Class 2: Capital Chapter 1: The Commodity, part 2

0:58

The entry point into the capital system

1:00

is through the commodity,

1:02

and it's very narrow,

1:04

and there's a lot of stuff stuck in that entryway.

1:09

So, keep your eye on the reduced situations

1:12

that Marx gives you,

1:13

like simple commodity exchange between individuals,

1:18

exchanging particular commodities

1:20

from particular concrete acts of production.

1:23

And when he talks about groups

1:28

and phenomena in general,

1:30

these are all different things

1:31

that have to get worked out in their own analysis

1:33

because, ultimately,

1:34

the only way you can understand

1:36

any individual phenomena in this system

1:37

is by starting from the whole.

1:40

This is, of course, impossible to do.

1:44

Maybe the critical of capital can see the whole.

1:49

Maybe Marx, after 30 years, could see the whole,

1:52

but it might not be the case.

1:55

He might not have gotten there.

1:58

So the first four chapters has this heuristic situation,

2:03

simple individuals, concrete commodities,

2:06

and moving from there to the genesis of value

2:11

and towards general questions

2:12

and universal questions in this system.

2:16

Anything universal, by the way,

2:18

is historically bounded to the capital system.

2:20

It's universal, meaning it's necessary,

2:22

and applies in every situation under capital.

2:25

That doesn't mean it's universal in our historical moment

2:29

only where capital is touching it

2:31

because that is a quality of the capital system

2:33

that it universalizes

2:35

and has moments of absolute necessity in it.

2:40

We'll talk more about that as we go through.

2:42

The guiding question

2:44

for our reading of the first four chapters is:

2:45

What is value?

2:49

Where does it come from?

2:51

And what does it do?

2:52

Those are the ways he works out the what-is question

2:56

because it has a source in the system

2:59

and it is an operation.

3:02

And also what is the apparatus that value needs around it

3:06

in order to continue to exist?

3:10

It needs a system.

3:11

It isn't something that works just on its own.

3:14

It calls into existence a system around it.

3:19

His technique is the phenomenology of the commodity,

3:23

this is the first four chapters,

3:24

which I'm calling the entry point.

3:28

It's the most familiar, or at least he thought so,

3:31

even more familiar in a certain sense than labor,

3:33

but he gets to labor right away.

3:36

And it is...

3:37

It's quite narrow

3:39

and you can't totalize the system from the commodity.

3:42

So this is not a book about the commodity.

3:44

This is a book about capital,

3:45

and the way in is through the commodity.

3:48

Does that make sense?

3:49

Because as I said last time,

3:50

capital is not an elemental theory,

3:52

like chemistry, let's say.

3:55

Although chemistry is beautiful

3:56

because the compounds have different emergent qualities

3:59

than the elements.

4:00

So you can't fully explain a compound from its elements.

4:03

And capital is the same.

4:08

So, if you're in doubt,

4:10

I know this sounds like a salesman's trick,

4:12

but if you're in doubt, read on.

4:15

Things don't fully make sense

4:16

from the perspective of the entry point.

4:19

Like, you can't see a house from the foyer.

4:22

You need to go through the rooms first.

4:24

You get a sense of the whole layout.

4:25

And then, it will make sense

4:27

what the foyer does in the house.

4:28

It's an entry point.

4:33

You will go through a set of perspective switches.

4:37

That's what Marx is gonna do for you

4:38

and that's the phenomenological aspect of this book.

4:41

Phenomenology just means the science of appearances

4:44

or the way you experience things.

4:47

Something always appears to someone else

4:51

and it has another form that is the way it doesn't appear.

4:56

And in this phenomenology,

4:58

you will be asked to switch perspectives.

5:00

I'm just gonna give you a little list here,

5:01

from objects to processes,

5:04

from things to ghostly qualities that hang around them,

5:09

from singles to doubles,

5:13

and from elements to the whole.

5:15

These are the perspectives,

5:17

these are the perspective switches

5:18

you're going to be asked to accomplish as you read the book.

5:22

So, it is a kind of training for your psyche,

5:25

for your perceptual apparatus,

5:26

for your understanding apparatus.

5:29

Today, we have an objective,

5:31

which is part of our objective is going to be to define use,

5:36

use value exchange, exchange value,

5:39

and the product of their relationship, which is value.

5:45

You're gonna be introduced to a new term,

5:47

which is value form, it's a Marxian term,

5:50

and it's very important

5:52

for understanding how the capital system works.

5:57

Let's start with value.

5:59

This is what the first seven pages leap into

6:02

and the first four chapters try to define for you.

6:05

You are witnessing the birth of a fantasm value,

6:09

but more than a fantasm, a necessary fantasm,

6:13

like freedom or democracy.

6:15

But those belong to other systems.

6:17

This is the fantasm that belongs to the capital system.

6:21

Value is a fantasm born out of the lopsided relationship

6:24

between use value and exchange value

6:26

or between use and exchange.

6:30

You're gonna hear how it comes to be treated

6:33

as an independent quasi-natural substance,

6:36

something like a substance in the philosophical sense.

6:41

Value is a unique quality of things

6:43

under the capital system.

6:46

You'll see that Marx uses an analogy of weight,

6:48

like in a physical system.

6:51

The capital system has this unique quality called value.

6:55

Value is the weight of the capital system.

6:57

Value is the substance that you can read

7:00

through things like...

7:02

You can read weight in a physical system.

7:08

And there's a whole set of strange operations

7:10

that the capital system uses

7:12

that other social systems don't.

7:14

Reflection,

7:16

comparison, reduction, abstraction,

7:19

reification, or objectification.

7:22

These are all the processes of the capital system.

7:25

This is Marx's discovery.

