Talk:Value-form/Archive 1

nonsensical rubbish
I would appreciate it if clueless "Marxist" amateurs refrained from hacking into my wiki articles on Marx's concepts and vandalize them. Sadly, many articles have become nonsensical rubbish because Marxists defaced them. While this demonstrates the stupidity and sectarianism of the Marxists doing it, it simultaneously turns people right off Marx as well, whereas the purpose is to provide an accessible introduction to concepts. User:Jurriaan 14:21, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

kritik or propaganda?
Some of the criticisms of Marx's theories are straight rubbish and propaganda. You can't expect us to take you seriously when you write nonsense like "workers choose their own employers, stable prices, and own their own private property" —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.80.104.182 (talk) 03:14, 13 January 2011 (UTC)


 * In listing a few of the main kinds of criticism, I was not commenting on the validity of the criticism, I was merely describing what the criticism is about. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.144.162.215 (talk) 18:36, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Reduction edits
Once again Nikkimaria has valiantly endeavoured to reduce the length of an article I originated. About 42% has been deleted by Nikkimaria and another editor. I'm personally not all that happy about that, but I am also mindful of the need of the article to conform better to wiki standards, for which length is a consideration. If my try-out bites the dust, so be it. If readers want to access the "full monty", they can still do so, by going to the larger version of the article, dated 3 May 2013, which is still available in the archive record for this article. User:Jurriaan 9 May 2013 4:23 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.64.48.162 (talk)
 * This article should be WP:SPLIT into sub-articles anyway, with the current one as the main article. Each top section is long enough to become a stand-alone article on its own. Diego (talk) 06:12, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
 * The issue of splitting the article should have been discussed earlier, before Nikkimaria cut out nearly half of the article. If the article was split up first, much of the material would not have to be cut and would not be wasted. User:Jurriaan (talk) 9 May 2013 1:39 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.64.48.162 (talk)

Reinsertion
I have reinserted a bit from the original article in the current article such as it is after Nikkimaria's reduction edits. That bit is: "Because value is expressed as exchange-value, it seems to the ordinary observer that value and exchange-value are simply the same thing. And since exchange-value is most often expressed by a money-price, it seems that "value" and "money" are the same thing. But Marx argues they are not the same things." This part is absolutely essential to understanding what the concept of the value-form is about and so I have re-inserted it. Jurriaan (talk) 23:28, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

Footnotes problems
I should warn readers that some of the footnotes no longer make sense after the massive reduction edit by Nikkimaria. That is not my fault.Jurriaan (talk) 10:45, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Beware of Bob Rayner's "editing"
The scam editor Bob Rayner User:Bobrayner specializes in cutting large bits out of articles that he doesn't like, for no reason at all or for some spurious reason. He doesn't understand anything about the subjectmatter. The article then has to be reset to what is was before his vandalism. This article is still being worked on from time to time and Rayner's destructive habits are unwanted here. Jurriaan (talk) 19:23, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Perhaps you could stop lying about me and making personal attacks, and explain why the article should be built around a giant quotefarm, synthesis, and in-universe rhetoric. bobrayner (talk) 16:43, 20 July 2014 (UTC)


 * It is not me that has anything to do with in-universe rhetoric, but you who engage in in-universe editing. You live in a world of your own where you are the God of editing. This article is not a giant quotefarm, that is just your smear, it is just that the text has to be appropriately referenced. You are a proven article wrecker, with a long record of wrecking articles, and your groundless editing nonsense will in turn be reverted.Jurriaan (talk) 09:51, 21 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Your personal attacks will be overlooked, as ever; but you still haven't explained why the article should be built around a giant quotefarm, synthesis, and in-universe rhetoric. Could you? bobrayner (talk) 21:20, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Marx's profound critique of Aristotle's theory of value
In the section on Aristotle where we discuss:

"Aristotle thought the common factor must simply be the demand for goods, since without demand for goods that could satisfy some need or want, they would not be exchanged. According to Marx, the substance of product-value is human labour-time in general, labour-in-the-abstract or "abstract labour". This value (an average current replacement cost in labour-time) exists as an attribute of the products of human labour quite independently of the particular forms that exchange may take, though obviously value is always expressed in some form or other."

It may be worth pointing out why, according to Marx, Aristotle was unable to arrive at the conclusion that human labour time is the magnitude of value (as an aside, in the description above, I think you confuse the *substance of value*, which is congealed labour, with its *magnitude*, which is socially necessary labour-time). The reason, according to Marx, Aristotle lacked ‘a concept of value’ was because ‘Greek society was founded on the labour of slaves, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and of their labour-powers’ (152, Fowkes ed). But, ‘in the form of commodity-values, all labour is expressed as equal human labour and therefore of equal quality…’ And so, only when the ‘commodity-form is the universal form of the product of labour, and hence the dominant social relation is the relation between men as possessors of commodities,’ do humans develop ‘the concept of human equality’ as ‘popular opinion’ – not meaning that humans are actually equal, because self-evidently they are not, but that they see themselves as ‘equal’ because of the commodity relations that construct the lives they live.


 * Aristotle realized philosophically that in order to value bundles of goods for the purpose of trade, what the goods were worth had to be compared, measured and expressed using a common yardstick. This presupposed that the goods shared a common characteristic which made the comparison possible. Only then could one express, what the "relative values" of the bundles were. But what did the goods have in common, and more specifically, what was the real substance of their value? A measure of value has two basic components: the unit of measurement itself (identified with a category stating a qualitative distinction - this is the "substance"), and the quantity of this unit (this is the "magnitude"). Then we can state an expression such as "X quantity of Y equals Q quantity of P". Marx intends to say, that Aristotle could not conceptualize, that the common factor of commodities was that all the goods were labour products, fundamentally because there existed no universalized commodity production in Ancient Greece, and implicitly, because Aristotle himself was fairly oblivious to the slave labour supporting his own lifestyle. But actually Marx's argument is a bit dubious, because (1) his argument about slavery and value is imprecisely stated, referring to several different aspects at once, (2) modern historical research has shown that a large amount of wage labour existed in ancient Greece as well (there was a mix of wage-labour, slave-labour, subsistence labour, contract labour and independent trading labour), (3) you can just as well argue, that what different goods have in common, is that they can be priced - and, since prices can be attached to anything, then the whole historical specificity of commodity trade is erased, (4) the qualitative inequality of categories of labour persists throughout the history of class society, with all kinds of class and ethnic biases about how labour should be valued (for example, the educated rich class assumes that its own labour is qualititatively in a different and superior category than other kinds of labour), (5) the equation of commodities in a trading process that keeps growing does not automatically cause the growth of social and civil equality among citizens. The general point that Marx intends to make is, that the forms in which the value of products is expressed, simultaneously obscure and hide the substance of the value of products, and how their value is formed - and this is practically possible, since knowing what the substance of value is, is in principle completely unnecessary for the purpose of trade (all you need to know to navigate the market are cost prices, sale prices, price averages and whether prices are going up or down). An important epistemological aim of Marx's theory of value is to explain why people (mis-)perceive the market economy in the way that they do, by showing that this (mis-)perception is a natural reflection which grows spontaneously out of the relations of commodity trade themselves.  Cambridge Optic (talk) 12:15, 26 February 2018 (UTC)