Discussion in the Matrix reading group (see this post for instructions on how to join) Saturday/Sunday of week 4, and anyone who’d rather discuss the text here can do so instead (a few questions will be posted here as well)

If anyone wants a reminder on the weekend for this and/or future discussions, mention it in the comments

  • pigginz
    2·
    8 months ago

    I’ll try my best on these since nobody else seems interested.

    1. A thing, which has both use value and value. A useless thing is not a commodity, nor is a valueless thing. A use value is only a commodity when it is transferred to someone else for whom it is also a use value.

    2. Useful labor produces use values. Use value, at least in the English translation is a term used to refer to two different but related things: a useful thing itself, or the property of a thing which makes it useful. In order to be useful labor, it must be labor that produces something useful.

    3. Simple labor is just the baseline average labor that any human can do, and skilled labor is just multiplied simple labor for purposes of determining value. All forms of labor can be reduced to simple labor. The value of a commodity comes from the simple labor necessary to produce it. Necessary being a key term here; in a world of mass production, making a commodity by hand does not make it any more valuable by the extra labor, because that extra labor is not necessary labor.

    4. Value comes from the labor required to produce a commodity. If the same amount of labor produces more commodities – more use value – the value of those commodities decreases because the labor required to produce each of them has also decreased.

    5. Exchange value is the proportion in which one commodity is exchanged for another. Exchange value equates one commodity with any other in some proportion. Value is the thing contained in both commodities that allows them to be equated: abstract simple labor.

    6. Increasing productivity increases the use values (more useful items are created) but decreases the value of each (less labor required per item). For the total sum of all of a given commodity an increase in productivity divides the total value of that sum of commodities by the change in productivity because – regardless of the labor which was originally required to produce some great hoard of commodities – the current amount of simple labor required to produce a commodity is what determines its value. So if productivity doubles, twice as many use values are created by the same amount of labor, and the value of each commodity and the sum total value of all of that commodity is halved.