Capital Volume One
Part I: Commodities and Money
Chapter One: Commodities

Section 4.The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4

We conclude our reading of Chapter One with Fetishism. The section is significant for many reasons, not least of which is that Marx himself reworked it several times in later editions of Capital. The section is meant to be a summary of what came before in the chapter, but also, it is intended to use what we have derived to address the mystery and confusion surrounding the commodity and its circulation. As this form is the very foundation of the society which we take for granted, there is little that this discussion does not touch... at least in its potential.

Instead of a "line-by-line" reading, we can start "paragraph-by-paragraph", beginning with the first two:


A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was. [26a]

The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determining factors of value. For, in the first place, however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, may be, it is a physiological fact, that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles, &c. Secondly, with regard to that which forms the ground-work for the quantitative determination of value, namely, the duration of that expenditure, or the quantity of labour, it is quite clear that there is a palpable difference between its quantity and quality. In all states of society, the labour time that it costs to produce the means of subsistence, must necessarily be an object of interest to mankind, though not of equal interest in different stages of development.[27] And lastly, from the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labour assumes a social form.


The notes to the two paragraphs, which are quite important in this section, are here:


26a. In the German edition, there is the following footnote here: “One may recall that China and the tables began to dance when the rest of the world appeared to be standing still – pour encourager les autres [to encourage the others].” The deafeat of the 1848-49 revolutions was followed by a period of dismal political reaction in Europe. At that time, spiritualism, especially table-turning, became the rage among the European aristocracy. In 1850-64, China was swept by an anti-feudal liberation movement in the form of a large-scale peasant war, the Taiping Revolt. – Note by editors of MECW.

27. Among the ancient Germans the unit for measuring land was what could be harvested in a day, and was called Tagwerk, Tagwanne (jurnale, or terra jurnalis, or diornalis), Mannsmaad, &c. (See G. L. von Maurer, “Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark, &c. Verfassung,” Munchen, 1854, p. 129 sq.)


Marx begins with a variation on the summary he has repeated many times throughout the Chapter: Products of labor are common to all epochs of human history and undergo no strange metamorphosis as such. So soon as they become commodities, however... so soon as they are explicitly produced for exchange, "so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was. [26a]"

What "grotesque ideas" are these? That the commodity "has" Value and that it "engages" (or "exchanges") with other commodities... no, the world of commodities... wherein each commodity shares that very same notion. It is not just that commodities become stamped with the social relationships of their producers but that those relationships appear to be aspects of the bodily form of commodities themselves.

Not only is Marx playfully repeating what we have already acknowledged, but he goes a step further: "In all states of society, the labour time that it costs to produce the means of subsistence, must necessarily be an object of interest to mankind, though not of equal interest in different stages of development.[27] And lastly, from the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labour assumes a social form."

Obviously, something even greater than either the natural interest in the labor time it takes to produce the various products of labor, or the social form of that labor is at work.

Consider this for a second... All of the traits of commodity production exist previously, without ever producing "grotesque ideas" from the "wooden brains" of inanimate objects. This fetishism is something unique to commodity production.

Where does it come from?

Why do we call it fetishism?

"It is not just that commodities become stamped with the social relationships of their producers but that those relationships appear to be aspects of the bodily form of commodities themselves." I realize that I am thick about this stuff, but could you offer an example of how commodities are "stamped with the social relationships of their producers"; and how they "appear to be aspects of the bodily form of commodities themselves."

I have a feeling that, at least in part, this is why we call it "fetishism"...

we were hashing out "value" around here, and it kept coming back to the fact that we felt that Value should function as an honorific of sorts -- ie the more useful/necessary the work, the more we should esteem it. Especially manual labor since it seems the most primary type of labor.

As it turns out this line of reasoning is entirely beside the point, because value is simply a measure of how many "average hours" is invested as considered from the perspective of the commodity. And there again we see the perils of language with words like "invested".

This is why what is really being traded is the labor time of human beings, with commodities in truth serving as tokens of "shares" of the collective labor pool of human beings.

That is also why I think Anax says this Section functions partly as a recap of the previous section. Because once you've calibrated yourself to this understanding of value, the rest more or less falls into place by itself.

about the relative invisibility of the labor (and war and environmental costs) of the commodities we buy. Memorably, one of these discussions was a thread Chlamor put up some time ago here about Coltan and our electronic gadgetry.

As I recall,the conclusion of that discussion, such that there ever is one, concerned the harsh fact that the opacity of the production behind the commodities we buy means that we really are powerless to make "good choices" as we consume.

I think many of us, completely aside from anything to do with Marx, have though about buying items that are "green" or "fair trade" or "local," etc. And all of this in some effort to inject some sort of do-gooder morality into the logic of our role in the economy.

Stepping back from this matter of making "good choices," what we can come to see is that there is a clear view of the items we have to choose from. There is however no clear view at all of their origins, whether it be the labor that went into their final production, the "dead labor" that precedes that final productive process, or the concerns related to raw materials and the environment that are related. We turn on our lights and somehow are not thinking too much about the missing mountaintops in W VA. ...

It is this, the separation of commodities from production and from the social relations of production that I understand to be the source of what Marx coins as Fetishism.

The commodities and the swirling markets of and around them are as an inscrutable apparition entirely disconnected from, well, US. This is of course just the opposite of reality. However, in this case, we do not tend to see reality. We see the alternate reality of exchange values arisen from the ether and walking among us, the 'reality' of commodity fetishism, one especially apparent when things crash and the flood of ghost hunters theorize about what caused the crash while, "as the hart pants after fresh water" they pile up cash, the only commodity that seems to make any sense all of the sudden.

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/gen/124448/thumbs/s-GLENN-BECK-GOLD-large.jpg

the nature of the capitalist system is occluded in many ways (BY the nature of the capitalist system, no less), and you've introduced several more here. I do think at some point we are less talking about fetishism and more about "their morals and ours" though.

but I was thinking that after we finished Chapter 1 it might make sense to do a thread about Marx's method, the Abstract and the Concrete, the meaning of "scientific" investigation, the "rich totality" and unity in diversity (which surprisingly or maybe not is cast off as a catchphrase for things like "dialectical unity/interpenetration of opposites")

And of course, another angle for wrapping this up would be the exposition vs inquiry distinction Marx is at pains to relate to us.

The reason I'm thinking about this is because I've often that a final summary serves not just to reinforce the previous material but also to help organize it mentally so it falls into place. For me at least.

And, as a side bit of philosophy for Dhal and myself, we could talk about "Hegel's Ladder" which has quite a bit to do with all of the above.

Maybe a Cadillac is seen to intrinsically "say" something - that you are a superior person, or discerning, or successful if you have one. But the observer does not look at the person who owns it and say "you are a superior person" they look at the Cadillac and think those things, as though the Cadillac itself had the qualities we are "seeing." Our notions about social relationships have been transferred to the object.

BP and I were talking about this is regards to others things, musical instruments for example. Old instruments were just laying about and inexpensive to buy, until speculators and investors started trading in them. Soon the $5 fiddle became a $500 fiddle. This changed the way that people looked at the object, the instrument. They now looked at the instrument and "saw" qualities that "explained" its value. But the object didn't change. New uses were not found for it. Something changed in the realm of social relationships, not anything about the object.

while I suppose it depends on how "macro" you want to look at things, this seems like more of a derivative effect than anything terribly fundamental.

Also, its not quite correct to think that properties of the object are sacrosanct. Maybe they are and maybe they're not, but outside of the requisite need to possess some utility, those properties are irrelevant.

I think its entirely a different conversation if we want to talk about if/why use values SHOULD be considered relevant.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15-D-Wfx0-A

http://espanol.video.yahoo.com/watch/2827121/v2167259

You might recall a conversation we had about Cuba, how the government was having a hard time filling management positions for the same pay as regular workers. So Cuba gave the managers better pay as an expedient. Goes back to the revolution being executed in phases, as conditions allow. It is I think a real reason for the resistance of the middle class liberals, their pay rate, their stuff, is them, that is their fetish.

At a certain point in human history, humans primarily produce commodities which are nothing other than the same old products of labor, but now produced for exchange. The basis for that exchange is a reduction of the labor time it took to produce each commodity but in a strange social form: undifferentiated "abstract" human labor. In order to make such a calculation, all human labor is stripped of its real attributes in order to create a socially defined commonality measured only by its duration.

Now, take a step back... The above evolves from the trade in the products of labor, which was for the longest time incidental or strictly limited. Yet, at some point, exchange implies the production of commodities, or production explicitly for exchange. The evolution of "markets" allows this change but the motive force of this transformation is that it is a method for producing surplus value... i.e. a method whereby some live by the labor of others. Commodities are produced by free laborers who are paid for their labor, but the price of that labor is completely different from the amount of value which that labor creates. The difference is the foundation of commodity production. Commodities themselves appear in the starring role but, in truth, they are mere vessels in a social dance whereby "proprietors" (of capital) happily expropriate the actual producers.

Now, take a step back... The expropriation above is only apparent retrospectively. It is not sufficient that commodities be produced for the surplus value to be realized. They must be exchanged (or sold). The original participants, the owner of Capital, and the producer who has no means to produce on his own and therefore must sell his labor power to survive... these actors are finished with their respective "duties" while "their" commodities go forth into the world of buying and selling. In this world, the commodities themselves owe nothing to their own origins, other than a passing acknowledgement that they were indeed, once, produced. Now their "value" appears as something "innate". More, it is the inanimate commodities which appear as the active parties, whirling in circulation, while the original producers now act as passive spectators.

What has happened is that the commodities - objects - have been endowed with inherent value or powers by their creators. That is the very definition of a "fetish". From the Latin: facticius ("artificial") and facere, ("to make").

Where does this strange perspective of ours come from? Marx says in the very next paragraph that it comes from the form itself (commodities).

It is not commodities, but we who find ourselves standing on our head... or, at least, seeing the world from that position.

artificial relationships? OK, I will try not to hold up anybody on this. Thanks. I will stick my hand up if I lose the track...

because this really IS the crux of fetishism.

