This started out as a comment over at Rough Theory but got too long so I figure I’ll post it here. NP mentioned something Mike Beggs (the name of whom I must finally admit always makes me think of the Goldie Lookin’ Chain because one of them has a similar name, though a worse grasp on Marx) said in discussion on the post below on Negri (it’s a flurry of link and counterlink, like a chess game of cooperation except without horses, bishops, or other animals), about how overblown responses to immaterial labor seem to involve a mistaken understanding of Marx’s account of abstract labor. I won’t summarize further, the post and discussion are worth reading in full. At present I continue to have to do more of the work I’m paid to do and less internet stuff if I’m to avoid near-panic, so I will add much of the substance of the post and discussion to the long list of stuff I plan to read and respond to in full when I eventually get time.
For now a somewhat tangential comment on the immaterial labor bits. First, not prompted by the discussion so much as something I remembered I’d wanted to say (and which I’ve tried to say before but I’m not sure with how much success, like this old post from when Negri first started to unravel for me and this post that I never followed up on, referencing Plato and obliquely Leibnitz) which is that I feel there’s a serious mistake made in some of the discussions of immaterial labor that link immaterial labor to political forms. Virno writes somewhere that Aristotle/Arendt’s (I think it was their’s) formulation of the division between politics, art, and whatsitcalled – thought maybe? – has broken down due to immaterial labor. The first problem is that it’s not clear that this formulation ever held. Worse still is the attribution of new capacities – new abilities to autonomously produce sociality, new powers of cooperation, and new capacities for the working class to exist not just in itself but for itself – based on changes in labor. This forgets precisely that labor under capitalism is abstract labor (see Mike and NP for more on that category) and implies a derivation of communist subjectivity from capitalism (put schematically, capitalism is an order of reduction into a single quality which is quantified; the immaterial labor mistake is to suggest that this qualitative reduction makes possible new qualitative multiplicity, a very old bad marxist mistake).
The issue for me is the type of novelty implied in “new.” “New” as in “a new mode” is fine. “A new mode of ability to autonomously produce sociality,” “a new mode of power of cooperation,” “a new mode of capacity to produce the class for itself,” fine and good. That implies that these abilities, powers, capacities are not new. That is, it is not the case that the working class prior to the transition to immaterial labor etc (whenever the moment of transition is alleged to have happened) lacked the capacity for producing sociality, cooperating, being class for itself, etc. Unfortunately this is I think implied in the immaterial labor stuff – the bad (and false) claim to historical novelty rather than the innocuous (and true) one. I know I’ve said this before, but this strikes me as going back on one of the most important bits of operaismo from what I know of that material, in that this post-operaismo immaterial labor stuff derives political capacities from the technical composition of the class as it currently stands – schematically, a technizing of politics. The point instead as I took it was that the current technical composition was the result of the prior political composition and struggles around that (capitalist reaction), a politicizing of the technical. Also, it’s not at all clear to me how much of the exciting bits of history make sense based on the ideas implied in the post-operaismo immaterial labor stuff (which doesn’t seem to be too much of a problem for that discourse because its practitioners don’t seem to want to do or read much history, to be uncharitable for a moment).
Anyhow, second tangent (it’s like a tangent fork) – NP writes
Whatever stance one wants to take toward Marx’s theory, it is somewhat difficult to see how the development of service industries, the rise to prominence of “knowledge workers”, the development of some kind of “creative class”, or similar trends often cited as evidence of a shift toward “immaterial labour”, would have much to do one way or the other with the “theory of value” that Marx articulates.
Marx is very clear, very early in Capital, that his notion of “use value” and of “labour” is extremely broad, and can comfortably encompass the sorts of activities that some theories currently attempt to pick out with concepts like “immaterial labour”.
Mike writes
my reason for highlighting the collective aspect of abstract labour was that I think it is a confusion over this that leads people to think ‘immaterial labour’ requires a rethink of ‘value’. I take it that people notice that an awful lot of workers in advanced capitalist society are not directly involved in the physical production of commodities – they are ’symbolic manipulators’ or whatever. But labour doesn’t have to be _physically_ involved in producing a commodity to be necessary to commodity production.
But as soon as you admit that, it becomes more difficult to work out ‘how much’ each individual labourer is contributing in value terms. At a newspaper, say, what part of the product is produced by the journalist, the printer, the ad rep? Competitive pressures are felt on the commodity and the production unit as a whole.
I tend to argue that each kind of labour is necessary, and each labour process is rationalised by capital because of competition between capitals, so it seems reasonable to say, if you want to look at it on an individual level, that each person contributes equally.
(On the competition bit, see this brief post by Massimo as well.)
This reminded me of these bits from v2 of Capital (chapter 1 section 4 – http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch01.htm#4)
“there are certain independent branches of industry in which the product of the productive process is not a new material product, is not a commodity. Among these only the communications industry, whether engaged in transportation proper, of goods and passengers, or in the mere transmission of communications, letters, telegrams, etc., is economically important.
(… )
what the transportation industry sells is change of location. The useful effect is inseparably connected with the process of transportation, i.e., the productive process of the transport industry. Men and goods travel together with the means of transportation, and their traveling, this locomotion, constitutes the process of production effected by these means. The useful effect can be consumed only during this process of production. It does not exist as a utility different from this process, a use-thing which does not function as an article of commerce, does not circulate as a commodity, until after it has been produced. But the exchange-value of this useful effect is determined, like that of any other commodity, by the value of the elements of production (labour-power and means of production) consumed in it plus the surplus-value created by the surplus-labour of the labourers employed in transportation. This useful effect also entertains the very same relations to consumption that other commodities do. If it is consumed individually its value disappears during its consumption; if it is consumed productively so as to constitute by itself a stage in the production of the commodities being transported, its value is transferred as an additional value to the commodity itself. The formula for the transport industry would therefore be M — Clmp … P — M’, since it is the process of production itself that is paid for and consumed, not a product separate and distinct from it. Hence this formula has almost the same form as that of the production of precious metals, the only difference being that in this case M’ represents the converted form of the useful effect created during the process of production, and not the bodily form of the gold or silver produced in this process and extruded from it.”
I quote this for two reasons. One is that some of the qualities occasionally pointed to about immaterial labor (like in Virno’s discussion of “virtuousity”) are present here. This activity does not immediately appear productive, though it is for Marx. It has the quality of being sort of performative: what is sold is the act of the workers, not an object existing outside the person or persons who work. He also mentions an early case of the type of immaterial labor that most commentators on the term are most interested in, which is the information side – telegrams and all that. This labor also fits with the stuff Mike is referencing in his comment quoted above. As do the reproductive labors I’ve been concerned with lately particularly in regard to Negri and immaterial labor – many of these labors are or appear not directly or physically involved in the production of any specific commodity, but are still necessary and still get pressures from capital.
