(compelling music)
- So, we are starting back into Chapter 1.
The first seven pages are a kind of a bombshell.
A lot is contained in them, which will be unfolded later.
I want to mention that the first few chapters
have a kind of hypothetical form,
hypothetical situation.
They take up simple commodity exchange
under the capital system.
That is, more or less,
if I go to you and try to sell you something
and you come to me and try to buy something from me.
This is not possible outside of the whole capital system,
but he has to find a way in
and he wanted to find a way in that is familiar to you.
I call this the entry point,
and I still, even though it's difficult,
don't think it's a bad way to start.
The entry point into the capital system
is through the commodity,
and it's very narrow,
and there's a lot of stuff stuck in that entryway.
So, keep your eye on the reduced situations
that Marx gives you,
like simple commodity exchange between individuals,
exchanging particular commodities
from particular concrete acts of production.
And when he talks about groups
and phenomena in general,
these are all different things
that have to get worked out in their own analysis
because, ultimately,
the only way you can understand
any individual phenomena in this system
is by starting from the whole.
This is, of course, impossible to do.
Maybe the critical of capital can see the whole.
Maybe Marx, after 30 years, could see the whole,
but it might not be the case.
He might not have gotten there.
So the first four chapters has this heuristic situation,
simple individuals, concrete commodities,
and moving from there to the genesis of value
and towards general questions
and universal questions in this system.
Anything universal, by the way,
is historically bounded to the capital system.
It's universal, meaning it's necessary,
and applies in every situation under capital.
That doesn't mean it's universal in our historical moment
only where capital is touching it
because that is a quality of the capital system
that it universalizes
and has moments of absolute necessity in it.
We'll talk more about that as we go through.
The guiding question
for our reading of the first four chapters is:
What is value?
Where does it come from?
And what does it do?
Those are the ways he works out the what-is question
because it has a source in the system
and it is an operation.
And also what is the apparatus that value needs around it
in order to continue to exist?
It needs a system.
It isn't something that works just on its own.
It calls into existence a system around it.
His technique is the phenomenology of the commodity,
this is the first four chapters,
which I'm calling the entry point.
It's the most familiar, or at least he thought so,
even more familiar in a certain sense than labor,
but he gets to labor right away.
And it is...
It's quite narrow
and you can't totalize the system from the commodity.
So this is not a book about the commodity.
This is a book about capital,
and the way in is through the commodity.
Does that make sense?
Because as I said last time,
capital is not an elemental theory,
like chemistry, let's say.
Although chemistry is beautiful
because the compounds have different emergent qualities
than the elements.
So you can't fully explain a compound from its elements.
And capital is the same.
So, if you're in doubt,
I know this sounds like a salesman's trick,
but if you're in doubt, read on.
Things don't fully make sense
from the perspective of the entry point.
Like, you can't see a house from the foyer.
You need to go through the rooms first.
You get a sense of the whole layout.
And then, it will make sense
what the foyer does in the house.
It's an entry point.
You will go through a set of perspective switches.
That's what Marx is gonna do for you
and that's the phenomenological aspect of this book.
Phenomenology just means the science of appearances
or the way you experience things.
Something always appears to someone else
and it has another form that is the way it doesn't appear.
And in this phenomenology,
you will be asked to switch perspectives.
I'm just gonna give you a little list here,
from objects to processes,
from things to ghostly qualities that hang around them,
from singles to doubles,
and from elements to the whole.
These are the perspectives,
these are the perspective switches
you're going to be asked to accomplish as you read the book.
So, it is a kind of training for your psyche,
for your perceptual apparatus,
for your understanding apparatus.
Today, we have an objective,
which is part of our objective is going to be to define use,
use value exchange, exchange value,
and the product of their relationship, which is value.
You're gonna be introduced to a new term,
which is value form, it's a Marxian term,
and it's very important
for understanding how the capital system works.
Let's start with value.
This is what the first seven pages leap into
and the first four chapters try to define for you.
You are witnessing the birth of a fantasm value,
but more than a fantasm, a necessary fantasm,
like freedom or democracy.
But those belong to other systems.
This is the fantasm that belongs to the capital system.
Value is a fantasm born out of the lopsided relationship
between use value and exchange value
or between use and exchange.
You're gonna hear how it comes to be treated
as an independent quasi-natural substance,
something like a substance in the philosophical sense.
Value is a unique quality of things
under the capital system.
You'll see that Marx uses an analogy of weight,
like in a physical system.
The capital system has this unique quality called value.
Value is the weight of the capital system.
Value is the substance that you can read
through things like...
You can read weight in a physical system.
And there's a whole set of strange operations
that the capital system uses
that other social systems don't.
Reflection,
comparison, reduction, abstraction,
reification, or objectification.
These are all the processes of the capital system.
This is Marx's discovery.
I'm gonna give you one definition of value
and then we'll come back to it a number of times.
Value is a norm for comparing commodities
in order to find the right ratio in which to exchange them.
Value is a norm for comparing commodities
in order to find the right ratio in which to exchange them.
This doesn't quite get to the changes,
the transformation of value, in under the capital system.
The way it compares commodities, the way it comes to ratios,
is gonna be different in capital
than in simple non-capitalist exchange.
But if you wanna know what value is
in a non-capital setting,
it is something like what you need
when you're not producing solely for yourself
and you don't live in paradise.
Or you could say if you don't live in hell
where desire is 100% and the supply is zero,
and you don't live in paradise
where desire is at zero and supply is at 100%.
You need value.
Value is what allows you to trade your thing
for something else you need with someone else.
It's the way you decide how many of your thing you're giving
for how many of the other thing.
Under the capital system,
it isn't so much arrived at according to desire or demand,
even in that case.
It's arrived at according to reduction, hypothesization,
equalization, expression,
mirroring all of these weird processes
that Marx is gonna lay out for us,
as though the capital system were really very different
than any other social system
because this processes were totally different and abstract.
Abstraction being one of the processes.
So, about value,
Marx is not saying there is something like value,
like there is a chair in a room, we know this.
He is saying, however,
we act as though it's there like a chair in a room.
It gets objectified.
It has what he calls ghostly objecthood.
A great translation by the new translator, Paul Reitter.
It's true, ghostly objecthood.
It's a kind of objecthood that you can't touch
and it can dissolve easily.
It goes through a lot of transformations.
Capital has its own ecology and its own physics.
So, on one hand, value has a subjective side.
We feel it to be there.
If someone comes up to you and say,
"I'll give you this banana for your iPhone,"
you're like, "But that's not worth my iPhone."
"How do you know?"
"Well, I feel the value of this.
I paid for it, or my parents paid for it,
or the school paid for it, right?"
You have a sense of its value, but it's not only subjective,
it is an objective need of the system
for things to have value.
So, one thing to keep in mind
is you cannot do away with value
just by feeling differently.
Debunking value is not gonna help you
with the capital system directly,
although it will help you make better decisions.
If you all decided to give away all your stuff
as if it were valueless,
you would end up with no stuff,
but capital would go on happily,
especially in the people who got it, your stuff.
Does that make sense?
We'll track a little bit the difficulties
in finding positions of resistance to the capital system.
Debunking or refusing it doesn't seem to be enough.
Okay, we're starting with value.
And you'll see, if you open the book,
we spent last time talking about the vocabulary
of the opening paragraph.
He begins talking about what he calls use value,
which is, by the way,
already something different than use.
Value is only in play if you don't have the thing
or if you're not using it.
Once you're using a thing,
it has no value because you have it.
Once you have a thing,
it really doesn't have the same kind of value.
Value is only if it's threatened to be taken away
or you need to get it.
Value is a kind of teletechnology, a way...
of relating to something that you need.
That thing has value insofar as you need it.
That is the value insofar as you need it for use,
he calls a use value.
This seems like the easiest thing all around,
although value makes use already in a system of exchange.
So really outside of an exchange system,
there's no use value.
Again, if you're in paradise,
you don't need to exchange everything.
Let's say all the smartphones and all the updates
are all lying around on the ground.
They fell from the tree of smartphones.
They don't have any value for you.
So value again is part of an exchange system.
Samuel?
- Can we have a personal sense of value?
Like, just how much we want something, right?
If we're in paradise
and all the updates are lying on the ground,
we might not need a sense of hierarchy.
We might not need to hierarchize them,
but we still couldn't do it, right?
It's not...
Doesn't seem like it's a product,
it's a really straight system.
- Well, it would be satisfied immediately.
So, you wouldn't need value.
Value is the delay of that satisfaction, right?
Value is what comes into play
while you're waiting or trying to get something
that would be use value,
insofar as it's valuable to you because you need it.
But if it's right there,
there's no real value for an infant until the feeder,
whoever that is, says,
"I'm tired, you're not gonna eat now."
And you're like, "Wow, milk, valuable."
Rudimentary value systems.
Use values satisfy a human want or need of whatever kind.
They are multiple, they differ in quality,
and Marx is not interested in this.
So, if you're concerned about use things,
like some people are, who live their life.
You need a hammer, you need to go get a hammer.
Marx is not gonna talk about that.
In the beginning,
he is setting aside the spheres he's not going to go into,
and one of them is the infinite world of useful things.
Anything can become useful,
and your tasks that you use it for will change
according to what you imagine,
according to what someone tells you you need,
according to what confronts you at any moment.
This is on page 14.
The usefulness of a thing makes it into a use value.
Again, I think it's a little bit more complicated than that,
but this is very important
'cause he's going to contrast it with exchange value.
Usefulness, in this sense,
doesn't hover above us in the air.
It's determined by the properties of a commodity's body.
Just so we know, that does not have to be physical.
It can be a word document.
That's not physical; it has a physical manifestation.
It can be a dream if you're...
Whatever you're doing with that dream is useful to you,
doing psychoanalysis,
whatever those qualities are.
It can be a service, which is not a physical object, right?
A service can be commodified.
I sew your shirt for you, let's say, your shirt is fine.
Nice shirt, by the way.
And you pay me for it, that act has a delimited contours,
you know when it starts, you know when it's done,
you know how long it takes.
It has a use value to the shirt owner,
and that is perfectly well commodifiable.
There's no difference
between physical commodities and services.
So, if they tell you the service economy
is fundamentally different,
it is not fundamentally different.
It certainly changes the way people live,
what kind of concrete jobs you do.
But in terms of value,
the value moves around exactly the same.
This is the province of what he calls commodity studies,
which I'm not sure exists,
but that's not what he's gonna do.
Okay, so use value is the property
of being able to satisfy a human want or need.
It involves actually doing this as a practice
and activity use.
So, we know that use value is already abstracted.
It's potential,
it means it can be used;
and it's abstracted in the sense
that in any of the concrete situations
in which you use something,
this is called use.
Value is realized, use value is realized, when?
When a thing is used, right?
And the thing is, in a sense,
has a use value used up when you're done using it.
You may actually use up the usefulness of the thing, too,
if it's, let's say, a banana.
When you eat it, it's no longer useful.
The peel is not useful.
And incidentally, the value body of a commodity,
very different than the use body of a commodity.
Well, it's related to the use body of the commodity.
The peel is not really part of the value.
Well, it is kind of,
say it's part of the value in that it protects the fruit.
But there's many physical qualities of a body
that are not related to the use or the exchange.
So, for example, a banana can be green, it can be yellow,
it can be slightly brown, it can be small, it can be big,
it can be like cardboard, it can be like sugar.
And in all of those cases,
in fact, the exchange value remains.
What's required is that there's the usable part is usable.
Now, it could be that cardboard bananas end up...
You end up not buying that brand anymore.
So, the usable,
that is a quality that relates to its use value.
You have a question? - Is it...
Or what, like humans value (indistinct)?
- Humans value this particular thing socially.
- Socially.
- We'll talk a little bit about what that is.
The kinds of things that have use values, again,
are physical objects, services, intellectual objects, media,
processes like education or defense.
They can all have use value.
So, under capitalism,
they can all have exchange value potentially.
There is a world of useful things here:
food, energy, clothing, tools,
we can think of many of them that you could study.
And think about a kind of anthropology of human activities.
Anthropology had to change under capital, though,
to be an anthropology of the way human activities
are used by the system to produce value.
Let's talk about exchange value.
So, we need to talk about...
It's a very peculiar phenomenon.
It seems like this is the double in the commodity,
use value and exchange value.
But really, the double is this.
That's the double
'cause exchange value really only appears briefly.
This is a longstanding misunderstanding of the text,
and Marx is not so clear about it.
Exchange value is also potential and abstract.
Something has value when it still has a use,
but it has to be able to do something else beyond its use
in the capital system.
So, again, exchange value is not just a quality
that resides in the thing,
it's a quality that tends toward an activity,
a capitalist activity, which is exchange.
Does that make sense?
It doesn't just sit there, it happens,
and it's called up when you're exchanging.
- Would you mind explaining, like, that (indistinct)?
- Yeah, I'm gonna do that in just a second.
Value is potential use and exchange,
but it is also a ghostly substance
that persists through all changes of form
in commodities and labor.
Labor can go from being reserve to being active.
A commodity can go from being used,
that is to say when it's being worked in labor
to being exchanged, to being used, to being exchanged,
to being totally consumed and turning into waste.
The value is conserved,
even when something is totally consumed.
Because if you eat food, where does the value go?
Yeah, you become the value,
the value goes into you as a laborer.
So, you will notice
that value goes through a set of transformations
that is a circuit.
As a closed circuit.
It comes back around, you go back to labor the next day,
or you go back to your class the next day with the energy.
Again, energy and value seem to be
in a kind of E equals mc squared relationship here.
They can neither be created nor destroyed in this system.
Value is potential use in exchange,
but it's also a substance
that changes form from material,
to immaterial, to material, to immaterial,
from commodity, to money, to commodity.
That's one of Marx's famous formula, C-M-C.
And you can also use it the other way around, M-C-M.
Value is conserved.
Love the conservation of value.
The odd thing about the capital mode,
which we're gonna get to the operation
that this is all about,
is that value is conserved and augmented.
That's where the capital system perverts physics.
It doesn't, Marx will say,
ultimately because you get it out of the laborers.
But it looks like it perverts physics.
It looks like you put the money into an investment
and you get back 10% more, right?
What's the rate now of return?
I don't know, 7% more.
To me, it's always like going down in my mind.
I guess it's the privilege of a Marxian
to not really understand where their investments are going.
The oddity of this is that it only becomes exchange value
when it's not being used,
and it only becomes use value when it's not being exchanged.
When it's being exchanged,
it holds the use value in reserve.
It depends on it, it can't go away.
But it's not being exercised.
So only one can be activated at a time,
and this is what Marx calls a contradiction.
And we get back to the question about doubles.
Before we get to doubles,
you can see here is a different world
from the world of use values,
it's a world of exchangeables.
You could talk about what they are,
but they're not the same thing as use values
'cause things can be exchanged
that have very little use value,
like junk plastic toys that you get in a goodie bag
at a birthday party.
Barely, you barely have any use value.
The use value is like, "Oh, that's it."
Then they go right in the garbage.
It's a brilliant, it's a stroke of genius plastic,
and an evil.
So here, you would plug in a picture.
I'm so bad at PowerPoint,
so you're just gonna have to listen to this discourse
because I was gonna, like,
"Wouldn't it be nice to show all the crazy commodities?"
But,
I'm not a visual guy.
So, these doubles are in attention with one another,
which Marx sometimes calls a contradiction,
and a single thing like a commodity
is a strange and strained unity of contradictories.
But we have to understand what this relationship is.
Obviously, use value and exchange value
are not logical opposites.
It is true that like Aristotle's idea of a logical opposite,
they cannot exist in the...
They cannot be active in the same thing,
in the same respect, at the same time.
So, that's why he uses this Aristotelian figure,
logical figure contradiction.
Does that make sense?
Exchange value means it's not being used.
Using means it's not being exchanged,
but they have to both be in there.
Now, you can make something for use that isn't exchanged,
but that's outside of the capital system for him.
You can make something for yourself
or you can use something that's not exchangeable
because it's common to everybody.
This is why the enclosure of the commons
was very important for capital.
If they start to enclose air and water
more than they already do,
they will become commodified, too.
Water is already on the way,
but air, so far, is not, this is Marx's example.
So obviously, they're not opposites, they're just different.
And they could be complementary under some systems,
but in this system, they're antagonistic to one another.
Exchange value and use value.
Okay, I'm spending a bunch of time on this
because these sorts of strange,
and strained unities are gonna come up over and over
in the capital system.
Yeah? - Does Marx argue
that these two concepts use exchange value
exists within all systems of production?
- Mm-mm.
Nope.
They don't.
In any society bigger than one,
you're likely to have use and exchange.
But again, remember that these terms, these concepts,
this is a very important Marxian thought.
It's a Hegelian thought,
but Marx brings it back to real living history.
These terms are only necessary
when society gets into a shape where it needs those terms.
So, again, if you're in paradise,
you don't need the term use or exchange because...
Or think of an infant.
You're just kind of eating,
and pooping, and wandering around,
and you don't have to distinguish your activities
because you're never in a situation of lack.
Yeah.
- And (indistinct) is about the idea of work (indistinct)
being somewhat separate from the strength,
in the sense that like our commodities
are still part of us,
like many people have through commodities or art occlusion,
then this is the cell.
(indistinct)
- Well, humans separate from the system
is gonna be hard to justify as we go on.
So, let's just...
Let's take the system in itself.
It feels a little bit cold and distant,
but Marx will argue that humans
are in service of commodities,
and that's the big difference.
So, it's dehumanizing, for sure.
So, let's hold that question. Yeah.
- Marx says that something is a use value
or is exchange value.
Why does he say is relevant, has this value,
or have a value? - Uh-huh.
That's a great question.
Did you hear that question?
Marx says that things are use values
and are exchange values,
not that they have them.
Because that is the being of the thing.
The being of the thing is not some independent, God-given,
or nature-given set of qualities.
When in a social setting,
which is all we're talking about here,
you have a thing for use, its qualities are the thing.
When you encounter a hammer, you could have an aesthetic,
now we're getting into the precincts of German philosophy.
You could have an aesthetic relationship to that hammer
and be like, "What a beautiful hammer."
But let's put that aside for now.
I think that's fairly artificial.
The hammer is weight, shape,
the useful qualities for hammering a nail.
And you don't really see a hammer otherwise,
unless you go to the market, or Home Depot,
and you're like, "How much does this hammer cost?"
And you're negotiating between cost
and the kinds of qualities
that will get your particular job done.
So for him, things are double,
so much so that you have a double consciousness.
The double consciousness is,
"Oh, my gosh, I can get $5 for this hammer."
Or, "Oh, my gosh,
I can hammer in 20 nails with this hammer in today.
I can hammer just the kind of nail in
that will hang my picture or frame my barn."
Does that make sense?
And the thing is only that.
There's nothing subsisting outside of the capital system
that is a thing in itself.
Yeah.
- So, if, like...
Just like on the point on like the contradiction
between something having use value
and exchange value at the same time, like surely that's...
I'm just not sure why like they're applying to...
Or those two concepts can apply to like the same object
because surely, like, say I have like an apple,
but that presents use value or that has use value,
insofar as the apple is like an object of mine,
desire to eat the apple.
So, it's like a property of the apple.
But then like the exchange value is, surely then, not...
It's not just like a property of the apple,
it's like a relation between the apple
and say, like, an arm.
So it's not like- - Well, both in that case...
It's a good question.
In both of those cases, the apple has a use value
and the apple has an exchange value.
They are relational characteristics of the apple.
The apple is useful to you.
So apples in themselves belong to, I don't know,
some alien observer from an asteroid passing by.
They're like, "Apple."
But they wouldn't point it out
because it's of no use to them one way or the other.
So, both are social qualities.
That is to say they are related to you as a desirer,
and you desire apples because in your culture,
apples are things that get eaten,
as opposed to using them
to build a house or something like that.
So there are two different kinds of social characteristics,
and you can tell immediately
that these two things go together
in a strange and strained way.
They're always both there.
One comes forward in exchange and one comes forward in use.
When you go to the supermarket,
if you just shove your face into the apple,
someone's gonna be like,
"Wait, this is an exchange place, we're not doing that here.
You take that out, you pay for it, right?"
And you always feel bad when you eat the apple
and then you're gonna pay for it up at the register.
Like, "I was just so hungry."
(Paul laughing)
In fact, it has to be an exchange first under capital.
Just like you give your labor first before you get paid,
the thing is exchange,
and Marx is going to show
that not only are these things strange and strained doubles,
but they are reversed from what you imagine them to be
in your humanistic way of thinking
and from what they are in other systems.
You don't look convinced, but let's keep going.
We have a lot to get through and we barely started.
(Paul clears throat)
Okay, what we know about things as use values, right?
The thing is a use value.
It's a use value
because someone put concrete characteristics in it
through their concrete labor, right?
Somebody put the characteristics into an apple.
They're not just born there.
They've been refining these trees for years,
for decades, for centuries.
And putting in the fertilizer and putting in the work,
and picking them right, and polishing them,
and all that kind of stuff.
A skilled person uses qualitatively specific activities
to make something that satisfies a human want or need.
This is called production, by the way.
This is called product production.
At a later point, a thing gets taken for exchange.
Temporally, production of a use value
comes before production of an exchange value.
But logically, in the capital system,
production of exchange value
comes before production of use value.
The way the contradictions can exist in capital
is that they get spread out in time,
they get unfolded in time.
And we will talk about why exchange comes first.
Again, in a capital system,
commodities are things that are produced for exchange.
So, before they get thought of as use values,
no, that's not exactly right.
They're both thought of as use values
and exchange values at the same time.
But exchange is the original impetus for producing them
in a capital system.
Okay.
I think we're doing good.
You are totally confused.
Let's take a look at page 15 to 16.
Here.
At the very bottom of 15, as use values,
commodities differ above all,
with respect to quality.
As exchange values,
they can differ only with respect to quantity,
and they contain not even an atom of use value.
That's why these are so peculiar, Samuel.
- It seems that this taking exchange values to be constant,
which is what he says at the top of that.
And at the bottom,
he said they're for only relative (indistinct).
Can't an object have exchange values to each person?
- Not to each person, but to each commodity.
Exchange values do not have any relations to people
until they have relations to other commodities.
- So it could have simultaneously, say,
Saraiya is willing to pay the victim bananas for an iPhone
and I'm willing to pay,
to exchange 10 bananas for an iPhone.
- Unrelated to what you're willing to pay.
It's only related to what socially a thing is worth
compared to other commodities.
- We're not talking about price as we know it around that.
- We're not talking about price,
we're talking about value and the way value gets set up.
The way you know that value and price are different
is that if something is trading for above its value,
people invest in that.
And if something is trading for below its value,
people don't invest in that.
And in fact, those firms can go out of business
because they're not making back what they need
to make back to cover their costs
and to prepare for the following year, et cetera.
So, price and value are absolutely different.
The relationship between value and price
is a controversial topic in Marxian studies.
It goes back to the infamous cliche,
the transformation problem.
And I don't think it's worth talking about here
because we are interested
in the social outcome of abstraction,
and we have to get there.
For those people who try to make economics work out
so they can predict what prices will be,
it's a question of the relation of value to price,
and different economic theories
settle this question in different ways.
And Marx was famously unable to settle it,
but it doesn't touch the basic insight,
which is that exchange value, value, rules our lives,
determines the quality of our labor,
determines the amount of leisure time we have,
determines the way we relate to one another.
Yeah.
- Can you think of price and value
as kind of one of those weird doubles,
where one losing into the other, right?
You question kind of like why a price is this way
and that's the phenomenology of it.
And then, (indistinct).
- There's a lot to be said about price.
Maybe we set aside,
once we understand these things down the line,
half of a session to talk about price.
It's worth thinking about Adam Smith
and David Ricardo who thought about this a lot.
And they also recognized
that one thing that's characteristic of prices,
which is not characteristic of value,
is that they fluctuate wildly day to day, minute to minute.
But they fluctuate around a center,
Smith called this a natural price, around a center,
which is thought to be something like the value
is not gonna get too crazy.
Like, you will never have an iPhone selling for 25 cents.
And you can see when you compare commodities,
that value is real.
You see, you might have a banana selling for 25 cents,
you'll never have it selling for $1,000,
unless things go really haywire.
And the opposite is also true.
You'll never trade a banana for an iPhone.
Yeah.
- So, you said that use value strictly relates to quality.
Is it the quality of the total actions
that encourage people to use that commodity?
- Let's look at the sentence again.
I love it when we do philological work.
As use values,
commodities differ above all with respect to quality,
that is in their qualities.
So that as a banana is peelable
and an iPhone is not peelable, et cetera.
A banana is nutritious,
and this is what Marx is thinking of.
In one sense, he has a kind of Spinozistic ontology.
Things have qualities.
Yeah.
- So there's a lot of different value terms going around.
And sometimes,
I'll hear you talk about, say, exchange value or use value,
and then you'll just dive into the topic
with the shorthand of value.
Just for my comprehension going-
- Oh, yeah. - Or whenever you say value,
maybe with a capital V,
are you talking about that sort of value
that's derived from abstract labor?
- Use value, you understand it,
is something that corresponds to your wants and needs.
Exchange value, you understand it,
is how much you can get for your thing,
how much you can get by exchanging it.
So, he uses coats and linen.
It's 19th century, it's Germany or he was in London.
It's cold, you need a coat.
The coats are not made of linen.
For a long time, I was confused by that.
Coats are wool, the linen is a separate thing.
It's like we have these things that are different,
and he is very clear.
You can't exchange linen for linen.
The same amount of linen for the same amount of linen.
This is how you know there's something like value
and how it's parasitic on use value
because you already have the linen.
If you have it, you don't need it unless you need more.
But then you'd have to exchange something else, right?
There is no market of exchanging the same for the same.
You need to exchange things with different qualities.
One second.
So, use value as a kind of basis is a sufficient...
Is a necessary, but not sufficient,
characteristic of a commodity.
It must have the use value
'cause no one will buy it otherwise.
But when it comes to exchanging,
it only matters how much it exchanges for of another thing.
Out of these two comes a phantom.
Because when you exchange it for something else,
you think it has this thing intrinsic to it
that is of value.
The value appears in the thing
as something it seems to carry with it
and have with it everywhere it goes.
So, value as a product
is the unity of exchange value and use value.
You say that is worth X, Y, and Z
because it has this ghostly quality that adheres to it.
You could say, if you want,
that this is the antithesis and this is the synthesis,
but Marx is not so clear about that, okay?
He will not talk about exchange value
as a separate and interesting thing after this.
He's just gonna talk about use value and value
because it's value that will end up making capital work.
Value is...
based in use value and realized in exchange value,
and it looks like an independent thing
that you could trade on a market.
And it comes to be represented through one of the processes,
representation, or expression of capital in what form?
Value is represented independently as money.
It's as though you took it out of the thing
and value started living on its own.
And I said, "I'll give you this money,
which is equal in value to what you're having
because that thing has intrinsically, in it, value."
Does that make sense?
- There were some questions.
- Yeah.
- So this value,
because I think you mentioned that this so thing
of you starting it...
(indistinct)
- Ultimately, we'll talk about value,
but this is the genesis of value.
You have something that's useful, socially useful.
People use it in our culture, right?
Something that's totally outside
of what other people recognize as useful
might be useful to you individually,
but it doesn't have a use value.
And you have exchange value,
which is what you get for it on a market
related to an equivalent.
And these two together
make it seem as though there's this special substance
that adheres to all commodities,
just in different quantities.
And it's not purely psychological, it is ontological.
You live in a world as though this was real.
And so it's real.
Value is real under capital.
As I say, give away all your things,
and you'll just have no things.
But value will go on happily.
And if you wanna get them back,
you'll have to concede the reality of value.
Okay.
Wow, you're really pushing me.
This is good.
What else do we need to talk about?
We need to talk about the double character of labor.
So,
actually, a commodity has this double character,
use value and value,
and labor has a double...
double character, too.
Useful labor makes useful things.
That is a qualitative act that requires skill and knowledge.
As machines tape go over that,
you can put less skill into it,
but nonetheless it requires some skill.
From the perspective of a useful object,
labor is useful labor.
So, the question is:
What is labor from the perspective of value?
It is a bare gelatinous blob.
Don't you love this translation?
It's a translation by a writer whom I admire
of a German word gallerte,
which is something like sue it.
It's when you took everything that was left over
and you boiled it down into a gelatinous blob.
We thought of using sue it,
but we didn't think anyone would know really what that was.
So we put a bare gelatinous blob.
It's everything kind of mixed together
until all of its qualitative characteristics disappear
and you just have a kind of quantity of stuff.
That's the second characteristic of labor,
which he calls abstract labor.
So you have concrete labor
and abstract labor.
Clearly, abstract labor makes value
and concrete labor makes use values.
In capital,
these get inverted so that you do concrete labor,
so that you can get abstract labor
and you'd make useful things,
so that you can get value out of it.
I'm jumping ahead.
That's like the climax of the first project.
We will go from commodity production
or production of products to production of value.
Commodity production to production of value.
You don't get the second type of labor
from concrete differentiated labor.
If you look at the world of useful things,
you see all these different qualities.
They're edible, they're sweet, they're sour,
they're tools to make other things, they're entertainment.
Whatever it does for you, it does for you.
The same thing with the labor that goes into it,
it's absolutely an infinite,
potentially infinitely differentiated.
That's why if someone plays the trumpet
and I play the guitar,
that doesn't mean I can play the trumpet
and they can play the guitar.
Although musicians are pretty good
at different things like that, right?
But this divides us as people.
So we have a social division of labor, as Marx calls it.
But when it comes down to the labor that makes up value,
it is undifferentiated, homogenized,
reduced to one particular quality,
which is, according to Marx, how long it took to do.
How long it took to do according to the average
that it takes to do that in the society.
Okay, let's say a couple of other things.
We need like a four-hour lecture,
but you're probably happy you don't have that.
Let's talk about socially necessary average labor time.
Socially necessary average labor time
is what distinguishes Marxist theory of value
from Ricardo's theory of value or Smith's theory of value.
Value is not just what the worker put into it
in producing a useful product.
Value goes through this homogenizing process,
and you can tell the magnitude of value
by the socially necessary average labor time
that went into it.
Because labor goes through its homogenizing process, too.
And you are being compared
to everyone else on the labor market,
so that when you go to work, they don't say,
"Take your time, you do it in five days.
Do it in five days."
