(lively orchestral music)
- This is where we've come
by way of certain mediating doublets.
Right, we saw how values are made by this peculiar,
what do you call it?
Union of incompatibles I would like to call it.
We saw how
concrete labor becomes the bearer
'cause it makes use values of abstract labor,
which has to go through.
You'll notice that these,
I don't like to call this dialectics exactly
because it isn't exact.
Hegel really wanted dialectics to be exact.
The kinds of pairings
and the kinds of transformations
that happen here are not regular.
But nonetheless, this will help you see a little bit
what has happened so far.
Forms of value, what are they?
Do you remember?
The two main ones.
The equivalent form
and the relative form.
They work together in a certain way
to make money precipitate out.
You can see how the way the result comes out
of this strange doubling process
is not the same in every case.
Thank you for turning that down.
This is not all that happens, but it's a kind of a skeleton.
And then the question is, how do you get from here to here?
And that's what we're talking about today.
In the end, we get a formula, which is something like this.
And it also goes...
Let's see.
It goes in all dimensions at once, right?
Not exactly sure how, but there is a...
It's probably like
this money gets used for something else altogether.
In any case, I would want to just point out to you again
that the use process
and the capital process are the same and different.
This is commodity exchange.
This is money exchange.
This is what Marx will focus on
as the signature of capitalism,
of the capital system.
He calls it the general formula,
and it will have a lot of problems.
It can't dispense with commodity exchange,
especially because what this produces
is everything we consume to keep going,
but our consumption is now...
So this is, you could call it a consumption formula,
and you could call this a production formula,
but it's a production of value.
And this is a consumption
for the purposes of surviving. (laughs)
Surviving becomes the handmaid
of the production of value.
You survive in order to produce value.
This is how, incidentally, the commodity formula
and the money formula are the same and different
at the same time as the economic structure
of society is the same and different
as the social structure of society.
You begin to see that social things like surviving,
what you have to eat, what you have to live with,
and producing value
come out of the particular change
from one economy to the next,
from a commodity economy to a money or value economy.
There's another feature here that's really important,
that a merchant
looks at the capital system from here.
A merchant, an investor, and a businessperson,
and all the economists that Marx was arguing against,
they look at it from this particular chain.
They don't look at it from here.
This is what Marx is adding.
These are the operations that go on
to turn products
into capital.
The economist and the businessperson looks at it
from circulation,
and they don't see what Marx calls the difference
in content lurking in the form.
This form seems the same until you break it in two,
and then it's drastically different.
You have different starting points and different endpoints,
and the difference in content is significant.
One concentrates on producing commodities
and supporting consumption.
The other concentrates on producing money
and supporting value production.
You need the one for the other,
but you don't need the other for the one.
This is where socialism would enter into something more.
It wouldn't dispense with money necessarily.
It might not even dispense with value,
but it certainly would dispense with capital.
I love this.
Humanists don't have so many blackboards usually.
I just want to point out that there is a simple...
Oh, this is not what I want.
There is a simpler formula, commodity to commodity,
in which you might have the mediation of money,
but that would be money of account only,
where you would say a banana's worth three tires.
Three would be money there,
but it just keeps the account of the value
so you know how much you need to give of bananas for tires
or tires for bananas.
Here,
you have money as...
Remember the different functions of money?
Money as a standard of value or money of account.
So this, if there was money in here,
it would just be like, I'd say,
"You know, give me 20 bananas for those tires."
20 would be the money of account or the standard of value.
This would be money as a means of circulation.
You need it in there.
It would actually facilitate the handing over
because, as you remember,
CM is separated in space and time from MC.
These are really the same M.
Someone gives money for something,
and that person would go and buy another commodity
at a different space and time.
So without money in that size of economy,
you could not do your economy.
You couldn't get your bananas.
So we're talking very different sizes of economy,
but you can see how the different functions
of money are used in different kinds of economies, right?
Money of account could just be a number.
It could be you're counting these things in dates,
but no dates have to change hands.
You don't even have to have dates there.
You're just like, "Okay, this is worth 20 dates.
That's worth 30 dates.
I'll give you, you know,
I'll give you 2/3 of my thing for your other thing."
This, money takes on a different function.
It's very odd that the same thing
can be functionally different,
but this is the way Marx is beginning to see the world.