It also strikes me that the formula Marx names here might be applicable to those labors: the housewife’s services (re)produce labor power via performative actions, or I think more accurately, the type of action described in this quote are an important subset of the labors of reproduction performed (the housewife’s management of when to perform what labors, often just-in-time, including labors which make others possible – shopping then cooking in order to have food ready to serve at the right time, for instance – also involve multitasking and self-management in a way that Hardt and Negri attribute to immaterial laborers, arguably to a degree greater than assembly line work; to be polemical, it seems to me that these activities are equally deserving of being dignified with counting as part of “general intellect”).
crashcourse666 
I never really got the turn to immaterial labor. I just had a long back and forth with some guy who didn’t really understand Lukács but wanted to argue that software engineering, since its process is ‘unrationalizable’ was some new form of production. He didn’t get what it meant to be ‘rationalizable’ under capitalism. Notions of ‘immaterial’ labor seem to arise from a similar confusion about what ‘material’ is suppsoed to signify. Just because you don’t work in a factory doesn’t mean that you aren’t materially producing things. Even if they are stored electromagnetically on hard-disks.
And by the same token, factory work is based on and productive of social relations and involves ideas and affects.
This is actually one of the reasons that I try to draw attention to what (I think…) is an argument in Marx’s work about why we start perceiving things in terms of the category of “the material” – I take Capital to be making a sort of complex meta-commentary on why this category arises, why it becomes plausible, how it is “situated” – and how not recognising this situatedness then leads to predictable forms of misrecognition – misrecognition involving some of the sorts of things being thematised critically above… (Apologies if this makes no sense – just coming out of a day-long university planning session – not the best space for thinking… ;-P)
Hey Nate,
Like I said over at the Colonel’s, I’m not familiar with all this Italian stuff, so I’m probably talking at a tangent to your main point.
But I think there is a distinction in value terms between labour producing a commodity (physical or intangible) and labour that does not produce a commodity, even though it may be necessary for social reproduction. (I prefer ‘intangible’ to ‘immaterial’ given the non-physical meaning of ‘materialism’ in Marx.)
So (uncommodified) housework is not value-producing, even though it is essential to reproducing labour-power, and as you say, may “still get pressures from capital”. The reason is that they are not subject to competition on the market and capital has no impersonal force to allocate labour to ensure these things get done.
More broadly, you might include a lot of functions undertaken by the state in the same category or socially necessary labour that is not organised by value relations. Eg, health and education. (Though obviously capital has been busily trying to colonise these spheres with commodity relations – and housework and child-raising too – it is unable to maintain these functions by itself.)
The comments at the Massimo post you link to remind me – have you read Michael Lebowitz’s “Beyond ‘Capital'”? It seems to address some of the same questions as Negri from a different angle. Check out the Panitch and Gindin review in Historical Materialism 14:2 (they’re always excellent, Panitch and Gindin, in my opinion).
“But I think there is a distinction in value terms between labour producing a commodity (physical or intangible) and labour that does not produce a commodity, even though it may be necessary for social reproduction. ”
But Mike, doesn’t this labour – housework and the like – indeed produce a commodity, namely labour power? isn’t this one of the main points of difference between Marx and the neo-Ricardians, the latter treating labour power much like land or a natural resource, while Marx recognises labour power is a commodity sold in a market, with (necessarily) a labour value like other commodities?
(In Capital Volume III, chapter 11-12 I think are the relevant passages.)
“If the change in the rate of surplus-value is not due to a depression of wages below normal, or their rise above normal — and movements of that kind are to be regarded merely as oscillations — it can only occur either through a rise, or fall, in the value of labour-power, the one being just as impossible as the other unless there is a change in the productivity of the labour producing means of subsistence, i.e., in the value of commodities consumed by the labourer.”
Colonel, you beat me to it. If you have a chance and are interested in this, you might check out The Arcane of Reproduction by Leopoldina Fortunati. It’s not very inviting prose, but it’s short. Her argument is essentially that reproductive labor also produces value because it produces labor power. Someday when I get more time I’d like to really dig into the stuff on what value is and is not, the housework stuff raises hard questions about that.
Hey guys,
Labour-power is a commodity of sorts. But its value is the value of commodities purchased for labourers’ subsistence. Household labour is not abstract labour and does not produce the value of labour-power, though of course it influences what commodities workers need from the market.
This is clearest in v1 ch6, but it is logical whatever Marx said about it, because distinction is vital for the determination of surplus value, which is the difference between the value of the commodities taken by workers from the commodity sphere and the total value produced by workers in a period.
What you quote seems to back up this interpretation too, Chabert, Marx is clearly talking about commodities purchased and not household labour.
Nate, I’d be interested to read the Fortunati piece to see what the argument is. But I’m dubious because it seems to stretch the concept of value beyond its usefulness. Value doesn’t explain the whole reproduction of capitalist society, just commodity relations.
hey Mike,
I’m not committed to Fortunati’s argument about housework as value productive, just the part that housework is productive for and faces pressures from capital. If you have a chance to look at it I’d be keen to hear what you make of it. Part of her argument entails that labor power is systematically underpriced, because the labor power of the male worker requires a great deal of labor time to produce and reproduce but that time is not included under (doesn’t count as) socially necessary labor time and so doesn’t figure into the value of labor power.
take care,
Nate
thanks Mike; I think I disagree for a couple of reasons. One, the passionate opening to the Critique of the Gotha Programme:
First part of the paragraph: “Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture.”
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.
The other, the acknowledgement that the commodities which are staples for the working class concerned are not being/have not been always produced by wage labour solely (cotton, sugar) but by slaves and peasants and serfs as well. Marx here is not connecting the value of labour to the “cost of living” – the cost of reproducing the possibility for labouring- on the contrary, to the labour value of the commodities (thus productivity emphasised rather than cost) in the labour power sold. It’s not stated explicitly anywhere that the value of labour power is determined by the labour (waged and unwaged) involved in its production – the political aspects of wage determinations (“sheer abuse”, Marx writes, of the labour of women and children) are stressed – but I think it’s implied. (Also seems to be understood in remarks of Proudhon, etc..)
remarks oN
Colonel, thanks for this, it crystallizes Fortunati’s point for me better – she writes at some length about the ideology of naturalization (not in those terms), that reproductive labor is counted as natural rather than as social ie labor, thus it’s easier to not compensate it.
Hey Chabert,
The point is not that household labour is not necessary for reproducing labour. (Who would disagree with that?) Just that it does not create value, including the value of labour power.
I’m not sure how the Gotha quote helps your case. He is clearly talking about use value there. In fact a major point of the Critique of the Gotha Program is to clear up a widespread misunderstanding – that his theory of value leads to the conclusion that workers should be remunerated on the basis of the work they perform. Value has nothing to do with ‘right’, it is about how capitalism organises commodity production. There is no need to confuse the idea that household labour _should_ be remunerated with questions of value. Value (a theory of how capitalist commodity production is organised) brings nothing to that argument. Thus (from the Critique):
“I have dealt more at length with the “undiminished” proceeds of labor, on the one hand, and with “equal right” and “fair distribution”, on the other, in order to show what a crime it is to attempt, on the one hand, to force on our Party again, as dogmas, ideas which in a certain period had some meaning but have now become obsolete verbal rubbish, while again perverting, on the other, the realistic outlook, which it cost so much effort to instill into the Party but which has now taken root in it, by means of ideological nonsense about right and other trash so common among the democrats and French socialists.
