I got into a minor disagreement with Foucault is Dead about Marx in this post over there. FiD argues that Marx is an essentialist, particularly about use value. Connected to this, FiD rejects the concepts of use value, exchange value, and surplus value. I don’t understand FiD’s supporting argument, in part because FiD is drawing on works by Baudrillard that I haven’t read and using concepts I don’t get.
The best reconstruction I can give of FiD’s argument is that FiD thinks Marx is reifying or naturalizing human needs in a way which implies an essentialist picture of what a human is and which in doing so imports – and in doing so, universalizes – a value laden concept of humanity, one which is actually contingent, relative and historical. FiD takes this argument from Baudrillard, and rejects the idea of use value because it is supposed to imply between needed use values and non-need use values. This is a misreading of Marx, as all use values are needed, by definition, and Marx doesn’t stipulate types or gradients of use values. He admits any need – “needs of whatever kind (…) whether arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference” in terms of their being use values. Anything which can be used by someone to do some activity has the use value of being useable in that activity. Marx does not list any criteria for the uses of objects in activities. Pick an activity. An object used in that activity will have the use value of being usable in that activity. One could say that this makes use value banal or tautological, but it’s not a matter of essentialism. Marx simply doesn’t address and doesn’t seem particularly interested in qualities inherent in objects when he talks about use values. He just looks at what people and have done with objects.
I’ve been doing a quick(ish) reread v1 of Capital recently, in preparation for finally finishing v2 and reading v3. I found some passages that support an argument that Marx isn’t an essentialist about use value. (Just to note, this isn’t the best argument in my view. The best argument in my view is that it doesn’t matter if Marx is an essentialist or not, that it’s the arguments not capital ‘M’ Marx – the theme, not the name, as Angela once said to me – that really matter. Those arguments, which are a selection from and interpretation of Marx, who wrote a lot and developed over the course of his career, are what matter and have some utility. Even if Marx was an essentialist, we could productively read him against the grain on this. Put differently, the best argument would emphasize that what one can do with Marx is much more interesting than the marxological question of the essence of Marx or what Marx’s intentions were for his own work or what Marx really meant. That said, I have a marxological inclination and I do care about what Marx meant, having a perhaps unreasonable affection for the old kraut, and so I proceed with what is not the best argument but I think one which holds.)
New commodities with new use values can and do arise over the course of time, the new commodity “is the product of a new kind of labour, and claims to satisfy a newly arisen need, or is even trying to bring forth a new need on its own account.” (201, Penguin edition.) Needs are what makes something count as a use value for Marx. Since new needs arise and old needs can pass away, needs and therefore use values are not fixed but dynamic.
Needs vary. “[T]he number and extent of (…) so-called necessary requirements, as also the manner in which they are satisfied, are themselves products of history (…) they depend on the habits and expectations with which” the individuals who have these needs have been formed. Marx is concerned with workers, but the point extends to capitalists as well (as in Marx’s discussion of hoarding and misers). Individuals are historically produced or conditioned, and this historical production varies geographically (Marx specifies “by country”, I would also add “by social strata”, in keeping with Marx’s remarks about the make up or composition of the class in terms of men, women, and children, among other factors). Needs are not fixed. Therefore use values required to reproduce labor power – means of subsistence – are not fixed. This is why “the determination of the value of labour-power contains a historical and moral element.” (275.) Marx does specify that the average means of subsistence is knowable, but this is not an essentialist claim.
(Marx does not specify the total set of factors involved in the historical production or conditioning of individuals. One might object to this, stating that it’s incomplete or insufficient. It is not, however, an essentialist claim. The point of the claim of the historical conditioned-ness of individuals, like much of Marx’s claims about capitalism, is simply that the qualities in question came into being at some point in time and could pass away, that individuals and society are not always already as they are at present. Part of how individuals are produced is through consumption: “the product of individual consumption is the consumer” [290, just as “the usefulness of tailoring consists” in terms of use values “in making clothes, thus also people”, 150].)
Use value for Marx is a multiple. That is, one use value always co-exists with others. Every object is “capable of being applied to different uses” (288). It is the application of an object to some use by some user – or, more simply, it is the use of an object – which makes clear that the object has any given use value. Use values are retroactively posited after uses. Marx’s focus in terms of use values is more on varying practices of use than on objects. Marx is concerned with the latter in relation to the former, not the reverse.
So no essentialism here. If I had the motivation I’d try to expand this further as an argument against any need to talk about ontology in relation to Marx.
(Note to self, go over this passage later: The labor contained in a commodity “is past labour; and it is of no importance that the labour expended to produce its constituent elements lies further back in the past than the labour expended on the final process (…) The former stands, as it were, in the pluperfect, the latter in the perfect tense, but this does not matter.” 294.)
crashcourse666 
I am entirely in agreement with you, as opposed to FiD: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=454
hi Steve,
Thanks for the link. I’m curious, where does the Baudrillard quote come from? I know it’s not fair to read a lot into short quotes, but when B writes against “the hypothesis of a concrete value beyond the abstraction of exchange-value” he seems to be saying there is only exchange value, which is to say, naturalizing capitalism. That’s the essentialist move here – pretty much the one Marx criticizes in the classical political economists he draws from – rather than Marx being the essentialist.
For what it’s worth, I do disagree with you on two points. First, that “It is only when things are commodities, produced for exchange rather than direct consumption — that is to say, when they have exchange-values — that they can be said to have use-values as well.” And second that “The use-value of a commodity is the way it embodies “my way, for today” – so that I feel impelled to buy it.”
On the first, I think it does make sense to say that use value arose as a term only with exchange value or something like that. Sort of like how it’s only from a point after the start of capitalism that we can look back and indicate some time as “pre-capitalism” and it’s only by contrast with capitalized/capitalst spaces and times that we could point to (or posit) others as noncapitalist. That does not mean, though, that noncapitalist is only a function of capitalist or that after capitalism we might not still have occasional recourse to the term “non-capitalist” in describing our communist society.
On the second, it seems to me that what you indicate – use value is why we buy the commodity – is true, but this is a subset of total use value (a total which can’t be exhaustively listed, I’d say). Use value also includes the reason(s) why one makes an object or an experience – like the use value(s) of this conversation, for instance – without direct purchase. It also includes reasons why one might steal an object instead of buying it, like with pirating of music etc.
take care,
Nate
ps- I wrote a post on this a while back, in conversation with Tim from Voyou Desouvre (sp?), here http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2006/01/04/is-unmediated-use-value/ where I had linked to the post you linked to, but then I forgot about it. I think you and Tim are on the same page to some extent.
In Capital Marx argues that “use-values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth” (p. 43)…what part of this is essentialist quite beyond me. It seems more and more to me that Marx’s work on values reflects a differential ontology similar to that of Spinoza–where substance, modification, and expression are used, in a non-Hegelian fashion–that is, without any kind of idealism or essentialism. Hmmm…Have to think more on this.
I was also thinking about Negri’s discussion of small-scale circulation (following Marx’s example that English proletariats “require” beer while French proletariats “need” wine) in Marx beyond Marx. Might be useful to the debate…
ciao, comrade
hi Matt,
I’m more than a bit hesitant about pegging Marx to any ontological or other metatheoretical commitments. I think Marx’s work is sort of ontologically indeterminate or ontologically indifferent such that different views can plug in to it (or it can stand without an ontology). That’s not to say that no good work can be done within any of those frameworks, quite the opposite. I like some of Negri’s stuff very much and I also like John Holloway, who is (and reads Marx as) very Hegelian.
Do you have a reference for the Negri stuff? I read Marx Beyond Marx ages ago and remember little of it.
I’m agreed that Marx isn’t an essentialist, though. I mean, there be some Marxes who are, but why limit ourselves to those limited Marxes?
take care,
Nate
Hi Nate, if I may, I think there is a difference between use value in general (which Marx is unconcerned with) and the use value of commodities. The use value of an apple as you said before could be as a missile but the use value of the apple commodity isn’t, which is why there is no comparison between apple commodity production and crab apple commodity production (its product equally useful as missiles). What Marx is concerned to do here is explain what a commodity is. He says, it’s a good with two features or aspects; it’s a clump of concrete properties (use value) produced by concrete labour, and a quantity of abstract exchange value deriving from abstract labour. That something produced as a commodity (apples) whose (dominant social) use value is edibility or juicibility – use values which will mark and impact forcefully on apple-commodity production and distribution, which will be determining factors impacting on the capitalist apple industry, and even influence technological development in it – can be put to another use by the individualist stepping from the pages of marginalist fables (the hero of neoclassical econ), seems to be a diversion from Marx’ hypothesising of these two aspects of commodities and proposing the labour theory of value in which they are deployed. I don’t think he is attempting psychoanalysis or interested in the individual’s quest for fulfillment in the dazzling marketplace, etc.; in the discussion of commodities and their value, use value is a social fact, and a political fact, and he’s trying to explain how social production happens in capitalism (how social needs are created and met, how labour is organised in reproduction of the material world), for which explanation a concept of use value – something both found in nature and the product of labour – that is not at all some utopian alternative to exchange value but addresses the concrete properties of things produced in this arrangement, is I think more important to emphasise than the personalised and psychologised notion of desire gratification and whimsy which always comes dressed in carnival attire and eccentricity (“my way for now”). The biggest realisers of use values are not individuals but institutions engaged in industrial production – Sony is not subject to whims regarding its realisation of coltan’s and labour’s use value. The various things one could do with rice – throw it at weddings, use it for calculations, sabotage machinery – doesn’t tell us too much about rice as a commodity, but its use value as food is really important to its story as commodity and this is the story Marx is trying to tell using this concept.
I’m glad Matt invoked Spinoza’s substance and the idea of differentials, as it opens onto the so-called postmodern critique of Marx perfectly. In Organs Without Bodies, Zizek notes that Spinoza’s substance has a name: God. This signifier indicates no positive content whatsoever, it merely designates our ignorance of what this substance really is. So the differential metaphysics comes at a price: identity is forced upwards to either the divine, or, the empty signifier.
In terms of Marx and use-value, identity is likewise forced onto the human individual. And, for me, this gesture is a reification, even if the needs of that individual are in flux rather than being fixed by some sort of eternal human essence.
Here’s a question: would it not be possible for me to create an (imaginary) object in the privacy of my own home/mind which is a useless object to me, except that I now write about it in this comment thread in order to illustrate a point? In other words, this would be another version of Russell’s paradox. The Useless Object has a use-value for me, in that I use it in an argument, even though it is otherwise useless. The Marxian response to this sort of game-playing must be somewhat like when Freud advised his patients that even those dreams which did not aim at wish fulfilment in fact aimed at fulfiling the unconscious wish to prove his theory wrong. So if Marx isn’t taking us towards metaphysics, then perhaps the only path left is psychoanalysis!
hi FiD, Colonel,
FiD, I don’t read Zizek so I don’t understand the claim about Spinoza. As I understand Spinoza, there is a positive content, so to speak – god is nature is the world, panentheism. What do you mean by identity? I don’t what you mean by the term and I don’t understand what you mean when you identity is forced in some direction.
I don’t think you could, for Marx, create a useless object (like a piece of automatic writing, say) if you then used it in an argument here. If you used it in that or some other way, it would have the use value of being so used. So no paradox there. Of course, you could also _not_ use the item that way. Like a tissue after you’ve blown your nose in itor something, which you then don’t use but throw away. That object might be said to have no use value (unless someone did use it or find a use for it, then it would – one might argue that the company that handles your trash does indeed have a use for it, since it forms a fraction of the total quantity of material they’re contracted to handle). None of this provides any problem for or criticism of Marx.
