¿In What Sense do Objects of Value “Contain” Labor-Time?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

           ¿In What

              Sense

 

do

 

Objects

of Value

 

“Contain”

 

Labor-

Time?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Reader,

¿In what sense do objects of human valuing – objects “produced” by human labor, and that have use-value, “value”, exchange-value and price – “contain” the labor-time that produced them?

 

The metaphor of human labor-time “containment” in commodity-objects is encountered frequently in Marx’s discourses on his “law of value”, in his immanent critique of the capitalist ideology/science of “political economy”.

 

Well, first of all, it does not mean that the aggregate of human labor-hours that were spent on “working-up” raw material – material not produced by human labor, but, instead, produced by pre-human/exo-human Nature – that were applied in the individual history of each individual commodity-object – are “contained” inside that commodity-object.

 

For a present such commodity-object, that labor-time counts as so “contained” only to the extant of the average abstract labor-time socially necessary to reproduce that object presently, given the presently prevailing level of the social force of its production, in the field of production under which it falls, as reflected, albeit in a complex manner, in its presently-prevailing price.  Any labor-hours applied in its individual case, above and beyond that social average, does not count as “contained in it”, or as adding to its value/price.

 

If, by today, an innovation has spread society-wide that enables units of that same object-kind to be produced, on average, within half the generic labor-hours it took to make that object a year before, then each unit of an inventory of that object, produced, e.g., the year before, “suddenly”, “instantaneously”, i.e., given price-competition in its market, against such objects produced today, will have its value, and its price, drop accordingly, despite the average number of generic labor-hours actually applied, per unit, in its batch.   

 

Sometimes one might get the feeling that the abstract labor-time “contained” in a produced commodity-object represents something like the “time-binding” of which Korzybski wrote.  But the amount of abstract labor-time “bound into” a given unit of commodity-product is not a locally measurable quantity of generic labor-hours.  Its effective amount depends on market competition – is, in effect, influenced by the “action at a distance” of generic labor-hours “cost of production” of similar, competitively-equivalent commodity-objects, produced “at a distance”, elsewhere.

 

The human “working-up” [Marx] of raw materials, into a finished commodity product, sometimes “sounds”, in Marx’s discourse, like an addition of “order”, of a, to humans, use-valuable kind, a ‘negentropy-added’ form of “value-added”.

 

However, in terms of saleable price, that “negentropy-value” is contingent upon the amount of economic value added per unit by the production of such commodity-objects elsewhere, even if the ‘order-added’ to the raw material, and the ‘use-value-added’ is the same there.

 

The ‘labor-value-added’ requires that, in the same process, there must be a specific use-value-added – that, whatever the amount of generic labor-time added, that labor-time added must add to the use-value of each unit of the commodity-objects output for a specific use, relative to that use-value for the inputs to its production, or no economic value will be added.

 

However, given rising productivity, or rising “productive force”, in that branch of production, the same ‘use-value-added’ will “contain” less ‘exchange-value-added’, less ‘price-added’ by the generic-labor-time-added, than that for commodity-objects of the same kind produced earlier, before the rise in the “productive force” of their production.

 

Thus, the “abstract, presently socially-necessary labor-time” metaphor of labor-time “containment” has to be carefully couched within key exceptions if it is to be made apt.

 

General inflation also takes its toll on consumers, for many kinds of commodity-objects all-at-once, by raising unit-prices of commodity-kinds across-the-board, even despite falling socially-necessary abstract-labor-time ‘containings’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For more information regarding these Seldonian insights, and to read and/or download, free of charge, PDFs and/or JPGs of Foundation books, other texts, and images, please see:

 

www.dialectics.info

 

 

and

 

 

https://independent.academia.edu/KarlSeldon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For partially pictographical, ‘poster-ized’ visualizations of many of these Seldonian insights -- specimens of ‘dialectical art’ – as well as dialectically-illustrated books published by the F.E.D. Press, see –

 

https://www.etsy.com/shop/DialecticsMATH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

¡ENJOY!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Regards,

 

Miguel Detonacciones,

 

Voting Member, Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.];

Elected Member, F.E.D. General Council;

Participant, F.E.D. Special Council for Public Liaison;

Officer, F.E.D. Office of Public Liaison.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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