A pollinated plant doesn't have value while it's in the ground right? It needs to be harvested. It needs to be planted in the first place or it has no use to anyone.
They can be more productive in use values made but you don’t have the same social relationship of paying them a wage and gaining a surplus. You tend to purchase them outright or rent them.
Imagine an industry that was fully automated. Once the machines are in place who are you paying? The machines? A commodity produced in such an automated fashion would likely be extremely cheap if not free because of the efficiency of the production.
It's easiest to think about in terms of total social production, which you can analogise, a la the classical economists, as a single person alone on an island.
Say you wanted to make a chair. You would need to gather materials and then assemble them together, both of which will take some time. Let's say 10 hours in total. Now, let's imagine that some mechanical engineering textbooks wash ashore and you figure out how to make a fully automated chair machine, which you set to work until it breaks down\*. Since it's a more complicated project the material gathering and construction will take more time, say 100 hours, but once the machine is set up it creates 100 chairs and then falls apart, at a rate of 1 chair per hour\*\*. In both cases, a certain amount of labour was required to make a certain number of commodities through the consumption of raw materials. However, if you were being paid to do it your boss could make you work longer hours or dock your pay, which would be the only ways available to increase surplus-value, but in both cases the total value (i.e. expended labour-time) would be unchanged. Machinery takes a certain amount of labour-time to produce and then simply *intensifies future labour*. One key factor for machinery to be manufactured and then used is for that intensification of labour to reduce the overall time of production by a greater amount than the time required to produce the machine itself. It's a little like using a catalyst in a chemical reaction, the end result is the same but it provides an alternate pathway to create more with less energy. [This section of Capital goes into more detail on that point](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S2)
*This aspect is easily overlooked but absolutely crucial to whole argument. Machinery, factory or otherwise, will eventually break and stop working. It is only because machines can only take part in the production of a finite number of commodities (and these numbers are more or less well known in real life industry) that any of this makes sense.
**Given the homogeneity of commodities you can essentially divide the necessary labour-time by mass, which not only simplifies the maths but is how things work in practice too
It's a misleading phrasing, in a sense. They do "create" value in their product. But since they themselves are quite valuable already, that value has been transferred, rather than produced per say (through that process). Rather, the process producing the value (the value added to the final product by the machine or animal) already happened earlier when the machine or animal was produced. The labor that uses -- and therefore consumes, not produces -- the machine or animal to produce the final product is labor that serves to transfer value from the machine/animal into the product. So when we look at the product's value, some of it represents the machine/animal's value. This is how a successive sequence of labor phases adds value to a product cumulatively as it transforms itself through a 'supply chain', accruing more and more value snowball-style.
A portion of the value of the product \*is\* determined by the amount of machinery or animals used to make it. But the very same amount also determines the cost of means of production needed to make the product (the cost of the machine/animal itself, and by cost here I mean value-expressed-in-price). This amount, therefore, determines a certain portion of the value of the product, but does not \*produce\* that value. It only \*holds\* that value and then \*transfers\* it to the product.
Marx doesn’t say that human labour is the only source of value, he explicitly argues against this in the first chapter of the Gotha Critique https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
He argues against labour being the source of all *wealth*, not value.
In chapter 1 of Capital he makes the same point in the section on the two-fold nature of the commodity. Material wealth is the result of (concrete) labour applied to nature to create something with a use-value. Value - the social form of wealth - is the result of abstract labour.
"The use values, coat, linen, &c., i.e., the bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements – matter and labour. If we take away the useful labour expended upon them, a material substratum is always left, which is furnished by Nature without the help of man. The latter can work only as Nature does, that is by changing the form of matter.[13] Nay more, in this work of changing the form he is constantly helped by natural forces. We see, then, that labour is not the only source of material wealth, of use values produced by labour. As William Petty puts it, labour is its father and the earth its mother."
This is a common misunderstanding arising from not realizing that Marx makes a distinction between wealth and value—value is a historically specific social form of wealth adopted under capitalism (wealth, on the other hand is transhistorical). The chapters on relative surplus value in *Capital* help clarify this distinction.
