[00:00] (intense violin music)
[00:13] - Page 19, the double character
[00:15] of the labor represented in commodities.
[00:17] First, the commodity
presented itself to us
[00:20] as a double-something,
[00:21] both use value and exchange value,
[00:24] or, I would say, use and value,
[00:27] that's a better way to put it,
[00:30] more precise,
[00:32] or use value and value.
[00:35] We then saw that labor too,
[00:36] when it was expressed as value
[00:38] and it is expressed as value,
[00:40] loses the particular qualities it has
[00:42] as that which produces use values.
[00:45] When you're producing
something for exchange,
[00:47] your labor changes.
[00:49] Interestingly, it doesn't
change in content,
[00:51] at least at the beginning,
[00:53] until capitalism is well-developed,
[00:57] industrialized, expanded,
[01:01] then it starts to change the
quality of concrete labor.
[01:05] But in this hypothetical, this heuristic,
[01:09] simple heuristic at the
beginning of the book,
[01:12] which is, by the way, a
theoretical heuristic,
[01:14] not a historical heuristic.
[01:17] It wasn't like we started
with the commodity in AD 1,
[01:22] not true, we're starting
with the commodity
[01:24] for the analytic, for
analyzing capitalism,
[01:28] starting with its its cell form,
[01:31] what Marx calls its cell form,
[01:33] because he thought this would be easier.
[01:34] Hah, you know?
[01:37] But I don't think there is an easy way in,
[01:39] so we're taking this as our entry point.
[01:43] We saw then that labor too,
when it's expressed as value,
[01:46] loses the particular qualities it has
[01:48] as that which produces use values.
[01:51] So briefly, we have to talk about
[01:52] the double character of labor,
[01:55] useful labor, and labor towards
value or abstract labor,
[02:00] socially necessary average labor time,
[02:02] which is the measure of its magnitude.
[02:09] You can see the difference on page 23
[02:11] in a really clear formulation,
[02:13] "In and for itself a greater
quantity of use value
[02:18] amounts to greater material wealth."
[02:19] This is like the third
full paragraph on page 23.
[02:24] Two coats amount to more than one.
[02:26] If two people need coats,
you need two coats.
[02:30] And the use value of two coats
[02:32] is two coats worth of use value.
[02:34] That make sense?
[02:36] But two coats of value
[02:38] might not be the value
of what one coat was
[02:40] half an hour ago if exchange
conditions change, he says.
[02:46] Two coats can clothe two people,
[02:47] one coat just one person,
[02:48] yet when the quantity of
material wealth increases,
[02:51] this can correspond to a
simultaneous drop in its values.
[02:56] If, for example, you
can suddenly make coats
[02:59] much more quickly, with
much less labor input,
[03:03] then the value drops.
[03:05] This would happen for all
coats already on the market,
[03:07] even though they took
[03:10] a much higher socially
necessary average labor time.
[03:12] Does that make sense?
[03:14] So value means something
totally differently,
[03:16] this, we just need to put
out of our minds right away,
[03:18] value is not the worth of
something for me in my life,
[03:24] but the number of things
something can be exchanged for
[03:27] on the market.
[03:30] There are two different systems,
[03:33] and as we'll start to see,
[03:34] there's what I call an eversion,
[03:36] it's an inversion with a change of values,
[03:41] use value and value evert.
[03:44] Value is number one, comes
first, and is more important
[03:49] and subordinates use value to it.
[03:52] So you get useful things as a byproduct
[03:55] from the exchange process.
[04:00] Okay, today, we're gonna talk
about a number of operations.
[04:02] We might get through chapter one,
[04:04] but if not, we'll leak over
a little bit to Monday.
[04:07] This is the third week,
[04:08] and we're gonna be talking about
[04:11] one operation in particular, reflection.
[04:16] In exchange, you have
this Hegelian operation.
[04:20] And these are not operations
that the economist carries out,
[04:23] they are not operations that
happen in your consciousness,
[04:26] they happen in actual
exchange on a market.
[04:30] They're anticipated by production.
[04:33] You get the reflective determination
[04:35] of the value of one thing
[04:37] through another thing.
[04:40] You will have read the
forms of value section.
[04:44] And then we're moving on to the best part,
[04:47] the fetish section,
[04:48] in which you get something
like a distorting reflection.
[04:51] There's a lot of mirrors
in these sections.
[04:53] So to make it clearer, let's
stick with the mirror figure,
[04:58] the mirror image.
[04:59] We're still working on the cell
form of the capital system,
[05:02] which is the commodity.
[05:06] What Marx does is gives
us a set of categories
[05:09] which are operations,
[05:10] especially in these first four chapters.
[05:13] These are the operations
that make commodities happen,
[05:17] so they aren't simply
things that float around
[05:19] or that have qualities inherent to them.
[05:22] Those are, just to give
you a list of them,
[05:24] reflection, eversion, abstraction,
[05:28] reification, or objectification,
[05:30] concentration, transformation,
expression, fetishization.
[05:35] You see all these operations are going on,
[05:36] and this is Marx's unique
contribution to the discussion,
[05:40] these operations
[05:42] that are societal operations,
they're not individual.
[05:45] They happen in a social setting
[05:48] where certain things need to be done
[05:52] in order to preserve,
maintain the society.
[06:01] His goal in this volume, we'll remember,
[06:03] is to show the perversion of our sociality
[06:07] by analyzing the workings of production.
[06:10] Sociality under capital is perverse,
[06:13] is a word he uses sometimes,
[06:15] and the verso words
indicate the turnaround
[06:20] that capitalism enacts on history.
[06:24] It isn't just a continuation,
it's a sharp verso,
[06:30] it's a turnaround
[06:33] that might produce vertigo
if you knew about it.
