Jason Rhodes - In Service to Scarcity: The Pursuit of Value as the Production of Poverty
Jason Rhodes - In Service to Scarcity: The Pursuit of Value as the Production of Poverty
from Insurgent Notes: Journal of Communist Theory and Practice
see also
A Historical View of Economic Categories
from Insurgent Notes: Journal of Communist Theory and Practice
Preface: While the left has had little success in
developing a critique of capitalist value capable of informing either radical
organizing strategies or an anti-capitalist narrative which reaches a popular audience,
the conventional assumption that manifestations of economic value are
reflections of social utility has escaped critical examination.This essay
argues that exploring the roots and subsequent development of capitalist value
theory over the course of the nineteenth century reveals a Janus-faced
project:on the one hand, the development of a popular narrative which insists
upon the “natural” inevitability of the scarcity which both backs value and
precludes socialism, and on the other, an esoteric discussion of the need to
channel the labor-power of society in directions that maintain the scarcity of
the goods for which the majority exchange their time.Both the popular and the
esoteric discussion had as their common enemy the nineteenth century socialists
who argued that both the folly of capitalism and the potential of socialism
could be readily seen, and explained, by way of a critical examination of the
uses to which the collective labor-power of society were being put.What follows
is intended to suggest the contemporary relevance of such an approach as
radicals seek to develop narratives about imagined possibilities—which the
discourses of value, both popular and esoteric, are deliberately designed to
foreclose.
Introduction: The anti-capitalist left is in need of a
coherent, popularly accessible critique of capitalist value.We live in a time
in which well-researched exposés of capitalist crimes are common—think
Monsanto, or the numerous studies that trace everyday objects to the labor and
environmental horror stories at the production end of their supply chains—but
do little, if anything, to explain the systemic logic that produces the
conditions under discussion, much less spark subversive dialogue about possible
alternatives to capitalism.Indeed, both elites and the public seem to be held
in thrall by a “market populism” that suggests that freedom is found in the
marketplace, and “radical” critiques of the systems that produce our food,
clothing or electronics frequently conclude by urging us to “revolutionize” the
market via a redirection of our purchasing power.
What’s missing, of course, is any critique
of the institution of capitalist value, an understanding of which is obviously
necessary for any attempt to analyze and explain what drives the allocation of
time and resources in our society, or to provide a clear and comprehensible
answer to the question, what are we chasing, or being compelled to chase, in
this rat race?Being able to answer this question seems crucial to any effort to
make a convincing case that the race be scrapped, or to projects animated by a
desire to scrap it, or at leastprovide exits and resting points from it along
the way.
Value theory is implicit in any attempt to
explain the rat race.We’re familiar with the conventional wisdom.Money is the
measure of value, and we express our own desires when we part with it, while
fulfillingor attempting to fulfill, those of others as we chase it.In
aggregate, this is the market, a map of our collective desires, and everyone
knows, or is supposed to know, that it would be impossible to imagine a more
efficient mechanism for channeling resources in what amounts to a non-stop
process of voting on the market to inform the collectivity of our individual
wants and needs.Calling it a rat race betrays a bad attitude, though if the
characterization happens to be on target, it’s only because, at the end of the
day, we are, by our very nature, all rats.
Marxist value theory, of course, is
supposed to make short work of this nonsense.Marx tells us that value is the
necessary labor-time embodied in the products and services that produce profit
for capitalists, and thus serves capital in its inexorable drive for
expansion.Workers are exploited in the capitalist production process because
the time they spend producing the value equivalent of their subsistence, which
they receive in wages, is exceeded by the time they spend working for the
capitalist.This is the source of capitalist profit, which is the same thing as
the exploitation of labor, and Marx’s value theory makes it possible to read
capitalism as the insanity of a society that devotes its time to the pursuit of
representations of that very time.
It’s all very heady, seemingly quite
powerful stuff.Why, then, is there an apparent disconnect between Marxist value
theory and a popular critique of the rat race capable of not just doing battle
with, but destroying the banalities of someone like Thomas Friedman?Why is it
so hard to draw direct connections between Marx’s account of capitalist value
and political projects that inspire us with their potential for transformative
change?
Perhaps it’s because by the time we get
finished explaining (or attempting to explain) the discrepancy between the
value embodied in an iPhone, measured in units of necessary labor time, and its
price, the audience has left the room, and they’ve done so not simply because
of the obscurity of the discussion, but because it has seemingly taken them so
far afield from the concerns that brought them to the discussion in the first
place.There is, undoubtedly, a solution to this problem, to be had if only we
arrive at the correct reading and presentation of Capital, but I’d like to suggest
an alternative route to a subversive critique of capitalist value, one that
just might be capable of reaching and engaging a broad popular audience, and
serve as a complement to, rather than replacement for, what we’ve learned about
capitalism from Marx.
If we can think about political economy as
a discourse of governance, not as a contest to see who can come up with the
manual which most accurately describes “how the economy works,” it should be
obvious enough that as radicals we should take a vital interest in the
conception, or conceptions, of value which inform the projects of governance
which are inscribed in our landscapes and do so much to structure our lives.In
Capital, Marx did just that by taking the economic categories of David Ricardo,
the then-reigning champion of bourgeois economics, and demonstrating that they
exploded on their own assumptions.The principles of Ricardian economics have
long since been decisively rejected by elites, however, specifically on the
grounds of their uselessness for the development of tools of governance, with
Keynes declaring that the teaching of Ricardo and his followers “is misleading
and disastrous if we try to apply it to the facts of experience” (Keynes
1936).In what follows I’ll explore the history and implications of the value
theory which triumphed over Ricardo’s precisely for its perceived superiority
as a tool of governance, and argue that a plain-spoken indictment of capitalism
as a colossal misapplication of time and resources, which has as its intention
and effect the exchange of lifetimes of obedience for goods which require
comparatively infinitesimal quantities of human labor for their production, can
be derived directly from bourgeois value theory itself... read more:
http://insurgentnotes.com/2016/04/in-service-to-scarcity-the-pursuit-of-value-as-the-production-of-poverty/see also
A Historical View of Economic Categories
