Exchange value

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As exchange value is known in the industry , the proportion in which goods to markets , in barter or exchange contracts against each exchanged are. The exchange values ​​are based on the value of the goods .

General

According to the labor theory of value, the value of a commodity is determined by the labor that is necessary to produce this commodity, whereby it is not the individual labor time of the respective worker , but the average socially necessary labor . Exchange value was originally a term used in classical economics of the 18th and 19th centuries, but today this term is almost exclusively used in Marxist economics . The commercial value of the goods is expressed in the offer price , which is made up of material costs , personnel costs and profit margin . Depending on supply and demand , the market prices or purchase prices to be achieved on the market oscillate around the actual exchange value of the goods in question. The respective quantity of goods to be exchanged must offset each other in exchange value if the exchange is to be reasonable.

Exchange value in Marxist theory

In accordance with the classical economics of the time, Marx differentiates between the use value and the “value” of a commodity. Use-value consists in the usefulness of a commodity, that is, in the fact that it fulfills some need. The utility value of a shirt is z. B. in protecting from the cold. The use value is inextricably linked with the material properties of the goods: size, material, weight, processing quality, etc. The use value of a product is always the same, regardless of whether I use the product for myself or whether I sell it, which turns it into a commodity. In addition to this tangible use value, there is also the economic category of “value”. As soon as products are exchanged, i.e. traded as goods, one needs a measure of the ratio in which they are exchanged with one another. I want z. B. To exchange shirts for bread, I need to know how many shirts are to be exchanged for how much bread. In accordance with the hitherto classical economy (e.g. Adam Smith, Ricardo), Marx advocates the labor theory of value, according to which the value of a commodity results from the labor time expended in its production. The more labor intensive a product is, the more value it has.

This “value” is not a property that is inherent in products, such as weight, size, etc., but is a property that society ascribes to goods. The “value” category is therefore only needed in societies in which products are exchanged as goods. In contrast, societies in which individuals or groups produce (only) for their own use, it can be irrelevant whether and what “value” the things have. The only thing that matters to them is their use value. Since, according to Marx, a market no longer exists in a communist society, but society as a whole produces for its own needs, the category “value” no longer has any meaning in communism. “Value” is - unlike “use value” - only a historically valid category.

The “exchange value” can be distinguished from this “value” as a kind of substance. Exchange value is the manifestation of value, its expression. The value has to be expressed somehow. In a society based on the exchange of goods - which is only the case in perfection in modern bourgeois society - value must in practice take the form of exchange value. Today we have got used to expressing the exchange value of a commodity in money, e.g. B. "1 shirt is worth 10 euros". But how does this expression of money even come about? Marx examines this in the first chapter of the first volume of his work Das Kapital . He claims to have been the first to even investigate the question of why the value of a commodity is represented in the form of money.

In Capital, to explain this form of money, Marx develops a series of stages of different forms of value : simple form of value (commodity A serves as the equivalent of a quantity of commodity B) to the form of a general equivalent (of money). Whether it is a purely logical sequence of the various forms of value, or whether it is (also) a historical description, in the sense that the simple form of value was only valid in earlier, simple exchange societies, is very controversial among Marxists .

The category of exchange value is more than just an explanation of mere quantitative proportions: In the section on the so-called fetish character of the commodity in Marx's capital it becomes finally clear that the category of exchange value has a qualitative side, a criticism of the Form of production in which “people see the social characters of their own work as the objective characters of the work products themselves, as natural social properties of these things” (Marx, MEW 23,86). The exchange value arises because the producers, as private producers, mutually exclude each other from their actually social products. People do not exchange their products because they are forced to do so because of the division of labor - that is the view of the bourgeois economy. According to Marx, it is the specifically bourgeois form of the division of labor that leads to the products, which are after all products of social labor, being privatized again with the price tag attached to them, a private form - the value form! - to get.

Exchange values ​​at Hans im Glück

In the Schwank Hans im Glück by the Brothers Grimm , Hans receives a head-sized lump of gold as wages for seven years of work . He exchanges this for a horse, the horse for a cow, the cow for a pig, the pig for a goose, and he gives the goose for a grindstone and a simple field stone. From an economic point of view, he enters into an unfortunate barter, because just exchanging the gold for a horse brings him economic disadvantages. Even if he has the utility value of the received items in mind, from an economic point of view he acted as "Hans in misfortune".

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