Law of Value 4: Value
June 13, 2010Use-Value, Exchange Value, Value
part 4 of the Law of Value series
This is one of many abandoned houses in my neighborhood. The slumlord owner let the property deteriorate until it became unlivable and doesn’t want to pay the money to make it livable again. There are thousands of abandoned houses in this city, and thousands of homeless people. Despite the urgent social need for houses these properties don’t fulfill a social use. Why not? Because the owners of these commodities are not interested in their use. They are interested in their exchange-value, the rent they receive from the property. For decades they collected rent while the use-value of the house deteriorated. And now these houses sit vacant, a testament to the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value.
This is not a contradiction restricted to housing. Every commodity contains this contradiction because every commodity is produced to be exchanged, not to be used by the producer. We have enough food on the planet to feed everyone, yet millions starve. Why? Because we don’t produce food directly for social need. We make food in order to sell it for money. Society has much of the technological ideas it needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet it isn’t acting fast enough to apply these ideas. Why? Because production is not undertaken to direct ly mediate our relation with the environment. We produce for profit.
The exchange of the products of labor in the market is just one of many possible ways that the private labors of billions of individuals can be coordinated. Some people think this is the best possible way to coordinate human productive activity. Marx saw that, despite all of the dynamism and technological wizardry of capitalism, there were fundamental social antagonisms at the heart of this means of coordination… that production for market exchange leads to all sorts of unexpected consequences including gross inequality, exploitation, and crisis. And for Marx all of these social antagonisms can’t be understood until we understand the contradiction within the idea of a commodity itself: the contradiction between use value and exchange value.
Use value vs. exchange value
A commodity has a use. This is its use-value. What does use-value tell us? It tells us how a commodity satisfies a social need. If we want to feed everybody we need a certain quantity of food. If we want to build everyone a house we need a certain quantity of wood and nails. Some use-values require no effort to attain: air, sun, gravity, etc. Others require effort to attain. There is a finite limit to the amount of labor that can be devoted to the production of use-values. Society must apportion this labor between the production of different use-values in some way. As technology changes the amount of labor required to produce some use-values decreases thus signaling a change in the apportioning of labor. As technology evolves to reshape what human labor is capable of producing so do our needs and desires evolve.
In different societies this labor is apportioned by different methods. In a market society it is the buying and selling of the products of labor in the marketplace that serves the purpose of allocating labor between the production of this use-value or that use-value. This creates a second type of value, unique to market societies: exchange-value.
Exchange value is the ratio in which one good exchanges for another. Perhaps one book exchanges for a loaf of bread… Or a new car exchanges for a thousand bottles of whiskey. These ratios are all exchange values. They say a book is worth this much bread; a car is worth this much whisky. In a developed market society one commodity eventually emerges as the primary commodity in which all other commodities express their exchange value. This is what money is. For most of the history of capitalism this commodity has been gold. By comparing the ratio of tomatoes or cars or baseballs to gold all commodities measured their exchange value in ratios to gold.
These two sides of the commodity, its use-value and exchange value, form two opposing, contradictory poles. Much of the social antagonisms of capitalism are rooted in this tension between use-value and exchange value. Of course, most of the time when we look at a commodity it doesn’t seem very antagonistic. This is because the antagonistic social relations behind the commodity are not visible. But when we look at a society organized around commodity exchange we can see lots of social antagonisms. To understand how these social antagonisms spring from the opposition of use-value and exchange-value we will need to take a closer look at both…
You can’t use it AND exchange it!
If I am selling a tomato this tomato has no use-value at all for me. Its use-value only exists for the person that buys it. I am only interested in the exchange-value, how much money I can get for it. Production in a capitalist society is not production for use, but for exchange. This means that we have no inherent interest in the usefulness of our labor outside of its ability to create exchange-value. Now, from a social perspective, it is very important what kind of labor we do: Do we make bombs or flowers? Oil or cupcakes? But as individuals we have no stake in this. We produce in order make money, to get exchange value.
