Unfortunately Marcos Fred said the exact opposite in the supplement
to Vol III under the section "Law of Value and the rate of profit"
although he obviously uses down to instead of the conventional up to.

L&W 74 pg 900

" thus the Marxian law of value has general economic validity for a
period lasting from the beginning of exchange which transforms
products into commodities down to the 15th century of the present
era. But the exchange of commodities dates from a time before all
written history...............thus the law of value has prevailed
during a period of from five to seven thousand years."

I don't think capitalism has been around that long, having said that
it could perhaps explain why Karl said in volume III that ancient
slaves produced surplus value. Irony.

The reason it fell apart in the 15th century i presume is because
of capitalism and the interfering effect of the average rate of
profit but perhaps he is more likely refering to the effect of the
merchants. Fred goes further than I would dare on this.

Dan as far as your other points are concerned i am sure i have
covered them in earliar posts and feel i am going around in circles.

Good luck with capital Vol I as to vol II i found it incrediblely
boring mostly and i think you can go from I to III without missing
anything.

Marcos I really liked your lenin quote.

"It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and
especially the first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and
understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a century
later, none of the Marxists understood Marx!!"


'Philosophical Notebooks' Collected Works Volume 38 p180

I am deeply prejudiced against all things leninist and it shows my
desparation when i almost resorted to calling Lenin himself to my
defence. Fortunately i stopped myself in time.

[Petersen erroneously assumes … that articles have Value simply
because
human labor is expended in their production. But products (or for
that
matter labour-power) have no value until they become commodities.

dave in vt. comments:

But now he apparently agrees with Dave B.'s explanations at 29376
that
value (as measured by socially necessary labor time embodied in an
object) will exist under socialism. I am not going to get into who
was zigging and zagging and whose position was correct when – the
thiung that hopefully has emerged from this discussion is apparent
agreement on the concept that even under socialism value (as measured
by socially necessary labor time embodied in an object) will exist.

I think where some confusion exists is in the terminology:]

There is and a quite understandable one. I don't know where Petersen
was coming from but if he had said "But products (or for that matter
labour-power) have no EXCHANGE value until they become
commodities." I could agree with it but that is only a bit like
saying something doesn't have a price until it is decided to sell it.

The statement that the value of an artefact is the amount of
socially necessary labour embodied in it is not a law it is a
definition as Karl says on the 4th page "Value as defined above". A
scientific law is a "generalization based on a recurring fact or
event", Laws govern and describe how things that have been defined
behave, normally within the parameters of cause and effect . Thus
laws have a predictive capacity otherwise they are quite useless.

The Law of Value governs how and in what proportion artefacts are
exchanged, their exchange value. The law says that the relatives
proportions at which artefacts are exchanged, "the recurring fact or
event" are dependent on the amounts of socially necessary labour
embodied in them, its value.

"Starting with this determination of value by labor-time, the whole
of commodity production developed, and with it, the multifarious
relations in which the various aspects of the law of value assert
themselves, as described in the first part of Vol.I of Capital; that
is, in particular, the conditions under which labor alone is value-
creating"

and



"In a word: the Marxian law of value holds generally, as far as
economic laws are valid at all, for the whole period of simple
commodity production — that is, up to the time when the latter
suffers a modification through the appearance of the capitalist form
of production. Up to that time, prices gravitate towards the values
fixed according to the Marxian law and oscillate around those
values, so that the more fully simple commodity production develops,
the more the average prices over long periods uninterrupted by
external violent disturbances coincide with values within a
negligible margin. Thus, the Marxian law of value has general
economic validity for a period lasting from the beginning of
exchange, which transforms products into commodities"

Capital Volume III
Supplement
by Frederick Engels
Introduction

Thus the law of value applies to commodity production and
commodities ONLY, products that are produced for sale, exchange.
What the law says is that the price of a commodity will be governed
by its value. That sounds a bit daft, but it isn't because a law is
a "generalization based on a recurring fact or event" and with it
being a generalization does not always have to be obeyed.

Why do we need a definition at all, because the meaning of value as
has been clearly demonstrated here has been clouded in mystery. Thus

"their own consciousness of the value-measuring property of labor
had been fairly well dimmed by the habit of reckoning with money; in
the popular mind, money began to represent absolute value."

There will be no law of value in an exchange-less free access
socialism, but as long as we continue to make things they will have
value as Karl defined it, as that is what value is,irrespective of
whether or not we measure or pay attention to it. Then that might
just become an existentialist argument.

Thus again end of cahapter 49 Vol III-:


"Secondly, after the abolition of the capitalist mode of production,
but still retaining social production, the determination of value
continues to prevail in the sense that the regulation of labour-time
and the distribution of social labour among the various production
groups, ultimately the book-keeping encompassing all this, become
more essential than ever".

Well you can agree with that or not but for me it creates no
contradiction or problem.

In the labour voucher system, retaining exchange, however unlike
free access socialism the law of value becomes more important than
ever.