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[As signalled by me earlier, I’m now posting a series of excerpts from the joint paper by Mark Harvey and me with the above title. The first excerpt was here and the second here. This third excerpt is also from section II of the paper. At the end of the post there’s a link to a full PDF version of ‘Marx’s economy and beyond’; it contains the footnotes omitted from these blogpost excerpts. – NG.]

Marx closes the circle of commodity production and consumption outlined in our earlier diagram with his account of what happens to labour-power when used in production. Again, there are ambiguities and confusions in Marx’s own struggle with conceptualization. For he slips from talking of the basket of commodities necessary for the reproduction of labour-power to talking of that necessary for the reproduction of the existence of labour-power. And by that he seems in places strongly to indicate biological existence. From there the circle is closed in production by a suggestion that physical and mental exhaustion, consumption of labour-power as the using up, in addition to use of, labour-capacity, is what occurs in production. In that respect again, labour-power is likened, as we have earlier seen, to the using up of other commodities in production: raw materials (for example, oil) and machinery. There is an expenditure of ‘vital forces’. The living being is physically and mentally depleted, exhausted, by work and then restored by consumption of food, clothing, housing, heating – and TV, I-phones, MP3s, etc, etc. And this link in the chain is what ties reproduction with consumption of labour-power within a closed commodity circuit. So, however ambiguous and open to interpretation, it is difficult to understate the role of this conception in the theory – it is an indispensable link in the analytical chain.

And of course, there is much that is convincing in Marx’s account, and not to be jettisoned. People do need to eat – even eat well – to live, and thereby to work. But again we come back to the knowledge of the knowledge-bearers, and now to its use in production. It certainly is used, but equally certainly it is not, in the other sense of the word and by contrast with raw materials, used up. The biological brain may become physically tired, but the ideas and knowledge do not. There is a strong argument, indeed, that knowledge and skills are enhanced, even developed in use, and (again) collectively. Undoubtedly, such knowledge enhancement or development, knowledge outputs, may well be appropriated by the employers of the bearers of knowledge, through intellectual property rights. But the difficulties of employers in ensuring the kind of property rights over this knowledge that they typically have over other outputs, given that it also resides in the knowledge-bearers, are also well known. And, to conclude this point concerning the use of labour-power in production, if knowledge is used, but not used up, in production, it is not in need of restoration, and certainly not by the consumption of anything one might like to put in a basket of commodities. So, this final link in the chain of a labour-theory-of-value understanding of surplus value production is also broken, in a way calling for further development of the analysis of economies of labour.

[I shall be posting further excerpts later this week. For the full paper (PDF), ‘Marx’s economy and beyond‘, click through the link. See also ‘On working together‘.]

For those of you unable to understand me in English, here’s a post of mine translated into Hebrew, at Na’ama Carmi’s blog. I’m striking a small blow against the cultural boycott. Thanks to Na’ama for that.

Robert Crampton, by contrast, doesn’t neglect or understate the difference between a democratic leader and the head of a military junta. Crampton is explaining (£) how he ceased to see Margaret Thatcher as all bad:

And yet, long ago, I moved away, geographically and intellectually, from the default position of thinking Maggie Thatcher was the devil incarnate. I remember when that started, 31 years ago this month, when the Argentinians invaded the Falklands. The Left’s response was to let the Falklands go. I thought: Galtieri versus Thatcher? I’m with Thatcher. Why? Because, my family, Thatcher may not like us, but she doesn’t kidnap, torture and kill us. Or if she might like to, she isn’t allowed to. Galtieri, fascist bastard, he can and he will and he does. He’s got to be opposed.

A sound principle, opposing fascist dictators, though you’d be surprised at how often some people will find reason to override it in the light of… another principle.

