Date: Sun, 4 Apr 2004 19:01:22 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave-AT-eco.utexas.edu>
Subject: Re: AUT: Re: Immeasurable value


On Sun, 4 Apr 2004, Nate Holdren wrote:

<snip>
> You make a distinction between people working for their own ends and people
> working for the sake of work. I assume you mean by the latter people working
> because they have to - surplus value production, right?

Yes, but more than that. As I understand capitalism to be a social system
based on, organized around, endless work, surplus work/value/profit is
ultimately (through investment etc) merely the means of maintaining and
expanding that work-based society.

> This makes sense. As
> a whole, bosses make more by employing us than they put out to pay us,
> otherwise how could they keep us employed? And there's the point about why
> we work. I work to pay the bills. But also, some of the work I do I
> occasionally enjoy and benefit from beyond just the wage (I've got this very
> occasional and unreliable spanish to english translation gig that is like
> that, the work itself is kind of fun, improves my spanish a little).

Sure, in the 1844 Manuscripts in arguing how work is estranged/alienated
in capitalism Marx also points out, a little bit directly more so by
inference, how work can be one means of human fulfilment. Concrete work is
a mixture of the two when we can manage it.

>
> Also, outside of work I do things that are not all that functional to
> capital (like fill time and inboxes on autopsy). Some of these kinds of
> things though, our self-valorizations writ small or large, are sometimes
> made functional for capitalism (the Situationist's detourning practices and
> manifestos related to this have been in some ways taken up by ad agency and
> music video production firms). So subsumed vs unsubsumed time is sometimes
> hard to tell apart, and sometimes the second can get rendered functional
> anyway, like when an old favorite tune - not written to sell but for fun -
> gets made into a jingle for a commercial ("turning rebellion into money").

For sure, the degree to which our activities are work-for-capital vs
self-valorization, or subsumed vs unsubsumed is almost always a question
of "the degree to which". And the conversion of self-valorizing activities
into the valorization of capital or of the subsumption of that which was
hitherto unsubsumed is the old critical theory story of
instrumentalization. Detournement was the flip side: the conversion of a
mechanism of domination into one of liberation.

>
> I used to work in nonprofit organizations here in Chicago, and a lot of that
> worked entailed just kind of hanging out, getting to know people,
> accumulating a stock of affection and nonmonetary debt [they call it
> "relationship building" if memory serves] so that when the time came to make
> something happen you had the phone numbers and the pull needed to get what
> you want toward meeting the grant proposal or doing someone a favor as part
> of the above game or whatever else ["hey, Jane! How are you? It's been a
> while. How's the housing/healthcare/juvenile justice/church etc thing going?
> Great. Yeah, I'm fine. Listen, I need a meeting space/bodies at an event/a
> press contact/advice on a grant proposal/a new job/advice on who to hire
> etc."] With this kind of stuff it's really not clear what's subsumed and
> what's not, and stuff that isn't or seems like it isn't - hanging out at a
> bar with the manager after work - can be made functional for capital anyway
> or used against or by one in the workplace later.

That's the kind of thing that gives Negri's position some weight. But
there is nothing automatic about subsumption. Your hanging out, creating
relationship, networks, etc. can also be elements of self-valorization, of
"exodus" or escape. And not just on the individual level but socially as
such things rapidly gel to produce mass movements, e.g., the unexpected
emergence of Solidarinosc in Poland.

>
> I read some remark by Negri somewhere about taking this from Tronti, seeing
> the sole motor for new development in us. As I (mis)understand the point,
> it's that our activity is sometimes functional to our ends and antithetical
> to capital's, sometimes functional to capital's ends and antithetical to
> ours, but occasionally (temporarily and in a problem ridden way subject to
> having the deal broken from either end) functional to both due to minor
> truces or being below the radar for a while or to new responses by us or the
> capitalists.

Tronti's famous for restating Marx's position that living labor dominates
dead labor, that the life of the vampire comes from us, in a new way,
namely in dynamic terms: our struggles drive capitalist development. The
bit about our activity being functional to both sides comes in with
things like wage struggles that both raise our standard of living, giving
us more power to struggle, yet are organized by capital in a way that
provides a motor for its own development. That's the dialectic for you,
the struggle lives, but is yet subsumed. The anti-dialecticians among us
emphasize the endless threat of explosion that terminates any and all
possibilties of subsumption once and for all, e.g., the end of the
dialectic.

> For instance, at one point in time kids were going home from school or dead
> end jobs and spinning records and writing rhymes (or playing instruments
> badly and writing angst ridden lyrics) and recording them and distributing
> them and performing them through small networks, house parties, etc. Then it
> turns out there's money in hip hop (and punk rock) and so what was once done
> off the clock (identifying cool breaks, writing inspirational lines, writing
> the songs and guitar riffs that many decent bands whether stadium or garage
> still cover and recycle to good effect, etc) is now rendered functional to a
> moment of capital accumulation.

Yup.
>
> This is why I'm sympathetic to the Negrian arguments as I hear them, because
> I think with cultural production/immaterial labor (a poor choice of phrase I
> think) it isn't always clear what's on or off the clock, subsumed or
> unsubsumed, work time or life time, and what was the second is sometimes
> later appropriated/rendered useful anyway

Yes, but just because something is later subsumed doesn't mean that the
earlier moment/periods of self-valorization were mere illusion and
subsumption is eternal - anymore than the defeat of a cycle of struggle
means the struggle was an illusion.

> (and these two aren't always the
> same either, there's something like a formal and a real subsumption that
> goes on, the difference between when a product becomes a commodity and a
> product made with being a commodity in mind in the first place -

You are using formal/real subsumption differently than either Marx or
Toni, I think. For them the terms refer to the conditions of the
capitalist annexation of labor (and for Toni society). In formal
subumption unaltered labor processes are annexted to produce commodities;
in real those processes are altered for greater control, more work, higher
profit. Ultimately, that first moment of appropriation you are talking
about is like primitive accumulation writ small. But the analysis of
accumulation, tout court, is of on-going, expanded reproduction.

> taking the
> fiction or music written out of a love [or masochism is probably more
> accurate] and putting it in stores by companies that care only about sales
> and profits vs calculating exactly what needs to be produced to move the
> most units - entering more directly into the production process and
> production values [in the non-marxist sense of values].)

Aye, that is exactly what happened with my book Reading Capital
Politically, which was crafted within a research project and then as an
aide to my students and then became a commodity through outside
intervention.

> At the same time, what's on the clock isn't solely domination (the
> International Noise Conspiracy's music is clearly part of capitalism given
> the conditions of its production, distribution, and consumption, and yet
> they're part of the circuit of struggles, or at least the circuit activity
> useless to capital [they're how I found out about Autopsy) - that's one big
> difference for me between Negri et al and the Frankfurt School.

Yes, absolutely, as with much protest and other music of the past. It is a
capitalist world after all and so perhaps most of the things we create and
produce circulate as commodities, yet our "consumption" of them is often
not simply the reproduction of our labor power but part of the
struggle against that reproduction as well as against other dimensions of
capitalist expanded reproduction.

> Do you know when that Caffentzis piece is coming out?  Maybe it can make this
> stuff clearer to me.

No, I don't know when it's due out, tho I have told him about this
discussion and suggested dropping it in. He's revising at the moment.
It's for a collection on Empire I think.

> I like some of the political ramifications of the bits
> of Negri I've read, mainly the leveling moment, useful for knocking down
> aspects of intra-class hierarchy (factoryism etc) but this isn't unique to
> Negri necessarily.

There are many useful "bits" in Negri's writings as well as in Future
Anterieur and other projects he's been involved with.

> I do wonder at the "it's all productive" idea.

In recent years, I've seen little in Negri's writing to suggest that he
makes any distinction between work and other human activity. Like many
Marxists he seems to collapse all of the latter into the former. And then
to see all work as subsumed by capital. The notion of self-valorization,
as I read it, used it, wasn't confined to labor but encompassed all kinds
of unsubsumed human activity. His later emphasis on "consitution" taken
from Deleuze's reading of Spinoza could also be read this way. But the
absence of any analysis of non-work activity suggests no perception of
such. He once asked me "What's your problem with work?"! This from a guy
who once took the Italian struggle against work as a point of departure
for theoretical innovation! You read Communists Like Us, that he wrote
with Guattari and it's pretty clear who wrote what. All the stuff
emphasizing work is clearly Negri. The French title "Espaces de la
Liberte", Spaces of Liberty, emphasized the Guattari side of the text. I
liked that better.

