The Problematic Aura of Immaterial Labour
The recent fuss about guaranteed income – presented at the conference on immaterial labour in Cambridge as a possible new Keynesian deal – suggests, if nothing else, something of what is at stake in the discussion of the validity of the labour theory of value in its classical Marxian formulation. To what extent would capital, given the impossibility of measuring labour, welcome such a demand through the state, and to what extent would such a severed connection between wage and measurable labour time presuppose massive force? The contribution of Emma Dowling at the Cambridge conference offers a discussion of value and affective labour that I believe to be helpful for dealing with these questions. Below follows some commentaries on her "Formulating New Social Subjects? – An Inquiry Into the Realities of an Affective Worker".
In her paper Dowling addresses her own experience as a waitress at a restaurant of the more fancy kind. She stresses how her work, by management, was formulated as to "make the customer feel happy, contented and entertained", that she’d produce a dining experience. On the one hand it is required that her services be personal and personalized and on the other hand there is a programme established by management of the sequence of service and a set of techniques to measure the performance of the waitress. Dowling points to these techniques to argue, against Antonio Negri, that this sort of affective labour is not, after all, beyond measure.
"Formulating…" is interesting in that it by focusing on a particular kind of immaterial labour seeks to clarify some of the more sweeping characterisations of the valorization of immaterial labour. Having said this, however, this procedure also carries some limitations. For one I want to point to how the isolation of one individual production process makes the categories according to which this production process is not only characterised as a labour process but also a valorization process somewhat abstract. Consider, for isntance, the following formulation: "enough space was left for me to add my personal touches to my table performance, because it was understood that we shouldn’t all be completely the same and that further value (and thus competitive advantage for the company) would be added to the product by granting us the scope to let our own personalities shape our engagement with the guest." I do not doubt that this is correct (though I might have some issues with the "added"-metaphor). But there is nothing here to say why we could not simply use the words price and profit instead of value and surplus-value. There is a difference between saying that a personal service makes it possible for a restaurant to charge a higher price and to say that this personal service increases value, but it is not possible to address this difference within the scope of an individual production process. So far as Dowling writes within the problematic of Hardt and Negri, this is an objection that is quite unfair, I know. But I want to raise this issue here because I experience it to be something not dealt with in a lot of discussions of immaterial labour. If I (or an advertisement company), for instance, convinces someone that one sort of shoe rather than another is smart, or some such, and hence to buy that sort of shoe rather than the other (or whatever other commodity he or she would otherwise have bought), to what extent is this to add to the so called "cultural content" of the commodity, to define tastes, consumer norms and all that; and to what extent is it to shift demand from one commodity to another commodity, so that one company increases its profits only to the extent that the profit of another company decreases? I believe this is a question that needs to be answered in order to develop an adequate concept of how personal charm, the soul of the worker, or what have you, could be not only a prerequisite for profit but also constitutive of value, and hence exploited. It seems to me that the distinction between the preconditions for the individual company’s increased profits and the precondition for accumulation of total social capital is often nivellated in the discussion of immaterial labour.
Private Labour
Anyway… even if Dowling for the most part is preoccupied with the level of the individual labour process, she does cover the question of social form. And in particular I think she has noteworthy things to say about the category of private labour. Antonio Negri has made much of the passage in the Grundrisse known as the fragment on machines where Marx writes about the subsumption of the means of production, where they turn from instrument-form to machine-form, which implies that the "cornerstone" of production turns from the "direct" labour of the individual worker to some sort of "mediated"/social labour. Negri argues that so far as the classical formulation of the labour theory of value implies that the mediation of different kinds of labour within a division of labour falls outside them, in exchange, so that they are "private" in their individuality and only becomes social as equalized in exchange – i.e. as abstract labour – this shifting of "cornerstone" implies serious trouble. With the cessation of the instrument-form (and the "direct" labour it implies), we have labour that is immediately social. (See, for instance, page 20 in Books For Burning. The same argument could also be found on page 222 in "General Economy: The Entrance of Multitude into Production" by Akseli Virtanen).
There is nothing, though, in Marx’ formulations that excludes an external mediation in exchange between different systems of machineries, something that would suggest some limits to the sociality that the labour of the worker "standing aside" so immediately coincides with. If the "machinery" we are speaking about is common knowledge and all that, this, however, becomes a less important objection. And it is precisely here that Dowling makes a point:
Of course any type of affective work by definition is social in nature, whereby the worker produces "forms of community" of sorts which rely heavily on the worker’s interpersonal skills that they learned in common with other people through their working and non-working lives. The fact that I was nice to my guests, engaged with them in conversation and read their every desire from their body language, personalities and conversations, did not mean that we were together creating a common "internal to labour" and "external to capital". First, the form of community that was created between guest and myself was an unequal one in which I was not simply under command to relate to other people in a way that I would anyway whether the capital relation existed or not, but one in which precisely because of the capital relation, I had to behave towards my guests in a particular way, namely one which involved me pandering to their needs and desires so that the company could make its profit. Hence the active involvement of capital fundamentally changed the nature of my relationship with the people who where my guests. Whereas the potential for the kinds of life activity that my labour as a waitress consisted of existed prior to the capital relation I was bound up in, it was capital that gave it its particular form in the relations established in the restaurant.
So there are "forms of community" involved in the labour process, yet they are not "internal to labour". Dowling could even have pushed this point further and – bringing out a theme dear to Maurizio Lazzarato – argued that the customer, perhaps, was co-constitutive of these forms, co-constitutive of the very product of consumption. Still, from the point of view of capital the important relation is not between the waitress and the customer as co-constitutive of whatever relation emerges between the two, but between the waitress and the customer as a worker in an entirely different production process, i.e. between the waitress and the others wage (or revenue, etc.). I would argue that this distinction constitutes two sets of relations. On the level of the co-constitutive customer we could speak of the use-value of affective labour and the labour process. On the level of the paying customer we could speak of the value of affective labour and the process of valorization.
