Saad-Filho has analysed the ‘normalisation’ of labour in production thanks to intra-branch competition and capitalist control of the production process.38

This correction of Rubin’s version of value theory does not, however, remove the problem of the contribution made by exchange to the social equalisation of labour. To answer this question we have to consider more closely how Marx defines value. At the beginning of Capital, I, he writes:

Socially necessary labour time is the labour time required to produce any use value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society… What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour time socially necessary for its production. (CI: 129)

Marx doesn’t explore further here what is

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