I need this to be explained and questioned as much as you all can take it...I'm not even sure enough to ask questions...

Anax says: "All of the traits of commodity production exist previously, without ever producing "grotesque ideas" from the "wooden brains" of inanimate objects. This fetishism is something unique to commodity production."

So, before capitalism when a human and/or his/her family produced excess items for barter, they were using their own labor to produce one item (pottery, basketry, food, etc.) to exchange directly for the labor-product of another (pottery, basketry, food, etc.). In other words human number one is exchanging his/her labor directly with human number two, exchanging labor for labor in a (hopefully) equitable way. An exchange of human need for human need.

But with the rise of capitalism, all of a human's labor was bent to the production of one thing, no longer an exchange of need for need, but for the wealth inherent in the production itself. Might this be part of those "grotesque ideas"?

Close? Way off?

I think it would be interesting to revisit earlier sections and ask if these statements are true.


before capitalism when a human and/or his/her family produced excess items for barter


In other words human number one is exchanging his/her labor directly with human number two


exchanging labor for labor in a (hopefully) equitable way. An exchange of human need for human need.

The reason I highlight these quotes are that

1. Humans didn't individually trade with each other even in precapitalist society outside of a complex network of social relations and highly governed interactions

2. There was still a calculus of social labor constantly being done before the onset of capitalist society, and it certainly did not reduce to "need for need"


no longer an exchange of need for need, but for the wealth inherent in the production itself.

It was always about extracting the wealth "inherent in the production process", I don't think that is what differentiates capitalist society from preceding modes of production at all. If it was, then class struggle would have to emerge and accompany capitalism without preceding it.

is not necessarily the same "thing". In many ancient societies production was based on slave labor. And serfs and wage laborers in the middle ages were not the same and did not "translate" into the workforce of capital in the same way. To talk about "production" pre and post capitalism as being the same thing, I think is wrong. There has to be a place for the motivation of production. Human beings do not produce (as human beings) for the purpose of acquiring wealth alone (or perhaps not a all). The difference between producing on a level of human need (the individual human being) and of producing on a mass scale (the capitalist owner) for the acquisition of wealth has to be seen as different. Engels says as much in his book on the English Working Class. The distinction is not on a society-wide level or on the level of an historical epoch, but on the level of, "Why is this person working? What is she working for?"
As Anax said, all of the conditions for this "fetishism" existed before capitalism. What was the cause of this fetishism? What changed between the pre-capitalist and capitalist eras to produce this fetishism? Of course all of these things are social relationships - that is a given. But when speaking of social relationships what are we talking about? Aren't we talking about the relationships between individuals on the large group scale? Social relationships are between me and you, us and them, "we" are made up of a whole bunch of "I's".
If the motivation for production is not at the heart of this thing, then where do you see the arising of this fetishism from?
I am willing to be schooled...

PC, says a lot of this in Reply #3, just turning on its side a bit.

One small part of this, is the point in time that surplus value is expropriated from an object. It appears as though it at the moment of exchange, when money, goods, etc. come as wealth to the capitalist. In reality, it is at the moment when the abstract labor has become fully embedded in the object.

In the first case, the exchange of objects ignores the human actors involved in production, distribution, etc, making it seem that the objects have value in and of themselves. Any political or social entity that accepts, and, even more, organizes economic processes around this idea, embraces commodities as fetishes.

It doesn't matter whether it's a free laborer, serf or slave who contributed their labor to the production of a commodity. If surplus value is realized at the moment of exchange, then these inanimate objects must have some living component that make them social actors. Of course they don't. We watch them interact, and presume they make vital decisions about our lives, as though they had brains, when of course, they don't.

Fetishism arises from a consideration of exchange or trade value that transcends human labor.

Commodities, as products of human labor, is the difference between pre-capitalist and capitalist society. Does the fetish arise from the motivation of production or from the nature of commodities? And the nature of commodities arises in the expropriation of labor?

but speaks to the exact same thing I think

<div class=excerpt>But where, in a given society, the fundamental form of production is that spontaneous division of labor which creeps in gradually and not upon any preconceived plan, there the products take on the form of commodities, whose mutual exchange, buying and selling, enable the individual producers to satisfy their manifold wants. And this was the case in the Middle Ages. The peasant, e.g., sold to the artisan agricultural products and bought from him the products of handicraft. Into this society of individual producers, of commodity producers, the new mode of production thrust itself. In the midst of the old division of labor, grown up spontaneously and upon no definite plan, which had governed the whole of society, now arose division of labor upon a definite plan, as organized in the factory; side by side with individual production appeared social production. The products of both were sold in the same market, and, therefore, at prices at least approximately equal. But organization upon a definite plan was stronger than spontaneous division of labor. The factories working with the combined social forces of a collectivity of individuals produced their commodities far more cheaply than the individual small producers. Individual producers succumbed in one department after another. Socialized production revolutionized all the old methods of production. But its revolutionary character was, at the same time, so little recognized that it was, on the contrary, introduced as a means of increasing and developing the production of commodities. When it arose, it found ready-made, and made liberal use of, certain machinery for the production and exchange of commodities: merchants' capital, handicraft, wage-labor. Socialized production thus introducing itself as a new form of the production of commodities, it was a matter of course that under it the old forms of appropriation remained in full swing, and were applied to its products as well.

In the medieval stage of evolution of the production of commodities, the question as to the owner of the product of labor could not arise. The individual producer, as a rule, had, from raw material belonging to himself, and generally his own handiwork, produced it with his own tools, by the labor of his own hands or of his family. There was no need for him to appropriate the new product. It belonged wholly to him, as a matter of course. His property in the product was, therefore, based upon his own labor. Even where external help was used, this was, as a rule, of little importance, and very generally was compensated by something other than wages. The apprentices and journeymen of the guilds worked less for board and wages than for education, in order that they might become master craftsmen themselves.

Then came the concentration of the means of production and of the producers in large workshops and manufactories, their transformation into actual socialized means of production and socialized producers. But the socialized producers and means of production and their products were still treated, after this change, just as they had been before — i.e., as the means of production and the products of individuals. Hitherto, the owner of the instruments of labor had himself appropriated the product, because, as a rule, it was his own product and the assistance of others was the exception. Now, the owner of the instruments of labor always appropriated to himself the product, although it was no longer his product but exclusively the product of the labor of others. Thus, the products now produced socially were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by the capitalists. The means of production, and production itself, had become in essence socialized. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, every one owns his own product and brings it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter rests. [2]</div>

I just chose an excerpt but the rest is definitely a must-read as well.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm

The distinction I am cutting is what I bolded. Commodity production was NOT the prevailing mode of production during the medieval era.

I was off track, for sure.

I am not trying to "weigh in" as an expert at all, I am just trying to discuss things without getting it all cluttered in my head.

I was mainly posting the Engels piece because 1. I really like Socialism: Scientific or Utopian because it is so direct and straightforward and 2. I wanted to make sure what we were talking about was as transparent for other readers as possible

I don't think its helpful to break society into a bunch of individual "Is" who are all producers. In fact, I think Marxs leads off in the preface of Capital (to one of the German editions) by saying you CAN'T do that because you immediately find you have a hollow abstraction and have to delve into the next level.

That next level being that some people are different from others in that they do not work but instead live off the work of others (ie class). And then you have to keep digging from there because "class" is an abstraction outside of being placed into specific historical contexts. And from that "reduction" you can then start to reconstitute the empirical reality you started with -- with all of its peculiarities and in all of its specific glory -- but in a much more coherent framework, a much more structured way.

This methodological approach is almost straight Hegel by the way.

has almost no meaning if individuals are not, at the very least, implied. To say that fetishism is the warping of human relationships to the point where they are dealt with as though the relationships were between inanimate objects (commodities) and not human beings (producers) - and then say you cannot discuss this in the context of individual human beings makes no sense to me. It is precisely the impact upon the individual class member that this is to be understood, isn't it? One of the problems, I think, is that these issues and this subject is real world, everyday, meat and potatoes stuff. It is not that "society" be "broken" into "a bunch of individuals". It is that society IS made up of a bunch of individuals.

We are trying to "get" how this thing works and I understand that; and I am very willing to suspend all of these considerations if that will be helpful for me in grasping this better (or at all). But disregarding the individual class member seems to me to be an odd way of going about it. But I will listen...

(Oh, and I love Engels, too.)

but at the same time, each individual acts against a backdrop that is established by 100s, 1000s, 1000000s of other individuals.

For instance, commodity production of any type including "simple" is only possible with a fairly well-developed set of relations (for starters, otherwise everyone would be too busy hunting/growing their own food to produce commodities)

But human beings (producers) is just part of the story. There are human beings (expropriators) that enter into those social relationships. They also are necessary for the dance of commodities.

The whole thing is kept in the air by class structure, which can't be considered as an "I", but can be considered as a bunch of us and a few of them. It's not a disregard of individuals, but a recognition that it's all about us v. them. The impact on each of us may be existentially unique, but it can only be understood, as an effect that commodity fetishism has on us as a class.

That was the point I was trying to make

Crystal clear.

those who are always so quick to invoke "The People" as some sort of idyllic unification/culmination of humanity, understand exactly what Curt wrote and are plying on it heavily.

"The People"? What the hell is that?

Anax said that everything that existed after the advent of capitalism exist before its advent. And he asked where did the fetishism come from. That is what I was trying to work through - to answer Anax's question.
OK, it did not come from a change in the "reason" for production. So you are saying that it came from class antagonism? Or from a new arrangement of classes? Or from the growth of one class and the shrinking of the other? Or the creation of a new class, altogether?
Help me out here.

had grown, developed, matured, evolved, incubated in the womb of feudal social relations is what I think he meant. Its kind of self-fulfilling statement, since they are pre-requisites. And it is certainly something that is only totally identifiable and clear in hindsight (since even the principals -- the capitalists -- didn't really see the Big Picture until well afterwards)

Where fetishism comes from is a multi-layered question I guess, since you can answer on more than one level of abstration. But fetishism is not that different than religion -- we personify and objectify relations of exploitations into actual physical items (commodities) -- a strange type of transubstantiation, if you will. Which if you draw the parallel, mirrors religion.

