Upon the iron wheel: circulation work, moving toward crisis.

[I edited this post because I had originally pieced it together out of two different themes, making it an unruly, Gemini kind of thing. Now it flows like water, almost - all the curents are folded into one stream. I hope]

“Marxian theory aims not to resolve “economic problems” of bourgeois society, but to show them to be unsolvable. Marx was a socialist, not an economist – Paul Mattick, Marxism, the last refuge of the bourgeoisie? P.87

Paul Mattick poured as much cold water as he could on the project of normalizing Marx. This project consists in finding problems in Capital that can be rephrased in terms of Walrasian equilibriums – and proceeding from this point to translate the whole system. Thus, according to Mattick, an industry has devoted itself to ‘transforming’ value into price, in response to the critiques of the bourgeois economists, without thinking of the fact that Marx continually advocates the revolutionary overthrow of wage labor – and thus of the price system as we know it. This should alert us to two things: for Marx, value as he is using the term in Capital is a historical construct of a particular mode of production – capitalism. And secondly, that Marx is not concerned with finding a way to successfully translate values into prices in such a way as to establish some grounding equilibrium from which to understand and control crises in the economic system. That is, he is not working on the parameters assumed by the bourgeois economist.

“Not searching for an equilibrium in terms of prices, Marx’s mixture of value and price relations suffices to illustrate the statement that prices and values will be altered through the competitive establishment of an average rate of profit. Whereas Marx’s example of the transformation process has only an explanatory function, Bortkiewicz [one of Marx’s critics] approaches value relations as if they were actually ascertainable in price relations. Like Ricardo, he conceives of labor-time value in terms of physical commodity units, and not, like Marx, in terms of socially necessary abstract labor time. He therefore thinks it is possible for analysis to proceed directly from technically determined observable production prices with a uniform rate of profit. But it this were so, there would be no need for value theory, for it would yield no more than can be found in price relations.” (49)


Marx, in the 1840s, the first period in which he turned to the study of the political economy as the master key to the social transformations he saw happening all around him, quickly became certain that capitalism produced its own undertakers – the proletariat- and that it was a system that was internally bound to experience crises. Revolution, as I have argued in these posts, is the truth procedure in Marx’s work. It is from the standpoint of the overthrow of the form of the class relations upon which capitalism is founded that we understand the truth of capitalism, just as we understand feudalism from the point of view of its overthrow by the bourgeoisie. That, of course, is the standpoint unconsciously adopted by the mainstream historian today – for whom feudalism is always leading to something else.

However, while revolution was one way to envision the end of the capitalist system, crisis was another. The idea of the crisis is, of course, not Marx’s alone – indeed, the cycles of the business crisis have been lamented since the 16th century. Crisis, then, there will definitely be – yet Marx wanted to understand crisis in terms of the overall structure of capitalism. Crisis has a certain similarity to revolution in that, theoretically, it could put an end to the whole system – and in fact, after Marx died, the idea of the inevitable crisis served as a sort of tool by which the reformist socialist parties could reconcile themselves to capitalism. By mitigating the causes of class struggle through regulation and the provision of public goods, the liberal state could both ensure that the working class would not struggle with the capitalists too aggressively and that the tendency of the capitalist to increase the level of exploitation as the rate of profit fell would be buffered.

Marx, in a letter to Kugelmann in 1857, sarcastically saw that all laissez faire doctrine would be laid aside when the investing class felt threatened. In that year, bank failures had initiated bank runs that had their usual effect of freezing credit and thus bringing industry to a standstill. The same Victorian respectables who had, ten years before, condemned a million Irish to starve to death because state support would weaken their will to work and encourage an inefficient agricultural sector had no problem immediately reacting to the trouble of a handful of financiers.

“It is beautiful that the capitalists, who scream so much against the right to employment, now everywhere demand public assistance from their governments in Hamburg, Berlin, Stockholm, Copenhagen, even England [in the form of the suspension of bills], thus seeking to enforce a “right to profit” at the public’s expense.”

Why, though, did crises originate in the speculative sector? And how do we distinguish crisis, anyway, from the usual degradation of the position of labor?
Talk about crisis tends to float to the top level – we tend to look at crises as they effect the financial system. Marx’s idea, that the rate of profit, collectively, tends to fall is, in fact, placed squarely in the sphere of circulation. Crisis effects the capitalists, who react to it by trying to shift the cost of the crisis on the backs of the working class by mass layoffs, cuts in pay, making jobs temporary, shifting to piecework, etc. On the largest scale, the capitalists depend on the state.

Thus, Marx needs a theory of the sphere of circulation. One way of approaching this is to ask – what kind of labor is involved in the movement that transforms commodities into money and money back into commodities?

