As Kurz explains, the quantity of tokens in circulation that correspond to the notion of socially necessary labor time consistent with maintaining existing relations of production, since they are entirely fictitious,  necessarily implies the constant expansion of the mode of production and the consequent expansion of unproductive consumption of value. It is related to these questions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Sohn-Rethel, https://www.internationalmarxisthumanist.org/articles/contra-sohnrethel-philosophical-roots-anticapitalismby-david-black. However, while this labor is only necessary in relation to the capitalist mode of production, but really superfluous from the standpoint of a future communist society, it is not correct to say this form of socially necessary labor time is somehow arbitrary or not of true theoretical significance. Postone explains: ‘we have seen that value… is based on direct labour expenditure’; and since manufacture is inevitably based on direct labour, we will be inevitably obliged to reproduce the form of capitalist production, whether we like it or not.36 In this spooky vision, labour acquires the mystically scary power to survive as a ghost and rule over us as a ‘matrix of social domination’, as long as there … The relation between the two money forms is not arbitrary: in turn as prices measured in the commodity money fall, prices measured in valueless tokens of money must increase, or, what is the same thing, the so-called purchasing power of the tokens must depreciate. If this cannot happen, or only happens in part, the unconverted token are worthless. Second, in the growing mass of idled capital seeking “safe harbor” in state issued debt instruments, which must be fed constantly with new state issued debt. This is how Kurz explained his notion of collapse in December: “One has to distinguish between a crisis or even the collapse of capitalism, and the transcendence of capitalism. I had to read this passage several time, almost word by word, before Postone’s argument made sense to me. Postone thinks this division of socially necessary labor time into antithetical forms does not, of itself, leads to the collapse of capitalism: “Against the analyses of Robert Kurz, I don’t believe that these developments will necessarily lead to the collapse of capitalism, even if the dynamic of expansion stalls. Postone breathes new life into the Marxian theory of value, just when most critics of Marxism had … If you think about it the same question of perspective can be posed regarding Marx’s formulation of the organic composition of capital. Introduction 1 The value-form of the product of labour is the most abstract, but also the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production; by that fact it stamps the bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and transitory character. Today I found a blog from the St. Louis Fed that neatly explains. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Now I realize Postone isn’t a political scientist but it seems to me that: (1) the term Traditional Marxism invokes the Marxian thinkers prior to the mid-20th century who established the paradigm other value-form theorists refer to as ‘Worldview Marxism’ or ‘Left-Ricardianism.’ This tells us quantity of output without regard for prices. ( Log Out /  Value, according to Marx, is a self-mediating form of wealth, and is essentially temporal. We are not only concerned with how things are, but also how they appear to us in their movement. Do you think his ideas have developed since Time, Labour, and Social Domination? Arguably this is a great empirical score for the law of value. According to him, as soon as the gain of productivity has generalized itself, the growth of value is cancelled, the basic unity of abstract work (the hour of work) having been brought back to its initial level. This has such fucking deep implications that it would be impossible to address them all fully here. Recommended. The antithesis of value after capitalist breakdown. It sure has, in most charts! Value is the dark matter of political-economy, and as such can only be inferred from the behavior of things we can observe, like prices. Kurz, it is alleged, felt this process must necessarily lead to this collapse. It exists, first, in the growing mass of unemployed who are now utterly cut off even from unproductive employment along with a growing mass for whom unproductive employment is their only opportunity. I was actually wondering this today, and I achieved it by using the php explode function, like this: HTML Form (in a file I named 'doublevalue.php': I then According to Postone, Marx viewed social domination as ‘grounded in the value form of wealth itself’ and therefore ‘based on the unique character of labor in capitalist society’, rather than as a function of private property and the ownership of the means of production (1993, p. 30). Postone’s rendition of Marx’s “categorial analysis” asserts, rather, that value, abstract labor, the commodity and capital are “determinative of social being within capitalism”.Postone means to “dispense with evolutionary conceptions of history and with the notion that human life is based upon an ontological principle that ‘comes into its own’” (p. 20). (My emphasis) The crisis, on the other hand, is purely objective, not a result of criticism, but rather of a systemic logic independent of the consciousness of social agents. What you have been elucidating