[06:36] That's why, for example,
economists and everyone else
[06:39] projected back across all history,
[06:41] because it was really vertiginous change
[06:43] that happened over a couple hundred years.
[06:48] To do this, he starts with the nearest,
[06:49] and most familiar, and most obscure.
[06:52] He does a phenomenology,
[06:53] I'm just reminding you what we're doing,
[06:57] which I'm calling the entry point,
[06:58] the narrow way and the commodity.
[07:00] The commodity necessarily
brings labor into view.
[07:05] The commodity is nothing without labor.
[07:08] And both are double.
[07:10] And each of the pairs gets everted.
[07:13] Use value gets subordinated
[07:15] and mated, put into a second position,
[07:20] vis-a-vis value.
[07:23] And abstract labor gets super-ordinated
[07:27] over useful, concrete labor.
[07:31] If you wanna know how big a commodity is,
[07:32] we know a commodity is a side of labor,
[07:35] if you wanna know how big a commodity is,
[07:37] it's the socially necessary
average labor time
[07:40] involved in doing it.
[07:41] That's all, really, socially
necessary average labor time
[07:43] tells you, is how big it is,
[07:44] because it's the one thing that's standard
[07:46] among all the commodities,
[07:47] they all have some amount
of time it takes to do it
[07:51] that the society says this is,
[07:53] usually it's close to the minimum,
[07:57] with some adjustments for anomalies.
[08:03] It certainly wouldn't be the maximum,
[08:04] that would not be a capitalist society.
[08:09] So the magnitude of value is measured
[08:11] by the socially necessary
average labor time
[08:13] it takes to produce it.
[08:17] And value is something that
[08:19] you could say hovers around the commodity,
[08:21] it's a strange metaphysical,
quasi-metaphysical,
[08:25] quasi-physical thing, a phantasm
that the system puts up.
[08:31] But it's also social,
[08:34] and this is what we're gonna
talk about a little bit
[08:35] today as well.
[08:37] Value organizes social life
under a capitalistic economy.
[08:43] It is not just a thing that hovers there,
[08:44] it is the measure of everything we do,
[08:47] it's the impetus of everything we do,
[08:49] it's in the impetus of everything we do,
[08:52] even if we have other impeti.
[08:55] It organizes economic life,
[08:57] and it also organizes social life
[08:59] because the social is
subordinated to the economic.
[09:03] So the social or the societal
[09:05] is ground zero for Marx's interpretation,
[09:09] and for all reflection.
[09:12] The economy is not,
[09:14] politics is not,
[09:15] nature is not,
[09:17] God is not.
[09:18] It is what he calls the social,
[09:20] or (speaks German),
[09:22] which I would translate as "societal."
[09:24] Social is very confusing when he uses it,
[09:26] I don't know if you found it odd
[09:28] when he says things have a social life.
[09:31] It's not that they go to dances,
[09:34] it's that they are making society go.
[09:39] Society is a grouping principle,
[09:42] a name for a grouping principle
[09:43] in which people are
independent on one another.
[09:46] So society will always be both
our lowest common denominator
[09:49] when we're reading capital,
[09:51] that's what makes everything go.
[09:53] Human being is a social
being, a societal being.
[09:56] Can't live outside of society,
[09:57] that's why he has these
tirades about Robinson Crusoe,
[10:00] this fictional individual
[10:03] who brings his whole society with him
[10:05] and acts as though he's
still in the middle of London
[10:08] with his lists of things to do,
[10:09] and his religion,
[10:11] and his slave.
[10:14] (Paul chuckling)
[10:16] And it's also the highest
goal, the societal.
[10:20] The answer will be societal,
[10:22] be making society much more important,
[10:25] we'll be desubordinating
it to the economy,
[10:28] or making a free association of producers
[10:31] who are in control of production,
[10:34] Marx's minimal idea of socialism here.
[10:38] That is, you strengthen this ground zero,
[10:40] you bring it back to the front.
[10:42] How to do that?
[10:44] I'll let you tell me
[10:45] as you ruminate over this
for the next 10 years.
[10:50] But we learn in this section also
[10:52] that use value is not
only something that comes
[10:56] at the end of production,
exchange, circulation,
[11:01] et cetera, et cetera,
[11:02] when you finally get the
thing home and you use it,
[11:04] or use it up.
[11:05] Use value is something that
also structures the society,
[11:09] it structures the society as
a social division of labor.
[11:14] So remember, we're talking
about a big enough society
[11:17] where no individual can produce
[11:20] everything they need themselves
[11:21] and no family really either, as a unit.
[11:25] You need the whole society,
[11:27] and so the production of
use values is spread out.
[11:31] This is of course why you need exchange,
[11:33] exchange of raw materials,
[11:34] you need to get the rock over here
[11:36] for the whatever over there.
[11:38] Right?
[11:39] So we're imagining this zone
in an ever-widening image
[11:45] from an individual act of exchange
[11:47] to, ultimately, the totality of society
[11:50] whose exchanges are contingent,
[11:55] can be affected by random events,
[11:57] but ultimately work out
according to the system's laws.
[12:00] That's all about concrete
labor and who needs what when
[12:03] and who can make what when.
[12:05] But the social division of
labor is one of the tools,
[12:07] one of the instruments
of the capital system.
[12:10] It can use that.
[12:11] It can divide it more, beyond
what use value dictates.
[12:16] It can divide labor even within a factory.
[12:19] Take Adam Smith's example
of the pin factory,
[12:22] where it used to be that someone
hammered out a little pin
[12:24] with a tiny hammer,
[12:26] and eventually there was someone
[12:28] who made the head of the pin,
[12:29] someone who extruded the metal,
[12:32] someone who sharpened the pin,
[12:33] someone who polished the pin.
[12:34] And labor can be divided
even in an individual,
[12:37] where I am now no longer
making a whole object.