Money still functions as a money of account
or standard of value,
but it has to be there in some sort of form to mediate,
to stretch space and time so that the transaction can occur.
There was a question which I missed.
Yeah, Tomas.
- For the first one we see C?
- Yeah.
- What sort of economy is that?
- I mean, it could be like a barter economy,
but nonetheless you could still have a standard of value,
and normally you would,
but because you could trade the thing for the thing
because you were close enough,
you'd only need to refer
to the standard of value notionally.
- On the side notation, referring to C and C, right?
- This is a commodity economy, which is larger,
and you need money to mediate.
And there is something like,
there's value in a more robust sense.
So you notice that in this,
in the middle one, money is a mediator.
In this, you have a special verb.
You say, "I spend money."
You spend money to buy,
and you gain money when you sell,
and the exchange is equal.
You end up with the same value on either side.
Does that make sense?
It starts with production and ends with consumption.
And it's only about use values,
although use values are mediated by value.
And as we said last time,
the same piece of money changes place twice,
and it moves in an eccentric fashion
away from the original owner of the money.
The disposition of each buyer, as I said last time,
is, "I don't need my money.
I want a banana.
Take it.
Do what you want with it."
In this, the commodity is the mediator for money.
It's a vehicle to bring the money back to you,
and money returns in a reflux.
The commodity is a mediator,
and money, as Marx said, is the alpha
and omega of this religion.
It begins, it creates, and it redeems.
In this, money is not spent.
It is advanced.
This is what capitalists call it.
I don't think I've ever advanced money.
That's why I guess I'm in the situation I'm in,
unless you count advancing it to my teenager. (laughs)
There's no reflux there except his joy and health,
and, right, that's okay.
In this case, the same commodity changes place twice,
but the money comes back,
and this makes circulation
into a circuit that has to be completed.
It's not commodities flying off
into people's mouths or backyards.
It is money returning to the account
of the original advancer.
But the problem, as Marx says,
is that the buyer ends up with the same...
I mean, the capitalist ends up
with the same thing that they started with.
Give money away, you get a commodity.
You sell that commodity, you get the money back
because everything trades at its value.
This, he says, is absurd,
and yet all of the people
who only see the circulation system,
who see that as the source of value,
imagine that out of the same, you can get more.
This is the fantasy, pernicious fantasy,
of the traders,
the business owners,
and the economists who take their perspective
or their standpoint
because the general formula, as you know,
like "The Wizard of Oz,"
is MCM prime,
or MC delta M, delta meaning change.
There has to be a change in the advance.
Otherwise, why would you do it?
Because the use value of money is to bring more money,
just like the use value of a seed is to bring a carrot.
If your stuff doesn't grow...
My one foray into gardening,
I tilled this giant garden when I was in college,
planted the whole thing,
and one sprout of tomatoes came up in the compost heap.
So, I was a very bad gardener/capitalist.
A supplement has to enter the picture somewhere,
and Marx wants to argue that this supplement
cannot possibly enter in circulation
no matter how high you sell your stuff
because as we said last time,
and we'll say over and over,
all overages and all underages are passed on.
Someone will make it up out of somewhere
because the economy in these terms is a zero-sum game.
If I buy dear,
then I have to get something else cheaper
'cause I only have a limited amount.
If someone gets something for more,
they can pay more for something,
and someone's gonna raise the price.
Supply and demand equal out over time.
You cannot get what Marx will now call surplus value
out of the circulation sphere.
The sphere of circulation doesn't make more of anything.
It just passes around the same.
You must have it, but it's not the productive source.
It's the location of the realization of value.
But the productive source has to be elsewhere.
We don't know yet where it is.
It could be in your dreams, in your fantasies.
Those people who live in a commodity society,
which is all of us, we all live in a commodity society,
we say, "Well, you can't eat money."
And those people who live in a value society,
which we all do,
it's just layered on top of the commodity society,
you say, "We can't eat our commodities."
You see the difference?
The people who are out for value want
to preserve their commodities
to make value before they're eaten.
If you eat what you produce, you're not a capitalist.
So he needs a new form change.
He needs a kind of form change
that brings more from the same
or finds a new source.