Why do people produce for exchange and not for their own use? Because in a capitalist society the working class does not own the means of producing their own subsistence. The only way for working people to get the necessities of life is buy them in the market. And the only way to do this is to sell our labor to a capitalist for a wage. We spend our whole life making a profit for an employer so that we can spend this wage in the market to obtain our daily bread. Our job is not a means toward personal satisfaction. Our job is a means of making money so that we can buy our satisfaction in the market.
Bourgeois subjective value theory talks about a “double-inequality of exchange.” It says that the only reason exchange happens is that two people value the other person’s product more than the product they are giving up. Marx actually goes even further than this. He says that to the seller the commodity has no use-value at all, other than the fact that it can be exchanged.
Not only does this bourgeois theory of “double-inequality of exchange” give the mistaken impression that people produce for their own wants and then sell off the surplus in the market, but it also imposes the profit-maximizing logic of the capitalist onto the consumer. By claiming that consumers make a subjective profit from exchange it transposes the real, objective profit of a capitalist who pays his workers one sum of money and sells the products of their labor for a greater sum of money, onto a completely intangible and unquantifiable notion of subjective profit. But subjective preferences for commodities can’t be measured, divided, added to, or compared in a numerical fashion. By imposing the logic of capital onto consumers it effectively erases class from the scope of its analysis.
The mystery of exchange value…
One book= 1 car. What does that mean? What does it mean to say something is worth so much of something else?
Some people think that the usefulness of a commodity can answer this. But uses of things can’t be compared. You read books. You drive cars. They are two totally unrelated and incomparable uses. Maybe you like books more than cars. Does this mean that books are worth more than cars? (1)
What does it mean to say a book is worth so many jars of peanut butter, or so many cups of coffee? Clearly jars of peanut butter or cups of coffee are measuring something. And clearly any other commodity could be used to measure this something. A book could be worth so many pencils, so many kittens, so many tires… And each of these exchange values would be a different way of measuring the value of the book.
But this means that the book has a value independent of the particular commodity that we choose to measure it with. Whether we measure the book’s value in beers, beans or kittens it stays the same. Yet we can’t see this value. We only see the specific exchange ratios of the book as it is exchanged with other commodities. [The only thing that changes is the "form of appearance" of this value- the particular manifestation of this value.] But isn’t this what exchange value really is- the comparison of the value of one commodity with the value of another? These exchange-values only make sense, only work, because there is something called value that is being measured by them. Exchange value necessarily implies the presence of an underlying value. Marx uses the term “intrinsic value”. By this he doesn’t mean that value lies buried within the commodity, or that it is magically bestowed upon the commodity, but that it is impossible to compare commodities to each other in the market without a commodity having its own value. But what is this value?
What is the 3rd thing?
We have seen that exchange value implies that commodities have an intrinsic value expressed in different exchange ratios. This value is not use-value or exchange-value but a 3rd thing. What is this value? Where does it come from?
I know you are in a lot of suspense so I’ll just come right out and say it: Marx argues that it is the labor time that society devotes to the production of these commodities that accounts for this underlying value. Commodities that take more labor to create have more value than ones that take less labor. As labor becomes more productive, as it becomes easier to produce things, their value falls. But what is Marx’s justification for choosing labor as this 3rd thing?
Marx’s critic Bohm-Bawerk pointed out that there are lots of properties that are common to all commodities: Marx could just as easily have said scarcity or utility were this third thing. This, of course, is the approach taken by marginal utility theory which argues that it is our subjective desires for commodities in relation to their scarcity that determines their value. Why is it that Marx doesn’t take this route?
For one, scarcity and utility cannot be understood without reference to labor. The amount of a commodity that exists at any point in time is clearly related to the amount of labor that has been devoted to producing that commodity. And utility isn’t just some abstract, individual substance detached from the labor process. Subjective desire only counts economically when it is turned into real action, when we buy things in the market. The only way to enter the market as a purchaser is to also enter it as a seller. We must sell the products of our labor and then use this money to buy the commodities we desire. (More specifically, workers sell their ability to work, their labor power, to an employer. The employer sells the product of that labor in the market. Workers receive a part of this value in the form of a wage.) The only means of attaining our desires is the buying and selling of the products of labor. Not only does capitalism shape our desires, it determines how we go about attaining our desires.
But there is an even more important reason why Marx doesn’t choose scarcity and utility as the determinants of this underlying value. Utility and scarcity both describe the relation between individuals and objects. Marx is interested in the relations between people. If we think back to Marx’s argument about commodity fetishism we will remember that in a capitalist society the relations between people take the form of relations between things. Objects appear to have power and value, on their own. But this wold of appearance is not the full story. These value relations between commodities are actually relations between people whose work is coordinated indirectly through commodity exchange.
And this is where any social theory must begin: with a study of the productive activity of people as they work to create the world they live in. Not only is this the best starting place for an analysis of society, it is also the best starting point for a radical social theory whose aim is to investigate the possibility of changing the world. If we realize that human society is not the result of some natural or divine eternal logic but merely the creation of our own labor then that means that we have the power to mold and shape that society as we see fit. In a capitalist society these creative powers take the form of an external world of value and capital that acts back upon society, shaping it against the will of its creators. Yet, in the end the world of capital is nothing but the product of our own creation. If we truly want to change the world it is not up to nature, God, fate or experts, but up to us. This is the radical challenge of the law of value.
Let’s review and clarify:
1. The usefulness of a commodity is its use-value. Uses can’t be quantitatively compared.
2. The exchange-value of a commodity is the proportions at which it exchanges with other commodities.
3. Price is a specific type of exchange-value, the ratio at which a commodity exchanges with money.
4. The fact that commodities measure their worth against each other implies that they have an intrinsic value.
5. This intrinsic value is not a physical thing, nor is it magically bestowed upon commodities. It is not a timeless trait existing for all products of labor everywhere. Value, in the way Marx uses the term, is the means by which the labors of isolated producers are coordinated through commodity exchange. It is the social substance the binds together the labors of isolated, disparate individuals separated through the market.
Price and Value (a brief distinction)
We notice then that value and price are not the same thing. The value of a sandwich may be 1 hour of labor. Yet we don’t see this 1 hour when we buy a sandwich. All we see is its price. Prices are just the exchange value of commodities measured in money. The only way we see value is indirectly through these quantitative relations between commodities. Though value and price are indirectly linked, their connection is still strong. If demand rises suddenly causing the price of sandwiches to rise this will trigger an inflow of sandwich-making labor to meet demand. And once demand and supply have balanced, price falls back down to meet value. If the productivity of sandwich-making rises the time it takes to make a sandwich falls. The supply rises and the price falls. Prices and values fluctuate around each other, constantly codetermining each other.
Conclusion
The last thing we should note is that this concept of value is historically specific. Unlike bourgeois economic theory which projects its categories of utility and capital back in time to make all of history retroactively bend to the laws of capitalism, Marx’s theory of value describes a specific type of social organization unique to a society in which the dominant form of production is production for market exchange. When we don’t produce directly for use, but for exchange, we find that our productive activity is regulated by unconscious economic laws which Marx calls the “law of value”. Whereas before we said there was an antagonism between use-value and exchange-value we can now say that this is really an antagonism between use-value and value (since exchange value is an expression of value). As long as production is production to produce values instead of uses we will have to deal with the social antagonisms that spring from this contradiction: The logic of profit will dominate over society rather than the logic of usefulness. And the nature of work will be to maximize profit at all cost rather than to maximize the quality of the experience of work or of the life of the worker.
Footnotes:
1. There have been attempts by neoclassical economists to reduce the usefulness of commodities to some common substance. Since there is no common substance that makes up usefulness they have to make up an imaginary substance called “utles”. These economists actually say things like, “A cup of coffee has 13 utles and a car has 3000 utles of utility”. But such attempts to invent imaginary substances with which to reduce utility to are generally thought to be pretty silly and misguided. In neo-classical economics this concept has been mostly replaced by the concept of rank preferences, or graded utility: A consumer has a ranking of demand preferences but these can’t be reduced to some common scale. In this way the question of value, in the sense that a commodity has a definite amount of value as determined by subjective social demand, is mostly abandoned: Commodities don’t have values, but consumers have preference rankings and these preference rankings result in prices. This approach conveniently eliminates many of the theoretical problems with earlier marginal utility theory (namely the unquantifiable nature of subjective utility), yet it has an inherent circularity: consumer preferences are not formed in a vacuum. They are formed on the basis of preexisting exchange ratios. As the prices of commodities change so do the preference rankings of commodities. So commodity prices must first be assumed in for marginalists to theorize the subjective processes of price formation. This is circular. The pink elephant in the room is the productivity of labor. As this productivity changes so do prices. There are a host of other criticisms lodged at Marginalism by Marxists. Perhaps sometime in the future I can write/produce more on the topic.
I really appreciate this series
“They are formed on the basis of preexisting exchange ratios. As the prices of commodities change so do the preference rankings of commodities. So commodity prices must first be assumed in for marginalists to theorize the subjective processes of price formation. This is circular.”
No. Not circular. It’s a causal cycle. Circular is meant to describe reasoning. What you just described is a causal cycle, but you did not at all criticize their reasoning for proposing that causal cycle. If you call that circular, then so is the statement that we produce for money so that we can buy commodities, since the the observance of having these commodities bought also signal that I should produce, which will get me my commodities bought, etc. The first basis of that causal cycle, however, is the subjective processes of price formation–that’s the initial condition. That’s one possibility. A second is that price formation and preference ranking is parallel, even if the independent cause is the subjective preference ranking. Third possibility: if you go back far enough, there will be a point when consumers did not have a price to observe. The initial interpersonal valuations established the condition for price observation that would help further valuate goods. Also, remember that money is a good as well, so it also has a price, and that valuations always change even after price formation.
“A commodity has a use. This is its use-value. What does use-value tell us? It tells us how a commodity satisfies a social need. If we want to feed everybody we need a certain quantity of food. If we want to build everyone a house we need a certain quantity of wood and nails.”
There can be no exchange value with no use-value. If no one deemed anything useful, there could be no exchange. Use-value is a necessary condition for exchange. If you’re referring to personal use-value, which most people do when they say use-value, it says nothing as to whether a good satisfies a social need–only your need is being satisfied. Without exchange, goods are not allocated at all–rather, they stay as property of individuals. Exchange gets goods to go on hold to certain places at certain times. If other people really need houses or food, there is high demand. Naturally, producers would try to exploit that by trying to raise profits–this would involve trying to make production cheaper and cheaper (cheaper but harmful ways will suffer market discipline)–changing the structure of production/labor, increasing stock, lowering prices. You’re also completely ignoring political policy as a possible factor for deterred supply.
“The amount of a commodity that exists at any point in time is clearly related to the amount of labor that has been devoted to producing that commodity.”
Goods precede labor, otherwise their would be nothing to labor with or to labor for. With competition due to scarcity to appropriate (not through force, hopefully) goods, we also have exchange for goods in order to produce/labor, where different people value their own goods “opposite” to each other at certain times. The labor allows for consumption and also for further exchange, development in method, and increase in goods, and thus living standards. You are right, I guess, in a sense, that labor is the basis of production and is thus the basis of the creation and multiplication of goods, but it is not what creates the value of goods. It is the subjective valuation of goods that give them their value. Just because labor increases stock doesn’t mean it’s what has created the value of the good–their was labor for a reason in the first place. Their was labor in the first place because of the valuation of goods. This pushed labor forward for meeting those goods and/or using them to make more goods, which meant an increase in stock. As the stock increases, we make more valuations that continue to determine the structure of production, the stock of a certain good, and, in the end, the allocation of resources, because our valuations are based on present goods. Remember that in the beginning their is nature, not defiled by human touch. You’re right: value doesn’t mean anything unless its translated into action, but the fact that people act to attain things is what subjective value theory is about. It’s the backdrop of action, whatever that action is: labor or consumption. We CAN change our world through production/labor. We’re doing it all the time. However, the demand depends on the culture (ideas), which are related to people’s valuations of goods. Culture and economy is parallel, because valuation and action is parallel. Valuation helps to understand action in relation to goods, while culture helps us understand the economy, in terms of where the resources are going, how they are being given out, and what is being produced most, etc.
“Marx is interested in the relations between people.”
Unfortunately, the people are also connected to their environment (which includes things as well). Society is interactive, and the acquisition of things is also a natural part of humanity, which is why it is also another essential part of society besides a society’s ideas and customs. People affect people, along with goods. It isn’t about a fetish. It’s about recognizing the reality that people WANT things (even other people) and that this basic fact also goes into how they interact with each other and how they get them. That’s what economics is about. Politics, morals, ethics, aesthetics is about what people should want. What people should do. How we should enforce things. How people should interact with each other regardless of wants. That’s all. If you’re going to completely dismiss it by labeling it a “fetishistic ideology,” you’re not gonna get anywhere.
Re. circularity:
But the very notion of subjective value holds that people decide how much value to give things. But in reality this is not the case. We confront a pre-existing world of prices which we have no power to change. We make our choices in the market based on a pre-existing world of prices. Now, at this point we don’t even need to wonder what the cause of these pre-existing prices is to see the circularity in the argument. (Obviously I think it is the productivity of labor that is the ultimate influence in these prices.) If I have no control over prices I confront in the grocery store then by definition their value is not something I am subjectively creating. I am obviously engrossed in a vast web of social interaction, an objective world of production, which I then relate my subjective preferences to. Nobody is denying that people have preferences. What is problematic is the idea that these preferences have a determining force in the exchange ratios between commodities. The neoclassical demand/supply curve can’t be drawn without a ceteris paribus condition (all things being equal). It is necessary to assume constant the prices of all other commodities except the one under investigation. Then one presupposes all prices on the demand and supply curves and then uses these presuppositions to “determine” the equilibrium price. Marx’s theory of price on the other hand does not require a ceteris paribus. He analyzes the simultaneous effect of the entire structure of production and the structure of demand upon commodity prices.
“There can be no exchange value with no use-value”.
Of course. This is why Marx conceives of value as a unity of exchange value and use-value. And I’ve tried to explain this concept to the best of my ability in my videos “Das MudPie” and “Value”.
“Without exchange, goods are not allocated at all”.. I guess that depends on how you define exchange. Here I am talking about market exchange. I think it is problematic to assume that all modes of social distribution are just variations of market exchange. There are qualitatively distinct features to market exchange that make is very different than other forms of past of future distribution of the social product. Marx’s theory of attempts to theorize this distinct aspect of market distribution….
“…where different people value their own goods “opposite” to each other at certain times.” This, I believe, is a core fallacy of the modern micro-econ/subjective-value position. People don’t value the use of the products of their labor at all because they don’t produce for personal use, but for exchange. By repeating this empirical error bourgeoise economy perpetuates the myth that all production is production for use, the surplus being exchanged. This was the case with pre-capitalist exchange but is not the case anymore.
“Just because labor increases stock doesn’t mean it’s what has created the value of the good–their was labor for a reason in the first place. Their was labor in the first place because of the valuation of goods. This pushed labor forward for meeting those goods and/or using them to…”
Here we are actually saying the same thing except that we are interpreting it in radically different ways. I actually agree with all almost all of your comment here and I think you have stated a great defense of Marx’s theory of value…. almost. The way I would put it is this: without labor we have no way of meeting our needs as a society. In a market we require a mechanism of apportioning this labor to meet demand for the products of labor. Price is this mechanism. The things that effect price are the productivity of labor in the production of the objects of our demand and the relation of demand to supply. The constant fluctuation of these factors determines the allocation of labor. This is the “law of value”. This system would reach an “equilibrium state/price” except that at at the heart of value production lie contradictions which move the system toward disequilibrium (covered in a future video). Of course aggregate demand effects price and thus the allocation of labor. It does so by raising or lowering price above or below value to send signals to producers. And this is why there must be a correlation between price and labor time for a society of commodity production to function.