“Quite apart from the analysis so far given, it was in general a mistake to make a fuss about so-called distribution and put the principal stress on it.
“Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of nonworkers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labor power. If the elements of production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically. If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one. Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?”
As for whether Marx means that ‘the cost of living’ or the ‘labour used up in its production’ determines the value of labour-power, I think it is clearly the former – again see v1 ch6.
I wouldn’t want to be too pedantic about it (or is it too late?) but the reason it is important is, as I said above, that surplus value is defined as value created in the production of commodities, less what workers remove from the commodity sphere. The value of labour-power is the second element. Household labour plays no part precisely because capitalists do not pay for it.
Household labour, as concrete labour producing use values, may influence the value of labour power (e.g. if the household makes its own bread, it only has to buy the ingredients, if it doesn’t, it has to buy bread). But this is a secondary effect.
That comment beginning “As for whether Marx means…” is the second part… I’m assuming the first part has appeared in Nate’s spam trap for whatever reason and will eventually appear!
Mike, I’m not entirely sure but I think your comments would get automatically moderated less often if you didn’t include all those links to pay porn sites.
Re: price of labor power, that Boydston article I mentioned a few times about housework makes a lot out of wives’ scavenging and production activities as part of providing the worker with use values. I’m not sure if it changes anything, but it did challenge what I’d always taken to be Marx’s methodological assumption, which is that means of subsistence are commodified. A big piece of Boydston’s argument essentially boils down to an argument about the continuing importance of use value production or appropriation via non-monetary exchanges. Among other things, this means that the wage provides less of the workers’ subsistance than I’d assumed.
take care,
Nate
Hey Nate,
What can I say, I recommend those sites very highly!
The Boydston point sounds like a totally reasonable one, along the lines of my bread-baking example. It is a help to capital if workers have non-commodified means of subsistence. But the effect of this kind of labour is to _lower_ the value of labour-power; it doesn’t increase it.
Of course capital doesn’t want labour being too self-sufficient, either. That’s why Marx puts such great weight on the enclosure movement, etc. More contemporarily, it can help the accumulation of capital for things that used to be non-commodified within the home to be done through the market. Commercial childcare frees up the mother to work and allows profit to be made from raising children, for example. The macro effect depends on the balance between the extra cost of child raising, which now forms part of the value of labour-power, and the extra value created by the extra worker.
thanks Mike;
“Just that it does not create value, including the value of labour power.”
I think this is kind of a disagreement about the perspective on this question.
What creates the value of labour power (and thus of all commodities)? We know that it’s value is not created by buying commodities. Boys in the mills bought no commodities. Slaves bought no commodities. Peasants bought few commodities. All this labour power was acquired by capital in different ways. Its market price, if sold in a market – the boys in the english mills – is manipulated politically. If slaves, paid for in a lump life sum, and various. If peasants, another thing entirely. Its value cannot be examined at the point of its subordination to capital. But. Its value can be seen and examined in what it adds to commodities produced and sold in markets.
So, slave labour, boys in mills, adult factory workers, peasants. All labour. Only some sell the commodity labour power, but all labour and the value of the amount of labour can be examined in its dead form whether it was acquired in the commodity form of labour power, the commodity form of slaves, or exploited some other way.
Like cotton, labour power, the commodity, has this grounding in the value of natural resource, for cotton it is land and vegetable, for labour power it is….social nature.
that’s what i meant to say. anyway; a clear case is that a sick or unconscious or dead labourer cannot labour. I think its implied that abstract labour producing labourers, that is, total social production, is abstract labour. Then the issue is the quantity in commodities, to determine relative values. Since the total is spread out basically evenly (everyone is gestated for nine months etc) across a working class in a region, its neither here nor there, one can eliminate it from the calculations. But in comparing the value of commodities from different regions and economies, one sees that it is a factor. A good comparison is the cotton produced in the mid nineteenth century in Palestine, by peasants, and in the southern US states, by slaves.
“As for whether Marx means that ‘the cost of living’ or the ‘labour used up in its production’ determines the value of labour-power, I think it is clearly the former – again see v1 ch6.”
Okay but there are two perspectives. If we are talking about the market price of labour, then the cost of living is the sort of floor. But the value of labour power is in the commodities it produces. And this returns to the questions before about use value and exchange value and value. Because I think here is the illustration that use value is not insignificant in marx on value; the use value of labour power to the capitalist is what’s determining the value of commodities, not the exchange value of labour power. So it is the use value of labour power that is crucial, that is value creating. In Capital Marx is mainly concerned with describing one set of processes. But put it together with the sociological writings, and I think it’s implied that the source of value is social production in general.
the monsterator ate a comment.
“Value has nothing to do with ‘right’, it is about how capitalism organises commodity production. There is no need to confuse the idea that household labour _should_ be remunerated with questions of value. ”
Yeah agreed, but but. (anyway it’s not just housework, its everything.) But. Put simply, if surplus value is the difference between the use and exchange value of quantities of labour, then its the use value (labour) that’s the determining thing (in the last instance). And the use value of labour derives from social nature.
And in the critique of the gotha programme, Marx is railing against the “iron law of wages”, the notion that wages are pushed down to bare subsistence, that the cost of living is the determining factor of the exchange value of labour power. He’s arguing that that’s not the case, that in capitalism wages can go up, and the standard which counts as subsistence can in fact change. So this – the exchange value of the commodity labour power – is not what determines value, but is in fact one of the determined commodities (though unusual), and its determinants are the use value of labour and class struggle.
(okay i stop now)
Hey Chabert,
I think we agree on the basic point (that there are things outside the sphere of commodity production and exchange that affect the reproduction of labour-power) and disagree on definitions of ‘use value’ and ‘value’. Definitional debates are maybe not of much practical importance, but the right definitions are important for doing economic research with the categories, and that’s why I care.
The value of slave labour-power (in capitalism) is higher than the cost of buying the slave because the owner must maintain the slave. So while the slave may not purchase their own means of subsistence, it is still a deduction from the value produced by their labour. And that is the key point, equally applicable to boys in mills.
The peasant question is interesting, because they live to some extent outside the commodity sphere, even in a generally capitalist society. Value and surplus value are not appropriate categories for understanding their reproduction, though ‘surplus’ (without the ‘value’) still applies, and the prices they face for sales of their surplus product may be set by competition with capitalist farming (where ‘value’ applies). (This is why Marx thought capitalism doomed peasantry, so that some peasants would develop into workers and some into capitalist farmers.)