To return to the question of the prerequisites of the labour theory of value, the point is that there is a conceptual distinction between on the one hand "direct" labour and on the other hand "private" labour. The first belongs to the level of the labour process and the second belongs to the level of the process of valorization. In other words: The question of private labour is not an issue of determining a pre-social source on which the "realization" of a product is predicated. Private labour is rather a social form that cuts through the social forms of the labour process. Labour that is social through and through on the level of the labour process could still be determined as private on the level of the process of valorization. The affective worker is, in the midst of various social forms, privatised "relative" towards the "eqivalent form" of the money of the paying customer. Thus, as equalized with money (i.e. as valuable) affective labour repels itself from itself in that this value – in so far as it is "its" value – is not expressed in itself according to its social, co-operative character, but in money. Thus affective labour is differentiated in such a way as to uphold a distinction between production and circulation even though it does not result in a product lasting longer than the labour process. A decisive point here is that it is this external circulation that mediates the reproduction of the prerequisites of the repetition of the labour process at hand, i.e. new groceries, rent, cleaning and renovation of the restaurant, and so on.
I want to add here that the passage quoted from Dowling above also testifies as to how the process of valorization manifests itself in – and is consequently not entirely external to – the labour process. In stressing this distinction I do not want to regress to a pre-panzierian productivism. Yet it seems to me that the two levels can not on the other hand be entirely conflated, the labour process could not be reduced to the process of valorization, if for no other reason that the way the former manifests itself in the later – hierarchy, command, fawning – is not by itself synonymous with capital.
Simple Labour
Dowling picks up yet another issue that has been the target of some debate concerning immaterial labour and the labour theory of value. I’m thinking about simple labour as the common measure of simple and complex labour. Dowling accentuates, in her account, the question of social skills. She writes for instance:
A substantive element of the investment in me on behalf of the company was in the training of my affective skills in line with the requirements of the restaurant and the script provided, although the service provision also relied extensively on my social skills, on me "being myself" for its success.
Later on she addresses the sorts of techniques according to which the management of the restaurant tries to measure these skills. But I want to return to these techniques later and for now turn once again to Negri. In the beginning of his "Value and Affect" he formulates two reasons why the possibility of measuring labour has disappeared (or more accurately "increasingly disappears"). One has to do with finance and the state as mediating between different sectors of the economic cycle, but the other has do precisely with the question of simple labour. Negri writes that this is because:
… labour – becoming more qualified and more complex, both at the individual and the collective level – could no longer be reduced to simple quantities.
Marx had argued, very briefly, that the "qualitative" difference between simple and complex labour, when it comes to value, is reduced to a quantitative difference: a certain amount of complex labour equals a larger amount of simple labour. Complex labour is not reduced to simple labour, but to the measure of simple labour. The qualitative difference is not simply done away with (which is one reason to be somewhat careful about Marx first "physiological" characterisations of abstract labour in terms of expenditure of muscles and nerves and all that). Now, it seems to me that there is a contradiction in Negris statement that labour has become "more" qualified, and hence "more" qualitatively different. One would think that either there is a qualitative difference or there is not. To say that there has become "more" of this difference is already to imply quantity. This is, however, not what I want to address here. But it makes me, more importantly, recall something Roman Rosdolsky once wrote about Eugene von Böhm-Bawerk. In his famous criticism of Marx Böhm-Bawerk had, besides the relation between the first and the third volume of Capital, been preoccupied with Marx’ treatment of simple labour and the reduction of complex labour. Rosdolsky remarked, with some acidity, that the fact that the problem of the equalization of qualitative differences first became an issue for Böhm-Bawerk with the relation between simple and complex labour perhaps conveyed the prejudices of the educated circles concerning the exclusive character of complex labour. Adam Smith, for instance, used the words "common"/"skilled" for this distinction. Rosdolsky’s point is that the reduction of qualitative difference to quantitative difference is a moment of the equalization of concrete labour in abstract labour. It seems to me that Negri, in his argument about the more qualified labour, implies a natural equalization of un-qualified labour. But qualitative difference – i.e. division of labour – is a prerequisite for any equalization through exchange. There were never some common intrinsic quality in different un-skilled concrete labours that grounded their equalization in abstract labour. This equalization was always social (carried out by commodity exchange and implying the sort of mode of production that this exchange takes place in) and never "physical". And the proportion in which skilled labour is reduced to the measure of simple labour was always a touchy spot in marxist theory. Today there seems to be something of a consensus in the Marxist camp that the labour of education turns over with complex labour, and this is what explains the proportions in the reduction of qualitative difference to quantitative difference. I want here, in passing, also to suggest that Rudolf Hilferding might have had a point when, writing about Böhm-Bawerk, he argued that even if there were a certain arbitrariness in these quantitative proportions this would not necessarily do away with the law of value on the level of total social capital. One could, so to speak, think of an ideological determination of what counts as skills etc., without necessarily have to accept that this ideological valuation constitutes a second "source" of value next to labour. In such a case ideology, and the "demand" side, would determine quantitative proportions of value, but not increase value; a case of overdetermination rather than substance.
Virtuous Labour
Speaking of Rosdolsky there is also another point in his criticism of Böhm-Bawerk that I believe to be of importance in this discussion of affective immaterial labour. In his attempt to demonstrate that Marx argues in circles on the question of the reduction of complex labour Böhm-Bawerk had used the example of the relation between the labour of the sculptor and the stone-breaker. Rosdolsky objects to this example on the grounds that the products of the sculptor are unique and hence irreproducible objects, which falls outside Marx’ object of investigation. He suggests instead to turn back to the standard example of complex/skilled labour in classical political economy: the labour of the goldsmith.
If Marx, in Capital, treats the subject of simple/complex labour very briefly in explicit terms, the subject of the unique/reproducible commodities is treated even more so. It is just stated on two places in the third volume of Capital that he does not address the issue of the price of antiquities and art and so on. This might have been self-evident from the point in the first volume when he starts to write about reproduction and accumulation. Still, though, the distinction between what is skilled and what is unique is not always obvious, and it raises the question if the social skills of the affective worker is closer to the goldsmith or the sculptor. I would like to try to address this question by way of a detour through a discussion of a passage on productive labour in "Results of the Direct Production Process".
When Paolo Virno in "Virtuosity and Revolution" addresses what he finds to be a political character of labour in post-Fordism, he does this on the one hand by inverting Hanna Arendts argument about the subsumption of politics under production and on the other by bringing out a certain inability of Marx to handle the types of labour that do not result in a lasting product, and Virno is here above all interested in the virtuous performance. According to him, this kind of labour does not, for Marx, really fit with the definition of productive labour. In commenting the discussion of productive labour in "Results of the Direct Production Process" Virno states that this is because :
the absence of a finished work that lives on beyond the activity of performance puts modern intellectual virtuosity on a par with actions undertaken in the provision of a personal service: services that are seen as being non-productive, because in order to obtain them one spends income, not capital. The "performing artist," put down and parasitic, is thus consigned to the limbo of service work.
