butchersapron
Bring back hanging
What do you need explaining about it?
Reading Marx's 'Capital': Tips, Questions, Theory, Support and Bookclub Bunfight...
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mojo pixy
...שלא נמצא בשמאל
Anyone who produces value can control how much surplus value is available for how long, by changing models and making products that are un-repairable (eg iPods) or become ''uneconomical'' to maintain and must be replaced entirely after a certain point. It limits the potential not only for continued use / obliges re-purchase, but also for resale.
EtA, I think it's important for me to say I struggle with these concepts (does it show? lol) but I do try to relate the theoretical to my observations of daily reality. I have to, for it to make sense, and it's not easy.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
It's the new (old) thing!
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
inbuilt obsolescence
Idaho
blah blah blah
I am stuck at this point. Can we go back to our (entropy worn) table analogy to explain?
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
from the notebooks for capital
No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them. Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary. On the one side, then, it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value. Forces of production and social relations – two different sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high. ‘Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time’ (real wealth), ‘but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.’ (The Source and Remedy etc. 1821, p. 6.)
No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them. Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary. On the one side, then, it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value. Forces of production and social relations – two different sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high. ‘Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time’ (real wealth), ‘but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.’ (The Source and Remedy etc. 1821, p. 6.)
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
This is a thread on capital so this is important - expending the use-value of labour-power is what can produce surplus-value. Not just labour. The production of surplus-value is specific to the capitalist mode of production - otherwise any old labour at any old time can and did produce value.
mojo pixy
...שלא נמצא בשמאל
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
The planned obsolescence thing isn't really relevant to capital - the competitive obsolescence in the quest to reduce the amount of socially necessary labour going into a single capitals commodities via developing productivity increasing technologies is (edit: as well as technologies increasing capital control/enclosing labour-powers technical knowledge) over the labour process in order to do the same) - and how this then effects total capital and its action. Namely, an inbuilt technological rush that has no option but to reduce the amount of value-producing labour power in the overall total production process resulting in over-production/under-consumption and fall in the average rate of profit - which itself necessitates a whole raft of political measures to counteract - which the single capitals cannot carry though on their own and so requires the building/reproduction/extension of a political state and political powers. Cor blimey. or as marx said in capital:
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danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
We covered this when we recently discussed the music industry. Remember we discussed intensification? This is a feature of capitalism (the industrial revolution, the changing nature of the social relations that surround labour).
The relevant passage is here:
"Labour-time continues to transmit as before the same value to the total product, but this unchanged amount of exchange-value is spread over more use-value; hence the value of each single commodity sinks."
The total value remains the same, but the value (socially useful labour time) in each item (let's stick to tables) is less. So instead of expending his or her shift on one table, the worker using the machine might expend the shift on ten tables. The socially useful labour time is still one shift. But now it is distributed across ten tables instead of one. But remember the production line is now regulating the way the socially useful labour time is expended. Wandering off to fetch another chisel or stare out of the window is now not possible because the parts will be piling up while you do so. That's intensification.
Remember, this is a social phenomenon.
Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
In other words, the use value of a commodity to a capitalist precisely is its exchange value. That makes sense, but the same is plainly not true of the consumer. No matter how much socially necessary labour time goes in to the production of a chocolate tea pot, its use value to an non chocolate teapot fan is unaffected.
I don't think its plausible to claim that "value and socially necessary labour time are the same thing". After all, socially necessary labour could be used to make a product that isn't turned in to a commodity. I'm sure you were talking about commodities in particular when you made that point but I think the non-commodity example illustrates that whilst socially necessary labour supervenes on exchange value, that doesn't mean that exchange value is reducible to socially necessary labour (just as hydrogen is necessary for water but that doesn't make water reducible to hydrogen).
It seems to me that most plausible things we can say about socially necessary labour are that (1) it sets a floor on the exchange value of any commodity sold for profit (everything above that floor being surplus value) and (2) that it is the only thing that can *increase* exchange value of any given commodity. It seems that demand and other variable also affects exchange value, independently of SNL. Marx seems to acknowledge that there are other relevant variables, as in his discussion of uncultivated land, sentimental items etc that affect price. I’m trying to piece together these various observations Marx makes, I feel I am clearly not interpreting correctly how they all join up.
