Тауарлардың айырбас құндылығының пропорциясы

Proportion of worth at which a commodity can be traded for other commodities

In political economy and especially Marxian economics, exchange value (Tauschwert) refers to one of the four major attributes of a commodity, i. e., an item or service produced for, and sold on the market, the other three attributes being use value, economic value, and price. Thus, a commodity has the following:
a value, represented by the socially necessary labour time to produce it (Note: the first link is to a non Marxian definition of value);
a use value (or utility);
an exchange value, which is the proportion at which a commodity can be exchanged for other entities;
a price (an actual selling price, or an imputed ideal price). These four concepts have a very long history in human thought, from Aristotle to David Ricardo, and became more clearly distinguished as the development of commercial trade progressed but have largely disappeared as four distinct concepts in modern economics. This entry focuses on Karl Marx's summation of the results of economic thought about exchange value.

Marx regards exchange value as the proportion in which one commodity is exchanged for other commodities. For Marx, exchange value is not identical to the money price of a commodity. Actual money prices (or even equilibrium prices) will only ever roughly correspond to exchange values. The relationship between exchange value and price is analogous to the relationship between the exact measured temperature of a room and the everyday awareness of that temperature from feeling alone. Thus, Marx did not regard divergence between the two as a refutation of his theory. The value of a good is determined by the socially necessary labour time required to produce it. Marx believed that an understanding of exchange value was necessary to explain fluctuations in price. Exchange value does not need to be expressed in money prices necessarily (for example, such as in countertrade: x amount of goods p are worth y amounts of goods q). Marx makes this abundantly clear in his dialectical derivation of the forms of value in the first chapters of Das Kapital (see value form). It was only in the 13th century AD when the word price came into use in Western Europe, its Latin root being pretium, meaning "reward, prize, value, worth", referring back to the notion of "recompense", or what was given in return, the expense, wager or cost incurred when a good changed hands. Its verb meaning "to set the price of" was used only from the 14th century onwards. Its evolving linguistic meanings reflect the early history of the growing cash economy and the evolution of commercial trade. Nowadays the meaning of price is obvious and self evident, and it is assumed that prices are all one of a kind. This is with respect to how money has become used ubiquitously for nearly all transactions. But in fact there are many different kinds of prices, some of which are actually charged, and some of which are only "notional prices". Although a particular price may not refer to any real transaction, it can nevertheless influence economic behavior, as people have become accustomed to valuing and calculating exchange value in terms of prices, using money (see real prices and ideal prices).

In volumes I and II of Capital, Marx usually assumed that exchange values were equal to values, and that prices were proportional to values. He was talking about overall movements and broad averages, and his interest was in the social relations of production existing behind economic exchange. However, he was quite conscious of the distinction between the empirical and microeconomic concept of prices (or exchange values) and the social concept of value. In fact he completed the draft of volume 3 of Das Kapital before he published volume 1. Despite this, the fruitless search for a quantitative relationship allowing the logical derivation of prices from values (a labor theory of price) with the aid of mathematical functions has occupied many economists, producing the famous transformation problem literature. If, however, prices can fluctuate above or below value for all sorts of reasons, Marx's law of value is best seen as a "law of grand averages", an overall generalisation about economic exchange, and the quantitative relationships between labour hours worked and real prices charged for an output are best expressed in probabilistic terms. One might ask, how can "value" be transformed into "price" if a commodity by definition already has a value and a price? To understand this, one needs to recognise the process whereby products move into markets and are withdrawn from markets. Outside the market, not being offered for sale or being sold, commodities have at best a potential or hypothetical price. But for Marx prices are formed according to pre existing product values which are socially established prior to their exchange. Marx sought to theorise the transformation of commodity values into prices of production within capitalism dialectically, as a "moving contradiction": namely, in capitalism, the value of a commodity output produced encompassed both the equivalent of the cost of the used inputs which were initially bought to produce it, as well as a gross profit component (surplus value) which became definite and manifest only after the commodity has been sold and paid for, and after costs were deducted from sales. Value was, as it were, suspended between the past and the future. An output with a certain value was produced, but exactly how much of that value would be subsequently realised upon sale in markets was usually not known in advance. Yet, that potential value also strongly affected the sales income that producers could get from it, and moreover that value was determined not by individual enterprises, but by all enterprises producing the same type of output for a given market demand ("the state of the market"). The business results of each enterprise were influenced by the overall effects created by all enterprises through their productive activity, as an ongoing process. This simple "market reality" has stumped many of Marx's interpreters though; they fail to see that value is conserved, transferred and added to by living labor, between the initial purchase of inputs with money on the one side, and the subsequent sale of outputs for more money, on the other. They see only input prices and output prices, or cost prices and sale prices, and not the creation of a product which already has a value prior to being exchanged at a certain price a value which is moreover socially determined by a group of enterprises together, and which sets limits for price fluctuations. For that reason, the whole process of the formation of value which Marx so carefully lays out, with its complex determinants, seems like an unnecessary detour from commercial wisdom. If, however, we wish to understand the "deep structure" of market behavior, then we rapidly confront all the issues that Marx was concerned with.

In modern neoclassical economics, exchange value itself is no longer explicitly theorised. The reason is that the concept of money price is deemed sufficient in order to understand trading processes and markets. Exchange value thus becomes simply the price for which a good will trade in a given market which is identical to what Marx refers to as price. These trading processes are no longer understood in economics as social processes involving human giving and taking, getting and receiving, but as technical processes in which rational, self interested economic actors negotiate prices based on subjective perceptions of utility. Market realities are therefore understood in terms of supply and demand curves which sets price at a level where supply equals demand. Professor John Eatwell criticizes this approach as follows: