Value What is Value Section 1. Chapter 1. From the latin Valere: To be strong. To be well.

. To be of value In the first section of capital value in understood as a quality related to commodities. A capitalist society is a society whose wealth is made manifest in the 'vast accumulation of commodities.' Value / Capitalism and the social reciprocally inform each other. Exchange Value emerges as property within the act of the exchange of two commodities The fact of being a commodity is not an inherent trait of an object itself, rather it is part of social relation. As Michael Heinrich has put it: 'That a chair is a commodity is not a characteristic of the chair as a thing, but of the society in which that society exists.' A commodity has both a use-value and an exchange value. The use value is related to its material characteristics, the exchange value to its social character as commodity. The value of a particular commodity is dependent upon the socially necessary labour time that has gone into its production. This labour must be understood in two different ways. (Concrete and Abstract) Marx describes concrete labour as the labour of an individual who makes a particular product. E.g. a carpenter or a chef. Exchange value however is not determined by concrete labour, but by abstract labour. In order for two commodities to be exchangeable the labours which have produced must be qualitatively the same, that is it must be able to held together in a thought or an expression. Value is a social relation, it is not congealed within a commodity and it frequently proves not to be there at all, or at least to be unstable. Goods which prove to not be exchangeable after-all are more often than not thrown out rather than kept for a more suitable moment in circulation: Marx describes socially necessary labour time as: the labour time required to produce any use value under the conditions normal for a given society and within the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society.' (Capital I) (There is no historical transition from concrete to abstract labour ALL labour under capital is concrete in that it goes into the production of specific use-values. It is abstract only in the social relation of exchange.) As such, the determination of exchange value alongside SNLT is a relationship which abstracts from the histories of the individuals who made the products being exchanged and of the social relations which inform them. In the moment of exchange 'all seems eternal now.' What is Value for Capital? Capital is described as self-valorising value. That is, it is value which is used in order to generate more value. Money becomes capital when it is advanced rather than spent. Typically, within the process of production, this is achieved through the advancement of capital into two areas fixed (or constant) and variable capitals. Fixed capital is capital used to create things / it is a form fixed value which transfers its value into the value of the commodities produced. Variable capital is that aspect

of the production process which is employed in order to create surplus value (the absolute and only end of productive labour in capitalist society.) The M' in the M. It is....people. Value for capital then is always in the process of generating more value, in order to this capital changes form (variable, fixed, commodity, money) but always with the same aim. The objects which value generates are necessarily smoothed out and understood as capital either variable, fixed, money or commodity etc. It is important to note that accumulation takes place when commodity capital is transferred back into money capital / i.e. money that can then be reinvested. Value as Social Synthesis or living UNDER value. It is common to read of social relations as somehow under the value form. But what does this mean, and how is it lived? Most commonly this term is used via the term real subsumption which Marx uses to describe the relation of capital to labour in terms of the process of valorisation. In the 'results of the immediate process of production' the appendix's to capital volume 1, we read that real subsumption occurs within the LABOUR PROCESS when every aspect of that process is tailored towards the realisation of capitalist surplus value: ' As such it stands in distinction to formal subsumption, a process where 'Before the process of production they (capital and labour) confront one another as commodity owners and have only a money relationship together within the process of production......) Within the condition of real subsumption one speaks of the presence of the realisation of value in every aspect of the labour process, as if often argued it no longer makes any sense to speak of a democratisation or re-organisation of labour as a revolutionary measure. There is no such thing as a communist call-centre. At the same this would seem to raise the question as to how much one can speak of the primacy of use value over exchange value in terms of a revolutionary measure. (Question for after.) i.e. how the liberation of use from exchange mean anything when the use value is entirely determined by the valorisation of capital: (but is there a use-value in the enjoyment of destruction?) .... Theodor Adorno, in a piece dealing with the concept of society in the 50s gave somewhat more apocalyptic sheen to a similar thought: 'The form of the total system [society] requires everyone to respect the law of exchange unless they want to be destroyed....' It is perhaps an inane observation were it not for its necessary frequency, to say that one cannot live outside of relations of value in a society in which these relations are dominant. This statement is true in the most materialist sense, and we all know this. What is perhaps more interesting is to take this forceful declaration alongside Adorno's other observation regarding the social machine, that its forces only ever become apparent in their objectivity when they hurt. To retreat slightly one may consider the idea of social synthesis. Alfred Sohn Rethel described this in the following way: 'The network of relations by which society forms a coherent whole...the multiplicity of links operating between men according to the division of labour...In societies based on commodity production the social synthesis is centred on the functions of money as the 'universal equivalent.' In the determinations of value, money functions as a universal equivalent precisely in its ability to express the value of any other commodities which it comes in contact with. This equivalence

