Really the issue just now is use value, though in a minute it will also start to touch on the proletariat and bare life cuz those are other things I’ve been thinking about. I just started Agnes Heller’s The Theory of Need in Marx. I suspect, if the introduction is any indication, that it will take a turn or turns which I won’t like. In the three or so pages of the actual book so far, though, there’s much that I like.
Heller begins with the beginning of v1 of Capital, the definition of a commodity as something which satisfies some want or need, regardless of whether that need is of the fancy or the stomach.
“[U]se value (…) satisfies needs” including “the need for the production of surplus value and for the valorisation of capital. (If labour power did not produce surplus value and the capitalist did not buy labour power, the capitalist relation would cease to operate.)” Heller quotes Marx, that under capitalism “the labourer exists to satisfy the needs of self-expansion of existing values.” In short, “the production of surplus value satisfies a need (the “need” to valorise capital).” (24. The last quote is Heller, not Marx. Note: find other related passages in v1 of capital to similar effect.)
The relationship this suggests between use value and exchange value is not opposition. Use value is a category which contains exchange value. Exchange is something which can satisfy a need, and thus can be said to have a use value. Exchanges, in so far as they recreate the capital relation, have the use value of recreating the capital relation. The quality of exchange-ability, or more particularly, to have the quality of being able to participate in exchange which recreates the capital relation, in turn, is precisely a use value. The conflict, then, is not use value vs exchange value but rather some use values with others
(just as, say, the conflict between the working class and the employing class is not humanity vs its other but some humans vs others).
Heller also notes that the value of the means of subsistence required to reproduce labor power, from which derives the value of labor power, is bound up with the needs of the worker (24). Or rather, the working class and sectors thereof, varying across a number of axes. These needs are not fixed or given but produced. When they fall below a certain level, however, there is a process which sets in, or which kicks into overdrive, of treating or producing the working class or sectors thereof as bare life, on which more in a moment. The needs of the members of the working class appear to capital “as limits of wealth and are analysed as such. At the same time, however, the need that appears in the form of effective demand is a motive force and a means of economic development.” (25.) Wealth here is defined as command, as surplus value.
*
Craig suggested in a comment on my notes on primitive accumulation etc that the proletariat is a variety of bare life, precisely the direction I’ve been wanting to go in with this stuff in relation to Agamben. (I would eventually like to make additional arguments about sovereignty and the state in marxism and in capitalism, when I get time to finally read through the state derivation debate, more of Bonefeld and others, etc).
Heller quotes from the 1844 Manuscripts, “Man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom.” She then adds “Physical needs correspond here to biological needs, which are directed towards maintenance of the mere conditions of life.” The book was originally published in German (as Bedeutung und Funktion des Begriffs Bedurfins im Denken von Karl Marx). I have it in English, but I’m pretty sure that the term here is “bloß,” which is also the term Benjamin and Agamben use to talk about mere or bare life.
Heller continues, noting that in the Grundrisse Marx “distinguishes the needs “created by society” from “natural” needs.” (29.) Heller stresses that for Marx - and if not for Marx still certainly for us and so much the worse for Marx - “external nature exists for man only in reciprocal interaction with society, in the process of socialisation.” (32.) Natural needs, that is, are social.
I think “mere” is also here “bloss,” though I don’t have the Heller in German.“Let us first analyse the group of “natural needs”. “Natural needs” refer to the simple maintenance of human life (self-preservation), and are “naturally necessary” simply because, without satisfying them, man is not able to preserve himself as a mere natural being.”
(31.)“These needs are not identical with those of animals, because for his own self-preservation man must also have certain conditions (warmth, clothing) for which the animal has no “need”. The necessary needs for sustaining man as a natural being are therefore social (there is a well-known passage in the Grundrisse according to which the hunger which is satisfied with knife and fork is different from the hunger which is satisfied by raw meat) : the mode of satisfaction makes the need itself social. Nevertheless, there is a contradiction between the concept of “natural needs” as an independent “group of needs”, and the concept of “social” or “socially produced” needs; or at the very least, there is something which cannot be coherently integrated into Marx’s philosophical theory of need. Let us now examine needs as structure of need (later on we shall see that Marx himself does this). If we state that the structure of need as a whole can only be interpreted in its correlation with the totality of social realtions, then it follows that only socially produced needs exist, and “natural needs” (whose mode of satisfaction changes the need itself) also have this “socially produced” character.”