[12:40] This is a capitalist use of
the social division of labor,
[12:44] it's still social,
[12:45] because I depend on someone
else to sharpen my pin.
[12:48] That sounds vaguely obscene.
[12:57] Use value produces a vast differential
[13:01] of who makes what, when, and how,
[13:03] and where it gets traded, et cetera.
[13:11] But you can see also how it contributes
[13:13] to the abstraction of labor
in so far as labor is now
[13:17] a function of exchange,
[13:20] labor is now a something that, itself,
[13:24] can be an adjustable lever
in the capital system.
[13:27] You can do much less or much more.
[13:30] How can I even tell what labor
is if I'm sharpening pins?
[13:33] There has to be some average
[13:34] that makes it equal to
someone knitting a sweater.
[13:39] Who knows the sweater,
[13:40] in Aristotle's sense,
[13:41] it's an image of the
sweater before they start,
[13:43] they know how to use the
tools, they have know-how,
[13:45] and they have an image of the sweater,
[13:46] and they take that image
out of their consciousness
[13:49] into yarn.
[13:54] The idea is that as you make commodities
[13:58] that have to be exchanged,
[14:00] the pressure to make commodities
[14:02] makes you work the average amount of time.
[14:07] If you work more, you are just
cutting into your own wages.
[14:13] If you work less, you're increasing them,
[14:15] so there is a kind of pressure to speed up
[14:18] to increase productivity.
[14:21] Okay, just to say how labor gets abstract,
[14:24] it goes through an operation
which I didn't mention,
[14:27] which is reduction.
[14:28] Marx says in this section
[14:30] that it gets reduced to
a simple from a complex,
[14:34] it gets reduced to one
quality, value, or labor power,
[14:39] socially necessary average labor time.
[14:43] It gets homogenized,
[14:45] it gets all the other
qualities stripped off it,
[14:47] it becomes bare.
[14:50] These are not the only forces on value,
[14:53] you will see, in fact,
that we're starting with
[14:54] a very simplistic view of the economy.
[14:57] And later, when we get to volume three,
[15:00] we're not doing volume three,
[15:01] but you all can read on to volume three,
[15:04] when you get to volume three,
[15:05] you have to see these all
things in a different way
[15:07] when the pressures of competition
[15:09] between different sectors of the economy
[15:11] change the way value is made.
[15:13] So, for now, these are provisional ways
[15:14] to understand the inputs to value.
[15:19] Once it's been reduced,
[15:20] like these values have what
he calls value objecthood,
[15:24] which is ghostly.
[15:25] Every time you have a
thing like this thing,
[15:28] it has its physical and use objecthood,
[15:31] but it also has a value objecthood.
[15:33] Whereas if this were, I don't know,
[15:35] something cheap, I might drop it.
[15:37] But since it isn't,
[15:40] I respect, preserve its valuehood,
[15:45] which is here in a contained form,
[15:48] though you can't see it,
[15:48] it's not exactly equivalent to
its physical characteristics.
[15:52] Okay.
[15:57] You can see how the use side of labor
[16:02] gets used by the value
or abstract side of labor
[16:06] in the capital system.
[16:08] You have questions about that section too?
[16:14] Isn't it good to read a book very slowly?
[16:16] I just love it, it's my favorite thing.
[16:18] I always get anxious about
large amounts of text.
[16:22] Yeah?
[16:23] - Just really quick.
[16:24] The last time,
[16:25] you just mentioned like value
object perfect something.
[16:28] Is that the same as exchange value?
[16:32] - No exchange value really is,
[16:35] we're about to see that in more detail.
[16:37] Again, use value and exchange value
[16:41] live in a kind of contradiction
[16:43] whose odd and tense solution is value.
[16:49] So really, Marx wants you to
focus on use value and value.
[16:53] Exchange value is like the
technical number of things
[16:56] you can get for this thing.
[16:58] What it seems to contain,
[17:00] what it appears, in the
real appearance, to contain
[17:04] is value.
[17:06] I'm not thinking about how much,
[17:07] when I hold onto this and protect it,
[17:08] this is a very psychologistic
way of putting it,
[17:10] but when I hold onto this and protect it,
[17:12] I'm not thinking because I can get,
[17:15] you know, 1/10th of a car for this,
[17:16] or 1/20th of a car for this.
[17:19] Right? I'm not thinking about that.
[17:21] But the whole exchange market,
[17:22] the whole exchange
phantasmagoria has conditioned me
[17:28] such that I know this
is a container of value.
[17:31] And I know this is a container of value
[17:34] much higher than this, oddly.
[17:39] Yeah?
[17:41] - Is this value objecthood a
feature of the capital system?
[17:46] - No other system has value objecthood.
[17:49] It's a total perversion
of ontology under capital.
[17:54] Does that?
- I'm not convinced.
[17:56] (student speaking faintly)
[17:57] - Okay.
[17:59] I mean, there's no...
[18:01] What could?
[18:03] Convincing?
[18:05] I think it's better to
understand the system.
[18:07] We could have an argument
about that, which I would win.
[18:11] It would take up a lot of time, yeah.
[18:14] Sorry, wait, David behind you first.
[18:16] - What's the pedagogy
that like Marx has opined,
[18:20] like you earn the obvious value,
[18:22] or is it just assumed to us?
[18:24] (student speaking faintly)
[18:27] - It's all objective.
[18:29] The question was, what is the
pedagogy of object valuehood?
[18:33] When do we learn it?
[18:35] And I'm talking about it
in psychologistic terms,
[18:39] but really, it's purely objective.
[18:41] If you don't treat these things
as though they have value,
[18:44] you'll lose out.
[18:46] If you don't treat your
car as though it had value,
[18:48] which is the way I've
beat up a number of cars,
[18:53] you lose out, you don't get
to sell it for anything,
[18:55] and you know this is the
case when you're doing it,
[18:57] that's why, as a teenager,
[18:59] I rebelled and beat up
a lot of cars, right?
