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Questions on and responses to the Spivak piece.
The following is a guest post by Nate Holdren, blogger at the militant What in the hell .....
First, thanks to Jon and the Long Sundayista crew for holding this symposium. This is not a text I would have otherwise read. I look forward to reading the other contributions in order to understand it better.
Second, while I'm glad to have read it and grateful for the opportunity to participate in the symposium, it is unfortunately the case that I'm not sure what to do with this text. Much of the idiom and at least one of the major writers it references--Derrida--is very unfamiliar to me. I also find some of the philosophical uses of Marx in the essay bring out a proprietorial response on my part. I'd like to claim that it's because I prefer treatments of Marx to stick closer to the letters of blood and fire in which the history of capitalism is written, but that would be dishonest. I like a lot of abstract treatments of Marx. I don't know what it is about this text that doesn't click for me, maybe it's just that I don't really understand chunks of it. Hopefully some of you lot can and will help sort me out.
In any case, below is what I have to contribute to the symposium on Spivak's "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value." I have organized my contribution into three categories. There are two items under each category. I have numbered these items according to category.
The three categories in my contribution, in order of appearance, are:
- Questions that are nothing more than questions (QTANMTQ)
- Questions that are maybe a bit snarky and which are just as much comments as they are questions (QTAMABSAWAJAMCATAQ)
- Responses (R)
QTANMTQ #1. To begin, I would love for someone to explain to me what the phrase "predication of the subject" means (73). Does this mean simply "identification of the subject"? Does it mean the determination of the predicates or of additional predicates of an already subject? Or something else?
QTANMTQ #2. What does Spivak mean when she writes of "the embarrassment of the final economic determinant" (74)? Does this mean something like "embarrassingly--because perhaps out of fashion--we hold to the idea that the economic is determining in the last instance"? Or instead "how embarrassing it is to have--or that some have--believed the economic was determining of all else"?
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QTAMABSAWAJAMCATAQ #1. Why does Spivak write that with telecommunications "circulation time attains the apparent instantaneity of thought" (84; and a similar formulation on 82, "of Mind [and more]")? Does this do any work in her argument? Sorry to be pedantic and overly literal, but this sounds silly to me. Circulation doesn't achieve the speed of thought. Some circulation attains the speed of, say, a mouse click which enacts the sending of electronic information elsewhere at (I think) the speed of light. This is not instantaneous. It may be apparently instantaneous to some, but I don't see why one would want to prop up that appearance. This kind of treatment seems to me to give more power to informationalized/telecommunications sectors of capital (which, as Spivak happily notes on 84 is not all of capitalism) than already they have. It also papers over a number of contending factors involved in the determination of the speed of operation of telecommunications capital. (For example. the speed of a mouse click may be slower at times--when hung over, or angry at a supervisor, or at the end of long work day, or during a deliberately organized slowdown--and faster at others, like when one's job is on the line or there is a productivity bonus.)
QTAMABSAWAJAMCATAQ #2. Spivak writes that money "is posited through a process of separation from its own being as a commodity exchangeable for itself." (78). This sounds like the standard Marx(ist) story of the origin of money. But I don't know what the "for itself" could mean. To my mind, the commodity--that is, its use-value--is always for (or, relative to) defined in terms of (the use to be made of it) some end of some person or group. All I can think of is that the "for itself" means some substantive use value that is proper to the commodity, something which the commodity is suited for. I don't think that's what Spivak means--I hope not, at least, as that strikes me as wrongheaded. Perhaps she means that the commodity that plays the roll of money is generally desired for its roll as (or, in that it is) the bearer of the money function. So, a dollar bill could be useful for snorting cocaine, for serving as kindling to start a house on fire, for scrawling a secret message upon, etc. But generally--and insofar as it is money--it is not desired for these uses. Is that what Spivak means? I hope so. I don't see why this use as being money, though, should be thought of as not a part of the set that is the use value of the dollar bill. This is a use value that all commodities have (qua commodities).
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R #1. Spivak writes of a time when "capital is fully developed," defined as "the structural moment when the process of extraction, appropriation, and realization of surplus-value begins to operate with no extra-economic coercions" (79). It's a shame that "fully developed" and extra-economic vs economic do not undergo critical (deconstructive?) treatment in Spivak's hands, as they are concepts that could use such a treatment. The maintenance of capital never occurs, at least not for any significant length of time, without resort to so-called extra-economic force.
One could quibble over labor law, public health, housing policy, and many other factors, but I think the numerous historical examples of military, police, and private vigilante use of force against strikes and slowdowns demonstrate quite clearly that capitalism does not exist without the so-called extra-economic. The determination of some things as economic and others as not is what Carl Schmitt (in The Concept of the Political) called a depoliticalization. That is, it is an operation which decides what is and is not political, an operation with powerful political effects. The passages in Marx on primitive accumulation, which Spivak briefly discusses, demonstrate this. Primitive accumulation was the process which produced a situation wherein people had a relative lack of access to a large enough quantity of use values they wanted and needed such that they had little other option than to enter "freely" into the market as sellers of the commodity labor power. This process only occurred with massive extra-economic force, as Spivak recognizes. This process is also continually repeated over time--because wants and needs and use values are politically conditioned over history--such that primitive accumulation is, in effect, a presupposition of the logic of capital that capital must periodically reposit or re-enact.
