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Increasingly, I find that people no longer understand the most straightforward things: they read Marx as if he is speaking allegorically. E.g. as if exchange-value were not an observable phenomenon he set out to explain but an occult force he invented like phlogiston/angels.
We can all observe that there are different concepts of value and that the exchange value of a commodity is not related to its moral value or sentimental value or as Marx calls it, use value. This is not something Marx was the first to discover. It was something everybody can see
It was since the dawn of markets and the first merchants an obvious phenomenon that political economists set out to explain - what determines the market value of commodities, i.e. their relations (which for merchants appears as a principle grounding +differentiating spot prices).
The post-structuralists hurt people's heads in such a way that they started to take "value" to be something mystical. (And certain Wall Street rightists now say "value doesn't exist", denying the existence of this mystical fairy nobody ever assert did exist in that sense)
Perhaps the growing confusion had/has to do with the analogy that the posties were constantly making between commodity production+exchange and language. Anyway: Derrida debuted with an essay, if you can call it that, on Condillac on Knowledge, in which he never mentions Condillac
on Commerce, which however seems to be the repressed in a sense in his text causing all these ticks as symptoms. Condillac starts off his investigation of commerce with this condundrum as these guys saw it, which was: why aren't water and air commercially expensive, when they are
the most precious things in the sense of being the most absolutely necessary and universally necessary to humanity. It is hard now to believe that grown men racked their brains about this. In Condillac's hazy ponderings we see operating the capitalist dream:
Today, many clerks are so narrowly educated and so kind of doctrinaire in their whole mentality --trained as priests of a miniscule holy canon -- they believe their superceleb thinkers invented everything they thought about. They believe Freud invented the psyche and unconscious
Concrete labour actually performed in the production of commodity - concrete life expended and "worked up in" a commodity - does not endow the commodity with exchange value. Read Variety. Some movies bomb. Not because there is less labour involved in making them.
What gives commodities their value in the first place is a social need for them, a market or demand. LABOUR quanta is determining rather of the relative values of commodities, that is, relations between all commodities, all of which are clumps of dead labour, in varied forms.
The breakdown of language capacity is on display in the inability of many young clerks to recognize there are multiple senses and valences of the word VALUE determined by the context. For example, here are three sentences using the word
value: "This vintage Gucci bag is badly marred by cigarette stains and has no value." "What is the value of this Gucci bag?" "Gucci is ranked the 38th most valuable brand, with a brand value of $12.4 billion as of May 2015."
Take sentence two, which can be ambiguous; it might mean, what is the point of having a Gucci bag, how does it enrich your life? But more likely if you were discussing poliecon, it would mean what precisely can a Gucci bag exchange for, that is, a question about quantity of
purchasing power, exactly the same question as "what is the value of the dollar today (in euros, in gold, in oil futures.)" That sense of the word value is a "how much of" not "what type of", and the "what type of" is understood to be given.
Increasingly. clerk youth can't cope with ambiguity; they can't distinguish when it is a given property of a language product and when it can be dispelled, and they can't generally dispell it. The synthetic function of language use is waning. This seems to come from the practise
of cynical snark which is the use of a claim convenient ambiguity as a sheild for disavowed meanings,+ it implies despotic individual control of language content/meaning. It's like they crossed their eyes so often, they got stuck; they crossed their minds so often they're stuck.
There no magic, no secret hidden essences of which the observable concrete phenomena are merely show. It's not kabbalah. In other words: your kidney has no value on ebay because it can't be sold, but it still has a notional value, a relation to commodities. As does a public road.
This should not be a difficult thought to entertain in your skull. But it has become so, because of the snark, the screen damage, the videogame idealism, the drop menus, the ones and zeros. Ordinary reality has become unthinkable to clerk youth; there is a trained reflex to
spectacularize, to "cure" reality of its concrete qualities and translate it into ones and zeros and static essences.
To this mentality, Marx historical materialist explanation of value is simply not comprehensible and not satisfying. They want the secret code. There is no secret code. Value is reproduced by human beings in social relations, with all its contingency and context: it's not
revealed by the magic decoder and incantations. The mentality that is making reality recede is illustrated very well in the fad for these DNA kits, in which people feel they are discovering something magical and hidden about themselves, which makes no fucking sense at all
But this is the mentality, this kind of Murdoch's Priestess Buffy mysticism: oh look I seem to be an enfranchised first world white person but really I am the wraith of the exterminated Taino.
The real information from DNA is completely lost in this spectacularization and cartoonization of the concrete organic reality of the human species.
The discussion of Socialist or Not Socialist Nation states is also like this,DNA fantasy, and "does a public road have exchange value?" and "Is Carlos Slim white?" demanding yes/no replies, the arresting of ordinary dialectical thought and the replacement of language with code.
IS value a quantum of completed concrete labor? This is all wrong thinking; this is the wrong question. The Marxist question is always "how is value produced?" The answer to all inquiries re: human affairs is historical, not theological or philosophical.
For this reason Deleuze and Macherey, the Spinozists, are the least mind-damaging of the students of Althusser. But they'te still all best treated with extreme caution.