Colonel, I don’t think Marx is concerned with use values much at all – it’s part of why he leaves them largely undetermined and unaddressed – except for the use of being a bearer of labor time. So with Sony etc type examples he’s not talking about technical factors when he’s talking about capitalism, or rather, he talks about them only as secondary to and functional for capital (the labor process is subordinate to the valorization process). For the capitalist any quality whatsoever will do – as long as there is some quality – to be the bearer of value, of labor time. In a sense, then, capitalism could be said to be anti-essentialist, being indifferent to any qualities at all. (This is one of the smarter things I think Hardt and Negri say in Empire, by the way, that post-structural critics of capitalism are often pushing on an open door.)
take care,
Nate
“Colonel, I don’t think Marx is concerned with use values much at all – it’s part of why he leaves them largely undetermined and unaddressed – except for the use of being a bearer of labor time.”
But he doesn’t do this; he methodically defines the abstract socially necessary labour as a derivative of only that labour which produces use values. It is the relation of human labour to use values that is the basis of the labour theory of value.
Without this assumption regarding labour’s exclusive ability to produce use values, why would the socially necessary abstract labour time required to make a commodity determine it’s value?
“(This is one of the smarter things I think Hardt and Negri say in Empire, by the way, that post-structural critics of capitalism are often pushing on an open door.)”
(I disagree. I think you can’t take the materialism out of Marxist even to conform to the latest intellectual fashions.)
oh…also, i would venture to say Marx did not spend a lot of time explaining use value because it’s not hard to explain, because it’s straightforward, not because it’s mysterious.
Nate, today Spinoza is celebrated as a thinker of immanence, a thinker who undermines identity in favour of a differential metaphysics, an early poststructuralist even… However, Zizek’s point is that Spinoza develops a very interesting narrative about affects and passions which certainly undermine identity in the ontic sense, but he has to label it all under ONE substance i.e. God. Yet, because Spinoza is undermining identity, this raises the difficult question of what exactly the nature of God’s identity is. Zizek’s point is that, by containing his metaphysics under a tin labelled ‘God’, Spinoza proves that it is really impossible to get away from identity. ‘God’ is an empty signifier because although it appears to be meaningful (being a signifier already associated with religion), in fact, Spinoza could have just used the signifier ‘everything’ instead of God. So why didn’t he?
By ‘identity’, I simply mean something that can be identified. It’s precisely this aspect of identity that Spinoza dodges in relation to God – he knows that if he just uses the completely vague and meaningless signifier ‘everything’ then his whole system will sound ridiculous, so he uses the rhetorical resonance he can get from the use of the signifier ‘God’.
But to identify something, we usually examine its properties. And once we get into examining the properties of things, we are into metaphysics. Now one could identify what a human is by listing human needs. Indeed, the idea of a planned economy suggests that such a process would be necessary to any authentic form of communism. Is Marx a communist? I think he might be. And this process of identifying what a human is according to what a human essentially needs not only leads us into an essentialist metaphysics, but fits in rather neatly with how Marx writes about use-value. As the Colonel says, it’s a very straightforward metaphysics.
Here I must disagree with Steven Shaviro that Baudrillard merely repeats Marx’s view that use-value provides an alibi for exchange-value and that there is no use-value outside of an exchange-value economy. Read the paragraph a couple of pages into Capital Vol 1, which says: “A thing can be a use-value, without having value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows etc. A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use-values, but not commodities.” So how can use-value be immanent to exchange-value if it is possible to create use-values without creating commodities?
Sorry, I meant to write “As the Colonel says, it’s a very straightforward concept”.
hi Colonel, FiD,
I appreciate the engagement.
Colonel, I agree that use value is very straightforward. Use value just means “can be used for”, in relation to some use, and use just means “doing an activity with an object.” I also agree that Marx “defines the abstract socially necessary labour as a derivative of only that labour which produces use values” but I think he leaves use value as a wide open category – a use value is something that satisfies any need whatsoever, whether of the fancy or the belly. (This is part of my objection to FiD, I think that Marx on use value isn’t susceptible to the charge of essentialism precisely because the category is so open – put differently, I think use value is a category of underdetermination in Marx.) To my mind this is valuable because it foregrounds power relations – the needs of capitalists to impose work and maintain and expand their ability to impose work vs the many needs of workers which are precluded by the imposition of work – and because it notes that basically any need – and therefore any good or service which meets that need – is commodifiable at least in theory.
FiD, I’m still not sure I follow, but that’s clearer so thanks. I agree with you in disagreeing with Steve. I read exchange value as a subclass of use value (one which is tremendously important in capitalism), not the reverse. Leaving that aside, I don’t think Marx is engaging in metaphysics. Marx discusses use values in relation to commodities. He’s not listing the properties of things that make them usable. He says basically if someone uses something in some activity then the thing has the use value of being usable in that activity, that’s as far as he goes in examining properties of things with regard to use value. I don’t see that as metaphysical. He also says commodities are usable for a host of purposes (always at least two), but the primary purpose of commodities in capitalism is that they function as bearers of average labor time. That’s his main interest, labor time, and he doesn’t engage in any “process of identifying what a human is according to what a human essentially needs” as a matter of general categories. He does engage with the voices of actual humans who have needs which they express, like needs to sleep and not eat bread with sand mixed in it and so on. That doesn’t involve Marx in any essentialist or metaphysical claim (certainly not in any philosophically interesting or important way), and it doesn’t provide evidence of use value being a moment of essentialism or metaphysics in Marx’s work. I also think Marx’s remark on communism in the German Ideology fits with this interpretation – “communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, (…) makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” Lastly, I don’t think Marx’s communism has much to do with the ‘communism’ of planned economies. At a minimum, Marx’s communism or the communism(s) which can draw upon Marx as an important resource is not reducible to only a planned economy and those who see communism and planning as always identical. Marx is also useful for communism(s) against so-called ‘actually existing communist’ planned economies. I think the chapters on primitive accumulation are one source for a good criticism of planned economies, including capitalist planning. There’s also some very solid works written against the capitalism vs planning distinction, two that come to mind just now one by Raya Dunayevskaya the title of which escapes me (RD poses a difference between capitalist planning and workers’ planning) and one by Raniero Panzieri called “Surplus Value and Planning.” These are connected to the analysis of the USSR etc as state capitalist rather than communist.
take care,
Nate
Thanks Nate.
Marx:
The capitalist buys labour-power in order to use it; and labour-power in use is labour itself. The purchaser of labour-power consumes it by setting the seller of it to work. By working, the latter becomes actually, what before he only was potentially, labour-power in action, a labourer. In order that his labour may re-appear in a commodity, he must, before all things, expend it on something useful, on something capable of satisfying a want of some sort. Hence, what the capitalist sets the labourer to produce, is a particular use-value, a specified article. The fact that the production of use-values, or goods, is carried on under the control of a capitalist and on his behalf, does not alter the general character of that production.
What I don’t see is how you would be able to support the labour theory of value reading “use values” in Capital in a manner significantly different from what seems pretty clear here – that is as something “wide open” and independent of labour, created by individual caprice of the consumer, instead of as concrete properties of commodities produced by labour in a way organised toward a specific result and not especially chaotic, operating within myriad material goal-oriented restraints (this factory, making cars to be used as cars, not capriciously, must acquire glass and steel and rubber; its a constraint; its possible for people to use the cars laundry racks but this possibility doesn’t enter into the organisation of the production or reduce the necessity of employing more labour in the car than in another kind of laundry rack).
That is, expelling this concept of “use values” as something created exclusively by labour, why would the relation of two use values (exchange value) be presumed to be governed by quantity of labour in each? What is it about labour that make people exchange things in such a way that this feature of commodities (an amount of abstract labour) consistently, and no other, comes out even in the exchange?
FiD I don’t know why you say “use value” is “metaphysical” in some way all the other nouns you use – “immanence” “exchange value” “Spinoza” – are not. By ‘identity’, I simply mean something that can be identified. See? There’s no escape.
I’m sorry I phrased my question badly; what I mean is why, given your notion of what is intended by “use value” in Capital, do you think the account of value given by marginal utility is wrong? (if you do; maybe I’m presuming).
Colonel, As far as social ontology goes, I’m cautious about the importing of metaphysical terms. For instance, take Badiou’s claim that “those who have nothing, have nothing but their discipline” – my own, Baudrillardian subversion of this claim is to asser that those who have nothing, have nothing but their credit cards. In other words, Badiou relies here on a metaphysical sense of nothingness, which he assumes it is possible (within some social ontology) to hit upon. Baudrillard, on the other hand, shares Nietzsche’s complicated relationship with metaphysics (see Beyond Good and Evil) which is not an outright rejection of identity, but a playful seduction by the Otherness of language – including the language of metaphysics. So, in fact, I think your question was better phrased in the first instance – no, you are quite correct to point out that there is no escape from identity and metaphysics, but this demands an attention to the problem not a shrugging off. It’s not that Baudrillard or myself believe that talk of use-value is “wrong” in the conventional sense, but Marx’s overly-conventional (in Nietzsche’s language “cold”) use of such a concept IS misguided (and, as Baudrillard notes, privileges the principle of production). Baudrillard himself has used the language of use-value and exchange-value in a playful Nietzschean way, for instance:
“The only solution to the drugs problem is to make drugs a universal medium of exchange, the new general equivalent. That way, they would no longer be consumed. Shifting from use-value to exchange-value, they would become as abstract as gold or paper.”
Nate, I am aware of alternative forms of communism which avoid the idea of a planned economy. Eugene Holland, for instance, has proposed ending the job market in order to strengthen the commodities market as a virtual principle of desire. Instead of individuals applying for the job they “fancy”, individual workers would be assigned different tasks in response to fluxuations in desire and the commodities market. Holland describes this as a soccer-style of labour-division in which roles are fluid rather than in American football, where the rigid roles create a strict division of labour which responds poorly to sudden changes. For me, this is a perfect example of how the same problem in Marx becomes a hundred times worse in various Marxist and post-Marxist thinkers. After all, if we are matching-up the skills of individual workers to changes in the commodities market, then we are reifing those workers i.e. telling them what they are capable of and what they are not capable of. Anyway, that’s just one example of the problems which I see haunting a lot of these post-Marxist ideas.
hi Colonel, FiD,
I’ve met Gene a few times, I like him personally and have a lot of respect for him intellectually and for being supportive to people in a way which isn’t required by someone in his position/stage in academia. But I disagree with him on that idea completely. It just sounds like market socialism, which doesn’t appeal to me. It sounds to me like a permutation of the value form (one involving planning). That’s not at all what I had in mind and I don’t know of passages in Marx which speak of anything like that and I think it’s quite a stretch to read Marx as implying anything like that. So I don’t think that’s a problem in Marx. Among the communisms supportable in Marx, one of those I like is the end of surplus labor and the decoupling of access to use values from labor time, hence the old slogan ‘to each according to need.’ As for metaphysics being inescapable, I don’t understand what you mean here and so I don’t know what you mean when you say Marx is misguided. I don’t think Marx is making any metaphysical claim about use value, at least not in v1 of Capital. That’s part of why Marx can be, so to speak, grafted onto the Spinozian Marxist perspectives, Hegelian Marxist perspectives, and others. There are moments where you might find metaphysical moments and perhaps essentialist moments, particularly in the early works, but it’s not clear that those works have to be read that way (that is, I think you’d be as likely to be interpreting Marx as essentialist/metaphysician as you would be to be actually finding this in Marx), and it would have to be shown that that element is present in the later works of Marx (late 1860s and after). Even if both of these were establishable, it would still have to be demonstrated that this is the only/best reading/use of Marx possible such that folk like me and others who’ve commented here are making a mistake in reading Marx as non- or anti-essentialist.
