Luce Irigaray - “Women on the Market”

It's been a while since I ridiculed a post-modernist. I thought I'd have another go. This time I've picked on Luce Irigaray.

In “Women on the Market”, written in 1978, Irigaray attempts to meld ideas from Karl Marx with feminism. The result is not good. In fact, it's terrible. She gets some of Marx's critique correct, but a lot of it is completely wrong. The connection between her interpretation and how it relates to women is almost entirely nonsensical. Her essay is almost devoid of substance, with an utterly conservative, pro-capitalist conclusion.

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Irigaray's first sentence is:

The society we know, our own culture, is based upon the exchange of women.

A contemporary capitalist society is generally not based on the exchange of women. Slavery, especially sex slavery of women and girls, is a very important component of modern capitalist society. These women, millions around the world, are living as slaves. They are exchanged in the market. However, billions of women aren't slaves - they aren't exchanged as commodities.

It's true that women exchange their ability to work (labour-power) for money. They are generally paid atrociously for their time. Their wage is frequently below its value (meaning they must rely on other sources of income to survive). It's true that women have to do large amounts of unpaid work in a house. This is a horrible, never ending grind that destroys women's physical and mental health. But neither of those situations mean that women themselves are being exchanged. Sure, there is bride price for marriage, but this is not enough to go on.

Therefore, Irigaray's first sentence is false. Not a great start.

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Later, she says:

[1] In this new matrix of History, in which man begets man as his own likeness, [2] wives, daughters, and sisters have value only in that they serve as the possibility of, and potential benefit in, relations among men.

I broke this sentence into two parts. [1] I entirely do not understand this. What could "man begets man as his own likeness" possibly mean? Irigaray gives no explanation. [2] This part of the sentence is correct. Women are forced, by men, into roles of subservience. They are forced to find a life as sex worker or unpaid house-worker. If they go off by themselves they're attacked as being too masculine, or worse, lesbian. Women have been, and still are, persecuted for not filling their gender role - they are violently forced to do so.

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In other words, all the social regimes of “History” are based upon the exploitation of one “class” of producers, namely, women. Whose reproductive use value (reproductive of children and of the labor force) and whose constitution as exchange value underwrite the symbolic order as such, without any compensation in kind going to them for that “work.”

The first sentence is correct. Since the beginning of class society, women have had the worst of it. The second sentence throws in some Marxist terms, use-value and exchange-value. It's ambiguous, but it appears that Irigaray is suggesting that exchange-value exists in all class societies. It doesn't. Exchange-value only exists in commodity economies. Furthermore, exchange-value is compensation for work! In a capitalist economy, if you don't receive your exchange-value for your labour-power, you die.

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Commodities among themselves are thus not equal, nor alike, nor different. They only become so when they are compared by and for man.

If a tree fell in forest and no-one was around, would it make a sound? If there are no humans around to turn things and actions into commodities, they aren't commodities. Commodities can't be "among themselves." Things and actions (products and services), regardless of whether they are commodities or not, are never equal nor alike.

the commodity obviously cannot exist alone, but there is no such thing as a commodity, either, so long as there are not at least two men to make an exchange. In order for a product - a woman? - to have value, two men, at least, have to invest (in her.)

This appears to contradict the above, though at least Irigaray is correct this time. But she's really not saying anything new. Yes, you need (at least) two men (or women) for an exchange of commodities.

Why does Irigaray keep trying to reduce women to mere commodities?! Commodities are empty vessels with no power to change the world. Irigaray is espousing an anti-feminism. Women can, and have always, resisted; as commodities (slaves), as serfs, as waged workers, as unpaid servants of fathers and husbands. Admittedly, women's role over the past hundred years has often come extremely close to slavery, in practical terms it was/is, but women don't generally take the form of commodities on the market - except when they literally are slaves like in the illegal sex industry and mail order brides, etc. If Irigaray was making an analogous argument, I wouldn't mind. But she isn't. She is literally saying that women are exchanged as commodities. That's just not true.

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The price of the articles, in fact, no longer comes from their natural form, from their bodies, their language, but from the fact that they mirror the need/desire for exchanges among men.

The price of articles have never come from their natural form, they have always come from their value form.

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The general equivalent of a commodity no longer functions as a commodity itself.

Irigaray throws in some Marxist jargon with no definition of her terms. That's fine for Marxists, no good for everyone else. The general equivalent is (basically) money. She's also completely wrong in her conclusion. The general equivalent is a commodity and it always will be. If it weren't a commodity, it couldn't be used in exchange. If it ever ceased to be a commodity, the entire capitalist economy would immediately collapse because there would be no equivalent to exchange for the relative.