“So it is the use value of labour power that is crucial, that is value creating. In Capital Marx is mainly concerned with describing one set of processes. But put it together with the sociological writings, and I think it’s implied that the source of value is social production in general.”
OK, here the disagreement is clearly over what ‘value’ as a concept is supposed to do. It is not supposed to explain the reproduction of capitalist society in general. It is supposed to explain the workings of capitailst commodity production, capital accumulation, competition and exchange.
Clearly the capitalist system requires a broader social structure that it does not reproduce for itself. That does not mean these elements create ‘value’. You could make the point that capitalism requires a supply of breathable air and a solid earth’s crust; this does not mean that air and the surface of the earth create value.
‘Value’ is meant to explain such things as the ratio in which different commodities exchange for one another, and the rate at which capital can accumulate, _given_ a broader capitalist social structure.
“Put simply, if surplus value is the difference between the use and exchange value of quantities of labour, then its the use value (labour) that’s the determining thing (in the last instance). And the use value of labour derives from social nature.”
Again this is a definitional difference. ‘Use value’ is not quantifiable. But there is a (‘surplus value’) gap between the value of labour-power over a given period and the value created by labour in the same period.
This gap is not determined prior to production by ‘social nature’ or anything else. The capacity of labour to produce value is not a quality of the labour alone, but of the whole commodity/capital system.
It is certainly not my position that the value of labour-power is determined by bare subsistence! Like you say, wages have a tendency to rise, but it depends on class struggle over wages as well as competition between capitals (both nominal wages and prices are involved). This is why I say the value created by labour and the value of labour-power (and together, surplus value) are not determined ex-ante, but only ex-post, i.e. through the workings of the whole system.
hey Mike and Colonel, I haven’t had the time and the sleep to follow this conversation as closely as I’d like and to formulate responses beyond “hmm” and “interesting” and “say more.” Sorry about that. My nanowrimo’s bloggerly cousin isn’t helping neither. Anyways, I wanted to ask – is there a short piece or two we could all read on this subject? Or, could we break down the disagreement into some short distinct questions around which a reading or two each could be found?
take care,
Nate
thanks Mike: I agree this is terminological, but as you suggest, not trivial for all that.
“This gap is not determined prior to production by ’social nature’ or anything else. The capacity of labour to produce value is not a quality of the labour alone, but of the whole commodity/capital system.”
This is the crux of our dispute here – that with commodity production and capitalism, labour becomes the sole producer of value. On the contrary, labour was always the sole creator of value and capitalism is a transformation of the way some of this total value of total social production is expropriated by a ruling class. Marx makes the point of going over the development of capitalism, as a shift from a previous system of surplus extraction. I mention cotton because in Marx’ era, cotton was a major commodity, in capitalism, being produced mainly by slaves but also by peasants, and very significantly during the US civil war, dominantly produced by peasants in the Ottoman dominated middle east. Peasant produced cotton had of course exchange value, and its sale in European markets generated surplus value, just as slave produced cotton and wage labour produced goods using cotton.
Anyway, I think our disagreement is a square one thing; it is not only in capitalism but in all modes of production that human labour alone produces use value, and this is not trivial but what determines that in capitalism it is human labour alone that produces the exchange value of use values and that commodities are exchanged in markets in relations to one another determined by relative quantities of labour.
I’ll drag Mandel in to help me here for the moment:
Ernest Mandel:
As said before, Marx’s theory of classes is based on the recognition that in each class society, part of society (the ruling class) appropriates the social surplus product. But that surplus product can take three essentially different forms (or a combination of them). It can take the form of straightforward unpaid surplus labour, as in the slave mode of production, early feudalism or some sectors of the Asiatic mode of production (unpaid corvée labour for the Empire). It can take the form of goods appropriated by the ruling class in the form of use-values pure and simple (the products of surplus labour), as under feudalism when feudal rent is paid in a certain amount of produce (produce rent) or in its more modern remnants, such as sharecropping. And it can take a money form, like money-rent in the final phases of feudalism, and capitalist profits. Surplus-value is essentially just that: the money form of the social surplus product or, what amounts to the same, the money product of surplus labour. It has therefore a common root with all other forms of surplus product: unpaid labour.
This means that Marx’s theory of surplus-value is basically a deduction (or residual) theory of the ruling classes’ income. The whole social product (the net national income) is produced in the course of the process of production, exactly as the whole crop is harvested by the peasants. What happens on the market (or through appropriation of the produce) is a distribution (or redistribution) of what already has been created. The surplus product, and therefore also its money form, surplus-value, is the residual of that new (net) social product (income) which remains after the producing classes have received their compensation (under capitalism: their wages). This ‘deduction’ theory of the ruling classes’ income is thus ipso factor an exploitation theory. Not in the ethical sense of the word – although Marx and Engels obviously manifested a lot of understandable moral indignation at the fate of all the exploited throughout history, and especially at the fate of the modern proletariat – but in the economic one. The income of the ruling classes can always be reduced in the final analysis to the product of unpaid labour: that is the heart of Marx’s theory of exploitation.
That is also the reason why Marx attached so much importance to treating surplus-value as a general category, over and above profits (themselves subdivided into industrial profits, bank profits, commercial profits etc.), interest and rent, which are all part of the total surplus product produced by wage labour. It is this general category which explains both the existence (the common interest) of the ruling class (all those who live off surplus value), and the origins of the class struggle under capitalism.
Marx likewise laid bare the economic mechanism through which surplus-value originates. At the basis of that economic mechanism is a huge social upheaval which started in Western Europe in the 15th century and slowly spread over the rest of the continent and all other continents (in many so-called underdeveloped countries, it is still going on to this day).
Through many concomitant economic (including technical), social, political and cultural transformations, the mass of the direct producers, essentially peasants and handicraftsmen, are separated from their means of production and cut off from free access to the land. They are therefore unable to produce their livelihood on their own account. In order to keep themselves and their families alive, they have to hire out their arms, their muscles and their brains, to the owners of the means of production (including land). If and when these owners have enough money capital at their disposal to buy raw materials and pay wages, they can start to organise production on a capitalist basis, using wage labour to transform the raw materials which they buy, with the tools they own, into finished products which they then automatically own too.
The capitalist mode of production thus presupposes that the producers’ labour power has become a commodity. Like all other commodities, the commodity labour power has an exchange value and a use value. The exchange value of labour power, like the exchange value of all other commodities, is the amount of socially necessary labour embodied in it, i.e. its reproduction costs. This means concretely the value of all the consumer goods and services necessary for a labourer to work day after day, week after week, month after month, at approximately the same level of intensity, and for the members of the labouring classes to remain approximately stable in number and skill (i.e. for a certain number of working-class children to be fed, kept and schooled, so as to replace their parents when they are unable to work any more, or die). But the use value of the commodity labour power is precisely its capacity to create new value, including its potential to create more value than its own reproduction costs. Surplus-value is but that difference between the total new value created by the commodity labour power, and its own value, its own reproduction costs. The whole marxian theory of surplus-value is therefore based upon that subtle distinction between ‘labour power’ and ‘labour’ (or value). But there is nothing ‘metaphysical’ about this distinction. It is simply an explanation (demystification) of a process which occurs daily in millions of cases.