Colonel, I think the issue is simply that the commodity has to be sellable. If the laborer gets paid to make objects that no one will buy then that’s like paying the worker to stand around, as far as the employer is concerned. So the capitalist needs to produce goods that are usable for something in addition to being the bearer of labor time. What that use is, the employer (qua perfect capitalist) is indifferent to. (One of the first jobs I had after college was a brief stint at a bookstore, in the academic book section. I was excited because I love books, sort of fetishize their physical book-ness such that I enjoy just being around a lot of books. I said something to this effect to the store owner. He said, something like “yeah sure, I guess, but really we’re just selling things. They could be cans of beans for all it matters.” I was a marxist by that point but was quite taken aback that this guy thought that way so straightforwardly. He also paid minimum wage.) The indifference to use value – but absolutely not being indifferent to the presence of some use value – is part of why new needs can get commodified, like in the culture industries: “go find out what the kids are doing currently that they’re not paying for so we can find a way to sell it to them and eliminate their non-commodity source of this stuff/activity.”
Also, as I read Marx use value is not something created exclusively by labor. (It _does_ take labor – in the very bare sense Marx defines it, as the expenditure of human brain and/or muscle power – to make use of a use value. But that use, the work of appropriation, doesn’t count as labor under capitalism – housework, the time it takes me to bathe and dress before work, time spent learning language and learning to learn as children, all of that isn’t included in capitalist socially necessary labor time – hence it’s not remunerated – it’s appropriated for free by capitalists as a sort of ongoing enclosure. So the labor of using doesn’t count as labor in capitalism.)
“A thing can be a use-value, without having value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, &c. A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use-values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use-values, but use-values for others, social use-values. (And not only for others, without more. The mediaeval peasant produced quit-rent-corn for his feudal lord and tithe-corn for his parson. But neither the quit-rent-corn nor the tithe-corn became commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others. To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use-value, by means of an exchange.) Lastly nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value.” (p131 in the Penguin ed. of v1, it’s the final paragraph of section 1 of ch1.)
I think the last line here indicates Marx’s interest. He’s not studying use value as such, he’s saying “if it’s a commodity it has some use value” then following the commodity into analyzing capitalism.
I do think it’s the case that Marx is mainly concerned with humanly produced use values, but I think that concern is derived from Marx’s interest in commodities – that is, he is concerned only to lay out how capitalism operates, not with use values in their particularity – which is derived from Marx’s interest in the workers who produce these commodities vs the capitalists. But that – ‘humanly produced use values’ or social use values as Marx calls them in the above quote – forms a subset of the category ‘use value.’ It’s a tremendously important subset and should be focus of our inquiry and is the focus of much class struggle, but that’s not the same as the category ‘use value’. You could respond ‘then why talk about use value at all?’ and that’d be a fair question for me and for Marx. For me, I am generally interested in the category but I don’t know that it’s important. I raise it in this post because I’m concerned just to address FiD’s reading of Marx as essentialist. For Marx, I think it’s just part of his exposition, like when he differentiates labor as such from waged labor, I think he’s at pains to show that not all use values are commodified – that is, that use value isn’t a commodity a priori – just as he’s at pains to show that labor isn’t always already waged labor. That’s an important point but if Marx had rewritten v1 without as much of the first 3 chapters I’d have been into that.
I’m off to an ice cream place with my wife.
take care,
Nate
Nate I have to disagree, and so does the Man:
Only a vir obscurus, who has not understood a word of Capital could conclude: Because Marx dismisses all the German professional twaddle on “use-value” in general in a footnote on “use-value” in the first edition of Capital and refers the reader who would like to know something about real use-value to “manuals dealing with merchandise’” [12. See Contribution, p.28] therefore use-value plays no role for him . . . If one is concerned with analysing the “Commodity”, the simplest concrete economic entity, all relations which have nothing to do with the object of analysis must be kept at a distance. However, what there is to say about the commodity, as far as use-value is concerned, I have said in a few lines; but, on the other hand, I have called attention to the characteristic form in which use-value –the product of labour – [13. this should read, ‘insofar as it is the product of labour’.] appears in this respect; namely, “A thing can be useful and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfied his own needs with the product of his own labour creates, indeed, use-values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use-values, but use-values for others, social use-values . . .” [14. Quoted from Capital I. p.131 (40).]
Hence use-value itself – as the use-value of a “commodity” – possesses a historically specific character . . .It would therefore be sheer wordspinning to use the opportunity provided by the analysis of the commodity – because it presents itself as, on the one hand a use-value or good, and on the other a “value” – to add on all kinds of banal reflections about use-values or goods which do not form part of the world of commodities [in the way that standard university economics does.] . . .
On the other hand the vir obscurus has overlooked the fact that I do not stop short in my analysis of the commodity at the double manner in which it present itself, but immediately go on to say that in the double being of the commodity there is represented the twofold character of labour, whose product the commodity is useful labour, i.e. the concrete modes of labour which create use-values, and abstract labour, labour as the expenditure of labour-power, irrespective of whatever “useful” was it is expended (on which my later representation of the production process is based); that in the development of the value-form of the commodity, in the last instance of its money-form and hence of money, the value of the commodity is represented in the use-value of the other, i.e. in the natural form of the the other commodity; that surplus-value itself is derived from a “specific” and exclusive use-value of labour-power, etc. etc. That is, use-value plays a far more important part in my economics, than in economics hitherto, [15. Marx refers here, of course, to the economics of Smith and Ricardo.] but N.B. that it is only ever taken into account when this arises from the analysis of given economic forms, and not out of arguing backwards and forwards about the concepts of words “use-value” and “value”. [16. MEW Vol. 19, p.371]
http://maximumred.blogspot.com/2005/05/rosdolsky-on-marxs-use-value.html
This is the important sentence:
“that surplus-value itself is derived from a “specific” and exclusive use-value of labour-power”
I was going to quote Marx on Wagner too, Chabert. One way in which the specificity of use values continues to play a major _economic_ role in Capital relates to the concrete forms capital takes. The specific, physical character of machines and other fixed capital, for example, plays an important role in relations between the sector producing them and that producing consumer goods. Technological development cannot be considered apart from the realm of use values, yet plays a major role in changes to labour processes and is eventually reflected in exchange value. A third example is Marx in the Grundrisse on capitalism’s tendency to expand consumption norms: “firstly quantitative expansion of existing consumption; secondly: creation of new needs by propagating existing ones in a wide circle; thirdly: production of new needs and discovery and creation of new use values.”
“””the last line here indicates Marx’s interest. He’s not studying use value as such, he’s saying “if it’s a commodity it has some use value” then following the commodity into analyzing capitalism.”””
This seems fairly close to Marx’s thought. He’s not prescribing, but describing. And like other economists, he has a problem defining, or quantifying, shall we say, utility, and its relation to consumption, or even supply and demand. Water and food–pure use value, right– could be far more valuable than diamonds in many “real world” situations (a drought, or war, riot, etc). Yet in a stable market, obviously the diamond’s exchange value far exceeds that of necessaries such as water.
By commodification he generally means mass production of goods (which have use value, and sometimes exchange value as well–as with precious metals), does he not. So commodification, supported by capital (and by labor) may result in various market imbalances –gluts, over-under pricing, etc.–sometimes to the benefit of the owners, but not always.
The essence of Marx then is the criticism of mass production (how items/goods/resources which have high use value–foods, fuels, textiles, lumber, etc.–become commodities, along with the items which have only exchange value–jewels, and really money itself), and what that mass production depends upon, or requires in terms of labor–the exploitation “factor” then somewhat provisional. He is still somewhat mercantilist–even contracturalist— in the sense of suggesting that a society based on the exchange of “use value” items–items produced/grown/manufactured by the laborer/owner himself–would be preferable to that of the mass production/industry of capitalism. But instead of the pastoral dreams of a Jeffersonian contracturalist (even one who might agree to the elimination of finance/banking), Marx would have the State manage those contracts, and that’s where any self-respecting anarchist should reach for his revolver………….
Colonel,
That’s a dense quote and I’m not sure I understand it or the objection it makes, as you read it, particularly as you’ve posted it without interpretation. Can you present what ‘use value’ means for you in Marx, so I can see where we disagree? I don’t understand the point you’re making.
To my mind the specific and exclusive use value of labor power is value productive labor. The use value of labor power is labor and nothing but labor produces value. In order to produce value, labor has to also produce some other use value but the capitalist cares about that use value only as it serves in the accumulation of capital. As I read Capital the heart of the issue is labor power, what the bearers of labor power undergo as they’re made to sell their labor power (or denied the ability to sell their labor power in a way which functions to control other sellers of labor power), and the processes by which the capitalist uses labor power by setting purchased labor power to work. This is where I disagree with Per, in that I don’t think Marx’s target is mass production. Marx sometimes sounds like mass production is historically progressive. Marx’s target is the power relations that make people have to have jobs and the power relations that operate on the job. Per, I’m also not convinced that Marx is quite the statist you see him as (and if he is then indeed, that’s when I reach for my revolver). Much of Marxism is, but not all of it.
take care,
Nate
Hey Nate,
I agree with you that Marx’s main objective with the concept of value – esp. in v1 – is to explain the effects of capitalism on labour, and to explain surplus value, not to quantify exchange value. Prices of production do the latter job.
Per, you are completely wrong that Marx thought the State would “manage those contracts”. Check out the first item at http://marxmyths.org/index.php for some debunking.
From Marx’s notes to English workers (there are other passages advocating “nationalisation of land” —in other words, Statism)
“….leaving aside the so-called “rights” of property, I assert that the economical development of society, the increase and concentration of people, the very circumstances that compel the capitalist farmer to apply to agriculture collective and organised labour, and to have recourse to machinery and similar contrivances, will more and more render the nationalisation of land a “Social Necessity”, against which no amount of talk about the rights of property can be of any avail. The imperative wants of society will and must be satisfied, changes dictated by social necessity will work their own way, and sooner or later adapt legislation to their interests.”””
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/04/nationalisation-land.htm
Lenin develops this idea in State and Revolution, making numerous references to M & E. I am not saying it’s prima facie incorrect, but at least call a spade a spade. Marx’s somewhat “agrarian” aspects are among the more cogent sections of his theories, if somewhat utopian.
Perezoso:
Note, however, in the same short piece you quote: “There will be no longer any government or state power, distinct from society itself!”
I think Marx can be accused of utopianism and vagueness in his ideas on the withering away of the state, just as anarchists can, but it is more difficult to call him a statist.
A few sentences later:
“”National centralisation of the means of production will become the national basis of a society composed of associations of free and equal producers, carrying on the social business on a common and rational plan.””
Centralization seems fairly close to what one might call statism–or maybe not. Marx offers his lengthy diagnosis of capitalism (from a historical and economic perspective), and then offers a cure. Neither diagnosis (the labor theory of value, really—which is not some immutable law) nor cure should be accepted as dogma, though I believe he was a better diagnostician than healer. Class struggle as dialectic itself presents all sorts of problems. And looking at value as defined strictly by the cost of production (iddn’t that orthodox marxism?) presents problems. Ditchdiggers work a lot harder than do civil engineers, yet most humans would say the guy working out the load bearing equations etc. does perform work, and really does something more valuable–even in “social” terms–than the guys collecting the stone (or refining it into steel, etc.) . How does one quantify the value of different types of work, whether intellectual or laboring? I’m not really sure, but making some assumption of the equality of all work (or workers) is not merely utopian, but naivete of the highest sort (I think Keynes thought that as well).
