Читать книгу Value - Frederick Harry Pitts - Страница 11

Marx himself is often thought of as advocating precisely such a substantialist or ‘embodied’ position, in his labour theory of value, as that found in the political economy that preceded him. In this account, a commodity’s value always stems from the ‘labour time necessary in production’, and ‘labour performed under the command of capital’ likewise always ‘produces value, regardless of what later happens to the product’, the commodity’s value differing from its underpinning value substance only due to the artificial fluctuations of supply and demand.³⁹ From this perspective, Marx holds to a similar set of ‘conservation principles’, insofar as labour-time extracted in production reappears in the commodity, where it subsists independent of other activities such as trade and circulation, which can only transfer commodities and their values.⁴⁰ The presentation of such a reading of value in Marx’s work was partly as a result of political expediencies, sitting within a political and theoretical tradition that has staked its analyses and objectives on the power bestowed upon workers to create the value contained in the world of commodities and lay claim to the wealth produced. Regardless, the substantialist approach to value that we find in Marx represents ‘the culmination of the substance-theory tradition’ – and, we might add, its most sophisticated and forceful rendition.⁴¹

In his masterwork, Capital, Marx ‘start[s] from the simplest form of the product of labour’ in the society under study, which is that of capitalism.⁴² In capitalist society, this product is the commodity. Whilst some, as we will go on to see, have read this as an indication of the primacy of monetary exchange to Marx’s understanding of value, a substantialist reading of Marx’s value theory would instead suggest that Marx selects the commodity for the same reason as it was the starting point of Smith’s analysis: because it is a product of labour, which is the true underpinning principle of value.⁴³ Marx suggests that the commodity is ‘the simplest social form in which the labour product is represented in contemporary society’.⁴⁴ The commodity matters because labour matters. On this account, instead of looking at prices and seeking an explanation of why they are as they are, the aim for Marx was instead to understand the forms that labour takes and what the consequences of these forms might be.⁴⁵ Marx stated the importance of a perspective rooted in labour in his engagement with Smith, suggesting that ‘As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and how they produce.’⁴⁶

Commodities, for Marx, possess a use value and an exchange value. On the market, commodities are equalized where their exchange values are concerned, and differentiated with regard to their use values. The former is what allows the commodity to be exchanged with others; the latter is what makes the commodity attractive as an object of utility or desire.⁴⁷ Commodities must be sufficiently different from one another in order to have specific, particular characteristics that render a good or service a worthwhile purchase amongst all the other similar goods and services for sale on the market. For traditional readings of Marx’s value theory, this specificity consists in the ability of the labour engaged in production to offer a particular skill or capacity that endows the product of that labour with an individual use value carrying with it a practical, aesthetic or sensual application that makes the product of labour desirable as a commodity in itself. The commodity’s use value – its usefulness to the purchaser – therefore pertains to its endowment with a specific characteristic or feature rendering it superior or unique in some way with reference to other products. Exchange value, meanwhile – its power to command money in the market – is the criterion of the exchangeability of one commodity with one another, and dictates the proportion in which this can be done. In order to be considered exchangeable, two or more commodities must possess some common characteristic which brings them into relation with one another. The most immediate way in which two equivalent commodities might be said to be exchangeable is that they are products of human labour. From this flows the notion, common to the substantialist Marx and classical political economy, that value must have something to do with the labour expended in a product’s creation.⁴⁸

Commodities are traded not directly with one another, but by means of money. This is most auspiciously because capitalist societies are not societies of independent commodity producers who take the good or service they produce to market. The capitalist system of organizing economic relations is based upon the separation of workers from the means of production through which they would be able to provide themselves with their own commodities. The ownership of the means of production by a class of capitalists concentrates into the hands of this latter class control over the fruits of the process of production. It is therefore the capitalist who oversees and organizes the aggregate efforts of their workforce, who, structured in accordance with a division of labour, are unable to achieve the production of any good or service individually.