“In our view the “natural needs” are not a group of needs but a limit concept: a limit (different for different societies) beyond which human life is no longer reproducible as such, beyond which the limit of bare existence is passed.” (32.) Given how frequently this limit condition exists, the category must still be retained, but Heller changes it: “I shall speak not of “natural needs” but of the “existential limit to the satisfaction of needs”.” (33.)
This limit is also bare life, it is the reduction of the proletariat to bare life. The production of the proletariat to bare life means a few things. It means that the conditions of this production are conditions where sovereignty exists, defined in Agamben’s terms, for the production bare life is what identifies the sovereign as sovereign. There are, then, many sovereigns. It also means that the proletariat is continually at a risk of death (though not in the same ways or to the same degree, this difference can not be overstated lest terribly important distinctions be leveled) because being bare life is precisely to have one’s being alive in question. In this sense, capitalism as biopolitical is thanatopolitical, an engine producing death.
This is the complaint of Sir F.M. Eden, quoted by Marx, that wages “were not more than enough for the absolute necessaries of life.” (Eden, quoted by Marx, Capital v1 ch27, p888 in the Penguin ed.) Marx next quotes a J. Arbuthnot: “If, by converting the little farmers into a body of men who must work for others, more labour is produced, it is an advantage which the nation should wish for.” Marx adds parenthetically that this means as well that the nation is thus something “to which, of course, the people who have been ‘convereted’ do not belong.” A figure included as excluded and reduced to bare life in the same process.
I think there’s a catgeory error here. Use values are the products of subjectivities. To say that exchange is a use value for capital is to reify capital as a subjectivity whereas the auto-valorisation of capital is an emergent tendency from the social relations of production (or something…).
Comment by Paul — October 5, 2006 @ 2:48 pm
hi Paul,
Thanks for the comment. I disagree, though.
I think there are capitalist subjectivities as much as proletarian ones. Human Resources departments help produce them, among other institutions. If we say that capital is a social relation and that subjectivity is also social (a product or form of social relation), then there’s no necessary contradiction in saying there are capitalist subjectivities.
Basically, I want to say surplus value production is the use value of labor power as a commodity, a use value which the capitalist fights to make use of on the shopfloor. I’m pretty sure Marx uses phrasing similar to this (not that Marx saying means it has to be right).
So if there’s a strike and a picket at some workplace then the owner has a need for surplus value extraction to begin again, for all sorts of reasons (this is a need of the fancy, so to speak). The manager has a need to restore surplus value extraction so the owner doesn’t fire her. Eventually production is restored without the manager being fired. The owner’s need is met, and the manager’s too. If this happens by buying off the leadership of the union, then whatever is used for the bribe has the use value of restoring production of surplus value. If this happens by cops and/or privately hired goons cracking heads, then that activity has the same use value (and the payment to the gov’t and/or the private security firm is the purchase price of that commodity). The same goes for union busting lawyers etc. There are a number of subjectivities produced and productive in all of these instances, including capitalist ones and ones productive of capitalism (like the proletariat - we produce capital because we have to, cuz we have to work).
We can also say that money has the use value of facilitating other exchanges, facilitating the transformation of my labor power into means of subsistence. That’s how I read the passages in Capital on the general equivalent.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 5, 2006 @ 4:36 pm
Hi Nate,
I think there is a fundamental asymmetry in the class struggle. Marx talks about the subjectivity of capitalists being formed only by the relation of competition with other capitalists - i.e. by the emergent tendency of capital. Whereas the subjectivity of workers is not external imposed in the same way by relations with other workers, but by their direct drive to their own auto-valorisation - i.e. unmediated. The role of capitalist is imposed externally on the subjectivities playing that role whereas the auto-valorisation of workers is the struggle against externally imposed values. We workers fight for use values to reproduce ourselves (though, admittedly, that’s still a social self) whereas capitalists fight to reproduce the social relations of capital that dictate their role to them. There is an asymmetry of freedom.