With his most famous book, One-Dimensional Man (1964), Herbert Marcuse contributed something to the false thesis that Western capitalist democracies and Soviet-style dictatorships were, alike, ‘totalitarian’. This passage from the book’s opening chapter sums up the line of thought:

For “totalitarian” is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests. It thus precludes the emergence of an effective opposition against the whole. Not only a specific form of government or party rule makes for totalitarianism, but also a specific system of production and distribution which may well be compatible with a “pluralism” of parties, newspapers, “countervailing powers,” etc.

The ‘manipulation of needs’ thesis plays an important part here, because it is the theorist’s judgement that the needs being met are foisted upon a population not in a position to know any better – to know what its true and authentic needs are. One of the strengths of advanced capitalism, however, has been its ability to meet perfectly genuine needs, as well as to create interest in new types of product that are, in themselves, unobjectionable and make people’s lives easier and/or more enjoyable. That these benefits are not distributed fairly is a serious shortcoming, but it doesn’t undo the fact that the thesis about manipulating needs is misleadingly one-sided, at best. Marcuse, furthermore, also put forward the idea of ‘repressive tolerance‘, according to which even the overt political virtue of liberal pluralist societies could be seen as self-cancelling because of the way in which tolerance of dissent serves to blunt and absorb ideas critical of the status quo. If Marx’s Capital is on sale in attractive and affordable paperback editions, this supposedly demonstrates the power of capitalism to ‘take over’ the very cultural outputs aimed against it.

Of this you can find some account here by Peter Thompson. In one point, though, Thompson goes too far. He writes:

Constitutional liberty and equality was all very well, he [Marcuse] argued, but if it simply masked institutionalised inequality then it was worse than useless.

‘Worse than useless’ is a conventional phrase, but although Marcuse was certainly responsible for eliding the differences between real totalitarianism and pluralist democracy, he did not negate them altogether by saying that constitutional liberty and equality were worse than useless:

Still, for the administered individual, pluralistic administration is far better than total administration. One institution might protect him against the other; one organization might mitigate the impact of the other; possibilities of escape and redress can be calculated. The rule of law, no matter how restricted, is still infinitely safer than rule above or without law.

It is an insufficient qualification of Marcuse’s main argument, but a qualification is what it is.

It’s an established principle of blogging that early on a Sunday evening in mid-April you should let people know your favourite national anthems. Here are my top four. I haven’t ranked them. They’re in alphabetical order by country.

One
Two
Three
Four

You can read them ideologically if you want to: believer in the principle of a right of revolution against tyranny; Jew and Zionist; pro-American; supporter of Wales at rugby. But, actually, I just like them as anthems.

Further to my post about the death of Margaret Thatcher, I’ve just come across this column by A.C. Grayling, in which he argues that we owe no respect to the newly dead. The piece is marked by a giant obfuscation. Grayling’s entire argument comes down to the claim that we are perfectly entitled to give an honest account of what we think of the record and the influence of the person who has recently died. Of course we are. That follows from simple principles of speaking the truth as one sees it, and as I said in my earlier post, obituary reflections are never required to hold back from praising their subjects, so criticism is equally valid when called for.

But this is not at all what is at issue when people find it repugnant that others are rejoicing at someone’s death and making it the occasion of a party. Grayling does appear to have a vague sense of something else being ‘in the air’ here, for he refers to the possible bad taste of death celebrations, and says also that one ‘might be mindful of the grief of family and friends’. But these vague stirrings go no further for him, and in the end all he can offer in explanation of the principle of respect for the recently dead is a form of superstition or supernatural belief:

Respect for the dead is a hangover from a past in which it was believed that the dead might retain some active influence on the living, and that one might re-encounter them either in this life or a putative next life.

If this explanation were sound, we’d be challenged to explain why atheists also feel bound by norms of respecting the dying, the recently dead and the bereaved. It has got nothing to do with the possibility of the dead enduring in some form; it has everything to do with the world of the living.