It is partly in explaining how this state of affairs came to be that Marx’s developed value theory represents a distinctive step both within and beyond substantialism.⁴⁹ Specifically, Marx’s theory of labour power follows through on the unfulfilled potential of cost-of-production approaches to value by uncovering the historically determinate character of labour power and its value as a stake in the conflict between workers and capitalists. For Marx, at the inception of value is a prior act of valuation conditioned normatively and politically, even if value thereafter is taken to flow as if by osmosis from its substantial foundation. Certain historical preconditions must be in place to render labour as an act not for itself but for exchange, and these must be institutionally reproduced. It is only by virtue of these conditions being in place that labour can be posited a value to begin with, and, from this, a value notionally posited to that in which labour is embodied thereafter.⁵⁰

In embedding the study of value within an account of its prehistory, Marx’s labour theory of value surpassed the naturalization of labour and exchange in the work of Smith and Ricardo. This is not to say that Marx’s work was free of transhistorical concepts. Marx saw work – in the sense of the human metabolism with nature through which the world around us is transformed into useful things for us to use, wear, eat and so on – as a necessity specific to humans alone, in that we exist, unlike the animal kingdom, at one remove from nature.⁵¹ Unlike the bee which acts upon nature as a matter of instinct, building its hive, humans conceive of designs upon the world before executing them.⁵² Nature does not give over easily to human purposes but – with sometimes disastrous consequences – must be made to bend to our will. This is not a ‘natural’ state of affairs but expresses the development of humankind as a specific sort of social animal that defines itself through its domination and objectification of nature as a means to establish its own subjective presence in the world.⁵³ Thus, the need to produce the world around us is a constant part of human life. Humans require means of production – tools, machines – to use to do this, and the application of human effort, in the form of work, to accomplish the transformation of nature.

What differentiated Marx’s account of the transhistorical character of the human intercourse with nature from Smith and Ricardo’s naturalization of human economic life was its critical confrontation with the contemporary mediation of this essence in the historically specific form of wage labour. The selling of one’s capacity to labour for a wage, Marx suggested, was the result of a social and political process characterized by violence, struggle and the unintended consequences of movements for reform and liberty. Feudalism – in most cases, the mode of production that preceded capitalism – was characterized by a direct relationship of power and dependence between feudal landlords and their tenant serfs. The serf relied on the landlord for the land that they in turn farmed to subsist, with a payment to the landlord as rent. Whilst their freedom was limited, their subsistence was guaranteed, directly or in collaboration and exchange with others. With the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth century in countries like England, France and the Netherlands, these relationships were restructured.⁵⁴ From a relationship of mutual interdependence and personalized power with the feudal landlord, tenant serfs were cast free, with nothing to call their own but their capacity to work for pay. Deprived of the independent individual or collective means of producing the things they needed to live directly, the rising proletariat were therefore doubly free: free of feudal domination, and free to dispose of their capacity to labour in the labour market for a wage in order to subsist.⁵⁵

For most, the selling of labour power for a wage became the dominant means of reproducing the conditions of life. In order for them to deploy that capacity to labour, means of production were needed, which a combination of new regimes of property and the rule of law, and brute force and violence, had placed in the hands of a rising merchant and industrial class at precisely the time their technological sophistication was accelerating. The ascendant bourgeoisie was therefore placed in a position to acquire the capacity to labour – the ‘labour power’ – sold by the new proletariat on the newly created market for labour. The consumption of the commodity labour power enabled the bourgeoisie to reproduce the conditions of their business operations, whose success workers depended on in turn, in order to continue being employed. The things produced were the property of the owners of the means of production. The results of production were sold as commodities on the market by means of money. The producers of these goods – the workers – in turn survived by purchasing their means of living with the wages paid for the disposal of the labour power they sold.