The capitalist does not buy the worker’s ‘labour’. If he did that there would be obvious theft, for the worker’s wage is obviously smaller than the total value he adds to that of the raw materials in the course of the process of production. No: the capitalist buys ‘labour power’, and often (not always of course) he buys it at its justum pretium, at its real value. So he feels unjustly accused when he is said to have caused a ‘dishonest’ operation. The worker is victim not of vulgar theft but of a social set-up which condemns him first to transform his productive capacity into a commodity, then to sell that labour power on a specific market (the labour market) characterised by institutional inequality, and finally to content himself with the market price he can get for that commodity, irrespective of whether the new value he creates during the process of production exceeds that market price (his wage) by a small amount, a large amount, or an enormous amount.
The labour power the capitalist has bought ‘adds value’ to that of the used-up raw materials and tools (machinery, buildings etc.). If, and until that point of time, this added value is inferior or equal to the workers’ wages, surplus-value cannot originate. But in that case, the capitalist has obviously no interest in hiring wage labour. He only hires it because that wage labour has the quality (the use value) to add to the raw materials’ value more than its own value (i.e. its own wages). This ‘additional added value’ (the difference between total ‘value added’ and wages) is precisely surplus-value. Its emergence from the process of production is the precondition for the capitalists’ hiring workers, for the existence of the capitalist mode of production.
(more shortly)
The key sentence: The whole marxian theory of surplus-value is therefore based upon that subtle distinction between ‘labour power’ and ‘labour’ (or value).
Nate, for me the question here arises most clearly sort of in a gap between a) a bunch of Marxist economists’ responses to Sraffa and in Mandel’s response to Baran and Sweezy, and b) the historians’ querelles about the transition from feudalism. In the discourse of economists the question – what is the use value of labour and its relation to Marx’ concept of value in capitalism, how do we understand this – is only really obliquely addressed because capitalist mode of production is the given, and the issues are explaining capitalism as a given, its laws of motion and the specific realities of now, and this is all influenced by Keynes one way or another, while in the discourse of historians, the question of surplus production and appropriation is addressed in another way, sort of a preoccupation of the querelles of the transition, the first querelle (sweezy, hilton, dobbs) and the second (brenner, le roy ladurie, harman). And the question rises somewhere between these perspectives. I think it’s fair to say economists tend to equate value with exchange value, that’s legitimate for their concerns and in the explanations economists are involved in producing of a certain object, while the historians whose concerns and object are different emphasise that these are not for Marx actually perfect synonyms, that value in Marx really partakes of both use value and exchange value. And then maybe the challenge is finally still to understand the capitalist mode of production’s relation to the total society, total production/reproduction, with its (vanishing, progressively conquered) outside, from these different perspectives simultaneously. I think.
and just to link this back to the original question (where is negri getting his notions from), here’s Jonathan Beller:
If we recall from Marx that “production is not only particular production, but it is invariably a definite social body, a social subject that is active in a wider or narrower totality of branches of production” and, further, that the instruments of production are “also past, objectified, accumulated labour” (Grundrisse), then the cinematic image not only as Vertov fabricates it but in general contains, as it were, the social totality. It is invariably a monad, a crystal of the socius, the totality of society registered in a crystalline form. Just as Edward W. Said can show how the micropolitics of a Victorian parlor novel depends on the British in India, one ought to be able to show how a still from, say, Pretty Woman is linked to concrete histories of patriarchy, the feminization of labor, and the formation of global commodity chains. Each image, like each commodity, potentially leads to the totality of the relations of production.
The crucial difference between the commodity-object and the image-object lies in the distinctive character of the image-object’s circulation and consumption. The cinematic image is a sensualized abstraction with no physical content beyond its intellectual and sensual appeal, at least as far as the consumer of the image is concerned. It is a material formation emptied of its material, the label without the can – in some respects, the realization of what was once called the commodity’s ersatz value. Thus, as cinema is a dematerialized form of circulation, the image is a dematerialized form of the commodity, the commodity without its material content. Indeed, this virtual, immaterial character might lead us to believe that the image is not a commodity at all, at least to the extent that it has no readily apparent use-value other than something that erupts in the zone of pleasure (use) and its psychic-ideological labyrinth, that is, until one considers its use-value for capital. In this usefulness for the valorization of capital, then, it is for the wage earner like money – the company scrip of U. S. Incorporated, a means to subsistence.
What is the use of the image? One cannot eat it or sleep in it; in the cinema, one cannot even take it home. If it is true that an image has no use-value in the practical, material sense, then it is pure exchange-value. Its use-value is its exchange-value. It circulated commodities through our sensoriums and exchanges itself for us. When we incorporate the image, we ourselves become exchangeable; we have/are social currency. In this respect, the commodity that the image most closely resembles is indeed money, the vanishing mediator, which, from the standpoint of the consumer, is the most general form of pleasure, the general form of social wealth, the means to life; and yet it is not money. One does not spend image; one performs it. As with money, the circulation of the image and its related phenomenological effects, along with the subroutines these imply, are essential for the valorization of capital.
To say that the spectator extracts subsistence use-values in a relation to exchange-value mediated by the image and valorizing capital is to reissue Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s formulation, “Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work.” The next moment in the transformation of the interactivity of the image, cinema’s legacy in email and the World Wide Web, makes this tendency patently obvious. The residual effects of money, so scrupulously noted by Simmel, are, in the moment of cinema, given a new turn: The residue of the circulation that is the moving image is the internalization of the consciousness of the industrialm revolution and the subjugation of social performance to the logic of capital. This consciousness, and the array of affective states necessary to it, is itself necessary to the development of industry. This, Adorno and Horlheimer’s assertion that the spectator’s experiences “are inevitably after-images of the work process itself” describes not just the culture of industry but the political economic trajectory of industrial culture. – the cinematic mode of production
Hey Chabert (if you’re still reading this thread),
You write: “On the contrary, labour was always the sole creator of value and capitalism is a transformation of the way some of this total value of total social production is expropriated by a ruling class.”
I agree this is the crux of the disagreement. Because I see ‘value’ as specific to commodity production. I notice later in the paragraph you prefix pre-capitalist value product with ‘use’, which I wouldn’t disagree with.
A question for you then – why do you think “all modes of production… human labour alone produces use value”? I would disagree with this and it’s probably central to the disagreement about housework etc.
What is it that is special about human labour? And doesn’t this contradict the Gotha Program quote from earler? “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.”
I notice Mandel avoids using ‘value’ to describe the surplus product except where it takes a money/commodity form.
Thanks Mike – I didn’t mean to leave out “and nature”, but I think for Marx its implied very simply human beings are part of nature. Like lions, individual people can kill more than they eat. This is nature; the human species can producemore stuff than it can use per capita.