Virnos argument is not, in this text, that there is something in Marx’ formulation of surplus-value that would in principle exclude the virtuous performance from productive labour. The argument is rather that Marx gets confused about the issue because virtuosity traditionally "was the architrave of ethics and politics." Now, it is true that Marx hesitates about this sort of labour, but I would argue that it is in a different way and for a different reason than what Virno argues.
To begin with I want to point out that when Marx first, in "Results… ", addresses the labour bought to be consumed as a service he is addressing a class relation. The decisive distinction here is between capital and revenue, not – as Virno argues – between capital and income. He does address workers consumption of services later in the same text, but then the distinction between capital and income is not an issue since the money of workers consumption never function as capital anyway.
Secondly I want to argue that Marx, in this passage, not is particularly swayed by any distinction between poiesis and praxis, but is preoccupied with social form in a sense that is indifferent to whether there is a lasting product or not. If one considers the following, for instance, Virnos conclusion does not seem so obvious:
Milton, for example, who did Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. In contrast to this, the writer who delivers hackwork for his publisher is a productive worker. Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature. Later on he sold the product for £5 and to that extent became a dealer in a commodity. But the Leipzig literary proletarian who produces books, e.g. compendia on political economy, at the instructions of his publisher is roughly speaking a productive worker, in so far as his production is subsumed under capital and only takes place for the purpose of the latter’s valorisation. A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker. If she sells her singing for money, she is to that extent a wage labourer or a commodity dealer. But the same singer, when engaged by an entrepreneur who has her sing in order to make money, is a productive worker, for she directly produces capital.
So much for the unproductive virtuous. Yet, though, - and this is the odd thing that Virno draws upon – he states, right after, that:
On the whole, the kinds of work which are only enjoyed as services, and yet are capable of being exploited directly in the capitalist way, even though they cannot be converted into products separable from the workers themselves and therefore existing outside them as independent commodities, only constitute infinitesimal magnitudes in comparison with the mass of products under capitalist production. They should therefore be left out of account entirely, and treated only under wage labour, under the category of wage labour which is not at the same time productive labour.
Something is troubling Marx. That virtuous performances constitutes a small portion of the mass of products in society does not really make for an argument to treat it as unproductive. It is clearly something else than the small magnitude that is making him hesitate, but its not clear what it is. I’d like to suggest – perhaps somewhat speculative, but at least as hypotheses – three possible incentives for this hesitation:
i) The lack of means of production in the virtuous labour of his examples constitutes a problem. Right before the passages quoted above Marx had just characterized capitalist relations of production as exploitation of living labour by means of dead labour. The problem is why the virtuous would accept exploitation – and not rather become a simple commodity producer – if his or her labour is not dependent upon means of production in the hands of the capitalist.
ii) Marx might also be preoccupied with the disposition of his own text. Non-productive service labour could be characterised as something in between simple commodity production and wage-labouring commodity production when it comes to its relation to the means of production and to the consumer. If it would be productive of surplus value the relation between the first and the fourth chapter of the first volume of Capital would be disturbed; Marx would loose something of the elegance of his Darstellung. This might be a base reading, but I believe there is still something further in motion here, which just might be of more crucial importance, namely:
iii) The intimate connection between the virtuous worker and his or her specific kind of virtuous labour makes the distinction between labour power and labour problematic. I am here thinking of the, in these passages by Marx, often repeated statement that what is bought in services is a specific use value of labour. This is a question of form, for sure, as his example with the singer clearly shows. But it is not only a question of form in this sense. If what is bought is not labour power but labour itself, there is no distinction between necessary labour time and surplus labour. This is the standard argument about improductive labour. So what does it have to do with virtuous labour employed by capital (and not by revenue/wage) where there, in principle, seem to be possible to make such a distinction? The point is that the distinction between necessary labour and surplus labour as well as the corresponding concept of labour power not primarily addresses the single production process and its contingent exchange, but the reproduction of capital: the repeated production and the repeated exchange. The virtuous worker can produce the value of his or her own wage (and an additional surplus value), and it is hence possible to speak of the reproduction of labour power in a formal sense. But as long as the use value of the virtuous labour is intimately tied to the virtuous person there is a limit to this reproduction that is posited by this very connection: the problem of aging and health and so on puts some limits to simple reproduction, and expanded reproduction is simply out of the question.
I believe this is a reason to not simply interpret labour power as an ontological category – dynamis – indifferent to the mode of production. The important thing to recognize is the specific character of the institutionalisation of dynamis in the capitalist mode of production. Labour power is not simply an issue of that the piano player can play piano, that this playing is predicated on the player, or something like that. As commodity, labour power is also determined on the level of circulation as a continual disruption from, and reencounter with, the prerequisites of its actualisation. When the particular encounter in exchange is measured against the profits of every other encounter, capital moves so as to maximise its profits, and consequently equalize the profitability of different labour powers. The realization of a specific use value of a specific labour power is rather contingent in relation to the necessity this movement constitutes for the particular capital. In this sense every labour power implies every other in a way that makes the "labour power"-ness of a specific labour power indifferent to the labour that is its use value. And is it not in this indifference that we encounter the substance of value – i.e. abstract labour – as it exists on the level of the production process? If so, the conceptualisation of abstract labour exclusively in terms of the "retroactive" equalization of labour through the equalization of its products would be only partially true. On the level of the singular and contingent exchange it might as well be, as Böhm-Bawerk argues, scarcity that is what is common to the commodities in exchange. But isn’t it the repetition of the encounter between worker and capital – and the way this repetition comes to imply every labour power in every other labour power – that constitutes the movement of value from contingent form of exchange to social substance? It seems to me that it is in this sense we should understand the following statement by Marx: "That worker alone is productive whose labour process = the process of the productive consumption of labour capacity – the vehicle of the labour – by capital or the capitalist."
So, if I am right in my arguments above I think one could sum up Marx position on virtuous labour as follows: There is nothing in principle, with the specific character of virtuous labour, that excludes it from the category of productive labour. But if it is to play a substantial part in accumulation on the level of total social capital the intimate connection between virtuous labour and the virtuous person has to somehow be broken. The distinction between skilled labour and unique labour (between which virtuous labour oscillates) is not to be found in intrinsic properties. It is not an issue of asking whether Marx perhaps operated with a Kantian problematic and conceptualised this distinction in terms of following rules and positing rules. In fact, this distinction is a practical one; it is a question of to what extent capital on the level of the production process has managed to establish a scheme (of the virtuous) according to which the individual worker becomes exchangeable.