[19:03] It's just, it's a matter of conditioning.
[19:05] And you could choose differently,
[19:07] but you can't do any differently,
[19:09] you'll just be stuck.
[19:11] Samuel, and then David.
[19:13] - So if I understand
what we're talking about,
[19:18] we have use value and exchange value,
[19:22] which together kind of like synthesize
[19:27] into this notion of value
which we project onto things.
[19:30] So into this notion of
value goes use value,
[19:32] which depends on the body of the object,
[19:35] and exchange value,
[19:36] which depends on the
socially average labor time
[19:38] that goes into to its creation.
[19:40] And then from value, we
get to value objecthood,
[19:43] which I assume is sort of
a property of an object
[19:46] we project onto it somehow?
[19:48] But then he says the body
[19:50] doesn't play a role in this at all.
[19:52] - The physical body does not
play a role. That's right.
[19:54] - The physical body, through use value,
[19:56] plays a role in value?
[19:58] - Well, not every commodity
has a physical body.
[20:01] But let's talk about bodies,
[20:03] the funny body theory, this one.
[20:05] Commodity, let's say it's
a physical commodity,
[20:07] has a physical body,
[20:08] but its value body, which
adheres to its physical body,
[20:12] and in fact it's the other way around,
[20:13] the physical body only moves around
[20:15] because it has a value body,
[20:16] it's only made because
it's making a value body
[20:19] at the same time,
[20:20] it's only traded because
it has a value body,
[20:22] the value body you can't see.
[20:24] But you understand Marx is using
[20:26] a kind of idealist vocabulary here
[20:29] to demonstrate to you that
capitalism is a religion.
[20:33] Something like a religion.
[20:35] It has these phantasms
[20:37] that are absolutely real in the system,
[20:39] you can't live without them,
[20:42] and they can't be wished
away psychologically.
[20:48] - I guess I'm kind of stuck,
[20:49] that if the body plays
a role, a use value,
[20:52] which plays a use in value,
[20:54] which plays a role in value objecthood,
[20:57] how does the body not
play a role within loss?
[21:00] And second, a kind of circular thing.
[21:02] - Right, well, it is just subordinated.
[21:06] - Okay.
[21:07] - You know, let's say a digital object,
[21:09] it doesn't have a physical body.
[21:12] It's related to some
physical residing place
[21:14] which uses a ton of
electricity, but let's just say.
[21:19] It has some sort of distinct
boundaries as a use item.
[21:23] Right? This PDF.
[21:25] Distinct boundaries as a use item.
[21:28] All that value requires
[21:29] is that it has distinct
boundaries as a use item
[21:32] and that someone needs
to use it for something.
[21:36] But that gets completely subordinated.
[21:37] In fact, in the end,
[21:39] the things are made only
because of their value body.
[21:42] So it gets subordinated
[21:44] from the very cause of their
existence later down the line.
[21:48] It isn't that value is
added on in capitalism,
[21:51] this is a mistake that some
mainstream economists make
[21:56] that he wants to avoid.
[21:58] Value is not added on.
[21:59] The whole system will work
such that value comes first,
[22:03] and in fact, it's only because
there's going to be value
[22:06] that you decide between a physical body.
[22:08] Imagine, you're gonna make a business.
[22:09] Am I gonna make water bottles?
[22:11] Sneakers? Digital objects?
[22:14] Bitcoin? What am I gonna make?
[22:17] It's all determined by
value to some degree.
[22:21] Even if you're like,
[22:22] how I really like to make big,
metal, ugly electric trucks
[22:28] that never come off the assembly lines.
[22:31] You might think this is
like a designer's dream,
[22:34] but no, there had to be a
market for it to begin with.
[22:36] The market figures into
the decision-making.
[22:39] So the idea of capital
[22:40] is that it turns those relations around.
[22:44] We have to talk about value form.
[22:45] David, quickly.
[22:46] - Yeah, could you talk a bit more
[22:48] about why it's use value
and not exchange value
[22:50] that performs a function of
differentiation in labor?
[22:54] Because I take it,
[22:55] and maybe this is what
Marx goes to in Volume 3,
[22:58] but it seems to me the capitalist logic
[23:00] and the competition that it entails
[23:02] actually forces firms and producers
[23:05] to try to minimize their exchange value,
[23:07] and that's what's determining
the social division of labor.
[23:11] - So the question is,
[23:12] why does use value determine
the social division of labor?
[23:15] And that is,
[23:21] let's say for now,
[23:23] we'll say only in production,
[23:26] and only because use value is a necessary
[23:30] but insufficient cause for value.
[23:35] And I guess because of a
practical consideration,
[23:38] I think this is the best
way to think about it,
[23:41] in Marxian terms,
[23:42] use value becomes the content of value,
[23:46] and value becomes the form.
[23:47] So value carries around this use value.
[23:49] It can't do without it,
[23:50] because if no one ends
up using it in the end,
[23:54] the value disappears.
[23:55] But it is at the behest of
value that it moves around.
[24:01] And ultimately too, value
depends in part on use value,
[24:06] but much more in the capital system
[24:08] does use value depend on value.
[24:11] That's what we call innovation,
[24:14] entrepreneurship and innovation.
[24:17] That's where value,
[24:18] like, where could we find the most value?
[24:20] Let's invent this crap,
[24:23] this giant pile of crap, like AI.
[24:26] Let's invent this.
[24:27] Let's give $150 million
to support this here,
[24:31] because value's gonna come
out of it, we can't not do it.
[24:33] You can't not do it, you'll fall behind,
[24:37] you'll become like a
small liberal arts college
[24:39] with no research.
[24:45] You better cut this out of the video.