No, they say, "Well, the average for this is two hours,
so you've got two hours to do this."
If not, (Paul mimicking air whooshing)
you're out.
Right?
This is the way it works 'cause if one firm
is working much more slowly than another firm,
they won't last very long.
Here is where competitive pressures come in.
You don't actually get those very much in this volume.
You get them much more in Volume 3.
But you have to keep in mind
that we're looking for the whole system.
So ultimately, competitive pressures
push these things in a particular direction.
We'll see this a bit later in this book.
Socially necessary labor time.
The labor time necessary in this society
to make a certain thing.
Marx is gonna use the prefix social a lot.
What does social mean?
It has three opposites: natural, individual, and ideal.
In this way,
he gets rid of a kind of by a logistic anthropology.
He gets rid of the Hegelian
or liberal concentration on an individual,
and he gets rid of German idealism.
Social is not natural.
It means something that was made,
something historically specific to a given society
to a certain way of living,
which has institutions,
although he will say often
that the social is natural for human beings.
Don't be confused.
The social is quite different than nature.
Although Marx understood that nature had its own history,
at that time, he read the "Origin of Species"
and was really keen about it.
The social is its own category.
It also means not individual,
that is, it's something that applies to the whole society
and emerges from the interactions of individuals,
the individuals in the largest collective
that shares a way of living.
And social is also not ideal,
that is to say it's not a prescription
or a description of some abstract truth,
but a set of practices.
Practices that make sense for a group
under certain pressures.
A group whose members are completely interdependent,
for whom an individual is a falsification
of their real way of living
because they collaborate on everything
through a division of labor.
Social or societal names,
the interdependent group that cannot be reduced
to an individual free will,
to individual inclinations, or individual drives.
So, the social is a ground zero
for all of Marx's reflection.
That's what makes him useful
and the course is called Foundations of Social Thought.
Yeah, Samuel.
- Yeah, Marx is living in a Kingdom.
They are true, right?
Like, living in pressure, right, which he was-
- Well, he is living in London at this time.
- But he dropped in (indistinct), which is a kingdom.
And arguably, a lot of societal pressures
are coming from the whims of the leader of that society.
But how do we work that?
- Well, he is not talking about political forms
or government.
He is talking about the way people
have to collaborate on their social life
to make their means of subsistence,
which he saw as quite independent
of the whims of the Prussian leaders,
although they could infringe on it.
But people tended to do that on their own,
they could benefit from it,
but the people tended to do that on their own, yeah.
- What is he describing as society?
Is it particularly London Revolution or IWA Society?
- Capitalist Society.
Society under the domination of capital.
Okay, we're coming up to the end of our time.
Let me see if there's any questions.
We're crawling along, but it's gonna get faster, I promise.
(indistinct)
- So, capitalism is neither a political system
nor (indistinct) for a social sector?
And the key, does he need practical?
- Oh, yeah, the last chapter is about colonialism.
Uh-huh, he links it to colonialism
and the types of colonial-type activities in Europe
in which people were dispossessed of their land
and forced into factories.
Yeah.
Very loud.
- This might be too big a question to ask,
and we're at the end,
but how much of the rest of Marx's economic analysis
depends on his labor theory of value?
- He does not have a labor theory of value.
He has an abstraction theory of value
or something people have called a value theory of labor.
I think it's a good turn
because he's really interested
in what being forced to produce value first does to labor.
He is not interested
in working out how we can get the most out of a market.
And so his goal is very different
than mainstream economists.
But, we can talk more about that.
It's the last minute where a bone of contention has come up.
Other questions before we cut?
Yeah.
- (indistinct) together, like exchange value, used value,
and how value is determined by (indistinct)?
- The only thing about value that's determined by...
Value is determined by exchange,
and its magnitude is determined by the abstraction of labor
such that those things become comparable.
It's complicated.
He says, "When you take all these things
of totally different qualitative characteristics
that are used for totally different things
by different people,
incidentally, not everyone wants a hammer, right?"
We are not philosophizing with a hammer,
we're philosophizing with a MacBook.
How do they become comparable?
They become comparable through exchange.
Where do they get their magnitude?
They get their magnitude
from the socially necessary average labor time used in them
because that's the only thing
that differentiates different commodities
in their magnitude of value.
Says Marx.
Not the only way to look at it, but it's fairly logical.
The only thing that's different between a banana,
aside from its qualitative characteristics,
and an iPhone is how much average labor it takes
to go into it.
Does that make sense?
For Marx.
See you next time.
(uplifting music)