follows the line, according to Sohn-Rethel, of Kantian apperception. This salvage job on bourgeois self-hood is Kant's response to Hume's assertion that no self hood can be found within the milieu of sense impressions and disconnected memories that constitute his life. Experience would be impossible, were these experiences not capable of being predicated by the phrase 'I think.' This necessary adjunct is, at the end of the 18 th century, the last remaining bastion of the bourgeois self. According to Sohn-Rethel, the construction of the Kantian object is such that it mirrors completely the ontologically abstract, ideal, form of the commodity. In the act of judgement, objects are subsumed under concepts in consciousness a series of datum is subsumed under the concept 'cup' and as such it is comprehensible. This involves a necessary mental abstraction. This abstraction is mirrored in the 'real' abstraction of the commodity exchange, whre material circumstances are ignored in favour of exchange value, and of the realisation of surplus value inherent in a product (or service.) Thus the accumulation of commodities is based upon capital's apperception of 'I can exchange.' Not capital not valorisable - not recognised. This abstraction must be able to be clean and fluid. No negativity, no emergence of the suffering left out of the process abstraction: none of the concrete. (this is not to say that this concrete is congealed in commodities as suffering precisely not / from the standpoint of capital / which is the stand point of value / it is not.) The value form an handle any activity as long as it is meaningless, as long as it is reducible to the tautologies of life under capital. (Charlie Simpson playing a show in Siberia / Vice Magazine.) As such one imagines a bourgeois consciousness whose perception is dictated by the abstraction of the commodity form at the same time the subject herself is formed as an object by the categories of capital End Notes make a similar point when they claim that capital both produces the value and the worker as wage labourer / neither is conceivable without the other. .. To exist under the apperception of capital is find to find oneself necessarily re-integrated, via abstraction or translation, into a system devoted to continued valorisation. It is to occupy a passivity Kafkaesque dimensions, in which the subject must always have had lies told about her. Value in Crisis According to Marx, usually, value covers its own tracks. The worker produces more value within the production process than they are paid for (traditionally as Federci and Delacosta so evidently demonstrate this labour is backed up by the unwaged labour of the house-wife / the partner / the care-worker) In the ideal situation everything is covered by value, and value covers everything. The same, of course this can be said for the innane chatter of the bourgeois historian / journalist / politicain. It is common to read of literature which speaks of the integration of the proletariat within the system of exchange. The value form itself, and the accumulation of surplus value relies on the abstraction of the concrete, to be unable to abstract is to be unable to accumulate and as such the integration is a much the integration of the material object into timeless / unchanging form of the commodity. Peter Linebaugh can, demonstrate how in the 18 th century with the increased atlantic circulation of goods comes the necessary movements against 'tapping the admiral', a capital offence, consisting of stealing rum from barrels destined for private buyers. The synthesis of object as commodity (a commodity which in its ideal form exists outside of its material contingency) has its equivalence in the material world with the social synthesis of subject as labour / labour in potentia /

or as dead. The removal of non-identity from both is essential. (Frank Wilderson's work on Black and Native American grammer's of suffering is good place to start thinking this.) A crisis of value is as such, a crisis in the apperception of capital. Objects, or bonds, or houses, or people, which were previously thought to hold value prove to be useless for the continued process valorisation. Commodity capital can no longer be turned into money capital, the metamorphose stops and the world no longer makes sense according to its schema. As such, it is thrown out (capital can and does handle well-enough that which is completely outside of it) In a quote from the Grundrisse. already mentioned by Rose Anne and Svenja, capital is described as a 'moving contradiction.' The contradiction is that, through the necessary innovations in production, the input of 'living' labour is kept to a minimum in order to maximise returns whilst at the same this value is measured according to quantity of labour involved. I would seek to end by drawing attention to the fact that (spuriously or wrongly?) this 'moving' contradiction is moving in a peculiar way. It moves according to the need to maintain the relation between labour and capital the relation of valorisation and of apperception under value. As such it moves in order to maintain an a-historical. This stasis is of course the manifestation of a profound asymmetry but it one which constitutes subjective positions within this apperception. As such, Wilderson states that the smooth running of things for capital is literally the state of emergency for a Native American the asymmetry here is both necessary and fatal. Benjamin remarked in 1921 that 'we cannot close the net in which we are trapped.' Fortunately, perhaps, as we witness everyday, neither can capitalism. Any subsumption / real or otherwise leaves a residue / perhaps simply a wrinkle but enough to be necessarily forced back or kept out / to live under value is to live the reality of this abstraction. In the modern social synthesis the needs of value as measure of wealth measure themselves against the needs of value of social synthesis; as the exclusion of everything which cannot be valorised (the deathly negativity and abject misery of life itself under capital / value.) A crisis of one is an intensification of the other.