As I'm focused on the current valorisation of money and the means of
production, I'm delighted with your multiple conundrums.
>Gold is a commodity which is valued in money units. Money is a
commodity
>which is valued in gold units.
Gold is a commodity valued in money units. Money, however, is now a
commodity valued in units of confidence: 'I believe your money is worth
x, therefore I will pay for it with y". Or, on a grander scale, "We do
not believe that your [nation x's] money is worth much at all, therefore
we will not buy it. We have lost confidence in you".
---snip---
>the value of money today is really guaranteed by the availability of
good and services at known >prices in various national monetary units and
their corresponding economies, made semi-fungible >by global markets and
the global economy.
You suggest that the availability of goods and services guarantees the
value of money. During the 20s-30s depression, grain, food, goods, etc,
were left to rot in warehouses while people starved due to a lack of
money. It's kind of like: "We have flour, milk, eggs, and sugar, but we
have no ounces. Therefore, we cannot make a cake."
Unfortunately, these days physical goods and services constitute less
than 1 percent of global trade. The other 99% is made up of trade in
financial products. That is to say, pure speculation or gambling. So, as
it is, money is its own guarantee of replacement: It serves in place of
itself in terms of fungibility. Of the 1 percent of global trade that
_is_ contituted of goods 1/3 is constituted in arms sales which is mostly
paid for in loans to third-world countries. Sixty percent of the
remainder is intra-company trade.
Most money these days is actually launched in appropriating time itself.
Take, for instance, credit derivatives. These are a certain kind of
insurance notes that are now traded. They are insurance on the "notional
capital" raised against "futures". Futures are, of course, potential
cows, strawberries, whatever. Notional capital is exactly that: it is
predicated, and subsequently lent, upon the posssibility of cows in the
future, etc. Credit derivatives insure against the imaginary money lent
against price of the future cows. These particular so-called 'products'
are generating over $100 billion per year in profit!
>And what was backing the value of gold? effectively the same thing,
no?
No.
>Does not money remains a commodity, whether tied to gold, or to labor
>units, or to nutrition units, or not, so long as it has a market and a
>price?
Money has not always been bought or sold. Rather it has most usually
served in a fully-fungible relationship with gold. That is to say, gold
(and silver) has been the traditional holder of financial confidence,
apparently for the reasons you stated.
>... in fact the price of money is itself a strange notion in
>economics, being both the value of the money (in gold? in some
>inter-currency unit? in goods and services?) and the cost of the money
>(e.g. interest rates to be paid to get hold of some more of it without
>actually selling anything).
Interest is another bugaboo that has not always been a socially
acceptable form of wealth generation. Throughout (written) history,
interest has fallen in and out of legal status based on its effects on
society. The first big loan default - which also preceded the abolishing
of interest as a source of wealth generation - that I know of was by
Solon of Athens who deposed Draco. Draco held the people of Athens to
ransom in a regime based in debt.
The illusions created by the sale of money - including interest - and the
high levels of speculation that generally follows, is a phenomenon that
seems to cyclically occur, usually to the detriment of the society at the
time. Whether or not this is merely a causal attribution on my part, I
don't know. However, the only postmodern aspects of the current economic
system - speaking historically as I must - is its methods of mediation
and propogation, and the particular aspects of the system that are
valorised.
>Classically, a commodity was thought to have to be a good, and then a
>"service" (which is what really foregrounds the role of labor, though
the
>link between goods and services and labor may be a historically
specific
>one, see below),
Regardless of terminologies, different things are valorised at different
times and 'capital is ... indifferent to the technical character of the
labour processes it consumes' (Marx, p. 358). Take tulips, for instance.
In 1642, a single tulip bulb could buy three houses in downtown
Amsterdam. This was the result of mass-manufactured and propogated
illusion and speculative elitist self-interest. The result, of course,
was great suffering for many people who had to work harder to make stuff
to eat while the valorised tulip received its hyperinflated attention and
adornment.
>but with the growing dependence of postmodern economies on
>intellectual property (software, trademarks, patents and copyrights,
>"content"), there seems to be no doubt that signs (e.g. texts, verbal
or
>musical or video or computer code) are also commodities (with the same
sort
>of logic of labor value applicable), and so why should not money be a
>commodity as a sign, either solely, or in addition to being a commodity
as
>a "good" ? in this way the usual logical link to gold-as-commodity no
>longer seems necessary in theory, as it obviously has long not been in
>practice.
Dependence is indeed the correct word here from my perspective. Current
economies [esp transnational corporations] depend, almost entirely, upon
the valorisation of signs, some of which are commodified time. Concensus
in this game is electronically produced like the robot's cabbage. Part
electronic, mostly organic.
As an economic standard, the decline of gold is an extremely recent, and
most probably temporary, phenomenon in human societies.
>How well does a labor theory of value account for the amplification of
>labor investment, not only via capital, but via certain sorts of
>self-amplifying technologies?
Marx covers this nicely. Self-amplifying technologies also include
factories, guns, computers, shoes, houses, cities, etcetera. Any
self-amplifying technology _is_ capital. Any technology is necessarily
self-amplifying. The question might be: How much life does a
self-amplifying technology absorb? How long does a person have to work to
buy shoes - or a robot? How many lives does the Nike factory in Beijing
absorb? How many lives has New York absorbed in reproducing itself during
the short blip of time it has occupied? Capital is predatory.
>If I invest a few hours and build a robot,
>and the robot can do a man's daily labor, what is the labor value of
the
>robot: a few hours, or many man-years?
A few hours.
>what is the labor value of an
>article made by the robot?