7:29

I'm gonna give you one definition of value

7:31

and then we'll come back to it a number of times.

7:33

Value is a norm for comparing commodities

7:36

in order to find the right ratio in which to exchange them.

7:42

Value is a norm for comparing commodities

7:46

in order to find the right ratio in which to exchange them.

7:51

This doesn't quite get to the changes,

7:54

the transformation of value, in under the capital system.

7:58

The way it compares commodities, the way it comes to ratios,

8:03

is gonna be different in capital

8:04

than in simple non-capitalist exchange.

8:08

But if you wanna know what value is

8:10

in a non-capital setting,

8:11

it is something like what you need

8:14

when you're not producing solely for yourself

8:18

and you don't live in paradise.

8:20

Or you could say if you don't live in hell

8:22

where desire is 100% and the supply is zero,

8:28

and you don't live in paradise

8:29

where desire is at zero and supply is at 100%.

8:35

You need value.

8:37

Value is what allows you to trade your thing

8:39

for something else you need with someone else.

8:42

It's the way you decide how many of your thing you're giving

8:47

for how many of the other thing.

8:50

Under the capital system,

8:51

it isn't so much arrived at according to desire or demand,

8:57

even in that case.

8:58

It's arrived at according to reduction, hypothesization,

9:05

equalization, expression,

9:09

mirroring all of these weird processes

9:12

that Marx is gonna lay out for us,

9:14

as though the capital system were really very different

9:16

than any other social system

9:17

because this processes were totally different and abstract.

9:25

Abstraction being one of the processes.

9:29

So, about value,

9:30

Marx is not saying there is something like value,

9:33

like there is a chair in a room, we know this.

9:37

He is saying, however,

9:38

we act as though it's there like a chair in a room.

9:42

It gets objectified.

9:44

It has what he calls ghostly objecthood.

9:47

A great translation by the new translator, Paul Reitter.

9:50

It's true, ghostly objecthood.

9:52

It's a kind of objecthood that you can't touch

9:55

and it can dissolve easily.

9:57

It goes through a lot of transformations.

10:00

Capital has its own ecology and its own physics.

10:06

So, on one hand, value has a subjective side.

10:08

We feel it to be there.

10:10

If someone comes up to you and say,

10:11

"I'll give you this banana for your iPhone,"

10:12

you're like, "But that's not worth my iPhone."

10:16

"How do you know?"

10:17

"Well, I feel the value of this.

10:18

I paid for it, or my parents paid for it,

10:20

or the school paid for it, right?"

10:22

You have a sense of its value, but it's not only subjective,

10:25

it is an objective need of the system

10:27

for things to have value.

10:32

So, one thing to keep in mind

10:34

is you cannot do away with value

10:36

just by feeling differently.

10:40

Debunking value is not gonna help you

10:42

with the capital system directly,

10:45

although it will help you make better decisions.

10:47

If you all decided to give away all your stuff

10:49

as if it were valueless,

10:51

you would end up with no stuff,

10:53

but capital would go on happily,

10:54

especially in the people who got it, your stuff.

10:58

Does that make sense?

10:59

We'll track a little bit the difficulties

11:01

in finding positions of resistance to the capital system.

11:06

Debunking or refusing it doesn't seem to be enough.

11:13

Okay, we're starting with value.

11:19

And you'll see, if you open the book,

11:25

we spent last time talking about the vocabulary

11:28

of the opening paragraph.

11:33

He begins talking about what he calls use value,

11:36

which is, by the way,

11:37

already something different than use.

11:39

Value is only in play if you don't have the thing

11:43

or if you're not using it.

11:44

Once you're using a thing,

11:45

it has no value because you have it.

11:49

Once you have a thing,

11:50

it really doesn't have the same kind of value.

11:52

Value is only if it's threatened to be taken away

11:54

or you need to get it.

11:56

Value is a kind of teletechnology, a way...

12:01

of relating to something that you need.

12:05

That thing has value insofar as you need it.

12:08

That is the value insofar as you need it for use,

12:11

he calls a use value.

12:14

This seems like the easiest thing all around,

12:17

although value makes use already in a system of exchange.

12:21

So really outside of an exchange system,

12:23

there's no use value.

12:24

Again, if you're in paradise,

12:25

you don't need to exchange everything.

12:27

Let's say all the smartphones and all the updates

12:30

are all lying around on the ground.

12:32

They fell from the tree of smartphones.

12:34

They don't have any value for you.

12:37

So value again is part of an exchange system.

12:40

Samuel?

12:42

- Can we have a personal sense of value?

12:46

Like, just how much we want something, right?

12:49

If we're in paradise

12:50

and all the updates are lying on the ground,

12:54

we might not need a sense of hierarchy.

12:57

We might not need to hierarchize them,

12:59

but we still couldn't do it, right?

13:01

It's not...

13:01

Doesn't seem like it's a product,

13:02

it's a really straight system.

13:05

- Well, it would be satisfied immediately.

13:06

So, you wouldn't need value.

13:09

Value is the delay of that satisfaction, right?

13:12

Value is what comes into play

13:14

while you're waiting or trying to get something

13:17

that would be use value,

13:18

insofar as it's valuable to you because you need it.

13:21

But if it's right there,

13:23

there's no real value for an infant until the feeder,

13:28

whoever that is, says,

13:30

"I'm tired, you're not gonna eat now."

13:32

And you're like, "Wow, milk, valuable."

13:37

Rudimentary value systems.

13:41

Use values satisfy a human want or need of whatever kind.

13:45

They are multiple, they differ in quality,

13:51

and Marx is not interested in this.

13:53

So, if you're concerned about use things,

13:56

like some people are, who live their life.

13:58

You need a hammer, you need to go get a hammer.

14:00

Marx is not gonna talk about that.

14:02

In the beginning,

14:03

he is setting aside the spheres he's not going to go into,

14:07

and one of them is the infinite world of useful things.

14:12

Anything can become useful,

14:14

and your tasks that you use it for will change

14:18

according to what you imagine,

14:19

according to what someone tells you you need,

14:21

according to what confronts you at any moment.

14:27

This is on page 14.

14:29

The usefulness of a thing makes it into a use value.

14:32

Again, I think it's a little bit more complicated than that,

14:36

but this is very important

14:37

'cause he's going to contrast it with exchange value.

14:40

Usefulness, in this sense,

14:42

doesn't hover above us in the air.

14:43

It's determined by the properties of a commodity's body.

14:49

Just so we know, that does not have to be physical.

14:53

It can be a word document.

14:56

That's not physical; it has a physical manifestation.

14:59

It can be a dream if you're...

15:02

Whatever you're doing with that dream is useful to you,

15:04

doing psychoanalysis,

15:07

whatever those qualities are.

15:08

It can be a service, which is not a physical object, right?

15:12

A service can be commodified.

15:14

I sew your shirt for you, let's say, your shirt is fine.

15:19

Nice shirt, by the way.

15:22

And you pay me for it, that act has a delimited contours,

15:30

you know when it starts, you know when it's done,

15:31

you know how long it takes.

15:33

It has a use value to the shirt owner,

15:37

and that is perfectly well commodifiable.

15:39

There's no difference

15:40

between physical commodities and services.

15:44

So, if they tell you the service economy

15:46

is fundamentally different,

15:47

it is not fundamentally different.

15:49

It certainly changes the way people live,

15:51

what kind of concrete jobs you do.

15:53

But in terms of value,

15:54

the value moves around exactly the same.

16:00

This is the province of what he calls commodity studies,

16:03

which I'm not sure exists,

16:05

but that's not what he's gonna do.

16:09

Okay, so use value is the property

16:10

of being able to satisfy a human want or need.

16:15

It involves actually doing this as a practice

16:18

and activity use.

16:22

So, we know that use value is already abstracted.

16:27

It's potential,

16:30

it means it can be used;

16:32

and it's abstracted in the sense

16:34

that in any of the concrete situations

16:37

in which you use something,

16:38

this is called use.

16:42

Value is realized, use value is realized, when?

16:45

When a thing is used, right?

16:48

And the thing is, in a sense,

16:50

has a use value used up when you're done using it.

16:53

You may actually use up the usefulness of the thing, too,

16:56

if it's, let's say, a banana.

16:59

When you eat it, it's no longer useful.

17:01

The peel is not useful.

17:02

And incidentally, the value body of a commodity,

17:07

very different than the use body of a commodity.

17:10

Well, it's related to the use body of the commodity.

17:12

The peel is not really part of the value.

17:14

Well, it is kind of,

17:16

say it's part of the value in that it protects the fruit.

17:20

But there's many physical qualities of a body

17:22

that are not related to the use or the exchange.

17:26

So, for example, a banana can be green, it can be yellow,

17:29

it can be slightly brown, it can be small, it can be big,

17:32

it can be like cardboard, it can be like sugar.

17:37

And in all of those cases,

17:38

in fact, the exchange value remains.

17:42

What's required is that there's the usable part is usable.

17:48

Now, it could be that cardboard bananas end up...

17:52

You end up not buying that brand anymore.

17:55

So, the usable,

17:56

that is a quality that relates to its use value.

17:59

You have a question? - Is it...

18:00

Or what, like humans value (indistinct)?

18:04

- Humans value this particular thing socially.

18:07

- Socially.

18:08

- We'll talk a little bit about what that is.

18:12

The kinds of things that have use values, again,

18:14

are physical objects, services, intellectual objects, media,

18:20

processes like education or defense.

18:23

They can all have use value.

18:24

So, under capitalism,

18:25

they can all have exchange value potentially.

18:29

There is a world of useful things here:

18:31

food, energy, clothing, tools,

18:33

we can think of many of them that you could study.

18:37

And think about a kind of anthropology of human activities.

18:43

Anthropology had to change under capital, though,

18:45

to be an anthropology of the way human activities

18:49

are used by the system to produce value.

18:55

Let's talk about exchange value.

18:59

So, we need to talk about...

19:01

It's a very peculiar phenomenon.

19:11

It seems like this is the double in the commodity,

19:14

use value and exchange value.

19:16

But really, the double is this.

19:20

That's the double

19:21

'cause exchange value really only appears briefly.

19:27

This is a longstanding misunderstanding of the text,

19:29

and Marx is not so clear about it.

19:35

Exchange value is also potential and abstract.

19:40

Something has value when it still has a use,

19:46

but it has to be able to do something else beyond its use

19:49

in the capital system.

19:51

So, again, exchange value is not just a quality

19:55

that resides in the thing,

19:56

it's a quality that tends toward an activity,

19:59

a capitalist activity, which is exchange.

20:01

Does that make sense?

20:02

It doesn't just sit there, it happens,

20:06

and it's called up when you're exchanging.

20:09

- Would you mind explaining, like, that (indistinct)?

20:13

- Yeah, I'm gonna do that in just a second.

20:20

Value is potential use and exchange,

20:22

but it is also a ghostly substance

20:24

that persists through all changes of form

20:29

in commodities and labor.

20:31

Labor can go from being reserve to being active.

20:35

A commodity can go from being used,

20:38

that is to say when it's being worked in labor

20:44

to being exchanged, to being used, to being exchanged,

20:47

to being totally consumed and turning into waste.

20:52

The value is conserved,

20:53

even when something is totally consumed.

20:55

Because if you eat food, where does the value go?

20:58

Yeah, you become the value,

21:01

the value goes into you as a laborer.

21:04

So, you will notice

21:05

that value goes through a set of transformations

21:08

that is a circuit.

21:09

As a closed circuit.

21:11

It comes back around, you go back to labor the next day,

21:13

or you go back to your class the next day with the energy.

21:18

Again, energy and value seem to be

21:22

in a kind of E equals mc squared relationship here.

21:25

They can neither be created nor destroyed in this system.

21:34

Value is potential use in exchange,

21:35

but it's also a substance

21:39

that changes form from material,

21:41

to immaterial, to material, to immaterial,

21:43

from commodity, to money, to commodity.

21:46

That's one of Marx's famous formula, C-M-C.

21:49

And you can also use it the other way around, M-C-M.

21:52

Value is conserved.

21:54

Love the conservation of value.

21:58

The odd thing about the capital mode,

22:00

which we're gonna get to the operation

22:02

that this is all about,

22:03

is that value is conserved and augmented.

22:07

That's where the capital system perverts physics.

22:14

It doesn't, Marx will say,

22:16

ultimately because you get it out of the laborers.

22:22

But it looks like it perverts physics.

22:23

It looks like you put the money into an investment

22:26

and you get back 10% more, right?

22:30

What's the rate now of return?

22:32

I don't know, 7% more.

22:33

To me, it's always like going down in my mind.

22:38

I guess it's the privilege of a Marxian

22:42

to not really understand where their investments are going.

22:48

The oddity of this is that it only becomes exchange value

22:53

when it's not being used,

22:58

and it only becomes use value when it's not being exchanged.

23:03

When it's being exchanged,

23:04

it holds the use value in reserve.

23:06

It depends on it, it can't go away.

23:09

But it's not being exercised.

23:10

So only one can be activated at a time,

23:13

and this is what Marx calls a contradiction.

23:18

And we get back to the question about doubles.

23:23

Before we get to doubles,

23:24

you can see here is a different world

23:26

from the world of use values,

23:28

it's a world of exchangeables.

23:30

You could talk about what they are,

23:31

but they're not the same thing as use values

23:33

'cause things can be exchanged

23:34

that have very little use value,

23:36

like junk plastic toys that you get in a goodie bag

23:41

at a birthday party.

23:43

Barely, you barely have any use value.

23:45

The use value is like, "Oh, that's it."

23:48

Then they go right in the garbage.

23:50

It's a brilliant, it's a stroke of genius plastic,

23:55

and an evil.

23:57

So here, you would plug in a picture.

23:59

I'm so bad at PowerPoint,

24:00

so you're just gonna have to listen to this discourse

24:04

because I was gonna, like,

24:05

"Wouldn't it be nice to show all the crazy commodities?"

24:08

But,

24:10

I'm not a visual guy.

24:14

So, these doubles are in attention with one another,

24:18

which Marx sometimes calls a contradiction,

24:23

and a single thing like a commodity

24:25

is a strange and strained unity of contradictories.

24:31

But we have to understand what this relationship is.

24:34

Obviously, use value and exchange value

24:37

are not logical opposites.

24:40

It is true that like Aristotle's idea of a logical opposite,

24:44

they cannot exist in the...

24:45

They cannot be active in the same thing,

24:47

in the same respect, at the same time.

24:50

So, that's why he uses this Aristotelian figure,

24:52

logical figure contradiction.

24:54

Does that make sense?

24:56

Exchange value means it's not being used.

24:59

Using means it's not being exchanged,

25:01

but they have to both be in there.

25:07

Now, you can make something for use that isn't exchanged,

25:10

but that's outside of the capital system for him.

25:12

You can make something for yourself

25:15

or you can use something that's not exchangeable

25:17

because it's common to everybody.

25:19

This is why the enclosure of the commons

25:21

was very important for capital.

25:23

If they start to enclose air and water

25:26

more than they already do,

25:27

they will become commodified, too.

25:29

Water is already on the way,

25:31

but air, so far, is not, this is Marx's example.

25:38

So obviously, they're not opposites, they're just different.

25:41

And they could be complementary under some systems,

25:44

but in this system, they're antagonistic to one another.

25:48

Exchange value and use value.

25:49

Okay, I'm spending a bunch of time on this

25:51

because these sorts of strange,

25:55

and strained unities are gonna come up over and over

25:59

in the capital system.

26:01

Yeah? - Does Marx argue

26:03

that these two concepts use exchange value

26:06

exists within all systems of production?

26:09

- Mm-mm.

26:11

Nope.

26:13

They don't.

26:14

In any society bigger than one,

26:17

you're likely to have use and exchange.

26:21

But again, remember that these terms, these concepts,

26:26

this is a very important Marxian thought.

26:28

It's a Hegelian thought,

26:29

but Marx brings it back to real living history.

26:32

These terms are only necessary

26:34

when society gets into a shape where it needs those terms.

26:38

So, again, if you're in paradise,

26:40

you don't need the term use or exchange because...

26:44

Or think of an infant.

26:45

You're just kind of eating,

26:46

and pooping, and wandering around,

26:48

and you don't have to distinguish your activities

26:52

because you're never in a situation of lack.

26:57

Yeah.

26:58

- And (indistinct) is about the idea of work (indistinct)

27:02

being somewhat separate from the strength,

27:04

in the sense that like our commodities

27:07

are still part of us,

27:08

like many people have through commodities or art occlusion,

27:12

then this is the cell.

27:14

(indistinct)

27:17

- Well, humans separate from the system

27:20

is gonna be hard to justify as we go on.

