Shaviro on surplus value

Steven Shaviro has a fascinating post on the Grundrisse and surplus value. Read the whole thing: The Pinocchio Theory. He writes:

If value cannot be calculated in empirical terms, then neither can surplus value (or the quantitative amount that capitalists are appropriating from workers). Marx knows that there is no simple one-to–one correspondence between the rate of exploitation in a given firm or industry, and its profit; rather, the entire social surplus (the excess of what is produced over what is paid for in production costs) gets distributed among capitalist enterprises through the market. But again, Marx never succeeded in linking the macro-level to the micro-level mathematically. ...

Throwing out the whole dimension of value, however, is like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. You need some concept like value if you are ever to try to look at the economy (of the world, or of a given nation or society) systematically rather than just atomistically.... 

But how do we make sense of Marx’s whole theory of value, if we stand apart from the questions of calculation that he tried but failed to put into practice? All sorts of answers have been given in the course of the last century. I am inclined to accept Karatani’s suggestion that the theory of value needs to be regarded, not as an empirical phenomenon, but as the “transcendental condition,” in a Kantian sense, for the functioning of a capitalist-commodity mode of production and distribution. Marx acutely notes at one point in Grundrisse that “language as the product of an individual is an impossibility. But the same holds for property” (490). It is much more familiar today than it was in Marx’s time to note that, although I express myself through language, the language in which I make this expression is not properly mine, and does not belong to me, because it is social and communicative, and even precedes me. Marx says that the same is the case with “private property”: it is only in a given social framework, only when there are others, and myself and those others stand in various forms of relation, that I can even make the claim that something is mine, that it represents me, that it belongs to me. Property relations, like language, already have to be given before the issues of personal expression and personal presence and personal belonging even arise in the first place.

Comments

[s0metim3s]

Wittgenstein wrote somewhere that a proposition presupposes a calculus. He doesn't talk about it in the terms of value, but methinks that's another way into the above.

[Squibb]

One might also further say that, following Hayek, it is precisely that irreducibility of value to any empirical standard that gives the market its power. That these calculations cannot be made, cannot (for the first time) be expected to be made, (and yet somehow must be made, are made).

In this sense value stands as a sort of thing-in-itself, the result of a thought experiment, an essential place holder if Capital qua Capital is to be thought in totality at all, but this always remains a performative coherence, an arbitrary axiomatic assertion, this 'value,' any value which we would hold onto, insofar as the market-as-such, is as-such by virtue of its defiance of any normative standard of value, its refusing of any attempt to capture its excessiveness in the essentially reductive calculation that precedes an assertion of (human)value.

Value itself is a surplus, a leftover, something perhaps needed to get to where we are, but now left to whither and die where it is not utilized by the larger process.

The market is not a consciousness, and yet we need it to be, need it to be the sort of thing that would act in terms of the universal pretensions of something like value, if it is to appear for us as The Market.

Thus the attributing of any animism or subjectivity to what we would call the market itself, i.e. to hold it responsible for anything, is a failure of a self-conscious species to realize the radical presence of its own limitations.

In this ridiculous formulation, all value is use-value, exchange value is a category mistake, the mistaken recognition of an old friend in what is really beyond our comprehension, insofar as exchange proceeds precisely from the destruction of any universal form of value, (the form of value as universal) taking place instead by virtue of the individual’s desire, specifically from that which could never be value, but only 'of value' to a given person.

Is this the difficulty of thinking value after capital? That there can really be no formulation of something like exchange-value, as it universalizes something that is always already exhaustively particular?