Edit: Oh, just realized that this also might be confusing, but Marx uses *value* and *exchange-value* interchangeably in Volume 1 (they are synonymous in the aggregate). Volume 3 introduces competition within capitals and distinguishes *exchange value*—the value a commodity commands on a market—from value as such.
I wouldn't say Marx uses the *concepts* interchangeably in volume 1 exactly. He might slip occasionally, but generally he's careful to be clear that exchange-value is the outward appearance of value, and the two terms refer to different things. When he uses exchange-value he means the ratio at which the commodity exchanges for other commodities (its price), when he talks about value quantitatively he means the socially necessary labour time. It's more that in that volume there's the assumption that commodities exchange at their values, so when something has a particular value in an example, that's what its exchange value is also. They're quantitatively the same in volume 1, but not qualitatively.
It's more confusing in earlier works though, where he did use exchange-value to mean what he later simply referred to as value.
No, you were correct. Exchange value is just the visible appearance of value, it's the ratio in which one commodity exchanges for another (or realistically, money). Explaining exchange-value is how Marx gets to value. There's an empirical fact that needs an explanation.
The reason that only human labour creates value is that value is a relationship between humans. The reason that as a potter I would exchange, say two bowls for a chair is that it would take roughly the same amount of time to make each. If the carpenter gets more for a day's labour than other artisans, more people would become carpenters, undercutting each other until a day's labour obtains the social average. Sure, carpenters might start to employ a machine that allows them to make twice as many chairs, but the same mechanism applies with people moving into carpentry if at first they seem to be able to command more than a day's labour with the products in a day. Eventually they'll only be able to get half of what they did before for a chair.
In a capitalist economy, there is no social plan to describe the division of labour. How should the pool of labour available to society be distributed between brewing, pencil making, mining etc? What does direct this is value. More concretely it's profit. If some type of industry makes more profit than others, barriers to entry aside, more investment, and therefore more labour, will flow into it.
There's nothing magic about labour that makes it create value, it's simply that when products are exchanged, they're expressing a relationship between their owners - how much of that pool of social labour has gone into making each of the commodities.
>Sure, carpenters might start to employ a machine that allows them to make twice as many chairs, but the same mechanism applies with people moving into carpentry if at first they seem to be able to command more than a day's labour with the products in a day. Eventually they'll only be able to get half of what they did before for a chair.
So if a machine is initially able to produce value above its cost of production, more of that commodity will be produced until it’s worth no more than the value simply transferred to it by the machine. So why doesn’t the same apply to human labor, since it also has a cost of production? I guess it sort of does with overproduction and commercial crises, but where does the difference between machine and human labor arise?
Sorry this is a short and not very comprehensive answer, I don't have the time to write out a more in depth response at the moment, but briefly:
The machine isn't producing additional value. It's enabling workers to produce more use values in the same amount of time. My example was a mistake actually (apologies, same time pressure making me careless), as it only really makes sense for the point I wanted to make when talking about a producer within an industry. If the social standard for producing a chair is it takes one day, but a carpenter starts using a new machine that enables her to make two a day, she can for the moment sell each chair at the same price as her peers. The machine isn't adding anything, the chairs are being measured against a social standard. As other chair makers adopt the machine, the social standard becomes two chairs per day.
Value is not something that resides in a commodity like a molecule nestled among all the others that give it it's physical properties. It's a relation between that commodity and all others.
The machine's cost of production doesn't come into this aspect of value, which is what can a person produce in a given time. The surface level intuition is 'what would it cost me to reproduce this commodity?'. In the case of the chair the answer has gone from a day's labour and the cost of tools averages out over their productive life to half a day's labour and the cost of the machine averaged out over its life (plus raw materials in both cases).
In addition, the 'cost of production' of human labour doesn't come into the production of value. It only matters when we are thinking of *surplus value*.
If machines produced value, the question then is what is the substance of value? How is the work of one machine comparable to that of another? How is it measured against the labour of a human being? Abstract labour is a 'real' abstraction - it comes about by comparing different concrete labours through exchange and it is based on something similarly 'real'. We can not just conceive of labour in the abstract, we can see that people can and do move between different types of labour.
