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[ox-en] Re: What is value?



Stefan Meretz wrote:
It can be done by adding up the time taken to train different trades
and professions and amortising this over either the working life, or
the period of obsolescence of the skill , whichever is the shorter.

What about development of productive forces? Using machines, computers, levels of cooperation? What about tacit knowledge? Affective labour? And so on...

Why does this enter into the question, could you explain a bit more what you are thinking?
Is it value or exchange value that you mean is a social relationship?

Both.
I would say that exchange value is a quadernary social relation , but that value is a a potential or scalar field. A scalar field is arguably a binary relation, but this binary relation is a projection subspace of the higher order space given
by the technology matrix.
Exchange value certainly is presented by Marx as a relation in the
strict sense of Cobbs relational algebra, but is value also a
relation?

Yes, of course. Value is the expression of the fact, that production is taken place isolated from each other (aka: privatly) which brings up the necessity of an exchange and thus of a comparision of the goods. But goods are not comparable in the sense of finding an answer to the queston if they are equivalent. The only aspect, which is comparable in the sense equivalence, is the abstract labour.
Here I think you are confusing exchange value with value. Value in the sense
of socially necessary labour exists whether you have exchange or not.
There was an extensive literature in Russia an Czechoslovakia etc during
the 50s and 60s on how to compute objectively determined valuations
prior to and independent of whether exchange relations existed.
Look at the work of Kantorovich and others
Abstract labour does not exist and does exist at the same time. Nobody has ever seen or done »abstract labour«, it is nothing »real«. At the same time it is »real«, because it is created by the simple fact, that it is needed to be able to exchange equivalently. And the process of »abstraction« is real in sense, that it happens really (the word »real abstraction« is from Alfred Sohn-Rethel), it guides the actions of the people (which is the base of fetishism). But this reality is nothing natural, but exists only due to the fact, that isolated production needs exchange and thus value. Value is a social relationship. In other social circumstances, namely in a society, which does not base on isolated production and exchange, there is no value at all.

I disagree here. I take abstract labour to be labour abstracting from its
concrete characteristics. Humans are universal labourers in the same
sense as the universal Turing machine. The UTM can do any calculation,
a human has the abstract ability to do any labour task. In both cases
programming/training is required, but just as the the UTM is the abstract
universal computer, we are RUR  in Karol Capeks sense.
It is the polymorphism of human labour that allows one to think
of it in the abstract, and for this available amount abstract polymorphic labour: the working population and working day, to act
as the fundamental limit on what society can achieve.
This labour constraint is prior to the particular juridical form
assumed by production. In commodity economy it expresses itself
in the mystical form of prices, but one could have a de-mystified
set of social relations in which this value was dealt with explicitly.

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