Socially Necessary Labour
Returning at last to Dowling, the point I hope I made (or at least suggested) through this long detour, is that of a distinction between on the one hand the measure implied in the scheme of the virtuous production process subsumed under capital and on the other hand the measure of socially necessary labour.
Dowling writes about the practice of so called "mystery dining" where "mystery dining firms… assess how well the dining experience lives up to the standards [the restaurants] set for themselves, which are continuously assessed and improved upon." This implies secret visits after which written reports are formulated:
The written report correlated elapsed time and key moments in the sequence of service with the overall fulfilment of the service requirements, measured in percent. In a further correlation, the scores for "fulfilment" by department (reservations, kitchen, management etc) and fulfilment by key indicators (service, hospitality, attention to detail, revenue generation, food, atmosphere) were compared with former reports at the same restaurant as well as fulfilment percentage averages of other restaurants owned by the same company, shown in bar charts and correlation matrices with the respective percentage figures.
After accounting for techniques and practices such as these she draws the conclusion that:
Thus, whilst we might believe that we cannot place a value on affect in any abstract way, we can see that activities are not beyond measure when the purpose of measurement activity described is to place an objective value on the affective labour of the worker, to measure and through this determine the value produced.
Given the object of my detour, it is here I want to make an objection. It seems to me that if the techniques Dowling writes about serves the purpose of establishing a standard – or, as I wrote: scheme – according to which capital makes itself relatively independent to the unique personalities of different waitresses by controlling the way this unique personality is inscribed and function in the labour process, so as to make it exchangeable by other unique personalities, this is a measure of a given sort of labour and not labour tout court, and hence it is not the measure of value. This is quite the same as how the "time unit" of the taylorised labour process is not the same thing as socially necessary labour time. The measure of value – i.e. socially necessary labour time – is established on the market and nowhere else, and it is established as the proportions of equalization between different virtuous and non-virtuous labours and the movement of capital in between these moments of equalization. But it is as a way of handling the interrelation of measurement on the market that capital needs to establish the (perhaps arbitrary, but still functional) measurement of the scheme of virtuous labour in the virtuous labour process, and time units in the taylorised labour process. The measure of value motivates, so to speak, the measure of the scheme.
It seems to me that the formal indifference towards labour, established in the scheme of the virtuous labour process, possibly might have a political dimension in the Lukácsian/Trontian sense. At least this would be something to hope for if one in the affective dimension of present day capitalism sees more of neurosis than joy and doesn’t feel particularly moved by the concept of a (non-state) public sphere of cymbol analysts or the democracy of the interior to labour, and what not. It still needs to be worked out in what sense and under what conjunctural conditions this dimension could possibly become politically effective.
This is excellent. I need to revisit this later when I have more time, as I think I disagree with some of this but I want to think about it. For now, your account of Negri on simple and complex labor seems to me to be exactly right. It’s a major problem with Negri, and if you’re right - I think you are - then a lot of the rest of his account of the present wouldn’t bear scrutiny, because so much of his recent work hinges upon the transition from (naturally, properly) measurable labor to immeasurable labor. I would love to hear more from you on this point in particular, as it’s something I’ve been meaning to spend more time on myself.
On other thing for now - I’m not familiar with Rosdolsky and Böhm-Bawerk, but based on your presentation here I’m not convinced by the criticism of Böhm-Bawerk’s use of the sculptor as an example. The point I’d want to make is similar to the point you make against Negri, that measurability of simple labor, the quality which simple labor has in common such that it is rendered one thing called simple labor, is the result of the social relation of capitalism, not the result of something inherent in simple labor. (The exact same point could be made about labor power as a commodity - every labor power is different, in that every person is different, but capitalism is indifferent to that difference.) Similarly, every commodity produced is unique, considered in one register. Considered in another register, every commodity, qua commodity, is the same as every other. In that sense, then, the uniqueness of the product of the sculptor is no more important than the uniqueness of every object from every other, in that with the sculpture as a commodity the uniqueness doesn’t function the same way it does with the sculpture as a unique work of art. I may be missing the point here, since as I said I’ve not read Rosdolsky and Böhm-Bawerk.
I’ll revisit this as soon as I’m able, and I hope you continue writing on all of this. I’m interested to hear what you make of the new Althusser collection as well, which you mention in your other post.
Best wishes,
Nate
Comment by Nate — August 2, 2006 @ 12:58 pm
Hello. Thanks for your comment. I dont want to take to much credit for the argument about equalization, since it has already been formulated, and better so, by Erik Empson, in his fragment “Rubin as critic of Negri”, which is to be found on the following page:
http://www.generation-online.org/p/fprubinnegri.htm
And about the question of the reproducible and non-reproducible: In his discussion of simple and complex labour Böhm-Bawerk adresses the relation between the sculptor and the stonebreaker and argues that as simple commodity production the labour of the sculptor equals five times as much stonebreaking labour. (I dont know if his is an empirical example). His point is that such proportions can not be the result of difference in education, since that would imply an impossible amount of education, if one compares an extended amount of these different sorts of labour. He draws the conclusion that “simple labour” is not only arbitrary in relation to the “content” of labour, but also in relation between different sorts of labour. Labour as such, then, could not be the substance of value.
The distinction between the reproducible and the non-reproducible is about the condition that if the product of one sorts of labour (x) is exchanged unfavourable with another sorts of labour (y), capital would be reeinvested in y, so that the products of y increases in supply while the products of x decreases in supply, which would lead to a change in the rate of the equalization of their products, which would eventually tend to equalize their relation to profit. In my view the “law of value” is mystical without this precondition (which is one reason why I (contrary to, for example, Friedrich Engels and Jason Read) understand Marx to imply capital already in the first chapter of Capital). The thing is that this sort of allocation of capital is not possible if it not is possible with an expanded reproduction of the
production process of labour y.
Comment by erik — August 6, 2006 @ 11:21 am
I find this post very interesting and well-written. I would like to comment the discussion initiated by Nate, and also ask Erik a question about something he writes.