R #2. I don't know what Spivak means when she says that use value "is both outside and inside the system of value-determinations" (80). She specifies that use value is "outside of the circuit of exchange." I don't know what she means here either, and I like neither formulation. I would like to quibble with Spivak on use-value. I may well be quibbling with Marx here, though I'm not sure this is so.
My own understanding of use value comes from how I read the opening bits of vol. 1 of Capital. (For the record, this is not the hoary "recourse to the founder" marxological power play, it's just where I get the terms. I may be misreading Marx, or these passages may be inadequate passages, or whatever. I only reference the passages because that's where I find them. I make this specification because I find "what Marx really meant" and competitions of who best knows Marx errata both quite tedious, and if my piece is to be found tedious I would like it be a deserved tediousness.) In the opening of vol. 1 of Capital Marx says that a use value is the quality of satisfying a need or want. This is any need or want as such, whether of "the fancy or the belly." To my mind, this is not a very philosophically interesting issue and I don't understand when people have strong opinions or philosophical points to make about use value. As I understand the term, use value simply means the capacity of (any) stuff to have (any) things (whatsoever) done to it. This implies a minimal concept of "use" as well, of course, defined as "doing things with stuff." These doesn't seem to me to be much of interest to say about use value (or, perhaps it would be better to say use values). Any use of any stuff for anything proves that stuff has a use value (ie, a capacity to be used) relative to that use.
In that regard, it seems to me a mistake, or just a strange turn of phrase, to describe use value as being inside or outside of exchange (or neither or, as Spivak puts it, both). The act of exchanging an object proves that objects have a use value such that they can be used for exchange. All commodities have the use value of being money, though only a very few at any given time will actually be used for that function. It strikes me as better simply to say that some use values are within exchange and others are not, some are within capitalism and some are not. (Just as some nitrogen molecules and some sentences are and some are not within exchange and within capitalism.)
Spivak writes "use-value is in play when a human being produces and uses up the product immediately." (75). This doesn't make sense to me. This may well be a use of the term "use-value" that Marx used. Regardless, it is a formulation I would advocate for voting off the island, were we to play Conceptual Survivor. It sets overly narrow limits (and without an argument for doing so) on the concepts "use" and "use value." Hoarding and exchanging are uses, as are eating, burning, strutting, caressing, bludgeoning-with, worshipping, and any number of other activities. Other uses that are particularly important for capitalism are policing the working class, helping (re)impose the conditions within which people have to sell their labor power, and making surplus value (this is the use value of the commodity labor power for capitalists: to produces more wealth than the price of purchase for it, at the general or average level of aggregate social production).
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Thank you for your time and attention.
By Nate | April 19, 2006 in Marxism, Politics, Readings, Spivak | Permalink
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"She specifies that use value is "outside of the circuit of exchange." I don't know what she means here either, and I like neither formulation. I would like to quibble with Spivak on use-value."
Nate, I admire your willingness to forthrightly state what you do and don't understand. In turn, I will say that my answer to this may well by my own misunderstanding. But I think that Spivak can never quite bring her statements about use-value into focus because she wants to remain within what she defines as a materialist conception of value.
Take the dollar bill example. If someone has no need for paper to light fires, write secret messages, snort cocaine etc. then its use-value to that person (assuming no value as currency) is zero. Someone else may find use-value in it for those purposes, depending on their particular circumstances and their imagination. (Perhaps they'd never think of writing a message on a dollar, simply because there isn't much blank space on it.) So already we're back to subjective value. This is why economists threw up their metaphorical hands and turned to the concept of utility instead. Something could have had hundred of person-hours and many resources used to make it, yet could still have no use-value for me. The question of whether it would have exchange value would depend on whether I could find anyone for whom it has use-value, etc.
When Spivak goes on about discontinuities, seperation from exchange, etc., it seems to me like she's just re-treading this ground. She doesn't want to say that value is individual and subjective, because that would put her on collision course with neoclassical economics. So it all has to sound like a great paradox, a discontinuity in the illusion of the smooth market-exchange. But it isn't, really, not to anyone who hasn't restricted their terms as Spivak did in the first place.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Apr 19, 2006 10:30:29 AM
Thanks Rich, that's nice of you to say.
I'm not sure I understand what's meant by "materialist conception" generally. That doesn't stop me from using the term, of course! I'm attached to it, because it has Marxist overtones. I'm not sure if it really does much work, though. I mean, I generally believe, without too much investment at this point, in a type of materialist (or physicalist) worldview, the details of which are not really worth going into here, but I don't see what political import that has.
More particularly, I don't know what Spivak means by "materialist conception of value" or use value. Care to take a crack at it, Rich? It sounds like on your view for Spivak materialist conception means nonsubjective conception, is that right?
You go right where I want to with use value: use values are relative or observer dependent. I'd say that what you say about the uses I suggested also applies to the use that is to serve in the money role (to be bearer of exchange value, to be help reimpose the wage relationship etc). One might not have any interest in purchasing things - one may not want to live anymore, for instance, so the use of the dollar bill to buy food is not a use one would have any interest in, such that for that person the dollar bill would not have that use value.
