comrade]
Forgive me, Marx, for I have sinned.
My matrix is @queercommie28:matrix.org

Moderating

Ask Lemmygrad lemmygrad.ml

8mo ago

Class Consciousness: What? How? Why?
Jump
5

QueerCommie @lemmygrad.ml 8mo ago
Use-value and exchange-value: the two qualities of the commodity and what they show
“The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. … They constitute the material content of wealth, whatever its social form may be. In the form of society to be considered here they are also the material bearers of … exchange-value.” (Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 125-126) What is Marx telling the reader in this first sentence? The wealth of this society which constitutes its prosperity appears as a collection of commodities. The single element of this wealth is the individual commodity. And what is a commodity? A useful thing. Secondly, a thing with a price at which it exchanges for money. This wealth does not simply consist of being a useful thing that can be used to satisfy a need. If you have cooked your own food, then you have not produced a commodity, but a good meal. In this society, wealth does not come from the useful things which can satisfy needs. The useful thing is something else at the same time: a thing for sale.
From this commonplace observation, Marx draws a conclusion:
“Exchange-value appears first of all as a quantitative relation, the proportion, in which use- values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind. … x boot-polish, y silk, or z gold, etc. each represent the exchange-value of one quarter of wheat. Therefore x boot-polish, y silk, z gold, etc. must, as exchange-values, be mutually replaceable or of identical magnitude. … [T]he valid exchange-values of a particular commodity express something equal … [They] are therefore equal to a third thing, which in itself is neither one nor the other.” (ibid., p. 126-127) If boot-polish, silk and gold are exchanged for wheat, or wheat is exchanged for the other three things, and these things are counted as equal in exchange, then these things must have the same substance. They must have a third thing in common which does not correspond to the use-value of the boot-polish or the use-value of the silk. The common third thing is well known to everyone. When people exchange and/or buy, they are aware that they must be careful about how much they get in the exchange. They have the idea that they can make a good exchange or a bad exchange. If this is true, then they also have an idea about a “correct” exchange ratio. What do they think would be the correct exchange? An exchange in which the owner gains nothing and loses nothing. But from the standpoint of use-value, one always gains when one exchanges. One gets what one needs, and one is willing to give something up for it. But if one has the idea of a “correct exchange,” then this does not apply to the use-value; then one thinks of the quantity: how much do I get for my money? The idea of the “correct” exchange refers to the value that one holds in one’s hands. The valid exchange-value of commodities expresses a match which is with neither one nor another commodity, but with a commonality of commodities. Now comes the conclusion that has caused so much surprise:
“If then we disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labour. … All these things now tell us is that human labour-power has been expended to produce them, human labour has been accumulated in them. As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values – commodity values.” (ibid., p. 128) Marx’s famous conclusion about labor has been taken to mean: what else should it be? All the other characteristics of commodities relate to the commodity’s use-value side. The weight, the odor, the solidity, whether one can listen to music with it, whether one can saw a board on it, etc. – in these respects, commodities differ. And it would certainly be absurd to exchange things that are the same. Nobody exchanges a kilo of salt for a kilo of salt. What do commodities have in common when one puts aside everything having to do with their natural qualities? Only that they are products of labor. [1]
Here one might say: this is trivial; of course, material wealth only comes into existence through labor. This is true in all societies. But it’s not that simple. The labor that forms the substance of value, thus the fact that the exchanged things are products of labor, is not the actual labor of individuals:
“ … [T]he labour that forms the substance of value is equal human labor … The total labour- power of society, which is manifested in the values of the world of commodities, counts here as one homogenous mass of human labour-power.” (ibid., p. 129) The labor which constitutes the substance of value is the socially necessary average labor time. The issue is not whether the labor is fairly rewarded and if one gets more by working more. Marx maintains here that the value of the labor product doesn’t depend at all on the individual labor that has actually been expended. Vice versa, the individual finds out how much socially valid labor has been realized with his individual toil from the price his commodity wins on the market.
Bourgeois economics have argued that goods rarely exchange exactly according to the labor hours incorporated in them. This is supposed to be a criticism of Marx, although Marx clearly says that it is not the real individual labor that forms the substance of value. It’s not as if Marx wanted to calculate the working hours that are measured in prices, only to realize that there is a divergence between the real amount of work and the price. This follows from what Marx has claimed – it does not rebut it! Marx wasn’t interested in calculating prices. He wanted to say something else, and he dealt with these objections in a passage in a letter to Kugelmann. The economists said to Marx: prove your concept of value; prove empirically that working hours is the substance of value and can therefore be used to calculate prices. Marx, however, contended that it is not a matter of having to prove value and its substance:
“The nonsense about the necessity of proving the concept of value arises from complete ignorance both of the subject dealt with and of the method of science. Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish. Every child knows, too, that the masses of products corresponding to the different needs required different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labor of society. That this necessity of the distribution of social labor in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance, is self-evident. … And the form in which this proportional distribution of labor asserts itself, in the state of society where the interconnection of social labor is manifested in the private exchange of the individual products of labor, is precisely the exchange value of these products.” (Marx to Kugelmann, July 11, 1868, Letters to Kugelmann, p. 73)

8mo ago

Class Consciousness: What? How? Why?