We must emphasize also that the general equivalent, since it is no longer a commodity, is no longer useful. The standard as such is exempt from use.

Therefore, money is no longer useful? Okay...

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This means that mothers, reproductive instruments marked with the name of the father and enclosed in his house, must be private property, excluded from exchange.

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Once deflowered, woman is relegated to the status of use value, to her entrapment in private property; she is removed from exchange among men.

Is Irigaray suggesting that private property is excluded from exchange? It appears so. Either way, these sentences are nonsensical.

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Mother, virgin, prostitute: these are the social roles imposed on women.

Agreed. But what about violence against women? What about the culture of rape, domestic abuse, honor killings and slut shaming? What about old women being ignored in society? Irigaray only scrapes the surface of women's oppression and exploitation.

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For, without the exploitation of women, what would become of the social order? What modifications would it undergo if women left behind their condition as commodities - subject to being produced, consumed, valorized, circulated, and so on, by men alone - and took part in elaborating and carrying out exchanges?

This paragraph, right at the end of the essay, is where Irigaray reveals her true colours. It's only here that her utterly conservative approach to political economy is exposed. What would happen if women "took part in elaborating and carrying out exchanges?" Exactly what was already happening in 1978 and what is still happening today (2013). Women were and are an integral part of the economy. Women are slaves, unpaid labourers and wage slaves in capitalist society. They are not and never were mere commodities exchanged among men. They have no need to become full citizens of exploitation because they are that already.

Instead of joining the market (that they've already joined), women need to: 1) refuse their gender role to end their oppression and 2) refuse to be workers to end their exploitation. Both refusals are interconnected. To fight against one is to threaten the other. But they're not the same thing and women need to deal with both issues. Men, on the other hand, only really need to deal with their exploitation as workers. Men clearly materially benefit from women's gender role. If men want all humans to be free, they will have to completely change their relationship with women and in doing so, give up a substantial component of what it is to be a man. In effect, they'll have to stop being men. They're not going to do this willingly.

By horribly mangling Marxism and feminism, Irigaray's essay, if it reflects the rest of her work, suggests that she is a poor critic of patriarchal society and doesn't understand the critique of capitalism, let alone have any sort of anti-capitalist politics.

Essays on Marx's Theory of Value

Essays on Marx's Theory of Value by Isaak Illich Rubin is one of the best books I've read on Marx's critique of capitalism. It contains a very detailed explanation of many aspects of Marx's critique of political economy.

The book is available here.

Fetishism

The most important aspect of this book is Rubin's reintegration of the fetishism of the commodity as underpinning Marx's entire critique of capitalism. In this way, political economy becomes

not a science of the relations of things to things, as was thought by vulgar economists, nor of the relations of people to things, as was asserted by the theory of marginal utility, but of the relations of people to people in the process of production. (Introduction)

This is not necessarily easy to understand, nor does it seem initially particularly convincing (or perhaps it appears to be uselessly obvious?) but it enabled Marx to look behind the veil of money, employment, interest and rent, work-time and industrial production; to expose these interactions as ideological constructions that we have created between each other. Our day-to-day lives are lives where we act out our roles in a capitalist society as though these relationships between commodities and people are really existing categories rather than socially constructed phantoms of our consciousness.

One can only wonder why Marx's critics did not notice this inseparable connection between his labor theory of value and his theory of the reification or fetishization of the production relations among people. They understood Marx's theory of value in a mechanical-naturalistic, not in a sociological, sense. (Chapter 8)

Since Rubin's time - he wrote these essays in the 1920s - it hasn't just been Marx's critics that didn't notice the inseparable connection, but the bulk of his biggest fans: Marxists.

Since the things come forth with a determined, fixed social form, they, in turn, begin to influence people, shaping their motivation, and inducing them to establish concrete production relations with each other. Possessing the social form of "capital," things make their owner a "capitalist" and in advance determine the concrete production relations which will be established between him and other members of society. It seems as if the social character of things determines the social character of their owners. Thus the "personification of things" is brought about. (Chapter 3)

Economists

Rubin's ability to summarise economists is superb. He does so in one paragraph:

Vulgar economists commit two kinds of errors: 1) either they assign the "economic definiteness of form" to an "objective property" of things (C., II, p. 164), i.e., they derive social phenomena directly from technical phenomena; for example, the ability of capital to yield profit, which presupposes the existence of particular social classes and production relations among them, is explained in terms of the technical functions of capital in the role of means of production; 2) or they assign "certain properties materially inherent in instruments of labor" to the social form of the instruments of labor (Ibid.), i.e., they derive technical phenomena directly from social phenomena; for example, they assign the power to increase the productivity of labor which is inherent in means of production and represents their technical function, to capital, i.e., a specific social form of production (the theory of the productivity of capital). (Chapter 3)

According to Rubin, Marx's approach is the inverse to how economists analyse the world:

Starting with the social forms as given, the Classical Economists tried to reduce complex forms to simpler forms by means of analysis in order finally to discover their material-technical basis or content. However, Marx, starting from a given condition of the material process of production, from a given level of productive forces, tried to explain the origin and character of social forms which are assumed by the material process of production. (Chapter 4)

Value

Rubin links value with prices, in a way that all the Klimans, Bortkiewiczs, Cockshotts, and Sraffas persistently fail to do:

The basic error of the majority of Marx's critics consists of: 1) their complete failure to grasp the qualitative, sociological side of Marx's theory of value, and 2) their confining the quantitative side to the examination of exchange ratios, i.e., quantitative relations of value among things; they ignored the quantitative interrelations among the quantities of social labor distributed among the different branches of production and different enterprises, interrelations which lie at the basis of the quantitative determination of value. (Chapter 8)

The deviation of market prices from values is the mechanism by means of which the overproduction and underproduction is removed and the tendency toward the reestablishment of equilibrium among the given branches of production of the national economy is set up. (Chapter 8)

The average prices do not correspond to the actual movements of concrete market prices, but explain them. This theoretical, abstract formula of the movement of prices is, in fact, the "law of value." From this it can be seen that every objection to the theory of value which is based on the fact that concrete market prices do not coincide with theoretical "values," is nothing more than a misunderstanding. Total agreement between market price and value would mean the elimination of the unique regulator which prevents different branches of the social economy from moving in opposite directions. (Chapter 9)

This "moving in opposites directions" is the result of the uncontrolled overproduction and underproduction in the anarchic commodity economy.

In a commodity economy, no one controls the distribution of labor among the individual branches of production and the individual enterprises. No clothmaker knows how much cloth is needed by society at a given time nor how much cloth is produced at a given time in all cloth-making enterprises. The production of cloth thus either outruns the demand (overproduction) or lags behind it (underproduction). (Chapter 8)

Prices

Chapters 17 and 18 were the most challenging for me. Chapter 17 explains how supply and demand relate to value. Chapter 18 concerns the relationship between production prices and average profits, on one side, and value, on the other. This is more famously described as the transformation problem (the linked Wikipedia page needs a complete re-write, by the way.) Rubin provides no mechanistic transformation of value to production prices, but links them as layers in a general scientific theory.

The increase of productivity of labor, expressed in the labor-value of products, cannot influence the distribution of labor any other way than through its influence on the distribution of capital. Such influence on the distribution of capital is in turn possible only if changes in the productivity of labor and labor-value cause changes in costs of production or in the average rate of profit, i.e., influence the production price. (Chapter 18)

The labor theory of value is a theory of simple commodity economy, not in the sense that it explains the type of economy that preceded the capitalist economy, but in the sense that it describes only one aspect of the capitalist economy, namely production relations among commodity producers which are characteristic for every commodity economy. (Chapter 18)

This layering works in much the same way as the theory of the cell gives way to organs, systems and organisms in biology. Perhaps a better analogy is the distinction between the matter of the brain and the formation of human consciousness. We know that human consciousness stems from chemical and electrical impulses in the brain, but we'll probably always be clueless as to how that manifests as what we experience as consciousness. In a similar sort of way, there is no mechanical transformation of value into price. However, we know the sociological truth that workers have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Workers are employed in a system that is so productive that they can easily out-produce what they need to survive, as workers, from day-to-day. This excess produce is captured and shared (between those that own everything) via an intellectually sophisticated and enforced social relationship, money. The only thing different between this - capitalism - and slavery or serfdom is that the excess produce isn't completely consumed by those that own everything, but used to expand this way of life.

NB This is not to suggest that the value-price relationship suffers from the same issue as the brain-mind relationship, an explanatory gap. The relationship between value and price is fully explained. It's merely that the relationship cannot be fully explained solely in economic or mathematical terms.