I’ll try to explain from scratch how I see this. The question is “what creates value in capitalism”?
“Value”, in Marx I think, is not created by capitalism, it is not new with capitalist markets, capital and the wage relation. Capital is new, a new form of value. The commodity as dominant is new, a new form of value. But this is a transformation, whose continuity is as important as its novelty for understanding Marx not only on capitalism but on history I think. Even value in its specific capitalist form(s) – of exchange and use value of commodities in capitalism – precedes the dominance of the capitalist mode of production. We have first “the so called primitive accumulation”. There is a long intermediary period between feudalism and capitalism no matter which account of the transformation you find more persuasive.
I think we have to read Marx concept of “value” the way we would read a concept of “production” or “the state” or “the family”. That is, historically specific, changing, but also with continuity. “The family” of the renaissance Italy is not “the family” of Victorian England; nonetheless there is a continuity of content which is historically specific in circumstances. So with “value”. It’s not something that did not exist before capitalism. In capitalism, it has specific forms, as in Feudalism, or ancient slave societies.
I think Marx’ idea of value begins in the most general sense with class societies, with the surplus that in class societies is made by producers and expropriated by appropriators, the ruling class. It is the surplus of the entire social product and the nature human society controls (the relation of humanity and nature is another long discussion, let’s say its not a binary distinction) – the surplus of the entire human society, it’s technology, social arrangements, knowledges, biological functions. Even if it takes for the feudal lord just a few forms, it is the product of the entire social order including the property relations and class distinctions. A whole social order produces a surplus, accrues real wealth, and a minority encloses most of this surplus, which is always accumulating, is always being compounded, in property. Engels and Marx both on many occasions refer to non-capitalist ruling class appropriation of the surplus as “exploitation” as well, of a different kind – direct rather than the indirect exploitation in capitalism. So, the labour of slaves, peasants, serfs, are all exploited; the surplus that is extracted is all surplus labour product, and in all these arrangements this surplus has value, which is historically defined, and has an historical character. The lord takes part of the harvest he did not himself participate in cultivating.
Exchange value – commodification – which is not entirely new in capitalism (there are markets in other societies of course) but is newly dominant with capital, creates the distinction between exchange value – which is the mechanism for the distribution of the surplus among appropriators as well as of exploitation – and use value. This “use value” that now exists conceptually in distinction to exchange value in capitalism is historically new, that is its definition in relation to and as a relation to exchange value is new in capitalism, but it is not sui generis, but a development, an historically specific form of value: now this total social surplus of stuff is capitalised, is circulating and accumulated as capital, but this has not abolished its older qualities as the social surplus generally, the stuff made by producers, real wealth enclosed in property. (The ideology of individualism and the division of labour in industrialisation frame the question in terms of an individual – the amount the individual can produce in a day minus what he needs to consume in a day. This is ideological; no individual can produce or consume as an individual, or exist for just a day. It doesn’t exist. Nor can an individual produce a surplus as an individual. Work is always social, the being who works is always social, a quantum of an entire material and intellectual society. The illusions and blindnesses resulting from this individualist way of thinking, and the preference for certain kinds of anecdotes which naturalise it, is one of the things Marx sets out to correct, on the deepest level.)
So there is continuity, in class societies, about exploitation and expropriation – a producing class, and an appropriator class who extracts a surplus, the product of the labour of the producing class, the majority. Marx and Engels often stress this continuity, although Capital is focussed on the uniqueness of capitalism so except for the historical stuff early on, it’s not stressed.
Here’s Engels: “The worker in the service of the capitalist not only reproduces the value of his labour power, for which he receives pay, but over and above that produces a surplus value which, appropriated in the first place by the capitalist, is in its further course divided according to definite economic laws among the whole capitalist class and forms the basic stock from which arise ground rent, profit, accumulation of capital, in short, all the wealth consumed or accumulated by the non-labouring classes. But this proved that the acquisition of riches by the present day capitalists consists just as much in the appropriation of the unpaid labour of other as that of the slave-owner or the feudal lord exploiting serf labour, and that all these forms of exploitation are only to be distinguished by the difference in manner or method by which unpaid labour is appropriated. This, however, removed the last justification for all the hypocritical phrases of the possessing classes to the effect that in the present social order right and justice, equality of rights and duties and a general harmony of interests prevail, and present day bourgeois society, no less than its predecessors, was exposed as a grandiose institution for the exploitation of the huge majority of the people by a small, ever diminishing minority.”
Okay so, the historical development, capitalist and the politically free propertyless wage labourer, conceals a continuity of exploitation, of surplus extraction, the appropriation of wealth as property which accumulates. This exploitation is the appropriation of surplus labour, which is “wealth” at bottom, though in this new form, and distributed among the appropriator ruling class in this new way.
If the question is what creates value – in capitalism – the question has to acknowledge that value is nothing other than, as Marx and Engels both repeatedly stress, form in capitalism of this social surplus, that is the total social surplus, accruing wealth enclosed in private property. So what creates this is fundamentally unchanged; it is human labour acting on nature and the products of past human labour; it is human society as a whole, biological intellectual material and social.
The human labourer sells labour power for a day; the wage is politically manipulated and subject to lots of “oscillations” but in principal it’s value is roughly the reproduction costs of the labourer individually for that one day, the marginal costs of reproducing an existing, socially produced human being for that one day. But no other commodity than labour power, bought at an equivalent amount to a daily wage for a labourer, has the use value of human labour. The ability of the human labourer to create use values – in capitalism or in any other arrangement – that is, the use value of the labour to the capitalist (which is his ability to create use values, which in capitalism are also exchange values, whose sale realises surplus value, or profit) is not the creation of capitalist exchange. It is not the result of the social arrangements, or the arrangements of production, or property relations, but is the material given. It is for one thing not “individual”, it cannot be understood in this individualist framework. It is of the same character as peasants ability to create a surplus harvest in feudalism. The individual labourers ability to create use values is a social product, a social and natural fact. The whole society exists and this labourer and his labour is a product of it. Even the whole society’s needs are necessary to the creation of surplus as wealth (in or out of capitalism). So that is what I meant. The exploitation of labour, in whatever class society, is always the exploitation of the total social surplus, the wealth which is created by the whole society, the whole material and social order, because it is this material reality of human society that produces the fact of the human labourer’s ability to create use values, to transform nature and the products of previous labour at a greater rate than human society can consume/destroy what is created. Thus not only housework, but language capacity and the binomial theorem, create the value that is then divided between producers and appropriators. How it is then socially defined and divided – the form of exchange value and capital in capitalism – is historically specific.
Hey Chabert,
I think you are using ‘value’ in an overly-general sense, as ‘product of labour’.
The condition for the appearance of ‘value’ in Marx’s sense is regular commodity exchange, not necessarily capitalism. Obviously ‘value’ has a long history, like commodity exchange itself. But in pre-capitalist history commodity exchange was not central to the social allocation of labour and its products. Surplus and value are different concepts and they only come together with the development of capitalism.
