#value-form

[leftpress]

Capitalism: Concept & Idea (audio)

cominsitu | communists in situ | November 17th 2017

The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) presents:

Capitalism: Concept & Idea

150 Years of Marx’s Capital: The Philosophy and Politics of Capital today

As a counterpoint to the retreat of the concept of communism from history to ‘idea’, this conference will mark the 150th anniversary of the first volume of Karl Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy by asking the question of the meanings of ‘capital’ and ‘capitalism’ today as at once (explanatory structural-historical) concepts and (political) ideas.

In particular: What is the current standing of the different philosophical interpretations of Marx’s Capital? Wha...

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[pluxae]

Given that the stereotypic use-value is an instrument, use-values are simultaneously semiotic processes (i.e., instruments, which consist of an artificed entity as their sign, a function as their object, and a mode of wielding as their interpretant) and the sign components of larger semiotic processes (i.e., commodities, which consist of a use-value as their sign, a value as their object, and an exchange-value as their interpretant). See Figure 6. However, use-values are not only instruments as so defined. Rather, any semiotic process (consisting of a sign-object-interpretant relation) can be a use-value so far as it serves as the sign-component of a commodity. In this way, a commodity is necessarily meta-semiotic: consisting of a larger semiotic process, each of whose components may be smaller semiotic processes. And, in this way, one may begin to investigate the commoditization of semiosis, or sign-object-interpretant relations more generally: giving off signs for others to interpret and interpreting signs that others have given off. [...]

As is well known, once commoditized, the economic value of these constituents may supersede their other meanings. In such cases, the infinity of meaningful qualities is reduced to different quantities of a single quality. For example, ‘functions’ and ‘purposes’ (qua objects of the embedded semiotic processes) are elided, while ‘value’ (qua object of embedding semiotic processes) is emphasized. Thus, while critical theorists from Aristotle to Marx will speak of the flattening effects of capital in terms of quality being reduced to quantity, it is much more precise to say that embedding semiotic processes turning on collateral relationality (i.e., use-values, values, and exchange-values) come to trump embedded semiotic processes turning on conditional relationality (i.e., signs, objects, and interpretants more generally). Proverbially, one knows the price of everything and the meaning of nothing.

Paul Kockelman (2006), “A Semiotic Ontology of the Commodity.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 16, no. 1: 87-89.

[ultroid2068]

Only with commodity exchange do relationships between humans appear as relations between things. The 19th century worker tended to see in capital only the capitalist. The 21st century wage-earner often perceives capital as just… capital, and not their own activity that (re)produces it. Fetishism still rules, albeit depersonalised, but it still veils the social relations producing capital. The denunciation of exploitation usually misses what economy is — the domination of everything and everyone by production for value. Actually, what’s at stake from a communist point of view is not what capital hides and what most proletarians have the intuition of: the extraction of surplus-value. What’s at stake is what capitalism imposes daily in real life and impresses on our minds: the economy as something obvious and inevitable, the necessity of exchanging commodities, of buying and selling labour, if we wish to avoid want, misery and dictatorship.

Karl Nesic & Gilles Dauvé, Love of Labour? Love of Labour Lost... 

[weil-weil-lautre]

The value-form of the product of labour is the most abstract, but also the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production; by that fact it stamps the bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and transitory character. If then we make the mistake of treating it as the eternal natural form of social production, we necessarily overlook the specificity of the value-form, and consequently of the commodity-form together with its further developments, the money form, the capital form, etc.

Karl Marx, Capital, (Penguin) p. 174, n. 34

[writtencompulsion]

Marx’s method, his approach to the problem he raised, was designed to cope with that problem, not with the problems raised by his critics, i.e., to answer how the distribution of labor is regulated, and not why people buy goods, or how resources are allocated, or what determines market price. Thus it was not in order to define what determines market price, but in order to focus on the problem of the regulation of labor that Marx abstracted from the real capitalist economy, that he reduced it to its bare essentials, so to speak. Capitalism is a commodity economy; social relations are not established directly but through the exchange of things. In order to learn how labor is regulated in an economy where this regulation takes place through the exchange of things, Marx constructs a model of a “simple commodity economy”, namely an abstract economy in which social relations are established through the exchange of things, and in which the ratio around which commodities tend to exchange is determined by the labor-time expended on their production. The statement that commodities exchange in terms of the labor-time expended on their production is then a tautology, since it is contained in the definition of Marx’s model. The point of the abstraction is to focus on the regulation of labor in a commodity economy, not to answer what determines price in the actual capitalist society. In this context it is irrelevant to observe that there are “other factors of production” (such as land and capital) since, as Rubin points out, “the theory of value does not deal with labor as a technical factor of production, but with the working activity of people as the basis of the life of society, and with the social forms within which that labor is carried out” (Rubin, p. 82). It is also irrelevant to point out that “things other than labor” are exchanged, since “Marx does not analyze every exchange of things, but only the equalization of commodities through which the social equalization of labor is carried out in the commodity economy” (Rubin, p. 101). Marx’s abstraction is not designed to explain everything; it is designed to explain the regulation of labor in a commodity economy.