So where does fetishism come from. I think we can work out why it is called fetishism, the explanation you give seems right to me. But where and why does it arise? That seems to be the question no one is addressing straightforwardly. If that question can be answered on many levels, give me one and then we can advance to other levels.

This is getting good...

It comes from the perception that the value of a commodity is realized at the moment of exchange, thus making invisible the labor embedded in it. If the human element of labor is ignored then all that follows must be innate to the object. Trade becomes based in some mystical quality that all commodities are assumed to have, capital obtains wealth from the value of the object in the market place, and the value added by labor is left out of the equation.

trying to avoid platitudes, but it is still instructive to remember that the ideology of the ruling class is the ruling ideology of the age.

And to the bourgeoisie (as the cartoon in the other thread depicts), they make money by buying and selling products. And its the movement of those individual products that magically transform into money (read their economics textbooks, they really think its magic)

Further, wage labor is "free" and voluntary.

In fact, value only sustains and reproduces and expands itself through the reproduction of the same enormously entangled and variegated manifold of social interactions that underlies value in the first place. Value in isolation is something of a misnomer.

At any rate, making a nice epigram out of the above one might say that nature of capitalism is occluded because capitalists are occluded by/to their own nature. Thats a little rough, probably sound better in German ;)

In light of the Kid's reply, I think I completely misunderstood the question. He's right, it's an attempt to make tangible, economic theories that lack a material foundation. Others here know the evolution of Bourgeois Economics (I don't). Most academic disciplines (at least those concerning Social Sciences) have developed as apologies for ruling class ideologies.

It's not some phenomena that appears across many different human experiences. It a lie.

You are dead on. Keep talkin'. Fetishism predates "economic theories" of any kind by a few thousand years. It is inherent in "the form itself", that is in the advent of commodities... exactly for the reasons you have laid out.

Barter exists for as far back as we can discern. The production of surplus and the normalization of trade transforms the trade of products of one kind into the possibility of access to human products of all kinds. The social "interest" in labor time becomes formalized in a way that "sticks" to products in exchange. The "invention" consists of production for exchange... for sale. From here, it is a hop, skip, and a jump to buying and selling labor itself (as opposed to buying and selling the laborer) and the realization that surplus can be extracted from the production process. In truth, it is nothing other than the developed expression of the existence of "surplus" labor itself, the fundamental pre-condition for the development of commodities and formalized exchange.

Value isn't a "plot", let alone an ideology. It is real. Yet the form in which it "congeals" (remember that word), brings with it a huge confusion, precisely because of the reasons laid out above. It shares with religion the trait of giving special powers and an independent existence to the figments of the human brain, but it is not an "idea". It is a social product.

"Gold has a special luster... well, it really doesn't but as money it has luster because it allows you to buy anything... well, that is really because money is a repository for value and the command of it commands all commodities... but the command of commodities is the command of labor because all the labor which produces commodities counts as one labor... so, the private appropriation of dead labor essentially allows those who appropriate it to command the labor of the living... so, it ain't gold but class relationships based on private property and the enforcement of them that really has "luster", but..."

Shit. And we think that the unbelievable muddle of feudal relations and obligations were complicated and ridiculous...

Or is the latter confined to capitalist society?

and I was thinking mine wasn't necessary since you'd already said the same thing :)

PS and Anax is right, you've been on fire for this whole thread

This is why the world is turned upside down regarding jobs and labor and unemployment (among other things). Workers are seen as being employed as some kind of boon from the society or the corporations; when in fact they are the very sources of all the wealth, everywhere. But workers are forced to relate with "gratitude" to the Bosses for their jobs, when it is their jobs which are the basis for all profits everywhere.

So the fetish comes in by sourcing the value of a commodity as being an invisible quality of the commodity and thereby making the labor source of value "disappear". It is the Emperor's New Clothes...

Thanks curt and Kid and everybody for being patient with me on this. I hope I have finally got it...

I think I know what that means, but I have been mistaken before. Could we get a little more on "dead labor" - maybe from curt, the Human Torch! :)

It is the labor used in the production of a commodity, it has been expended by the worker but is infused in the commodity.

Wait a minute...

Or is it the dead labor tied up in money that is not in circulation within the capitalist system?

damn....

so that you have to denominate it in labor time. What takes an hour in one industry is the same as what takes an hour in any other industry.

Both money and commodities are tokens of this social labor (hence as Anax says above it is "congealed")

That is one of the things that these "skilled" workers are most resistant to, that a manual laborers time has the same value as their's, but it's true. I see it as true in two ways, the social value to society of the labor and as the equality of all human's time. As though one person's life has more value than another's.

Repetition helps me ;)

a commodity. Its value has already been extracted and is being held within the commodity until it is exchanged? Why is it called "dead labor"?

Objectified labor set against the living laborer...

...or "Them" in shorthand.

in this thread:

http://www.progressiveindependent.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=96699

sort of. That's what over-thinking gets ya.

kinda mind-boggling when ya think about one coat, the shepherd(assuming its wool), the shearer, transit, spinning, carding, dying, weaving, cutting, sewing, more transit......lots of pieces of lives there.

paragraph 3?

;)

that maybe I'm not so much! :aetsch: Let's get the OK from everyone. There might be one or two who want to ask more. We ain't all as smart as you...

(punk)....

Did I say that out loud?

pretty sure it kept me from getting laid alot of times

Truthfully, I was being facetious. It seems like we've talked the subject into oblivion and we're only on paragraph 2 ;)

Great discussion, everyone. Very helpful.

Section 4.The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1...

Marx now answers with what has been said above (although with a little more economy). The mystery arises from "this form itself".


Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products.

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.


"...the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things."

In a world defined by commodity production, it is almost superfluous to add that this very same "fantastic form" colors the way in which human beings see the rest of their world and their connection to it...

Examples?

If you will wait just a hair longer, Marx does some serious explainin' of all this, at the high altitude at which I took your question.. I will do my best to answer the questions you have left, when the old man stops for a breather.

Use value becomes secondary, non-economic values become irrelevant.

A river, which may provide a multitude of human uses and services, is subjugated to that purpose which provides the most exchange value, regardless of all of the other value lost.

unless you think it will help all; I do pick up enough stuff to be practical, I think! As I said before, I really do seem to have a learning disability regarding economic theory, maybe that's a good thing! ;D

Tech fetishism? Funny anyway (and its not the fake bud light commercial):

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/sony_releases_new_stupid_piece_of

I've been carrying this bit around in my wallet for a year. A friend sent it:

"Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity--and does in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally...
the object which labour produces-- labour's product-- confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer... labour's realization is it's objectification... in the conditions dealt with by the political economy this realization of labour appears as loss of reality for the workers;...

So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the fewer can he possess and the more he falls under the dominion of his product, capital...

It is the same in religion. The more man puts in God, the less he retains in himself..."

I asked a while ago about antiques/collectibles as having very little use value (aesthetic value is or is not a use value?) but seem to have an assigned economic value?? also they are imbued by the buyer with a quality placed on them by the buyer as maybe, for example, he romanticizes the object due to its maker, say Gustav Stickley? (a laborer being commodicized here?) Kind of beauty lying in the eye of the beholder, but that beauty is enhanced by a perceived value?

I think maybe the video I posted in #55 might be an example??

If I am way off here, just say so, I'm feeling brave enough to try to souse things out in public...

BLF, Aesthetic value is a prime example of fetishism. The value of the object remains the labor congealed (there's something about that term that strikes me as odd, but every time I try to use a synonym I hear about it), but the typical apologies for the innate value of an antique or work of art are among the most extreme.

In these fields the genius of the producer and/or the scarcity of the item are the leading explanations for the relative value of the item. Some time ago Dahlgren (I think) commented on his feeling that looking at a well made barn was a more valuable experience for him than looking at a beautiful painting of a barn. In fact, the abstract human labor congealed in both the barn and the painting determine their values. On the market, however, the academic or commercial status of the artist, the paintings age, which galleries or museums have exhibited them, which collections are they in etc. are understood to determine exchange value. The history of art is a tale of academics and merchants writing polemics as vicious as any commie, to identify which work(s) is truly worthy of high value. A more serious approach would be view it all equally based the amount of labor expended.

The objection to this, is commonly, that it makes no sense to pay a bad artist as much as a good one or value a bad painting as much as a good one. It doesn't. Nor does it make much sense to value a product that works, the same as one of the same type that doesn't. There has to be a way to recognize social useful products of all types (including art), and socially useful work. What it is I don't know, but it's got to be done.

I'd start talking about the need to recognize the relative onerous character of different types of labor, but there's a normally Nice Guy around here that yells at me whenever I do.

I appreciate this. I like to open up discussions with my students (you may know I teach high school art?) about just this kind of stuff but my terminology is different. One example come to mind: I show the kids a repro of Van Gogh's Irises and tell them a man in Japan paid 83 million dollars for it (true)...I don't state what I believe, but ask them what they think about a painting being given that kind of value...I will ask how much food that might buy, how many cars, etc., but try to let the kids have it out...

(I too love barns more than most paintings of barns, unless there is something extraordinary about the painting...)
I may write a little bit on bad/good art if I can find the image...who places the value?

the relative character of different types of labor. I think it goes a long way to figuring out how "we" value things socially.

But its not necessarily germane to a discussion of value in the (for lack of a better adjective) Marxian sense because we are primarily talking about a critique of the capitalist system as it stands (and a critique is as much an expose as a criticism)

I do think that its important to ask how the "reproduction of labor as a commodity" takes into account the fact that you can only put in so many days of your life at a factory while you can pretty much warm a desk until you croak.

teachers too, all say its not art, bad art, but its "valued in the 6 or 7 digits...His work is often more about the thoughts behind it than the image...How is intellect given value? exchange or use? (for me, actually, beauty supplies me with sanity, does that mean, for me its value is more use value?)

http://www.artknowledgenews.com/files2008a/twombly_souvenir.jpg

Sorry Master Anax for the tangent here...