As regards reproducibles and irreproducibles I don’t think the important point is the uniqueness of the product but the relation of the worker and his/her capabilities to the use value of his/her labor. Nate, when you write that “every labor power is different, in that every person is different, but capitalism is indifferent to that difference” I think you are wrong. Labor power is pure use value, empty potentiality. It is labor power that is indifferent to the workers’ differences. It is only in that he buys something that can be abstracted from the worker that the capitalist buys labor power, and since the ability to produce sculptures can not be abstracted from the sculptor sculptors do not sell their labor power. This is what Marx hints at when he writes that Milton in writing Paradise Lost (in contrast to a carpenter building a house or a mechanic putting together a bicycle) expressed his own nature. The virtous labor process is not, as is the case where labor power is consumed, constantly interrupted for the re-buying of (the same worker’s och someone else’e) labor power. It all boils down to the fact that the ability to produce sculptures can not be separated from the sculptor and bought as a commodity (one can buy the production of a sculpture but not the ability to produce a sculpture). The effects this has on the allocation of capital Erik has highlighted in his response.
To move on to my question, Erik writes that “every labour power implies every other in a way that makes the ‘labour power’-ness of a specific labour power indifferent to the labour that is its use value. And is it not in this indifference that we encounter the substance of value – i.e. abstract labour – as it exists on the level of the production process?” You may very well be on an interesting track here - labor power’s indifference to the labor that is its use value might be connectable to abstract labor. But is it enough to say that this is where we “encounter” abstract labor? What is this indifference exactly - is it an effect of abstract labor, is it a parallell to abstract labor or is it an aspect of abstract labor? I have no suggestion as how to solve this, but it would be interesting to hear you develop this theme.
Looking forward to hearing more of both of you
/David
Comment by David — August 8, 2006 @ 9:45 am
I really enjoyed this. It is a very fine critique of Negri and immaterial labor. I was writing notes and comments parallel to your text and I would start in on a critique of something only to see you pick it up as I kept reading.
I think that your attentiveness to the question of form was good. I am tempted to say that maybe you could work that aspect out a little more. Also, I think you could develop the critique of Negri’s notion of mediation a bit more, as it is clearly simply not what Marx understands by mediation and this is important. There is always someting normative in Negri’s treatment that is not present in Marx’s work.
The rest is just some points from my notes that I hope make some sense.
Dowling is of course correct that labor can be measured, but her kind of measurability is not what Marx talks about. The measure of the value of labor is socially necessary labor time, and this happens in the market, as you say. But as you also note, the equalization of labor does not happen only in the market. Unlike those who deny that abstract labor is the substance of value (the value-form analysis like CJ Arthur, Michael Williams, Geert Reuten, etc), I think that labor is in a sense measured or equalized twice. The first time capitalist makes an “estimate” and employs labor at a certain value, employs constant capital of a certain value and then sells the resultant commodity at the price sustainable on the market. If the capitalist has paid too much or employs outdated constant capital, etc. then the price paid for the commodity does not return the full value (and even if it does, if the capitalist pays the worker too much, i.e. spends too high a proportion on necessary labor leaving behind too little surplus, this is the same effect.) In this sense, the equalization in the market retroactively “posits the presuppositions” of the capitalist, it renders judgment on the capitalist’s estimation of the value of labor, value of materials, etc. i.e. it judges that capitalist’s ability to accumulate and to engage in extended reproduction.
I think this formulation is interesting:
“I would argue that this distinction constitutes two sets of relations. On the level of the co-constitutive customer we could speak of the use-value of affective labour and the labour process. On the level of the paying customer we could speak of the value of affective labour and the process of valorization.”
I am not sure what you mean by “co-constitutive”. I am also not sure if it is possible to separate the labor process from the process of valorization, if by this one means valorization as exchange, rather than the production of exchange-value and its realization.
Also, nowhere in the Dowling quote is the idea that “social” does not refer to the relation between laborer and consumer, but between labor and capital. In the idea of M-C…P…-C’-M’, the P…C’ is the relation of the server to the customer, but M-C is the purchase of labor by the capitalist and C’-M’ is the receipt of money for services by the capitalist. The services of the waitress are not “directly social” because 1) the waitress confronts capital as an individual, ie as a private laborer 2) her labor is only socialized, her service is only socialized, via the exchange of money between the customer and capital. That we are expected to be “social”, to create an “experience” is in fact the commodity, or at least a part of it, but what is sold is still there service, and it is sold. Money still mediates the relations.
I liked your comments on simple/complex labor. Very nicely put.
The discussion of virtuous labor was very interesting. At first I was not sure where you were going, but when you got to your third point, it started to become clear. I think the following was crucial, esp. the rejection of treating labor power as an ontological category.
Cheers,
Chris
Comment by Chris W. — August 11, 2006 @ 3:53 pm
hi David, Chris,
Chris, how’s Baltimore? You got a blog yet?
David, I appreciate your engagement and sorry for not replying. I’ve been away from home a lot and thus hadn’t checked back here in a while.
You write: “Labor power is pure use value, empty potentiality.” We disagree on the meaning of the term. Now, labor power as a commodity, commodified labor power, is all the same when judged from the perspective of the capitalist. The capitalist is indifferent to differences between labor power and the sellers of labor power (except when attention to said differences suits the capitalist). I see no reason why this perspective should be the only one, however. To posit this homogeneity of labor power as pre-existing labor power existing in the form of a commodity - LP as C(LP) - seems to me to be a mistake, the mistake of taking the capitalist form of labor power to be labor power as such.
Put differently, on my reading, labor power means simply the ability to do. Labor as a commodity is the power to do for a wage. In one register (that of some abstract indifferentiated doing) all labor power is the same. My contention is that this is largely the perspective of the capitalist who treats labor power as homogeneous, quantifiable, etc. In another register, every act of doing is different from every other (for instance, most acts happen either at different times or in differnt locations) and in a sense is also different from itself, in the sense of not being self-identical.
This may seem like a very circuitous meandering on my part - these formulations of mine are clumsy - but there’s an important point for me in all this. Which is, the capacity to do for the capitalist is predicated upon a capacity to do which extends beyond the range of doing which satisfies the capital form. That is, the existence of C(LP) as a homogeneity is predicated on a heterogeneity - a nonidentity - of LP. Thus, while we exist within the capital relation we also exist beyond and against it. Further, our capacity to resist and overcome the capital relation does not derive from the capital relation but the reverse: the capital relation derives from the very powers which make it possible for us to end the capital relation. It is because we have the capacity to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticise after dinner that we are capable of working for a wage. Not the reverse.