In the sixth chapter of Capital, 2, Marx makes a start at outlining a theory of rentseeking. This theory has problems. He starts out wrongfooting himself by decreeing that the work of transforming commodities into money is not work in the proletariat sense as it does not add value. This, one has to say, threatens to fetishize value as a property of creating some physical object only. Marx begins badly, with a complicated analogy to the work of making heat – which in itself does not add to the heat. Thus, the work of the salesman who tries to sell the dynamite the Ardeer girls make does not add to the value of the dynamite, nor the work of the secretary who takes calls for the salesman.

“The dimensions, which the transformation of commodities assume in the hands of the capitalists, could naturally not be those of value creating labor, but instead only the mediating work of changing the form of value. Even so little can the miracle of this transubstation occur through a transposition, that is, through the fact that the industrial capitalists instead of themselves completing this burning labor, make it the exclusive business of third persons paid to do the task. These third persons will naturally not out of love for their beaux yeux put their labor power to this task. To the rent collector of a landlord or the slavey of a bank it is completely indifferent, that their labor does not add a jot to the value quantity of the rent nor to the goldpieces that the latter drags to another bank.”

This, it seems to me, simply can’t be the case if value theory is to have any coherence. Here it takes on a double determination, on the one hand as a property of the making of a thing, and ally stuff the components that make up the explosive charge of dynamite into the cartridge are not making is dynamite - they are part of the chain by which dynamite is assembled. Marx mostly sees this very clearly - it is only from the point of view of abstraction that we separate production and circulation.

This is what is meant by integrating the work flow. Take a thing like beef. When, in 1866, the Packers Association of Chicago, along with some local boosters, hired Octave Chanute to lay out a massive stockyard on the Chicago River’s South Branch, he directed the building of sewers for discharge, holding pens, railroad docks, etc. which in affect made connected Chicago to ranchers in Texas. The chain that was built, using drover trails, stockyards, railroads, vast slaughterhouses, and refrigerated cars to send the meat out to clients – all of it could be thought of as making meat. True, there were salesmen going out to find clients, there were packagers, there were truckers, there were clerks at the end in the store that rang up the charges for the consumer – but they were all more conveniently regarded as part of the entire meat network, than divided between those who ‘added’ value and those who only moved the meat. And the meat did keep moving:

It was a long narrow room with a gallery along it for visitors. At the head there was a great iron wheel about twenty feet in circumference with rings here and there along its edge. Upon both sides of this wheel there was a narrow space into which came the hogs at the end of their journey; in the midst of them stood a great burly negro, bare armed and bare chested. He was resting for the moment for the wheel had stopped while men were cleaning up. In a minute or two however it began slowly to revolve and then the men upon each side of it sprang to work. They had chains which they fastened about the leg of the nearest hog and the other end of the chain they hooked into one of the rings upon the wheel. So as the wheel turned a hog was suddenly jerked off his feet and borne aloft. At the same instant the ear was assailed by a most terrifying shriek; the visitors started in alarm the women turned pale and shrank back. The shriek was followed by another louder and yet more agonizing, for once started upon that journey the hog never came back; at the top of the wheel he was shunted off upon a trolley and went sailing down the room. And meantime another was swung up and then another and another until there was a double line of them each dangling by a foot and kicking in frenzy and squealing. The uproar was appalling perilous to the ear drums; one feared there was too much sound for the room to hold, that the walls must give way or the ceiling crack. There were high squeals and low squeals grunts and wails of agony there would come a momentary lull and then a fresh outburst louder than ever surging up to a deafening climax. It was too much for some of the visitors -- the men would look at each other laughing nervously and the women would stand with hands clenched and the blood rushing to their faces and the tears starting in their eyes.

Meantime, heedless of all these things the men upon the floor were going about their work. Neither squeals of hogs nor tears of visitors made any difference to them; one by one they hooked up the hogs and one by one with a swift stroke they slit their throats. There was a long line of hogs with squeals aud life blood ebbing away together until at last each started again and vanished with a splash into a huge vat of boiling water. [Sinclair Lewis, The Jungle 1920, 39]

Value would be too thinly bladed if we decide who, here, adds value and who does not.

And yet, there is a socially valid reason to separate the circulation work from the production work, if we don't hypostatize that separation too much. The bookkeeper, the floor boss, the salesman, the clerk - they may all, as a matter of fact, be as inexorably chained to wage labor as the pigs are chained to Sinclair's iron wheel. But unlike pigs, human cries are much more diverse as they are jerked up into the air and their throats slit. Some cry that they are individualists, and that any burden upon the owner of the slaughterhouse is a potential burden to them, as they, too, will one day own slaughterhouses. As the circulation worker gets more distant from the making of the product, the same ideological hierarchy to which Marx, obscurely, responds by separating out productive labor as thingmaking from non-productive labor as merely movement making works, in reverse, to make the petit bourgeois identify with the owners and investors.

Thus, even though Marx writes that the proletarianization of the circulation workers is ongoing and inevitable, their understanding of this is spotty and aspirational. In fact, so much do they employ their time in distancing themselves from classic proleterian labor that they hardly have time to think about the conditions under which they do labor. Rather, they substitute the notion that they have achieved a certain skill upon which the reward for their labor depends. This is half true. But, as we have seen, any skillset also gets chained, figuratively speaking, to the iron wheel - to the level of routinization to which all work is heir.

Marx himself backs away from his grand gesture, by moving on to explaining circulation work in terms of time - which of course gets us back to valorisation:

For the capitalists, who let others work for them, buying and selling are central functions. Since he adapts the product of many to the great social measure, so he must also sell it as such and later again transform it again out of money into the elements of production. Yet the buying and selling time, as we have said, creates no value. An illusion comes in here through the function of the businessman’s capital. But, without going into this here, so much is clear: when a function, which is itself unproductive, is, through the division of labor, a necessary moment of reproduction, and from an auxiliary operation of the many is transformed into the exclusive operation of the few, in its particular business, yet does this not transform the character of the function itself. One businessman (here treated as a mere agent of the transformation of commodities, as a mere seller or buyer) may through his operation abbreviate the buying and selling time for many producers. He is then to be treated as a machine, that shortens the useless expenditure of power or helps set free production time.”

the three muskateers, increasing return on investment, and the crisis in the humanities

In Benjamin’s essay on Eduard Fuchs there is a passing mention of a fascinating incident:

When the 1848 Revolution came, Dumas published an appeal to the workers of Paris in which he presented himself to them as one of their own. In twenty years, he had made 400 novels and 35 plays: he had been the source of the daily bread of 8,160 people. [My translation]



I thought that was a fascinating fact, and looked up the proclamation, which is reprinted, in part, in the Nouvelle Revue, vol. 8. Here is a bit of it:

I am putting myself forward as a candidate to the legislature, and I am asking for your voices. Here are my titles to your trust:
“Without counting six years of education, four years under a notary and seven years in an office, I have worked twenty years, ten hours a day, which is 73,000 hours. During these twenty years I composed 400 volumes and 35 dramas. The first print runs of the 400 volumes were at 4,000 and sold at 5 francs, producing 11,853,000 francs. Here’s a list:
To the editors… 264,000
To the printers… 528,000
To the paper merchants…. 633,000
To the advertising brochure designers…120,000
To the bookstores… 2,400,000
To the brokers…1,600,000
To the salesmen…1, 600,000
To the deliverers… 100,000
To the bookstores…4,580,000
To the illustrators…28,000
Total: 11,853,000 In putting the daily wage at 3 francs, and assuming 300 work days, my books have, over 20 years, employed 692 people.”

And so on. [My translation]

Thus, 140 years before Romer's Increasing Returns and Long Run Growth inaugurated the growth school, taking up, finally, the issue of increasing returns on investment, Dumas had already been there.

Mainstream economics has, of course, congealed around the image of decreasing return on investment. The volume of the Three Musukateers you purchase at the store has already gone through a certain amount of deterioration by the time it is lodged on the shelf of the book store. The very act of shelving it may have bent the cover a bit. The chemicals that make up the page – even if, as the small print tells you, the pages are acid free, which became standard in paperbacks in the nineteen nineties – are of course subject to the stains and stresses of use, especially if you mix eating and reading. The glue that binds the pages – especially in a 720 page paperback, which is the number of pages in the Penguin translation of The Three Muskateers – dries and loses its hold.

Thus, as a physical product, the book you purchased rapidly loses value. Take it to a used book store and you may get ten percent for what you paid for it. Of course, the very signs of deterioration can become beloved – an old hardback “in good condition” can become a collectors item. But, in general, that particular book deteriorates in value.