recently relates to the philosophical (and metaphysical perhaps) implications of Value theory, so in this sense it is related to Sohn-Rethel’s work. However, the conditions of critique can intensify and change, as can practical critique through crisis developments. „The social critique of the specific character of labor in capitalism is a theory of the determinate structuring and structured forms of social practice that constitute modern society itself“ (Postone, 1993: 67). Postone argues that the structure of capitalism is historically specific and determines social relations. According to the value-form school, it is the physical material of money that gives all other commodities their value, by serving as the form of value, the value-form, the money-form. Now the problem with demonstrating this beyond mere theoretical assertion is that value, in Marx’s theory, cannot be directly apprehended. This is labor time that Kurz refers to in his essay, “The Apotheosis of Money” as value that cannot reenter capitalist reproduction. In that period employment has notoriously shifted towards service sectors that are labor intensive by definition. Zero books announcement yesterday about the situation of Postone was proven wrong. The second form must express socially necessary labor time whose expenditures is required to maintain the existing relations of production, i.e., the total labor time of society. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. This stuff is very interesting. Can your general strike or political revolution do this… ? The argument of both writers suggest this sector of unproductive consumption must increase along with the increase in the organic composition of capital. https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2017/april/us-manufacturing-really-declining. | The Real Movement, How Quantitative Easing really works: Occupy Wall Street Edition, Social emancipation cannot be founded on labor, Clever Monkey versus the Accelerationists (2), Clever Monkey versus the Accelerationists (1), Keynesian Checkers versus Monetarist Three Dimensional Chess, Reinhart-Rogoff and Austerity: The math is not the problem, Nonfinancial economics : the case for shorter hours of work, UPDATED! There is now, step by step, a process in which this unreal, anticipated value creation is realized as a crisis development. There is, in addition to socially necessary labor time in its two forms — value and surplus value — a growing quantity of labor time that is neither. Although no human labor has been expended on this cache, it is still estimated to have a market value in the range of several quadrillion dollars — an entirely ideal valuation, but one that enters Russia’s ledger as an asset nonetheless. The self-movement of value takes on the forms of money and the commodity, yet capital is the abstract subject which maintains its unity in the diversity of such appearances. Change ). Thanks for this. On structure, subjectivity and agency. Understanding why Postone and Kurz do not in fact disagree on the issue of value has significance for our understanding of the movement of society. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Rather, what is pre-financed here for a miserably long time is actual reproduction. The trigger to Kurz’s predicted event, may have already happened with Lehman, which forced the extraordinary (and, even by historical standards of fascist state economic policy, insane) measures by the Federal Reserve that we have seen in this crisis. What I think this agreement between the two writers displays is a focus not on the historical prerequisites of human activity, but on the activity and its product — it is, in a phrase, a form of the value fetish itself, with the state as a self-moving construct. I hope he does. In an interview conducted in 2010, Kurz is asked to explain his differences with Postone regarding the impact improvement in the productive power of labor has on value: “For you, with the gains of productivity, capital loses its substance (abstract work) and, with the third industrial revolution, it loses it absolutely. Whereas material wealth, when it is the dominant form of wealth, is mediated by overt social relations, value is a self-mediating form of wealth. Value is constituted by human labour-time expenditure alone, according to Marx, and is the dominant form of wealth in capitalism. Second, Marx moves the relation from a focus on output to a focus on the material basis or prerequisites of productive activity. I can’t reach a consistent comment. UiPath.Core.Activities.PostponeTransactionItem Adds time parameters between which an Orchestrator transaction must be processed (not before Postpone and no later than Deadline). An aside: I was really puzzled by Postone’s claim in his paper and some talks that manufacturing output in the US as a share of GDP had not declined since 1965. It is the commodity form, expressed in abstract labour (labour dictated not by utility, and thus productive of material wealth, but by the need to generate ever greater abstract value) and flows of money that determines subjectivities and social relations, histories and times. I think, although I am prepared to be wrong, that Marx’s organic composition of capital is the answer to this bourgeois formulation in two ways. Empirically, however, things appear otherwise: while the organic relation, c:v, represents the actual historical progress of abstract homogenous labor, the bourgeois