Assuming the robot requires no maintenance: none other than the labour
you advanced to the robot. If it requires maintenance, and you - as its
creator - do it, its labour value, for you, is equal to the amount of
your life that it takes to maintain the robot. If you, by paying money,
or by some other form of coercion, appropriate someone else's time/life
to do it, then the exchange value of the labour you buy is most usually
determined by you, but it is also embodied in the renewed robot and
valorised in the use-value and/or exchange value of any further work that
the robot does for you.
If the robot makes useful things for you, it has use-value. If you can
and do sell it, it has exchange value. If, in exchanging the robot, you
make more than your initial investment of life, you have created surplus
value through your own labour.
>what if the robot builds a robot, and the
>second-generation robot makes the article? the 100-th generation
robot?
>what if I design a software program that can write TV sitcoms? or that
can
>write programs that can write TV sitcoms? or that can write programs
to
>your specifications to do a wide range of tasks, equivalent to what a
>specialized human programmer can do today? It seems clear to me that
human
>labor cannot be fundamental, just as gold cannot be fundamental, when
an
>economy changes historically to a basically new mode of production.
Human labour is _necessarily_ fundamental to the person doing that
labour. If someone wrote the archetypal sitcom, didn't they also write
the program for the programmer of the automatic sitcom programmer? And if
sitcoms count for production, who consumes them and what do _they_
consume?
The remotely written sitcom script you describe is not a sitcom until
labour is consumed by it. The script - at a certain point - becomes the
means of production; it absorbs the life of those who act and produce it,
and of those who supposedly consume it. Hence Adorno & Horkheimer's
argument:
'If one branch of art follows the same formula as one with a very
different medium and content; if the dramatic intrigue of broadcast soap
operas becomes no more than useful material for showing how to master
technical problems at both ends of the scale of musical experience -real
jazz or a cheap imitation; or if a movement from a Beethoven symphony is
crudely "adapted" for a film sound-track in the same way as a Tolstoy
novel is garbled in a film script: then the claim that this is done to
satisfy the spontaneous wishes of the public is no more than hot air. We
are closer to the facts if we explain these phenomena as inherent in the
technical and personnel apparatus which, down to its last cog, itself
forms part of the economic mechanism of selection'.
Adorno T. & Horkheimer M. (1944). <italic>The culture industry:
enlightenment as mass deception
</italic>http://hamp.hampshire.edu/~cmnF93/culture_ind.txt. Also in:
<italic>Dialectic of enlightenment</italic> (1993) NY: Continuum.
Furthermore, as you and Adorno & Horkheimer point out, the underlying
infrastructure of modern and ancient production absorbs enormous and
cumulative amounts of lives.
Are these of no value?
If not, is there anything which is fundamentally valuable?
---snip---
>The argument here is really just like the postmodern
>argument against causality in human systems: causality only applies if
you
>can _isolate_ the causer and the effected, if they are embedded in webs
of
>mutual constituency and interdependency, there is no causality because
>every effect depends on the state of the entire web, which is both
>macro-causer and macro-effected in one, inseparable, unfactorizable.
Nevertheless, in this "postmodern" world, one thing still actually
_appears_ to cause another. If the cabbage stealer pulls the trigger and
kills the former cabbage owner, a clear case of culpability and causality
would exist for many observers. If we were to abandon causality
altogether, what would we be? Purely instinctive perhaps? Or completely,
uncritically passive?
The relativist-subjectivist method of argument is _not_ postmodern, it's
not even new: 'In fact this kind of "sophistry" understands better than
Protagoras and better than the Eleactics how to demonstrate before your
very eyes that everything real is merely apparent' (Marx,
<italic>Capital,</italic> Vol 1, 1976, p. 358). It appears that,
historically, the relativist-subjectivist method is promoted and
encouraged when social inequities are at their peak (cf also Plato:
Apology; Aristotle's Rhetoric and Politics for very early refs to the
social phenomena surrounding the primacy of
relativist/nominalist/subjectivist methods of argument).
>(In fact this may apply to all systems, junking the notion of
causality
>completely, though there are a few idealized kinds of systems for which
we
>can still pretend that there is isolability ... and many for which we do
so
>pretend, in dangerously misleading ways.) Likewise, one can argue in
just
>the same way that in economic systems all the labor of all the actants
>(including bacteria and robots) is implicated in every effect of
>production, at some remove.
Indeed one can. Nevertheless, in human societies, money, and with it the
means "<italic>du jour"</italic> of surplus-value production, is
valorised in contemporaneously propogated 'expert' discourses of
political economy which are then 'transformed into discourses of social
policy' (Lemke, 1995). This is the technocracy. Whether or not computers
or mechanical spindles are valorised as the "new" means of production,
and whether they produce significant yarn or significant bits of data,
they absorb the lives of people in the production of surplus value which
allows valorised capital to continue extorting labour from an ecoomic
underclass. The flip-side of the interconnectedness-of-everything
argument is that one can equally argue, quite logically, that anything
can be attributed as a cause for anything else, indeed, for everything
else.
>So perhaps, logically prior to the commodification of labor is the
>commodification of individuals as such, the creation of an
interest-serving
>cultural belief that one can assign to each product not only an
individual
>owner, but an individual producer, rather than the belief that all
products
>are products of the ecosocial system as a whole, and belong only to it
as a
>whole. The rest is appropriation. JAY.
Here! Here! I'm fairly sure that this is what Marx had in mind.
Unfortunately, and at times disgustingly, for me, as a living being -
commodified or otherwise - I am driven by basic needs to appropriate
other things - animal, vegetable, mineral, and otherwise - to maintain
myself for the brief period that I have here. Thus, I think, my identity,
beliefs, and illusions necessarily arise as a function of my nature.
Bummer.
Phil Graham
Student
Queensland University of Technology