I've always had a hard time selling my art, I usually give it away or keep it (they are alive to me, I guess true fetishes...). Of course I don't produce much these days, if anything...

or a series of analysies which might entail many aspects. I do think that the conversation is hitting at the top of the capitalist hierarchy...The elite class member collects one of a kind objects that have been given very high exchange value...how capitalistic is that?

Anyway, that said, I concede this is a conversation for further down the road maybe...

As a teacher I'm starting to hit the wall, its more exhausting in all ways than factory line work... how does that fit in as labor commodity?

Yes, I see how the critique of capitalism doesn't make that discussion necessary. The only thing that commodities have in common is the duration of labor expended, because the type of labor can't be measured empirically. As much as I get it, it just seems counter-intuitive to me. I understand it much better now (after our reading) than I did before. Just couldn't resist taking a cheap shot at Mr. Nice Guy.

for the way we assess things and place importance and emphasis and bestow honorifics. Because otherwise "value" has at least two meanings and one of them is a misnomer..and I don't even know which one ;)

Worth? Merit? Regard? Respect?

It is written with an admirable economy of language and uses wordplay to make a point. Wage labor does indeed "produce" itself in the sense that wages are equal to the cost of reproduction of the laborer and are entirely consumed, regardless of their magnitude. The handful of exceptions prove the rule. The dilemma thus presents itself thus: the wage laborer has no option but to sell his labor at the "prevailing wage" but, by doing so, he also assures that Capital is ever enhanced while his relative position can only change for the worse. Even the various "Golden Ages" enjoyed by this Capital or that... these buy, at best, a temporary respite. In a phrase, we have just tagged the basis of reform and revolution. The former is simply not possible no matter how stridently one may wish for it.

The rest of the quote about estrangement, and the estranged labor becoming a hostile object in opposition to the laborer... and the effect of this on "consciousness"... this is the heart of the "alienation" discussions of the 1960s and 70s. 'Course its all true... but these days they'll take away your job and your house first.

The times kinda set the priority on which aspect of Capitalism we find ourselves focused on.

In music anyway, it seems to me that the better music is more a function of the amount of time put into training and practicing then it is about genius or talent. For every hour of performing, there are many hours of practice.

can you refer me to the relevant Marx for something? I am not finding exactly what I'm looking for but I know its there somewhere. I'm blanking on where though.

I am looking for where Marx (or Engels or Lenin) talk about the idea that by trying to reduce the lag time in the circuit of capital from commodities into money involves reducing the amount of living labor invested and thus the capitalist is hememd in by the need/drive to expel from the process the very labor he seeks aggrandizement from.

I have been scouring the Manifesto for a day or so looking for this, but I am also remembering something a bit more thorough written about it as well.

Yes, that's the point. Ignoring the concept of "better" for now, once music (like any art form) becomes a commodity, the pay-off comes when a piece of music is performed in a paid venue or sold as a recording. The real value lies in all the training, practice and even equipment needed to lead up to that moment, as well as the performance.

If music wasn't treated as commodity, then the value would be in a musician's accumulative labor, not in their perceived genius, intellectual property or a production company's marketing. Music then could be performed in all sorts of venues, for all sorts of people, and musicians can make a living.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fNYEQYNjtg

The whole world's broke and it ain't worth fixing
It's time to start all over, make a new beginning
There's too much pain, too much suffering
Let's resolve to start all over make a new beginning

Now don't get me wrong - I love life and living
But when you wake up and look around at everything that's going down -
All wrong
You see we need to change it now, this world with too few happy endings
We can resolve to start all over make a new beginning

Start all over
Start all over
Start all over
Start all over

The world is broken into fragments and pieces
That once were joined together in a unified whole
But now too many stand alone - There's too much separation
We can resolve to come together in the new beginning

Start all over
Start all over
Start all over
Start all over

We can break the cycle - We can break the chain
We can start all over - In the new beginning
We can learn, we can teach
We can share the myths the dream the prayer
The notion that we can do better
Change our lives and paths
Create a new world and

Start all over
Start all over
Start all over
Start all over

The whole world's broke and it ain't worth fixing
It's time to start all over, make a new beginning
There's too much fighting, too little understanding
It's time to stop and start all over
Make a new beginning

Start all over
Start all over
Start all over
Start all over

We need to make new symbols
Make new signs
Make a new language
With these we'll define the world

And start all over
Start all over
Start all over
Start all over ...

Back ten years ago or so, there were a bunch of people from the Soviet Union showing up in Detroit including some of the best musicians I have ever met. One of them was a balalaika player who played in our band for a while. Here, everything depends upon the "sale" either of recordings or the performance. What a nightmare. All of the work behind the scenes is dismissed or ignored. But he had been paid for that work - he made a living whether he sold anything or not. Then performances were almost an after thought, not tied to selling anything. According to all of the apologists for Capitalism, there should have been no incentive for the musicians there to excel. So how come those musicians, freed up from that pressure to sell and the constant threat of starvation, were better than any we have here?

I worked for a couple of years trying to help these musicians establish careers here, and what an eye-opener. It was just about fucking impossible, and miserable as well talking to sleazy slimebag presenters and promoters and record company assholes - the gatekeepers between the musicians and any hope of eating. The Soviet musicians were all amazed - "is this what you guys have to go through here to be musicians???" We had one success - Irina Mashalov, a mezzo from the Moscow opera, who got gigs with the Met and signed a recording contract with Shandos in the UK. One world class pianist could only find teaching work, another played bars, and the traditional folkloric musicians are now working at Pizza Hut or WTFever.

There, all musicians worked and were paid regardless of their sales potential - whatever that even means - and all audiences got great music all over the Soviet Union regardless of their ability to pay or "what they were in to" or whatever.

I realized when I was working with them that we have become accustomed here to being treated like dirt, ripped off and humiliated and demeaned at every turn, with our musicianship only being seen as having any value to the degree to which we sell - "hey if you guys were really good you would be discovered" or "why don't you get out there and hustle your music like so and so did" - or else seen as a pleasant hobby activity - "hey chill out and have fun, and keep your day job." Ask the musicians who have been "discovered" what that is like. It is worse.

I was trying to explain to one musician how things worked here. His response was "I am a musician." Damn fucking right. A musician. Now there is a novel concept. He is not a self-promoter, he is not a hustler, not a personality trying to achieve celebrity, he is not striving for success, he has nothing to sell - he is a fucking musician, and one of the best I have ever worked with. Now he is a janitor.

On edit - by the way, they were not leaving the Soviet Union to escape "communist tyranny" but rather the opposite. They were being thrown on the "free market" there and the infrastructure was collapsing. Many were Jews who in the new wave of Russian nationalism and restoration of the Orthodox church were losing jobs and under persecution.

I was just on the phone a bit earlier with the local [link:www.jwj.org/about/contact.html|JWJ] guru discussing the US Social Forum later this year in Detroit (*which I may attend), the current JWJ fundraising effort, and generally the matter of jobs/unemployment. We were both remarking at how very little action there is on the matter, either popular or in the national leadership.

only a few moments after getting off the phone did I read your comment about alienation. Kinda made me wonder if it is not a necessary ingredient for the activation of class consciousness. Alienation being relatively nowhere around, just as is any appreciable mass action concerning the jobless, I couldn't help but find myself wondering if there was a correlation at play rather than a coincidence, estrangement giving ways these days to outright me-first survival efforts.

It's nine days since I had someone move in who was on the verge of going homeless after six months of unsuccessful job searching; he's previously been employed in corporate accounting with a median sort of income and is young, sober, capable, and responsible enough that he made it six months without income before coming to the brink. What a vile world it is when such a person can fall into the abysss of losing everything without even enough societal recognition of that reality to be characterized as cold and callous!

I can't do much, but I can take a very direct action to keep one person from losing everything...

Not the composer of the music? Practicing musicians are like the translators, this is not to take away from the value of their labor, or the time... Its the same with actors and dancers where the directors and writers or choreographers are the genius that get translated? The translation skills and creative interpretations of the practicing artists is where the talent also comes in, practice honing the skills of course.

The visual arts really don't have a comparison to music, unless you include craftspeople who create works based on the original artist's idea? Regarding the ability to draw from observation, anyone can learn to do that (who is not handicapped in some way), and with time and practice be competent at least. Some have a greater aptitude for that, and the time needed is less and becomes lesser with practice. Observational artwork is generally given greater value by many as they say "they can't do it" (they can, they just haven't put in the requisite labor/time to do it), whereas the art that many eschew, such as non-objective, which doesn't necessarily require the time, is the art of true originality. Although many will say "oh, I can do that", they maybe cannot as they haven't learned the compositional skills/knowledge necessary, or don't have the requisite vision. Remember, it is over a century since the first "accepted" piece of non-objective work was completed by Kandinsky.

Hey, and thinking of Russian art, what about the great Constructivists? Their work requires no observational skills, but is universally accepted as highly aesthetic, I love it myself. The time required, at the time, would have been in the craftsmanship as the work was so precise...

Sorry, I'm an aesthetic nerd...

Value has more than two meanings, many more. We need other words or compound phrases to be clear with those unfamiliar with the marxist intent, maybe?

Has anyone ever rewritten Marx with contemporary phraseology, that might help us explain him better?


(The following paragraph probably has very little value to folks here, and can be disregarded!)
I think that this is one of my problems (and who cares about that? ;) ), one major definition, for me, of the word value, is the degree of visual lightness or darkness used in an artwork, or part of an artwork: high contrast photography only has two or three values, for instance (Black, white, and maybe a midtone). Still another definition is the degree of light or dark of a color, yellow is always high value, blue is normally low value. To me, these meanings are such a part of my everyday lexicon, that it might be affecting my flow while reading of use value etc, this is something that occured to me in writing. Maybe other terms have affects on other people in like ways? Value, for example again, might be considered only as monetary to some and to break from that mindset might be difficult, making the readings less clear?