Under capital, all of these processes transform
to be headed towards M prime,
headed towards this more or this plus,
the plus of value.
Now if we ask what capital means,
we go back to the definition of one very good economist,
Kit Sims Taylor.
Capital is value held over time.
We start to think, "Well, there's something missing
from that."
I've held a lot of things over time,
and they tend to lose their value.
If capital is what brings more or the more that comes,
it can't simply be that.
What you need is a commodity,
a special commodity that brings more than it costs
because of its special qualities.
A couple of stipulations.
When you get to studying the capital system in these terms,
you can no longer say profit until the very end.
We're not concerned with the genesis of profit.
The terms that Marx uses are capital and surplus value.
Capital is made up of surplus value.
Profit is mystified.
It doesn't tell you anything about where it comes from.
It doesn't even tell you that it's a surplus.
This is huge.
In a zero-sum system, where does the surplus come from?
We know one place it comes from, nature,
which is thought of in capitalism as a bottomless abundance.
We know how this is not true in many ways.
And in fact, all surplus will come from nature.
It's just it also comes from the nature of human beings.
That is their capacity to labor.
Okay.
Capital is not just value held through time.
It is value that is in movement here,
but it's not just in movement through space and time.
It does have to circulate to get realized.
It's in movement within itself.
It transforms within itself in an increasing way.
It valorizes itself.
We go from a production process here
in which you produce a commodity.
You use money to get it somewhere,
and someone consumes it.
This would be,
the production of commodities would start this out
to a system in which you are producing value
that has to come back with more,
and Marx calls that valorization.
So every time you see valorization,
it's where something is getting what it didn't have before.
And Marx
holds to Occam's razor,
or holds to Spinoza and Leibniz.
He believes everything has to have a sufficient reason.
If you have more, it has to come from somewhere.
Nothing comes from nothing.
You can argue with this, but Marx doesn't.
That's his instrument to show that the economists are silly
or blind or...
And you will notice how many of them he quotes
in the footnotes and in the body like,
"Condillac and others who say,
'Yes, the one who sells something gets more back,
and the one who buys something gets more back.'"
And Marx was like, "Huh, that's interesting." (laughs)
A lot of fantasies among the people
who are thinking about the economy because it's a mystery.
It was the biggest mystery, and Marx solved it,
and he solved it by giving names
to the parts that nobody had thought of,
one of which is surplus value.
Now we have to ask where it comes from,
which is in our reading this week,
but I want to make sure you understand this stuff
before we go on.
Questions while I sip my cold brew?
You notice that the capitalist fuels
are getting stronger and stronger? (chuckles)
This all clear?
- Does cold brew valorize?
- Cold brew of course valorizes, yeah,
by the poor guys who are pulling shots all day.
- Is it monetized?
- (laughs) No, I'm not invested, if that's what you mean.
I always think it would be good to invest in something,
and I think, "How does one do that?"
- Will you say more about (speaks faintly) topic?
- Sure.
I will say also that I taught this book.
In prison, one of the guys asked me if when they got out,
they use it to start a business.
You might learn how to invest.
I mean, it is real economics,
so you might learn how to invest here, but I resist.
Why not profit?
Because profit seems to be the thing
that comes from trade.
That's what it means.
It seems to emerge
at the moment where you're selling something.
Profit is what you get back.
Surplus value is what goes in.
So if you're asking where's this extra coming from
in a ontologically sufficient universe,
then it has to come from somewhere,
and profit denies that.
Profit is the most mystified concept.
Wait, there was a question up here.
- Right, so my question is about value in society.
When you're buying a commodity with money,
and then you exchange the commodity,
you know, and you leave it there,
are you using the commodity as a store of value?
- Yeah.
- And so M prime is a newer value?
- Uh-huh, it comes from somewhere,
extra value. - Right, okay.
- Yep.
Yep, commodities store value too.
If these things didn't hold value and preserve value...
Now we're gonna see in the labor process
how preserving the value
of the semi-products that come in
and also of your means of production,
your tools and your equipment,
is one of the chief jobs of the capitalist
to ensure by/through two methods,
discipline, called supervising,
and propaganda,
Marx calls real subsumption.
You preserve your stuff at work much more carefully
and with much less effort on the part of the owner
when you love your work.
- So you say value and mainly while, I guess,
still talking like simple society.