It should be noted here that, whilst these political and economic conditions were central to the rise of capitalism and a society that reproduces itself through the valorization of value, this understanding of the evolution of ‘free labour’ only gets us part of the way. For Marx, at the same time as ‘freeing’ labour, capitalism is historically and continuingly constituted in various states of unfree labour, including, notably, slavery.⁵⁶ Rather than seeing these as a remnant of pre-capitalist modes of production contravening the intrinsically ‘free’ character of labour in capitalist society, Marx recognized that the revolution in social relations that paved the path for the rise of capitalism implied the exploitation and appropriation associated with plantation slavery and colonialism.⁵⁷ Marx observed that ‘without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry’, and that ‘the veiled slavery of the wage-earners in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the New World’.⁵⁸ Likewise, Marx contended that slavery was itself capitalist insofar as it was driven by the valorization process and the pursuit of profit through productivity gains.⁵⁹ Unfortunately, this has not stopped subsequent Marxists neglecting or relegating not only the importance of slavery to the analysis of capitalism, but also the racial domination around which slavery was and is organized.⁶⁰ Marx’s analysis, then, has also been used to locate – as well as class – racism, and specifically anti-blackness, not as an epiphenomenal consequence or superstructural distortion of capitalist social relations, but as a constitutive factor in its development.⁶¹

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In Marx’s account of the violence and subjugation at the origin and basis of capitalism, then, the development of labour, exchange and value looks very different than it does in the work of the classical political economists. Marx improved upon prior political economy by explaining how a society in which subsistence is mediated by wage labour came about. As we have seen, he did so through an explanation based outside the workplace itself, taking in broader changes in juridical, political and transactional relationships between class actors in the legal sphere, the market and society at large. But it was insufficient simply to stop there, and, having established this state of affairs in Capital, Marx took readers beyond the ‘realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham’ into the sphere of production to explore the implications of these changes for how work is performed and experienced, and the hidden mechanics and dynamics of value creation in capitalist society.⁶² What Marx called the ‘valorization process’ – the process by which the value invested in production is expanded in pursuit of profit and the reproduction of the conditions for business to continue – compels the process by which labour is bought, sold and engaged in the ‘labour process’.⁶³ Profit, for Marx, arises where the capitalist is able to receive more from the sale of the good or services they produce than they have expended on its production – in other words, from surplus value. In order to understand how this surplus can be raised from the exchange of equivalents, we pick up where Marx’s account of the constitution of wage labour in the proletariat’s ‘double freedom’ left off. The individual’s labour power must be sold to a willing buyer in possession of the means of production required to put that labour to good use. This labour power presents at the point of sale a purely potential quantity, for which a wage is agreed in order for the willing buyer – the capitalist – to claim its ownership and thus the ability to turn what is merely a potential into actuality. In selling labour power to the capitalist, the individual thus gives over full and sole discretion as to how, when and for how long the labour power can be employed in its next stage of development – as labour in its concrete, practical existence.⁶⁴

The secret of the surplus at first appears inscrutable because the capitalist purchases the commodity labour power at its value.⁶⁵ This value is the ‘socially necessary’ minimum amount of time that the worker must labour to reproduce her labour power so that she might reappear for work the following morning.⁶⁶ Yet for a profit to be turned and the value invested valorized, the monetary worth of what they produce must be greater than the employer has outlaid on wages. How can this be so? Marx contends that the commodity of labour power possesses a unique quality when inserted in the labour process and applied to the means of production: it can create more value than it is worth.⁶⁷ For Marx, this cannot be determined in the market alone, but rests on a specific set of antagonistic and highly conflictual relationships situated in the labour process itself. This has to do with the way that the time, effort and productivity of workers is managed through organizational and technological means. The contract of employment having been signed, the employer has the power to wield control over the worker they have recruited, but there is no telling what the effectiveness of the labour capacity they have acquired may be in the production process itself – varying in skill or militancy, for instance. A struggle therefore ensues on the part of the employer to extract from that labour power as much effort and productivity as possible in combination with the means of production they own.⁶⁸

For Marx, the production of commodities is divided up into two parts: necessary labour and surplus labour. Translated into time, the first ‘necessary’ portion has two determinations: the amount of time taken to produce the commodity demanded for sale by the capitalist, as a measure of general human labour in the abstract; and the amount of time the worker takes to produce the commodity in order to reproduce their labour power with the consumption of equivalent commodities through the provision of a wage. This demonstrates the dual nature of necessary labour-time: necessary for the worker, because of their sustenance, and necessary for the capitalist because ‘the continued existence of the worker is the basis of that world’.⁶⁹

Whereas the necessary labour-time is that part of the working day where the labourer works ‘for himself’, what Marx calls surplus labour-time is time spent working for the capitalist. Here, labour power is consumed by the capitalist in order to produce surplus value: that part of the value generated from the labour process left over when the worker’s recompense and other associated expenses are taken into account. As such, it is in the capitalist’s interests to prolong this part of the working day for as long as possible and minimize the proportion of time spent on the reproduction of the worker. By manipulating the length and composition of the working day, the capitalist can secure a greater amount of value from the commodity of labour power than its value at the point of purchase.