> Sure, in
> some Deleuzian sense. This is in the intro to Labor of Dionysus, about labor
> as the production of values, not solely Value for capital. Well and good,
> and a nice point, but the distinction between Value and values - capital and
> the different ways of life that folks build and try out and that capital
> reacts to - is one that shouldn't be lost.

Yeah, and your implicit "as far as it goes", among other things, is to the
border line between work and other human activities. Once we move outside
capital it is not just labor that "produces" values but all kinds of
activity - indeed we should abandoned that verb that reeks of factory
grease.

> And if all activity is productive
> for capital then the big question is exactly the one you posed - where's the
> rupture come in? The EZLN are productive for capital? Maybe, in some sort of
> Trontian way of the working class as engine for development, but that's a
> kind of capital-centric inversion of operaismo/autonomist stuff, making the
> emphasis on the function for capital rather than for us, and it loses sight
> of the possibility of there eventually or sometimes being not a recuperation
> and further development but a genuine alternative outcome.

Absolutely!

> I think this is a thorny issue because I don't want to be one of those who
> is constantly going on about recuperation and thus pouring water on any fire
> someone tries to light, but I also don't want to be blind to those
> questions, since what may look to some like liberatory may actually be old
> wine in a new bottle (like the Trots who think we just need a USSR of A).

Of course not. But one would have to be unread in the 20th Century Marxist
tradition to have such a blindness. Most of that tradition is precisely
about recognizing domination when you see it, and some of it, eg.,
critical theory is about recognizing it when it seems to be its opposite.

> Given that Negri is no fool, Harry (and others), what do you think he's
> trying to accomplish or thinks he's accomplishing by the immeasurability
> argument?

I think it's a theoretical argument that results in downplaying
"quantitative" struggles, e.g., wage struggles, in favor of qualitative
ones. This was one of the points of contention between Negri and the Wages
for Housework movement years ago: they argued, obviously, for struggle for
wages saying such struggles strengthened workers against capital, while
Toni was arguing for direct confrontation with the state. While he was no
Brigadista he was definitely caught up in the spirit of direct action and
thought he saw the possibility of revolutionary upheaval. That upheaval he
thought was much more broadly based, flaring up throughout the social
factory, than traditionally conceived, i.e., factory worker struggles, but
he thought push was coming to shove. Much of his more recent writing while
somewhat differently posed theoretically has some of the same flavor.
After all if working class struggle is "mature", as he has written, if the
existence of capitalist hegemony means the omnipresence of exploitation,
alienation and struggle, then what's left but widespread revolutionary
rising? If on the other hand, we are not at precisely that moment before
such a thing happens, then his analysis fails to provide enough help in
getting there because if blurs too many distinctions in ways not helpful
for organizing outselves, circulating our struggles, etc.

>
> What does value's measurability mean, exactly, anyway? I'm reading volume 2
> of Capital with a friend who insists that the textiles Marx uses as an
> example have a value equal to the cost of MP+C plus a surplus regardless of
> sale, prior to sale, like in them as a substance or something.

The above doesn't make any sense to me. In the first place C = MP in
value terms, so I don't know what MP+C means. Second, if you meant to
write C+V + surplus (S) then I think your friend is wrong to say this is
true "regardless of sale". Marx's categories are those of self-reproducing
processes. Therefore if the sale doesn't occur the production process that
combined C with V to generate C+V+S will be abandoned and value won't be
realized, e.g., Edsels. Your friend's way of thinking is what I have
called  a phlogiston concept of value. See:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/rcp3.html
I argue for talking about these things differently from Marx in:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/357ksg08.html
To say the "substance" of value is abstract labor doesn't automatically
mean thinking, or talking, about that "substance" as if it were like a
chemical substance.

> I just can't
> get my head around this and it seems a total political third wheel, a gear
> that turns nothing, and leads my friend to arguments about overproduction
> and falling rates of profit that I just can't follow (not least because they
> sound so old fashioned and boring that I have trouble paying attention).