You say this added value, this valorization,
can't come from circulation.
- Oh, well, Marx says that.
- But if we bring something from a market in which,
say, if we bring a commodity from a market, right,
in which it's very easy to produce
to a place where it's much harder to produce,
then doesn't value simply come from that circulation?
Or are we saying that, like, transporting the commodity...
Say we bring bananas from a very sunny place to a very cold.
- You mean, imagine that, let's say,
a shirt is made much more cheaply in Bangladesh?
Just imagine (student speaks faintly)
it's made more cheaply in Bangladesh than here.
Yeah, it just means that the market switches
to get all the fashion from Bangladesh,
so you're not really comparing anything there.
- But we're getting this delta M
from moving something, right?
Like, you bought it- - Well, yeah, I mean, it's...
Well, you're getting the shirt from there,
but you're no longer comparing it
to shirts made in the US, for example,
except as a luxury good.
So there's no added value to getting it from there.
It's just that when you go
to a place where labor is much cheaper
or technology is much more efficient,
then the cost of production goes down.
Sorry, Richard and then Tomas.
- I'm trying to think about the relationship
between production and consumption here
because it's all in one circuit, basically,
in throughout the society.
So does circulation conceal production?
- Yes, circulation conceals production
and consumption, actually.
In this circuit,
the question is about production and consumption.
In this circuit, Marx says consumption happens
outside of circulation.
This is for private consumption.
I can't load this anymore, can I?
Ah.
It's big, the economy.
You noticed?
Private consumption
here.
In this, there's a kind of consumption, as you'll notice,
that he calls productive consumption,
which money uses to make a commodity
to make more money,
and that is raw materials and means of production.
Those are consumed in the production process.
So there's two types of consumption.
It is true that circulation,
at least historically for the economists,
has concealed the abode of production
or the place of production,
and that's where we're going today.
Marx makes it very dramatic in this version of the book.
In other versions of the book, it's much drier.
But he wanted this to captivate you.
So he says, "We will now move
into the hidden place of production."
Production is hidden historically
because economists have just thought
that magically the more comes out of there.
But it's also the case
that circulation is very public,
and production is hidden even by capitalists.
It's locked behind doors.
It's hidden for all sorts of reasons.
So there's a factual material concealment
that goes on as well.
What of course is hidden
because we didn't have the analytic tools to see it
is the capital process in its real operations.
Nobody had seen that before, not Ricardo, not Smith,
certainly not Hegel,
according to Marx.
One more question, yeah.
Tomas. - To the previous question,
on value-
- Yeah. - We'd need the (indistinct)
and the dash.
So when the conditions of productions of,
we have a car that won't (indistinct) change,
which is what today in like, yeah,
"Financial Times" is called adding value, right,
that's no longer the same commodity.
What happens is that the commodity changes entirely anew,
so that's all you can compare,
yeah, right, wouldn't you say?
- No, it's because the conditions of production.
Once you start making cheap Xs in Mexico,
it doesn't matter where it is,
but it does obviously for the lives of the people there
and international relations.
But wherever it is that you're making a thing cheaper
because labor is cheaper
or because there's better technology,
then everything switches to that source.
So,
it may be that it's cheaper for the people to buy it,
for us to buy it here in a core economy.
But, I mean, it's just like any other value production,
just happened to move there,
and the factors of production have changed.
It doesn't change the way value is made at all.
- It's also, like, one market.
There aren't different markets,
so it's just the socially necessary labor time.
- Yeah, exactly, socially...
So I'm trying to call it SNAALT
with a kind of Swedish accent,
socially necessary average abstract labor time,
(laughs) SNAALT.
So hold on to that one, but that's right.
It's just that the parameters of SNAALT have changed,
but anyone who wants to get a shirt
has to compete with Bangladesh.
Okay.
We know that the main contradiction,
what he calls a contradiction in the general formula,
is that in the general formula,
you have to somehow get more out of the same.
That's the contradiction.
We're looking at chapter four.
If you take a look at the last four or five pages,
they're very important.
They start to tell you some of
the real inputs here.
Buying and selling labor power is an important section.
This will be the special commodity
that allows more to be added
to the money that you circulate.
That means, actually, that the more comes in here.