To see clearly why, just imagine renunciation of the relevant norm of respect taken to its logical extreme. So we needn’t observe any restraints in expressing, upon someone’s death, contempt and hatred for what they did with their life but in the specific shape of glee that they have died? OK, why then leave it at street parties? Why not string up the body from a lamp-post, chop it up, shit on the person’s remains, jeer at the grieving relatives, throw rotten fruit at them, etc?

Why not? Because that is not the ‘civilization’ we profess or want to be. We respect the human form, yes, even in those we perceive to have done great mischief, and we accord them the rights due to those suffering life’s final, unavoidable sentence, as we do the rights due to those they are leaving behind. It is a feeble diversion to pretend that this is a question merely of differing assessments of Margaret Thatcher’s record. Speaking for myself, I have always loathed what Thatcher stood for and most of what she did. But to nod these death celebrations through is to connive at a form of moral thuggery. It does not come well from a would-be humanist philosopher.

You know the concept of a responsibility to protect? Well, you probably don’t know it like this.

‘We got the responsibility to protect; tell your government, tell your president…’ (Thanks: JP.)

To prevent possible misunderstandings, Norman Geras and Mark Harvey, co-authors of ‘Marx’s economy and beyond‘, would like to put it clearly on record that their joint authorship does not entail agreement on all political and intellectual issues. There is agreement between us, naturally, about the content of the paper itself, though doubtless each of us might elaborate consequences, implications, nuances, etc, in his own way. But we did not agree – just for example – over the Iraq war and we do not agree about the Falklands/Malvinas. We also don’t see eye to eye on whether or not there is a universal human nature. More things could be added to this list, but a few examples should suffice to have made the point. We have produced our paper in common because we thought the arguments we shared regarding Marx’s political economy were substantial and important enough to put both of our names to them. For the rest, like other pairs of co-authors we agree about much but also disagree about plenty. It has been no obstacle in the way of working together as old friends. On the contrary, we have both enjoyed the collaborative effort involved, benefiting from one another’s different perspectives and intellectual resources.

[As signalled by me last week, I’m now posting a series of excerpts from the joint paper by Mark Harvey and me with the above title. The first excerpt was here. This second one is from section II of the paper. At the end of this post there’s a link to a full PDF version of ‘Marx’s economy and beyond’; it contains the footnotes omitted from these blogpost excerpts. – NG.]

Arising directly from Marx’s analysis is the emphasis on the necessity – Marx uses the term ‘compulsion’ – for the exchange to take place between capitalists and workers, as two classes of economic agent: owners of money (potentially capital) and owners of labour-power. Marx has a strange formulation of the double freedom of the wage labourer: on the one hand, the free ownership of his or her labour-capacity; on the other hand, freedom from, that is, deprivation of, any objects that might otherwise ensure the worker’s continued existence as a living being. There are two major revisions required to develop this understanding of the constraint, or compulsion, to sell labour-power. The first concerns the nature of the economic constraint: the absolute dichotomy between owners of means of production (in the first instance, money) and owners of labour-power deprived of all objects other than labour-power to sell. The second puts in question whether the constraint to sell can, in fact, be seen as purely economic: to sell and survive or not to sell and to die.

There is considerable ambiguity in Marx’s text, for he does certainly consider, on the one side of the exchange, labour-power as comprising all the mental and physical attributes of a living being, but then equally emphasizes the absence of all other objects necessary for survival. On the other side of the exchange there is a parallel emphasis on ownership of physical assets, money, commodities and eventually physical means of production. So, the contrast or dichotomy is drawn between owners of means of purchase of commodities and owners of nothing other than a capacity to produce commodities, a static and absolute division of rights over commodity resources.