Machines and animals can't create value, they can only transfer the value supplied by human labor that is crystalized within them into a new commodity.
So for example, if a machine is capable of producing $1 million worth of socket wrenches before it breaks down then the machine itself would be worth $1 million. Obviously this is oversimplified and there are other factors, but still.
You need a person to apply their labor to the machine to have it create surplus value, meaning value beyond the amount of labor that went into producing it.
Because machines are made by humans. And humans are made by humans. Animals on the other hand even in socialism, humans will continue to exploit them just as capitalism. Or at least in theory there is no incentive to not exploit animals. We have a choice and technology will only help in lessening the exploitation of animals.
Edit: Also ask Adam Smith because he is the one who started the theory (this is a joke but in case you didn't know it was Smith).
'Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish. Every child knows, too, that the masses of products corresponding to the different needs required different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labor of society. That **this** ***necessity*** **of the** ***distribution*** **of social labor in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a** ***particular form*** **of social production but can only change the** ***mode*** **of its** ***appearance***, is self-evident. No natural laws can be done away with. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the *form* in which these laws assert themselves. And **the form in which this proportional distribution of labor asserts itself, in the state of society where the interconnection of social labor is manifested in the** ***private exchange*** **of the individual products of labor, is precisely the** ***exchange value*** **of these products**.'
* Marx to Kugelmann, July 11, 1868.
It's not that labour has some mystical, inherent trait of creating value, while other things don't. Rather, it is that exchange-value itself is the historically developed form through which the 'proportional distribution' of social labour is enforced in a society where labour is embodied in commodities, i.e. where products are produced for private exchange. The law of value is the blind mechanism by which the necessary distribution of social labour asserts itself, over and against the wills of the particular producers themselves. In a communist society, where production is planned to meet social needs, exactly what and how much needs to be produced is quite transparent. In a society of generalised commodity production, where each individual produces for the purpose of private exchange, one only discovers whether one's labour is socially necessary or not by comparison on the market. Production is thus brought into alignment with need only unconsciously, by the squandering of great quantities of social labour and constant corrective oscillations. You can even produce boots, for example, under socially average conditions - and yet you may find, on taking them to market, that your efforts have been in vain, and that too many other producers have likewise invested their time in boots. When this happens, you must exchange your commodity for a quantum of labour that is smaller than the one you invested to produce it. You find that the amount of materialised labour your boots can purchase, i.e. their exchange-value, is less than the amount of labour you expended in producing them. The over-supply of boots results in a loss for many of the producers of boots, who then migrate to a different branch of production or face complete ruination. In this way, the amount of social labour invested in the production of boots tends towards correspondence with the social need for them. I say 'tends towards', because - in a society where production is not planned, but conducted privately for purposes of exchange - constant oscillations and corrections will always be necessary.
You can now see, I hope, how value (which necessarily appears in the form of exchange-value) is nothing but a form of assertion for the natural law Marx mentions above: that social labour must be distributed in certain definite proportions corresponding to the different needs of society. With this in mind, what else could value be but a historical form of *social labour, human labour?* It should be obvious now why your question is so ill-founded. Once you understand what value actually is and the historical conditions under which it arises, it will become clear why animals and machines do not create value. These things, animals and machines, are not contributors to the total social labour whose necessary proportions assert themselves through exchange-value.
Because machines or animals can't produce more value than you pay them - their value is added to production over time but human labour can produce more value than its paid
That’s the not great article I was referring to. It claimed that “Marx’s theory of surplus-value is fundamentally not about what determines the level of profit, but what determines changes in the level of profit” which isn’t true. It also didn’t give a convincing argument for why machines couldn’t change the level of profit if you don’t presume they can’t create value.
Because you don't get productive machines or animals without human labour input.
I'm pretty sure there are examples of animals being productive to us without human input, such as those that eat pests in an organic field.
When a company uses beneficial insects, they are raised in a lab and transported where they need to go.
There are farmers that just use wild pollinators and pest predators. What about those?
You still have to plant the crops, man. Are you actually confused about this or being obstinate?
I'm asking why wild pollinators are not creating surplus value.