Rubin

Rubin's life in soviet Russia appears to have been especially traumatic. From his Wikipedia page:

Rubin was arrested on December 23, 1930, and accused of being a member of the All-Union Bureau of Mensheviks, a fictitious secret organisation. [...] On January 28, 1931, Rubin was brought to another cell, where he was shown another prisoner and told that if he did not confess, the prisoner would be shot. Rubin refused and the prisoner was executed before him. The process was repeated the next night. After the second shooting, Rubin negotiated a "confession" with his interrogators, who insisted that he implicate his mentor David Riazanov as a member of a secret Menshevik conspiracy.

Rubin served most of his prison term in solitary confinement, during which he continued his research as best he could. When he fell ill with a suspected cancer, he was removed to a hospital and encouraged to make further confessions in return for favourable treatment, but declined the offer. He was released on a commuted sentence in 1934 and allowed to work in Aktyubinsk, Kazakhstan, as an economic planner. Rubin was arrested once more during the Great Purge in 1937. After this arrest he was never seen alive again.

Old Age Marxism

The following is a response to Paul Cockshott's review of Michael Heinrich's Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, New Age Marxism. Read Cockshott's review first.

Biology

Cockshott begins his review by criticising Marx's and Heinrich's biological metaphor:

The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape. On the other hand, indications of higher forms in the lower species of animals can only be understood when the higher forms themselves are already known

I'd agree with Cockshott that to suggest humans are better than other apes is ridiculous. There are no higher and lower forms of life, just ones that are successful (extant) and unsuccessful (extinct). However, other than using sloppy language, I'm not sure that Heinrich and Marx are saying anything controversial. If one replaced "lower" with "less complex" and "higher" with "more complex," there wouldn't be an issue. They're not actually suggesting that humans are better than other apes and they're not even really talking about evolutionary biology.

Value Theory

It's when discussing value theory that Cockshott goes awry:

The establishment of capitalist industry went hand in hand with the development of artificial sources of power: coal then oil. We also all know that in today’s world the owners of oilfields are fabulously wealthy, so might energy not be the source of value?

There are a couple of problems with this:

1. It appears as if Cockshott is suggesting that value only came into being at the beginning of capitalism. But value relates to commodity exchange, not capitalism as such. There were commodities before capitalism and therefore there was value before capitalism. Since coal and oil use, at least in any generalised form, came after commodities, how could they be the source of value?!
2. Cockshott makes a logical jump from oil/coal to energy. Oil/coal is not the same thing as energy. There have been lots of different sources of energy throughout human history with vastly different uses. E.g., burning wood for heat and food; burning candles for light; oil/coal for industrial production. Can one really jump through wood-candles-coal-oil to energy, from there to a value theory, without any theoretical complications?

Cockshott's argument is that the labour theory of value is lacking, so we must look to what science does.

If one adopts the normal method of science, the answer is simple. You see what price structure would be predicted by the labour theory of value, what price structure would be predicted by the energy theory of value, and see which theory gives the better predictions. Such tests have been done, and they show that actual prices correspond much more closely to what the labour theory of value predicts than to what the energy theory predicts. But as we will see in the next section Heinrich’s approach prohibits this sort of scientific test.

Does science really work like this? It's true that empirical measurements are essential to science, but it's at least misleading, probably downright wrong to apply empirical results to a poor theory. For a scientific theory to be accepted, it needs to make coherent, logical arguments in a purely abstract form that then fits fairly well with reality. If the theory is faulty, the evidence is irrelevant.

As an example, I could propose f = mac (force = mass * acceleration * crap). Most of the time c is 1, but occasionally I decide that it's 1.5 or .5 for masses that I have a peculiar distaste. Now, it could be, with God's favour, that the world really does agree with my formula, f = mac. Or it could be the case that we never come across masses that I don't like (e.g., invisible pink elephants). (My formula would be essentially f = ma.) Neither of these possibilities have anything to do with the fact that this formula is logically inconsistent with other physical laws.

My point: you have to sort out your theory, regardless of the evidence! Cockshott suggests you can "go through the passage from Marx above and wherever there is a reference to labour substitute energy or power and the essence of the argument would be unchanged." If that were true, Marx's labour theory of value would be wrong. It would not be theoretically sufficient. It would need to be revised or abandoned.

I do not agree for a moment that you can substitute terms in Marx's theory. For a start, Cockshott missed a crucial section, the fetish of the commodity. This grounds Marx's value theory as part of the social consciousness of humanity. The commodity, abstract labour, value-form, etc. is a psychological trick.

Abstract Labour

Cockshott truly breaks with my reading of Marx in the notion of abstract labour:

So abstract labour is the abstract expenditure of human physiological effort and society has only a certain amount of this effort available to it which can be expended in different concrete forms.