These things do have a sort of social objectivity (or rather, there is a power relation at play such that one is compelled to do certain things and not others). That's the important point for me (as is the analysis of value production in Marx, he's on about general social averages - there are of course individual cases that depart from averages but one can see a pattern going on, a reproduction of a certain order). Every purchase I make reproduces and reinforces global capitalism, as does the sale of my labor power. I don't have too many options to do otherwise, so the dollar does have use values for me as money. A Euro, though, or a Confederate dollar or Argentine Peso would not have that same use for me.
The point of course is social relationships, but I don't see how those can me made sense of - at least not in any way that I find compelling - by trying to posit some nonsubjective (objective?) position. I think that move is a colossal mistake, at least it has been within the history of Marxism.
Posted by: Nate | Apr 19, 2006 11:04:17 AM
Yep, I agree (with Nate, if anyone else posts in between).
As for the materialist conception, I think that Spivak is throwing chaff into the air, a bit. The most common theories of value are usually described as intrinsic (i.e., like the labor theory of value, or the cost-of-production theory of value, in which the value of something can be determined by what went into making it) or subjective (which leads you straight to marginal utility). At the beginning of her essay, Spivak sets up an idealist-vs-materialist binary and says that she's mainly going to consider "what the question of value becomes under a 'materialist' subject-predication such as Marx's." I think that this is where she implicitly says goodbye to anything but a labor theory of value. (It's the first of a few occasions where she goes up to the abyss of neoclassical economics, looks over the edge, and says that unfortunately her problem-boundary stops here; later on, she says that she's not going to say anything about price.)
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Apr 19, 2006 11:28:12 AM
hi Rich,
Just so it's clear, I am quite attached to at least a vulgarized version of the labor theory of value, cashed out like this: stuff is generally made by US and taken away by Them. Stuff is made in a way such that it's functional to continuation and extension of their control. But again, all this operates at a very general level, it's not particularly interesting at the level of every single object and case. As in "how much value is 'in' this computer" and so on. I think it's quite important that value not be considered a substance. (Harry Cleaver calls the treatment of value as substance, whether implicitly or explicitly, the 'phlogiston theory of value', which I quite like.)
take care,
Nate
Posted by: Nate | Apr 19, 2006 5:09:13 PM
Yeah, but "the labor theory of value" is a really poor way of describing the making stuff / extension of control thing that you're describing. It's clear that capitalism needs labor, and that it needs to control labor in a certain fashion. That doesn't mean that labor produces value -- there really are good reasons to talk about utility instead, and describing what people do in this way doesn't mean that all of a sudden labor is "valueless". People who are still focussed on value have taken something that Marx intended to be the best intellectual statement of the problem (and which was, for its time) and turned it into nostalgia; poring over Marx as a text rather than emulating Marx as a thinker.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Apr 19, 2006 5:43:38 PM
hi Rich,
I'm kind of attached to the terms for, well, sort for the sake of names, allegiances, family resemblances ...
It's been a bit since I've been back over the stuff in Marx on value, but I like to think of it as a type of approximation procedure by which one can make sense of processes and events in the past and today - extension of hours, speed ups, etc. In that respect I do find it pretty helpful. It's also helpful for a constitutive function - positing an Us and a Them. Negri says somewhere, I believe in the collection Revolution Retrieved, that among the many good reasons to read Capital one of the best is the class hatred it instills. There's some problematic things about that formulation (for instance, the risk of implying one can't get the class hatred w/ out the book), but all in all I think it's a great point.
take care,
Nate
Posted by: Nate | Apr 19, 2006 11:00:19 PM
Oh hell, there goes the symmetry of my piece, such as it was. I just remembered another QTANMTQ.
#3 - What does "intendedness towards the object" mean, in the following sentence? "Consciousness is not thought, but rather the subject’s irreducible intendedness towards the object." (I'd actually really love someone to parse that whole sentence for me, as it didn't understand it.)
Posted by: Nate | Apr 20, 2006 12:19:02 AM
Intentionality as the that which is the particular characteristic of what it means to be conscious.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Apr 20, 2006 12:32:58 AM
Thanks Angela.
So, "intendedness towards the object" meaning "intentionality," meaning "the capacity for the having of intentions"? Is that right? If so, why is this distinct from "thought" (defined as "the capacity to have thoughts", rather than as "thoughts", just as "the capacity to have intentions" is not "intentions")?
I could see one sense, in which thought is wider in scope than intentionality (since, presumably, one can have thoughts that are intentions and thoughts that are not intentions). One could make "thought" synonymous with "mental activity" (or better, "the capacity for mental activity", mind) as such, or not (if not then "mental activity" would be wider in scope than "thought"). Spivak might want consciousness to be narrower than thought or mind, in order to preserve space for unconscious thought/mental activity, maybe?
In any case, I still don't see where consciousness fits into all this for Spivak, or how it's defined.
Posted by: Nate | Apr 20, 2006 1:29:59 AM
I think you've kind of answered your own q, Nate. Though, I'd add that intention has to purport something of a telos, even if one that becomes blocked or frustrated, but nevertheless a telos that emerges from within the thinking subject. That's crude, but ...
And, I'm prettys sure that the sense in which 'consciousness' opens the essay is as a reference to Marx's critique of Hegel, and insofar as this can be said to be a significant marker of the distinction between 'idealist' and 'materialist' forms of predication.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Apr 20, 2006 2:35:28 AM
Thanks Angela. That's a useful orienting marker.