Per:
I agree with you that Marx was better on the diagnosis than the cure, and that his writing shouldn’t be taken as dogma. But since we were arguing about whether or not Marx was ‘statist’, looking at what he wrote seems appropriate.
I have to say that you are also seriously misinterpreting Marx on value. As I’m arguing on my site (but the relevant section is not posted yet), Marx was more a critic of the classical labour theory of value than a proponent of it. The issue you raise – about the problem of reducing different forms of concrete labour to a quantifiable abstract labour – is in fact a problem recognised and written about at length by Marx. He certainly didn’t think that in capitalism commodities exchanged at prices based on the labour time (abstract, concrete, or otherwise) expended to produce them.
The quoted essay (and others) indicates that Marx was advocating the nationalization of the means of production, in regards to property, agriculture, manufacturing. I don’t think he’s thinking of stalinist 5 year plans, but it’s still a type of statism.
Capital is obviously an overwhelming work, but I do not recall much discussion of the specifics of how various types of work are converted into value, apart from the insistence that owners/capitalists/management always exploit the worker, and must do so to turn a profit. I agree that capitalists and management do often exploit workers, by the way, but that is an exceedingly complex problem and Marxism seems a bit unable to deal with the complexity. In California, tradesmen and the skilled proletariat may do quite well, thanks to powerful unions, etc. They could be stockholders as well, and thus sharing in the profits, and then they buy houses, invest, etc. (are they then bourgeois?). And so-called petit-bourgeois—teachers, professionals of various sorts–might be struggling in the private sector. I think Marx does draw a distinction between skilled/unskilled workers, and the problems of defining all these different groups (or awarding them values of various sorts), but I for one have a problem with paying the maintenance staff at Bonehead Jr. College the same as –or more than– the teachers. There is a legitimate issue regarding the division of labor (and in a sense meritocracy), but the marxist cure for the disparity in labor, property, wealth etc. is not the only cure…….
So, Perezoso, what is the cure in your self-respecting anarchist community for this egregious overpayment of janitors relative to teachers?
I’m not an pure anarchist in the Bakunin sense, rilly: only in the sense of being opposed to centralization and statist schemes of some marxist writers (including Lenin, for one). I would admit, however, that centralization –and economic planning of course–could work but that many westerners have some instinctive reaction to it (myself included). I mean, who , even in marxist-Leninist terms, is allowed to be a Planner or par-tay member? Do you, as a Planner, sit next to migrant workers who can’t speak English? Construction workers? How about gangsters or criminals? etc. The Bolsheviks had no problem keeping the peasantry out of the ranks (or even the more dreamy leftists). I’m for some egalitarianism (and for seizing the property and assets of the very wealthy, and in favor of a “just” system of economic distribution), but not the sort of across-the-board egalitarianism. of some leftists (and alas I do understand the motivations for a sort of quasi-aristocratic backlash against the left). That said, I believe the education business lends itself to a rather virulent type of bureaucracy which even authentic marxists should oppose.
I’m not sure we are now chatting about diagnosis, or cure, however. A nasty statist bureaucracy co-exists with the corporate and financial powers in many parts of America, doesn’t it. Imagine a kinder, gentler Maoism where the Peoples work the fields for part of the day, and then a bit of factory or technical work, and later something like piano practice, etc… Of course that happens (if it happens at all) after churches have been burnt down, the great financiers, industrialists, technological barons are all arrested, etc. (tho’ not killed, but like given meds and sentenced to some pleasant re-education camps) and “marriage” has been made illegal, and womenfolk work alongside the menfolk. Si Se Puede! VIL himself wrote some interesting things on womens’ lib., and a requirement that females enter the workforce.
I will try to be Socratic.
“nothing but labor produces value.”
Is there mayhap some reason to believe this?
” As I read Capital the heart of the issue is labor power, what the bearers of labor power undergo as they’re made to sell their labor power”
Yes of course this is the heart of the issue, but Marx is not just wanting to deplore this but to explain it so everyone can understand it. He is very precisely explaining exploitation, the power of labour not just the woes, and really does believe that workers have nothing to lose but their chains. For this it is necessary to understand that when “use value” appears in Capital it means the concrete properties of commodities produced by concrete labour – that is, material things of economic importance, the material world, the wealth of the world that is produced in capitalism for exchange – or in the case of labour itself, the specific abilities of concrete labour to produce use values of this sort. Not the feeling a user of consumer goods might have burning his sofa to cook a hot dog or whatever, or someconscious satisfaction driving a conscious and elective purchase of a consumer good.
Marx does not offer any magic formula for quantifying the cost of production, for converting various sorts of the labor-commodity into “real” value. So invoking Capital as authoritative misses the point: few “real” economists take the a labor theory of value seriously , at least as specified by Marx. 8 hours of making sofas = how many bags of potatoes, or apples, oats, or fuel, lumber, etc? What about 8 hours of writing java code, or writing in French? Who decides on the various exchanges (or wages, prices, bartering-rules), even in a socialist economy? Utility creeps in, at all stages. The labor theory of value in many cases seems correctly applied, but it is not a precisely defined equation or formula, nor is exploitation. At some point economic problems, problems of distribution, property, division of labor relate to something like “ethics.”
I’m mostly with you nate – mostly it doesnt really matter if he was or wasn’t. But i’d have to disagree and say that in Capital at least, its hard not to see him as essentialist with regards to human nature. the whole process of establishing human labout as the source of value requires him to distinguish between human and non-human production, then between various kinds of human production to arrive at the source of value. From a purely ‘political’ perspective, sure, its a move designed to show that labour is what makes the world in which we live, and that the products of this labour are appropriated by capitalists etc. The whole proceedure from production in general (some kind of deleuzian production?) to free waged labour is built, imho, on essentialising a certain kind of human activity – conscious free labour – as an essential defining human characteristic (im thinking of the bee’s passage). And its this movement that is the one I think opens up some of the most interesting lines of productive critique (what is productive, how does labour come to be defined, what is it that capital is a ‘vampire’ on, etc).. which is a little distance from use value and all that, but is none the less hard not to see as essentialist. That said, I’m hardly one to speak because i don’t really see the point of marx’s ‘value’ or the need for it….
Much to comment on here, thanks y’all!
Per, I think if the conversation ascends to Marx as a whole, or worse, Marxism as a whole, it will cease to be productive. I’m open to evidence that Marx had a statist side. Engels certainly did. I do think Marx had anti-statist moments as well, but ultimately Marx as understood by Marx is less interesting to me than uses of Marx. I’m anti-statist – I’m an anarchists – and I think there’s much in Marx that’s tremendously valuable for my purposes. If Marx disagrees with or would disagree some of this on occasion, then so much the worse for Marx. One other thing – the key disagreement you seem to be having with Marx, the one I’m most concerned with, is that you seem to say that capitalism is only sometimes exploitive: “capitalists and management do often exploit workers.” Marx’s analysis in Capital is that capitalists, in order to stay in business, can only exploit. If they fail to exploit they cease to exist. Exploitation here means “pay less in wages to the laborer than the laborer produces in value for the firm.” Of course there are some exploited workers whose exploitation hardly seems egregious compared to others who are exploited, but, while those differences are really important, it’s all included as exploitation for Marx.
Mike, I agree with you completely that Marx is a critic of political economy, not an economists. There’s some cartoon about this, Marx telling Engels “if I had a fiver for everytime I had to tell you Freddie, it’s the _critique_ of political economy… by the way, can I borrow a fiver?” I’ve never liked it when Marxists (including close friends sometimes) talk about “Marx’s” or “Marxist” economics. I think John Holloway has written on this as well. I glanced at the stuff on your site, I’ll give it a read when I have a chance.
Colonel, I don’t think that’s accurate but I think this may come down to semantics. When Marx says “use value” he doesn’t mean “the concrete properties of commodities produced by concrete labour.” Use value and those concrete properties aren’t synonyms. Those concrete properties are a subcategory of the larger and more expansive category of use value. I do agree that the actually existing use values that Marx talks about (with the exception of his remarks on the properties of precious metals which make them amenable to being coined) and the use values that he actually cares about are precisely these properties of commodities. But it’s not the case that that’s what the term “use value” means in Marx. Just as “commodity” and “exchange value” for Marx doesn’t mean always and only capitalist produced commodites and exchange values. These exist prior to capitalism. It _is_ the case that all Marx really cares about are the commodities and exchange values in relation to capitalism, not commodities and exchange values in general (ditto for use value). As a result, you can say that the points I’m making here are merely trivially true – a charge I’ll accept, like I said I brought this up mainly to argue against FiD saying Marx is an essentialist about use value – but I don’t think it’s accurate to say the points are false.
Nic, I don’t think Marx is making any claim for value. I think he gets the term from classical political economy and is criticizing it (as Mike wrote), and is saying “in capitalism this is how things operate.” I don’t think he’s saying only that which is valued – ie, value – under capitalism counts as valuable. If he is, then he’s wrong. There’s a lot of labor that occurs that isn’t included, like housework. Another way to put this is that as I read him, Marx doesn’t say “socially necessary labor” is the sum total of the labors – and the activities of nonhumans – necessary for the existence of society. Rather, socially necessary labor is the sum total of labor counted – counted in units of money paid by capitalists for labor time – as meaningful labor under capitalism. (So one form of struggle – Negri says this somewhere I think in Revolution Retrieved – is to try to raise socially necessary labor time by raising wages and slowing production, in classic syndicalist style.)
take care all,
Nate
Thanks Nate, I’m not sure I follow. If what you say is correct, wouldn’t this sentence for example:
“in the last instance of its money-form and hence of money, the value of the commodity is represented in the use-value of the other, i.e. in the natural form of the the other commodity”
be just basically nonsense? How can a commodity’s value be represented in the “use value” of another given your understanding of what use value is (“anything someone could do with the other commodity, determined after the fact of the doing”) Basically it seems to me you are saying Marx contends a commodity’s value is represented in what somebody does with another commodity. It seems to me he’s referring to something far more specific.
Oh also then…I know I keep asking this…but what is your take then on Marx’ argument for the validity of the proposition that, as you say, “nothing but labour produces value”? How do you see the validity of this hypothesis established (roughly)?
Lots of strands in this thread now but anyway…
Actually I wasn’t really making the argument that Marx was not an economist. I think that is overdone, by people like Holloway especially. Marx was clearly building a positive theory about how capitalism works, and spent decades seriously reading the political economists because he believed they were insightful, especially Ricardo. He thought they were wrong about many things, though. He also thought there was much ideology in political economy, and to that extent was also a critic of it. I don’t have a problem saying that Marx was an economist, and to me his economic writings are among the most vaulable.
Per, again, Marx did not believe commodities exchanged at rates derived from the labour time used to produce them. He was very explicit about this, for example, to quote another section from the Notes on Wagner Chabert quotes above:
“Mr. Wagner could have familiarised himself with the difference between me and Ricardo both from Capital and from Sieber’s work (if he knew Russian). Ricardo did indeed concern himself with labour solely as a measure of the magnitude of value, and was therefore unable to find any link between his theory of value and the nature of money.
