This Time Not on Anyone's Behalf -- A Discussion with Yunguzi on What Value Is!

Yunguzi recently dug out the bottom of his trunk from over 30 years of research, apparently with grand ambitions to topple Marx. But unfortunately, many of his understandings are incorrect. This kind of incorrectness is actually very common. Regarding Miss Chan's proof, it now appears that whatever rebuttals can be raised are all inconsequential. I will have sufficient patience to accept all queries, because truth fears no questions. The same goes for the issue of Marx's value. But this time I'm not speaking on anyone else's behalf -- let me share some of my own understanding of the value category, hoping to cast a brick to attract jade.

Value is a historical category. Its essence is the totality of relations between people in the social structure. Any category can be examined from both qualitative and quantitative aspects. On the qualitative side, it is the intrinsic determinacy of relations between people in the social structure. On the quantitative side, it manifests in exchange as the exchange ratio between exchanged objects. The quantitative aspect of value is also called exchange value.

What then is price? Price is the monetization of value. Some may ask: wasn't there price before currency existed? In fact, currency is also a historical category. The historical process of value taking the price form is the historical process of monetization. There is no issue of "no price before currency existed."

On the qualitative side of value, since it is the intrinsic determinacy of relations between people in the social structure, it reflects the relations between people in the social structure. The general relations between people correspond to abstract labor in the general human sense, while the particular relations between people (that is, activities between specific individuals, etc.) correspond to concrete labor in the particular sense. Abstract labor determines the general determinacy on the qualitative side of value, while concrete labor determines the particular determinacy on the qualitative side -- namely, use value.

From the above it's not hard to see that Marx's value structure is very clear. It examines the value category from the standpoint of social totality, not from isolated phenomena or certain a priori premises as ordinary people do. Without standing on the standpoint of social totality and historical categories, it is impossible to truly understand Marx's labor theory of value -- note, not the labor theory of value in general, but Marx's specifically. It should also be emphasized that since many later so-called Marxists fundamentally didn't understand Marx's labor theory of value, the distinctions must be made clear.

In one sentence: Marx's labor theory of value is the necessary conclusion of Marx's historical materialism. Only by standing on historical materialism can one truly understand Marx's labor theory of value. And what is commonly called historical materialism has long been castrated into a few so-called principles -- that has nothing to do with Marx!