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