Commodity Fetishism: an introduction to I.I. Rubin’s Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value

Fredy Perlman

[writtencompulsion]

Marx’s central concern was human creative activity, particularly the determinants, the regulators which shape this activity in the capitalist form of economy. Rubin’s thorough study makes it clear that this was not merely the central concern of the “young Marx” or of the “old Marx”, but that it remained central to Marx in all his theoretical and historical works, which extend over half a century. Rubin shows that this theme gives the unity of a single work to fifty years of research and writing, that this theme is the content of the labor theory of value, and thus that Marx’s economic theory can be understood only within the framework of this central theme. Marx’s vast opus is not a series of disconnected episodes, each with specific problems which are later abandoned. Consequently, the frequently drawn contrast between an “idealistic young Marx” concerned with the philosophical problems of human existence, and a “realistic old Marx” concerned with technical economic problems, is superficial and misses the essential unity of Marx’s entire opus. Rubin shows that the central themes of the “young Marx” were being still further refined in the final pages of Marx’s last published work; Marx continually sharpened his concepts and frequently changed his terminology, but his concerns were not replaced. Rubin demonstrates this by tracing the central themes of works which Marx wrote in the early 1840’s through the third volume of Capital, published by Engels in 1894. In the different periods of his productive life, Marx expressed his concern with human creativity through different, though related, concepts. In his early works, Marx unified his ideas around the concept of “alienation” or “estrangement”. Later, when Marx refined his ideas of “reified” or “congealed” labor, the theory of commodity fetishism provided a focus, a unifying framework for his analysis. In Marx’s later work, the theory of commodity fetishism, namely the theory of a society in which relations among people take the form of relations among things, the theory of a society in which production relations are reified, becomes Marx’s “general theory of production relations of the commodity-capitalist economy”. (Rubin, p. 3). Thus Marx’s theory of value, the most frequently criticized part of his political economy, can only be understood within the context of the theory of commodity fetishism, or in Rubin’s words, the “ground of Marx’s theory of value can only be given on the basis of his theory of commodity fetishism, which analyzes the general structure of the commodity economy”. (p.61)

Commodity Fetishism: an introduction to I.I. Rubin’s Essay on Marx’s Theory of Value

Fredy Perlman

[swamp-wanderer]

Fredy Perlman, 1968

According to economists whose theories currently prevail in America, economics has replaced political economy, and economics deals with scarcity, prices, and resource allocation. In the definition of Paul Samuelson, “economics or political economy, as it used to be called, is the study of how men and society choose, with or without the use of money, to employ scarce productive resources, which could have alternative uses, to produce various commodities over time and distribute them for consumption, now and in the future, among various people and groups in society.” According to Robert Campbell, “One of the central preoccupations of economics has always been what determines price.” In the words of another expert, “Any community, the primers tell us, has to deal with a pervasive economic problem: how to determine the uses of available resources, including not only goods and services that can be employed productively but also other scarce supplies.”

If economics is indeed merely a new name for political economy, and if the subject matter which was once covered under the heading of political economy is now covered by economics, then economics has replaced political economy. However, if the subject matter of political economy is not the same as that of economics, then the “replacement” of political economy is actually an omission of a field of knowledge. If economics answers different questions from those raised by political economy, and if the omitted questions refer to the form and the quality of human life within the dominant social-economic system, then this omission can be called a “great evasion”.

The Soviet economic theorist and historian I.I. Rubin suggested a definition of political economy which has nothing in common with the definitions of economics quoted above. According to Rubin, “Political economy deals with human working activity, not from the standpoint of its technical methods and instruments of labor, but from the standpoint of its social form. It deals with production relations which are established among people in the process of production.” In terms of this definition, political economy is not the study of prices or of scarce resources; it is a study of social relations, a study of culture. Political economy asks why the productive forces of society develop within a particular social form, why the machine process unfolds within the context of business enterprise, why industrialization takes the form of capitalist development. Political economy asks how the working activity of people is regulated in a specific, historical form of economy.

...