I consider how I might arrange my living quarters to accomodate family and friends who are currently in disintegrating financial situations. An article I posted recently regarding Haiti, does point to the fact that people are much more human and humane than the elite would have it, might be a stretch connecting to your comment, but I think not. Here it is again, on edit I'll post the original article url, I could use some help for those who are still able to post at du:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7558788

http://www.slate.com/id/2242078/

The labor of the composer is part of the labor congealed in the performance, as is the makers of instruments, recording equipment, etc. The act of composing includes all the labor that proceeds the writing of a score for example. If music were not a commodity, all who labor through out the process would be paid based on the work they did to bring about the performance. As it stands, buying a piece of music to perform (for the composer) or performing it (for the musician) are considered to be the moment when value is established, as if the value lies in the piece of music, rather than in the human activity that produced it.

As for art, more generally, if we agree that the production of art is a socially valuable endeavor (I of course do), then the way we determine the value of art needs to lie in the actions of the artists, not in the work of art. How we decide which artists to support is another question. We certainly can't do a worse job of it than the current method.

Being an academically trained aesthetic nerd myself (as well as being an antique dealer for many years), the History of Art, as officially offered, is as much a lie as any other discipline. It has analogies in all the liberal political and economic histories. From the Great Men theories to the History of Style (where one movement builds upon another in a linear progression) to the lack of intent in Post-Modernism, they all fought to place art in the realm of commodities. Once, that's accomplished collecting becomes a way to invest capital, and accumulate more of it (if you bet on the right artist).

It's funny, that one of our valued myths is that the life of the artist, is their greatest work. If so, we ought to be recognizing their value in their experience and labor, not in the exchange of their work as commodities.

The History of Art is generally the History of European Art, so much is neglected about the rest of the world's art history...

"We certainly can't do a worse job of it" you know it! As I am still really trying to souse where all this fits, your comments really help to clarify...

Who could not value Van Gogh's experience and labor? His letters exhibit this so clearly, and should be read by all (such a socially conscious man...)

Section 4.The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1...



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 twofold 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 twofold 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.

Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it.[28] Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language. The recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves. The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value – this fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered.

What, first of all, practically concerns producers when they make an exchange, is the question, how much of some other product they get for their own? in what proportions the products are exchangeable? When these proportions have, by custom, attained a certain stability, they appear to result from the nature of the products, so that, for instance, one ton of iron and two ounces of gold appear as naturally to be of equal value as a pound of gold and a pound of iron in spite of their different physical and chemical qualities appear to be of equal weight. The character of having value, when once impressed upon products, obtains fixity only by reason of their acting and re-acting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary continually, independently of the will, foresight and action of the producers. To them, their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them. It requires a fully developed production of commodities before, from accumulated experience alone, the scientific conviction springs up, that all the different kinds of private labour, which are carried on independently of each other, and yet as spontaneously developed branches of the social division of labour, are continually being reduced to the quantitative proportions in which society requires them. And why? Because, 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. The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears.[29] The determination of the magnitude of value by labour time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities. Its discovery, while removing all appearance of mere accidentality from the determination of the magnitude of the values of products, yet in no way alters the mode in which that determination takes place.


The Notes:


28. When, therefore, Galiani says: Value is a relation between persons – “La Ricchezza e una ragione tra due persone,” – he ought to have added: a relation between persons expressed as a relation between things. (Galiani: Della Moneta, p. 221, V. III. of Custodi’s collection of “Scrittori Classici Italiani di Economia Politica.” Parte Moderna, Milano 1803.)

29. What are we to think of a law that asserts itself only by periodical revolutions? It is just nothing but a law of Nature, founded on the want of knowledge of those whose action is the subject of it.” (Friedrich Engels: “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie,” in the “Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher,” edited by Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx. Paris. 1844.)



Is this getting easier or is it still a struggle? What is he saying here?

I knew you were involved in art in some way, back when you were explaining socialist realism.

Anyway, could you expand on the postmodernism thing a little bit?

Was one of my favorite classes, it was composed of Marxists and radical anti-essentialist feminists, and me, neither at the time (guess which one I'm closer to)...as a recently off the assembly line welder I think I had some folks pretty nonplussed most the time. All about what kid wants you to expand on...I'm pretty much of a modernist myself...neo-modernist perhaps?

I don't believe in "composers" of music. That is part of the commoditization of music. It is all bourgeoisie pretense, a fraud - this idea of the "great composers." All of the nonsense about "genius" and stuff is a bunch of hooey, in my view.

Yes, musicians have been reduced to being mere "translators."

Nothing wrong with being an aesthetic nerd. It is all craftsmanship, I think.

Your example of dance - yeah, someone is putting it together, directing it, but the idea that they are the "genius" and the performers mere putty in their hands has more to do with who gets paid the most and controlling the workers so they can be exploited than it does any artistic purpose.

"How we decide which artists to support is another question."

The Soviets did a pretty good job of supporting a wide range of music, and supporting the performers, so much more so than here that it is a joke. They supported all performers. We have an idea here that it is all about "taste" - which is about buying products, not about music - so people here talk about "who's to say what is good?" and see art as somehow dramatically different than other disciplines - vague and personal and subjective. The Soviet musicians I worked with laughed at all of that - "this is good and that isn't. Obviously!" and they were right and they wondered how people could be so dense and ignorant that they couldn't tell the difference between what was good and what wasn't. Then they found out that the people controlling the business can't tell the difference. Weird society we live in.

as the education system neglects all the arts its a weird but pretty boring society at times...

I did not mean to demean the performers at all, so sorry if I came across that way! they take what's written and interpret it in a way that is beyond what is written. In the performance realm the gestalt of all people involved is the major thing...forgive me...

that is what I was trying to say here "The translation skills and creative interpretations of the practicing artists is where the talent also comes in," and may I say genius, there are some movies Gary Oldman has been in that weren't very good, but his performances are genius...


These are reasons why I like jazz and interpretive dance...on the spot...

I don't mean to make any kind of hierarchy of the arts here...

I just went to a "cirque de la symphonie" show where you have acrobatics performed in front of orchestral music.

Almost all of the performers were Russian.

The show is insane btw, one act has a guy balance on his hand on the other guys head. Even the juggling is incredible.

Seriously, they're the best athletes I've ever seen and they have an incredible aesthetic/artistry to all of their performances. I think they tried to develop a story of sorts, but it may have been too avant garde for me, ha!

I think Capitalism does.

Good example.

Funny how without the incentive of being a star and getting rich for the performers and profits for the presenters and sponsors, better art seems to get produced and more people have access to it. Now that they have a "free market" in Russia, the quality of athletes and musicians is going down dramatically. No need to split hairs over "what is good? Who is to say what is good?" The only reason people get into those debates is because they either need to justify the "success" of a lot of crap, or else question everything a little more deeply than they care to.

so funny, Picasso became a communist in later life, ironic with how his work became such a commodity...

I posted a piece on SI or Pop Indy about it. But I don't know the first thing about his work, except it was popular and he drew a really terrible doodle of Stalin that caused an uproar.

The fetish is our inability to see this and ascribe value to the product of labor.

The hard part is the 'congealed' aspect of all labor. It is something that 'came about' as exchange grew and prompted production of commodities which over time acquired customary values, subject to various local and temporal modifiers.

Thus one might find a chunk of gold in a stream bed, perhaps by accident and with little labor involved but the gold still has a much greater value than your labor because typically much more labor is expended in order to get that gold. Of course congealed labor includes all of the labor involved in production and cannot be isolated in one kind of commodity.

This is a real sticking point with the 'middle class', who claim their pittance of privilege is the result of the superior value of their work, as though their time on earth is more valuable than mine.

Picasso was great, La Guernica really earned him his fame, but his lesser works are wonderful for the most part...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/oct/21/books.guardianreview2

Very interesting piece...I didn't see the portrait, I'll have to search it...Picasso, like many artists, was fucked when painting the portrait of such a huge figure...very funny how he spoke about it later... pretty commendable his work for the party, I think...might have something to do with his minor loss of prestige in the art world, but he obviously didn't care...picture on edit, hopefully ...
http://www.artfagcity.com/wordpress_core/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/stalin-picasso1953.jpg

at least his eyes are in the right place. Rather humanizing, I think.

I mentioned that I think the whole "genius" composer thing is a bunch of hooey. It seems to me that it is all work with very little of the magic ingredient called "genius." If we can be brought to imagine that there is some mystical quality in the work of art, something ethereal, then it can be used for commercial purposes that have little to do with the work or the artist.

Music, just about everywhere and through all time, was used at gatherings and dances, and thousands of different traditions evolved in different locations. Just as the name that people use to describe themselves often means "people" in the generic sense, not a certain type of people, so too the name for any music meant just music, not a certain kind of music. Every village had musicians, and they played within a form that had been passed down. Some were better, but all were pretty damned good. Where does "genius" come in? I can't see it.

Wasn't the history of visual art similar? Decorations on practical items, likenesses of people that served the same purpose that snapshots do today? Wasn't quality all a matter of labor, time and effort put in, rather than any mystical ethereal qualities?

Whatever those sparks, those flairs are that give music or a work of art something remarkable or exceptional, seem to me to be found pretty commonly from many people doing many things, and are not reserved to the so-called geniuses.

I know that in music there are 10,000 "geniuses" completely ignored for every one that is recognized, and it seems to me that those who are called geniuses or "great composers" has more to do with upper class needs and sensibilities than it does any mystical quality in the art itself.

I think that everything we think we know about art and music is some sort of fraud, a con job by the ruling class. The purpose for elevating one artist up to "genius" category is to suppress, control and exploit the other 10,000 artists. The artists elevated are the ones who can most easily be used to promote ruling class interests, fit in with their narrative and be used to rob the working class of their art and music, their connection to it, their ownership of it. Once the ruling class declares one artist to be a genius, that means "fuck you" to all of the rest of the artists - no work, no income, no respect, no acceptance, turned into a social outcast.