“When Mr. Wagner says that it is not a “general theory of value,” he is quite right in his own sense, since he means by a general theory of value the hairsplitting over the word “value,” which enables him to adhere to the traditional German professorial confusion between “use-value” and “value,” since both have the word “value” in common. But when he goes on to say that it is a “theory of cost,” then either it amounts to a tautology: commodities, as values, only represent something social, labour, and as far as the magnitude of value of a commodity is determined, according to me, by the quantity of the labour-time contained, etc., in it, in other words the normal amount of labour which the production of an article costs, etc.; and Mr. Wagner proves the contrary by declaring that this, etc., theory of value is not the “general” one, because it does not correspond with Mr. Wagner’s view of the “general theory of value.” Or else he says something incorrect: Ricardo (following Smith) lumps value and production costs together; I have already expressly pointed out in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy as well as in the notes in Capital that values and production prices (which merely express in money the costs of production) do not coincide.”
In Capital, Marx is most explicit about this in Vol 3, when he explains the concept of prices of production, which is really what you need to be talking about when you make claims about what determines price according to Marx.
It is true that for Marx, as for most of the classicals, the cost of supply was emphasised over demand as a determinant of price. But I don’t think this is necessarily wrong, even today. In an economy where capital and labour are free to move between lines of production, demand will have influence on price only to the extent that economies of scale influence the cost at which a commodity can be produced. There is plenty of empirical evidence in (non-Marxian) economic literature that firms tend to set prices based on cost plus a markup. As Marx argued, though, that doesn’t explain much at all because the economist is simply forced to go back a step to find out what determines those costs, and so on, so that we are left with the question of what the whole structure rests on.
This does not mean that Marx thought demand (backed by purchasing power) was irrelevant in determining price, even in the long run. (In the short run, Marx, like Ricardo and Smith, of course accepted that supply and demand would not necessarily match and would make price fluctuate up and down – but, also like them, he realised that the problem was to find the average around which they would fluctuate.) For Marx demand is part of the concept of “socially necessary labour” – labour is only socially necessary to the extent that it produces goods that are sold. Most of Marx’s writing on the independent influence of demand can be found in the first two parts of Vol 3. See especially chapters 6 and 10. In places his discussion is quite sophisiticated and he anticipates, for example, Marshall’s concept of the price elasticity of demand.
The reason I persist just is that I think this is one of those crossroads in Marx where there is an historical materialist intention, that is often read ahistorically and in a mystical way, in the guise of “updating” or “devulgarising”, and the mystical way undermines the two pillars of the analysis; surplus value/exploitation and the labour theory of value. Both of these arguments, the proofs as it were, rely on a specific notion of use value that is not all that open and flexible. And some of the readings which undermine these arguments start with the mystification of use value, obsuring it’s social, historical and material character for Marx, so that say immaterial things – an “idea” or the “imagination” of a capitalist, or an abstraction like love or courage – has use value, and the use value of two coins of the same value in identical social historical conditions can differ, etc. The same with the contention you make above, which I disagree on also, that use values (as Marx uses this term) not simply found in nature can be produced without concrete labour, because there is no reason to suppose such use values could not be commodified and made exchangeable. If this were true, Marx’ theorems are reduced to axioms, and we’d have to suppose that the capitalist’s imagination or verve or charisma or idea, or the desires of consumers, or the activity of circulation, or capital itself, might be the creators of the profits of capital employed in commodity production. That there are only two sources of use values (nature and concrete human labour) is a feature of the material conditions of the capitalist mode of production.
For Marx, as I read him, the material world is not really subject to limitless possible remaking by discourse or perception or language. I think the idea that use value should or must mean anything you could stretch the word “use” over – beyond “if you can use it, it has use value” to “if you could describe some relationship to it as ‘use’ in english” – and be thus a concept in description of material reproduction as flexible as the parts of the language we inherit, leans toward that kind of reworking of Marx. For example surely one can say many people have many many uses for God. But to then say God is something which possesses what Marx calls use value is to I think really abandon Marx’ materialsim. And I think doing it here has repercussions for the whole of Marx’ writings.
Anyway, that’s how I see it. It is certainly just “semantics” but not only I think in the dismissive sense.
Colonel, where did I say this: “use values (as Marx uses this term) not simply found in nature can be produced without concrete labour”? I never said that as far as I recall. If I did, I was wrong. All use values are produced in some way. All those which are produced by humans require labor. Some of that labor doesn’t count as labor in capitalism, like the labor of a wife who makes her husband’s lunch.
I also don’t see how I’m saying anything mystical as you imply. Lenin says somewhere that Marx didn’t leave behind a logic like Hegel did, but he did leave us the logic of Capital (the book). All I’m saying is that I think in Marx’s ‘logical’ categories Marx’s term “use value” is very general. I think my saying to you “all the actually existing use values Marx cares about are humanly produced ones” (except brief notes on the properties of precious metals related to their being amenable to use in coining) covers the important historical matters. The matters which are the real meat of the book and the issues of capitalism. Tomorrow I’ll look up Marx’s remarks on general determinations vs more specific ones, I think those are relevant to this argument.
As for value, as I read Marx, value just means labor time. That’s derived from empirical observations of capitalism, by Marx and by classical political economists.
Mike B, what do you think? Why does Marx say “nothing but labour produces value”?
More later, I have to run just now.
Chabert,
I agree with what you are saying. To extend the point to exchange value, it’s also worth mentioning that the meaning of this too was specific to capitalism. Marx did not want his theory of value to be taken as a moral declaration, in the sense that the ‘worker is robbed of his product’. See, for example, the Critique of the Gotha Programme where he argues strenuously against both the idea that under socialism the worker would be entitled to the whole product, and also the idea that labour is the only source of wealth: “Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power.”
This distinction between wealth (used here interchangeably with ‘use value’) and value is very important, because it underlines that value for Marx was a meaningful concept only for objects (1) produced for market (2) in conditions of general commodity production.
Thus, the determination of value does not run simply from labour to value, but back the other way as well, because labour in capitalism is shaped by the need to sell the resulting commodity in competition with other commodity producers.
It is of vital importance to Marx’s theory of value that labour processes everywhere are under continual pressure to be made as efficient as possible. Labour time becomes a standard of value only because at any given level of technology, a capitalist overseeing an efficient labour process can not be undercut on the market. Labour time thus becomes a determinate base for the whole system.
This importance of competition has two important consequences, though. First, because competition happens at the level of the commodity, it is impossible to disaggregate value production any further to determine the value produced by individual labourers doing qualitatively different work. Sometimes Marx tries to do this, discussing different skills, supervisory labour etc., but I don’t think it holds with the rest of his value theory and it is even less tenable these days.
Secondly, the fact that capitalists use differing proportions of constant capital to produce commodities means that competition between industries (as opposed to competition between firms making the same commodity) will establish prices that are quite different from the labour time that went into making the commodities. This does not change the fact that labour time can be used as a measure of value in the economy considered as a whole.
Nate,
I just posted a long comment at about the same time you posted yours but I think the spam guard caught it – so I won’t post it again since it will probably show up twice like usual! I hope it answers your question about why I think Marx says nothing but labour produces value.
Briefly, he’s talking about exchange value, and it’s because the term ‘value’ actually presumes a certain social context (capitalism) in which the labour time necessary to produce a good forms a benchmark for exchange, because competing producers can not undercut one another by producing the good with less labour time, because this is impossible at a given level of technological development. (Of course this will drive them to try to improve the technology and transform the labour time taken to produce the commodity.)
At the level of the whole capitalist society, labour is the ultimate scarce good, needed to produce everything, and exchange value performs the function of allocating labour-time to where demand for its products is. Again, competition between capitals is a required mechanism for value relations to hold, this time between industries.
For Marx, labor-time does not equal value in terms of wages or production price–but I think–however obvious it is– that is because he assumes that (and in this partially correct) prices–under capitalism, of course–including wages do not match the actual value of the labor required to produce the item/good/commodity . Mark-up, profits, and the supply-demand factors (monopoly, gluts, consumption as a whole, etc.) add all sorts of other problems. Additionally Marx himself admits (reviewing some of the material on marxists.org—count me as one who thinks Capital needed like some severe editing) that he has no rough and ready conversion tables, or exchange rules– which seems a bit strange, since he insists workers are always shorted by the bosses; he seems to rely on some objective labor-value, without being able to specify what that is, or how it is precisely measured or even defined. Exploitation cannot be precisely defined in terms of class struggle, across the board, and the continuing power of unions complicates matters as well(like in CA—are the comrades of WITH down with say the cop or prison guard unions, some of the most powerful unions in the world, I would venture to say. How about prostitute unions? Some labor is more equal than others).
There are other problems with the LTV. Gold has a great exchange value, but that is not the end of the story, and its value is hardly measurable in labor hours (i.e Jed stumbles upon a nugget out in the hills–no real work required). That is perhaps obvious as well, but gold’s value (historically as well) really is not simply a matter of it being difficult and costly in labor hours to mine, but has something to do with status, prestige, Power…………….
Colonel may be correct that bringing in desire as an explanation of demand or whatever–(Veblen’s conspicuous consumption?) complicates things unnecessarily, or possibly makes economics a branch of clinical psychology, but nonetheless the Subject does enter the picture here and there (and my own sense is that Marx’s more materialist aspects–even quasi-biological aspects– are in conflict with some of his abstract theorizing in regards to value, prices, commodification).
“Colonel, where did I say this: “use values (as Marx uses this term) not simply found in nature can be produced without concrete labour”?”
Sorry! I was reading this, “Also, as I read Marx use value is not something created exclusively by labor”, but I suspect you mean ‘mother nature’ as the other creator? (I assumed that was established in the thread already but it isn’t. Sorry sorry I thought we were arguing about this.).
“As for value, as I read Marx, value just means labor time. That’s derived from empirical observations of capitalism, by Marx and by classical political economists.”
He doesn’t derive it empirically! The after the fact attempt at empirical support was very difficult for him (the transformation problem is nothing other than the attempt at empirical proof of the validity of the proposition that labour time determines commodity values, that is, that labour values of commodities are economic facts).
Marx derives the Value of commodities as an abstraction from their state as use values absorbed into a system of capitalist market exchange, that is as commodified use values. Their Value is the “socially necessary abstract labour time” required for the production of a specific use value. Say a label for a glass bottle. Now the actual socially necessary labour time involved in the production of labels for bottles will be determined by the use value as a certain set of properties. That is, it’s indiferent to certain kinds of imaginable differences of usefulness (it doesn’t matter if the label says Warning: Poison or Low Fat or Made In USA or Nike, which could be construed as different usefulnesses. The use value which will determine socially necessary labour – value – is more specific and excludes a lot of subjective conceptions of usefulness or utility.)
Without this notion of use value, you would be defining value in a circle or ending with the discovery that there is no socially necessary abstact labour in any commodity since its use is indeterminate and dependent on the will of the different individual users.