But does The Three Muskateers deteriorate in value? Posing the question points to the oddity of The Three Muskateers – what is it? It is like the Kingdom of Heaven – you can’t say that it is over here, or over there. The Three Muskateers is within ye - or rather, in what Lotman calls the noosphere. It doesn’t have a unique physical embodiment. It is, to use an ugly word, information. Has that information deteriorated? This can of course happen. When I open a notebook of mine at random, I often find hastily jotted down phone numbers and names. They have no meaning to me now, no use value. They have, in fact, deteriorated in value.
The Three Muskateers, on the contrary, has only gained in value. It has been translated and re-translated into all major languages. From a hasty look at IMBD, it seems that nineteen movies have been made with that title, including one starring Mickey Mouse and Goofy. If Dumas were to write his accounts now, he would no doubt find that, over the century and a half, The Three Muskateers have generated more than a billion dollars in value.
If we compare, say, the value generated by Ulysses, from the sale of the book itself to the tourist industry that has absorbed Bloomsday, etc., to two inventions of the 20s – the lead additive for gasoline, and the CFCs that were the basis of air conditioning, both the brainchildren of Thomas Midgely – we would find an interesting info track, in which all increased in value up until a certain point. Lead based additives for gasoline, it was discovered in the late sixties, translated into lead based additives in the human body. Not a good scenario. Then, in the 1980s, CFCs, which basically made the sunbelt in the United States, were found to have made a vast and growing hole in the ozone. And so both of Midgely’s products have had a shorter shelf life than Ulysses.
The simple lesson from this is that the university that lavishes attention and money on building that bio-engineering laboratory, and stingily withholds money from the English department building that was erected in 1910, is actually making an irrational decision even under its own capitalistic premises. The nano-tech device that comes out of the bio-engineering building may well never surpass, in cash value, the novel that comes out of the creative writing department. As is well known, since the late nineties, big Pharma, for instance, has spent literally tens of billions of dollars trying to develop the next generation of blockbuster drugs and has failed. The pipeline has long been clogged by mere tweaks, which exist for the sole purpose of extending patents – thus bringing together rent seeking behavior and engineering in a sort of male pattern baldness/penile lengthener festuche. But the humanities departments seemingly don’t know how to fight for themselves on this terrain. They should, of course, turn to Alexander Dumas for help. Also, they may want to try his recipe for Anchoïade Monte Cristo

accumulation, alienation, and Touch 'n Crawl Minnie

In the last post, I made a first stab at explaining accumulation in Marx’s terms.

In this post, I want to begin with two long quotes. The first is from 2004.

“Li is the fastest worker on a long, U-shaped assembly line of about 130 women who put together Mini Touch 'n Crawl Minnie, a scampering version of the Disney character activated by a baby's nudge.
“Li moves with lightning speed — gluing the pink bottom, screwing it into place, getting the rest of the casing to adhere, tamping it down with a special hammer, pulling the battery cover through its slats, soldering where she glued, testing to make sure the leg joints on the other side still work, then sending it down the line.
The entire process takes 21 seconds.

She generally works 5½ days a week, as much as 10 hours at a time. Her monthly wage — about $65 — is typical for this part of China, enough for Li to send money back home to her poor farming family in Henan province and to afford a computer class in town.
But Li, 20, pays a heavy price: Her hands ache terribly, and she is always exhausted — a situation to which she seems resigned.

"People at my age should expect some hardship," said Li, clad in bluejeans and a pink factory blouse, which she left unbuttoned to reveal a white T-shirt emblazoned with the silhouette of Mickey Mouse. "I should taste bitterness while I'm young." – “Mattel struggles to balance profit with morality” by Abigail Goldman Nov. 28, 2004.

The second quote is a long one in which Marx does some summarizing work. Always the Leo, Marx’s summaries are like the MGM symbol that proceeded its movies: full throated roars:

“The law according to which, thanks to the progress in the productivity of social labor, the growing mass of the means of productivity can be put in a motion relation to the progressively decreasing expenditure of human power, this law expresses itself on a capitalist basis [auf kapitalistischer Grundlage] in which it is not the laborer who applies the instrument of labor, but the instrument of labor who applies the laborer - in the fact that the higher the productive power of labor, the greater the pressure of the laborer on the means of employment, the more precarious become his condition of existence: the sale of his own power to the multiplication of someone else’s wealth, or to the self-valorisation of capital. The quicker the growth of the means of production and the productivity of labor over the productive population capitalistically expresses itself in the inversion, that the working population always grows faster than the valorization needs of capital.


As we saw in the fourth section, the analysis of the production of surplus value: within the capitalistic system are realized all methods to the increase of the social productive power of labor, to the cost of the individual laborer. All means to the development of production are transformed into means of dominating and exploiting the producers, of crippling the laborer into a part-person, in devaluing him to an annex of the machine, in negating with the pain of his labor its content, in alienating from him the intellectual powers of the labor process in the same measure, wherein science has finally been incorporated in it as an independent power; it distorts the conditions, under which he works, subjects him during the working process to the most petty and hateful depotism, transforms his lifetime into his worktime, and throws his wife and child under the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all the methods of production are at the same time methods of accumulation and every extension of accumulation is, inversely, the means to the development of this method. It follows that in proportion as Capital accumulates, the position of the worker [Lage des Arbeiters], whether his pay be high or low, must worsen.” [610 my translation, 798 Fowkes]

This is a high riding bill of indictment. One notices – and I put this down against those who, as Duncan has pointed out, discount alienation as an idea Marx tucked away in his notebooks in the 1840s, never to bring it out again – that the same complex of textual figures [the worker as a living and intellectual being, alienation, and the machine as the image of his doom] – come into play here, in almost the same way they figure in the Economic and Philosophical notebooks. Alienation, far from being about the essence of man, is about an essential structure in the construction of capitalism.