We have already seen that the economic compulsion does not exercise its force equally on men and women, because of various and developing divisions of labour, market and household. But this is not to diminish the understanding that there is indeed a constraint or dependency on selling labour, as a dominant form in a wage-labour economy of labour. However, the economic force of mutual dependency on buyers and sellers of labour, the asymmetric power relation between them that binds them into making exchanges, is far from static or universal in form. Again, the issue of knowledge and skills requires a theoretical shift. It is worth dwelling for a moment on Marx’s exact words, a kind of possessive individualism in which the seller of labour owns his own ‘mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being’. An argument might be – has been – mounted that the abstract individual is itself only a product of capitalist historical development, and that the theory is postulating such a being only as an unfolding outcome of this history. The difficulty with the argument is that the possessive individualism of labour-power is a critical theoretical component both identifying the initial conditions of capitalist economic growth and underpinning the theoretical edifice of a universalising capitalist logic of accumulation, as outlined above. It is the ‘commodity’ labour-power which the owner may under compulsion sell to the capitalist: ‘mental… capabilities existing in physical form’. We will come back to this when examining the use or consumption of labour-power in production.

But what is critically missing here are the skills and knowledge of knowledge-bearers: they may be deprived of necessary tools and equipment and all other means of producing means of subsistence. But workers have knowledge. They have skills. And it may be that capitalists have all the physical means of production, because they can purchase those with money and acquire full property rights over them; but given that those physical means of production depend entirely for their conception, design, implementation and maintenance on bodies of knowledge and skills, it is difficult to argue that this body of knowledge, and the technical skills allied with it, are not also a means of production. Setting aside, in this argument, the major significance of the public stock (not capital) of knowledge, and complex interactions between that and technological knowledge, knowledge of the means of production is itself part of the means of production. And owners of the physical means, the fixed and circulating capital, are not owners of the knowledge as such, but at most hire its use in production.

On the other side of the exchange, that of the sellers of the use of their knowledge, crucially, individuals do not own skills or knowledge in the way they own commodities. Indeed – though this is an argument that cannot be fully developed here – as individual bearers of knowledge, they no more own collective skills and knowledge than they own the language they speak, also only as individual speakers or as ‘bearers’ of languages. Here we are treating the significance of this exclusively from the angle of the constraint to exchange, the mutual dependency between buyers and sellers of labour-power. The key implication deriving from it is that the force of the mutual dependency between buyers and sellers of labour-power, the nature of the asymmetry of economic power, shifts with the growth and distribution of knowledge amongst the sellers of labour-power. To put it bluntly, the owners of physical capital hire labour under a force of compulsion to obtain the use of skills necessary to create and mobilize that capital. Conversely, the sellers of specialized scientific or technical labour-power in Silicon Valley are under a different force of constraint than migrant rural workers entering into waged labour in Ghuangzhou Province today, or indeed in Engels’s Manchester in the early 19th century. One further point before leaving this economic dimension of the compulsion to exchange: any division of labour creates a necessity to exchange between those who produce different commodities. If some workers produce bread and others butter, there is a necessity to exchange if people are to butter their bread, and wages (and, more widely, money) are a generalized means to enable such exchanges. People are under a compulsion to exchange wages for goods to sustain their customary ways of life. However, the necessity arising from interdependencies across divisions of labour are of a different kind from the necessities arising from divisions of wealth and resources, typified by the division between employers and workers. Marx is right to that extent. But then, in this respect, labour is not a commodity just like others, and the force of the compulsion to exchange is different from that to buy commodities. Moreover, this is only a first point to mark the fact that labour is not a commodity like others. So Marx’s analysis needs revision when he places such explanatory weight on the fact that it is a commodity like any other.

[I shall be posting further excerpts next week. For the full paper (PDF), ‘Marx’s economy and beyond‘, click through the link. See also ‘On working together‘.]

Here’s a guy, on the letters page of the Times, who has the right idea (£):

Sir, I was excited to read… that eating mackerel will add two years to my life, because I’m a collector of added years. I added ten years when I stopped smoking, two when I gave up white sugar, three when I began eating bran for breakfast, six when I began going to the gym.

Anthony Calder-Smith – for he it is – hopes these added years will run consecutively rather than concurrently. I have a different worry. My ten added years for giving up smoking way way back – when do I get them? Or have I already had them?