[24:47] (students laughing)
[24:50] So the system depends on,
[24:56] but takes completely under its control,
[24:59] a variety of qualitatively
different things.
[25:01] So it requires this as,
we'll call it a basis,
[25:05] a use value basis,
[25:06] and that's what determines
the social division of labor.
[25:10] There's other divisions
in the labor field,
[25:13] like merchants and truck drivers,
[25:15] and other people
[25:17] who are not directly
involved in production.
[25:19] There's a division of labor there too
[25:20] that has to do with circulation.
[25:22] But for now, we're not talking about this,
[25:23] we're talking about
how a socialist economy
[25:26] where everybody's making something,
[25:28] and they exchange it without
exploiting one another,
[25:32] and they're in control so they can say,
[25:33] "Hey, that's exploitation,"
[25:37] is the beginning and
the end of capitalism.
[25:40] It's in there, we actually are socialists.
[25:43] When you get to the
chapter on cooperation,
[25:45] you'll discover that we
already are socialists.
[25:50] Okay, section three, the
value form or exchange value.
[26:04] This is a complicated section, confusing.
[26:07] It is developmental,
[26:09] so you can see that you go from
[26:12] simple or individual value form,
[26:14] to total or expanded value form,
[26:16] to the general value form, to money.
[26:21] Money's the big one, the biggest fetish,
[26:23] that without which the
sine qua non of capitalism,
[26:28] for a number of reasons,
[26:29] you can see that Marx is
a pragmatist in this way,
[26:32] he doesn't want to tell you,
[26:34] he doesn't wanna define capitalism,
[26:35] give you some sort of lofty,
theoretical explanation,
[26:38] he wants to tell you how it works.
[26:40] These are the operations,
[26:42] as if it were like
[26:43] a kind of quasi-ideal,
quasi-material factory, capital,
[26:50] that equates things, that reflects things,
[26:54] that reifies things,
that transforms value.
[26:58] So it's absolutely crucial
[26:59] for everything that comes after
[27:01] to know that value transforms,
comes in different forms.
[27:05] Two of its main forms,
[27:06] which we'll get to I think for next week,
[27:08] are the commodity,
[27:10] and money, which is a
special type of commodity
[27:12] that takes on a life of its own.
[27:16] But before we get there,
[27:17] he's gonna derive these theoretically,
[27:19] analytically in steps.
[27:22] Value takes different forms.
[27:28] And it does this through and for exchange.
[27:35] Now our entry point is widening out,
[27:37] as you go deeper into the commodity,
[27:39] it opens up a whole vista for you
[27:42] within the commodity
and among commodities.
[27:44] It turns out that a
commodity is not a commodity
[27:46] if there isn't another commodity
[27:48] through which it reflects itself to say,
[27:50] "I am a commodity.
[27:51] I'm this commodity, and
this is how much I'm worth."
[28:00] Value has to have a number of forms
[28:03] and a constant cycle of
transformations through those forms
[28:06] as if it were the kind of
work of the capital system
[28:09] to be putting these
things through its form.
[28:11] You cannot do capital, which
we haven't brought up yet,
[28:15] which is value that makes more
value out of the same value.
[28:22] That's the mystified account of capital,
[28:26] let's stick with that for a minute,
[28:27] value that makes more value
out of the same value.
[28:30] You can't have capital
[28:31] unless you can transform
a commodity into money.
[28:34] We call that a sale.
[28:36] We also call it a purchase,
so that's confusing.
[28:39] There are perspectives involved in this
[28:40] in which things look different
than from other perspectives.
[28:46] This cycle of value forms,
[28:48] which is crucial to the capital system,
[28:49] depends on money as its lubricant,
[28:53] as it's representative,
[28:55] as a mode of delay, right?
[29:01] If I need to, how does it delay?
[29:06] I give you money, and you have that money,
[29:08] and it gives you time to go and buy
[29:11] whatever the next thing you wanna buy is.
[29:14] You don't have to do it
immediately as in a barter system,
[29:17] I guess you could barter around a lot,
[29:19] but that's very time-consuming.
[29:22] Okay so, as usual,
[29:23] he starts with the simple
or individual value form.
[29:27] This, again, is a conceptual heuristic,
[29:30] it's an analytic construction,
but it is powerful,
[29:32] So, let's look at page 25,
[29:35] simple or individual value form.
[29:39] He says, "The entire
mystery of the value form
[29:41] lies hidden in this simple value form,
[29:44] to analyze this form is
therefore our real challenge."
[29:47] This is the bottom of page 25.
[29:49] He likes to make grand statements.
[29:53] "Here are two different commodities,
[29:54] A and B, the linen and the coat.
[29:56] They play two distinctively
different roles, as we can see.
[29:59] The linen expresses its
value through the coat,
[30:01] the coat serves as the material
[30:03] for expressing the linen's value."
[30:06] So you can see that one becomes the form
[30:08] and one becomes the content,
[30:10] or one becomes the expression
[30:12] and the other becomes the expressed.
[30:14] One becomes the representation,
[30:16] the other becomes the represented.
[30:18] Or one is a mirror that reflects
[30:21] only the value quality of the
thing that is reflected in it.
[30:25] This is Marx's image,
and it's a very good one.
[30:28] It's a peculiar mirror.
[30:30] It's not the distorting mirror,
[30:31] it gives a reflective determination.
[30:33] This is a Hegelian term from the Logic.
[30:36] It's a funny way to think
about how things come to be.
[30:39] I come to be because, next
to you, I look like this.
[30:45] Like, if I'm standing next to
a tree, I look like a human.
[30:49] If I'm standing next to a child
human, I look like an adult.
[30:53] My being is reflected
through that other being
[30:55] and gets its specific determinations
[30:57] by the relationship between the two.