Posted by: Nate | Apr 20, 2006 8:55:31 AM
"I'm kind of attached to the terms for, well, sort for the sake of names, allegiances, family resemblances ..."
I don't mean to get on your case, Nate, but that sounds exactly like what I mean by nostalgia.
I'll give you an example of how this works. Imagine a factory that makes plastic packaging -- the decorative kind that assists in impulse buying but does not really have a protective function, and that immediately is discarded once unwrapped. By your "names, allegiances, family resemblances", you are pretty much committed to considering this product valuable because it was made with labor, right? But the local environmentalists see it as trash. So the capitalists who own the factory have used your nostalgia to make a disjunction between people who should be allies. Rather than saying that capitalism can control labor in such a way as to make useless products, as long as they produce profit, you're committed to an old, discredited idea. Marxism is the opium of the contemporary left.
For the rest, I don't think that you really need this concept to explain why extension of hours and speed-ups are bad, and I think that getting workers to read Marx is a really inefficient route towards radicalization.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Apr 20, 2006 9:02:28 AM
I'm not sure what else to say Rich. For starters, there's no need to reach for the big guns so early in a friendly discussion. (Opium, discredited idea, etc. Though if you find yourself want to make barbs stick worse against marxists, say "opiate" instead of "opium". You could also try some "specter is haunting" diss too, marxists tend to not like it when people use marx allusions in dissing them and the more exact the quote is the more effective it is.) The idea's clearly not discredited by people I credit Rich, or I wouldn't hold to it (I mean, who consciously believes things that they hold to be wrong or false?).
I'm not 100% sure but it's pretty likely that I know more people who hold the belief "the labor theory of value is true" than people who hold the belief "the labor theory of value if false". Given that that's so, an invocation of people you know who believe the former coupled with an assertion that those people are the ones who are right is not an argument that's going to change my mind so much as an indicating that it's going to be more difficult for us to productively and respectfull hash this out than I thought.
One thing, you refer to the plastic product as useless. This is subjectively so, right, not by some objective standard of usefulness? I don't find the usefulness ror otherwise of the product a particularly useful question (I could see it as rhetorically usefl - "look at the dumb stuff we squander our lives on!") The product's environmentally destructive, but it's useful to the owners of the factory and, in the short term, useful to the workers insofar as it's bound up with their having a needed wage. So it's not useful vs useless, but whose uses are on top, or, rather, who is calling the shots and how.
Leaving that aside, I think I was unclear before. What I should have said - I'm attached to Marx, and I like terms with a Marxist ring. You can call that nostalgic if you like, or silly. I would of course not agree with that description, and would be tempted to reach for my own descriptions that you wouldn't agree with. In the circles I move in marxist terms are part of the lingua franca, at least some of the time, and they don't generally cause serious misfires or misdirections in the small things that folks try to do. I realize that's not an argument in favor of others adopting my idiom, but that's not my agenda. As with all of this, one doesn't need to read the books I've read or the idioms I like to use to accomplish similar uses (different objects may have very similar use values). I think it's actually a really important skill to be able to make one's point in as many idioms as possible and to avoid making the demand that others speak one's own favored idiom unless one can come up with nothing else to do. Those uses of the idiom are the more important ones. (An important use for me that I get/got/make out of the terms is that they push against any idea of a happy 'bosses and workers can get along' kind of vision. I'm against that.)
The other thing I should have say is that I read the labor theory value as meaning those, to my mind, fairly obvious things I said about bosses and workers and all that. (The big one being "that thing you made/service you performed? Your boss makes more off it than you got paid for it.")
I think it can and often should be expressed in idioms that are more familiar to more people.
I'm not sure I can be any clearer on all this, sorry if I seem evasive, I don't mean to be. A really important person for me in terms of how I think about all this is Harry Cleaver, a marxist economist who teaches at U texas in Austin. He's got a lot of stuff online, if you've got a chance and want to see what a marxist who has read a lot of classical and contemporary economics stuff has to say about this, including a pretty detailed commentary (he calls it a study guide) on v1 of Capital.
Oh, one other thing, the point is _not_ to show why the boss's actions are bad. The point is to frame those actions in terms of interests, for lack of a better term. Why does the boss want speedups and forced overtime (and a change in the overtime laws, etc)? Because they're bad people? Yes. But not _capriciously_ bad. There's a fairly understandable logic at work.
Hmm, thinking of it again, perhaps you think I'm saying that the labor theory of value has some explanatory function beyond a very general (normative) one? Answering "where does value come from"? Is that right? (Tendency of the rate of profit to fall and so on?) That's not what I mean. I mean it the other way around, a very simple encapsulation of how work ... umm, works in capitalism, as a reasonably straightforward statement of something I would like to see gotten rid of (as someone who hates work, the society of work, and people who impose work).
Posted by: Nate | Apr 20, 2006 10:12:33 AM
"By your "names, allegiances, family resemblances", you are pretty much committed to considering this product valuable because it was made with labor, right? But the local environmentalists see it as trash."
Rich, I think that's a pretty unhelpful way of seeing value. Or rather, it confuses very different conceptions of value. (Heh. Which is not to say there isn't some way of relating them on another level.)