This concept is indeed ‘naturalistic’ and ‘a-historical’. It is naturalistic in that it depends on our adaptability as a species, our ability to turn our hand to any task. It is a-historical in that any society with a division of labour has abstract labour.

Marx's theory is the opposite of this view. It is concrete labour, actually doing stuff in the world, that is the only transhistorical, ahistorical or naturalistic conception of labour in Marx's theory. Concrete labour existed before capitalism, before class society. Abstract labour is vastly more modern and arises with commodity exchange. Abstract labour did not arise with the division of labour because many societies - those based on slavery or serfdom, for example - hardly measured and compared work at all. To the extent that they were not based on the exchange of commodities, they were not societies based on value and abstract labour. The key thing lacking in Cockshott's theory in these paragraphs is a clear understanding of the history of social production.

I.I. Rubin sorted out the issue of abstract labour and physiological effort long ago:

Marx never tired of repeating that value is a social phenomenon, that the existence of value (Wertgegenstandlichkeit) has "a purely social reality" (C., I, p. 47), and does not include a single atom of matter. From this it follows that abstract labor, which creates value, must be understood as a social category in which we cannot find a single atom of matter. One of two things is possible: if abstract labor is an expenditure of human energy in physiological form, then value also has a reified-material character. Or value is a social phenomenon, and then abstract labor must also be understood as a social phenomenon connected with a determined social form of production. It is not possible to reconcile a physiological concept of abstract labor with the historical character of the value which it creates. The physiological expenditure of energy as such is the same for all epochs and, one might say, this energy created value in all epochs. We arrive at the crudest interpretation of the theory of value, one which sharply contradicts Marx's theory. (Essays on Marx's Theory of Value, Chapter 14: Abstract Labour)

Cockshott's theory becomes incredible problematic when we bring in temporal concerns. If abstract labour is physiological effort, what can you say about that effort when the value of the commodities you've already produced halve in value because a competitor produces the same commodity for much cheaper? How does your physiological effort - that you've already expended - suddenly disappear into the ether? As abstract labour is the substance and measure of value, you've got a problem explaining where it went to.

Cockshott says:

On the other hand there is no doubt that were we to accept Heinrich’s reading we would have to abandon any claim that Marxian analysis of value was scientific. Science rests on the testability of its propositions and has to be wary of hypothesising causal entities which are in principle unmeasurable. If we say with Heinrich that the labour time that creates value can not be independently measured, can only be inferred from the price at which things sell, then you no longer have a testable theory.

Yes, it's true, we don't have a testable theory in the same way that a lot of the physical sciences do. If you tried to measure every aspect of commodity production, concrete labour-time, physiological equivalents, prices, etc. you would not arrive at Marx's critique of political economy. You would arrive at the tools of appearances that we already have: supply/demand curves, employment rates, economic statistics, etc.

Marx's critique has many complexities and subtleties that does not make it appropriate for empirical measurement as proof in the way Cockshott would prefer. One huge issue, for example, is moving from value to production prices and average profits. (See: Value and Production Price)

Finally, possibly the worst part of Cockshott's review, is a comment on a quote from Marx to Kugelmann:

“It is self-evident that this necessity of the distribution of social labour in specific proportions is certainly not abolished by the specific form of social production; it can only change its form of manifestation. Natural laws cannot be abolished at all. The only thing that can change, under historically differing conditions, is the form in which those laws assert themselves.” One can scarcely have a more explicit assertion of the natural and a-historical basis of abstract labour than that.

However, Marx was not talking about abstract labour in slightest! He was simply talking about the necessity for humans to work. Humans, from the time when we developed self-awareness, have had to work to survive. We need to gather, sow, reap and kill for food. We need to bring-up the young, collect water and dispose of waste. We need to look after the old. We will have to do this until we cease to exist as a species. Nothing, not pre-class society, slavery, serfdom, mercantilism, capitalism or communism is going to prevent this necessity for work. All that changes is how we organise work in society, as the most social species on the planet. What does abstract labour have to do with it? It is nothing but the form of how we are choosing to work at the present time, under capitalist conditions.

To suggest that abstract labour is going to be the form of society, not only of capitalism, but also communism, brings nothing but horrible images of totalitarian monsters into our mind.

Down with measurement!

Reading Capital Politically, Part 3

This blog entry contains the final set of quotes from Reading Capital Politically. These quotes are generally concerned with the money-form of value. Overall, a very quotable book, it would seem.