It's the only place it can come in.
It doesn't come in in consumption.
How am I adding more to it when I consume something?
In fact, I'm using it up.
The value will be gone by the time I'm done,
or slowly over the use of a hammer,
I will waste the value of that hammer.
It doesn't come in in circulation
'cause that's just the exchange of equal values.
There's no way I'm gonna give you my car,
old and crappy as it is, for your banana.
Sorry, you'll have to give me a few bushels
of bananas, at least.
The only place Marx says it can happen is in production,
and particularly in one aspect of production,
in the buying and selling of labor power.
This is the only place the change of value can happen
because of the schizoid nature of labor.
Labor's double.
This is really what makes capital the difference
between labor power and labor.
This you will have noticed from your reading,
that like any commodity,
the capacity to use the commodity
and the using of commodity are different things.
One is kind of stored in it,
and the other is used up when you consume it.
In fact, labor power is consumed when you're laboring.
Does that make sense?
There's no question that labor is a commodity
in a market economy, right?
It's a natural endowment.
It's an enhanced endowment through skill-building
and education and all of those things.
It's a natural cultural/societal endowment
that can be stretched and built, and waxes and wanes.
But nonetheless,
what makes this all go round is that it's traded.
In fact, if you think of an economy,
if I couldn't trade my labor power,
if I couldn't use my labor power for trade,
I wouldn't get anything back
so that I could go to the supermarket, right?
I must.
My labor power has to become a commodity
in a large exchange economy.
Otherwise, I wouldn't have that thing I need to
unless I started out with a huge amount of capital.
But if I came into this world with nearly nothing, as I did,
I have only my labor power to sell.
And on the other side, commodity sales,
capitalism requires someone with labor power
to sell so that they can have money
to buy the commodities that I'm making.
Marx uses the example of the company store.
You go to work.
You make a, what, a shoe.
And then of course to shoe your family,
you need to go to your boss
and buy the shoes at full price,
even though you can make them.
These are the ironies of the capital system.
So if I didn't have labor power to sell, right,
my being able to shoe my family,
though I have the skills to make the shoes,
is now mediated by labor power.
I have this thing.
I promise them I'm gonna give them X amount of my time.
Does that make sense?
The split that makes this not an economy
for the laborer, but a schizonomy,
if you want to be Deleuzian about it or something like that,
what makes it for me as a worker a schizonomy
is that I sell my labor power, but the owner gets my labor.
What's the difference between labor and labor power?
Labor power is what I promise as my capacity to do things,
but labor is as much as they can get out of me
in the time I've contracted to work, actual labor.
My labor power is valued at its cost of reproduction,
just like any commodity.
What does it cost to produce my labor power?
What are the factors in my labor power?
Can you shout them out?
Strength, it's a cost, but what builds strength?
Food, sleep.
So, a house, all of those things, right?
This is called my
means of subsistence.
There's a lot of little monograms.
My means of subsistence.
So labor power is sold
from my means of subsistence.
But you see what the issue is here.
The capitalist has to pay my means of subsistence
and their means of subsistence out of my labor power.
They have to pay for next year's contingencies
out of my labor power.
They have to hedge their bets against weather and thieves
and the up and downs of the markets
all out of my labor power.
So that better be pretty elastic
because it's not just gonna be...
They're not just gonna be getting out of it
what they pay me.
A laborer lives a schizonomy
in which their labor power is what is sold
and that what they get is the cost to reproduce themselves.
What they give, however, is the cost
to reproduce the business,
which might include a higher standard of living
for the owner, but doesn't necessarily have to.
The whole business depends on the value put in
through actual labor.
The value of labor power is determined
by my wants and needs.
It's worth saying that this is not a natural determination,
but a historical determination.
So if my wants and needs include an iPhone,
what else, an umbrella,
what do we need that are historical,
socially determined rather than naturally determined?
Huh?
Tuition for your children, amen.
That's right, the things I've done for tuition,
future tuition for my children.
Yep, depends on the society you live in.
If you live in Argentina, where my partner is from,
you don't save for tuition because the universities are?
- Free.
- You pay taxes, but the state has decided it wants
to allow you to go to these extremely dilapidated buildings
without a charge, right?
So this list of wants
and needs are not just, like, biological.