Hell, I mean from the point of view of capital (which is what's at issue), a cruise missile has value. (And they're priced at a million bucks or so, as I recall.) But that needn't stop us protesting their manufacture, just as an environmentalist might protest the manufacture of surplus packaging.
In short, we don't need to accept capital's definition of value. But we do need to know how it works.
(And this is rather to one side of the issue of whether or not you accept the labour theory of economic value.)
Posted by: Jon | Apr 20, 2006 10:49:06 AM
"Hmm, thinking of it again, perhaps you think I'm saying that the labor theory of value has some explanatory function beyond a very general (normative) one? Answering "where does value come from"? Is that right? (Tendency of the rate of profit to fall and so on?) That's not what I mean."
Well, it may not be what you mean, but it's bound up with what Marx meant. The seperation of an idiom from what was originally a world-defining intellectual effort is part of what I'm referring to as nostalgia. It's like ... the people who urge left-liberals to use religious talk, even if they don't really believe it, because that's what people are familiar with. There's nothing wrong with it as a short-term tactic, I guess, although I find it to be intellectually distasteful. See Spivak's interview linked to on The Valve, to get back to topic, where she talks about how she feels discomfort with using the Mother Earth metaphor but how she does it anyway. I can relate to that. But in the long term, the people who get to define the commanding heights of intellectual industry are going to win. (All right, I'm sorry for continuing to use twisted Marxist idioms. It's very hard to resist, given this conversation.)
But maybe some people really believe it. After all, you write: "(I mean, who consciously believes things that they hold to be wrong or false?)."
Well ... people presumably know that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall didn't turn out to be true. Many of the things that Marx wrote about turned out not to be true. I don't think that this is surprising, and I don't think it would have really been surprising to Marx. After all, truths for the ages are basically religious in nature, and scientific or humanist truth necessarily gets changed or replaced. So to the extent that someone really believes in the labor theory of value as opposed to using it as an idiom, I think that they're indulging in the same thing that scientists who are also creationists do. It's quite possible for people to compartimentalize their beliefs in order to hold contradictory ones.
Jon writes: "In short, we don't need to accept capital's definition of value. But we do need to know how it works."
I don't think that this helps us to understand how it works. The concept of labor power as the source of surplus value does not reflect how capitalism actually operates, because it is at best incomplete. Nate can talk about the boss making more from something than the worker got paid for his or her labor, but the destructive effects of capitalism would continue to operate even if this weren't true. For the most simple example of this, consider the concept of environmental sustainability. The plastics factory uses oil to make plastic, right? I don't have go through the whole chain of where the surplus value comes from, presumably, or what the source of capital is.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Apr 20, 2006 12:24:49 PM
Rich, indeed, Marx wasn't particularly concerned with environmental sustainability. (At least as far as I'm aware.) Spivak, in her more recent work, perhaps more so.
But I'm willing to follow your lead, which is a digression which might go somewhere: how might one think about the concept of "value" within an environmentalist discourse? It does seem rather different from the various ways in which Spivak considers value (i.e. as product of in/super-adequation). Or is it?
Posted by: Jon | Apr 20, 2006 12:52:45 PM
I don't think that this is really as large a digression as it might first appear, Jon. My basic problem with the "Scattered Speculations" essay is that I think that it's using a century-old version of economics for idiomatic purposes.
The concept of value in ecological discourse generally comes down to two things: solar energy and biodiversity. The human economy is basically a subset of the solar-energy economy, with some temporary redirections from fossil fuels and additions from nuclear ones; biodiversity is the stock of evolved solutions for capturing and using solar energy. The idea of in/superadequation doesn't really obtain; the idea of limits is a lot more important. Environmentalist discourse is a bit different, because it's a lot more concerned with the idealist side of Spivak's idealist-materialist binary: solar energy is quantifiable and biodiversity is in principle, but concepts like "existence value" are subjective.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Apr 20, 2006 1:22:02 PM
Ah, the labor theory of value…
I have to say, as much as I value Marx as one of the greatest thinkers of all time, I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything Rich has said here, even as I continue to depend on Marx for some conceptual work that I’m fairly certain he got wrong. (I especially like his distinction between “poring over Marx as a text” and “emulating Marx as a thinker;” just last night I found myself doing the former, although I in much of my writing I attempt (however vainly) the latter.)
I must confess that I haven’t read more than the first few paragraphs of the Spivak essay that this symposium is supposed to discuss, so these comments may be way off track, or they may be repetitious. Nonetheless, I want to add in two other factors that help explain my own very conflicted feelings about the labor theory of value: first, the question of labor-power’s commodity status; second, the notion of capital as “dead labor.”
On labor-power: Marx admits somewhere in the first volume of Capital that labor-power is unique among commodities in that its purchase does not guarantee access to its use value. That is, hiring workers doesn’t by any means assure that they will actually work, much less at the rate that is hoped for by the boss. From some perspectives, this means that labor-power is not best viewed as a “commodity” in the strict sense Marx invokes in the opening sentences of Capital. Cornelius Castoriadis, Ernesto Laclau, and Herbert Gintis, among others, make this point. Years back, in my undergraduate thesis, I argued strongly that this represented a fundamental contradiction in Marxism (labor-power is a commodity vs. labor-power is not a commodity), whose dialectical resolution involved the departure from Marxism as such, and the embrace of the “subjective element” implied in the notion that labor-power is not a commodity. As I’ve mellowed with age, I’m no longer quite sure that this is a necessary logical maneuver (although that mellowing hasn’t made me any more of a Marxist; still the anarchist-communist I was back in the day…), but I do think it should get people like Nate to think about this stuff a little differently.
