Labour and Value: Rethinking Marx's Theory of Exploitation by Screpanti Ernesto;

Author:Screpanti, Ernesto;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: H (Humanities), HB (History), HBG (General and world history), 4 (Educational purpose qualifiers), JP (Politics and government), JPS (International relations); BISAC: EDU016000 (EDUCATION / History), HIS000000 (HISTORY / General), HIS037000 (HISTORY / World), HIS054000 (HISTORY / Social History), HIS039000 (HISTORY / Civilization)
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Published: 2019-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

4. Values and Prices

© Ernesto Screpanti, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0182.04

After part 1, in which Marx develops a philosophy of “labour value”, he uses this notion as a measure of surplus value and the rate of exploitation throughout the remainder of Capital, volume 1. Abstract labour is the substance of value, according to the labour theory of value. However, the expression “abstract labour” almost disappears outside part 1 or, rather, it appears mainly in the notion of “labour time”, as it must when the labour hour is used as a unit of measurement.1 The real scientific problem addressed by Marx in Capital is bringing to light the social relations of production through which surplus value is extracted. The theory of value serves to provide a measurement tool capable of highlighting those relations, and Marx believes that embodied labour has this property.

In section 1 of the present chapter, I illustrate the labour theory of value in the simplest way possible.2 I describe an economy in which perfect competition and constant returns to scale prevail, and in which there are no scarce resources, no fixed capital, no joint production, no luxury goods, no complex labour and no growth. These simplifying hypotheses are assumed not just to make the text accessible to a broad readership, but also because my goal is to disclose the basic limitation of the labour theory of value. If this limitation is evident in the simplest model, there is no need to complicate the analysis. I argue that, since labour values are determined in a model of “commodity production in general”, they only express the technical conditions of production. This is true even if surplus value and the value of labour power are introduced into the equations that determine labour values. In fact, changes in the distribution of value added between wages and profits do not have any consequence on the value of commodities, as long as the latter is determined by the amount of labour contained in them.

In section 2, I elucidate the determination of production prices, and argue that they provide a correct expression of the technical and social conditions of production. Moreover, they provide a transparent account of exploitation when they are reduced to quantities of labour commanded. I then propose a comparison between the labour embodied in and the labour commanded by a commodity, and show that the latter expresses any change in the degree of exploitation in a way the former is unable to.

In section 3, I tackle the transformation problem: given a double system approach, with a labour value system and a production price system, is it possible to transform the former into the latter whilst keeping the profit and exploitation rates invariant? I show that, even when some aggregate invariance postulates are validated with opportune normalization, the basic problem remains unsolved, i.e. the inability of labour values to correctly express the social relations of production in a capitalist economy. In fact, no reasonable normalization can achieve the invariance of the rate of exploitation and the rate of profit.

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