One cannot posit the axiom “labour time is value” in order to prove the theorem that “value is labour time”. There is no socially necessary abstract labour required to produce an “exchange value”; abstract labour time socially necessary to produce a use value is the exchange value. The unknown – value – is derived by Marx from the known (the concrete use value, the social total of concrete labour distilled and purified of its variations and mulitiplicity into an abstraction, the quanta of this typical generic human labour needed to produce the given use value.) The necessary amount of labour in a commodity is determined by the specificity of the concrete use value that is that commodity. If the use value is indeterminate, there is no necessary labour time. (the necessary labour time for the creation of something with no finite concrete properties – for the creation of things that have a protean use value – cannot be known.) The relation of use value and value is more than mere coexistence in an object. It is a determined and determining relation:
Let us take two commodities, e.g., corn and iron. The proportions in which they are exchangeable, whatever those proportions may be, can always be represented by an equation in which a given quantity of corn is equated to some quantity of iron: e.g., 1 quarter corn = x cwt. iron. What does this equation tell us? It tells us that in two different things – in 1 quarter of corn and x cwt. of iron, there exists in equal quantities something common to both. The two things must therefore be equal to a third, which in itself is neither the one nor the other. Each of them, so far as it is exchange value, must therefore be reducible to this third.
A simple geometrical illustration will make this clear. In order to calculate and compare the areas of rectilinear figures, we decompose them into triangles. But the area of the triangle itself is expressed by something totally different from its visible figure, namely, by half the product of the base multiplied by the altitude. In the same way the exchange values of commodities must be capable of being expressed in terms of something common to them all, of which thing they represent a greater or less quantity.
This common “something” cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities. Such properties claim our attention only in so far as they affect the utility of those commodities, make them use values. But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterised by a total abstraction from use value. Then one use value is just as good as another, provided only it be present in sufficient quantity. Or, as old Barbon says,
“one sort of wares are as good as another, if the values be equal. There is no difference or distinction in things of equal value … An hundred pounds’ worth of lead or iron, is of as great value as one hundred pounds’ worth of silver or gold.”[8]
As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value.
If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.
Let us now consider the residue of each of these products; it consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour power expended without regard to the mode of its expenditure. All that these things now tell us is, that human labour power has been expended in their production, that human labour is embodied in them. When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are – Values.
We have seen that when commodities are exchanged, their exchange value manifests itself as something totally independent of their use value. But if we abstract from their use value, there remains their Value as defined above. Therefore, the common substance that manifests itself in the exchange value of commodities, whenever they are exchanged, is their value. The progress of our investigation will show that exchange value is the only form in which the value of commodities can manifest itself or be expressed. For the present, however, we have to consider the nature of value independently of this, its form.
A use value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? Plainly, by the quantity of the value-creating substance, the labour, contained in the article. The quantity of labour, however, is measured by its duration, and labour time in its turn finds its standard in weeks, days, and hours.
This specific argument for how labour time = value of commodities is necessary for the argument about surplus value and exploitation, that is, for showing that capitalist profits come from the exploitation of labour.
I am sorry Mike I did not see your comment before I posted the above.
“Marx did not want his theory of value to be taken as a moral declaration, in the sense that the ‘worker is robbed of his product’. ”
Right. But as you say he did want to explain why the capitalist driven by competition spurring the imperative to increase productivity must do certain things vis à vis human beings as workers, that is, to explain why there was no kind of nicey fixey for capitalist commodity production, why producing use values for exchange rather than the satisfaction of human needs and wants was disastrous for people generally, as you say….
About the validity of the LToV there is good empirical support for it being published by economists still, (I like Anwar Shaikh who teaches at the New School) despite how sort of unintuitive it looks with such vast wage differences and types of work and as you say differences of constant capital across the gamut from high tech to sugar cane in the dominican republic. When people bother to put numbers together it seems substantiated despite all this and the complexity of the transformation. But I think that there is a theoretical strength too, not “philosophical” exactly, that is worth insisting on, but this really relies on resisting some kinds of otherwise alluring readings of Marx’ argument, and accepting Marx’ picture of the social and material object that is human affairs even at the risk of seeming “vulgar”.
Colonel,
That’s clearer. I don’t see where we disagree or where I said anything implying we do. If anything, I think you’re talking about important subsets of use value in general but I don’t see how that’s a problem.
“socially necessary labour time” is “indiferent to certain kinds of imaginable differences of usefulness”. Yes. And the place where those kinds of usefulness fit in Marx’s categories is “use value.” That “fitting” into the category does not make them all the same – there are important differences. But they’re not differences of use value vs something else than use value. (And these aren’t just imaginable uses, they include some real uses that aren’t desired – like the ability to copy records and tapes and CDs and so on, or the ability to qlip qlip qlip coins made of precious metals.)
For what it’s worth when I said ’empirical’ I didn’t mean proving the determining role of labor time in price. I meant the continual conflict over labor time in capitalism, and I think Marx says this is always the case in conflicts over how surplus labor is distributed. I think that’s obvious and has been to waged laborers forever, and economists – the capitalist need to make workers work longer and to make them work harder during their work time.
Minor quibble – you don’t mean that the uses of the final product are the sole factor determining socially necessary labor time, do you? On SNLT, I don’t think it means average actual time of expenditure of brain and muscle required to produce an object. It means average time – if it takes a machine 30 minutes to make something and hand weavers an hour then the weavers’ labor only counts as 30 minutes. And housework doesn’t count in SNLT, commute time doesn’t count (except in some jobs where it does somewhat, I had a job where I got mileage reimbursement for driving), etc, even though those are still concrete labors which contribute to producing commodities.
I meant to say this before. I think all of this is true: “immaterial things – an “idea” or the “imagination” of a capitalist, or an abstraction like love or courage – has use value, and the use value of two coins of the same value in identical social historical conditions can differ”
but I think it’s trivially true in terms of Marx and these are not the things Marx is concerned about. But they do ‘fit’ inside Marx’s categories. Here’s a somewhat related quote:
“Productive labour is here defined from the standpoint of capitalist production, and Adam Smith here got to the very heart of the matter, hit the nail on the head. This is one of his greatest scientific merits (as Malthus rightly observed, this critical differentiation between productive and unproductive labour remains the basis of all bourgeois political economy) that he defines productive labour as labour which is directly exchanged with capital; that is, he defines it by the exchange through which the conditions of production of labour, and value in general, whether money or commodity, are first transformed into capital (and labour into wage-labour in its scientific meaning).
This also establishes absolutely what unproductive labour is. It is labour which is not exchanged with capital, but directly with revenue, that is, with wages or profit (including of course the various categories of those who share as co-partners in the capitalist’s profit, such as interest and rent). Where all labour in part still pays itself (like for example the agricultural labour of the serfs) and in part is directly exchanged for revenue (like the manufacturing labour in the cities of Asia), no capital and no wage-labour exists in the sense of bourgeois political economy. These definitions are therefore not derived from the material characteristics of labour (neither from the nature of its product nor from the particular character of the labour as concrete labour), but from the definite social form, the social relations of production, within which the labour is realised. An actor, for example, or even a clown, according to this definition, is a productive labourer if he works in the service of a capitalist (an entrepreneur) to whom he returns more labour than he receives from him in the form of wages; while a jobbing tailor who comes to the capitalist’s house and patches his trousers for him, producing a mere use-value for him, is an unproductive labourer. The former’s labour is exchanged with capital, the latter’s with revenue. The former’s labour produces a surplus-value; in the latter’s, revenue is consumed. (…) writer is a productive labourer not in so far as he produces ideas, but in so far as he enriches the publisher who publishes his works, or if he is a wage-labourer for a capitalist.
The use-value of the commodity in which the labour of a productive worker is embodied may be of the most futile kind. The material characteristics are in no way linked with its nature which on the contrary is only the expression of a definite social relation of production. It is a definition of labour which is derived not from its content or its result, but from its particular social form.” (Theories of Surplus Value, ch4.)
Ideas do have use value. The writer’s ideas (or whatever we want to call it) have use value which is why they can be commodified. Otherwise, they would be uncommodifiable, since commodities have to have some use value for Marx.
Per, I’ll get back to you, I need to sleep. Real quick, though, there’s only one comrade of WITH – defining ‘comrade of’ as ‘member of’, which is me – though there are many comrades of in a vague sense including friends, colleagues, discussants, fellow travellers or aspects thereof. I have mixed feelings about prison guard unions, less mixed (and more plainly negative) ones about cop unions. I’m pro- prostitutes’ unions. And I agree that v1 of capital needed major editing. I think the 1st 3 chapters could have been done in about 20 pages.
later all, good nite,
Nate
real quick then I simply have to get to bed, speaking of use value, how many of you have had this high quality a discussion of Marx in a setting you paid tuition for (in cash or with your labor)? Not me, anyway.
Chabert,
I have seen Shaikh’s stuff too. In fact his article “The empirical strength of the labour theory of value” is online here: http://homepage.newschool.edu/~AShaikh/labthvalue.pdf
He calculates values and prices of production from US input-output tables and concludes that “measured in terms of their average percentage deviations, prices of production are within 8.2 per cent of market prices, labour values are within 9.2 per cent of market prices and 4.4 per cent of prices of production… All these results point to the dominance of relative prices by the structure of production, and hence to the great importance of technical change in explaining movements of relative prices over time.”
Note that he doesn’t try to reduce observed labour time to units of simple (ie unskilled) labour – he takes hours worked straight from the statistics. I don’t have a problem with that, like I said above I think quantifying simple labour is the biggest problem with Marx’s value theory, bigger than the transformation problem.
Shaikh and the other New School marxist economists like Duncan Foley are excellent. They are highly technical and able to engage with neoclassical and post-Keynesian economics. And they put their course prospectuses entirely on the web. I have learned a lot from them.
Thanks Nate.
Before I get too annoying with my old fashioned 19th century Marx…just a couple last things.
I really want to understand what you meant but I don’t.
“Yes. And the place where those kinds of usefulness fit in Marx’s categories is “use value.””
Can you give me an example where Marx says something about something like this?
“Where all labour in part still pays itself (like for example the agricultural labour of the serfs) and in part is directly exchanged for revenue (like the manufacturing labour in the cities of Asia), no capital and no wage-labour exists in the sense of bourgeois political economy. These definitions are therefore not derived from the material characteristics of labour (neither from the nature of its product nor from the particular character of the labour as concrete labour), but from the definite social form, the social relations of production, within which the labour is realised., ”
Yes…Here Marx emphasises that his concept of use value is the exacty the same in and out of the capitalist mode of production, but that in the capitalist mode, in capitalist relations, the human production of use-value generates surplus value (is productive of capital). That is, that the difference between capital producing labour and non capital producing labour has nothing to do with a difference in what concrete labour creates – both in and our of these relations labour creates the selfsame use value – but is the difference between the social relations in which the production of use-value takes place. That is, this passage emphasises not that his idea of use-value is different when produced in capitalist relations – when it produces capital for the capitalist, ie when the production of use value by labour is exploited – but the opposite, that the referent of use value is the same whether one is speaking of an unproductive (of capital) instance of use value production or a productive (of capital) instance. Do you read this differently?
“while a jobbing tailor who comes to the capitalist’s house and patches his trousers for him, producing a mere use-value for him, is an unproductive labourer”.
… the production by concrete labour of a use value – which is prehistoric – is not sufficient for the production of surplus to a capitalist, but it is necessary. It is this existing human activity which capitalists exploit in new property relations and historicl conditions to expropriate surplus from it. I think Marx using the term “ideas” there is just colloquial and careless, he doesn’t identify them as what can be commodified in fact specifically changes the noun to name the commodity form of the labour product he is referring to. What can be commodified is books (or text or something concrete) which idea-production (thinking) are part of the labour of making as they are part of the tailor’s and the clown’s work, though normally we’d think of the clown and the writer as intellectual workers and the tailor, unless he was Versace, as a manual worker.