This can be done in two main ways, according to Marx: through raising absolute surplus value or relative surplus value. Both centre on the rate of surplus value, or what Marx also called the rate of exploitation: surplus labour divided by necessary labour.⁷⁰ If productivity and intensity are given, the rate of surplus value can only be raised by the prolongation of the working day – absolute surplus value – and if the working day is given, the rate of surplus value can only be increased by a shift in the ratio of necessary to surplus labour, achieved by a change in either productivity or intensity – in other words, relative surplus value.⁷¹

In raising what Marx calls ‘absolute surplus value’, employers extend the time workers work above and beyond the bare minimum to earn the wage necessary for the reproduction of their labour power. The employer pays the same but gets more in return. In this context, ‘moments are the elements of profit’. The means of production that lie dormant in workplaces overnight demand this, existing only to ‘absorb labour’. Starved of this, plant and equipment do not perform their function, constituting a loss to the capitalist. As such, Marx signifies here that ‘to appropriate labour during all the 24 hours of the day is the inherent tendency of capitalist production’.⁷² With a watchful eye on the clock, times extraneous to the labour process are carefully cropped. Workers see infinitesimal, yet ever-increasing, portions of their free time eroded at the beginning and end of the day and at break-times, accumulating over the year into a significant surplus under the command of the employer. Such is the capitalist’s ‘right’ as a buyer: the contract of employment signed, the capitalist possesses full discretion over the way in which the commodity at their disposal is used.⁷³

But, likewise, it is the labourer’s ‘right as a seller’ to have a set duration to the working day.⁷⁴ Although the working day can vary, certain limits do exist that cannot easily be transgressed by capital: firstly, the physical need for the worker to reproduce himself in order to arrive at the factory gates the next morning; and secondly, the ‘moral’ aspect related to the social standard of satisfaction, associated with spare time away from work, which varies between individual circumstances and social conditions.⁷⁵ Where these limits are in place, raising absolute surplus value becomes more difficult for the capitalist. Other means must be found to increase the ratio of surplus to necessary labour, which do not extend the working day outwardly but restructure it internally. This centres on raising what Marx calls ‘relative surplus value’.

The prerogative of relative surplus value pertains to the ‘curtailment of the necessary labour-time, and [with it] the corresponding alteration in the respective lengths of the two components of the working day’.⁷⁶ The necessary labour-time can only be lessened by a fall in the value of the labour power that needs reproducing. This implies that the means of subsistence must be produced over a shorter period, through an increase in productivity.⁷⁷ By intensifying work and reducing that portion of the day in which the worker labours for her own reproduction, whether through advances in productivity-raising technologies or management regimes, the capitalist can keep the length of the working day the same whilst increasing the proportion of it given over to the production of surplus value. The immediate aim of capital is, thus, less the contraction in labour-time itself as a narrowing of the time necessary within the day for the worker to reproduce themselves, and thus for a set amount of commodities to be produced.⁷⁸ The part of the working day ‘socially necessary’ to the reproduction of both capital and labour is proportionally shortened, whilst the ‘surplus’ part of the day that belongs to the capitalist and accrues as surplus value is proportionally lengthened, without infringing limits placed upon the length of the working day as a whole. Whilst the practical consequence of these dynamics might appear to be the theft of workers’ time, the capitalist, as the buyer of labour power, is simply exerting their legal right to derive as much use value as they can from the commodity they have purchased.⁷⁹ And, in deriving use value from one commodity, they hope to profit from the exchange value in which it results, in the sale of another.