“Culture and economy is parallel, because valuation and action is parallel.”
Is this not what Marx meant when he said “Men make their own history but not as the choose”? We create our social world through our labor and this labor in turn shapes our world-views and demands. In a capitalist society this process is beyond our conscious control- blind forces of value production shape these desires and create the bourgeois, utility-maximizing subject. This subject does not exist in a timeless vacuum.
“Unfortunately, the people are also connected to their environment (which includes things as well)”
Ah, but here you forget the unity of use and exchange value. Those objects are only scarce, only have value because it requires labor and a social organization of this labor to acquire this object. Objects that don’t require labor lie outside of the market and outside of value theory. I am not “dismissing the way people interact with each other regardless (sic) of their wants.” On the contrary I am talking about the way the social organization of labor constructs both our desires and our means of attaining these desires.
I apologize. I think I’m starting to understand what you mean not about value theory. However, I think this has a lot to do with semantics than anything else. Have you ever thought about synthesizing Austrian economics with Marxist economics? I think they have an awful lot of parallels. The thing is that each one approached it from a different focus, which sometimes skews conclusions. This is why sometimes Austrians, like most right-libertarians, sometimes end up being “vulgar libertarians” (i.e., apply their Austrian-ness in an obfuscated way or through equivocation to defend the current system that the left refers to as “capitalist”). Also, the other “right”-libertarians that are not vulgar who have a different definition of capitalism and do not apply it to the defense of the current situation through equivocation. The left is similar. There are the market socialists or mutualists who recognize “State socialism” and “State capitalism” to be of the same breed, and emphasize the role of the State in capitalism, i.e. as necessary to capitalism. Other leftists do not, and attack the private sector through the use of force (State or otherwise) to fulfill certain goals, while the market socialists see this as counterproductive and even unethical. Most of the disagreement is either ideological/semantical rather than economic, perhaps. I have a problem with Marx because of the language he uses. I actually got struck with some confusion with your videos, but this response helps a lot. Having already encountered the Austrian school, I found their language more understandable, and it could perhaps be applied to describe Marx’s theories. I know supply and demand only works in the short-term determination of prices; while demand and supply have an influence on price, I would agree that it doesn’t fully explain the determination of price on the long-term, which would necessitate the basis of labor as the determinant of equilibrium price.
Do you know of Kevin Carson?
Yes I’ve read Carson’s book and I find it an interesting read. In the end I think it is a failure. His attempt to revitalize the LTV doesn’t actually address Marx’s theory of value at all. Rather he focuses solely on Ricardo and Smith and conflates their use of the theory with Marx’s. The result is that he is constantly misrepresenting Marx and failing to understand Marx’s insights into why labor takes the form of value in a capitalist society. Rather he treats labor value as an accounting unit- a physical input into the production process, not as a social relation between producers as Marx does. This leads him to conclude that there is some really important synthesis needed between subjective value theory and the labor theory of value. But this is just a confusion of categories. Subjective preferences take a role in the formation of demand preferences which influence prices. But this is different than the objective structure of the division of labor, where production is production of exchange value… where the social substance of society, our labor, is coordinated through exchange values. He also fails to address the question of intrinsic value.
I agree that Marx is hard to understand. So is capitalism. To that end I have tried to make my work as accessible as possible, though I am sure I have not always been perfect in this regard. But just because something is hard doesn’t mean it is wrong. Adopting Austrian categories would not help one bit with Marx though, I am afraid. Their theoretical approach is exactly the opposite- dwelling in the world of surface appearance and ideology, rather than trying to pierce through to the actual social relations of production.