Look at the Pavarotti phenomenon. You can't take one tenor and raise them up to the level that he was without denigrating and harming the thousands of other tenors who are every bit as talented. They all suffer by way of imagined comparison, and suffer income and work loss as well, and the basis for comparison is strictly commercial and dictated by the needs of the marketers, nothing to do with art. (I just realized that the same process is happening with that new privatized apple variety I have been writing about - "better than any other! The only one you should ever ask for! It makes all others inferior and undesirable!") Pavarotti isn't "better," and certainly is not better by a factor of a thousand to one as his fame and income would suggest. There is not one in 10,000 people who could actually detect anything objective that would make him better. But they all "know" that he is "the best." Pavarotti is Pavarotti - that is why he is perceived as better. What makes Pavarotti Pavarotti? A product, an object of great desire? Marketing, not artistic qualities.

People come up to us after performances and say "you are so fortunate to have been born with such great talent." That makes the tens of thousands of hours of work, the learning, the practicing all disappear. It is the extremely rare case that a person puts in tens of thousands of hours and does not become good, and the extremely rare case that a person does not put in the work and is good. Whatever element of inborn talent or creative genius there may be, it must be a very small part of the process.

"This is a real sticking point with the 'middle class', who claim their pittance of privilege is the result of the superior value of their work, as though their time on earth is more valuable than mine."

Labor, too, is 'congealed" in the aggregate, right? So that "value" for any commodity (and all commodities)is arrived at by the accumulation (?) of congealed labor over time and across commodities? Is that close?

Though I think you can take it apart for one commodity as I did, just for illustrative purpose.

...there is no direct relationship between the price of labor and the value created by labor. There is a historical element to higher wages accruing to labor of higher skill levels as well as for overseers, etc. That is the germ of truth to the claim. There is also a historical basis for higher wages in the imperialist countries. That is the germ of "privilege".

Neither one is set in stone, however, as current events are demonstrating. The reduction of all labor to simple labor as a function of value creation always has within it the possibility of "revamping" such outdated "traditions". The prison trustees will always get a few privileges but their magnitude is purely relative.

I don't think the middle class survives "globalization". If they were smart, they would be radical protectionists, no matter what that did to the price of their flat screens...

"If"... now, there's the rub.

classic Picasso...

So the "Middle Class" is going to "gentrify" themselves right out of existence. By clutching relentlessly to the pant-legs of the Propertied Class (who espouse and even demand globalization) they are almost guaranteeing their "descent" into the lower classes... (I can't help but see this as sweet; I know, it is a personal failing of mine. :) )

Yeah, that "if", in regard to the "Middle Class" as big as the moon and a lot farther away...

of why every so often they had to grudgingly admit that a Buchanan or Paul was actually "making sense" on some economic issues.

They know they have to be America Firsters, but they're so venal and ignorant they think that somehow they can keep their high wages and spending driven lifestyle while "competing" with sweatshops in places like Vietnam. Along with "enforcing labor laws" in those countries.

Its why they're all mixed up and the USW is crowing about their big "victory" of stopping China from importing defective/shoddy tires.

Section 4.The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1...

Given the uncertain nature of the site, it seems appropriate to finish our reading of Section 4: Fetishism, so that all of our Chapter I readings are in one place. As life would have it, this is simultaneously the longest and the richest section that we have "eaten in one bite". Fortunately, the remainder of the section is a single logical whole... though it is anything but easy. I will reproduce the remaining text in its entirity, with my comments to follow in a subsequent post. There is so much here that someone may want to reintroduce the questions raised or even parts of the Section in another thread... perhaps even in another venue. Still, what follows is not to be ignored. It would be a grave error to assume that this discussion is about "economics" alone:


Man’s reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him. The characters that stamp products as commodities, and whose establishment is a necessary preliminary to the circulation of commodities, have already acquired the stability of natural, self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but their meaning. Consequently it was the analysis of the prices of commodities that alone led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and it was the common expression of all commodities in money that alone led to the establishment of their characters as values. It is, however, just this ultimate money form of the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers. When I state that coats or boots stand in a relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots compare those articles with linen, or, what is the same thing, with gold or silver, as the universal equivalent, they express the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society in the same absurd form.

The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.

Since Robinson Crusoe’s experiences are a favourite theme with political economists,[30] let us take a look at him on his island. Moderate though he be, yet some few wants he has to satisfy, and must therefore do a little useful work of various sorts, such as making tools and furniture, taming goats, fishing and hunting. Of his prayers and the like we take no account, since they are a source of pleasure to him, and he looks upon them as so much recreation. In spite of the variety of his work, he knows that his labour, whatever its form, is but the activity of one and the same Robinson, and consequently, that it consists of nothing but different modes of human labour. Necessity itself compels him to apportion his time accurately between his different kinds of work. Whether one kind occupies a greater space in his general activity than another, depends on the difficulties, greater or less as the case may be, to be overcome in attaining the useful effect aimed at. This our friend Robinson soon learns by experience, and having rescued a watch, ledger, and pen and ink from the wreck, commences, like a true-born Briton, to keep a set of books. His stock-book contains a list of the objects of utility that belong to him, of the operations necessary for their production; and lastly, of the labour time that definite quantities of those objects have, on an average, cost him. All the relations between Robinson and the objects that form this wealth of his own creation, are here so simple and clear as to be intelligible without exertion, even to Mr. Sedley Taylor. And yet those relations contain all that is essential to the determination of value.

Let us now transport ourselves from Robinson’s island bathed in light to the European middle ages shrouded in darkness. Here, instead of the independent man, we find everyone dependent, serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clergy. Personal dependence here characterises the social relations of production just as much as it does the other spheres of life organised on the basis of that production. But for the very reason that personal dependence forms the ground-work of society, there is no necessity for labour and its products to assume a fantastic form different from their reality. They take the shape, in the transactions of society, of services in kind and payments in kind. Here the particular and natural form of labour, and not, as in a society based on production of commodities, its general abstract form is the immediate social form of labour. Compulsory labour is just as properly measured by time, as commodity-producing labour; but every serf knows that what he expends in the service of his lord, is a definite quantity of his own personal labour power. The tithe to be rendered to the priest is more matter of fact than his blessing. No matter, then, what we may think of the parts played by the different classes of people themselves in this society, the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour, appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour.

For an example of labour in common or directly associated labour, we have no occasion to go back to that spontaneously developed form which we find on the threshold of the history of all civilised races.[31] We have one close at hand in the patriarchal industries of a peasant family, that produces corn, cattle, yarn, linen, and clothing for home use. These different articles are, as regards the family, so many products of its labour, but as between themselves, they are not commodities. The different kinds of labour, such as tillage, cattle tending, spinning, weaving and making clothes, which result in the various products, are in themselves, and such as they are, direct social functions, because functions of the family, which, just as much as a society based on the production of commodities, possesses a spontaneously developed system of division of labour. The distribution of the work within the family, and the regulation of the labour time of the several members, depend as well upon differences of age and sex as upon natural conditions varying with the seasons. The labour power of each individual, by its very nature, operates in this case merely as a definite portion of the whole labour power of the family, and therefore, the measure of the expenditure of individual labour power by its duration, appears here by its very nature as a social character of their labour.

Let us now picture to ourselves, by way of change, a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour power of the community. All the characteristics of Robinson’s labour are here repeated, but with this difference, that they are social, instead of individual. Everything produced by him was exclusively the result of his own personal labour, and therefore simply an object of use for himself. The total product of our community is a social product. One portion serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another portion is consumed by the members as means of subsistence. A distribution of this portion amongst them is consequently necessary. The mode of this distribution will vary with the productive organisation of the community, and the degree of historical development attained by the producers. We will assume, but merely for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour time. Labour time would, in that case, play a double part. Its apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the proper proportion between the different kinds of work to be done and the various wants of the community. On the other hand, it also serves as a measure of the portion of the common labour borne by each individual, and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption. The social relations of the individual producers, with regard both to their labour and to its products, are in this case perfectly simple and intelligible, and that with regard not only to production but also to distribution.

The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion. In the ancient Asiatic and other ancient modes of production, we find that the conversion of products into commodities, and therefore the conversion of men into producers of commodities, holds a subordinate place, which, however, increases in importance as the primitive communities approach nearer and nearer to their dissolution. Trading nations, properly so called, exist in the ancient world only in its interstices, like the gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia, or like Jews in the pores of Polish society. Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellowmen in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of subjection. They can arise and exist only when the development of the productive power of labour has not risen beyond a low stage, and when, therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between man and man, and between man and Nature, are correspondingly narrow. This narrowness is reflected in the ancient worship of Nature, and in the other elements of the popular religions. The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.

The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.

Political Economy has indeed analysed, however incompletely,[32] value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its product and labour time by the magnitude of that value.[33] These formulæ, which bear it stamped upon them in unmistakable letters that they belong to a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him, such formulæ appear to the bourgeois intellect to be as much a self-evident necessity imposed by Nature as productive labour itself. Hence forms of social production that preceded the bourgeois form, are treated by the bourgeoisie in much the same way as the Fathers of the Church treated pre-Christian religions.[34]

To what extent some economists are misled by the Fetishism inherent in commodities, or by the objective appearance of the social characteristics of labour, is shown, amongst other ways, by the dull and tedious quarrel over the part played by Nature in the formation of exchange value. Since exchange value is a definite social manner of expressing the amount of labour bestowed upon an object, Nature has no more to do with it, than it has in fixing the course of exchange.

The mode of production in which the product takes the form of a commodity, or is produced directly for exchange, is the most general and most embryonic form of bourgeois production. It therefore makes its appearance at an early date in history, though not in the same predominating and characteristic manner as now-a-days. Hence its Fetish character is comparatively easy to be seen through. But when we come to more concrete forms, even this appearance of simplicity vanishes. Whence arose the illusions of the monetary system? To it gold and silver, when serving as money, did not represent a social relation between producers, but were natural objects with strange social properties. And modern economy, which looks down with such disdain on the monetary system, does not its superstition come out as clear as noon-day, whenever it treats of capital? How long is it since economy discarded the physiocratic illusion, that rents grow out of the soil and not out of society?