We can see now that just as the relative value form finds its meaning only in the equivalent form so it is that the working class recognizes itself as working class only through its relation to capital. Indeed, it is working class only within that relation. The relative form thus expresses the perspective of the working class. Destroy capital and there is no more working class as such. And, conversely, the refusal to function as working class (i.e., to work) acts to destroy capital. Put in the language above, the mass of workers have their joint condition as working class reflected to them through capital acting as a mirror which mediates this recognition.

Children work for capital to the extent that they produce their labor-power for future roles as workers (waged and unwaged), but they are not directly waged. They, like housewives, are supported by the resources (money) obtained by their waged father or mother. The relation with capital is mediated directly for the father by the money wage, but for the children and housewives there is also the father/husband. In these circumstances the fact that children and women in the family work for capital is hidden by their condition of wagelessness. They appear to stand only in some private relation to the male wage earner but not to capital.

This was one of the main aims of colonialism - the creation of a world-wide reserve army. And poverty continues to be the tool by which vast millions are kept alive but (it is hoped) easily available when it suits capital's purpose. These reserves are then drawn upon either for immigration into areas where their cheap labor can be used to hold down the wage demands of more powerful workers (e.g., Mexican and Caribbean labor drawn into the U.S.; workers from Mediterranean countries brought into northern Europe) or for employment in their own areas when runaway shops seek out their cheap labor locally. Of course, time and again things have not worked out so well and the struggles of the unwaged have made them unfit for capital's factories.

Another way the class struggle refuses the mediation of money is the refusal of price. This is the essence of direct appropriation and includes not only the price of labor-power but also the prices of other commodities. It involves self-reduction of utilities or housing prices, changing labels in a supermarket, using 15-cent slugs instead of 50-cent tokens in the subway, or total elimination of price through shoplifting, employee theft, or Black Christmases where commodities are seized. This refusal of price is a refusal of capital's rules of the game. The refusal to accept the role of money is the refusal to accept everything we have seen going into the determination of money - the whole set of value relations. This is the working-class perspective with a vengence.

Inflation means rising prices due, not to increases in labor input, but to monetary deflation. Prices are the money equivalents of the value of commodities which are expressed in the price form. To raise prices means to increase the amount of money (gold or paper) being exchanged for goods. If the amount of money the working class holds is fixed, then the amount it can buy decreases accordingly. In this way, the amount of value the working class receives for its labor-power is reduced, and the amount of surplus value that capital gets is increased.

[...] it is easy to raise prices simply by circulating more paper so that a given quantity of commodities, being represented by an increased quantity of paper, has higher prices (assuming velocity of money constant, etc.). This was just the idea of Keynes, then Lewis and others. The state could print more money, or expand money via the credit system, and thus raise prices, which would decrease the value of each unit of money and thus undercut working-class wages. This undercutting could be done whether working-class wages were constant or increasing.

The robots have (finally) arrived

The New York Times recently published an article with content and arguments straight out of the 1820s.

OMG! Robots are replacing labour-power! I cannot believe it. What are these new fantastical devices? Quoting Karl Marx, the NYT declares that you can make a profit by replacing people with robots:

In one example, a robotic manufacturing system initially cost $250,000 and replaced two machine operators, each earning $50,000 a year. Over the 15-year life of the system, the machines yielded $3.5 million in labor and productivity savings.

Quoting John Stuart Mill, the NYT proclaims, when you think about it, no jobs are really lost. Think of all the new jobs being created!

Moreover, robotics executives argue that even though blue-collar jobs will be lost, more efficient manufacturing will create skilled jobs in designing, operating and servicing the assembly lines, as well as significant numbers of other kinds of jobs in the communities where factories are.

Don't Panic! Robots are kinda human and they're even fighting against the division of labour:

But the arms seem eerily human when they reach over to a stand and change their “hand” to perform a different task. While the many robots in auto factories typically perform only one function, in the new Tesla factory a robot might do up to four: welding, riveting, bonding and installing a component.

This brave new world - a beautiful symbiosis between man and machine - is a worker's paradise!

Mr. Graves wears headsets and is instructed by a computerized voice on where to go in the warehouse to gather or store products. A centralized computer the workers call The Brain dictates their speed. Managers know exactly what the workers do, to the precise minute.

Reading Capital Politically, Part 2

My last posthad a selection of quotes from Reading Capital Politically. There were so many that I retained some quotes until this blog entry.

[...] the overwhelming majority of the people are put in a situation where they are forced to work to avoid starvation. The capitalist class creates and maintains this situation of compulsion by achieving total control over all the means of producing social wealth. The generalized imposition of the commodity-form has meant that forced work has become the fundamental means of organizing society - of social control. It means the creation of a working class - a class of people who can survive only by selling their capacity to work to the class that controls the means of production.