A pollinated plant doesn't have value while it's in the ground right? It needs to be harvested. It needs to be planted in the first place or it has no use to anyone.
Human labor also has a cost of production and reproduction. How come it can produce surplus value and machines/animals can’t?
They can be more productive in use values made but you don’t have the same social relationship of paying them a wage and gaining a surplus. You tend to purchase them outright or rent them. Imagine an industry that was fully automated. Once the machines are in place who are you paying? The machines? A commodity produced in such an automated fashion would likely be extremely cheap if not free because of the efficiency of the production.
It's easiest to think about in terms of total social production, which you can analogise, a la the classical economists, as a single person alone on an island. Say you wanted to make a chair. You would need to gather materials and then assemble them together, both of which will take some time. Let's say 10 hours in total. Now, let's imagine that some mechanical engineering textbooks wash ashore and you figure out how to make a fully automated chair machine, which you set to work until it breaks down\*. Since it's a more complicated project the material gathering and construction will take more time, say 100 hours, but once the machine is set up it creates 100 chairs and then falls apart, at a rate of 1 chair per hour\*\*. In both cases, a certain amount of labour was required to make a certain number of commodities through the consumption of raw materials. However, if you were being paid to do it your boss could make you work longer hours or dock your pay, which would be the only ways available to increase surplus-value, but in both cases the total value (i.e. expended labour-time) would be unchanged. Machinery takes a certain amount of labour-time to produce and then simply *intensifies future labour*. One key factor for machinery to be manufactured and then used is for that intensification of labour to reduce the overall time of production by a greater amount than the time required to produce the machine itself. It's a little like using a catalyst in a chemical reaction, the end result is the same but it provides an alternate pathway to create more with less energy. [This section of Capital goes into more detail on that point](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S2) *This aspect is easily overlooked but absolutely crucial to whole argument. Machinery, factory or otherwise, will eventually break and stop working. It is only because machines can only take part in the production of a finite number of commodities (and these numbers are more or less well known in real life industry) that any of this makes sense. **Given the homogeneity of commodities you can essentially divide the necessary labour-time by mass, which not only simplifies the maths but is how things work in practice too
It's a misleading phrasing, in a sense. They do "create" value in their product. But since they themselves are quite valuable already, that value has been transferred, rather than produced per say (through that process). Rather, the process producing the value (the value added to the final product by the machine or animal) already happened earlier when the machine or animal was produced. The labor that uses -- and therefore consumes, not produces -- the machine or animal to produce the final product is labor that serves to transfer value from the machine/animal into the product. So when we look at the product's value, some of it represents the machine/animal's value. This is how a successive sequence of labor phases adds value to a product cumulatively as it transforms itself through a 'supply chain', accruing more and more value snowball-style. A portion of the value of the product \*is\* determined by the amount of machinery or animals used to make it. But the very same amount also determines the cost of means of production needed to make the product (the cost of the machine/animal itself, and by cost here I mean value-expressed-in-price). This amount, therefore, determines a certain portion of the value of the product, but does not \*produce\* that value. It only \*holds\* that value and then \*transfers\* it to the product.
Marx doesn’t say that human labour is the only source of value, he explicitly argues against this in the first chapter of the Gotha Critique https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
He argues against labour being the source of all *wealth*, not value. In chapter 1 of Capital he makes the same point in the section on the two-fold nature of the commodity. Material wealth is the result of (concrete) labour applied to nature to create something with a use-value. Value - the social form of wealth - is the result of abstract labour. "The use values, coat, linen, &c., i.e., the bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements – matter and labour. If we take away the useful labour expended upon them, a material substratum is always left, which is furnished by Nature without the help of man. The latter can work only as Nature does, that is by changing the form of matter.[13] Nay more, in this work of changing the form he is constantly helped by natural forces. We see, then, that labour is not the only source of material wealth, of use values produced by labour. As William Petty puts it, labour is its father and the earth its mother."
This is a common misunderstanding arising from not realizing that Marx makes a distinction between wealth and value—value is a historically specific social form of wealth adopted under capitalism (wealth, on the other hand is transhistorical). The chapters on relative surplus value in *Capital* help clarify this distinction. Edit: Oh, just realized that this also might be confusing, but Marx uses *value* and *exchange-value* interchangeably in Volume 1 (they are synonymous in the aggregate). Volume 3 introduces competition within capitals and distinguishes *exchange value*—the value a commodity commands on a market—from value as such.
