Abstract
What is the value of labor? If labor is as contestable as we have already indicated, then value is no less disputed. Within Marxist critiques of capitalism, the labor theory of value attempts to show how the socially necessary time of the worker is embedded by workers in the commodity. The value of the workers’ labor power is the market rate of that power as a commodity. This division of value between time and power is central to how labor’s value for capital is understood. Labor power is a specific capacity for producing use value that is commodified at the moment it is sold. The labor theory of value, however, which pre-exists Marx in the thinking of Adam Smith and David Ricardo for instance (from whom he rearticulates the concept) concerns the degree to which social production and reproduction constitutes the value of labor time in the commodity. In contrast to classical political economy, Marx argues that labor is value, a measure over time of how a socio-economic formation organizes the conditions of socialization in general.
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Notes
- 1.
The literature on these matters is immense and I will not attempt to summarize it here. The labor theory of value, for instance, can be discerned all the way back to Aristotle. In the modern period, the differences between Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx on the question have become a genre of political economy in itself. In addition to the work of these three on the subject, the following have been pertinent to my reading: David Harvey, Limits to Capital. New York: Verso, 2006 (Harvey 2006); George Henderson, Value in Marx. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013 (Henderson 2013); and Diane Elson, Ed., Value: The Representation of Labor in Capitalism. New York: Verso, 1998 (Elson 1998). For more on labor as always already an abstraction in value critique, see the extraordinary work of the Wertkritik project, Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown, Eds., Marxism and the Critique of Value. Chicago: MCM’, 2014 (Larsen et al. 2014). While not focused on the labor theory of value per se, Gayatri Spivak’s intervention in such debates remains for me a provocative rejoinder. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value,” Diacritics 15(4) (Winter 1984): 73–93 (Spivak 1984).
- 2.
See, for instance, Richard D. Wolff, Bruce B. Roberts and Antonio Callari, “Marx’s (not Ricardo’s) ‘Transformation Problem’: A Radical Reconceptualization,” History of Political Economy 14(4) (1982): 564–582 (Wolff et al. 1982).
- 3.
See Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014 (Piketty 2014). It is hard to exaggerate the event horizon of this book, much of it driven by a perception it provides statistical proof about how inequality is produced and therefore provides fiscal remedies in that regard. Like many brilliant books, it is more referenced than read. Here I am interested in its challenge for understanding value between the economic and the aesthetic.
- 4.
See, for instance, Robert Kurz’s contributions to Larsen et al., above.
- 5.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994: 10 (Hardt and Negri 1994).
- 6.
See Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Verso, 2009 (Althusser and Balibar [1970] 1998). I address this reading practice in Peter Hitchcock, “Defining the World” in Literary Materialisms, Mathias Nilges and Emilio Sauri (eds.) New York: Palgrave, 2013: 125–144 (Hitchcock 2013). A new edition, Reading Capital: The Complete Edition. New York: Verso, 2016, restores essays by Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancière from the original French version, a non-said in translation of fifty years.
- 7.
The reference here is to Fredric Jameson’s ardent polemic, Signatures of the Visible. New York: Verso, 2007. Jameson’s essays are on the subject of an ontology of the visible, on the saturated visuality of the present. In part, the visual mediates both reification (rendering social relations as things) and the division of labor, where we began in “inquiry.” With all the “elaborated codes” Jameson addresses in the book, the “elabore” of labor remains generally under-theorized in terms of the visual, except around the commodification of labor in general. This signature of labor’s invisibility will return later in the current volume.
- 8.
See Andre Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class. London: Pluto, 2001 (Gorz 2001); Antonio Negri, Goodbye, Mr. Socialism. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008 (Negri 2008); Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 (Aronowitz and DiFazio); Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work. New York: Putnam, 1996 (Rifkin 1996). Each one of these represents different genres within the study of class, politics, and technology but together are also symptoms of a certain invisibility where labor codes are invoked.
- 9.
This is the basic argument of Part One of Marx’s Capital (Volume One), but for further elaboration, see also, for instance, Harvey’s Limits and his A Companion to Marx’s Capital. New York: Verso, 2010 (Harvey 2010).
- 10.
While the basic argument of Harvey’s Limits to Capital was composed in the 1970s, its prognosis remains remarkably prescient around these themes.
- 11.
See, for instance, Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx. Trans. Chris Turner. New York: Verso, 2014 (Balibar 2014). Balibar is careful, of course, not to present Marx as a philosopher. To be fair to Piketty he does peruse philosophical texts (he approves of Rancière, for instance), although is characteristically suspicious of Marxism in that regard: “When one reads philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, and Alain Badiou on their Marxist and/or communist commitments, one sometimes has the impression that questions of capital and class inequality are of only moderate interest to them and serve mainly as a pretext for jousts of a different nature entirely” (655). Atteint!
- 12.
This is the subtitle to Henderson’s aforementioned book on value.
- 13.
See Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production. Trans. Geoffrey Wall. New York: Routledge, 2006 (Macherey 2006). The French text was originally published in the moment of “reading capital,” a project in which Macherey was a leading participant.
- 14.
In addition to Macherey’s work, see, for instance, Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983 (Lukacs 1983); and, N.N. Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989 (Feltes 1989).
- 15.
I tend to differentiate the proletariat and working-class in this way: the former connects a logic of relation vis-à-vis capital’s need for labor—to borrow from Hastings-King, capital is always “looking for the proletariat”; the latter concerns forms of social division and identity such a relation actually produces. At this level, class consciousness is both a realization of class identity and a coming to terms with the substance of the proletariat for the reproduction of socio-economic relations. At the moment class becomes proletarian, a specific historical mission is conjoined.
