The value of commodities as determined by labour time is only their average value. This average appears as an external abstraction if it is calculated out as the average figure of an epoch, e.g. 1 lb. of coffee = 1s. if the average price of coffee is taken over 25 years; but it is very real if it is at the same time recognized as the driving force and the moving principle of the oscillations which commodity prices run through during a given epoch. This reality is not merely of theoretical importance: it forms the basis of mercantile speculation, whose calculus of probabilities depends both on the median price averages which figure as the centre of oscillation, and on the average peaks and average troughs of oscillation above or below this centre.
Grundrisse, Penguin (trans. Nicolaus) p.137
Average value as an external abstraction today, which is not merely of theoretical importance. Average value of commods, average value of labour time, average figure of an epoch, average price of coffee, average peaks and average troughs. Of coffee.
There is an average value of coffee over a period of twenty-five years – an epoch, no less – and this twenty-five year average value appears as an external abstraction. External to what? External to coffee perhaps, or external to the epoch, or external to the society who finds this average figure applied to them? External to the point. Ok, but it is very real when we recognize that this external abstraction is also the force behind all the oscillations of the price of coffee in our epoch.
Well, if it looks like a real abstraction, and if it smells like a real abstraction… it’s probably a duck. The abstraction known as the average value of commods as determined by labour time is a real one. A very real one. The following grammar suggests that it is the realness of the abstraction that is significant, maybe rather than the abstraction-ness. [The reality] forms the basis of mercantile speculation. So there is an average value of the coffeecommod, which is determined by labour time; this average value is a real abstraction when we’re talking at the level of an epoch. So that suggests to me that it may not be a real abstraction when talking about smaller levels, so – although I’m not sure how this would go – like a week or something. Here it needs to be long term. I wonder if this might have changed with the speed of transactions or not – I think Marx is identifying the ability of the average commod price to have an effect on the oscillations which commodity prices run through during a given epoch, so I would have thought that if you have knowledge of the current average at your fingertips that would change things rather from the average being something you could only work out from time to time. This is not massively effective as a line of inquiry as I have no knowledge about what sort of access a coffeecommod trader might have had in the nineteenth century to information about average prices, and have no corresponding knowledge about now, other than the certainty that it will involve computers and quite possibly algorithms.
So, the abstraction needs to be long term and it depends on full information about real prices in the given period in order to calculate the median price as well as the average peaks and average troughs of oscillation either side of the median. I’m not sure if this data can then act on future prices because of its averageness theoretically, as it were, or if the averages have to be known by people who are consciously then trading on the basis of their knowledge. I would have thought this stuff would need to be known by people but who the fuck knows really. Maybe it should just be called magic abstraction and we can all just fuck off and draw some nice pictures. The next section is all about market value equating itself with real value by some sort of Hegelian deception, whereby it looks as though the real value might just be theoretical anyway. But for that I suppose Volume 3 is required because I still haven’t the faintest idea what value has got to do with price, since all the things that might cause a divergence between value and price seem to have been held still for 2 volumes so far. Don’t mention the war.
Alright, well, without any notion of algorithms or what’s involved in being a commods trader other than that you have to be a cock, it seems reasonable to assert so far that the point of this point is in the averages of prices, as the averages themselves have further effects on real prices right now. Which would mean I would have thought that this could all break down if you had incomplete or inaccurate data, but who knows how specific it needs to be?
External versus real; the abstraction we have come to know and love as the average value of commods as determined by labour time appears to be external, but as soon as you recognize it as a motive force of the epochal oscillations in commod prices then it’s real too. He doesn’t really rule out that the abstraction is still external – maybe it was just initially external in an inadequate way, and then its relationship back to the averages was asserted and it therefore was also real. So the external-ness isn’t the problem in itself, but it would be if it wasn’t combined with the relationship back to having an effect on the average prices now. This sounds reminiscent of (oh how much fun it is to reminisce about other ideas in Marx, the fun we had! the laughs and the jolly japes) present labour working on past, dead, labour all the time, that what has already happened in the past gives the ground of what is happening in the present. So here, the prices of the last 25 years aren’t like some irrelevance that’s done and gone, they are actually operating (in some way) on the present value of the coffeecommod. This isn’t the same, I suppose, as the dead labour embodied in the object of present labour but there does seem to be something in common in the idea of the conditions that have already been formed being the conditions of what goes on in the present.
Into Ruins 