This may seem like a petty debating point in the interminable squabbling among Marx’s interpreters. It is, however, useful to keep in mind – it is something I’ll return to later.

According to the classical and neo-classical criticism of Marx’s economics, it is in evaluating the price of labor that Marx shows that, underneath, the market is fundamental to his interpretation of capitalism after all. Because what does Marx tell us, with his marvelous phrase about the reserve industrial army and his remarks about the surplus labor population, except that it is ultimately supply and demand that determines the labor market?

Again, one must extract Marx from the dogmatic image of Marx. There is no question that for Marx, the realization of value in the market is done under the press of what I would call surface conditions. The competition between capitalists is one; another is the competition among workers. Those surface conditions, of course, can have more profound consequences – they set up incentives that operate up and down the system.

But ultimately, supply and demand come back to the structure of capital – to variable and constant capital, which together make up the organic composition of capital. Thus, Marx does not envision a labor market that tends towards an equilibrium between the demand for labor and its supply – ‘full employment’, in the bogus phrase of the economists. Rather, this is a market that expresses the profound disequilibrium between the power of the worker and the power of the capitalist, expressed in terms of dependence. The power of the capitalist is the power given by the accumulation of capital. When the laborer sells his labor power, he not only commodifies his labor time, but he adds to the accumulation process by which the capitalist acquires a number of powers- for instance, the power to change the organization of production. These powers, in the capitalist system, are considered the natural concomitants of growth. Looking at the workers themselves, they may be getting more prosperous every year. But looking at the position of labor – the Lage – we get quite a different picture, which is of the conditions of the bargaining power of labor. Galbraith’s useful phrase – countervailing power – nicely expresses the positional power of the players in the capitalist system.

Marx’s image of the industrial reserve army again turns us back to the place of alienation. Just as an army is united by its morale – its disposition to go into battle – so, too, is the industrial reserve army. Alienation is easy to spot in the workplace. It comes out in phrases like, well, I guess I’m lucky to have a job. Or Li’s infinitely sorrowful phrase: "I should taste bitterness while I'm young."
Inversely, the position of the capitalist class is structured by a continual effort to liquidate the supply and demand conditions that the classical economists think consider to be so healthy for the working class. The upper management in corporations in America have long formed a kind of guild, in which strange value laden criteria suddenly appear, approved by the economist/theologians of the system as the height of rationality. Thus we are told that x deserves some absurd compensation packet because, under x’s ‘leadership’, the company made a billion dollars in profits over the last ten years. The same economists who would be shocked if x’s secretary or the guys on the loading dock of x’s company demanded pay based on a similar principle find X’s demand almost saintlike in its humble reach for what X surely deserves. One could, of course, create an index of the compensation of the CEOs of the top 500 Fortune companies and tie the pay to the lowest paid – thus shifting the scale downward in a competitive, market-y friendly way – but it is pretty easy to predict that this will never happen. Supply and demand as a surface phenomena determining wages quickly turns into an ideology that is used like the law of gravity over those who lack the bargaining power to fight back – the workers – while it is simply tossed aside when determining the wages of those who own the capital.

PS. Duncan has put up a buncha posts over the last three months about the 25th chapter. Start here.

First stabs at the theory of capital accumulation: the self-perpetuating cycle of wealth inequality

From Esther's Piano

Since starting my Marx rush, I have overheard many interesting remarks exchanged among the coffee drinkers at the anti-union Whole Foods where I type things out. For instance, as I was typing up a post about competition, I was overhearing a young man being interviewed by some special events catering company – which involved the interviewer delicately approaching the fact that the man would fill out a W-9 tax form, or, in other words, would be a subcontractor. However, he was assured, if his subcontracting work met their expectations, they might actually hire him. I have no idea if the young man was secretly amused by this – I was. Marx would have been perfectly at home, listening to that conversation, in which commodifying one’s labor time became, itself, a reward for the piece worker.

Last night, I tried to explain the force of the complex that links ever greater specialization with ever greater routinization of skills to a friend who has an interest in what I am writing – but is not exactly a subscriber to the Daily Worker. More a Texan from the Valley with a sort of Austin liberal outlook – like my own. Anyway, she told me that she found the Escher escalator idea interesting. In her profession – which has to do with a certain branch of medical therapy – she has lately been alarmed by the fact that all the new hires come in armed with masters – in a field which once required, max, a B.A. And she’d been depressed to hear that this field was now being taught all the way to the Ph.d level now.

So I asked if the new hires had some greater skill that they carried with them. She said she really couldn’t see one. She was speaking from 15 years of experience. And she is one of the most fair people I have ever met in my life. I believe her.

