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.

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.

“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

“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… ;)

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.

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

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

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

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.