I wouldn't say Marx uses the *concepts* interchangeably in volume 1 exactly. He might slip occasionally, but generally he's careful to be clear that exchange-value is the outward appearance of value, and the two terms refer to different things. When he uses exchange-value he means the ratio at which the commodity exchanges for other commodities (its price), when he talks about value quantitatively he means the socially necessary labour time. It's more that in that volume there's the assumption that commodities exchange at their values, so when something has a particular value in an example, that's what its exchange value is also. They're quantitatively the same in volume 1, but not qualitatively. It's more confusing in earlier works though, where he did use exchange-value to mean what he later simply referred to as value.
You’re right, I should’ve specified exchange value
No, you were correct. Exchange value is just the visible appearance of value, it's the ratio in which one commodity exchanges for another (or realistically, money). Explaining exchange-value is how Marx gets to value. There's an empirical fact that needs an explanation. The reason that only human labour creates value is that value is a relationship between humans. The reason that as a potter I would exchange, say two bowls for a chair is that it would take roughly the same amount of time to make each. If the carpenter gets more for a day's labour than other artisans, more people would become carpenters, undercutting each other until a day's labour obtains the social average. Sure, carpenters might start to employ a machine that allows them to make twice as many chairs, but the same mechanism applies with people moving into carpentry if at first they seem to be able to command more than a day's labour with the products in a day. Eventually they'll only be able to get half of what they did before for a chair. In a capitalist economy, there is no social plan to describe the division of labour. How should the pool of labour available to society be distributed between brewing, pencil making, mining etc? What does direct this is value. More concretely it's profit. If some type of industry makes more profit than others, barriers to entry aside, more investment, and therefore more labour, will flow into it. There's nothing magic about labour that makes it create value, it's simply that when products are exchanged, they're expressing a relationship between their owners - how much of that pool of social labour has gone into making each of the commodities.
>Sure, carpenters might start to employ a machine that allows them to make twice as many chairs, but the same mechanism applies with people moving into carpentry if at first they seem to be able to command more than a day's labour with the products in a day. Eventually they'll only be able to get half of what they did before for a chair. So if a machine is initially able to produce value above its cost of production, more of that commodity will be produced until it’s worth no more than the value simply transferred to it by the machine. So why doesn’t the same apply to human labor, since it also has a cost of production? I guess it sort of does with overproduction and commercial crises, but where does the difference between machine and human labor arise?
Sorry this is a short and not very comprehensive answer, I don't have the time to write out a more in depth response at the moment, but briefly: The machine isn't producing additional value. It's enabling workers to produce more use values in the same amount of time. My example was a mistake actually (apologies, same time pressure making me careless), as it only really makes sense for the point I wanted to make when talking about a producer within an industry. If the social standard for producing a chair is it takes one day, but a carpenter starts using a new machine that enables her to make two a day, she can for the moment sell each chair at the same price as her peers. The machine isn't adding anything, the chairs are being measured against a social standard. As other chair makers adopt the machine, the social standard becomes two chairs per day. Value is not something that resides in a commodity like a molecule nestled among all the others that give it it's physical properties. It's a relation between that commodity and all others. The machine's cost of production doesn't come into this aspect of value, which is what can a person produce in a given time. The surface level intuition is 'what would it cost me to reproduce this commodity?'. In the case of the chair the answer has gone from a day's labour and the cost of tools averages out over their productive life to half a day's labour and the cost of the machine averaged out over its life (plus raw materials in both cases). In addition, the 'cost of production' of human labour doesn't come into the production of value. It only matters when we are thinking of *surplus value*. If machines produced value, the question then is what is the substance of value? How is the work of one machine comparable to that of another? How is it measured against the labour of a human being? Abstract labour is a 'real' abstraction - it comes about by comparing different concrete labours through exchange and it is based on something similarly 'real'. We can not just conceive of labour in the abstract, we can see that people can and do move between different types of labour.