Most fundamentally, the view of the commodity as use-value is the perspective of the working class. It sees commodities (e.g., food or energy) primarily as objects of appropriation and consumption, things to be used to satisfy its needs. Capital sees these same commodities primarily as exchange-values - mere means toward the end of increasing itself and its social control via the realization of surplus value and profit.

The preoccupation of the working class with exchange-value and the preoccupation of capital with use-value, however, are both the outgrowth of capital's success in imposing its social system.

Because of our need for this use-value of food, capital understood early on that its control over food as a commodity gave it control over workers. This was why the most basic means of production stripped from workers in the period primitive accumulation was land - the traditionally necessary precondition for producing food. Thus the fundamental use-value of food for capital is the power to force the working class to work to get it.

One way in which the old dichotomy between politics and economics has often been posed has been to label as "economism" struggles by workers which are deemed solely quantitative, for example, more wages, shorter workday, and so on. These struggles are said to be within capital, which is itself essentially quantitative. "Political" struggles are only those that challenge the "quality" of capital itself, that is, that threaten the "revolutionary" overthrow of capital via the seizure of state power. From what we have seen already, it should be apparent that struggles over the length and intensity of the workday (how much the commodity-form is imposed) are at once quantitative and qualitative: quantitative because they concern the amount of work that will be done for capital, qualitative because they put into question the realization of enough surplus value to maintain capital's control

[Quoting Marx:] ". . . the idea held by some socialists that we need capital but not the capitalists is altogether wrong. It is posited within the concept of capital that the objective conditions of labor -- and these are its own product -- take on a personality toward it, or what is the same, that they are posited as the property of a personality alien to the worker. The concept of capital contains the capitalist."

Men do benefit from women's work; whites do benefit from blacks' lower status; local workers do benefit from immigrant workers' taking the worst jobs. Therefore, the struggle to destroy the divisions generally finds its initiative in the dominated group, since the other side cannot be expected to always work to destroy its privileges. The efforts to overcome racism, sexism, imperialism, or the exploitation of students in the 1960s were led by the struggles of blacks not whites, women not men, peasants not Americans, students not professors or administrators.

[...] to conceive of the value of a commodity as being the direct result of the work of producing that individual commodity is to lose the social character of value and to see it instead as some metaphysical substance that is magically injected into the product by the worker's touch.

[Quoting Marx:] ". . . the real level of the overall labour process is increasingly not the individual worker. Instead, labour-power socially combined and the various competing labour-powers which together form the entire production machine participate in very different ways in the immediate process of making commodities, or, more accurately in this context, creating the product. Some work better with their hands, others with their heads, one as a manager, engineer, technologist, etc., the other as overseer, the third as manual labourer or even drudge. . . . If we consider the aggregate worker, i.e., if we take all the members comprising the workshop together, then we see that their combined activity results materially in an aggregate product which is at the same time a quantity of goods. And here it is quite immaterial whether the job of a particular worker, who is merely a limb of this aggregate worker, is at a greater or smaller distance from the actual manual labour."
These very important concepts should lead us once and for all away from any tendency to try to grasp value in terms of individual cases.

When Marx wrote, for example, in Chapter 15, Section 3, on the employment of women and children, he saw these persons being drawn ever deeper into the industrial machine to be chewed up daily and left to recuperate at night in the same fashion as male workers. There was no need for any special theory about the family, housework, or schoolwork, because these constituted negligible parts of the day. But later, with the expulsion of women and children from the mines and the mills and the factories, with the creation of the modern nuclear family and public school system by capital, such a theory is vital. Today, we must study how capital structures "free time" so as to expand value. We must see how housework has been structured by capital with home economics and television to ensure that women's time contributes only to the reproduction of their own, their husbands', and their children's labor-power. We must see the desire for the reproduction of life as labor-power behind capital's propaganda that it is in the interest of the individual or the family to have a "nice" home or a "good" education.

Both housework and schoolwork are intended to contribute to keeping the value of labor-power low. The more work done by women in the home, the less value workers must receive from capital to reproduce themselves at a given level. The more work students do in the school, the less value must be invested in their training and disciplining for the factory (or home).

[...] the labor an "average person" can perform, say, in the United States of 1775 and in the United States of 1975, or in the United States of 1975 and in upland Papua of 1975, is quite different. When put concretely this way, the vagueness of the notion vanishes. Workers of all these periods and places could be trained to perform "average labor" today in a New York City factory or office. But the amount of training our 1775 farmer or our 1975 tribesman would require would be substantially more and of a different order, involving not just linguistic, mathematical, or mechanical skills, but regularity and discipline.

