Abstract
It is always impressive to read how sharply Marx distinguishes three different historical characters, as presented in the forms of a commodity economy, the labour process and the capitalist economy, in just a small number of pages of chs. 6 and 7 of the first volume of Capital. In ch. 6 Marx has defined free workers in the double sense as an essential precondition for capitalist production in his theory of the transformation of money into capital. In ch. 7, after that definition however, he does not immediately analyse the capitalist process of production. In the first section of ch. 7, Marx investigates the labour process as the universal condition common to all forms of society. This is noteworthy, since the substantial content of capitalist production is designed to be studied from this ch. 7. The distinction between the labour process in general and the capitalist process of production is unique to Marxian economics, and important for Marxian socialism as well as for the economic theory.
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Notes
A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of Wealth of Nations, vol. 1 ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976 ) p. 48.
H. Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital ( New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1974 ) p. 48.
I. I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value (1928), translated by M. Samardzija and F. Perlman (Detroit: Black & Red, 1972 ) p. 97.
D. Gleicher, ‘A Historical Approach to the Question of Abstract Labour’, Capital and Class,21 (1983), and his ‘Note: A Rejoinder to Eldred’, Capital and Class ,24 (1985). I am uncertain whether all the theorists listed by Gleicher in these papers can correctly be called the Rubin School in this regard, since their positions are various.
Whereas, U. Krause, in Money and Abstract Labour,translated by P. Burgess (London: Verso, 1982)
must be added to Gleicher’s list, in addition to S. Himmelweit and S. Mohun, ‘The Anomalies of Capital’, Capital and Class ,7 (1978)
M. Eldred and M. Hanlon, ‘Reconstructing Value-form Analysis’, Capital and Class ,13 (1981)
D. Foley, ‘The Value of Money, the Value of Labour Power and the Mandan Transformation Problem’, Review of Radical Political Economy,2 (1982) as some representative examples. Although, Lipietz, op. cit., appx ‘The Value Controversy’, also highly appreciates Rubin’s approach, his treatment of the forms and the substance of value, such as his view of labour-time spent by Robinson Crusoe (p. 161) or in his analogy with linguistic structure (pp. 172–7), seem rather closer to our understanding in its spirit.
K. Marx, Grundrisse, translated by M. Nicolaus (Harmondsworth, Middlx: Penguin Books, 1973 ) pp. 172–3.
Though Marx uses the term ‘economic law’ in the quotation above, the general norms of economic life for all social formations must be distinguished conceptually from economic laws in a strict sense like the law of value which presents itself automatically through the anarchical actions of individuals in a commodity economy, so unconsciously realising always post factum the general economic norms. See also K. Uno, Principles of Political Economy (Brighton: Harvester Press; Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1980) pp. 21–2, p. 32, P. 171.
N. Okishio, [’Value and Prices’, Research in Economics (University of Kobe)], (Mar. 1955) would be one of the earliest papers which substantially clarified this solution. However, it was not proper that Okishio defined there the labour quantities thus determined as directly being values. It is because his solution can also be fully applicable to the forms of economy without commodity relations acting as the basis of the production processes.
P. Samuelson, ‘Wages and Interest: A Modern Discussion of Marxian Economic Models’, American Economic Review, XLVII (Dec 1957) pp. 891–2. ‘Understanding the Marxian Notion of Exploitation’, Journal of Economic Literature, 9–2 (June 1972) p. 415.
M. Morishima, Marx’s Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) ch. 7.
This position is first presented briefly in chapter 2 of M. Itoh, Value and Crisis (London: Pluto Press; New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980 ). Even when standard prices as the form of value are assumed to be in direct proportion to the labour-substance of commodities, according to the conventional notion of the law of value in the analyses of the capitalist process of production prior to the theory of prices of production, the possibility and the general scope of deviation of prices from such a direct proportionality had better be noted. The hypothetical character of, say, the third position above would be clarified and theoretically supplemented by noting these points as being examined below.
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© 1988 Makoto Itoh
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Itoh, M. (1988). Capitalist Production and the Law of Value. In: The Basic Theory of Capitalism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19107-9_5
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