Everyone should refamiliarize them with the Marx’s critical basis for class consciousness. The following is an intro to Marx’s work from a site called Ruthless Criticism.

⁠Some peculiar features of the capitalist mode of production that people often have problems with

Many people think that certain peculiar features of the capitalist mode of production are humanly destructive and irrational. Religious leaders, social workers, labor unions, politicians, etc., notice the juxtaposition of poverty and wealth in capitalism. In the USA, we see millions of people who can’t support themselves on their economic resources or find a way to make a living. When we look around the world, there are hundreds of millions of people who can’t earn a livelihood in this economic system. Many go hungry, while others scramble to get by on a dollar a day. It’s no secret: enormous wealth and extreme poverty exist side by side. Even in the world economy’s few successful centers, it is taken for granted that the rich get richer and the ordinary workers are relieved if their real wages don’t continue to decline.

The second absurdity is that the productivity of labor keeps increasing. Twenty-five years ago, it took a lot more people than today to run the same factories. And the decreased number of workers does not produce less, but more than ever before. The development of the productive power of labor is said to be about 5% a year; it doubles every twenty years. And yet the work never decreases. The productive power of work skyrockets and work is never reduced for those who do it; for them, work never becomes more productive. Right next to each other, there are employed people who are so overworked that they suffer from stress and people who are desperate to find work. And yet these two groups can’t split the work among themselves.

The third absurdity is that the economy operates in such a way that, in striving to make money, everyone streamlines until the universal pursuit of growth reaches a breaking point. Not in the sense that a single firm loses revenue because a competitor has become more productive and forces it from the market, but in the sense that it turns out that all the firms, in striving to make more and more money, are make less and less money. The crisis becomes generalized. The economy does the opposite of what everyone wants it to achieve: it stagnates or slides into recession, although everyone is trying to ensure that there is more and more of everything.

Everybody notices these absurdities. You don’t need to read Marx to learn about them. Marx, however, does not join the complaining, but sets out to explain them. He gives an answer to why these peculiar features exist. He’s interested in questions that most people aren’t interested in, such as: what is “money” really? The members of bourgeois society are faced with the problem of having to make money. They don’t care what money is, only how much of it they can get. They want as much money as they can get so that they can buy stuff. Marx is concerned with a different question: what do you actually have in your hand when you have money?

Marx maintains that the above-mentioned absurdities are not because this type of economy “isn’t working” or because of the “bad behavior” of a few members of this society, but are necessary consequences of this type of economy. And that’s why he doesn’t begin his book Capital in the way that bourgeois economists do, with the intentions and motives of the people participating in the economy. It is about something trivial: why does someone go to work? Because they want to earn a livelihood and because they want to live as best as they can. When you think of motives here, everything is very rational. Assuming this, the economic mode is supposed to be predicated on the satisfaction of needs. Marx does not address the motives of people, but the social forms in which they get involved when they pursue their motives. That’s why Capital doesn’t begin with people, but with the commodity. Marx begins by referring to the objectified form of social wealth, and this already tells us what people do. People’s intentions, good or bad, do not matter when they have to deal with commodities; then their purposes have already been set.

In place of the formerly widespread custom of gritting one’s teeth all one’s life and invoking Christian maxims to take on oneself the sacrifice for the family as one’s raison d’être, modern-day women have come up with a new ideal. They take the limitations that their functioning for the aggregate private life of society forces upon them as a reason to insist primarily on recognition of their efforts; demands for the remuneration of their managing of the household have been raised, as if the honoring of this service, carried out fairly in accordance accordance with all the principles of equality, would settle everything.

Some other kinds of discoveries have also conformed to ideas of equality; women’s liberation is suddenly supposed to come about by their getting (even more) work — a wish that is granted in keeping with the needs of the labor market, and of course adhering to the unpleasant rules of “performance-based” pay, which many a woman on the General Motors assembly line can tell a tale about. After all, the fact that confining them to hearth and home represents the the sanctioned way of using womenfolk does not mean conversely that their integration into the hierarchy of labor is a blessing. In view of the truth that men have treated women like servants who have nothing to say and know nothing of the ways of the world, it has also become customary to bank on discussions on an equal footing, so that the ideal of competition has been happily wedded to that of democracy, and the two upheld together with great public appeal as a critique of the role of women.

Repression has become the catchphrase that smothers all the special features of relations between the sexes — while the magnificent battle that is ultimately fought by women’s groups and magazines is against men per se, against “male society,” with salvos like, “How many women hold elected office?” It is sad to see how the decision to stop putting up with the costs of private life has become a citizen’s action committee devoted to “I am woman … I can do anything” — to the point of joyous commitment to motherhood as an experience of the most exquisite naturalness! The idea that there is a right to a specifically specifically womanly happiness, the application of the ideal of compensation that men assert toward women by turning it around, the staging of feminine initiative as a special case of “self-fulfillment” — that is all that constitutes the battle of the sexes.

— Psychology of the Private Individual, GegenStandpunkt