“Ideas do have use value. The writer’s ideas (or whatever we want to call it) have use value which is why they can be commodified. Otherwise, they would be uncommodifiable, since commodities have to have some use value for Marx”
This I think really contradicts Marx (as I read him) in a not unimportant way, since it requires a revision of what I take to be his notion of human labour, which includes thinking and writing. And I think also there are consequences to this way of construing use value as including say not just a thing like “wine” but also “flavour” and “intoxication”, that is broadening “use value” so that it is no longer of the material plane so to speak at all but a thing of the discursive plane, and the social is traded for the subjective. If “ideas” (and not expressions of ideas in concrete forms) had use value and were commodifiable, then it would be that the socially necessary abstract labour time to produce them are their exchange value. If this is so ideas have no exchange value, and therefore are not exchangeable (the normal amount of time for a person to have an idea is basically either no time or unknown). As we see – there are no idea-commodities though there are a huge number which convey ideas (perhaps this includes every commodity potentially) and arguably hashish is something closer to the an “idea”-intensive product than a book, but neither are “ideas” as such commodified.
Anyhow, I think what happens when you have use value as internally contradictory, a group of notions instead of a notion, including these possibilities that I don’t think Marx includes, is the clarity of Marx’ analysis of what commodification and exploitation actually is gets lost. Because one of the things he is doing is trying to demystify the world he was living in and we are living in and to say look it is not the marvellous expansion of tailoring that creates all this accumulated capital it is the exploitation of the tailor. Which the tailor knows, as you mentioned, which everybody working for wages knows, which capitalists know, but which Marx is setting out to prove and definitively describe and also explain the consequences of (the contradictions as well as the resulting power of labour to create socialism out of this existing interwoven interdepedent condition of people and productive capacity. Use value is a relation; laying bare the concealed or obscured relations between people-things-people is another consistent effort in Marx.).
So use value is I think not that expansive an idea, and the same whether it is made in the capitalist mode of production or the feudal, in conditions which are productive of surplus or unproductive. (That passage from Smith is something which seems fantastically obvious to us but was understandably not so obvious then, and it also highlights that the upbeat term “productive” to refer to the labour producing actually no more use value than what is disparagingly called “unproductive” but being exploited to produce profit/capital was introduced as propaganda.)
So I don’t see how this broader category of use value is impled in Marx and in practise, assuming it, I don’t see what it adds except to render the elements of the analyses ambiguous and self contradictory. With regard to intellectual property and how it is commodified, for example, I think the use value of productive labour (often, with intellectual property, including unwaged, as this is frequently enclosure and expropriation from the commons) is all that is required to be concieved in play and that it is to veer away from Marx to propose the use value of some’thing’ as abstract as an idea (or feeling or sentiment). There are endless possible confusions – say people who work as pharmaceutical guinea pigs. You could say “their hives” have a use value but this would be blurring the better conceptual tool which is that the developing of the hives is productive labour; its a case of gaining something maybe for another genre at the expense of what is in the genre Marx is writing in and at the expense of the centre of this story which is people, as you say. With regard to the general commodification of human capacities and psychic product I think the categories of abstract and concrete labour are broad enough and also better conceptually to account for the things that we in other codes refer to with certain reifications or abstractions like “an idea” or “a desire”. It is on these interpretative choices I guess that one decides whether the door is open for the post structuralists or not. From a philological standpoint I think it really is not open, but I know we’re of different minds about how compelling that is as reading guideline. But I think it is, with regard to the understanding of the present, meaningful that in fact ideas are not commodified and exchangeable as such, though there are concrete commodities which are ‘made out of them’ and not very much else and are usually used as communications of content of that kind, but that in ordinary discourse ideas have a kind of metaphoric commodity property (we speak of ‘Rancière’s idea of the police’ or ‘Kant’s concept of the sublime’), while ways of capitalising human mental and emotional capacities, exploiting them as value creating labour, creating exchangeable commodities derived from human sensual and intellectual faculties, in bulk as it were, expands. This seems to make Marx’ concept of a generic human labour, this substance that is abstract labour, even more compelling and the analyses of exploitation ever more compelling precisely because today a logo license and a “mortgage lead” are tradeable commodities but “a dream” “a feeling” and “a thought” aren’t.
Shaikh seems to illustrate (though the vector chat quite formidable) one of Galbraith’s criticisms of marxist-socialist planning: the socialists often seem to think that if workers merely take in higher wages (so that the mysterious labor-value equals what they are “supposed” to be paid–whatever that is—instead of the market wage/price), and are made owners (at least in part), then everything is cool, and the technostructure remains intact. The problem of defining “socially necessary” labor remains mostly untouched, nor is there any real substantive critique of corporations, finance, management, urbanity. A socialized or publicly-owned petroleum “business” might be better for the refinery workers than capitalist petroleum business, but it’s still a racket, destructive to the environment, requiring all sorts of skilled labor, technology etc. It seems a bit naive and reductionist to think that simply making the workers owners, or conversely, requiring management to do some labor, “fixes” things (and the marxist “fix” again usually begs certain ethical questions, however much some some comrades fancy those crypto-Hegelian abstractions of value, commodity, etc.). Perhaps others might experience certain Humean doubts as well while reading econometrics, whether traditional econ. or marxista—as in who the F. cares, even about some supposed equilibrium or efficiency. For some of us, just having a few bright progressives in the CA Assembly (or House, etc.) arguing for higher capital gains and property taxes would be a big step in the right direction; the worker’s paradise can wait a bit.
This isn’t fair of me to say, but I don’t understand the point of Marxist economics or proving this stuff that way. (It’s not fair because there’s as little or less point to the philosophic marxisms that I like.) I think Marx’s description of capitalism (or at least the heart of it) simply is true and in a way which pretty much anyone who has ever had a job understands with minimal discussion and not much of a reach. What I don’t get is who marxist economists are convincing, who they’re trying to prove things to. The rhetorical hired guns of the capitalist class in econ departments? I think they have a class (or stratum) interest in not being convinced, and even if they were convinced of the truth of the matter that doesn’t mean they’d change (there’s a great scene in a Dario Fo play where the owner of Fiat says to a group including an auto worker and some cops “haven’t you read Marx’s Capital? No, of course you haven’t, only we industrialists read that these days.”) It’s like trying to change the minds of union busting lawyers. The issue isn’t that they’re wrong, it’s that they’re part of the class enemy’s army. Sorry if that’s grumpy of me.
best,
Nate
Shaikh seems to illustrate (though the vector chat quite formidable) one of Galbraith’s criticisms of marxist-socialist planning: the socialists often seem to think that if workers merely take in higher wages (so that the mysterious labor-value equals what they are “supposed” to be paid–whatever that is—instead of the market wage/price), and are made owners (at least in part), then everything is cool, and the technostructure remains intact. The problem of defining “socially necessary” labor remains mostly untouched, nor is there any real substantive critique of corporations, finance, management, urbanity. A socialized or publicly-owned petroleum “business” might be better for the refinery workers than capitalist petroleum business, but it’s still a racket, destructive to the environment, requiring all sorts of skilled labor, technology etc. It seems a bit naive and reductionist to think that simply making the workers owners, or conversely, requiring management to do some labor, “fixes” things (and the marxist “fix” again usually begs certain ethical questions, however much some some comrades fancy those crypto-Hegelian abstractions of value, commodity, etc.). Perhaps others might experience certain Humean doubts as well while reading econometrics, whether traditional econ. or marxista—as in who the F. cares, even about some supposed equilibrium or efficiency. For some of us, just having a few bright progressives in the CA Assembly (or House, etc.) arguing for higher capital gains and property taxes would be a big step in the right direction; the worker’s paradise can wait a bit.
Ciao Colonel, we were posting at the same time.
‘”the place where those kinds of usefulness fit in Marx’s categories is “use value.””
Can you give me an example where Marx says something about something like this?’
That’s how I interpret the bit in the very beginning of v1 about ‘any need whatsoever, of the belly or the fancy.’ Needs are satisfied by the act of use. The act of use means the object so used has the use value of being used in that way. So the act of using an object to satisfy a need means the object has the use value – or rather, has as one of its use values – that it satisfies that need.
I read the passage starting “Where all labour in part still …” as you do.
I think maybe I understand better where some of your objections are coming from. You write “What can be commodified is books (or text or something concrete) which idea-production (thinking) are part of the labour of making (…) “If “ideas” (and not expressions of ideas in concrete forms) had use value”
I have a sort of vulgar physicalist outlook, part of my atheism. I think there’s one world and it’s a physical world. This means ideas are physical. I don’t mean this as a reductive philosophy of mind such that brain events cause mental events or that our ideas and feelings can be described as just brain states. But I do think that any mental event is at the same time a physical event. The vocabulary separating mental and physical is a holdover to a prior time and when science advances far enough and culture catches up then this vocabulary won’t make sense anymore. Which is to say, I don’t think there are meaningful ideas outside of concrete forms.
We don’t have to agree with this, and in everyday speech, we can and do say that the writer has an idea then writes a book. Fair enough. I’d quibble and say that the writer makes more ideas as she writes – writing is not a process of producing ideas mentally then transcribing them. Still, in this everyday speech register, I agree with you that it’s the expressions of ideas in concrete forms that have use value, not the ideas themselves that have concrete forms. (What’s an idea sans concrete form anyway? That sounds very much like an idealist notion, and in order for the idea to have a concrete form the idea must be able to take concrete form, so now we need a passage from ideal to material – sorry, I keep getting distracted by that.)
In any case, I don’t think translating “ideas have use value” into “expressions of ideas in concrete forms have use value” gets around the problem for you. Since these expressions can be commodified they must have use value, since all commodities have use value. I think the answer to the question “what use value?” will be the same and the same problems occur. What is the use value (or what are some use values) of the expression of an idea in concrete form? Where does that use value fit into Marx’s categories? I think it fits into the minimalist description I gave, use value as capacity to be used in some activity.
I do understand about and sympathize with your worry about blunting the use (ha!) of Marx’s work by blurring or expanding things to a vanishing point. I would certainly never say that use value alone – or use and exchange value alone – are sufficient. I think they’re actually among the less important categories and chapters in v1 of Capital (the best bits being the sections on the buying and selling of labor power, surplus value and relative and absolute surplus value, and the historical chapters).
One question about word order —
You wrote “use value is I think not that expansive an idea, and the same whether it is made in the capitalist mode of production or the feudal”.
Does this mean “use value is not expansive and use value is not the same across modes of production”? Or does this mean “use value is not expansive and it is the same across modes of production”?
I read it to mean the first. More on this later, in a moment I’m going to post up a passage from the Grundrisse that I found, it’s the one I thought of and mentioned earlier, on general determinations. I just looked it up. I think it’s relevant.
Lastly, you’re not “too annoying” here. It’s good to discuss this stuff, among others things sharpens my Marx.
best,
Nate
Here’s that quote:
“Whenever we speak of production, then, what is meant is always production at a definite stage of social development—production by social individuals. It might seem, therefore, that in order to talk about production at all we must either pursue the process of historic development through its different phases, or declare beforehand that we are dealing with a specific historic epoch such as e.g. modern bourgeois production, which is indeed our particular theme. However, all epochs of production have certain common traits, common characteristics. Production in general is an abstraction, but a rational abstraction in so far as it really brings out and fixes the common element and thus saves us repetition. Still, this general category, this common element sifted out by comparison, is itself segmented many times over and splits into different determinations. Some determinations belong to all epochs, others only to a few. [Some] determinations will be shared by the most modern epoch and the most ancient. No production will be thinkable without them; however even though the most developed languages have laws and characteristics in common with the least developed, nevertheless, just those things which determine their development, i.e. the elements which are not general and common, must be separated out from the determinations valid for production as such, so that in their unity—which arises already from the identity of the subject, humanity, and of the object, nature—their essential difference is not forgotten.