Your pre-capitalist examples show exploitation and surplus, but not surplus-value. The story of the transition from feudalism to capitalism is long and it’s hard to draw an exact line between them. The growth in importance of commodity production and exchange is only one important aspect. Even in a fully capitalist society ‘value’ and ‘products of labour’ or ‘surplus value’ and ‘social surplus’ are not co-extensive. Capitalist value relations still rely on non-value supports, though capital has shaped its social environment to serve it.
It is a circular and trivial argument to define value as the product of labour, and then say that labour determines value. Political economic arguments about value were always trying to say more than this – they were trying to explain _why_ commodities exchange at certain rates. Pre-Marxian labour theories of value argued that quantities of labour explained the phenomenon, and the theorists made causal arguments.
Marx actually seriously qualified this view and moved away from a pure ‘labour theory of value’ (though in plenty of his writings he continued to use it for simplicity’s sake). Though he maintained throughout that capitalist ‘surplus value’ was analogous to the extraction of social surplus in earlier modes of production, he did not conflate them. There is a need for two concepts, ‘surplus’ and ‘value’, and Marx’s analysis of capitalism shows how capital extracts surplus through value relations.
Like the earlier political economists, he gave causal explanations, not tautologies. (And he didn’t have the last word on value either, though his theory was definitely an advance.)
Thanks mike.
“Your pre-capitalist examples show exploitation and surplus, but not surplus-value. ”
I think we may be a little talking past eachother now. I mean to clarify what creates surplus value in capitalism – this question began does housework, roadways, government provided education, prison labour, and all this other stuff crea(te surplus value that is accumulated as capital now – not to say surplus value in capitalism is identical to all other forms of surplus labour product, but that it is a form of surplus labour product, the form specific to capitalism, but like all others created by the total social production, by the same forces, though shaped by different relations.
So I accept what you say about the distinction between surplus in non capitalist arrangements and surplus value in capitalism; I accept the distinction between capital and other forms of property and wealth. For example, I accept that cotton can be a commodity or not a commodity. Still this difference of form does not answer the question what creates cotton. That cotton may have the form of capital in one arrangement, and the form of another kind of wealth in another, does change how it is created and what creates it. What makes it one form – capital – or another does not tell us what creates cotton.
There is no value that capital creates. There is value created by labour, and capital is one form in which that value is expropriated, distributed and enclosed in property.
Clearly the forms of surplus labour product are not the same in all social and productive arrangements. But these varied forms of property and wealth are all forms of something which precedes them – surplus labour product. The question is; what creates value in capitalism?
And the answer cannot be “capital (as relation) creates capital (as property)”. That’s not satisfying because there has to be something, a surplus, to capitalise. And also because it is not so – capital is not creative of value. What creates this something, this surplus, which capital is one form of?
Marx says simply: A commodity has a value because it is a crystallisation of social labour. (Wages, Price and Profit)
I don’t think he changes his mind. It’s the assumption underlying all the subsequent refinements of the analysis.
So, what creates “social labour” (value)?
In seeking the answer to this specific question – where does value in capitalism come from? – one must emphasise the historical specificity of capitalism as a manner and method of the extraction and proprietisation of surplus labour product and the long duration of exploitation of surplus labour simultaneously, the historical and material inheritance of capital and capitalism (which is not a social order created from scratch, but arises within a previous order with specific characteristics, is made by men acting in conditions inherited from the past), the fact that capital is in capitalism the form taken by accumulated social surplus (whether accumulated as rents, profits, interest, or the direct extraction of surplus labour product from slaves and peasants), as in other class societies.
So what creates value in capitalism is the question; and this is asking what creates the use value of labour, the ability of labour to make use values? This ability is not created by the wage relation or market exchange. In fact, you can have market exchange, capitalist private property, and no labourers, and you cannot create value. And you can have no wage relation, slave and peasant labourers, and capitalist markets and private property, and create value in capitalism (cotton being the case I cited because it was significant not marginal, not like oil paintings.)
Value in capitalism is a new form of something. You write: it ” was analogous to the extraction of social surplus in earlier modes of production, he did not conflate them.” Agreed, not identical, they are different forms of the same thing (surplus labour product). They are different forms, but created by the same thing (labour). They are different social historical forms of the accumulated wealth of a whole society produced by the society and expropriated in different ways.
What is indispensable to the creation of surplus value in capitalism as with all other surplus labour product is the social production of human labourers with their specific capabilities and their specific needs. Capitalism is not in the particular aspect different from other class societies with producers and appropriator proprietors. It is one kind of class society wherein surplus labour product, the surplus of the total social production, is expropriated by a minority.
So if the question is what creates this surplus in capitalism in its specific form (socially and naturally produced human labour), not what gives it this form (relations of property and production), then one cannot avoid acknowledging all the unwaged labour, the whole of society which produces the labourers abilities and the markets in which the surplus created by those abilities is realised as profit. One wouldn’t say feudal relations creates the value (in feudalism) of the surplus harvest. The peasants create it; people also create the need/desire for what they create (an indispensable feature of value), and feudalism is the name for the arrangements in which a ruling class exploits them. The same is true for capitalism. The source of the value of the same harvest from the same land by the same people is the same, whether the arrangements which allow for its expropriation and distribution of the surplus and accumulation of it as property is feudal or capitalist.
so that’s what i mean about the value creating nature of all the unwaged labour and life, and what i think is the thing that negri is at once describing and distorting and drawing odd conclusions from.
Hey Chabert,
There’s nothing there I disagree with! Maybe it’s time to call it a day on this thread. I guess my concern is to maintain that value is specific to commodities. Maybe the implication of where we are going in this is that surplus value is not the only form surplus product takes in capitalism. So household labour does not create value, but that doesn’t mean a housewife is not exploited.
I wish I had more time and energy to participate in this conversation! Real quick – Mike, can you expand on the “surplus labor which is not surplus value” point? That seems reasonable to me. Is there sound Marxological grounds for it? (That’s only half a joke, actually.)
Hey Nate,
All I mean is that ‘value’ is specifically a property of commodities exchanging in a general system of commodity exchange. Which is not specific to capitalism, but central to capitalism in a way it is not in, say, 12th century European feudal society.
Exploitation, surplus labour and surplus product are however central to both societies. Value is not that important to the reproduction of 12th century feudal society, but exploitation and surplus product sure are. Serfs labour beyond what is necessary for their own reproduction, and are exploited by their lords, but their product never takes a commodity form, and thus has no value.
A major part of Marx’s project in Capital and elsewhere is to show how the system of exchange of equal values can maintain a structure of exploitation and surplus labour. Thus ‘surplus value’. That doesn’t mean necessarily that surplus value accounts for the totality of exploitation in a capitalist society. But I think we can talk about that without needing to confuse it with the system of value.