[31:00] Do you have a question, Zoe?
[31:01] - Yeah.
[31:03] Why is value becoming the
form and not the content?
[31:08] - Why is value then becoming
the form and not the content?
[31:13] That's a good question.
[31:21] Value forms.
[31:23] What is, what content?
[31:25] I think the content is value,
but it takes different forms.
[31:30] There's no other content
but value here either,
[31:32] so maybe the form content distinction
[31:36] is not so important here
as the transformation,
[31:39] the metamorphosis of
one thing into the next.
[31:42] That's a term that he uses a
lot as well, metamorphosis.
[31:46] Let's talk about it and see if
we can answer your question.
[31:54] The linen expresses its
value through the coat.
[31:57] No thing can express its value itself.
[31:59] It'd be like my saying,
[32:01] Leland, I'll trade you your white shirt
[32:03] for your white shirt.
[32:05] You're like, "Huh?"
[32:07] That's not getting me anywhere,
[32:08] in terms of use value or value.
[32:10] From that idea,
[32:11] you can derive the whole
capital system as well
[32:13] if you want to.
[32:14] It has to be qualitatively
different things,
[32:16] they have to be useful to someone
[32:19] and then you trade them.
[32:20] Value arises when you put together
[32:22] qualitatively different things.
[32:23] Because why else would I say
[32:25] I'm trading you a book for a shirt?
[32:30] How would you possibly
know that was a good trade?
[32:39] The first commodity plays an active role,
[32:41] the second plays a passive one.
[32:42] The value of the first commodity
[32:44] is represented as relative value,
[32:46] the commodity is in the
relative value form.
[32:49] The second commodity
acts as the equivalent,
[32:51] it is in the equivalent form.
[32:55] As you saw when you moved to
the second section of this,
[32:59] an equivalent form
[33:00] can have many, many, many, many relatives,
[33:02] can have infinite relatives.
[33:04] If we didn't have that, we
wouldn't be able to have money.
[33:07] Money is the universal equivalent
[33:11] to which anything that has
value can become the relative.
[33:14] They're all relative to money,
[33:16] that's another way to say,
[33:20] to say the difference that
the capital system makes,
[33:24] every commodity is relative to money.
[33:26] But he shows you how money takes over,
[33:30] and this is true historically too,
[33:31] from a specific commodity
that had a certain value
[33:34] and maybe had certain qualities
[33:35] that made it easy to cut
up in pieces or weigh.
[33:40] He will say, in the money section,
[33:42] it's interesting that most
money names are weight names
[33:45] for the metals that represented money
[33:48] so it's easy to quantify them.
[33:49] Easy to quantify, right?
[33:51] Coats, eh, you know,
[33:53] like, "Here, have a piece of gum.
[33:55] Okay, I'll give you 1/100th of my coat."
[33:58] Makes it a little bit difficult.
[34:00] Again, these are practical considerations,
[34:02] how can exchanges be made?
[34:04] And the forms take off from
the practical considerations.
[34:08] Okay, in value formation,
[34:09] there are at least three operations.
[34:14] Expression or reflection,
which are the same thing,
[34:16] reflection is the form of expression here.
[34:19] Equivalence and objectification.
[34:23] Only if I reflect my
value in the other thing,
[34:26] can I have an equivalence,
[34:28] 'cause I know how many of
that thing is worth anything,
[34:31] and it has to be objectified in a thing
[34:34] so it has a bounded limit,
and I can count them.
[34:38] Does that make sense?
[34:47] Remembering that the value object
[34:49] is not continuous with
the physical object,
[34:53] because there may be many
qualities in the physical object,
[34:56] or non-physical object, that
don't contribute to its value
[34:59] and that don't take away from its value.
[35:02] You could see a seat can be any color,
[35:05] even the most hideous possible fabric.
[35:08] Okay, we've added
something to our question
[35:10] about what value is.
[35:12] Value is something that is
always in a particular form,
[35:15] relative form, equivalent
form, simple forms,
[35:19] complex forms, expanded forms,
[35:22] as a commodity, as money,
[35:26] as labor, which is a commodity too.
[35:31] But it only exists in relations.
[35:34] You can take something out of
the market for a little while,
[35:37] but if you took it
completely out of the market,
[35:39] it would be valueless,
[35:40] if you separated it
totally from the market.
[35:45] Okay.
[35:54] It is in this exchange of reflection
[35:57] that things get homogenized.
[36:00] A commodity becomes a
gelatinous blob of value.
[36:04] A bare, gelatinous blob,
[36:05] it's coming to be a
very unappetizing thing,
[36:08] a bare gelatinous blob of value
[36:11] when it reflects through
this mirror that says
[36:15] you're worth one of me,
you're worth two of me.
[36:22] It is headed for that since production,
[36:26] the owners, the managers,
[36:27] the efficiency coordinators,
the supervisors,
[36:30] even the workers who
have internalized this,
[36:34] they know that they better get the value
[36:36] in its gelatinous blob in there,
[36:39] you know, whatever it is,
[36:42] however much it is.
[36:45] But it doesn't show up, it
doesn't identify itself,
[36:48] it shows itself in exchange.
[36:51] And simple exchange is
the the heuristic form
[36:55] in which he can show you
how value shows itself.
[36:57] It says, "Oh, I'm a coat,"
when it is not a coat.
[37:00] Or, "I'm money."
[37:03] This is, if you want to know,
an ontology of equivalence,
[37:07] this is where the is means equals.
[37:13] Which is another way to say
[37:14] what economism does to
sociality, is means equals.
[37:19] These things, for the purpose
of value, are equivalent.
[37:23] Nothing is equivalent to itself,
[37:25] so that's why it needs
the panoply of use values
[37:27] and the social division
of labor to keep that up.
[37:30] You couldn't trade, right,
[37:32] imagine we all started
making the same widget.