As for the sculptor, I see no reason why the sculptor can not sell the capacity for sculpting. Every microchip is different from every other microchip. Each exists at a different location in space and time. Microchip manufacturing workers still sell their capacities to make microchips. Every second rate formulaic true crime novel sold in airport bookstores is different from every other. The writers of such books sell their capacities to write them. In all cases, including that of the sculptor, these differences exist in at least one register. The capitalist doesn’t care about these registers, but that doesn’t mean they in no way exist. You might argue for a difference between microchips, airport novels, and sculptures. I’d probably agree. But this is not the terms in which the capital relation operates. In the capital relation all of these labor powers, as commodities, are just so many units for sale in the labor market.
I read the opening lines of v1 of Capital - where a use value is defined as something which meets any needs, whether of the imagination or the stomach - to mean that there are no needs or wants which are a priori impossible to commodify. I take this to imply, among other things, that the want for sculpture(s) can be commodified. Producing sculptures to meet a commodified want for sculptures means producing commodities which satisfy that want. Thus, sculpting can be commodified. The sculptor can sell her labor power (the capacity to sculpt) on the labor market just like any other labor power can be sold on the labor market. Imagine that WalMart hired every sculptor in New York to work at a new SculptureMart facility. Those sculptors would be selling their labor power. The individual sculptures might be different qua art objects but the capitalist is indifferent to those differences and in the SculptureMart factory the sculptures would be identical qua bearers of value. In the same way, the individual labor powers purchased by the capitalist in the labor market are different qua capacities of different people with different faces and lives, but are the same judged solely from the criteria of the capital form. (There may, of course, be labor powers which currently can not be sold on the labor market, but this does not mean that their sale is logically impossible or incompatible with the capital form, it just means that at a given moment and location there aren’t buyers for that type of labor power.)
I’m not sure I’ve been clear or convincing here, but I feel clearer on these ideas myself, so thanks for challenging me on them.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — August 30, 2006 @ 11:53 pm
Nate, sorry I’ve taken so long to reply to this.
I can’t argue with you that sculpting can be commodified, that sculptors can sell their ’labour power’ (understood in the sense of the capacity to make sculptures), and that the sculptures can be sold to a price higher than what the sculptor is paid. You are right in this. As well as in that people are capable of doing things in different ways. We look around and see that it is so. But if we try to address the question of value at this level (of looking around) we also see that just as there is no identity between different labours there is also no necessary analogy between the relations between labour and value, even from the perspective of capital, i.e. from the perspective of the valorization on the market. Capital is not indifferent to the difference between the sculpturing activity of the random happy amateur and that of, say, Martin Sjardijn. But what I tried to argue above is that the law of value does not operate at the level where the form of equalization (what you call the ‘perspective’ of the capitalist) is conceived as entirely external to the labour process. This is a question of a distinction between a formal subsumption of labour under capital and a real subsumption of labour under capital. I’d argue that the law of value (according to which abstract labour is the substance of value) operates at the (and hence presupposes a) level of the real subsumption, if we understand real subsumption to mean something like an impact of the process of valorization on the labour process, which breaks the immediate connection between the labour process and the person of the worker. What I above tried to address in terms of a scheme of virtuous labour, might also be called a real subsumption of virtuous labour.
I believe that it is in the light of this real subsumption that the concept of labour power takes on its full significance as a social concept (relatively indifferent to determinations of this or that particular kind of its “realization”). If the concept of labour power operated at the level of particular determinations of the labouring persons I believe it would be hard to argue why machines would not be creative of value.
Comment by erik — September 9, 2006 @ 12:59 pm
Erik, I think you’re absolutely right that Marx is uncomfortable with something in the “unpublished 6th chapter” - in fact I reckon its one of the reasons why it was excluded from the final cut. Look at his definition of the commodity at the beginning of chapter 1.
“The utility of a thing makes it a use value. But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, […], is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use value, something useful.[…] they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value.”
Here the very possibility of the “non-material production” that Marx is talking about in the RIPP is explicitly excluded. This is in some ways a reasonable operation as Marx is conducting a critique of classical political economy up to the time of writing which was unanimous that only material commodities could be considered as wealth. Nonetheless Marx, unlike J.B. Say does recognise two types of “non-material production”:
“1) it results in commodities which exist separately from the producer, hence can circulate in the interval between production and consumption as commodities;”
and:
“2) the product is inseparable from the act of producing it”
Wierdly Virno, although noting Marx’s two types, more or less immediately goes on to return to Say by ignoring type 1 and focussing on type 2, “virtuous labour” being of this type. Here I would argue he is fatally wrong. It is not that case that many types of virtuous production cannot be transformed into alienable immaterial commodities of type 1. That’s what recordings are for. The sculpture example is a particularly perverse example in this case. Lets consider pieces of music instead. For example one from Mozart and one from Lennon & McCartney. Mozart creates the use value that is “Cosi fan tutti” in his head and transcribes it onto paper. Lennon & McCartney write “Hard Day’s Night” and commit it to paper. So far, so much the same. The use values that are the opera and the rock song are still abstract, in a form that requires further (immaterial) labour to be produced in a form that an audience of consumers can enjoy. Mozart takes his piece to the Vienna Statsopera and directs a horde of musicians in performing the piece to his audience. John, Paul, George and Ringo go down to the Cavern and play their songs to an audience of screaming fans. So far we are still in the realm of performant immaterial labour, type 2. We are still roughly within the realm of the law of value as the labour of writers, performers, front of house staff, venue builders (capital goods) etc. can have a measure put to them and the limited audience can meet that value in the exchange of the price of entry. Next, however, the fab four do something Mozart couldn’t. They enter a recording studio and perform “Hard Day’s Night” to make a recording. The recording is now an immaterial product of type 1. Here’s where the M-C-M’ cycle goes haywire and why Mozart dies a pauper whereas McCartney is a multi-billionaire. In the making of the recording, the law of value can still be said to operate, but only as far as the cost of production is concerned. This cannot be transformed into a definite exchange value. That is because immaterial products of type 1. have a special feature - the untility of the product is not bound to any material form, it is a non-rival good. If the cost of production in terms of value (or price for that matter) is X, then the exhange value if you know that a copy of the recording is going to be sold to only N consumers is clearly X/Y. But what if the actual number of consumers that buy the single is not N, but 10 times N, 100 times N, a million times?