On “dead labor:” Despite my doubts about the labor theory of value, I love these formulations, scattered throughout Capital and the Grundrisse. (I mention this phrase in passing in a recent post on my own blog.) As I understand it, Marx is pointing to one of the implied conclusions of the labor theory of value: if labor produces the value in all commodities, then this is no less true for the machinery that workers use to create more commodities. Somewhere in Chapter 15 of Capital (can’t find the exact reference right now) there is a great phrase about the domination of living labor by dead labor. Putting aside briefly the question of whether the labor theory of value is “literally” true, it certainly retains a lot of metaphoric truth. That is, dead labor cannot “exploit” living labor, it can only “dominate” it, a twist that again calls into question the accuracy of the labor theory of value.
Like Nate, I love the class hatred to be found in Marx, but hatred of all sorts is occasionally incoherent. On the question of the labor theory of value, I find myself to be incoherent, but Marx doesn’t necessary do any better.
Solidarity,
Mike
Posted by: Mike | Apr 20, 2006 1:53:01 PM
Just a few comments on the discussion:
1. As I understand Marx, a commodity is not identical to its use value. A commodity has use values, but that isn't what makes it a commodity under capitalism: what does is that it must also have an exchange value, i.e., there exists some monetary equivalent for an object with use values.
2. Use value is realized in the consumption of the commodity. That doesn't mean that use value is subjective; it depends upon the actual physical properties of the commodity. Take the example of the dollar bill used to snort cocaine. If you had four quarters, you'd still have a dollar, but try snorting coke with them!
3. Again, as I understand Marx, it's not the specific labor power used to create a commodity that constitutes its value but what he called (in my translation of _Capital_ at least) the ‘socially necessary labor time’ required to produce it. I take that to mean the average labor time across different producers of the same commodity, or even (since Marx wants to cover social reproduction as a whole) the average labor time across all industries for product of an abstract unit commodity.
4. Yet again, as I understand them, all the *classical* economists (Locke, Smith, Ricardo, Marx) were concerned with _value_ rather than _price_. Optimally, price should coincide with value when a market is in equilibrium--but since Marx saw surplus labor used to produce surplus value, he didn't see market equilibrum as the natural state of capitalist production. (This is much condensed, probably inaccurate summary of some things I've been reading by the economist Alan Freeman, whose paper ‘If They're So Rich, Why Ain't They Smart?’ is a real hoot) Instead, the aggregate labor was the physical phenomenon that was the necessary and sufficient condition for commodity production under capitalism. The capitalist mode of production (to use Marx's term) views capital, rather than labor, as the privleged factor of production; commodity fetishism (properly understood) prevents people from understanding this.
5. In V1 of _Capital_ Marx makes the simplifying assumption that for all commodities, the price of the commodity is the same as its value. This isn't true, and the relationship between actual prices and values gives rise to what's called the transformation problem. Marx's own attempted solution was wrong (or so I've read), and some people say this is the real nail in the coffin of the labor theory of value, while others say that the discrepancy of value and price is the normal state of capitalism and what gives rise to its crises; in other words, that there *is* a transformation problem is at the root of what's wrong with capitalism.
6. But Marx wasn't alone in having a labor theory of value (LTV); so did the other classicals. Except for Marx and Ricardo, whose LTV most closely resembled Marx (again, so I've read, and I believe this is what caused Paul Samuelson to label Marx a "minor post-Ricardian"), the classicals were reborn as marginalists. Instead of labor theories of value, they were talking market theories of prices.
7. The marginal utility of contemporary economics is *not* the use value of Marx and the other classical economists! One might say that use value exists in the interaction between the consuming subject and the consumed object. Marginal utility is *wholly* subjective, being defined as the *level of satisfaction* and not the particular use obtained from consuming one additional unit of a commodity.
While I think Marx still has very much to offer, I wouldn't go around uncritically affirming his original version of the labor theory of value, although I think *something like it* could have explanatory and predictive power that marginalist price theory doesn't have. Back when the 90's bubble was inflating, I poked around the various investment sites like MS Money and Morningstar and noticed that for the full service commercial banking sector, the bank with the lowest labor cost/highest level of exploitation traded at a P/E premium relative to the other banks--at the time, this was Bank of New York. I know that's correlation and not cause, and I don't know if it's still true, but there it is. And certainly for a standardized rather than bespoke product--pencils, lightbulbs, etc--given the same level of fixed capital across competitors, the firm with the lowest labor costs will have the highest profit (duh). In a nutshell, I'd agree with Rich and say think like Marx, don't romanticize his concepts (although I probably think they have more relevance today than he does.)
What does this have to do with Spivak? I don't know, because I haven't read the text under discussion and I'm not going to. I'd rather read lit critters/philosophers on lit/philosophy than on economics. Ditto for economists on literature/philosophy (will somebody please fucking kill Brad DeLong if he posts another pseudo-Platonic dialogue? You've read the _Republic_, we get it now!)