27:25

So, let's just...

27:25

Let's take the system in itself.

27:27

It feels a little bit cold and distant,

27:29

but Marx will argue that humans

27:31

are in service of commodities,

27:33

and that's the big difference.

27:35

So, it's dehumanizing, for sure.

27:41

So, let's hold that question. Yeah.

27:43

- Marx says that something is a use value

27:46

or is exchange value.

27:47

Why does he say is relevant, has this value,

27:50

or have a value? - Uh-huh.

27:52

That's a great question.

27:54

Did you hear that question?

27:55

Marx says that things are use values

27:58

and are exchange values,

27:59

not that they have them.

28:01

Because that is the being of the thing.

28:03

The being of the thing is not some independent, God-given,

28:08

or nature-given set of qualities.

28:12

When in a social setting,

28:13

which is all we're talking about here,

28:15

you have a thing for use, its qualities are the thing.

28:20

When you encounter a hammer, you could have an aesthetic,

28:25

now we're getting into the precincts of German philosophy.

28:28

You could have an aesthetic relationship to that hammer

28:31

and be like, "What a beautiful hammer."

28:33

But let's put that aside for now.

28:35

I think that's fairly artificial.

28:39

The hammer is weight, shape,

28:43

the useful qualities for hammering a nail.

28:47

And you don't really see a hammer otherwise,

28:49

unless you go to the market, or Home Depot,

28:53

and you're like, "How much does this hammer cost?"

28:57

And you're negotiating between cost

28:58

and the kinds of qualities

28:59

that will get your particular job done.

29:01

So for him, things are double,

29:04

so much so that you have a double consciousness.

29:07

The double consciousness is,

29:09

"Oh, my gosh, I can get $5 for this hammer."

29:11

Or, "Oh, my gosh,

29:12

I can hammer in 20 nails with this hammer in today.

29:16

I can hammer just the kind of nail in

29:18

that will hang my picture or frame my barn."

29:22

Does that make sense?

29:22

And the thing is only that.

29:26

There's nothing subsisting outside of the capital system

29:29

that is a thing in itself.

29:33

Yeah.

29:37

- So, if, like...

29:40

Just like on the point on like the contradiction

29:42

between something having use value

29:45

and exchange value at the same time, like surely that's...

29:50

I'm just not sure why like they're applying to...

29:53

Or those two concepts can apply to like the same object

29:56

because surely, like, say I have like an apple,

30:00

but that presents use value or that has use value,

30:03

insofar as the apple is like an object of mine,

30:06

desire to eat the apple.

30:07

So, it's like a property of the apple.

30:11

But then like the exchange value is, surely then, not...

30:16

It's not just like a property of the apple,

30:18

it's like a relation between the apple

30:21

and say, like, an arm.

30:22

So it's not like- - Well, both in that case...

30:24

It's a good question.

30:25

In both of those cases, the apple has a use value

30:28

and the apple has an exchange value.

30:30

They are relational characteristics of the apple.

30:34

The apple is useful to you.

30:37

So apples in themselves belong to, I don't know,

30:41

some alien observer from an asteroid passing by.

30:44

They're like, "Apple."

30:47

But they wouldn't point it out

30:48

because it's of no use to them one way or the other.

30:52

So, both are social qualities.

30:54

That is to say they are related to you as a desirer,

30:59

and you desire apples because in your culture,

31:01

apples are things that get eaten,

31:03

as opposed to using them

31:05

to build a house or something like that.

31:07

So there are two different kinds of social characteristics,

31:12

and you can tell immediately

31:15

that these two things go together

31:17

in a strange and strained way.

31:19

They're always both there.

31:22

One comes forward in exchange and one comes forward in use.

31:27

When you go to the supermarket,

31:28

if you just shove your face into the apple,

31:30

someone's gonna be like,

31:31

"Wait, this is an exchange place, we're not doing that here.

31:35

You take that out, you pay for it, right?"

31:38

And you always feel bad when you eat the apple

31:40

and then you're gonna pay for it up at the register.

31:42

Like, "I was just so hungry."

31:44

(Paul laughing)

31:45

In fact, it has to be an exchange first under capital.

31:51

Just like you give your labor first before you get paid,

31:55

the thing is exchange,

31:56

and Marx is going to show

31:57

that not only are these things strange and strained doubles,

32:02

but they are reversed from what you imagine them to be

32:05

in your humanistic way of thinking

32:09

and from what they are in other systems.

32:13

You don't look convinced, but let's keep going.

32:15

We have a lot to get through and we barely started.

32:18

(Paul clears throat)

32:22

Okay, what we know about things as use values, right?

32:26

The thing is a use value.

32:28

It's a use value

32:29

because someone put concrete characteristics in it

32:31

through their concrete labor, right?

32:35

Somebody put the characteristics into an apple.

32:38

They're not just born there.

32:39

They've been refining these trees for years,

32:42

for decades, for centuries.

32:44

And putting in the fertilizer and putting in the work,

32:47

and picking them right, and polishing them,

32:49

and all that kind of stuff.

32:52

A skilled person uses qualitatively specific activities

32:56

to make something that satisfies a human want or need.

33:00

This is called production, by the way.

33:03

This is called product production.

33:07

At a later point, a thing gets taken for exchange.

33:11

Temporally, production of a use value

33:15

comes before production of an exchange value.

33:17

But logically, in the capital system,

33:19

production of exchange value

33:21

comes before production of use value.

33:25

The way the contradictions can exist in capital

33:28

is that they get spread out in time,

33:31

they get unfolded in time.

33:35

And we will talk about why exchange comes first.

33:38

Again, in a capital system,

33:41

commodities are things that are produced for exchange.

33:44

So, before they get thought of as use values,

33:48

no, that's not exactly right.

33:50

They're both thought of as use values

33:51

and exchange values at the same time.

33:54

But exchange is the original impetus for producing them

33:59

in a capital system.

34:02

Okay.

34:08

I think we're doing good.

34:09

You are totally confused.

34:25

Let's take a look at page 15 to 16.

34:31

Here.

34:34

At the very bottom of 15, as use values,

34:37

commodities differ above all,

34:40

with respect to quality.

34:42

As exchange values,

34:43

they can differ only with respect to quantity,

34:46

and they contain not even an atom of use value.

34:49

That's why these are so peculiar, Samuel.

34:52

- It seems that this taking exchange values to be constant,

35:00

which is what he says at the top of that.

35:02

And at the bottom,

35:03

he said they're for only relative (indistinct).

35:08

Can't an object have exchange values to each person?

35:12

- Not to each person, but to each commodity.

35:16

Exchange values do not have any relations to people

35:20

until they have relations to other commodities.

35:23

- So it could have simultaneously, say,

35:26

Saraiya is willing to pay the victim bananas for an iPhone

35:29

and I'm willing to pay,

35:29

to exchange 10 bananas for an iPhone.

35:32

- Unrelated to what you're willing to pay.

35:34

It's only related to what socially a thing is worth

35:39

compared to other commodities.

35:44

- We're not talking about price as we know it around that.

35:46

- We're not talking about price,

35:49

we're talking about value and the way value gets set up.

35:52

The way you know that value and price are different

35:55

is that if something is trading for above its value,

36:00

people invest in that.

36:02

And if something is trading for below its value,

36:04

people don't invest in that.

36:06

And in fact, those firms can go out of business

36:09

because they're not making back what they need

36:11

to make back to cover their costs

36:12

and to prepare for the following year, et cetera.

36:16

So, price and value are absolutely different.

36:20

The relationship between value and price

36:22

is a controversial topic in Marxian studies.

36:27

It goes back to the infamous cliche,

36:30

the transformation problem.

36:33

And I don't think it's worth talking about here

36:35

because we are interested

36:36

in the social outcome of abstraction,

36:42

and we have to get there.

36:46

For those people who try to make economics work out

36:49

so they can predict what prices will be,

36:52

it's a question of the relation of value to price,

36:55

and different economic theories

36:57

settle this question in different ways.

36:59

And Marx was famously unable to settle it,

37:02

but it doesn't touch the basic insight,

37:05

which is that exchange value, value, rules our lives,

37:12

determines the quality of our labor,

37:15

determines the amount of leisure time we have,

37:17

determines the way we relate to one another.

37:24

Yeah.

37:24

- Can you think of price and value

37:27

as kind of one of those weird doubles,

37:30

where one losing into the other, right?

37:32

You question kind of like why a price is this way

37:36

and that's the phenomenology of it.

37:38

And then, (indistinct).

37:41

- There's a lot to be said about price.

37:43

Maybe we set aside,

37:44

once we understand these things down the line,

37:46

half of a session to talk about price.

37:49

It's worth thinking about Adam Smith

37:52

and David Ricardo who thought about this a lot.

37:54

And they also recognized

37:56

that one thing that's characteristic of prices,

37:59

which is not characteristic of value,

38:01

is that they fluctuate wildly day to day, minute to minute.

38:07

But they fluctuate around a center,

38:09

Smith called this a natural price, around a center,

38:13

which is thought to be something like the value

38:15

is not gonna get too crazy.

38:17

Like, you will never have an iPhone selling for 25 cents.

38:22

And you can see when you compare commodities,

38:25

that value is real.

38:27

You see, you might have a banana selling for 25 cents,

38:29

you'll never have it selling for $1,000,

38:31

unless things go really haywire.

38:35

And the opposite is also true.

38:37

You'll never trade a banana for an iPhone.

38:41

Yeah.

38:43

- So, you said that use value strictly relates to quality.

38:46

Is it the quality of the total actions

38:49

that encourage people to use that commodity?

38:53

- Let's look at the sentence again.

38:54

I love it when we do philological work.

38:57

As use values,

38:58

commodities differ above all with respect to quality,

39:01

that is in their qualities.

39:04

So that as a banana is peelable

39:05

and an iPhone is not peelable, et cetera.

39:11

A banana is nutritious,

39:12

and this is what Marx is thinking of.

39:14

In one sense, he has a kind of Spinozistic ontology.

39:18

Things have qualities.

39:20

Yeah.

39:20

- So there's a lot of different value terms going around.

39:26

And sometimes,

39:27

I'll hear you talk about, say, exchange value or use value,

39:30

and then you'll just dive into the topic

39:33

with the shorthand of value.

39:35

Just for my comprehension going-

39:37

- Oh, yeah. - Or whenever you say value,

39:39

maybe with a capital V,

39:41

are you talking about that sort of value

39:44

that's derived from abstract labor?

39:53

- Use value, you understand it,

39:55

is something that corresponds to your wants and needs.

40:00

Exchange value, you understand it,

40:02

is how much you can get for your thing,

40:06

how much you can get by exchanging it.

40:08

So, he uses coats and linen.

40:10

It's 19th century, it's Germany or he was in London.

40:15

It's cold, you need a coat.

40:17

The coats are not made of linen.

40:19

For a long time, I was confused by that.

40:21

Coats are wool, the linen is a separate thing.

40:24

It's like we have these things that are different,

40:26

and he is very clear.

40:27

You can't exchange linen for linen.

40:29

The same amount of linen for the same amount of linen.