But although that stands, it still doesn’t really say what I mean that I think the extension of “use value” to cover action upon other people to have an effect is somehow different to action upon the world around us to produce the means for auto-valorisation.
*sigh*. File under terminally confused… I’ll have another crack at this tomorrow. I still think there’s a difference, and I think it will be useful to clarify what that is.
OK, all the best.
Paul
Comment by Paul — October 5, 2006 @ 11:01 pm
hi Paul,
I mostly agree - asymmetry, the capitalists are reactive to and parasitic upon our active power. (The working class is also an engine on the enemy class getting organized, though, not just competition w/ each other.) And there certainly is a huge difference between out self-valorization and the capitalist’s forcing us to (surplus)valorize ourselves, to be/act as capital. I just don’t think that use value vs exchange value maps that asymmetry well. I think these are oppositions within the category of use value such that use value is too broad and largely drops out - it’s some uses vs others, not use vs nonuse. Gotta run.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 5, 2006 @ 11:07 pm
Hi Nate,
[Perhaps we should clarify for readers? The bit above the crucial “*” in the above post is what this stream is about (not that bloss isn’t interesting and that, but it wasn’t in the original post)]. I guess the passage that I’m realy taking issue with is the contention “use value is a category that contains exchange value”. This is what I think is category error. We can say that exchange value is *used* to make profit for the bosses. That doesn’t make exchange value a species of use value. At the risk of sounding like an orthodox marxist (whatever the **** that might be defined as) I have to defend the distinction between use value and exchange value. You reduce by half the amount of socially necessary labour time to produce a use value, you haven’t changed the use value - a spade is a spade, is a spade (and not a shovel, still yet a spit or a turf-cutter).
Comment by Paul — October 5, 2006 @ 11:39 pm
heya Paul,
I don’t think the stakes are too big either way, but I do think that according to the logic of Marx’s categories (we can have a competition for orthodoxy, that’d rule!) the distinction between use value and exchange value doesn’t hold, in the sense of an opposition - really, the contradiction. If something’s exchange-ability is used by the boss to make a profit or to impose work on the proletariat then that thing has that as one of its use values. I’m all for all the things that fall under the term ‘use value’ in the conception you’re defending, more of them for we proles and less of the bosses’ use of our labor power, but I don’t see what holds up this distinction as a contradiction. There’s tons of uses we hate - like the use of music to spread racist ideas, the use of t-shirts to feel superior and make others feel inferior, etc. The uses that capitalists make of things in order to keep creating capitalism are among them.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 6, 2006 @ 2:23 am
Hmm, I like the idea of a competition re orthodoxy - a Cosmo-style quiz perhaps with 20 multiple-choice qustions and scoring? Potentially a rich seam… But back to use value. I think the difference is that exchangeability is not an inherent property of a use value, but one that is superposed on it by the social relations of production that surround it. In the same way that in past, pre-capitalist societies certain use values (tools, weapons) had magical properties attributed to them. And in a future, post-capitalist society use values will have no exchange value.
Comment by Paul — October 6, 2006 @ 8:35 am
Comrade Paul,
As I understand both historical and dialectical materialism (do I get orthodox points? maybe we could also have an ad campaign to re-brand orthodoxy, that’d rule), use values are not so much inherent properties but are properties which are socially produced. They can be materially embedded in objects, part of how objects can be part of the production of new needs, but they’re still social through and through. I also think exchangeability is just as inherent as the quality of being suitable to be painted on, or the quality of flammability. Exchanging something is no more an external imposition upon it than painting it or setting it on fire. The capitalist is no more in conflict with or removed from the inherent qualities of the object than the painter or the arsonist. They each just select different qualities to emphasize and other qualities to be indifferent from.
Comment by Nate — October 6, 2006 @ 1:06 pm
In the words of the Governer of California… Ahhl be bahk… For now I would direct your attention to Ch. 1 S. 4., Fetisism… more later.
Comment by Paul — October 14, 2006 @ 12:50 am