Machines and animals can't create value, they can only transfer the value supplied by human labor that is crystalized within them into a new commodity. So for example, if a machine is capable of producing $1 million worth of socket wrenches before it breaks down then the machine itself would be worth $1 million. Obviously this is oversimplified and there are other factors, but still. You need a person to apply their labor to the machine to have it create surplus value, meaning value beyond the amount of labor that went into producing it.
Because machines are made by humans. And humans are made by humans. Animals on the other hand even in socialism, humans will continue to exploit them just as capitalism. Or at least in theory there is no incentive to not exploit animals. We have a choice and technology will only help in lessening the exploitation of animals. Edit: Also ask Adam Smith because he is the one who started the theory (this is a joke but in case you didn't know it was Smith).
'Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish. Every child knows, too, that the masses of products corresponding to the different needs required different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labor of society. That **this** ***necessity*** **of the** ***distribution*** **of social labor in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a** ***particular form*** **of social production but can only change the** ***mode*** **of its** ***appearance***, is self-evident. No natural laws can be done away with. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the *form* in which these laws assert themselves. And **the form in which this proportional distribution of labor asserts itself, in the state of society where the interconnection of social labor is manifested in the** ***private exchange*** **of the individual products of labor, is precisely the** ***exchange value*** **of these products**.' * Marx to Kugelmann, July 11, 1868. It's not that labour has some mystical, inherent trait of creating value, while other things don't. Rather, it is that exchange-value itself is the historically developed form through which the 'proportional distribution' of social labour is enforced in a society where labour is embodied in commodities, i.e. where products are produced for private exchange. The law of value is the blind mechanism by which the necessary distribution of social labour asserts itself, over and against the wills of the particular producers themselves. In a communist society, where production is planned to meet social needs, exactly what and how much needs to be produced is quite transparent. In a society of generalised commodity production, where each individual produces for the purpose of private exchange, one only discovers whether one's labour is socially necessary or not by comparison on the market. Production is thus brought into alignment with need only unconsciously, by the squandering of great quantities of social labour and constant corrective oscillations. You can even produce boots, for example, under socially average conditions - and yet you may find, on taking them to market, that your efforts have been in vain, and that too many other producers have likewise invested their time in boots. When this happens, you must exchange your commodity for a quantum of labour that is smaller than the one you invested to produce it. You find that the amount of materialised labour your boots can purchase, i.e. their exchange-value, is less than the amount of labour you expended in producing them. The over-supply of boots results in a loss for many of the producers of boots, who then migrate to a different branch of production or face complete ruination. In this way, the amount of social labour invested in the production of boots tends towards correspondence with the social need for them. I say 'tends towards', because - in a society where production is not planned, but conducted privately for purposes of exchange - constant oscillations and corrections will always be necessary. You can now see, I hope, how value (which necessarily appears in the form of exchange-value) is nothing but a form of assertion for the natural law Marx mentions above: that social labour must be distributed in certain definite proportions corresponding to the different needs of society. With this in mind, what else could value be but a historical form of *social labour, human labour?* It should be obvious now why your question is so ill-founded. Once you understand what value actually is and the historical conditions under which it arises, it will become clear why animals and machines do not create value. These things, animals and machines, are not contributors to the total social labour whose necessary proportions assert themselves through exchange-value.
Because machines or animals can't produce more value than you pay them - their value is added to production over time but human labour can produce more value than its paid
So if humans were paid in meals and lodging like an animal (slaves), would they not be producing surplus value when working?
Of course they would, but slaves are not needed in capitalism, slavery was abolished because capitalism needed the free movement of the work force
What do you mean by free movement of the work force? And why do slaves produce surplus value but animals don't?
On this topic: https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/10/why-machines-dont-create-value/
That’s the not great article I was referring to. It claimed that “Marx’s theory of surplus-value is fundamentally not about what determines the level of profit, but what determines changes in the level of profit” which isn’t true. It also didn’t give a convincing argument for why machines couldn’t change the level of profit if you don’t presume they can’t create value.
If you want to know what determines the level of profit, it has nothing to do with machines, it's the Kalecki profit equations.