[37:36] This would be like a funny movie,
[37:38] or a tragedy depending on
how you think about it.
[37:42] There's no value if
there's only one thing.
[37:48] And equivalence is an operation
[37:50] for making unlike things exchangeable.
[37:57] You can see that equivalence
in the equivalent form
[38:00] is where the socially
necessary average labor time
[38:06] meets the road.
[38:17] He says on 28, towards the top,
[38:20] "Equating it, tailoring with weaving,
[38:23] does in fact reduce the tailoring
[38:25] to what is actually the same
and both forms of labor,
[38:28] to their common character as human labor."
[38:30] Philosophically, this is very interesting,
[38:32] because nothing has to
go on in anyone's mind,
[38:35] nothing has to go on in any kind of logic,
[38:37] you don't need a metaphysics for this.
[38:39] This is what happens when you
put these things together.
[38:43] It conjures up something
that must be the same
[38:45] in both of them.
[38:49] And it brings into view
[38:50] the specific character of
value generating labor,
[38:53] and it does that
[38:54] by actually reducing the
different forms of labor
[38:56] embedded in the different
kinds of commodities
[38:58] to their common something,
human labor as such.
[39:01] These are very important foundations
[39:03] for understanding this market
sociality that we live in.
[39:17] It requires the operation
of expressing your value
[39:20] through something else,
[39:21] of reflecting your being
into something else.
[39:24] And eventually, the entire
commodity phantasmagorium,
[39:29] the entire world of
commodities has to exist
[39:32] and be constantly
interacting with one another
[39:34] as potential relatives and equivalents
[39:38] to make anything have its own value.
[39:40] So you really need capitalism
developed in its full extent.
[39:44] Even if it's not geographically
taken over the world,
[39:47] it has to be a full capital system
[39:49] for any bit of value to exist.
[39:52] Again, so this is a
theoretical abstraction
[39:56] talking about just a simple form.
[39:58] Yeah?
[39:59] - Is there also a way in which we just,
[40:01] (student speaking faintly)
[40:02] in homogenized labors,
[40:02] saying like this person's,
you know, labor is worth $18.
[40:07] Say like I'm a proofreader or whatever,
[40:09] and I'm making $18 an hour,
[40:11] someone working as tailor,
[40:12] they're also making $18 an hour, right?
[40:14] Does that equivalence of value,
[40:17] to be ascribed to a standard
labor, also do this?
[40:19] - Labor is a commodity, but
it is the strangest commodity,
[40:24] and its value is determined
[40:26] by the amount you need to pay someone
[40:28] for them to reproduce their labor power.
[40:32] So that's different than a commodity,
[40:33] it doesn't have to reproduce itself,
[40:34] it can be totally consumed,
but labor cannot be.
[40:38] And the value of labor is also a lie,
[40:43] a very pernicious fetish,
[40:45] because it conceals the exploitation,
[40:50] the production of surplus value,
[40:54] the extraction of free labor.
[40:57] We're getting there.
[40:58] Yes?
[41:00] - I'm just getting confused about like,
[41:02] us moving between capitalism as law
[41:04] and capitalism as religion.
[41:06] Like, how is capitalism both
like this mechanistic system
[41:09] of shifting gears and also
a very spectacular system,
[41:13] or why?
[41:14] - Great question.
[41:16] The question was,
[41:17] how is capitalism like a law,
or a mechanism, or a system,
[41:21] and how is it like a religion
both at the same time?
[41:24] Well, I don't know.
[41:25] You know, he made this up,
[41:26] he was trying to get a handle on it,
[41:28] and he was using what he
could to understand it.
[41:31] For Marx, I would say,
[41:33] this is an interesting fact that the,
[41:38] how do I wanna say this?
[41:43] The images that capital
throws up are systematic,
[41:47] are systemic.
[41:50] These operations are
absolutely part of the system.
[41:53] They aren't religious
in the sense of belief,
[41:55] you don't have to believe at all
[41:57] that money will buy you love,
[42:00] but it will.
[42:07] I've got a few good lines
myself occasionally.
[42:12] Okay.
[42:15] When you get to the total
or expanded value form,
[42:17] you see the world explode
into all its commodities,
[42:21] and it becomes crazy,
[42:23] anything could be exchanged
for anything else.
[42:25] The question is just how
to do that efficiently,
[42:27] and the answer is one
commodity steps out and says,
[42:30] because of certain qualities I have,
[42:33] imagine it to be linen, or wampum,
[42:35] or in one society, bat wings.
[42:38] Don't ask me, it's true.
[42:42] Or gold.
[42:43] I will devote all of my,
[42:45] although I could be
used for something else,
[42:47] I'll devote all of my energies
to being the equivalent.
[42:51] It's much more efficient.
[42:53] It'd be very hard for us
[42:54] to have a full-fledged capital system,
[42:56] including bankers who invest,
[42:58] if the standard of value
is always changing.
[43:01] If I was like, "Well, I
trade things in bananas,"
[43:03] and he was like, "Well, I trade
things in hair clippings."
[43:07] Clearly, I lost out on that deal.
[43:13] That's the expanded form,
[43:14] we don't have to talk about it too much
[43:15] unless you have questions.
[43:18] Again, he's building this
up conceptually for you,
[43:20] which is something a
lot of people don't do.
[43:22] Marx got that from Hegel.
[43:24] It's a beautiful talent
to break down a concept
[43:29] into the parts that make it make sense.
[43:38] There is a peculiarity of the
equivalent for him though.
[43:42] So we know the equivalent
does the reducing,
[43:45] it does the homogenizing, right?
[43:48] It is an abstracting, homogenizing,
[43:50] reducing, averaging mirror.
[43:52] It says, you know,
[43:53] "Your labor is worth to
me 16 bushels of corn."