Posted by: et alia | Apr 20, 2006 6:25:18 PM
I'm glad that you liked what I wrote, Mike. It's interesting that you're documenting the 1970s Sojourner Truth Organization (I looked at your blog) -- some of my opinions have been influenced by reading about the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a 1840s integrated commune that Sojourner Truth belonged to. They were a case study in ideals undone by economics.
et alia writes:
"The marginal utility of contemporary economics is *not* the use value of Marx and the other classical economists! One might say that use value exists in the interaction between the consuming subject and the consumed object. Marginal utility is *wholly* subjective, being defined as the *level of satisfaction* and not the particular use obtained from consuming one additional unit of a commodity."
Yep. The reason this has come up is because Spivak makes an idealist / materialist distinction that (I think) has the effect of removing any consideration of subjective utility from her essay, restricting analysis to materialist use value and surplus value from labor power. Therefore, any theory based on Spivak's concepts from this essay hasn't confronted contemporary economic thought.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Apr 20, 2006 7:14:07 PM
Folks should read Steven Shaviro's post on use-value and exhange-value if they haven't already.
http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=454
Posted by: Andrew | Apr 20, 2006 7:34:31 PM
Thanks for the comments Et. Quite clarificatory and I'm in complete agreement. Re: the breakdown of the value/price relationship, I think that happens in v3 of Capital, which I've not read. I think this is what's called 'the transformation problem' in much of Marxism.
I'll have to get back to folk on the rest.
Posted by: Nate | Apr 20, 2006 9:03:35 PM
Oh yeah, thanks Andrew for the link to Steve's thing. This reminds me that I disagree with part of Steve's take on use-value (though his view may well be Marx's, if so, I still disagree) and want to write a response at some point. Tim from Wrong Side of Capitalism has a similar view, I think, to Steve, which I wrote a bit about once to try to get clearer on. If anyone's interested, that's here -
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/is-unmediated-use-value/
Posted by: Nate | Apr 20, 2006 9:08:53 PM
Thanks for the link, Nate. Appreciated.
Posted by: Andrew | Apr 20, 2006 10:20:53 PM
The marginal utility of contemporary economics is *not* the use value of Marx
No, it's not. And fwiw: Simon Clarke, Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology: From Adam Smith to Marx Weber
Rich's 'contemporary economists' song makes sense as a rhetorical gesture of expertise and innovation, but very little insofar as it doesn't quite get the sense in which Marx's writing were a critique of political economy. Not an alternative version of it.
One can question the sense in which Marx remains all too fascinated by the categories therein, but imagining Marx is or wanted to be an economist, and then deriding his work for not measuring up, is plain silly.
Spivak calls Marx's writings a 'speculative morphology'. Economics, otoh, I would call a metaphysics of stabilisation. Can't see the competion, myself.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Apr 20, 2006 10:26:16 PM
Angela,
Clarke's part of the Open Marxism mob, isn't he? It's been forever since I've looked at that stuff, I wonder if it'd be of any use here. At a minimum, as you show in your cite, those are folk who can't be accused of ignorance of what goes on in the discipline of economics. Andrew, thanks for that.
best,
Nate
Posted by: Nate | Apr 20, 2006 11:17:20 PM
One can question the sense in which Marx remains all too fascinated by the categories therein, but imagining Marx is or wanted to be an economist, and then deriding his work for not measuring up, is plain silly.
I don't know who's doing that there. It's certainly not my intention. Rich can speak for himself, but it seems his issue is with Spivak for really living up to the critique of economy that Marx practiced—namely, to confront the economic thought of her time, as Marx took on the economists of his time.
Then there's the question of what sort of critique he practiced. I read it as an immanent critique, one that sought to “explode” the notions of the vulgar economists of his time from within. So such a critique today wouldn't just be asserting the explanatory and predictive power of some updated version of Marx's LTV (which itself was a critique of the prevailing LTVs) but taking on marginalism from within.
To put it tersely: yes, Marx was an economist, but one out to destroy economics as apologetics for the capitalist mode of production. On the other side, orthodox practitioners of economics don't want to admit that their field has not liberated itself from specific and rather dubious metaphysical doctrines.
Personally, I think marginalism is lunacy—or to use the word in its out-of-fashion sense, ideology. Marginal utility if it exists is an unobservable, unquantifiable subjective phenomenon, which economists have the nerve to treat like a mathematical function. (I read something recently that spoke about "differentiating" an individual's personal utility function and I just about threw up. If Sokal and Bricmont really wanted to attack the misuse of science and mathematics in other disciplines, standard economics is the place they should start. But I digress.) It doesn't even deserve to be called a "metaphysics of stabilisation." It's just hooey and I say the hell with it. On the other hand, the socially necessary labor time to produce a commodity is a straightforward abstraction from observable, quantifiable physical phenomena.
Posted by: et alia | Apr 21, 2006 4:29:43 AM
Nate, yep. Et alia, I was talking about Rich.
Though, I disagree that Marx was an economist. Economics, as distinct from political economy, tends to postdate Marx in any case. And I can't see what kind of economic policy one might derive from Marx. But what's at stake in arguing that Marx is or is not an economist, for you? We could go on about this, no doubt, but this latter question might clarify ...