40:31

This is how you know there's something like value

40:34

and how it's parasitic on use value

40:37

because you already have the linen.

40:39

If you have it, you don't need it unless you need more.

40:42

But then you'd have to exchange something else, right?

40:45

There is no market of exchanging the same for the same.

40:47

You need to exchange things with different qualities.

40:50

One second.

40:52

So, use value as a kind of basis is a sufficient...

40:56

Is a necessary, but not sufficient,

41:00

characteristic of a commodity.

41:01

It must have the use value

41:03

'cause no one will buy it otherwise.

41:05

But when it comes to exchanging,

41:06

it only matters how much it exchanges for of another thing.

41:12

Out of these two comes a phantom.

41:21

Because when you exchange it for something else,

41:24

you think it has this thing intrinsic to it

41:27

that is of value.

41:29

The value appears in the thing

41:31

as something it seems to carry with it

41:33

and have with it everywhere it goes.

41:36

So, value as a product

41:38

is the unity of exchange value and use value.

41:43

You say that is worth X, Y, and Z

41:47

because it has this ghostly quality that adheres to it.

41:53

You could say, if you want,

41:55

that this is the antithesis and this is the synthesis,

41:58

but Marx is not so clear about that, okay?

42:02

He will not talk about exchange value

42:04

as a separate and interesting thing after this.

42:06

He's just gonna talk about use value and value

42:09

because it's value that will end up making capital work.

42:15

Value is...

42:19

based in use value and realized in exchange value,

42:23

and it looks like an independent thing

42:26

that you could trade on a market.

42:28

And it comes to be represented through one of the processes,

42:33

representation, or expression of capital in what form?

42:40

Value is represented independently as money.

42:43

It's as though you took it out of the thing

42:46

and value started living on its own.

42:49

And I said, "I'll give you this money,

42:50

which is equal in value to what you're having

42:52

because that thing has intrinsically, in it, value."

42:55

Does that make sense?

42:58

- There were some questions.

43:03

- Yeah.

43:04

- So this value,

43:05

because I think you mentioned that this so thing

43:08

of you starting it...

43:10

(indistinct)

43:15

- Ultimately, we'll talk about value,

43:16

but this is the genesis of value.

43:19

You have something that's useful, socially useful.

43:22

People use it in our culture, right?

43:24

Something that's totally outside

43:27

of what other people recognize as useful

43:30

might be useful to you individually,

43:32

but it doesn't have a use value.

43:35

And you have exchange value,

43:36

which is what you get for it on a market

43:42

related to an equivalent.

43:44

And these two together

43:46

make it seem as though there's this special substance

43:50

that adheres to all commodities,

43:52

just in different quantities.

43:57

And it's not purely psychological, it is ontological.

44:01

You live in a world as though this was real.

44:04

And so it's real.

44:06

Value is real under capital.

44:10

As I say, give away all your things,

44:12

and you'll just have no things.

44:14

But value will go on happily.

44:15

And if you wanna get them back,

44:17

you'll have to concede the reality of value.

44:23

Okay.

44:25

Wow, you're really pushing me.

44:27

This is good.

44:30

What else do we need to talk about?

44:31

We need to talk about the double character of labor.

44:33

So,

44:35

actually, a commodity has this double character,

44:38

use value and value,

44:46

and labor has a double...

44:49

double character, too.

44:59

Useful labor makes useful things.

45:02

That is a qualitative act that requires skill and knowledge.

45:07

As machines tape go over that,

45:10

you can put less skill into it,

45:14

but nonetheless it requires some skill.

45:19

From the perspective of a useful object,

45:21

labor is useful labor.

45:24

So, the question is:

45:25

What is labor from the perspective of value?

45:29

It is a bare gelatinous blob.

45:32

Don't you love this translation?

45:34

It's a translation by a writer whom I admire

45:37

of a German word gallerte,

45:39

which is something like sue it.

45:41

It's when you took everything that was left over

45:43

and you boiled it down into a gelatinous blob.

45:48

We thought of using sue it,

45:49

but we didn't think anyone would know really what that was.

45:52

So we put a bare gelatinous blob.

45:54

It's everything kind of mixed together

45:55

until all of its qualitative characteristics disappear

45:59

and you just have a kind of quantity of stuff.

46:03

That's the second characteristic of labor,

46:06

which he calls abstract labor.

46:09

So you have concrete labor

46:14

and abstract labor.

46:18

Clearly, abstract labor makes value

46:20

and concrete labor makes use values.

46:25

In capital,

46:31

these get inverted so that you do concrete labor,

46:37

so that you can get abstract labor

46:39

and you'd make useful things,

46:40

so that you can get value out of it.

46:45

I'm jumping ahead.

46:46

That's like the climax of the first project.

46:50

We will go from commodity production

46:52

or production of products to production of value.

46:56

Commodity production to production of value.

47:01

You don't get the second type of labor

47:04

from concrete differentiated labor.

47:07

If you look at the world of useful things,

47:10

you see all these different qualities.

47:12

They're edible, they're sweet, they're sour,

47:15

they're tools to make other things, they're entertainment.

47:18

Whatever it does for you, it does for you.

47:21

The same thing with the labor that goes into it,

47:22

it's absolutely an infinite,

47:25

potentially infinitely differentiated.

47:28

That's why if someone plays the trumpet

47:30

and I play the guitar,

47:32

that doesn't mean I can play the trumpet

47:34

and they can play the guitar.

47:34

Although musicians are pretty good

47:36

at different things like that, right?

47:38

But this divides us as people.

47:39

So we have a social division of labor, as Marx calls it.

47:44

But when it comes down to the labor that makes up value,

47:48

it is undifferentiated, homogenized,

47:51

reduced to one particular quality,

47:54

which is, according to Marx, how long it took to do.

