Marx’s labour
theory of value relies on the notion of socially necessary labour time. And we
have seen that this category cannot be quantified, so that the valuations
behind all private exchanges in capitalism must be politically founded,
regulated, organized. But how can they be so? How is this possible? Marxism is
silent on this, because it relies ultimately on some form of quantification of “socially
necessary labour time” or labour power – which is why, although it is “social”,
for Marx labour time must be “(objectively) necessary” rather than just “politically
coercive”. The objection and circularity of the theory is patently clear: if labour
power is the creature of coercion, how can it be objective and therefore
quantifiable or measurable? And if it is not quantifiable, then how can
capitalist exchanges and the calculation of profit function?
Marxist
theory relies at this juncture on a subtle but fundamental shift: - a shift
from a material, substantial notion of Value based on labour-time, to one that relies
on the fetishism of commodities. It is by turning concrete labour into abstract
labour that capitalism operated the quantification of labour power: by turning
human living activity into a commodity that can be purchased “on the market”
according to supply and demand capital manages to give a price to labour power.
The flaw in the argument is obvious: supply and demand can tell us the price of
a specific commodity; but it cannot tell us “what” this “price” represents! A
relative price (one apple is worth two pears) will not do because it does not
tell us what a banana is worth in units of value common to all commodities – in
terms of “money” measured in value units.
This is why
Marxists have always referred to labour power as abstract labour, that is, as
human activity abstracted into units of time employed in the performance of a
productive task “on average”. Because of the clear difficulty involved in this
calculation, given that human activities are so multifarious and diverse and
heterogeneous, Marxists then surreptitiously revert to the subterfuge that the
abstraction of human living labour is achieved through the commodification of
production, through the reduction of human production to a series of market-priced
equivalent exchanges that “crystallize” human activity and its products into a
relationship between “things”, between commodities – hence, “the fetishism of
commodities”. It is the violence involved in the two-pronged coercion of human living
labour, first by means of its alienation from the means of production, and
second through the parcelization of “social labour” into “individual labours”,
- it is through this violence that living labour can be abstracted or
objectified into a quantifiable commodity like labour power measurable in units
of chronological time. Thus, at the individual level, capital alienates living
labour by separating it from the means of production, by expropriating workers.
And at the social level, capital then turns the essential sociality of human
activity – its being social labour – into individual parcels of abstract
labour, into labour power. It is this double operation, individual alienation
and social segmentation that allow the fetishization of living labour and of
its products, what now become “commodities”.
For Marx and Marxists there are therefore two aspects to Value or exchange value: the first is that it is something quantifiable and measurable – objective in more than just a social sense, because otherwise the measurement would have to occur politically and institutionally, not “economically”, that is, “scientifically”; and the second is that for this objectification of Value to occur so that exchange values can be measured in common units of Value, concrete labour has to be fetishized into abstract labour. It is this second aspect, the commodification of living labour, its fetishization as a commodity, that turns it into abstract labour and socially necessary labour time from which exchange values derive a common measure as Value. At this precise point, Marxists argue, Value becomes a measure common to all exchange values, to all commodities. In other words, it is the fetishization of living labour, the reduction of concrete human living labour to abstract labour power that allows the generalization of commodity exchange. But then, when asked how this fetishization is possible, Marxists reply that it is the generalization of commodity exchange that allows the fetishization of concrete living labour into abstract labour power! Here, the vicious circle is stunningly and disastrously pellucid!
The fatal
error of this type of theory is to mistake hypostatization with objectification,
psychology with economics (or, more correctly, with economics as concentrated
politics). The fact that capitalist social relations of production manage to
turn political coercion into psychological mystification or fetishism of
commodities through the generalization of exchange by monetary means cannot
possibly account for the political reality that this purely mental
process of mystification or hypostatization or reification or fetishism or mass
hypnosis can lead to the effective co-ordination of productive activity such
that the society of capital is reproduced on an expanded scale. Were it
otherwise, all it would take to dismantle capitalism would be a collective form
of psychoanalytic treatment or other kind of “enlightenment” to free us from
the “necessary illusion” (Lukacs) or the “objective appearance” (Marx) of the
commodity form! Just as illusions cannot be necessary and appearances cannot be
objective, so necessity cannot be illusory and objectivity cannot be apparent!
Those
Marxists who pursue this account of how Value becomes effectual in
capitalism base the psychological illusion of fetishism on the objective
coercive reality of alienation, that is, on the forced separation of workers
from the means of production and from the sociality of the labour process. Yet
neither alienation nor segmentation are characteristics unique to capitalism:
Max Weber(in Parliament und Regierung) insisted on the fact that the “separation”
(Trennung) of workers or soldiers or indeed bureaucrats from their “means
and objects of production” by their masters or commanders or lords has been a
constant in human history. Clearly, therefore, neither the separation of
workers from the means of production nor the remuneration of social labour as
individual labours can be the differentia specifica of capitalism. Nor
indeed can mental notions such as alienation and fetishism be the reason for
its reproduction. If the operative medium for generalized exchange in
capitalism is money – as a unit of account, as a medium of exchange, and as a
store of value -, this can occur if and only if the use of money goes through a
complex series of institutional processes centred and organized politically
around the wage relation – that is, on real relations of force between
capitalists and workers. In other words, alienation and fetishism are psychological
descriptions, epithets, for what are real relations of power underlying the
wage relation in its three characteristics that we described earlier: (a) the
formal freedom of living labour or labour force, (b) the remuneration of social
labour as individual labours, and (c) the extension of the wage relation to growing
working populations. Each of these three conditions depend on sheer political coercion
and violence, not on mental categories describing the mystification of social
reality such as “fetishism” – although we ought to exclude “alienation” to the
extent that it refers to (a) above, that is, the creation of formally free
living labour or labour force.
There are
two more riders to the Marxian labour theory of value. The first is that given
the calculability of “socially necessary labour time”, it then becomes possible
theoretically to divide or parcelize this labour time into individual labour
times when the total social product or aggregate Value is considered. In that
case, the notion of “social labour” evaporates or is obfuscated: Marx himself
falls into this trap when he opines that “the capitalist does not pay” for the
co-operation of workers. But it is the very notion of socially necessary labour
time that nullifies any consideration of social labour! The capitalist cannot
pay for social labour because the political recognition of social labour would
spell the end of capitalism! Unless we fall back on the idea that socially
necessary labour time is appropriate only for the capitalist mode of production,
which effectively amounts to claiming that it is a form of political coercion
specific to capitalism and applied and enforced through specific capitalist
institutions.
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