- CAPITALISM IN PLACE
- GALLERIES
- Imagining Italy
- Revisiting Rome
- Staging Emilia-Romagna
- Consuming Milan
- Unhoused Atlanta
- Globalized Atlanta
- Racialized Atlanta
- Greenwashed Atlanta
- Georgia Timescapes
- Mississippi Timescapes
- New Mexico Timescapes
- Florida Beachscapes
- California Waterscapes
- Yankee Landscapes
- ¿Auténtica Oaxaca?
- Authentique Quebec?
- ¿Auténtica Cuba?
- New York Streetscapes
- Southern Roadscapes
- Branding Jacksonville
- Crafting the Quarter
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WHY VALUE THEORY?
Since the "marginalist revolution" of the late 19th century mainstream economists have dismissed Marx's conception of value as unscientific and bordering on the delusional. But before doing likewise, you might first want to consider how often in everyday life you accept without question the existence of immaterial forces which cannot be measured or directly perceived with the physical senses but which can be inferred from their objective and observable effects on the world.
I assume that you accept the law of gravity. Gravity is an immaterial force that has objective and observable effects on the natural world around us. In this regard, the law of gravity is like law of value, as Marx himself points out in Chapter 1. When we go to the main market of Oaxaca, Mexico, to buy a kilo of beef, and the butcher weighs it on his scale, we will have one eye on the hand of the scale to make sure it hits 1 kg and one on the hand of the butcher to make sure he isn't providing some extra help. Newton's law of gravity is thereby confirmed in this economic transaction.
But when we ask why the kilo of beef costs 50 pesos, or why this kilo of beef is the same price as the kilo of cheese in the next stall, we will need a different kind of law, one whose effects in the social realm are just as powerful as the effects of Newton's law in the physical realm. We will need a theory of value that has law-like properties, which is what Marx's theory aims to give us.
The real question behind our Oaxaca shopping excursion is this: what is the purpose of a theory of value, any theory of value? Why do we need one in the first place and what is it supposed to do? If you believe that we need a theory of value to explain how subjective tastes, or what is often called consumer preferences, determine the prices of goods and services in a market, then you'll find a happy home in mainstream economics. On the other hand, if you believe that we need a theory of value to explain how the fundamental social relations of capitalist production operate and with what consequences not only in the market but across the entire length and breadth of society, then Marx is for you. To quote Harvey, Marx uses his concept of value to build "a theory of the processes by which capital rules over the conditions of life and labour of the working classes."
Central to Marx's conception of value is "labor power," or the capacity to labor. Capital is the first and only mode of production in history to treat labor power as a commodity. Take a moment to reflect on how strange this is: our capacity to labor, as distinct from our physical being as embodied laborers, is a commodity that can be bought and sold at market, like an iPhone 15, a share of Coca-Cola or a Barbie doll. Stranger still is that labor power not only can but must be bought and sold if the masses of humanity wish to keep body and soul together.
Under capital labor power is a matter of life and death.
In accordance with Marx's tripartite conception of the commodity form, labor power possesses a use value, an exchange value and a value. For the worker the use value of labor power is that it can be sold for money with which to buy consumption goods. For the capitalist the use value of labor power is that it can be bought and used to make profit in industrial production. The exchange value of labor power is the wage that has been negotiated by the two parties.
What, then, is the value of labor power? It is the socially necessary labor time required to produce the laborer who is the bearer of labor power. It follows that the value of labor power is equal to the value of all the commodities workers must buy in order to live and reproduce themselves and their dependents as active or future workers.
Labor power is a unique commodity in one crucial respect: it is the only one that can produce value. What is more, it can produce value in excess of its own value. For capitalists labor power is the goose that lays golden eggs, a metaphor that Marx, who was deeply steeped in the literature of classical Greece, borrows from Aesop's Fables.
Under capital workers are desperate to sell their labor power, the only commodity they own, to the highest bidder. They would not be so desperate, or desperate at all, if they were independent artisans who owned their own tools and shops or self-sufficient farmers who had access to their own land and draft animals. But they own neither the means of production nor the means of subsistence, having been systematically and violently stripped of both through a process which Marx calls " original" or "primitive" accumulation. In the final chapters of Capital, Marx provides a broad-brush account of this historical dispossession, observing that it was written in "letters of blood and fire."
A number of Marxists have insisted that so-called primitive accumulation should not be regarded as a one-and-done event but a process that is woven into the very fabric of capital and continues to the present day. Harvey has proposed that we limit the term primitive accumulation to the historical transition from feudalism to capitalism, and use the broader term "accumulation by dispossession" when dealing with the ongoing nature of this particular form of class warfare.
Whatever we choose to call the naked violence that accompanies the accumulation process, as a practical reality workers who wish to eat rather than go hungry must exchange their labor power for money in the form a wage.
Industrial capitalists, taking full advantage of the "dull compulsion of economic relations," buy labor power and means of production. They then combine these two commodities in a production process from which emerges a new commodity whose value exceeds the value of the labor power expended in its production.
According to capitalists and bourgeois economists, this arrangement rests on the foundation of a free and equal exchange between two commodity owners, the capitalist who owns money and the worker who owns labor power.
But for Marx this freedom and equality are a sham. What the capitalist and economist carefully conceal is that at a certain point during working day, long before quitting time, workers will have produced new value equal to the value of their labor power. Beyond this point workers produce "surplus value" which the capitalist will appropriate as his justly earned profit. This act of appropriation is what Marx calls exploitation but which, in many other contexts, would be called extortion.
According to Marx, surplus value is actually unpaid labor time which the boss extracts from the worker in the "hidden abode of production." It is the historically-specific mechanism by which the dominant class appropriates the surplus product under the capitalist mode of production.
Surplus value is the source of the capitalist's golden eggs, the fuel powering capital accumulation and the terrain on which anti-capitalist struggle is waged, not only at the point of production but in the spheres of realization, circulation and distribution as well.
We have come a long way since Marx the geologist stood on the rim of the gorge inspecting his rock. But if value can be compared to the Rio Grande River and we are following its southward course, we still have a long way to go before reaching the Gulf of Mexico.
Central de Abastos, Oaxaca, Mexico (from "¿Auténtica Oaxaca"?)