47:58

How long it took to do according to the average

48:01

that it takes to do that in the society.

48:08

Okay, let's say a couple of other things.

48:10

We need like a four-hour lecture,

48:12

but you're probably happy you don't have that.

48:16

Let's talk about socially necessary average labor time.

48:22

Socially necessary average labor time

48:24

is what distinguishes Marxist theory of value

48:27

from Ricardo's theory of value or Smith's theory of value.

48:32

Value is not just what the worker put into it

48:34

in producing a useful product.

48:40

Value goes through this homogenizing process,

48:44

and you can tell the magnitude of value

48:50

by the socially necessary average labor time

48:53

that went into it.

48:55

Because labor goes through its homogenizing process, too.

48:59

And you are being compared

49:00

to everyone else on the labor market,

49:02

so that when you go to work, they don't say,

49:04

"Take your time, you do it in five days.

49:07

Do it in five days."

49:09

No, they say, "Well, the average for this is two hours,

49:12

so you've got two hours to do this."

49:14

If not, (Paul mimicking air whooshing)

49:15

you're out.

49:17

Right?

49:19

This is the way it works 'cause if one firm

49:21

is working much more slowly than another firm,

49:24

they won't last very long.

49:26

Here is where competitive pressures come in.

49:28

You don't actually get those very much in this volume.

49:31

You get them much more in Volume 3.

49:33

But you have to keep in mind

49:34

that we're looking for the whole system.

49:36

So ultimately, competitive pressures

49:39

push these things in a particular direction.

49:41

We'll see this a bit later in this book.

49:44

Socially necessary labor time.

49:46

The labor time necessary in this society

49:48

to make a certain thing.

49:50

Marx is gonna use the prefix social a lot.

49:53

What does social mean?

49:54

It has three opposites: natural, individual, and ideal.

50:01

In this way,

50:02

he gets rid of a kind of by a logistic anthropology.

50:06

He gets rid of the Hegelian

50:09

or liberal concentration on an individual,

50:12

and he gets rid of German idealism.

50:15

Social is not natural.

50:17

It means something that was made,

50:21

something historically specific to a given society

50:25

to a certain way of living,

50:27

which has institutions,

50:29

although he will say often

50:31

that the social is natural for human beings.

50:35

Don't be confused.

50:36

The social is quite different than nature.

50:38

Although Marx understood that nature had its own history,

50:42

at that time, he read the "Origin of Species"

50:45

and was really keen about it.

50:49

The social is its own category.

50:52

It also means not individual,

50:54

that is, it's something that applies to the whole society

51:00

and emerges from the interactions of individuals,

51:06

the individuals in the largest collective

51:08

that shares a way of living.

51:11

And social is also not ideal,

51:13

that is to say it's not a prescription

51:16

or a description of some abstract truth,

51:19

but a set of practices.

51:23

Practices that make sense for a group

51:25

under certain pressures.

51:28

A group whose members are completely interdependent,

51:33

for whom an individual is a falsification

51:37

of their real way of living

51:39

because they collaborate on everything

51:43

through a division of labor.

51:47

Social or societal names,

51:49

the interdependent group that cannot be reduced

51:51

to an individual free will,

51:53

to individual inclinations, or individual drives.

51:57

So, the social is a ground zero

51:58

for all of Marx's reflection.

52:00

That's what makes him useful

52:02

and the course is called Foundations of Social Thought.

52:05

Yeah, Samuel.

52:08

- Yeah, Marx is living in a Kingdom.

52:10

They are true, right?

52:12

Like, living in pressure, right, which he was-

52:13

- Well, he is living in London at this time.

52:16

- But he dropped in (indistinct), which is a kingdom.

52:18

And arguably, a lot of societal pressures

52:22

are coming from the whims of the leader of that society.

52:26

But how do we work that?

52:28

- Well, he is not talking about political forms

52:33

or government.

52:34

He is talking about the way people

52:37

have to collaborate on their social life

52:42

to make their means of subsistence,

52:44

which he saw as quite independent

52:46

of the whims of the Prussian leaders,

52:49

although they could infringe on it.

52:53

But people tended to do that on their own,

52:56

they could benefit from it,

52:57

but the people tended to do that on their own, yeah.

53:00

- What is he describing as society?

53:02

Is it particularly London Revolution or IWA Society?

53:07

- Capitalist Society.

53:09

Society under the domination of capital.

53:15

Okay, we're coming up to the end of our time.

53:19

Let me see if there's any questions.

53:21

We're crawling along, but it's gonna get faster, I promise.

53:29

(indistinct)

53:31

- So, capitalism is neither a political system

53:34

nor (indistinct) for a social sector?

53:38

And the key, does he need practical?

53:42

- Oh, yeah, the last chapter is about colonialism.

53:44

Uh-huh, he links it to colonialism

53:46

and the types of colonial-type activities in Europe

53:53

in which people were dispossessed of their land

53:56

and forced into factories.

54:00

Yeah.

54:02

Very loud.

54:03

- This might be too big a question to ask,

54:04

and we're at the end,

54:05

but how much of the rest of Marx's economic analysis

54:09

depends on his labor theory of value?

54:13

- He does not have a labor theory of value.

54:15

He has an abstraction theory of value

54:18

or something people have called a value theory of labor.

54:24

I think it's a good turn

54:25

because he's really interested

54:26

in what being forced to produce value first does to labor.

54:31

He is not interested

54:33

in working out how we can get the most out of a market.

54:37

And so his goal is very different

54:38

than mainstream economists.

54:42

But, we can talk more about that.

54:44

It's the last minute where a bone of contention has come up.

54:48

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