But not to anticipate, we will content ourselves with yet another example relating to the commodity form. 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.

“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.”[35] “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.[36]

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. Who fails here to call to mind our good friend, Dogberry, who informs neighbour Seacoal, that, “To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading and writing comes by Nature.”[37]


The Notes:


30. Even Ricardo has his stories à la Robinson. “He makes the primitive hunter and the primitive fisher straightway, as owners of commodities, exchange fish and game in the proportion in which labour time is incorporated in these exchange values. On this occasion he commits the anachronism of making these men apply to the calculation, so far as their implements have to be taken into account, the annuity tables in current use on the London Exchange in the year 1817. The parallelograms of Mr. Owen appear to be the only form of society, besides the bourgeois form, with which he was acquainted.” (Karl Marx: “Zur Kritik, &c..” pp. 38, 39)

31. “A ridiculous presumption has latterly got abroad that common property in its primitive form is specifically a Slavonian, or even exclusively Russian form. It is the primitive form that we can prove to have existed amongst Romans, Teutons, and Celts, and even to this day we find numerous examples, ruins though they be, in India. A more exhaustive study of Asiatic, and especially of Indian forms of common property, would show how from the different forms of primitive common property, different forms of its dissolution have been developed. Thus, for instance, the various original types of Roman and Teutonic private property are deducible from different forms of Indian common property.” (Karl Marx, “Zur Kritik, &c.,” p. 10.)

32. The insufficiency of Ricardo’s analysis of the magnitude of value, and his analysis is by far the best, will appear from the 3rd and 4th books of this work. As regards value in general, it is the weak point of the classical school of Political Economy that it nowhere expressly and with full consciousness, distinguishes between labour, as it appears in the value of a product, and the same labour, as it appears in the use value of that product. Of course the distinction is practically made, since this school treats labour, at one time under its quantitative aspect, at another under its qualitative aspect. But it has not the least idea, that when the difference between various kinds of labour is treated as purely quantitative, their qualitative unity or equality, and therefore their reduction to abstract human labour, is implied. For instance, Ricardo declares that he agrees with Destutt de Tracy in this proposition: “As it is certain that our physical and moral faculties are alone our original riches, the employment of those faculties, labour of some kind, is our only original treasure, and it is always from this employment that all those things are created which we call riches... It is certain, too, that all those things only represent the labour which has created them, and if they have a value, or even two distinct values, they can only derive them from that (the value) of the labour from which they emanate.” (Ricardo, “The Principles of Pol. Econ.,” 3 Ed. Lond. 1821, p. 334.) We would here only point out, that Ricardo puts his own more profound interpretation upon the words of Destutt. What the latter really says is, that on the one hand all things which constitute wealth represent the labour that creates them, but that on the other hand, they acquire their “two different values” (use value and exchange value) from “the value of labour.” He thus falls into the commonplace error of the vulgar economists, who assume the value of one commodity (in this case labour) in order to determine the values of the rest. But Ricardo reads him as if he had said, that labour (not the value of labour) is embodied both in use value and exchange value. Nevertheless, Ricardo himself pays so little attention to the twofold character of the labour which has a twofold embodiment, that he devotes the whole of his chapter on “Value and Riches, Their Distinctive Properties,” to a laborious examination of the trivialities of a J.B. Say. And at the finish he is quite astonished to find that Destutt on the one hand agrees with him as to labour being the source of value, and on the other hand with J. B. Say as to the notion of value.

33. It is one of the chief failings of classical economy that it has never succeeded, by means of its analysis of commodities, and, in particular, of their value, in discovering that form under which value becomes exchange value. Even Adam Smith and Ricardo, the best representatives of the school, treat the form of value as a thing of no importance, as having no connection with the inherent nature of commodities. The reason for this is not solely because their attention is entirely absorbed in the analysis of the magnitude of value. It lies deeper. The value form of the product of labour is not only the most abstract, but is also the most universal form, taken by the product in bourgeois production and stamps that production as a particular species of social production, and thereby gives it its special historical character. If then we treat this mode of production as one eternally fixed by Nature for every state of society, we necessarily overlook that which is the differentia specifica of the value form, and consequently of the commodity form, and of its further developments, money orm, capital form, &c. We consequently find that economists, who are thoroughly agreed as to labour time being the measure of the magnitude of value, have the most strange and contradictory ideas of money, the perfected form of the general equivalent. This is seen in a striking manner when they treat of banking, where the commonplace definitions of money will no longer hold water. This led to the rise of a restored mercantile system (Ganilh, &c.), which sees in value nothing but a social form, or rather the unsubstantial ghost of that form. Once for all I may here state, that by classical Political Economy, I understand that economy which, since the time of W. Petty, has investigated the real relations of production in bourgeois society in contradistinction to vulgar economy, which deals with appearances only, ruminates without ceasing on the materials long since provided by scientific economy, and there seeks plausible explanations of the most obtrusive phenomena, for bourgeois daily use, but for the rest, confines itself to systematising in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for everlasting truths, the trite ideas held by the self-complacent bourgeoisie with regard to their own world, to them the best of all possible worlds.

34. “Les économistes ont une singulière manière de procéder. Il n’y a pour eux que deux sortes d’institutions, celles de l’art et celles de la nature. Les institutions de la féodalité sont des institutions artificielles celles de la bourgeoisie sont des institutions naturelles. Ils ressemblent en ceci aux théologiens, qui eux aussi établissent deux sortes de religions. Toute religion qui n’est pas la leur, est une invention des hommes tandis que leur propre religion est une émanation de Dieu -Ainsi il y a eu de l’histoire, mais il n’y en a plus.” [“Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. ... Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any”] (Karl Marx. Misère de la Philosophie. Réponse a la Philosophie de la Misère par M. Proudhon, 1847, p. 113.) Truly comical is M. Bastiat, who imagines that the ancient Greeks and Romans lived by plunder alone. But when people plunder for centuries, there must always be something at hand for them to seize; the objects of plunder must be continually reproduced. It would thus appear that even Greeks and Romans had some process of production, consequently, an economy, which just as much constituted the material basis of their world, as bourgeois economy constitutes that of our modern world. Or perhaps Bastiat means, that a mode of production based on slavery is based on a system of plunder. In that case he treads on dangerous ground. If a giant thinker like Aristotle erred in his appreciation of slave labour, why should a dwarf economist like Bastiat be right in his appreciation of wage labour? I seize this opportunity of shortly answering an objection taken by a German paper in America, to my work, “Zur Kritik der Pol. Oekonomie, 1859.” In the estimation of that paper, my view that each special mode of production and the social relations corresponding to it, in short, that the economic structure of society, is the real basis on which the juridical and political superstructure is raised and to which definite social forms of thought correspond; that the mode of production determines the character of the social, political, and intellectual life generally, all this is very true for our own times, in which material interests preponderate, but not for the middle ages, in which Catholicism, nor for Athens and Rome, where politics, reigned supreme. In the first place it strikes one as an odd thing for any one to suppose that these well-worn phrases about the middle ages and the ancient world are unknown to anyone else. This much, however, is clear, that the middle ages could not live on Catholicism, nor the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the mode in which they gained a livelihood that explains why here politics, and there Catholicism, played the chief part. For the rest, it requires but a slight acquaintance with the history of the Roman republic, for example, to be aware that its secret history is the history of its landed property. On the other hand, Don Quixote long ago paid the penalty for wrongly imagining that knight errantry was compatible with all economic forms of society.

35. “Observations on certain verbal disputes in Pol. Econ., particularly relating to value and to demand and supply” Lond., 1821, p. 16.

36. S. Bailey, l.c., p. 165.

37. The author of “Observations” and S. Bailey accuse Ricardo of converting exchange value from something relative into something absolute. The opposite is the fact. He has explained the apparent relation between objects, such as diamonds and pearls, in which relation they appear as exchange values, and disclosed the true relation hidden behind the appearances, namely, their relation to each other as mere expressions of human labour. If the followers of Ricardo answer Bailey somewhat rudely, and by no means convincingly, the reason is to be sought in this, that they were unable to find in Ricardo’s own works any key to the hidden relations existing between value and its form, exchange value.

along with re-reading all of the Chapter we've covered, and I think that footnote 32 is particularly fascinating.

While "the value of labor" question might be too esoteric to talk about just yet, it has a strong bearing on this entire section


when the difference between various kinds of labour is treated as purely quantitative, their qualitative unity or equality, and therefore their reduction to abstract human labour, is implied

Why is this true?

"Man’s reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him."

We see social forms only in their present incarnation, "after the fact" of their historical evolution (post festum - "after the feast"). Marx is,of course, talking about the categories of Political Economy, as he makes clear in the rest of this section. Still, the observation is equally relevant to most social categories. Most of the forms we examine, "...have already acquired the stability of natural, self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but their meaning."

Consider something as simple as "greed" (or "hierarchy" or "power"), for example. We see "greed", not as something that has evolved in a peculiar, historically determined stage of society, but as a part of "human nature"... something immutable and ever-lasting... and we begin the exploration of it from that impossible starting point. Nevertheless, this exploration immediately falls afoul of the contradiction inherent in it. To understand something, we must reduce it... simplify it to its most essential elements... and this reduction for social categories always arrives at their history. The assumption of immutability is not enough.

To return to Political Economy, such attempts to derive its basic categories in a historical context leads directly to fantastic stories: of Robinson Crusoe or "The Indian and the Bow and Arrow". But, such stories are themselves dependent on projecting backward the equally fully-formed attitudes and forms of the present. By way of contrast, if we look at actual history, especially across historical epochs, most of these illusions of the present disappear immediately.

In the world of commodities which we are discussing here: "They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production."