Discuss… ;)
Comment by Paul B — September 9, 2006 @ 7:41 pm
Oops! That should be X/N obviously…
Comment by Paul B — September 10, 2006 @ 12:48 am
hi Erik,
No worries. I’ve been busy as well. I’m really enjoying this discussion but (and, because,) it touches on the limits of things I’ve thought about, so I apologize if I don’t get things the first time or if I say things that aren’t worked out and clear. On that, I don’t understand what you mean by this:
“here is also no necessary analogy between the relations between labour and value, even from the perspective of capital, i.e. from the perspective of the valorization on the market. Capital is not indifferent to the difference between the sculpturing activity of the random happy amateur and that of, say, Martin Sjardijn.”
I don’t know what you mean by ‘necessary anology’. I agree that capital is aware of the differences between qualities of sculptors. But capital’s awareness is linked to marketability - the capitalist qua capitalist wants the sculpture that is the best commodity - not to nonmarketable aesthetic quality (record companies don’t sell albums full of singers who sing like birds in a beautiful way, but sell commodities - if those commodities happen to be beautiful, then capital cares about that only to the extent that it can be made functional to the capital relation). I suspect we agree on all this, that this is obvious, and that I am therefore missing a point somewhere.
Can you explain to me what you mean by the law of value and/or point to a source on that? It’s very interesting but I’m not entirely sure I get it. I’m also not sure I get the argument about real subsumption. Do you mean to say that the law of value only reigns once real subsumption takes place? If this is so, does real subsumption happen at the level of individual firms or as a type of epoch a la Negri? Or, do you mean that the existence of the law of value means that real subsumption happens once the law of value exists? I’m suspicious of real subsumption as Negri et al use the term and they’re the folk I’m most familiar with who used it. To my mind from the perspective of the workers formal subsumption and absolute surplus value are already a change in the labor process. There’s a similar question in this issue for me as above re: the circuit board and the sculpture, the question of which differences make a difference and which are held as indifferent.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — September 14, 2006 @ 1:56 am
Paul, thanks for your comments. I was avoiding the question of the non-rival digital product in the text above, because it is, as you point out, tricky in another sense than the issues I tried to deal with above. I’m not sure really how to approach this issue. But I am involved in a project to collectively write about the concept of Immaterial Labour, so I guess I’ll have to try to find a way soon enough. These are some preliminary points I want to make so far.
1. It would obviously be absurd to try and locate the creation of the substance of the profits gained by the sale of a Beatles-record in whatever sort of labour the band was involved in writing and recording the songs. Its difficult to speak of socially necessary labour positing the relation between Beatles and whatever now forgotten band rehearsing next door to them. The labour process of writing songs although perhaps subsumed formally under capital still seems to point out a limit to real subsumption. Which might be a reason why this sort of activity seems to carry a sort of utopian aura in the eyes of so many people. The point here is that this kind of production is problematic from the point of view of the law of value even before the issue of non-rivalry is raised.
2. I’m not sure I’m to comfortable with the distinction rival/non-rival. As a song, or even as recording, the Beatles song is non-rival in the sense that one consumer listening to the record doesn’t exclude another consumer listening to the same record. But as a copy of the record, it is a rival good. And I believe this could be said to be the case even with the purely digital copys bought from a webb-shop. Consider, for instance, the importance of DRM-technologies in such commerce.
3. The value of the fixed sort of constant capital has always been distributed over a number of products. Perhaps what is new with digital reproduction to a certain extent could be conceived in terms of that a larger amount of variable capital turns from a circulating character of capital to a fixed one.
4. The fundamental perspective when it comes to any law of value is, I believe, that of reproduction. Even if piracy partially circumvent DRM, re-investment of capital is sensitive to conventions established by the balance of forces between piracy networks and the state, etc. Of course the record company director will claim they “lost” value due to piracy, but the law of value does not operate at such an “ideal” level that could be lost, even if perhaps it is ideal in another, what might be called symbolic, sense. Does the investment not bring in profits close to social average profit, this capital will be wiped out or directed elsewhere. Does it bring home profits well above social average profit, this production will attract more capital. This sort of rejection of any “realization problem” might perhaps be a bit too anti-Luxemburgian. I’ll have to come back to this in a year or so once I have a better grip on the distinction between the perspective of her and that of Grossmann.
5. And then there is the question of monopoly price, the difficulty of which is perhaps accentuated by digital reproduction, but still a difficulty present well before the talk of any new-economy.
6. I also want to stress a social level of the music industry. I believe it is a mistake to conceive the consumption of a record entirely in terms of a realization of a the musician labour-process, that the sort of intrumentality implied in the concept of labour process solely dominates the relation between musician and consumer. I raise this point because I believe that even if the labour process of the musician is hard to subsume under capital on the level of the “real”, and hence has a precarious relation to the process of valorization, other aspects of the music-industry does not face the same difficulty when it comes to real subsumption. In a way I think it is fair to say that the music industry consumes musicians. In the recording studio the band is like a labour material for the studio technicians, which they labour with by means of the studio equipment. The same goes for the cd-plant, and the distributor and the commercial capital. These instances constitutes large portions of what turns over in the price of the record.
7. I don’t know if it is important, but it might be worth noticing the difference in the composition of fixed and circulating capital in these different instances of the music industry. The capital with the least fixed capital (that is: that capital that has the fastest average turnover-time) is that of the record label. And isn’t it so that this has to do with the precarious character of this investment. It is a matter of getting rid of bad investments fast. And then there is the tendency of spreading the risk of bad investments within merging major labels.
8. The issue that really has to be delt with though, besides the “non-rivalrity” of digital reproduction, is the claim sometimes stated in the debate on immaterial labour that the audience produces parts of the profits of the music-industry, because the sort of labour it takes to be a fan produces the social meaning of certain music and without it there would not be a demand for the records. I’ve heard this argument kicked around, but when I think of it the only non-emaillist-text where I’ve seen the argument stated is in Reluctant Revolutionaries by Johan Söderberg. I thought this was what Maurizio Lazzarato argued as well, but reading his text on immaterial labour again I’m not so sure anymore. Consider for instance the statement that: “The split between conception and execution, between labor and creativity, between author and audience, is simultaneously transcended within the “labour process” and reimposed as political command within the “process of valorization”.” I think one might say that I hold the Lazzarato-line above when discussing the character of the “private labour” of the waitress (and Chris W raised a reasonable question about this). The problem I have with the concept of the (value) productive audience, is that it seems to predicate value-creation on the “demand”-side in a way quite similar to neo-classical political economy. Demand is a presupposition of production of value. But an increase in demand of a product (although it might raise the price of this product) can not by itself increase value on a social level (that is, demand can not by itself increase demand), since demand is measured in money – not only what I want but above all what I am capable of paying. And given the amount of money in my wage, if I prioritize something in my consumption, that implies that I deprioritize something else. It might well be true that the labour of the fan is a presupposition for the profit of the individual company, and I believe this is a growing feature of a lot of commodities. But it is one thing to say that something is a presupposition for profit, and quite another to say that it constitutes the substance of value.