I don't want you to think that any of this is natural.
It's socially determined,
and it might very well include a car,
a state government,
diapers for your kids
rather than running around pooping all over the place.
Yeah.
- So labor power is based at the (indistinct),
but it's in the (indistinct) sense, right?
- Yeah.
- And goods are priced as their SNAALT.
- Yes.
- How do we...
There's gotta be a difference between
like how we're pricing labor times
and how we're pricing means,
and how we're valuing labor power.
- That's right.
Yeah, you have to...
Well, one of the main controls
when we get to talking about
relative surplus value later,
you'll see that one of the main controls
that a capitalist has to increase their surplus value
is to diminish the cost of those goods
that maintain the means of subsistence.
So it doesn't help the capitalist
to drive down prices anywhere,
but it does help them to drive down the price of rice
because that means they can reproduce
the worker more cheaply.
So there's a lot of pressures on the agricultural sector
and other kind of infrastructure sectors
for individual consumption to go down and down and down.
Technologies in those parts of the economy
actually help profits rise or surplus value increase.
Richard.
- Talking about labor power,
and she says it's like all the capacities
that exist in a person.
But like, as one notices, like, an office worker,
which is like typing on Excel, saying something,
you know, (speaks faintly),
like, how are they, like, valued typically
if they're valued differently?
- No, they're always valued at the cost
to reproduce the worker regardless of what it is.
This is an another averaging force.
Right, all labor is the same.
That's why the proletariat is ultimately uniform
because they only get...
Their wages get driven down...
Wait till you see the mystification of the wage form.
Their wages get driven down
to the minimum of their historical means of subsistence
when at all possible.
Workers' groups can fight against that and can raise it,
but it gets taken out in other places, as he will show.
The capital system eats its limits, including unions.
So what do you do?
Form a union?
Shorten the day?
You can do that, but as he shows in the 19th century,
this increased the pressure to raise productivity
to such a degree that people were just dying
in a shorter time.
We don't have to be cynical about it,
but it is worth showing, understanding how capital,
the capital system, eats its limits.
Or if you try to make a reasonable capital system,
it always backfires.
This is Marx's view.
There is no way to make a better capital system.
It can be better temporarily.
It can be better for certain groups.
But it will always recoup
in one way or the other the misery
that it imposes on people.
This is Marx's position.
It's a structural analytic position.
It's not a moral position by any means,
and this is a very strong challenge to current economics
and liberalism that is worth thinking through,
whether you end up agreeing with it or not.
It is relentlessly and resolutely negative,
the effects of capital.
Though it feeds the world,
it drives the majority of people
into an immiserated circumstance
such that their lives are kind of keeping pace
with their own misery.
AJ.
Sure, you can for a short time,
but as Marx says in one of these chapters,
the quality of their work suffers, (laughs) right?
You can give them less than they need to eat,
but they're gonna wear out faster.
You can see that humans are now a form
of capital that are invested in,
and we end today's session talking about
constant and variable capital.
What used to be called workers
are now called variable capital,
variable because you can get more
and less surplus value out of them
depending how you turn the dials.
Okay, a few more things.
We only have 10 minutes left.
We go to chapter five,
the labor process and the valorization process.
But do reread if you have a chance the last pages
of chapter four.
One irony that comes up in the last pages
of chapter four, which I love,
is that in addition to being exploited,
that is, paid less than the value they actually create,
the workers have to loan their labor to the employer
and get paid at the end of the week.
Isn't that astounding?
The workers, not only are they exploited,
but they're the capitalist's first creditor,
and they have no choice but to lend them to work.
I always found it astounding.
Why do I have to wait till the end of the month to get paid?
Well, because they're extorting the work from you.
Did I tell you the four Xs?
Extortion, expropriation, extraction, exploitation.
This is the relentless negativity
that this book is giving you, the four Xs.
Those are the modes by which capital depletes everything.
Okay.
We're going into the sphere of production now,
but we're going in, first of all,
from the standpoint of the capitalist.
This is what production looks like
for the capitalists from their standpoint.
I'm giving you a lot of formulas today,
but let's do this one last one.
This is what it looks like.
This is where value is created.
You start with money that's advanced from the capitalist
to get a commodity that's a raw material.
It goes into production.