Reading Capital Politically

I have recently re-read Reading Capital Politically by Harry Cleaver. It's a book that injects contemporary discussion (until 1979) and class analysis into a reading of the first chapter of Karl Marx's Capital, Vol 1. I re-read an e-book edition (below) that I put together from Harry Cleaver's university webpage (which currently - Dec 2012 - no longer contains the files).

My edition is generally not as good as the PDF edition. The main disadvantage is that the footnotes aren't hyper-linked. However, it has the advantage of containing all the prefaces to the various editions that Cleaver has written over the years. It is current as of the preface to the German translation of November 2011. (I excluded the 2011 Polish preface as it is very similar to the German preface.) In that respect, it's the most complete version. I've also done some minor editing.

The formats that you can download are:

• HTML
• MOBI
• EPUB
• PDF

Below are some quotes that I found illuminating:

[...] the continuing spread of Taylorist and Fordist deskilling produced such an alienation of young workers from work that, by the 1960s, the desire to take over work and make it less alienating was being more and more replaced by its simple refusal. They didn’t want control; they wanted out.

For Marx, value was only understandable within the context of surplus value. It was not just a form, separable from its content. Value does have a form, exchange value, but it also has a content: imposed labor and the link between value and surplus value is that in the normal course of capital accumulation, the capitalists only impose labor when they can impose surplus labor.

The capitalists are capitalists, not when they consume the surplus, but when they invest it, i.e., when they impose more work. And this is exactly what the socialist critique of capitalist development fails to deal with. By focusing uniquely on the question of who owns or controls the surplus and demanding workers' control, it fails to come to grips with the substance of value and surplus value: endlessly imposed work.

Why did Marx hate money so much? Because it is the quintessential distillation of homogenized labor, of the reduction of all of human life to labor.

Rather than the usual Marxist image of the capitalist with a whip, better the image of would-be managers riding the tiger's back trying to coerce or cajole their mount along different lines of development, frequently coming within a hair's breath of falling off when the tiger rears or comes to a sudden halt, always in danger of the tiger turning around and ripping these upstarts from its back.

To the degree any group of people ruptures capitalist command and carves out their own space, capital responds by doing its best to isolate that space, to sever its connections with the rest of the system, to prevent it from drawing on the productivity of global social production and forcing it to rely on its own limited resources.

[...] the wage is not the only form through which the reduction of humans to abstract labor under capital is accomplished. Not in the Third World, not in the First. In all worlds where it holds sway the central problem for capital is the imposition of work, how it manages to do that is purely secondary.

But what, some may ask, of the peasants who produce a surplus they sell on the market? Are these not petty bourgeois producers and outside the working class? The answer is that they are still very much part of the working class if the result of their work is only self-reproduction. It does not even matter if they hire waged labor, if they are only earning subsistence. These peasants are essentially piece workers for capital and the per-unit price they obtain for their agricultural products is their piece rate.

It quickly becomes apparent to anyone who has read Engels and Stalin that Althusser and friends have added almost nothing to the original discussions of historical materialism except a more obscure vocabulary and a deeper scientific gloss. We are still left with a lifeless sociological taxonomy of modes of production, the unresolvable problems of the interactions between the base/superstructure dualism, the mystery of the articulation of modes, the absence of class struggle, and a fetishism of production that justifies contemporary socialism.

[...] despite the originality and usefulness of their research into the mechanisms of capitalist domination in both the economic and cultural spheres, and indeed precisely in the formulation of those mechanisms as one-sidedly hegemonic, Critical Theorists have remained blind to the ability of working-class struggles to transform and threaten the very existence of capital. Their concept of domination is so complete that the "dominated" virtually disappears as an active historical subject. In consequence, these philosophers have failed to escape the framework of mere ideological critique of capitalist society.

As Tronti pointed out, under the conditions of the unskilled mass worker, work itself could only be seen as a means of social control to be abolished, not upgraded. This understanding led directly to the realization that the basic characteristic of working-class struggle in this period is not only an escape from capital but also an escape from existence as working class. The aim of the mass worker is to cease to be a worker, not to make a religion of work.

[Quoting Marx:] "Bourgeois economy thus provides the key to the economy of antiquity, etc. But it is quite impossible [to gain this insight] in the manner of those economists who obliterate all historical differences and who see in all social phenomena only bourgeois phenomena. If one knows rent, it is possible to understand tribute, tithe, etc., but they do not have to be treated as identical."