- 16.
In addition to the work of Althusser already mentioned, see Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx. Trans. Harry Cleaver. New York: Autonomedia, 1992 (Negri 1992); each work by Zizek is hardly a variation on this theme—one could just as well make a case around Hegel and quantum physics but see, Revolution at the Gates. New York: Verso, 2004 (Zizek 2004); and Georges Caffentzis, In Letters of Blood and Fire. Oakland: PM Press, 2013 (Caffentzis 2013).
- 17.
Here Caffentzis problematizes the metric of subtraction itself in his Negrian reading. See, “Immeasurable Value? An Essay on Marx’s Legacy” in Reading Negri, Pierre Lamarche, Max Rosenkrantz and David Sherman (eds.) Chicago: Carus, 2011: 101–126 (Caffentzis 2011). See also, Bruce Roberts, “The Visible and the Measurable” in Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory, Antonio Callari and David Ruccio (eds.) Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996: 193–211 (Roberts 1996).
- 18.
The case studies in this project lean heavily on the worker in her representation and confirm both the compulsiveness of the assumption, “they must be represented,” and a displaced responsibility in the production of such representation. The paradox is that once one subtracts the worker from representing labor as relation the notion “the world is labor” (Hardt and Negri) is true. The dialectic between all the stories are about labor and the quandary of representing workers (who embody labor but do not represent it as relation) is a challenge not just to aesthetic history but to a politics of transformation. How can a requisite consciousness be produced if labor is not figured as workers? Surely the narration of labor minus workers is a capitalist fantasy? Indeed, it is against this desire the possibility of representation as intervention is maintained. From this perspective, the figure of the worker is the “labor trouble” of the “world is capital.” This is another part of the explanation for “worker of the world(s).” The idea is to make the worker more than the world that is capital and less than one that is always already labor as relation. The gesture toward a singularity of “worker” in a plurality of “worlds” indicates the vexed field of representational aesthetics in this regard.
- 19.
Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital. New York: Verso, 2013 (Jameson 2013).
- 20.
See Hitchcock, “Defining the World,” 125–144.
- 21.
Karl Marx, Capital Volume One. This appears in the first chapter on the Commodity.
- 22.
See Marx, Capital. See above David Harvey, A Companion to Capital, and Jameson, Representing Capital.
- 23.
This is a difficult point since I contend “not working” extends beyond pure unemployment to living outside work. Cultural practices around representing workers focus much more on life beyond the workplace than on the worker working. The absenting of work itself is part of the reification of labor as relation.
- 24.
See Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000 (Lukacs 2000). This text occupies a central role in the emergence of New Left Marxism so its articulation of the proletariat is particularly pertinent. See also Lukacs’ late and incomplete work, “Toward the Ontology of Social Being,” especially the third volume, meant to begin the second part of the project on “The Most Important Problems” titled Labor. Trans. David Fernbach. London: Merlin Press, 1980 (Lukacs 1980). Not surprisingly, the latter begins with a notion of labor as a form of social abstraction rather than the worker as subject. I have also tried to make this distinction around the question of ontology.
- 25.
See Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism. New York: Verso, 2013 (Jameson 2013).
- 26.
Another huge topic that I must bracket on this occasion, but that I have broached elsewhere. See the special issue of Mediations 25(1) (2011) that I helped to assemble with Sean Grattan. Jameson argues that affect should be more deeply articulated with the emergence of realism where feelings elude language and emotions are named. Could this antinomy in affect extend to labor, where labor is felt but attitudes to work are described? Here the difference between form and content is the logic of that between the value of labor and its reification in the commodity.
- 27.
See Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Del Ray, 1996 (originally published in 1968) (Dick 1996). The phrase Dick uses is “flattening of affect” which is another symptom for the instability of reality, like the reification of labor itself.
- 28.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1981 (Jameson 1981).
- 29.
See, for instance, H. Gustav Klaus, The Literature of Labor. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984 (Kalus 1984); Janet Zandy, Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004 (Zandy 2004); Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993 (Foley 1993); Paula Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991 (Rabinowitz 1991); Ian Haywood, Working-Class Fiction: From Chartism to Trainspotting. London: Northcote, 1997 (Haywood 1997); and John Kirk, Twentieth Century Writing and the British Working Class. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003 (Kirk 2003). The place of theory across such diverse texts is hardly uniform but generally they problematize class in a different key than that which confronts the troubled nexus of labor as relation with realism.
- 30.
This is not a small topic for Jameson because it is part of the dialectical claims for a Marxist reading of fiction. See, for instance, Jameson’s introduction to Lukacs on the historical novel noted above.
- 31.
The key text here would be Alain Badiou, Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Bloomsbury, 2013 (Badiou 2013). While a distinction between the being of labor and the event of the worker would not hold within Badiou’s terms, the historical possibility of the Event remains provocative regarding the absence/presence of labor. But see also, Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History. Trans. Gregory Elliott. New York: Verso, 2012 (Badiou 2012).
- 32.
The novel in question is Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety. London: Picador, 2006 (Mantel 2006). It is a novel, not coincidentally, about the French Revolution of 1789, and one replete with micronarratives of fictiveness in the event itself.
- 33.
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas. New York: Random House, 2004 (Mitchell 2004).
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Hitchcock, P. (2017). On the Cultural Representation of Labor (Value). In: Labor in Culture, Or, Worker of the World(s). Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45399-6_3
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