Idaho
blah blah blah
OK, so our man/woman is now cranking out 10 tables a day, but the exchange value of those tables is not a tenth of the previous value as there is still raw material cost, transport and capital costs, etc. Why is the labour value considered to be the principal factor? Is it because the raw material cost is in itself a measure of the amount of labour needed to cut and move it to our workshop?
Are you saying that it's only the labour that gives it any value, and only the cost of labour that is under pressure through market competition?
Idaho
blah blah blah
Also, on intensification, where I work, it seems to be well stocked with people doing large amounts of pointless, unproductive circular and activity just to look busy. There is pressure to justify your existence, but the measures are so abstract and circular (and in themselves justification for others more senior) that they are farcical.
Are pointless office jobs a kind of proletarian counter strategy to intensification?
(I really don't know if I joking)
Are pointless office jobs a kind of proletarian counter strategy to intensification?
(I really don't know if I joking)
Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
The exchange value of the raw material derives from the SNL that went in to extracting them from the ground, the labour of transportation itself as well as all the labour that went in to the making the transportation vehicles. The 'capital costs' are just the purchase of living labour power (i.e. the wage labourer) and dead labour (commodities that have already been transformed by the labour of earlier workers).
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
“In other words, the use value of a commodity to a capitalist precisely is its exchange value”.
No. A crofter in the Scottish Highlands before the onset of the Capitalist mode of production, might say “I need a table, I shall make one”. He or she is determining that he or she wants the use-value of a table. This is not a commodity. It’s a table. You, now, right here in the Epoch of the Capitalist mode of production might head down to the woodyard and buy a load of wood and make yourself a table as a hobby. That’s not a commodity either. It’s not intended as one, anyway. A serf might be asked to make a table for the lord of the manor. That is a use-value, but as it’s not going on the market, it isn’t a commodity. The capitalist, however, manufactures tables to sell. This is the production of use-values; use-values for others. If they did not possess use-value, who would buy them? Commodities are use-values.
Commodities are also exchange-values. Because they’re made for the market. They are desired because they are use-values, but they are commodities because they are also exchange-values. But what is that exchange-value a representation of? It’s a representation of socially necessary labour time.
Supply and demand plays a role in determining exchange-value, because the use-value decreases if I have several tables already and there’s nothing but tables on the market. I certainly desire tables a bit less at this point. But Marx points out in the section of fetishism of commodities ( Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - Chapter One ) that “in the midst of all the accidental and ever fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labour time socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of Nature”.
“As a general rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of the labour of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange. In other words, the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things. It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire, as values, one uniform social status, distinct from their varied forms of existence as objects of utility. This division of a product into a useful thing and a value becomes practically important, only when exchange has acquired such an extension that useful articles are produced for the purpose of being exchanged, and their character as values has therefore to be taken into account, beforehand, during production. From this moment the labour of the individual producer acquires socially a two-fold character. On the one hand, it must, as a definite useful kind of labour, satisfy a definite social want, and thus hold its place as part and parcel of the collective labour of all, as a branch of a social division of labour that has sprung up spontaneously. On the other hand, it can satisfy the manifold wants of the individual producer himself, only in so far as the mutual exchangeability of all kinds of useful private labour is an established social fact, and therefore the private useful labour of each producer ranks on an equality with that of all others. The equalisation of the most different kinds of labour can be the result only of an abstraction from their inequalities, or of reducing them to their common denominator, viz. expenditure of human labour power or human labour in the abstract. The two-fold social character of the labour of the individual appears to him, when reflected in his brain, only under those forms which are impressed upon that labour in every-day practice by the exchange of products. In this way, the character that his own labour possesses of being socially useful takes the form of the condition, that the product must be not only useful, but useful for others, and the social character that his particular labour has of being the equal of all other particular kinds of labour, takes the form that all the physically different articles that are the products of labour, have one common quality, viz., that of having value.”