…
In the last post, I promised to approach accumulation – which is dealt with in some of the most entertaining chapters in Capital. Capital is one of those rare books that is both great political economics/social theory and a kind of omnium gatherum like the Anatomy of Melancholy. When Marx explains – beautifully – the stages of the cultural development of the capitalist, from the image of the miser to the bourgeois culture of representation-work – which Veblen will call conspicuous consumption – he leaves a footnote about Balzac that should be put in relation to other of Balzac’s great readers – Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust, for instance.

28 a ‘Thus in Balzac, who studied all the shadings of greed on such a fundamental level, the old money lender Gobseck is already entering into his second childhood when he begins to make a treasury out of piled up goods.”

It was Marx’s philosophical training that allowed him to see that one moment in the system of production could contain not only many aspects, but many related aspects. Instead of going to school with the utilitarians, he went to school with the Hegelians, and emerged with a sense of narrative depth. Thus, the moment in which an Ardeer cartridge girl finishes the wrapping of one cartridge and turns to the next can be taken, by Marx, not only as a primary moment, an entrance into circuit of exchange and use values that takes us to the unpaid labor that permits Mr. Nobel to sell his dynamite for a profit, but as a moment in which all the dead unpaid labor that has accumulated and been objectified in the cartridge house and with the materials that make the dynamite stick is activated – resurrected from the dead – so that, in a real sense, there is a specter haunting the cartridge girl – the specter of capitalist accumulation.

The correlate of that accumulation is inequality. And there was an influential reading of Marx that stopped there. The social democratic impulse was to use the countervailing tools of the state and labor unions to make a ‘fairer deal’ that would chisel away at that margin of unpaid labor. As a result of that deal, the working class would itself be able to accumulate enough not only for its subsistence and its enjoyment of a greater variety of commodities, but enough to become investors. The working class would, in this way, be on both sides of the table.

I myself, over the years at Limited Inc, have criticized this arrangement as, ultimately, doomed to fail because the working class essentially is investing in a bet against itself – that is, it is invested in the increase in the level of profit that depends upon crushing labor bargaining power to increase its wages. Now, if the worker were financially independent, this bet might pay off – her gain in buying and selling stock – or having some representative invest her money in buying or selling a variety of financial instruments – would be greater than her loss from having her wage increases slowed or stopped. But this is, unfortunately, a absolute misconstruction of the worker’s real economic position. Not only do household expenses depend on income, but social welfare goods – for instance, healthcare or education – often require extraordinary out of pocket expenditure. Meanwhile, the representatives of investment money are notoriously slow on Wall Street. Thus, they often miss big gains and are crushed by big losses. This, again, comes down to the real financial situation of the worker – she can’t really afford to take the risks that would lead to big gains. Nor does she have the training. The bubble that just popped, the housing market, is a perfect instance of what happens when income stagnation is “solved” by asset speculation. Not only does it turn out that, unsurprisingly, information asymmetries are exploited by rentseekers – the mortgage brokers and bankers who ran the game – but the very process actually added to the extraordinary out of pocket expenditure needed for a social welfare good – housing.

A nation of investors is a fool’s paradise.

And so we get back, as we always get back, to the question of the historical conditions under which capital is accumulated.

ps. These remarks could be thought of as glosses on this passage.

Since in every year more workers are employed than in the past year, sooner or later the point must be reached, where the needs of accumulation begin to grow [hinauszuwachsen] beyond the normal addition of labor, where, accordingly, the increase in wages enters. During the whole of the fifteenth and the first half of the eighteenth century, complaints about this were sounded in England. The more or less advantageous circumstances, wherein wage labor maintained and increased itself, did not, however, change the fundamental character of capitalist production. As simple reproduction continually reproduces the relations of capital itself, capitalists on one side, wage labor on the other, so is reproduction reproduced on an expanded scale, or the accumulation inherent to capital relations on a widened scale: more capitalists or greater capitalists on this pole, more wage labor on that. The reproduction of the labor power that capital must unceasingly incorporate as a means of valorization, cannot loosen itself from it, and its bondage to capital is only disguised through the changing of individual capitalists to whom it sells itself, and in that act develops a moment of the reproduction of capital itself. Accumulation of capital is thus multiplication of the proletariat.” [577, p. 763-764 in Fowkes translation]

Abstract labor II - real labor b

Postone writes, with admirable clarity: “ The category of abstract human labor refers to the social process that entails an abstraction from the specific qualities of the various concrete labors involved , as well as a reduction to their common denominator as human labor. Similarly, the category of the magnitude of value refers to an abstraction from the physical quantities of the products exchanged as well as a reduction to a nonmanifest common denominator – the labor time involved in their production.” [189]

Marx, as I have said, was strongly aware that capitalism both freed labor and emptied it, as far as it could, of specificity. This correlate of the ideal interchangeability of the human is the quantity of time. The factory, to Marx, was in a sense the ideal palace of capitalism because there, interchangeability is crystallized, more clearly than in any other economic formation, in ‘putting in time.” They are the palaces of abstract time, and their ruin in the developed countries – for instance, the ruin of the explosives factory at Ardeer, which you can see here – has the air of the ruin of something royal and tyrannical, something that lasted for centuries. And yet, of course, it lasted for 80-100 years. And like the gutted palace of some predatory ruler, when it empties, when the people can rush into it - there is nothing there. Or rather, there is no treasure there.