Aye, Peter Bell and I offered a different reading of those theories in:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/CleaverandBell.pdf
We argue that the theories ARE meaningful, but not in the way they are
traditionally understood.

> You
> talked about value being measured "indirectly through an analysis of the
> array of production times distributed through society". Can you explain that
> a little?

That's what happens with "socially necessary labor time". The measure of
the value of a commodity, for Marx, is not the labor time directly
expended in its produciton, but the average labor time necessary for its
production across all those labor processes that produce it, e.g., in all
those factories (or other production sites) where that commodity is
produced. Individual factories may be more or less efficient, may require
more or less time to produce the commodity. Indeed, NO factory may
actually produce the commodity in the "socially necessary" time.

> Virno talks a little about (sorry to always be so vague, I need to read more
> carefully and make notes and such, yet another difficulty about the work
> machine, it makes it harder to read crazy philosophers) the distinction
> between labor time and production time. If memory serves, he argues that
> basically all of society is part of the second (the way that weather events
> and localized insect problems etc can enter into the production time for
> agriculture) but not the first. This seems to point toward some kind of
> recognition of what I like about the immeasurability idea while maybe
> allowing one to avoid some of the sillier conclusions.

I don't know what text you are refering to but the distinction between
labor time and production time is an old one. Labor plants, plants grow,
labor weeds, plants grow, labor harvests. Total production time = labor
time + growing time that doesn't overlap labor time. There is no
measurability problem here as far as I can see.

>
> One last question - have there been any critical responses to the
> immeasurability idea from other folks connected in some way with operaismo?
> (other than you and Caffentzis, obviously. I mean by Italians, mainly.)

I don't know. Perhaps Massimo, or Steve, or someone else, can tell us.

H.