[zaschiabouzarri]

Kurz gesagt: Wie verhalten sich Geschichtsphilosophie und Formanalyse zueinander? Formanalyse, Formbestimmung eines Systems, Trennung von Wertgröße und Wertform – der Witz ist ja bei Marx gerade, dass er sagt, die Wertgröße hat in allen Zeiten der Geschichte eine unbestreitbare Rolle gespielt, das fängt beim Neandertaler an: Wenn einer in einer Stunde seinen Faustkeil bearbeitet hat, ist es dem natürlich angenehmer, als wenn er zwei Stunden dazu braucht. Das, was Marx also, wie ich finde, neu ins Spiel bringt, ist die Formbestimmtheit. Es ist ganz interessant, dass im Marx ganz viel Aristoteles auftaucht, nicht nur als Beleg oder in Fußnoten, sondern in Bezug auf die Formbestimmtheiten. Aristoteles, der bedeutendste Denker des Altertums, den hat er nicht aus archivarischen Gründen in seinem Werk verehren wollen, sondern wenn ich die Hegelsche Philosophie materialistisch wende, tritt der Aristotelismus, der in ihr aufgehoben war, wieder an die Oberfläche. Ein ziemlich einfacher Vorgang. Daher das große Interesse an Form und Materie, an der Formbestimmtheit, an solchen Kategorien im Kapital. Ricardo war sehr weit gediehen mit der Analyse der Frage der Wertgröße, aber der Schönheitsfehler seiner Konzeption war ja in den Augen von Marx der, dass er es versäumt hatte, zu sehen, dass in der Formbestimmtheit der historische und damit auch vergängliche Charakter des kapitalistischen Systems, zuerst einmal auf einer theoretischen Ebene, nachzuweisen war. Man kommt nicht umhin, Georg Lukács’ Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein, den berühmten Aufsatz Die Verdinglichung und das Bewußtsein des Proletariats über den Fetischcharakter der Ware zu lesen. Aber schon der Titel zeigt, dass Lukács natürlich geglaubt hat, seine sehr gescheite und geistreiche Analyse dieser warenanalytischen Bestimmungen sei schon die ganze Wahrheit. Er hat es selber so gesehen, als spiele sich unter seinen Augen ein sich anbahnender revolutionärer Prozess ab, den es dann ja in der Tat nicht gegeben hat. Stalins berühmte These vom „Sozialismus in einem Lande“ von 1930 war ja eigentlich das Eingeständnis, dass das Konzept der Weltrevolution, jedenfalls so wie man sich das einmal gedacht hatte – Marx selber hat ja auch gemeint, es müsse gleichzeitig in allen Ländern das neue System aufgebaut werden -, gescheitert war. Kurzum, Trotzki wurde, wie Sie wissen, in Mexiko ermordet, weil er das immer noch im Schilde führte, nachdem die ruhmreiche Sowjetunion schon ganz andere Schritte getan hatte. Worin Marx geirrt hat, war einfach sein deutscher Idealismus, er hat geglaubt, die Menschen lassen sich den unwürdigen Zustand nicht gefallen. Wenn aber die Alternative lautet: Wir gehen nach Mallorca nächsten Sommer… Man hat dem Proletariat wahrscheinlich, so hat das der späte Horkheimer formuliert, die Sache ein bisschen abgekauft. Die Frage eines Subjekts der Geschichte ist von Herbert Marcuse so beantwortet worden, dass er meinte, das Proletariat sei korrumpiert worden. Er hat dann an die historische Kontinuität oder an das historische Kontinuum als solches nicht mehr geglaubt. Die letzten Werke von Marcuse, die ich ja auch bis zuletzt in großen Teilen übersetzt habe, beinhalten nicht mehr die Vorstellung: Jetzt brechen wir unmittelbar auf in eine neue Ordnung der Dinge. Die Vorstellung also, dass die politische Aktion der Arbeiterklasse, die theoretisch untersucht worden war, irgendwie mit der ökonomischen Dynamik vermittelt sein könne oder müsse, das hat er doch am Schluss aufgegeben. Der Begriff des revolutionären Proletariats ist ein mythologischer Begriff geworden, hat er einmal zu mir gesagt, und das ist nicht ganz falsch. Es tut mir also leid, dass ich hier keine großen Jubelstürme anstimmen kann, das entspricht einfach nicht der Wahrheit der Dinge.

Philipp Lenhard, Niklaas Machunsky, Mathias Schütz, „Es geht um die Anstrengung des Begriffs. Ein Gespräch mit Alfred Schmidt über Formanalyse, Geschichte und Revolution“, Prodomo no. 11, 08.06.2009.