“If the specific productive work of the worker is not spinning, he wouldn’t transform cotton into thread, and thus would not transfer the value of the cotton and the spindle into threat. If the same worker changes his métier and becomes a cabinetmaker, he would, as before, through a work day add value to his material. He adds this thus through his labor, not in as much as it is spinning or cabinetmaking, but in as much as it is abstract social labor in general, and he adds a specific quantity of value, not because his labor has a particularly useful content, but because it has lasted a particular length of time.”

This, of course, offends our sense of craftsmanship. The flight from abstract labor time is encoded in the system of distinctions that traverses the field of taste.
But I don’t want to get into that here. Rather, I want to return to the sticks of dynamite. Lovely things, dynamite. Their use value makes them allegorically interesting, in as much as it consists in destruction. Of course, in the main course of things, dynamite is usually used simply to destroy geological formations – in mining. Some stray sticks, of course, fell into hands that used it otherwise – the anarchist dynamiters in Colorado in Pynchon’s against the day undoubtedly used Ardeer sticks. As well as the absinthe drinking bombers in Paris in the 1880s.

But in the Ardeer factory, the girls, in Marx’s schema, both created value and preserved old value by completing the end of the process of making the sticks. Doubtless, the discipline of the plant led to the weeding out of slow girls. And thus, inevitably, abstract time was stained by human difference. But if the cartridge girls were rewarded for being quicker, it all, in Marx’s scheme, was subject to the capitalist imperative of seeking the most unpaid work possible – the highest surplus value.

That imperative is folded into another one – the social reproduction of the relations of production. Which I will try to touch on tomorrow.

Abstract labour II - real labor

“Your hands, my dear sir. Your right hand is quite a size larger than your left. You have worked with it, and the muscles are more developed.” - Sherlock Holmes

Perhaps we should begin with a description from real labor. This is from McClure’s magazine’s visit to the great Nobel dynamite factory in Ardeer Scotland in August, 1897 by H.J.W. Dam. Dam’s photographer captured many of the workers – 200 girls, and 1,100 men. Dam makes much of the contrast between the tanks of nitroglycerin and the female sex, who are searched by matrons three times a day to make sure they have no pins, shoebuttons or any kind of metal fastener – as the admixture of metal in the dynamite making process creates huge problems. The problem with the men is their habit of sneaking in matches to have a good smoke. The employees from different sections where clothing color coded to reflect their sections – cartridge girls, for instance, wear dark blue.

The cartridge houses are where all the materials – the charcoal, the nitroglycerin, the paper – come together for their ‘appearance’ in the world of commodities:

The hut is about ten feet square with a single door. Four girls are at work. Against the right and left walls are four spring pump handles about the height of a girl's head. Each pump handle when pulled down forces a brass rod through a small conical hopper of loose dynamite fixed to the wall and jams a portion of the dynamite down a brass tube at the bottom of the box. The girl wraps a small square of branded parchment paper around the bottom of the tube, folding it at the lower end. Then holding the paper with one hand and jumping up and down as she works the pump handle with the other, she pushes dynamite down the tube till the paper cylinder is filled to a depth of about three inches. She then removes it, folds down the top of it, drops it through a slide in the wall whence it rolls down into her own special box, a finished cartridge. She replenishes her stock of dynamite with a scoop through a sliding door in the wall from a box of loose dynamite which the runner has placed in a closed chest immediately outside. The girls work with the greatest rapidity. The sliding brass rod is actually lubricated with nitroglycerin. To see this operation, the brass rods flying up and down damp with nitroglycerin, and dynamite being forcibly jammed down a brass tube, entirely destroys your appetite for further knowledge. It is incredible and you want to go away outside the Danger Area and think it over.”

But, as we readers of Marx know by now, there is no area outside the Danger Area to think these things over. Marchons, mes amis!

As Nicole Pepperall has reminded me, in the comments to my last post, and as has been the nail that Moishe Postone hammers at all day and all night in his book, Time Labor and Social Domination, orthodox Marxists have fetishized abstract labor. By this, Postone means that the orthodoxy has lost its grasp on the historically specific character of labor and turned it into an essential and trans-historical entity. This is especially important to envisioning what it would mean to overthrow wage labor – an oppositional dimension that is, as I have been emphasizing, not the point of Marx’s work, but the center that makes his analysis of Capitalism possible.