The process I think you are getting at of what a capitalist sees in a commodity, why they want to produce commodities, is discussed in this section. Commodity fetishism is way that markets and money provide a disguise for what are actually social relations.
“Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange values. Now listen how those commodities speak through the mouth of the economist.
So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange value either in a pearl or a diamond. The economic discoverers of this chemical element, who by-the-bye lay special claim to critical acumen, find however that the use value of objects belongs to them independently of their material properties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a part of them as objects. What confirms them in this view, is the peculiar circumstance that the use value of objects is realised without exchange, by means of a direct relation between the objects and man, while, on the other hand, their value is realised only by exchange, that is, by means of a social process.”
“Value” – (i.e., exchange value) “is a property of things, riches” – (i.e., use value) “of man. Value, in this sense, necessarily implies exchanges, riches do not.” “Riches” (use value) “are the attribute of men, value is the attribute of commodities. A man or a community is rich, a pearl or a diamond is valuable...” A pearl or a diamond is valuable as a pearl or a diamond.
So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange value either in a pearl or a diamond. The economic discoverers of this chemical element, who by-the-bye lay special claim to critical acumen, find however that the use value of objects belongs to them independently of their material properties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a part of them as objects. What confirms them in this view, is the peculiar circumstance that the use value of objects is realised without exchange, by means of a direct relation between the objects and man, while, on the other hand, their value is realised only by exchange, that is, by means of a social process.”
It's now become clear that I'm practically re-writing Capital in order to discuss just one sentence of yours. 
So at this point I'm going to wind up.
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
Sticking with tables, lets say its raw material is trees. Clearly the trees have to be felled, logged, turned into planks. Or if it's a marble table, quarried, cut, polished, whatever.
Marx is saying that socially necessary labour time is one of the aspects of the tripartite nature of value. See the post above ^.
Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
Danny La Rouge, thanks for writing such a long response, but I'm not entirely sure what it has to do with the sentence you have quoted from me. I am aware of the distinction between UV and EV, I was trying to interpret you when wrote that UV and EV 'can't be separated out in the commodity'. I thought you meant that they were in someways interconnected conceptually, but I suppose what you meant was that they are merely both present in the commodity form.
My point simply was that the reason a capitalist hires labour power to produce commodities is so that the commodities can be exchanged on market for profit (i.e. surplus value). In that sense the use value of the commodity to the capitalist (who has hired labour to produce it) is its exchange value. If the commodity has no exchange value (i.e. it can't be exchanged on the market) then for the capitalist it has no use value. Surely that is correct?
My point simply was that the reason a capitalist hires labour power to produce commodities is so that the commodities can be exchanged on market for profit (i.e. surplus value). In that sense the use value of the commodity to the capitalist (who has hired labour to produce it) is its exchange value. If the commodity has no exchange value (i.e. it can't be exchanged on the market) then for the capitalist it has no use value. Surely that is correct?
Idaho
blah blah blah
Very interesting stuff danny la rouge, I think I am starting to understand a bit better.
So it is commodities that are central to the critique?
So it is commodities that are central to the critique?
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
That's what I was trying to answer. A capitalist produces a commodity for its exchange-value. But it doesn't make sense to say that's its use-value to the capitalist; it's its exchange-value.
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
Yes. The title of the book is Capital. So he's dissecting capitalism.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
What is the opening lines of the book ffs?
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Idaho
blah blah blah
So by extension, commodities only recently took centre stage in human life?
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
*****
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
Precisely.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Oh my fucking god. It's sort of the point of the book that this thread is about that you've been talking talking talking on.
Idaho
blah blah blah
You are a man who makes a commodity of his knowledge. To spend as a token of his prestige and social power. Danny is more of teaching and sharing person - to which I am grateful.
Idaho
blah blah blah
I suppose this could be a weakness in the proposition. Marx was fairly poor in terms of cultural understanding. I'll keep reading.
Athos
Well-Known Member
If you're asking whether or not Marx says commodities pre-existed capitalism; he did. But, he describes capitalist society as "a society where the commodity-form is the universal form of the product of labour, hence the dominant social relation is the relation between men as possessors of commodities".