In any case, as for economics being hooey, and to hell with it, I agree. Very muchly.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Apr 21, 2006 4:42:57 AM
et alia: "Rich can speak for himself, but it seems his issue is with Spivak for really living up to the critique of economy that Marx practiced—namely, to confront the economic thought of her time, as Marx took on the economists of his time."
et alia has it exactly right.
For the rest, let's see -- no one has said that utility is the same thing as use value, so I don't know what s0metime3s' point is there.
"One can question the sense in which Marx remains all too fascinated by the categories therein, but imagining Marx is or wanted to be an economist, and then deriding his work for not measuring up, is plain silly."
Yes, I agree that deriding his work for not measuring up would be silly. Who has been doing it?
As for the question of whether he was an economist, I fail to see the stakes involved. Marx was one of the figures that appears before the contemporary disciplines that their work affects were formed; it's like arguing over whether Newton was a mathematician or a physicist. But there is certainly a Marxist economics, taking Marx' work as its basic texts, that Spivak references.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Apr 21, 2006 9:22:58 AM
no one has said that utility is the same thing as use value
...
If someone has no need for paper to light fires, write secret messages, snort cocaine etc. then its use-value to that person (assuming no value as currency) is zero. Someone else may find use-value in it for those purposes, depending on their particular circumstances and their imagination. (Perhaps they'd never think of writing a message on a dollar, simply because there isn't much blank space on it.) So already we're back to subjective value. This is why economists threw up their metaphorical hands and turned to the concept of utility instead.
So, whatever ...
Posted by: s0metim3s | Apr 21, 2006 10:18:44 AM
Uh huh, I was describing why economists threw up their hands and turned from the concept of use value to the concept of utility instead. I don't see how it could possibly be clearer that I wasn't saying that use value was the same thing as utility.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Apr 21, 2006 10:52:02 AM
Et,
I wrote "I think this is what's called 'the transformation problem' in much of Marxism"
when you'd already written that that's what it's called. My bad. Product of reading too quick too late at night on too little sleep. Sorry if it came off dismissive.
Best,
Nate
Posted by: Nate | Apr 21, 2006 11:14:02 AM
For me, the stakes involved in calling Marx an economist are pretty high, but let me start off with a caveat: he wasn't and isn't just an economist. He was also a philosopher, but just as his economic project was to criticize economics (or political economy, if you prefer), so it was his philosophical project to criticize/transcend philosophy, and I think that follows pretty straightforwardly from the last of the theses on Feuerbach.
I'm sure people here will think this is a very crude notion of what a theory should be, but I think a theory of X should have some explanatory and predictive power for the behavior and dynamics of that X. What distinguishes Marx's economics qua critique of economics (and critical social theory à la Horkheimer and Adorno) from economics plain and simple is that it continually includes critical reflection on premises that otherwise go unquestioned. In Marx's case, you wouldn't have the analysis of commodity fetishism, the notions of surplus labor and value, the analysis of primitive accumulation, etc. without that critical reflection.
To put it differently, Marx, unlike the marginalists ga-ga at their market models and utility functions, sees real human agency in economic activity. The problem is that under capitalism the agency is blind, un-self-conscious (in the Hegelian sense, I suppose.) That's not to say there's no predictability to capitalism: it reproduces itself quite nicely, thanks very much, and on an ever larger scale. What are the features of this blind process that make it keep running? So numerous details might require tweaks or updates: Marx's project is still one worth persuing—and for those who want to bash Marx for the falling rate of profit thesis: if only classical and marginalist economics had such a good track record as just one failed prediction! Have a nice hot steaming cup of SHUT THE FUCK UP!
As far as suggestions for economic policy goes, I think the Marxian reply would be: whatever—as long as capitalist production is the case, anything put in place to mitigate the depredations of exploitation will be eroded. You aren't going to get lasting change until capital is dislodged as the privleged factor of production (the factors of production being raw materials, labor, and capital.)
Posted by: et alia | Apr 21, 2006 12:02:54 PM
et alia: "For me, the stakes involved in calling Marx an economist are pretty high, but let me start off with a caveat: he wasn't and isn't just an economist."
Hopefully it's understood that my comparing him to Newton wasn't intended as an insult. Newton's mechanics are now considered to be wrong (although they are good enough for day-to-day phenomena) but he's still considered to be the greatest physicist who ever lived, according to a recent poll of physicists. He also was one of the inventors of calculus, which would have made him a famous mathematician if he hadn't also done physics. He also did quite a bit of alchemy. In general, figures who appear before disciplinary consolidation aren't easy to classify by later standards. But their work still affects those later disciplines and becomes incorporated into them.
A lot of the "Marx wasn't an economist!" bit seems to me to be saying something like Newton wasn't a mathematician. OK, whatever. But when considering an essay that references a particularly Newtonian understanding of calculus, that seems beside the point.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Apr 21, 2006 12:47:04 PM
hi good day!!! I am clod from the Philippines.... im so glad to see your site... its definitely a big help and im learning a lot....... by the way, im taking up Art HIstory here in the Philippines..and i am planning to make post colonialism as my framework... unfortunately since we dont have that much book about contemporary literature can i you please explain what epistemic violence is?as far as Spivak anf Foucault are concerned... It would be a great help for my paper.... Thank you and hope to hear from you soon
yayo
uthopichellart@yahoo.com
Posted by: yayo | Sep 7, 2006 10:13:09 AM
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