Okay, I'm going to add more to this tonight.

Approaching abstract labor I

Halbwachs, in his study of the life conditions of the worker (published in 1912), shrewdly pointed to the fuzzy boundary between agriculture and industry. Agriculture, we usually assume, deals directly with nature – but as Halbwachs points out, there is hardly a bit of nature in agriculture as we actually know it – from the soil that has been changed in its chemical and geological composition over generations of work, to the organic products that are themselves constantly being changed and adapted by human ingenuity, to finally finished products like cheese and bread, the making of which takes place in buildings, and through gestures that are essentially no different from those employed in making glue. [See Halbwachs 1913, Vol. 1, 26]

Halbwachs’ emphasis on the “gestes” of labor is a welcome attempt to uncover what is partially mystified in Marx’s ‘materialism’. When Marx speaks of labor, he begins with a direct relationship with nature – although this is, in a sense, a fiction, as he tacitly concedes. What he is really writing about is a regime of routines. Although in some vague sense there is a connection, here, with the materialist tradition running from Epicurus through La Mettrie, in my opinion there is nothing in Marx that is as metaphysically musty as his ‘materialism’, which arose as a counter to an ‘idealism’ that has few real correlates outside of philosophy departments. Marx’s ideas could well be agreed to by, say, a Buddhist who could nevertheless insist that all of life is an illusion. Whether it is an illusion or not does not really affect Marx’s articulation of the capitalist system.

Here, in any case, is Marx on the primary labor scene:

“Labor is firstly a process between persons and nature, a process wherein the person mediates, regulates and controls his metabolic exchange with nature through his own act. He encounters natural matter as a natural force. The natural forces inhering in his embodiment, arms and legs, head and hand, he puts in motion, in ordr to assimilate natural matter in a form useable for his own life. When he effects the nature outside of him through this movement and changes it, he changes, at the same time, his own nature. He develops the powers slumbering within it and submits the play of their forces to his own purposiveness. We have to do, here, not with the first animal instinctive forms of labor. Lost in the circumstances of the primeval background in which human labor had not yet completely discarded its first instinctive forms is the moment when the laborer appears as the seller of his own labor power on the commodity market. We are assuming labor in a form, wherein it is exclusively appropriate to human beings.”

That appropriateness, famously, excludes the labor of animals as labor. Their routines – just like the routines of machines – lack purposiveness – although I don’t want to be too philosophisch here – since when Marx fills out this purposiveness, he is evidently talking about the imagination: “A spider commits operations that are like a weaver’s, and a bee, through the building of its wax cells, shames many a human architect [Baumeister]. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best bees is that he builds the cells in his head before he builds them in wax.”

There are a couple of things to note about this passage. Of course, it maintains an old Western hierarchy of thought over action – but this is not really important for me here. It could, of course, be claimed that the omnibus drivers of Paris, who, in the 19th century, were forced to work 14-18 hours driving their buses were working horses who, similarly, were being worn out – and who similarly assimilated the design of the routes in Paris through which they pulled the buses. Or could claim that if one designs a machine to weave the drapery, the product of that weaving, the drapery, will go to market in the same circumstances as the human weaved drapery. It will still be valorized. This claim has been made to show that the living human labor upon which Marx is basing claims about valorization is a secondary distinction, rather than a primary one.

But this is to conflate Capital and the Robinsonaids he mocks. The weaver who uses a shuttle is already using a machine. Or the ditch digger using a shovel. At some point in the process of production, the machine was actually built from real materials – carbon, steel, etc. – that did not hop out of the ground of themselves – and even in the finest robotic factories in Japan, it is subject to human monitoring. Furthermore – to flip the terms around – the notion of mechanization falls, peculiarly, on the working class. Few economists ask whether, in fact, the capitalist could be a machine. There is, obviously, a lag at the moment in the computerization of upper management services because the upper management has guild like features that fight against the obvious rationality of the move. And it would be an odd economist who would suggest that an expert system computer be granted stock options. Why not?

Work is never going to go beyond its social recognition as such, in Marx. The one tie to a transhistorical property is to the imagination. I will take that reference to the imagination as both the starting point for the distinctly human – which may or may not be shared by animals and machines, but which is recognized, in human society, solely with relation to humans - and the moment against which the capitalist system, in its de-skilling or routinizing tendency, works against. A routine is both an act of the imagination and contains within itself the antithesis to the imagination. And once we have down the fact that the act of recognizing human work is tied to the imaginative capacity of the human, one is equipped with the critical tools to sniff out self-interested social contradictions having to do with how humans are treated in different economic regimes - for instance, in the denial that housework is work. Etc.

Now, let's build on this...