Sunday, July 1, 2018

Labor-Value and Personal-Value

The Labor-Value of a commodity is generally conceived to be an objective property of the commodity.  However, the concept of Exploitation, according to which, that Value belongs to the Laborer whose exertion is its source, thus entails that that objective property includes components that transcend the commodity itself.  Now, insofar as the Labor that is embodied in the commodity is produced by some impersonal mechanical process, e. g. pressing a button on a machine, that additional component is similarly impersonal.  But, the more skilled the process, the more personal that component becomes.  So, just as part of a child is parental genetic factors, and a work of Art can reflect the distinctiveness of its creator, a constituent of Labor-Value can be what can be called Personal-Value.  Indeed, once that possibility is taken into consideration, Labor-Value in general can be conceived as including Personal-Value, of which an instance of apparent detachment of Labor-Value from subjective contribution is actually a special case.

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