What in the hell …

What follows started out as a comment on a post Tim wrote over at the Wrong Side of Capitalism. I decided to make it an entry here not out of any assessment of it’s quality but because it got too long and I started to feel like it may be overbearing of me to leave all of this in Tim’s comment section. I just cut and pasted the entry from his comment box to here, so it’s still in the form of a comment to Tim. All of this is stuff I want to think and read and write more on, which is to say, my mind is not entirely made up. I recommend reading Tim’s post.

hi Tim,
Thanks for this. It’s very interesting. I’m not sure what I think of this, and I’m not sure I agree. I’ve been meaning to write something about this to try and get clearer about it ever since our (rather drunken, at least on my end) conversation about this when you were in Mpls in the fall. This may provide the impetus. For now, here’s my take.

Very simply, I’m not convinced about the distinction between use and use value. Rather, I’m not convinced about the … well, the use you suggest could be made of the distinction. I’ll need to check back over the Marx to see if I’m departing from the Holy Writ here, but for now, here’s how the terms work to my mind.

Use is the activity (by some actor), use value is the potential (of something other than the actor) to enter into that activity. So, labor power as a commodity has, for the capitalists, the use value of being producing more value than its purchased price (the wage), when it is used. (If used successfully, judged from the capitalist perspective. Not a foregone conclusion but a continual matter of conflict.) In this sense, exchange value is a subset of use value, and one which serves to help police other use values from being made use of (ie, any that don’t entail submitting to labor and money).

I don’t think the term use value reflects or enacts reification. It just means that actors can potentially make use of objects in an variety of ways. Use values are relative to actors, of course - the use value of a free blogging site for bloggers might include a sense of connection, a feeling of self-importance, a chance to show off, a chance to try and write better, a way to meet people, something to do other than work while in an office, etc. The use value for employers might include employees who write better, get material published more often, know material better, etc (particularly for those of us whose employers are universities). The use value for the people hosting the site might include advertising revenue, some sense of pride in being a popular site, etc. All of these relate to each other in different ways, of course, some of them potentially antagonistically. I don’t see what’s problematic at terming these ‘use values’ and so on, or how that’s a reificiation.

It is clear, however, that there’s not an antagonism between use value as such and exchange value, but rather between some use values and exchange value. Like I said though, and I suspect you won’t agree, I think exchange value is a species of use value - in keeping with your point about literary strategy in Marx (which it’d be awesome if you wrote on cuz it’s a very interesting idea), I think exchange value is a character in the stage play who at first appears to be one thing and is later unveiled to be another different but related thing. If I knew more literature I’d give an example but I can’t think of one. (Perhaps the Communist Parties of the world, state capitalism generally? They appear in some cases and to some people to be something radically different but are actually a species of capitalism though not identical to ‘free market’ capitalism. I don’t know if that example works here very well.)

I do think you’re right that use value is only identifiable based on exchange value, but I think this historically the case, not logically. That’s vague, sorry. Let me try again.

Let’s say hypothetically I go to a restaraunt tonight and my dining companion chokes to death. It’s awful, I develop a phobia of dining out, I go to therapy, and eventually start dining out again to work through that. I now have a category of “deadly dining out” in distinction to “nondeadly dining out”. The latter category arises historically from my experiences - without that experience there’d be no need for the category - but it’s not in any way a mistake to use that category to read prior history. My therapist can say to me, “you had nothing but nondeadly dining out prior to January 2006″ as part of helping me get over my phobia. That’s true and a worthwhile distinction to make in that case. Now, it would be false and pernicious if the therapist said that therefore no future deadly dining out was possible, or that my prior dining experiences were perfect (some have involved experiences of racism, humiliation, exploitive waged labor, etc).

This parallels use value and exchange value. Once there’s exchange value, or production for exchange value, it makes sense to distinguish between the two in a way that wouldn’t have occurred before. That doesn’t mean that it’s invalid to say that prior to exchange value there was only use value. It would, of course, be invalid to say that all those prior use values were the same or to paint an idyllic picture in some unmediated or historically nostalgic/primitivist sense. (On that note, there’s a short discusison on this as regards the idea of the commons over at the archive, here.)

I’ve already gone on too long, but I’d like to say one more thing. You write:

“a valorization of use value fails to attack capitalism, as production of use value produces something separable from the producer and, so it would seem, something which will structure domination in just the way capitalism does. Valorizing production always risks valorizing the conditions of production under capitalism and so, in the last instance, valorising capitalism”

I’m not sure. Uncritical or unmediated valorization of use value, as if there’s a use value as such and as if that would be a priori antagonistic to capitalism, those are certainly problematic, not very interesting, and probably not of much use value to us. I’m not sure about the “something separable” part. Separability form the producer depends at least in part on the idiom or viewpoint: children are separable from their parents, and yet from another perspective they’re inseparably bound to them. You seem to imply here a sort of objective or non-interpretated separation, which I’m not sure I’d understand (I hate the bosses too, I don’t like capitalist separation, but I’m not sure that’s ultimately any more valid or from a more objective standpoint than any other - the correctness of my correct views is a judgment derived from standards internal to my [correct!] perspective - which is not at all to say I don’t hold my convictions strongly). I think something like this comes up in Debord and in some of the Open Marxism stuff I’ve read, I think it’s connected to the Hegelian idiom (not that in general that’s the only use of Hegel or the only source of this impulse) in those writers.

Finally, you say that productivism risks valorizing capitalist production, which I agree with, but most of what your saying sounds more like you mean, or at least suspect, not that it risks but that it does and will (and can not but) valorize capitalist production. Is that fair, or have I misread you? If that is a fair characterization then I think I disagree. At a minimum, I think it’s important to separate what we hold to be a risk from what we hold to be a foregone conclusion, and I do think there are specific situations where valorizing forms of production can have a worthwhile political use (recuperated factories in Argentina right now, for instance). That said, we don’t want to take these forms uncritically or treat them as not being still bound up with capitalism, I just mean that they can sometimes exist in a condition of contradiction/ambivalence/antagonism. I hope this makes sense.

Best wishes, and if I haven’t said it you already, happy new year,
Nate