(…)
If there is no production in general, then there is also no general production. Production is always a particular branch of production—e.g. agriculture, cattle-raising manufactures etc.—or it is a totality. (…) The relation of the general characteristics of production at a given stage of social development to the particular forms of production to be developed elsewhere (later).
(…)
All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society. In this sense it is a tautology to say that property (appropriation) is a precondition of production.
(…)
To summarize: There are characteristics which all stages of production have in common, and which are established as general ones by the mind; but the so-called general preconditions of all production are nothing more than these abstract moments with which no real historical stage of production can be grasped.” (Gundrisse, p85-88)
That quote helps me understand this argument. I’m reading use value as a trait or characteristic common to all modes of production (like how all logical propositions involve quantifiers). I’m not making a claim for the utility of the term here, I only raised it as an argument against FiD claiming Marx had an essentialist concept of human nature in his talk about use value. As Marx writes, use value is “segmented many times over and splits into different determinations” – actually existing use value is not the same in all cases, actually existing use values differ from each other. The use value of a time clock is different from that of an automobile, qua use value of a time clock and use value of an automobile. The use value is the same qua use value simpliciter, qua example of the category of use value.
Marx writes that “production is always a particular branch of production”, there is “no production in general”. This isn’t an attack on the idea of production in general — “production in general is an abstraction, but a rational abstraction” — it’s a useful concept for us to think with. But we do need to keep in mind, and this is what it means to say there is no production in general, that actually existing production – any example of production – is always particular concrete production.
Just as there is no actually existing “production in general” use value qua use value, use value simpliciter, never exists. You never have “use value”, you have a use value. There’s no thing in the world you can point to and say “that’s use value qua use value”, rather you’re holding up a specific case, an example of use value, and in looking at it as an example you abstract out the content it doesn’t have in common with eveyr other example. (I think this is connected to what Hegel does in the parts of the Logic I’ve read, I think Marx’s abstraction procedure is like that). Just as when you have money in your pocket, music in your headphones and art on the side of a building you always have some determinate quantitity of money, some specific music, and some concrete art object.
Again I’m not arguing that use value is sufficient for grasping much as a concept. It’s a general category “with which no real historical stage of production can be grasped” — understanding capitalism means understanding particular concrete use values, like those you’ve mentioned in your examples about Sony and so on. That’s why I think the historical chapters are so important. But actually existing use values in the capitalist era are not synonymous with (the abstraction which is) use value as such. That lack of synonymy is part of showing the non- eternal/natural -ness of capitalism: use value does not have to be the set of use values which exist under capitalism. The uses in the present which predominate over others – like the capitalist use of labor power – and those users do not have to continue to dictate over everything else.
take care,
Nate
Don’t you, Sir Nate–as an adherent to physicalism of some sort— on occasion feel that KM over-complicated things, rather egregiously? The endless discussion of exchange/use value, the commodity, pricing, labor, production etc. often seems to overlook distribution. Hobbes, 200 years BC (before Capital) more or less posits equitable distribution–of goods, property, work— as one of his givens—really quite a socialist assumption. That may have been sort of a token offering, but one could, it seems, work from various distributive sorts of assumptions, and produce a rather sophisticated, and even quantitative critique of capitalism–without lapsing into some Proudhon-like utopianism. Much of anti-capitalist but non-marxist writing (such as Galbraith, and even Keynes to an extent) relates more to distribution—than to the problems of production and value. For physicalists–and Hobbes himself obviously physicalist—any values, even relating to work, exchange, wages, property etc. would be negotiated, with an eye to “just” distribution. And ultimately exploitation, whatever form it takes, relates to unequal distribution, more than to problems of exchange or utility. Not real fancy ( Marx’s Hegelian roots should always be held suspect anyways. Looking at those byzantine discussions on Die Waren again I detect Hegel’s ghost).
hola Sr. Per,
While I’m not one to stand on convention, if we’re going to start using formal, I prefer “Lord Nate” to “Sir Nate.” I do think Marx complicates this and that on occasion. He’s my favorite write but he’s not perfect. Like you, I think Capital could stand further editing. About the Hegel I’m actually coming back to Hegel and Hegelian marxism, though very slowly. (And really, Schelling’s more my guy than Hegel, in part just because I had a class with Andrew Bowie at a formative stage in my development – if you haven’t read his book on Schelling I recommend it in the highest possible terms, he writes with much seriousness and is conversant with Schelling/Hegel/Fichte/Kant as well as Derrida etc and Davidson etc. He argues among other things that S/H/F/K prefigure much of the arguments in 20th century anglophone and francophone thought and that the germans are a way to put those other folk in conversation with each other in order to correct problems on both sides. And I think Schelling was both Engels and Kierkegaard’s teacher.) Re: distribution, Marx talks about the relationships between distribution and production in the Grundrisse. I like the focus on production over distribution because I’m someone who just hates having to work, Marx is great on that and that’s one of the chief reasons he speaks to me. My three or five months collecting unemployment (partially the result of a slowdown some of us started which resulted in the place closing down – hardly a victory in any meaningful sense) are among the most glorious moments of my life.
un saludo,
Nate
Per,
Where does Shaikh say anything like that? He doesn’t say anything about socialism in that article, and his point is certainly not to suggest that “if workers merely take in higher wages (so that the mysterious labor-value equals what they are “supposed” to be paid–whatever that is—instead of the market wage/price), and are made owners (at least in part), then everything is cool, and the technostructure remains intact.”
Shaikh aside, as I wrote above, Marx was opposed to the idea that his theory of exploitation implied that workers should be paid the equivalent of what they produce, even in socialism. This is because of the need for investment in means of production and social consumption.
As for Humean doubts about econometrics… Sure, to a devout econometrician I would be arguing along the same lines. But you’ll find that these days most econometricians are well aware of the severe limitations of statistical inference. They legitimately object though that your line often serves as a way to excuse those of us who have not learned to use it from having to engage with it while still maintaining some sense of superiority. For a thoughtful version of this: http://e1.newcastle.edu.au/coffee/pubs/wp/2007/07-02.pdf
Nate,
Your point about the lack of a point to this kind of proof is fair enough. (Though as you say, applies even more to philosophical hair-splitting.)
There’s been a debate among academic radical economists over the last few years as they have been progressively pushed out/allowed to die out in economics departments. Is the point, as you say, to try to supplant orthodox economics through strength of argument? If so, it is worthwhile to fight to maintain space in economics departments. Or do they recognise that this is not going to happen and assume their target audience is the other social sciences? In which case the fact that they are being pushed into non-econ social science departments is less troubling.
The point to radical economics is twofold. First of all, it is ideological. Neoclassical economics is vitally important to the hegemonic ideology of capitalism, and it is worth undermining its claims and its paradigm.
Second, it is genuinely important for left social movements to understand how the capitalist economy works, beyond the immediately obvious facts of exploitation. This is perhaps not true if you see capitalism collapsing in an instantaneous revolutionary singularity, after which socialism emerges unproblematically. But if the transition from capitalism is seen more realistically, as likely to involve a long and uncertain interregnum, it is essential for socialists to understand as well as possible how this complex system really works, so as better to intervene.
Per:
One more thing. I agree with you that Keynes (and to a lesser extent, Galbraith) had many insights into capitalism, and I hope my nitpicking about the details of what Marx said doesn’t suggest I think Capital was the be-all-and-end-all of economics. Far from it!
But there is no sense in which Keynes or Galbraith were anti-capitalist, and I agree with Nate that if nothing else, it is Marx’s foregrounding of the alienation and exploitation of the working class that makes him still relevant – neither Keynes nor Galbraith had much to say on this.
heya Mike,
On radical economics as intervention contra ideology, is the idea that neoclassical economics facilitates some actions by the ruling class, so that arguing against that ideology will hinder that facilitation? If so, that’s fair. My first impulsues about those sort of folk (producers and consumers of neoclassical economics and their bosses and their bosses’ bosses) is that they rather mechanically follow their class and stratum interests, but I could see how the reality might be more complicated such that hindering their ideology might slow them down, send them back to the drawing board for justification and so on.
I agree about the second bit, about the need to understand the concrete workings of actual capitalism. That’s part of the argument often made about the usefulness of reading industry/trade journals and papers like the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal. No argument from me on that quarter, and really none from me on the first part, the anti-ideology stuff, either though I admit I’m a bit less convinced of that. I could see how proving Marx (by resolving the transformation problem or whatever) could be useful to the first, I suppose. I could even see it have some minor use in the workers movement directly, convincing a handful of unconvinced workers, though I’m generally of the view that most workers already get this stuff without a ton of prodding based on the experience of working and having to work.
take care,
Nate
Thanks nate. That quote is helpful.
The rational abstraction “production in general” implies another: “product in general”. This product in general – (along with the natural and historical environment, that is, nature and whatever has been added by previous production) – is what is meant by “use value”. So it excludes certain orders of abstractions – “war” “cruelty” “speculation” “imagination” “useleness” can be said to be useful to be sure, but are not what is meant by use values.
Agreed. Though the cruelty of a torturer as expressed in certain practices might be said to have a use value for his employers, or the imagination of an artist as expressed in certain objects or performances might be said to have a use value for the buyer of the art, which allows it to be sellable by a gallery owner. Etc.
Strictly speaking human beings are use values – found in nature and produced by production. Skills that are produced by training are surely use values and have been treated as things for a long time. The concrete properties of human beings are their use value. BUT. I think with Marx human beings are unlike other use values. Labour is the primary use value, the special thing, human capabilities and creativity, and the fact that the social includes all people means the use value of people to other people requires distinction. A slave is not a spoon; the state of being a use value and being the organism and agent whose manner of using things determines use value simultaneously is peculiar to the use values that are also people. I think positing some superhuman user from whose point of view humanity is a concatenation of use values – Nation, Spirit, History, the Economy, or what have you – is just what Marx is trying not to do. So I think it’s always implied that humanity is its own category, and that therefore the use value of living human beings is its own subcategory of use value which appears in Marx as “labour”. Cadavers or severed parts of bodies – blood, bone marrow, shorn hair – are just like animal cadavers as far as use value is concerned, but the use value of living people is another thing altogether I think.
The labor theory of value could be, arguably, the “essence” of Marx: and not the worst concept to proceed from. The LTV should be read as a type of empiricism–even British Empiricism—in essence, as well. Marx is responding of course to Smith and Ricardo, offering his update of Ricardo’s LTV (even Locke had discussed a form of the LTV as well). So a real issue remains regarding whether say Ricardo’s version of the LTV (or other more “traditional” economists) is a more accurate model than that of Marx (or other radicals). I don’t always understand the distinction—-Ricardo DOES seem sort of correct that the price of labor would relate to the cost of production; it becomes a matter of which side you are looking at. Management tends to see labor as a liability (which is of course often wrong, exploitative, etc), while the worker feels he is being ripped off—though many workers will do well without working for a company as a wage slave, or they operate as an independent contractor etc. Which is to say, if plumbers, electricians, computer programmers, etc. (proletariat, right) are doing well (and in many places they are), then reforms have worked; Marxism does seems a bit antiquated in some regards to skilled/technical labor: though may be somewhat relevant to unskilled/peasants (say the people who assemble Apple computers in Brazil for a few bucks a day–or the LA garment district for that matter).