"Let us now transport ourselves from Robinson’s island bathed in light to the European middle ages shrouded in darkness. Here, instead of the independent man, we find everyone dependent, serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clergy. Personal dependence here characterises the social relations of production just as much as it does the other spheres of life organised on the basis of that production. But for the very reason that personal dependence forms the ground-work of society, there is no necessity for labour and its products to assume a fantastic form different from their reality. They take the shape, in the transactions of society, of services in kind and payments in kind. Here the particular and natural form of labour, and not, as in a society based on production of commodities, its general abstract form is the immediate social form of labour. Compulsory labour is just as properly measured by time, as commodity-producing labour; but every serf knows that what he expends in the service of his lord, is a definite quantity of his own personal labour power... No matter, then, what we may think of the parts played by the different classes of people themselves in this society, the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour, appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour."

In the present society, the opposite appears to be the case. While the mutual dependency and compulsory labour described above are ten thousand times evolved, they present themselves upside down - through the products of labor and as the direct opposite of what they actually are. Exchange value appears as an innate quality while usefulness is a social footnote.

"The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.

Political Economy has indeed analysed, however incompletely, value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its product and labour time by the magnitude of that value. These formulæ, which bear it stamped upon them in unmistakable letters that they belong to a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him, such formulæ appear to the bourgeois intellect to be as much a self-evident necessity imposed by Nature as productive labour itself."

In the meantime, "“To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading and writing comes by Nature.”

In order to be measured and compared, they must already have a trait or traits in common. We've already done the rest of the proof: that concrete labor shares nothing else in common.

...whether it was Capitalism alone which advanced technology because of its constant need to revolutionize production. The answer is no but not without more. To consider technology in light of fetishism, let's consider a different category: "efficiency". Any first year economics student is taught about the unrivaled "efficiency" of capitalism and of the "free market". But, almost never is it understood that efficiency here refers to efficiency in the production of values alone.

In South Florida, there are a significant number of older houses with fireplaces and there are a few nights cold enough to burn wood in them for heat (and a few more cold enough to burn wood for "decoration"). The unit of wood here is not a cord as it was in New England but a bag, typically fetching an outrageous price. Still, in winter, such bags appear and I saw a pile of them at the local grocery a few weeks ago. I don't normally pay much attention but I noticed while passing that they were marked "European Birch".

What?

On closer examination, they were bags of wood from Estonia and priced at (but not above) the same ridiculous price as all the other wood that shows up pre-packaged.

Now, I am sure there is an incredibly sophisticated discussion of "efficiency" here and probably a graduate thesis in the examination of transport prices and agricultural tariffs and the full utilization of partially underutilized cargo containers shipped from the Baltic to Florida... and...

But, when all is said and done, there ain't no magic in the entire world - once "cost" is eliminated - that can make cutting wood in Estonia to be burned in incidental fireplaces in Florida "efficient"... for any possible usage of this word...

And still, this is an everyday story.

abstract esoterica that follows about "value form"? I know that Marx treats this subject with more depth later ("not to anticipate..", as he says) but one thing that I'm struggling with is how it is even possible to misdirect/misinterpret the discussion of "forms" in the first place

I've saved the others but can't find the first discussion thread on Capital.

I thought it was just me. I wonder where it went?

http://www.progressiveindependent.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=100854

It started as a thread by KBOH called "What is Value?"

No two items of abstract esoterica seem the same to me. This material is not easy and certainly requires a careful reading and rereading which, perhaps, we are not used to. All in all, however, it is not easy to misunderstand the guy. I have no idea what at least half the "Marxists" are talking about.

Then again, I have no idea what half the Presbyterians are talking about.

I've saved all the "Capital" threads as well as others related. So far I've copied most of the important threads on the first ten pages of GD. No pictures are saved just the discussions.

With the end of Section 4, we have covered the part of Capital that is the most difficult to begin reading on one's own. The rest is sometimes easy and sometimes hard, but it "follows".

How did we do? Did it work on the Web?

I should ask blindpig who was willing to try it and PinkoCommie who insisted that it had to be done... If nothing else, I think we have a partial template for anyone to repeat the series.

My understanding of this material, while far from perfect, is vastly improved. Your dissection was very helpful and the comments by other participants allowed me to skirt asking quite so many dumb questions, thanks guys, hope I did the same for you.

A couple peripheral comments:

The first part of note #34 brought to mind the 'end of history' nonsense.

Your example of European birch firewood in South Florida is a fine example of the irrationality of capitalism and the operation of fetishism. No rational person would carry firewood across the Atlantic, only the peculiar logic of exchange value could make sense of such absurdity. In terms of the labor involved in the production and transportation it seems insane to me, yet some one is making money.

Only half so because I wanted to make sure Marx was not in fact making some additional comment on use value.

However, the rhetorical side is to point out that the "qualitative aspect" actually IS FOUND in its quantity. This is more Hegel (which we have technically already covered) but it is Hegel cast in a much more illuminating light than some of his curent hangers-on (the "Marxists" you allude to below) would have him.

In fact, I'm not sure they'd recognize the guy. "You look like someone I know but..nah, can't be.."

For me it is less than that. There is a guy called Chris Arthur who treads heavily on this topic and is much bandied about. Read the gobbledygook on the wikipedia page for the gist of how insane it is. It actually uses the word esoteric which is a welcome and candid surprise.

I think Arthur ends up talking about a "return" to the Paris Manuscripts. I don't think thats an all bad idea, but for him it becomes doctrinal. He especially focuses on "alienation" and the debate of how that later translates into the "division of labor" in "mature" Marx

"Consider something as simple as "greed" (or "hierarchy" or "power"), for example. We see "greed", not as something that has evolved in a peculiar, historically determined stage of society, but as a part of "human nature"... something immutable and ever-lasting... and we begin the exploration of it from that impossible starting point. Nevertheless, this exploration immediately falls afoul of the contradiction inherent in it. To understand something, we must reduce it... simplify it to its most essential elements... and this reduction for social categories always arrives at their history. The assumption of immutability is not enough."

This eliminates the necessity to indulge in refuting so many of the liberal arguments.
If we were serious (and energetic enough) we would take on the human nature arguments through an historical analysis of what any of the Seven Deadly Sins mean/meant at a given point in time. This section seems doubly rich when considered with what's happened here over the past months.

Definitely have the start of a template. We could start by editing some more of the bullshit comments (I know you've done some of that) and re-posting the threads, comment by comment, either here or there. I'd be willing to work on it.

Any plans to move on?

"internets" as much as I have with this study. I think that this was a terrific idea and is a great template. I am with curt on this. This has been a shining light, man, a shining light. I want more...

If you want to keep going, I will be happy to (after a break). There is simply too much material for line-by-line or paragraph-by-paragraph, however. It would be more chapter-by-chapter.

We've tried to do the exact same thing with the Manifesto a few times. That is the one that should have popular resonance. Unfortunately, I don't think we have the method for that one licked yet.

On your point, how about envy/jealousy? "Well, as far as personal jealousy goes, that is something that is biologically coded and... yadda, yadda."

BUT, there was no such thing as pairing marriage for the first million years of human existence.

"Well, that may be but jealousy is so ingrained in humans that it must have had another outlet..." In other words, we shall reduce our immutable category to something so indistinct and meaningless that we ourselves don't even recognize it anymore... and then this indeterminate thing is declared to be transcendent precisely because nobody can now say otherwise...

...like "hierarchy".

People have always loved gold, doncha know? It is part of their nature.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch02.htm

Whenever you and others want to continue, I'm ready.

that I expected there to be quite a bit more commentary on the last section we just did. The material may be linear, but it is also extremely dense in that it is kind of a summation of all that we have already established.

Maybe Anax is right that we should repost this, work on summarizing and reviewing, or even simply revisit previous material in light of a more complete perspective on it.

I also think we should be thinking about how this ties in with the Manifesto which is the explicitly political document of the two.

I've been reading Kropotkin recently. His Mutual Aid is maybe a bit too loose but in The Great Revolution he is essentially extending the idea of cooperation within species to the societal level.

He also sees France and the fall of the ancien regime as a roadmap to Revolution in the most practical and considered sense. It is perhaps his Anarchist Manifesto in spite of itself (since it is explicitly not about that, and in some ways about the opposite -- the establishment of the Modern State) and in spite of himself (since it is a prescription of sorts issued from a staunch anti-prescriptivist).

The point that I've taken to heart recently -- as I was reviewing the opening chapters looking for one particularly elusive passage -- was that what motivated the peasant risings more than anything else was lack of bread or more accurately, want of bread since scarcity is entirely a social category.

Meanwhile, Louis XVI stood resolute that the only efficacy of his power was as the absolute weilder of power.

We've talked about nationalization on here recently. But nationalization is not simply a matter of a state takeover of finance, because that is exactly the threshold that requires the defeat of those who control global finances.

The question is whether we seriously believe that we have arrived at the point where the slaves who feed their masters must instead be fed BY the masters. And it is not a question of "belief" at all, but one of really and factually existing social conditions.

Is there any further foundation for reform of the capitalist system? Has the bourgeoisie social contract been unforged? If so then we may indeed say that the needs and demands of the immiserated for necessities -- in a word, bread -- represents the germ of a revolutionary movement, a CLASS poised for revolution. Exactly what banner we will march under is secondary to the inexorable fact that human social relations must be remade to meet these needs (which are politically expressed as demands)

got the actual volumes 1, 2, 3...so I can always revisit as I read ... onward... when all are go...

I've been at home the past few days and have had to avoid this thread, it takes forever to load there.

Yep, in the end it always seems to come down to bread, which might give a clue to the new name we are hunting for...

we're just brainstorming for ideas and phrases that are evocative and thematic.

(Aren't we?)

those things are handy to have, particularly for illiterate soldiers like myself...

.

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and had forgotten how good they really were!!

So how do we do "more" from here.

It might be that a refresher is in order first..

(How) Do we cover the Manifesto? Is there a gameplan for covering the rest of Capital? (for instance, we hopped into Theories of Surplus Value instead to cover capitalist crisis)

Definitely more of this though, its invigorating