formulation, v:c, appears the more relevant relation, which it is to the capitalist. While the development of value in its second form, as Kurz argued, renders the consumption of value in the first form increasingly only apparently productive. prominent value-form theorist Moishe Postone is still alive struggling in the hospital..... zero books reports: Edit: It has come to my attention that the news about Moishe Postone's passing is untrue. The problem here is that value in these two now antithetical forms is becoming increasingly separated and at odds, as we might expect if commodity production is indeed approaching its demise. If I am correct in my restatement of Postone in this post, the answer will surprise you as much as it did me. My argument here is not meant to suggest v:c (labor productivity) is invalid for purposes of analysis; in fact it is essential. Only at the level of the entire world market, can we assume the sum of prices must equal the sum of all socially necessary labor times. Definition and Usage. The COVID-19 pandemic is taking a toll on Canada’s justice system as some courts are deciding to postpone trials and limit hearings. The organic composition of capital describes a relation between living labor (v) and dead labor in the form of constant capital (c). ( Log Out /  For Postone, the form that social wealth takes on under capitalism (the value-form) is as such because of labor’s unique role in capitalist society as social mediation. The subjectivity (and by implication agency) to overcome it is possible on the basis of a critique and conception of what is historically specific to capitalism’s form of social relations. It is constituted solely by the expenditure of socially necessary labor-time. The alleged differences between the two writers only appears to be differences because of the irreconcilable split within value itself. This is true with regards to the prices of specific commodities, but, more importantly, with regards to the sum of prices in the two forms. Which is to say, what constitutes value — socially necessary labor time — must be situated within the mode of production to which it belongs and cannot be treated as a generic category applying also to communism. Those are two different kettles of fish. My real problem with the data is that the measure of inflation is nonsense bourgeois economic theory. An example of this can be seen in the recent announcement by Russia of the discovery of an asteroid crater several decades ago estimated to contain trillions of carats of super hard industrial grade diamonds. Likewise, this means that value is not value as it is understood in various value producing societies, but is specific to capital, i.e., when we speak of value in capitalist society, we refer solely to the value of labor power or wages, the specific form of value native to that society. This latter depends on the development of what he calls a “critical consciousness’ within society. COVID-19 is a disease caused by the novel coronavirus, which has been classified as a pandemic by the World Health Organization. Real output is total prices adjusted for inflation. ( Log Out /  This is reflected in the changes in prices, perhaps. A good theory does not simply explain how things are under the capitalist mode of production, it also has to explain why things appear otherwise — why, for instance, does overwork express itself as too little work? On the one hand, material wealth, as it is understood generically, is mediated by wages; on the other hand, wages are a self-mediating form of wealth, constituted solely by the expenditure of socially necessary labor-time. From this tension, Postone draws out the "necessity represented by value", capitalism's inmost engine powering the treadmill effect. Price inflation in manufacturing has been only 2.2% per year. So I don’t believe in an inevitable collapse, unless what is meant is the regression into relations of capitalist barbarism.”. (As always, this does not imply gold is the only commodity that can serve this role — but all the other commodities suck by comparison.). So I assume he is preparing to publish an extended work of some sort. The collapse and supersession of capitalism. Real manufacturing output as a fraction of real everything output, taking into account the different rates of inflation, shows manufacturing relatively flat! In Kurz’s argument, the state can survive the demise of the value form; whereas, Postone seems to argue state force alone is capable of maintaining the social relations bound up with the value form. On the other hand, a commodity can end up unsold in the market, i.e., it can have a large quantity of actual value but no price — as GM, whose car sales in Europe fell this past month, discovered to its dismay. Although Postone’s conclusion is generally taken as a point of difference with Kurz, in fact nothing could be further from the truth. The price of a commodity, however, is not its value, but only the expression of the value of the commodity in the material of money. Thus, before they can gain their solution, communism, they must be theoretically developed enough to recognize that this solution is what they are striving for. That form of unfreedom is the object of Marx's critical theory of capitalism, which is ... His category of value… This, I guess, has been referred to as “third persons”, although they are actually proletarians. Change ), The Pogo Chronicle: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow. value-form new reading developed by Adorno and Horkheimer’s students. But there is also a form of socially necessary labor time (value) that is required to maintain the existing relations of production — as both writers explain. Thus, for you, value is collapsing, whilst, for Postone, value is growing continually then comes back to its starting point. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! This latter form of socially necessary labor time (value) is only socially necessary with regards to the existing relations of production, but is actually superfluous when considered from the perspective of society passing to a higher mode of production. ( Log Out /  Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. Sooner or later no increase in the quantity of debt will have any effect in maintaining or increasing profits, and the tipping point will be reached — Kurz’s devaluation shock. Postone’s and Kurz’s argument suggests, therefore, that there is now two distinct quantities of socially necessary labor time for one and the same expenditure of abstract homogenous labor time. On the one hand, I think it is clear that the alleged difference consists of no more than Postone’s and Kurz’s different perspective on the growing contradiction within socially necessary labor time itself.  On the other hand, it also results from an alleged different assessment of the result of the present crisis. This is not only the necessary solution to this crisis, it is — more important for our interest — the only necessary precondition required for communism itself — free disposable time won by the mass of society from existing capitalist relations of production. M. Postone (181) Department of History, The University of Chicago, 1126 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 6063 7, USA ... should be understood as delineating a form of unfreedom. The phenomenal expression of this antagonism is the growing quantity of fictional claims to the future profits of productive employed capital in all forms that is now necessary just to maintain existing levels of profitability. In either case, the state can survive the abolition of the substance of value. The force driving the growth of this superfluous labor is already given in the Marx’s analysis of expansionary character of the capitalist mode of production and its incessant demand for new markets. Since 1940 or so, the overall economy has seen price inflation averaging 3.2% per year. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. The workers are in the street demanding an end to austerity and unemployment, but somehow they do not “really” understand what they are fighting for. Marx's argument is that the exchangeability of commodities with recognition of their value is enabled by the common factor that all of them are products of social labour (co-operative human labour producing things for others). If the language sounds Hegelian here, it is because Postone claims that Marx’s concept of capital has all the same qualities of Hegel’s concept of spirit. Since money, in Marx’s theory, is the value form that expresses the value of a commodity (i.e., socially necessary labor time required to produce it), this would seem to imply money itself must assume two different and irreconcilable forms. In the first form, this socially necessary labor time appears as the labor time required for the production of commodities. Fetishism, Postone notes, must be analyzed "in terms of the structure of social relations constituted by forms of praxis and its seizure by objectifying the category of capital (and hence value). From my last post, I asserted, following Postone’s reading of Marx, that the categories of capital are specific to capital, but what does this mean? A collapse of the global financial system is actually overdue. In terms of the historical trajectory of social labor, socially necessary labor time is only necessary insofar as we a speaking of the capitalist mode of production. Sohn-Rethel’s Manual and Intellectual Labor is fascinating. This first point is important because ratios of this type are considered unit-less unless they relate quantities that have the same dimension. Both writers argue this mass of labor time takes the form of workers who have been rendered superfluous by the development of the productive forces bound up with capital. In this instance, Marx sets current activity in the context of past activity, giving us an historical perspective, as we also expect. I want to apologize for repeating that rumor here. What do you think his relation to Postone’s ideas are? An example of how you can use this activity is available here. Postone analyzed antisemitism against the Marxian notion of the dual character of the commodity category. This form of socially necessary labor time is, as Postone argues, entirely prospective, i.e., it reflects value as it must appear if the existing relations of production are to be maintained. At some point Marx had to ask himself what was the proper way to pose this relationship. You mentioned on twitter that Postone might be writing a new book? I think that this would be in keeping with Postone’s argument that the abstract and general character of commodities are valid in their abstract generality only for capitalist society. Endnotes collective, “Communization and Value-Form Theory” (2010). In Kurz’s argument, the state can survive the demise of the value form; whereas, Postone seems to argue state force alone is capable of maintaining the social relations bound up with the value form. Hopefully his ideas in this area have developed. The method attribute specifies how to send form-data (the form-data is sent to the page specified in the action attribute).. While socially necessary labor time in the first form constantly diminishes, socially necessary labor time in the latter form must constantly increase. It can be characterized by the constantly growing quantity of capital necessary to set in motion a constantly diminishing quantity of labor. RC249 Post-Death Decline in the Value of a RRIF, an Unmatured RRSP and Post-Death Increase or Decline in the Value of a PRPP For best results, download and open this form in Adobe Reader . Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Does Marx’s choice in how this relationship is posed in his own formulation of the organic composition of capital break through fetishistic ideology of bourgeois political economy? The expansion of the quantity of token in circulation, therefore, is not arbitrarily determined by political diktat, but by requirements of the existing relations of production. This split in what constitutes socially necessary labor time into irreconcilable forms prefigures the collapse of commodity production. And they both assume the state apparatus is autonomous from the development of an otherwise totalizing process of capitalist production. In either case, the state can survive the abolition of the substance of value. But to say it can be replaced by a token of money, however, is not to say this money form is only symbolic; in a crisis this token must be able to become money in the strict sense of that term, i.e., commodity money, or gold. Manufacturing has notoriously become more capital intensive. The question posed in the interview is which of these two theoretical approaches is valid for the period leading to the demise of capitalism. Marx formulated it as the latter — and I assume he did this for a reason. To demonstrate his argument let me paraphrase it as I have done before by substituting “wages” for the term “value”: Following Postone, I argue that the commodity is not the commodity as it is understood in various commodity producing societies, but is specific to capital, i.e., when we speak of the commodity in capitalist society, we refer solely to labor power, the specific form of the commodity native to that society. Ahmet Çakmak. Learn how your comment data is processed. The arguments of Postone and Kurz, therefore, imply there can no longer be a single measure of socially necessary labor time and thus there can no longer be a single expression of abstract homogenous labor that is now unequal within itself and, moreover, growing increasingly more unequal. Once value assumes these antithetical forms, the demise of value, of socially necessary labor time, is just a matter of time. Is that based on him being more active recently…? Value as the dark matter of political-economy. Value-creating labor thus appears as a historically specific form of social mediation, historically circumscribed to capitalism. Value is nothing more than socially necessary labor time, but this socially necessary labor time has now assumed antithetical forms. Are you familiar with the work of Sohn-Rethel? Finally, it can be visualized in the ever increasing divergence in nominal prices of commodities as measured in fascist state issued tokens and these same prices measured in terms of physical quantities of gold. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. Folks like Chris Arthur and Postone can probably answer this much better than I, but I think it deserves attention. I do so by placing the development of Postone’s project within the New Left and alongside and in distinction to the value-form theoretical new reading of Marx developed by Horkheimer and Adorno’s students. The socially necessary labor time required to produce commodities no longer corresponds to the socially necessary labor time required to maintain the existing capitalist relations of production. Trying to measure labor in terms of its output requires us to measure abstract labor in the form of a jumbled mass of qualitatively different use values that cannot be compared to one another. For Postone, following Marx closely, there is a distinction between wealth and value. It requires, in other words, the incessant expansion of the quantity of token (fictitious) money in circulation in relation to the quantity of commodity money that would serve if the existing relations of production were succeeded by a higher stage of these relations. This form cannot be anything other than a commodity money, which here I assume to be gold in keeping with Marx. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Postone says in his book, Time, Labor and Social Domination (pdf), that labor time in late capitalism is structured in such a way that what appears socially necessary for this mode of production is superfluous for the social relations of the new society. In the case of value, Kurz’s argument on unproductive labor holds, I think: we cannot measure value even indirectly from the prices of individual commodities in the market, but only by looking at prices as a whole. The self-movement of value takes on the forms of money and the commodity, yet capital is the abstract subject which maintains its unity in the diversity of such appearances.
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