It gets worked by labor and becomes commodity prime,
that is, you get a lump of iron,
and it comes out cast-iron pot, right?
And that cast-iron pot goes out
and brings more than the money you invested
in the means of production, which is
raw materials and the means of labor,
tools and equipment and objects,
and the labor power you've bought.
You've bought labor power.
You've bought means of production.
It goes into production,
and you get out something more than you got in, right?
That's what we understand work to be.
You've worked something,
and the thing is different, more,
better suited to something than it was before.
It's more developed like the lump,
like iron ore becomes an iron rod.
You just snap your fingers.
An iron rod becomes a cast-iron pot (snaps) like that.
You just snap your fingers.
No, there's this labor that happens in the meantime.
So he's adding this in here
and showing you what hides behind circulation
is actually the hidden place of production
in which these factors of production depend
on this difference in order to produce the more,
the difference between labor power
and the actual labor that comes out.
Okay, before we get to surplus value,
which I think we'll get to next time,
and remember, just we're doing
this weird formula dance today.
This is what a laborer sees,
sees their labor power exchanged for money,
which they use to buy a commodity,
which is their means of subsistence.
So this is the standpoint of labor
and the standpoint of capital,
if they knew it,
which they don't, unless they read Marx,
which they don't.
Okay, before we go, I want to just say a few things
about what labor is for Marx, where it comes from,
how it differs from Ricardo and Smith.
I'm gonna leave this up here 'cause it looks so good.
I realize spending a life reading texts like poems
with people, you don't put anything on the board, really.
It's not as impressive.
Okay, what is labor?
Labor is according to Marx...
What is labor?
Do you have a good definition?
Seminar moment.
Labor work?
AJ?
- The thing done to transform a thing.
- Thing done to transform one thing to another.
So if I take a hat,
and I pull a rabbit out of it, that's labor?
Well, maybe.
Could be.
Yeah. - So maybe add to that
it's an ability,
so it's a capacity to make change
or work on something.
- It is true Marx is Aristotelian in this way.
He thinks things go from capacities to actualities.
So, labor, if you can do it,
there was a capacity that preceded it.
This is not the only way to think about things.
Hazal.
- There has to be an idea behind it,
so it's not like the land engages in it.
- Okay, so nature does not do labor.
Nature transforms.
But as he says, quoting Aristotle,
labor, human labor, has an idea
and leads that idea as part of the capacity into actuality.
That's true.
Yeah.
- Is it like energy?
- Labor, that would be a physical definition of it,
that it's energy that does work
or effort that produces a product, yeah.
I'm gonna do another formula.
This is good.
Ooh, I can pull this down?
Is that true?
Yeah, look at that. (object whirring)
Ah.
Labor has a very particular intentional structure.
It's gonna sound insane.
- Wow.
- How's that?
This is the intentional structure of labor.
A worker works a workable into a worked.
It has a temporal structure too.
This is the subjective element,
what he calls the subjective element.
This is the objective element.
And this is a process.
These two belong to nature.
The process of work belongs to human nature
according to Marx.
I'm not sure I agree with this,
but it certainly has a non-natural element,
which is that the way of working changes socially.
But fundamentally, working is a natural,
as is the workable object,
comes from nature.
And the process here he likens to
another natural.
He likens to it, it's a little different,
where at least, in work in socialism
or pre-capitalist formations,
work is like a metabolism.
It takes a workable, and it digests it
and spits it out as a worked,
or as as a work, if you want to put it that way.
Yeah.
- Do capitalists do labor or do work?
- No.
Nope, capitalists never work,
not because they're sitting around either.
Capitalists are,
what do you call them?
What do they call them here? Stewards.
It's a terrible institutional name.
They're stewards of work
or overseers of work, organizers of work,
but always other people's work.
So work is not equivalent to effort.
You make a lot of efforts that are not work.
Richard. - So it's not really labor.
It's laboring.
- Yeah, laboring.
It's a process.
This changes somewhat.
This is the basis for labor under capitalism,
but it changes somewhat,
and we'll talk about that next time
when we get into surplus value,
the different modes of capital.
Just warning you that for next week,
we're talking about the working-day chapter,
which is about 100 pages.
It's not theoretical exactly.
It's historical,
but might want to get started on your reading.
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