Time, thus, represents the means by which all else is calculated in Marx’s substantialist schema, and the basis for the surplus that accrues to the capitalist in the form of value. Commodities, for Marx, are to be understood as ‘congealed labour-time’, and, where the substance of value is human labour, the measure of its magnitude is nothing other than labour-time.⁸⁰ However, it might be said that, if this state of affairs were really the case and labour-time directly determined value, then work conducted at a relaxed pace would be represented in a greater amount of value than more fastidious and efficient efforts.⁸¹ To clarify, Marx himself forewarns against the substantialist pitfall of regarding labour-time as the measure of commodity value whilst in the same instance ‘confusing the labour which is materialised in the exchange value of commodities and measured in time units with the direct physical activity of individuals’.⁸² This has implications that, as we will see in subsequent chapters, cannot be neatly contained in a substantialist approach to the value problematic.

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Scholars like Jean Baudrillard have suggested that Marx’s critique, in its continuation of themes from classical political economy, remains too close to its object in assuming the standpoint of one of its conceptual poles, labour.⁸³ Indeed, partly owing to the political expendiencies of the time in which Marx was writing, in places he did endow production and labour with a ‘revolutionary title of nobility’. This ‘productivism’, Baudrillard argues, exhibits a tendency to ascribe to production the status of the ‘active moment’ in the determination of value, and to other moments, such as consumption, a relative and absolute passivity. This conceptually subordinates ‘[s]ocial wealth or language, meaning or value, sign or phantasm’ to some kind of ‘production’ at the hands of one or another type of ‘labour’. This productivist logic, Baudrillard suggests, mimics that of capitalist society itself in subordinating everything, ‘all human material and every contingency of desire and exchange’, to the ends of ‘value, finality, and production’.⁸⁴ Delving into the realm of production brings us no closer to the truth of the matter, Baudrillard asserts, for, ‘instead of the shadows of the market place, we are sent to an equally obscure underside of the system: the place of production’.⁸⁵ The latter cannot be understood in isolation from its contradictory unity with the sphere of circulation, just as use value has no existence independent of its contradictory unity with exchange value – the each being the precondition of the other – and concrete labour no existence independent of its contradictory unity with abstract labour.⁸⁶ However, Baudrillard argues that this did not stop Marx positivizing the first term of each over the other as the underpinning principle of a wider social transformation, remaining mired in the ‘repressed side’ of the concepts of classical political economy and the capitalist society it sought to describe.⁸⁷

As such, in basing itself in the perspective of production, a part of Marx’s critique was left incomplete, and, at its best, it merely served to ‘interiorize’ and ‘complete’ its object, substituting one naturalization – of Homo economicus in Smith and Ricardo – for another.⁸⁸ In this way, Marx’s theories are ‘taken in by the [same] socially produced appearance (Schein)’ of economic objectivity that Marx’s critique itself attempted to decipher.⁸⁹ In taking for granted the appearance of value as having been ‘created’ by a substantial, physical, concrete brand of labour, Marx adopted a part of the object he sought to critique, namely Ricardo’s labour theory of value. Since then, over the course of its reception, ‘Marx’s theory of value has been mistakenly identified with the classical, or Ricardian, labour theory of value’, and not, as we will go on to see, the study of ‘the specific social form of labour’ that we find elsewhere in Marx.⁹⁰ Part of the difficulty arises from the fact ‘that Marx left behind no finished version of the labour theory of value’. In this context, ‘there remains … an urgent priority … to reconstruct out of the more or less fragmentary presentations and the numerous individual remarks strewn in other works, the whole of the value theory’.⁹¹ Rather than a question of theological correctness, uncovering the essence of Marx’s work is more a matter of where to place emphasis in his sprawling and unfinished output. Stressing the ‘labour’ theory of value or his theory of exploitation, as we have done here alongside other ‘substance’ theories of value, only serves to ‘neglect his originality and reduce him to something which was already reached before’.⁹² As we see next, it is rather the specific monetary character of his theory that distinguishes it from what went before, moving closer to later ‘subjective’ theories of value as a relation than the ‘objective’ theories of value as a substance considered in this chapter. This can be done only by ‘tearing the theory apart and putting it together in a new form to reach the goal that it has set itself better’, in the words of Jurgen Habermas.⁹³