Questions on and responses to the Spivak piece.

The following is a guest post by Nate Hawthorne, 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"?

*

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).

*

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).

*

Thank you for your time and attention.

Comments

[Nate]

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

[et alia]

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.

[s0metim3s]

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.

[Rich Puchalsky]

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.

[s0metim3s]

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 ...

[Rich Puchalsky]

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.

[Nate]

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

[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. 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.)

[Rich Puchalsky]

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.

[yayo]

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