>
> Thanks again!
>
> all the best,
> Nate
>
>
>
>
> >From: "Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave-AT-eco.utexas.edu>
> >Reply-To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
> >To: <aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU>
> >Subject: Re: AUT: Re: Immeasurable value
> >Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2004 21:50:34 -0600 (CST)
> >
> >On Tue, 30 Mar 2004, Nate Holdren wrote:
> >
> > > Hi Harry-
> > > What's at stake politically in the measurability vs immeasurability of
> > > value?
> >
> >Lots. For instance: think about the point of Marx's analysis of
> >exploitation, namely that while some of the work that people do is for
> >their own benefit, much of their time is spent working for the sake of
> >working, i.e., for surplus value or profit which is just used to keep
> >people working endlessly. Understanding this both provides, among other
> >things, one theory as to why people struggle - they resist this
> >imposition intuitively - and also a theory that points out how the
> >resistance to work directly undermines the mechanism of domination.
> >Historically this has been recognized in the struggle for the
> >reduction of waged working hours, and more recently it has been
> >recognized in the struggle to reduce the work of
> >reproducing labor power. In both kinds of struggle the analysis
> >provides both a qualitative analysis of what it means to work for
> >capital and a point of reference for recognizing success or failure of
> >resistance: waged hours or hours spent in education qua job training
> >are shortened, or not.
> >
> >Now suppose you give up quantity/measurability by
> >asserting that all of life is reduced to work for capital. How do you
> >differentiate between when your life is for-capital and when your life is
> >for-yourself defined in some sense other-than-for-capital? How do you know
> >if you are gaining or losing? If you provide a purely qualitative analysis
> >of life-as-work-for-capital and another of life-free-from-capital, without
> >measure you are faced with an either/or situation: either you are
> >subsumed or revolution frees you. Such an approach fails to provide the
> >means for analyzing history as we have known it, which is not either/or
> >but a class struggle in which the balance of power and the degree of
> >subsumption has shifted in cycles (cycles because final rupture of
> >domination hasn't been achieved). However, once you offer the qualitative
> >distinction between life-as-work-for-capital and life-free-from-capital
> >common sense suggests the inevitability of measure because if time spent
> >free-from-capital can be recognized it can be measured and if it can be
> >measured then the immeasurability thesis falls. Not surprisingly N&H, like
> >the critical theorists provide us with much more of an analysis of
> >subsumption than they do of escape from it and the crafting of other ways
> >of being.
> >
> > > Clearly for Negri his views are not just warmed over Critical Theory,
> > > because unlike the Frankfurters Negri thinks capital is fragile and that
> > > resistance happens all over the place.
> >
> >Yes, that is one reason why N&H's analysis is much more appealing than
> >that of the critical theorists. Moreover he does try to formulate a
> >theory of the struggling subjectivity that is being subsumed. At
> >least since Negri's earlier theory of self-valorization he has been trying
> >to develop such an analysis. I just don't find the latest results very
> >sastisfying, nor do I find them to provide a useful guide to the
> >recognition and analysis of rupture and escape/revolution.
> >
> > > I have a hard time following these
> > > arguments, both onlist and in writing, both for value's measurability
> >and
> > > its immeasurability. Can you give me an example of measured/measurable
> > > value?
> >
> >Marx's labor theory of value includes substance, measure and form - right
> >there in chapter 1 of CAPITAL. After identifying abstract labor as the
> >qualitative substance of value he passes on to its measure in socially
> >necessary labor time - which is differentiated from non-labor time. As
> >Caffentzis argues in a work in progress Marx's analysis involves
> >transvaluation: an analysis of the multiple and complex determinations of
> >value, something which is already evident in the notion of SOCIALLY
> >necessary labor time. The quantitative determination is socially -
> >complexly and indirectly - determined and not locally specific and direct.
> >Already in this concept of socially necessary labor time you can see a
> >Marxian reply to N&H's immeasurability: labor value cannot be measured
> >directly by examining how many hours of work it takes to produce a
> >particular commodity. BUT IT CAN STILL BE MEASURED indirectly through an
> >analysis of the array of production times distributed through society.
> >
> > > How do fights about overtime pay cease to make sense if one argues
> > > that value is immeasurable?
> >
> >Well, if you argue that all of life is work, then what difference does it
> >make how many of hours you work at your waged job? Even when you leave
> >you are still considered to be working! At least with critical theory you
> >could postulate that efforts at instrumentalization of unwaged life time
> >might fail and that you might suceed in carving out un-subsumed time
> >(even if that theory provided no real theory about the dynamics of the
> >struggles that might achieve such a result). If the only thing that
> >changes as you leave waged for unwaged work is the character of the job
> >then the struggle over overtime is reduced to a struggle over working
> >conditions, i.e., how much time you work at this kind of task vs how much
> >time you work at that kind of task. Oopps, but without quantity how can
> >you even talk about such quantitative comparisons.
> >
> > > Any reading you'd recommend to help me get clear
> > > on all this stuff? Please pardon my confusion, and I hope I don't sound
> > > flippant or dismissive.
> >
> >Nope, you don't. As for readings, well most basically I'd skim back over
> >Marx with the constant query of "how central is quantity here?" to each
> >element of the analysis and what could still be said if the quantitative
> >dimension is dismissed or left out. As I've already suggested, things like
> >the theory of exploitation would seem to go by the way-side. More subtle
> >inquiry is required of something like the theory of alienation which at
> >first glance does NOT involve a quantitative dimension, e.g., the
> >discussion in the manuscripts is carried on without reference (if I
> >remember right) to the quantity of labor time, only to its qualitative
> >character. But.... then you have the later works where you do discover the
> >connection between that qualitative character and quantity and to lose
> >that would be to lose a key guide to getting beyond alienation. Hopefully
> >the piece that George is working on will be finished soon and can be
> >dropped into this discussion; it's a nice critique of Negri and Hardt
> >on this issue and brings in some useful parallels between the issue of
> >measurability of value and questions of measurability in mathematics and
> >science. There is, of course, a long history of discussion in the Marxist
> >literature about various quantitative issues in Marx's theory but much of
> >it isn't very edifying, unfortunately.
> >
> >H.
> >
>
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............................................................................
Snail-mail:
Harry Cleaver
University of Texas at Austin
Department of Economics
BRB 1.116
1 University Station, C3100
Austin, Texas 78712-0301  USA

Phone Numbers:
(hm)  (512) 442-5036
(off) (512) 475-8535
Fax:(512) 471-3510

E-mail:
hmcleave-AT-eco.utexas.edu

Cleaver homepage:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/index.html

Chiapas95 homepage:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/chiapas95.html
............................................................................



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