A problem is that it is impossible to quantify non-value exploitation because there is no money/exchange/competition relationship that can be said to homogenise non-value-productive labour-time in the way value-productive labour-time is. But of course the same thing applies to slave or feudal exploitation – it cannot be quantified – but we wouldnt’ say it didn’t exist.
“All I mean is that ‘value’ is specifically a property of commodities exchanging in a general system of commodity exchange. Which is not specific to capitalism, but central to capitalism in a way it is not in, say, 12th century European feudal society.”
not to drag this out, but yeah, just to connect this to the original thing – the negri puzzle – the reason this matters is it may be that there is a kind of shift in the visibility of the unwaged underlying labour because the difference of conditions across the globe widens. for the exchange values of commodities, because there is roughly the same amount of social labour involved in creating the labourers, it doesn’t affect relative values. You can leave it out. But with the developments of the post war period, discrepancies grow (sugar cane is basically produced still as it was in the 18th century in dominican republic, by people who are basically enslaved all but in name, while call centres have lots of new technology and other industries have a lot of consultants who supply machines), and now maybe you can’t leave this out – the social labour making the labourers and their conditions (the fact that whole sectiosn of the workforce have mobile phones at their own expense; the fact that the economies of scale of mobile phones which makes this possible is the result of lots of leisure time as well as money donated by the whole society).
A certain commodity’s value is measured always in another commodity (any other). “The value of a single commodity, the linen, for example, is now expressed in terms of numberless other elements of the world of commodities. Every other commodity now becomes a mirror of the linen’s value.[25] It is thus, that for the first time, this value shows itself in its true light as a congelation of undifferentiated human labour. For the labour that creates it, now stands expressly revealed, as labour that ranks equally with every other sort of human labour, no matter what its form, whether tailoring, ploughing, mining, &c., and no matter, therefore, whether it is realised in coats, corn, iron, or gold. The linen, by virtue of the form of its value, now stands in a social relation, no longer with only one other kind of commodity, but with the whole world of commodities. As a commodity, it is a citizen of that world.” (Capital) Value is the social relation between discrete quantities of the total surplus labour product. The value of some linen is measured say in cups of coffee. Therefore, the value of this particular linen, regardless of how much actual concrete labour went into it (if it was especially slow or whatever, or homemade or something), is determined not only by the state of the linen industry, the rate of exploitation across the whole linen industry, and also the industries supplying materials and machines to the linen industry, but to the state of the coffee industry, since value of linen and cups of coffee are mutually defining, it’s a relation between them. How many cups of coffee is this amount of linen worth, how much software are those cups of coffee worth, how much toilet cleaning is that software worth, how much of everything everything else will exchange for, is determined not only by linen manufacture, but by everything producing everything, the state of coffee prduction, the cost of cleaning services, etc..
In the huge wage differentials – the effect of terror mainly and force – which have opened up between the imperial centre and the periphery, and in the appearance of fixed capital (computer software) whose marginal costs, like imperialised labour, tend toward zero (a dollar a day for the Haitian sweatshop worker; a dollar or so of electricity and telecom services a day to supply the call centre worker’s tools), and the explosion of the financial sector and the markets in futures, creates an illusion, I think for Negri, (and others) of the collapse of this basic reality of value production, of the collapse of these social relations between quanta of surplus labour product. But also what predisposes some postmarxist marxian thinkers to becoming interested in this illusion is they don’t want to talk about private property and accumulation, they don’t want to talk about wealth, about exploitation as the extraction of wealth. They want to see exploitation as a sadomaso drama of one sort or another, a kind of social theatre, thus the favouring of terms like oppression, exclusion, and the focus on the political in the common sense as determining. Private property almost unmentionable. Thus we get this portrait of international law disappearing, when in fact it is only international humanitarian law – a small part – and treaties governing the laws of war and stuff like that, that is being eroded, while international property and commercial law expands hugely.
Hey Chabert,
This is a really interesting point – the problem of concpetualising value in global terms. Marx’s theory of value assumes a fairly homogenous value of labour-power throughout. Obviously today commodities meet on the world market which were produced by workers whose labour-power is of quite different value.
Marx explicitly and often argued (along Ricardian lines) against the idea that the wage rate had a direct effect on the value of a commodity. It was labour-time (socially necessary, etc…) only. But he was working under the assumption that the value of labour power was pretty much the same everywhere.
The usual argument about wage differentials today (brought out to dispel the idea that first world wages are going to be dragged down to third world levels) is that they compensate for differences in labour productivity. There’s some truth in that (though the term ‘labour productivity’ hides so many determinants). But it’s hard to deal with in terms of vulgar value theory, where the rate of surplus value is also assumed to be constant. That’s why I think value theorists need to be aware of the causal mechanisms the theory is based on, and not be afraid to ditch certain elements when the real social mechanism changes. But ditch them in reasoned ways, working out what is baby and what is bathwater.
In this case, labour mobility, a key assumption of value theory (so far as equal value of labour-power and rate of surplus value are concerned) is highly restricted. That’s where I would start analysing these problems. I haven’t read Negri except Empire so I really don’t know what he argues.
thanks mike for the whole discussion. I guess I am trying to get a grip on why Negri thinks what he thinks and more importantly why so many other people find his account of things persuasive and attractive. I think the key to the attraction of this portrait of the world lie more in what it doesn’t say, the issues avoided, than in the actual description of what he does choose to highlight and notice. Because in the end these descriptions are political, I think, the preference for conceiving of “capitalism” as a kind of divine mind or something, controlling and governing for no human reason really, just for this divinity’s mishigas, and not a system of exploitation of wealth, and therefore kind of marginalising the fact of antagonistic interests of definite identifiable parties, whose constant contest produces the situation. Multitude against Empire, potentia against potestas…its noticing something real I guess, but this way of thinking really replaces class with the clash of two different orders of being, body and idea or something, humanity versus some diabolical demiurge or metaphysical software. The general picture seems to be borrowed from or at least deeply influenced by popular fictions, and it has a lot of implications and effects I think, for how people conceive the circumstances; it is at once very comforting in this optimism, that there is an irresistible force or power which will undertake a huge deep change just by being itself or coming into its own as it were, but paralyzing since its so unclear and abstract and one can have no relation to this power other than to say well i’m part of it already doing exactly what i do daily. And the specific attacks on LTOV also seem to undermine longstanding beliefs that capital and labour do fight over this material wealth constantly, and there can be and are different ways of dividing it up, and this is not pointless, because even if the apartment you live in is capital, its still better than sleeping in a car. I think Negri and others sort of bracket this, the situation of people as it were, in favour of focussing on the situation of abstractions, to the point where the connection Marx made between them vanishes, and the abstractions prevail. I guess for me the question is why this appeals to so many people (is that a good sign? A bad sign? A mixed bag sign?) and what that tells us about the current predicament and whether that really matters.
(thanks nate for the hospitality.)
” exploitation of wealth” should be exploitation of labour and expropriation of wealth