Comment by erik — September 14, 2006 @ 9:15 pm
Erik, I agree that the issue of value in relation to immaterial products is tricky and certainly I don’t have the answers yet. Nonetheless given that the profits accruing to “Intellectual Property” (henceforth IP) products of this type are a major part of contemporary capitalism (c.f. Bill Gates, Pharmaceutical industry, Cultural industries such as music, publishing, international football, etc.) it’s certainly one we must address. My argument with the line pursued by Lazzarato, Virno et al. is they are side-tracked into the “inputs” side of the matter which is missing the point - it’s also not a new argument at all, from Hodgskin and Thompson through to Kropotkin (see his “Wages System”) the “incalculability of contributions” or “indivisibility issue” has been argued against the justice of attributing labour time embodied into a commodity as the independent work of a given worker in a given space and time. While I accept Kropotkin’s use of this problem as an ethical lever against the ideological justifications of the bourgeois ideology of exchange, I don’t see it as ultimately an insurmountable problem for the capitalist in imposing the wage measure on commanded labour. The “outputs” problem though of how many copies of the immaterial product to divide the SNLT cost of production between is however, more of a problem for the labour theory of value.
This is going to get a bit lengthy, but I’ll reply to your points in order:
1. “[Re: value of Beatles song vs. unsuccessful band] The point here is that this kind of production is problematic from the point of view of the law of value even before the issue of non-rivalry is raised.” I partly agree that there are issues with value relating to original works intended to produce aesthetic or similar affects in an audience - see the sculptors issue - this maybe an issue with the Work/Labour distinction according to Engels. I.e. the difficulty in valuing the original use values produced by producers of specifically un-average skill and intensity. That said, the difference between the profit generated by Mozart and McCartney is so many orders of magnitude that I still maintain it is only explicable through the technology of recording making conversion of music into an immaterial commodity of the limitlessly replicable form, that makes the most significant difference.
2. The significance of DRM is precisely the opposite of what you’re saying. Certainly as long as immaterial commodities could only be replicated by means of material objects such as paper books, vinyl discs, etc. with the latter having non-negligible individual production costs themselves, the immaterial nature of these products was obscured. Our current digital infrastructure merely reveals what was already there. The immaterial product is characterised by its nature as a pattern form. A pattern form is always unique, irrespective of how many times it is replicated. Your and my DNA, the text of Paradise Lost, the lyrics and music of a “Hard Day’s Night”, the source code of the GNU C Compiler, all of this share this pattern form essence. Having been freed from the material encumbrance of vinyl or tape, DRM is an a posteriori attempt to impose IP rights to charge economic rent by force (of law, backed up ultimately by state violence). (c.f. Lazzarato’s “re-imposition as political command”?)
3. Not sure I follow you on this one…
4. Luxemburg I know roughly, but Grossmann… can’t help on this one either I’m afraid.
5. I don’t think monopoly price applies here. Also I want to emphasise that digital reproduction may have made the state of affairs more inescapably obvious, but I deliberately chose the Beatles example to illustrate the operation of the immaterial commodity in analogue, pre-computer, pre-internet days.
6. Actually, as a side-issue, this raises an interesting point in relation to the movement from formal to real subsumption. In the example given by Marx in the “unpublished 6th chapter” the movement from formal to real is associated with the alienation of the production of use values by employed labour and it’s monopolisation by the engineer/entrepreneur (Ford) or a specialised “labour aristocracy” engineering section of the workforce (Sloan/GM). In either case the move to real subsumption is accompanied by the loss of control of the use value from the rank and file worker. And yet, the characteristics of the new cognitive capitalist labour we are talking about is precisely the reclaiming of the production of use value, design and engineering process, by the employed workforce. For e.g. as software engineers we build systems (MP) operated by the system users to provide service to the customer. Is this not the reversal of the process of real subsumption? Kinda messes up Negri’s pat assimilation of real subsumption and cognitive capitalism into different facets of a single epochal change surely?
The other point is that which part of the musicians, recording studio technicians, studio capital goods, etc. contribute to creation of the recording is entirely moot. The fact remains the result is a single product - the recording - that can be sold limitless times.
7. True enough, but I don’t see how it relates.
8. [on the question of the audience producing part of the value]. Depends whether this is a type 1 or type 2 immaterial product. Of the type where we are talking of a performance - a production of affect in a distinct place and time in which both producers and audience are present and that does not result in a lasting alienable commodity - then clearly both performers and audience are involved in the final affects produced. After all, would you prefer to pay 10# to go and see your favourite band in an empty venue where you were the only audience there, or 12# to see them in a venue crowded with a big audience enthusiatic to enjoy the night to the full? Presumably our bourgeois neo-liberal economist would consider the first option the ideal - the full product for a reduced price without all the nasty necessity of having to collectively share the product. Yet another reason why bourgeois neo-liberal economists have so few friends, I guess :). But in the second case - the case of the transferable (and replicable - see below) immaterial product, then no, I too don’t think the audience is producing value in purchasing a copy of the pattern-form. You could argue that after enough units have been shifted to cover the wages and capital costs of production, plus the socially average rate of profit, then the profit made above and beyond that must be economic rent. However this begs the question of how does this rent relate to surplus value? *Sigh*! Looks like I’ll have to read Vol. III after all (*aargh!*).
I’m aware that this kind of process of point by point back and forth, quickly becomes unreadable. We may be best to start again somewhere else rather than trying to thrash out what are definitely non-trivial questions in one blog comment
NB On the question of the Labour Theory of Value, while I agree with you (and we are far from alone in this) in being unhappy and unconvinced by the glib efforts of Negri at al. to declare its time to “forget the whole thing” and simply move on, I think we have to also keep our ultimate goal in mind. We are revolutionaries not economists: to paraphrase Anthony’s famous soliloquy “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, I come to bury the LTV, not to praise it”. Ultimately we aim to abolish money and exchange value by a critique both theoretical and practical of it and the capitalist social relations that are intertwined with it. But that critique must expose exploitation not obfuscate it as those who would have us “push through Empire” appear to risk doing.
Comment by Paul B — September 16, 2006 @ 10:08 pm