I also think that Mutualists, with their obsession with blaming the state for all of the ills of capitalism, have it completely wrong. You will notice in my videos that I make no mention at all of the state. That is because the contradictions, the social antagonisms, of capitalism exist in the basic structure of production for exchange, not as an external imposition by the state. Yes the state is necessary for these antagonisms to exist. But there is no possibility in having production for market exchange without them. Thus Mutualism is a theoretical quagmire, a giant distraction that keeps intelligent people from actually examining the inner contradictions in the free market.
first video has been removed. erase my comment when problem fixed.
thanx, good work!
I can’t believe the pro-capitalists would sink so low to get your videos removed as to file copyright complaints. If I were a betting man, I’d wager that it was a “libertarian” who ostensibly opposes Intellectual Property. Those dirty !@#$%^& rats.
It was flagged for having nudity. I will upload a different version next week when I have more time… or I may just upload the original to a different site. No worries, the video is not lost. Yes, it was probably flagged by some immature libertarian (the irony of ironies: libertarians relying on censorship to win arguments….)
Bourgeois theorists are already responding to your video’s. Come help and educate them:
I don’t see a link here. Are you referring the pathetic series of videos made by some inarticulate teenager who calls himself “fringeelements” or something? I found the videos (those I finished watching) very amusing but not really worth responding to. The kid doesn’t even try to understand anything in my videos. He just makes up his own strawman arguments to use as fodder for his inarticulate libertarian ranting. It is not really possible to have a debate with someone who isn’t interested in actually understanding his opponents position. I suspect that as my videos increase in quality and as my audience grows I will probably attract all sorts of responses and I will have to decide which ones are worth responding to and which ones are a complete distraction and waste of time.
yeah, it’s all bourgeois.
Great article. Is the final version available online?
thanks.
I’m currently reading Capital, along with Harvey’s companion guide, and these vids are good little reviews that help solidify the info for me!
Cheers!
This is my first look at Marx and his theories, apart from random comments made by lecturers, as I start Uni of course. The quiz was amazing to get me to focus and realise what I had no conception of and misconceptions of. Plus, I really appreciate how you include a script with the video’s, it allows me to read then watch the video, and then rinse and repeat a few times until I get it.
My next stop is reading his works for myself and comparing and contrasting your concepts with what he himself wrote. I feel confident that I am going to find that you’ve done a pretty amazing job.
and feel confident that I may just be able to tackle reading him at all now ^^.
Brilliant. May I suggest a reading list and some words of caution?
- capital volume 1 + companion to marx capital (harvey)
- limits to capital (harvey)
Applying Marx ideas to other spheres of life except economics is a bit tempting I would say but that’s my point of view. There is/was actually more debate on the interpretation of his concepts, theories than actual development of the framework in the way Marx would have done himself (dialectically).
The proof of this are the various ‘forms’ of Marxism with sometimes diverging ideas (and methodological assumptions) without actually continuing the work of Marx as in expanding the argument. Remind for example the Althusser -Gramsci debate or the different controversies on the interpretation of Marx (transformation problem).
That is also one of the reasons why I think that Marxism was almost extinct. The application of Marx his unfinished (but brilliant) concepts sometimes went too fast and too far (politically and scientifically). For example the different assumptions that Marx used to advance his argument in capital always have to be kept in mind (equal exchange for example).
I really appreciate the work you are doing on Marx; it helps people like me, I think, who have been reading Marx but not really understanding him.
In the above article you mention how Marx places commodity production in historical context. My question (and I think i have asked it somewhere else on this site) is, how does commodity production compare to slavery and feudalism? I would think that those systems dont produce commodities, yet they produce use-values and exchange-values.
These videos are truly great. The way I learn best is to approach the same topic from different angles. Even though I’m doing pretty well on the basics, these videos are a great help in solidifying my understanding. I guess learning is essentially repetition (Gramsci?). – Also, I find your (and others’) discussions in the comments sections greatly illuminating; your dedication to this inspiring. So I thought I’d post this in support. – Your friend from the Middle East.