[44:00] Do you notice by the way, that,
[44:02] well, has anyone read the
Penguin edition before?
[44:05] Just bringing that up.
[44:06] Well, they translate the
German word corn as corn,
[44:09] so everyone thought the opening of this
[44:11] was all about trading corn for iron,
[44:13] but corn in German means
grain used for making bread,
[44:17] so we translated it as wheat.
[44:19] We're getting a lot of flack
about the corn problem.
[44:22] - Yeah, I guess before
we sort of fully skip,
[44:26] and this is a question
[44:27] that I could read just a
little bit in this section,
[44:30] why is Marx spending
like seven, eight pages
[44:35] on the simple value form?
[44:37] Whereas it seems like.
[44:38] (student speaking faintly)
[44:39] - Yes, why is Marx spending so much time
[44:41] on the simple value form?
[44:42] He says a number of times in here
[44:45] that it is like a monad
of the whole system,
[44:50] it contains the whole system in miniature.
[44:53] That's what he thinks,
the simple value form.
[44:55] The relation between the
equivalent and the relative
[44:58] is value in miniature.
[45:00] This is how it works, practically,
[45:01] so that's why he spends
so much time there.
[45:05] The expanded value form
[45:06] just shows you that, with
a world of commodities,
[45:09] it's not, not only,
[45:11] well, it's not efficient
I guess I would say,
[45:13] it's not even practical to
have multiple standards,
[45:18] so money emerges.
[45:21] A commodity looks in the equivalent form
[45:23] and sees itself as value.
[45:25] Okay?
[45:30] So first, you have concrete
labor that makes a useful thing,
[45:35] but then it sees itself,
[45:37] and he uses these, again,
personifying terms,
[45:40] to show you how capital works.
[45:42] Depersonalizing, de-socializing.
[45:48] The thing sees that
it's just an expression
[45:50] of the abstract labor
[45:51] that society deems average for making it,
[45:54] and which becomes comparable
to all other labors
[45:57] in order to be exchanged.
[45:59] That's what the coat
says back to the linen.
[46:02] "Well, you're just as much labor time
[46:05] that was socially necessary to make you
[46:07] as it was to make three of me.
[46:12] And look what you can
do with all of this."
[46:17] Marx says, and this is important,
in the equivalent form,
[46:21] labor transforms from private
labor to social labor.
[46:25] Any individual thing
that was made by someone,
[46:28] this is why the simple form is important,
[46:30] because you can see it
in an exploded view,
[46:34] goes up against something else
[46:35] and realizes that it's related
to all other commodities,
[46:39] and its labor is averaged
[46:41] because everyone else is working too.
[46:46] Labor is not private, it
is social, or societal.
[46:51] Or value is the social form of labor
[46:54] in a capitalist society.
[46:57] Value is the social or
societal form of labor
[46:59] in a capitalist society.
[47:02] So you can see that the relative forms
[47:06] are just kind of wandering
around, looking to become value,
[47:08] but the equivalent form
does a lot of work.
[47:11] And when it becomes the
universal equivalent, money,
[47:13] you can see, it is kind of an operation.
[47:15] Money is an operation in itself.
[47:18] It takes an internal issue value,
[47:20] and externalizes it into something else.
[47:23] Capital system would not work
[47:25] without the externalized value object
[47:30] that becomes the universal equivalent.
[47:32] It takes a private
issue and socializes it.
[47:36] It takes a concrete
thing and abstracts it.
[47:39] This is why he spends so much
time on the simple value form.
[47:43] And this is where we could
take a couple of questions
[47:46] and then stop on time.
[47:48] Yes?
[47:49] - Yeah, I guess I'm still confused
[47:51] as to how Marx makes the jump from,
[47:53] and in quite a few pages
[47:55] he seems to be saying
that the external value
[47:58] is the form of value itself, right?
[48:01] But in one of its peculiarities
[48:02] and mentions about the appearance,
[48:04] that the use value becomes the
appearance of value itself.
[48:08] So how does he make that jump from saying,
[48:11] that exchange value becomes
the appearance value,
[48:14] now he's saying use value
is that from our theory?
[48:17] - Yeah, I'd have to look back
[48:19] and understand when he says that use value
[48:21] is the form of appearance.
[48:23] But exchange value is
the form of appearance,
[48:24] you can see it right here
in the simple value form.
[48:27] When you go to exchange linen for a coat,
[48:31] the value in the coat shows
up as its exchange value for,
[48:36] sorry, the value in the linen
[48:37] shows up as its exchange
value for the coat.
[48:41] It's a very subtle difference,
[48:42] it becomes very important later.
[48:43] Value is something
[48:44] that is supposedly contained in the linen.
[48:46] The linen is value, is a value,
[48:51] but it only shows up
[48:51] when put up against the thing
it's gonna be exchanged for.
[48:54] That's what he means.
[48:57] We act, and we're forced to live,
[49:00] as though things have
value or are values, right?
[49:05] Think of a warehouse full
of things to be sold.
[49:07] That's value, those are commodities,
[49:09] they are value.
[49:12] But the value only shows up
[49:13] when it's put up against money.
[49:16] Yeah?
[49:17] - Is Marx invoking Spinoza
by saying that the values.
[49:21] (student speaking faintly)
[49:24] - You could say, people
have written about this,
[49:26] Althusser, to begin with,
[49:28] Jacques Lezra also,
[49:30] there is a nod to Spinoza here
[49:33] that value is substance,
[49:37] and all of the different commodities
[49:39] are just kind of attributes of value.
[49:42] You could think of it that way,
[49:45] but I think we should think
of doing fetish next time,
[49:48] and we'll try to get you the books.
[49:50] We will then move into
chapters two to four,
[49:53] and nothing will be as
crazy as chapter one again.
[49:58] (outro music)