Ep. 360: Karl Marx on Economic Value (Part Two)

0:08 Mark: The Partially Examined Life we're on episode 360 part two discussing chapter one of Marx's Capital. We had laid out use value versus exchange value. The commodity. There Is real value is congealed labor, at least necessary congealed labor. According to whatever the social norms are. So that this chapter four has four sections in it. I think we're mostly done with number one.

0:34 Wes: Well, I think. Yeah, I think we can jump ahead because we discussed. We already discussed quite a bit of what he repeats. And by jumping ahead, I mean going to page 139, where we start to talk about the relative form of value versus the equivalent form. On page 138, which is what starts section 3, which is titled the value form or exchange value. He's going to say, ultimately, the task is to get the origin of money, to derive money from this exchangeability of commodities. And so he wants to start with this equation between two different commodities.

So we're thinking almost like barter. Ultimately, we're thinking in terms of exchangeability of commodities. Ultimately that will become money. But for now, we're going to think of a relationship between linen and coat. So maybe 20 yards of linen equals one coat. And just as a cautionary, he's not thinking of 20 yards of linen going into the coat. No coat being made out of 20. Could be 20 pounds of butter. Okay. So two different commodities which have nothing to do with each other and yet are being equated. And we know that that has. We know from what's come previously that equation must have something to do with socially necessary labor time.

1:54 Dylan: Yeah. And in fact, at the bottom of 139, after he said, you know, this section, he begins the analysis. The simple, isolated, or accidental form of value. In which you have 20 yards of linen equals one coat. Or 20 yards of linen is worth one coat. The whole mystery of the form of value lies hidden in this simple form. Our real difficulty, therefore, is to analyze it. This is what we were saying earlier. This is the whole problem.

2:20 Wes: So in this equation, the 20 yards of linen is the relative form of value. And the one coat is where money would normally be and ultimately will be. So it is confusing now because it's a coat. And sometimes he's going to switch it around so that the linear linen is in that other spot. But it's important to remember that these. These equations are asymmetrical. So what's on the left side is the relative form of value. What's on right is the quote, unquote, equivalent form of value. And the way it performs that function is unfortunately a complication.

Because it performs that function by way of its being a use value. What he's trying to do here is he's Trying to convey the fact, right. That we don't see labor time in commodities and this weird abstract conception of value that we do have. Right. Ultimately with money. Right. It has something to do with gold being glittery. It has something to do with an actual experience of, ooh, gold, ooh. In this example, he wants to say, in a way, that the use value of a different commodity can, in a way, at a psychological level, represent or be a metaphor for.

I think is the. Is the best way to understand it to be a signifier for the actual value of the 20 yards of linen, which, as we know, has a referent in socially necessary labor time. So I know that's confusing. Hopefully as we discuss it, it'll become a little more clear.

3:57 Mark: Well, the way you've been putting it, it sounds like instead of money, we should just use the labor hour. But because the labor, socially necessary labor time is an abstraction from all the different hours. And some of them are skilled and some of them are unskilled, and some.

4:12 Wes: It's not possible.

4:13 Mark: Right, right. We can't say unless you're doing like a labor exchange. I was going to ask you guys last time whether anybody's played around with that. I know when we're getting into our new work, the neo Marxist thing, one of the things that, now that I've had access to, that I've never taken advantage of is a labor exchange where you sort of sign up with people in the community, people on your list, whatever, and say, these are the skills I have. So I'm going to, you know, come over and teach you guitar for an hour, and you're going to come over and fit fix my sink for an hour. But I just. It never seemed worth it to me.

4:44 Wes: This. Yeah, I think there's a good Freakonomics episode on this or some podcast that I listen to about this, where there are online labor trading websites and no one's been able to get them to work for whatever reason. I can't remember why they. I mean, they're predictable problems, obviously. And I think communes, you know, prior to Marx, different communes have tried this sort of thing. And yeah, it's difficult because you're issuing little money certificates based on labor hours, and you have to figure out how they match up and, you know, how one form of labor matches to another. And then it's just like, well, why don't we just use money? Why don't we just simplify things and just use money?

5:22 Seth: But what's the money based on?

5:24 Mark: The money is based on what Wes was talking about this is the story

5:26 Wes: he's going to tell. Stuff issued by the well. So chapter, chapter by the United States government.

5:32 Seth: I didn't ask what money was. I asked what value does money have? What's the value value of money?

5:37 Wes: Well, we're going to get there. Well, I know that's what we're trying

5:40 Mark: to figure out, sort of, because chapter three is a whole history of like, why coins, why gold? How did we get to the point where a government can just say this piece of paper is worth this amount of gold or whatever, like. But that's not even part of this story. We don't care about exactly that. We just care about why we need something that is called money. Because everything the way you've described it, Wes, is sure, I can measure the value of bread in terms of chickens, but then how can I measure the. Well, I guess I could measure the value of chickens in terms of bread. Right. There needs to be something that we're just considering the yardstick as opposed to just always considering different commodities.

6:17 Wes: If we. And if we want to look at it historically, I listened to a few things about the history of, of money. And I think economists now believe that there were no really such things as barter economies. I mean, people might were using. They were either working on credit or they were using. So for instance, a commodity like a pelt, but it's still serving the function of money. It's a common denominator that's being used as if it's a currency. Bartering is too hard because it involves what it's called a coincidence of wants. It's just too hard for people to line.

I have 50 eggs and I need one hat. You know, like it's coincidence that, you know, one person would need the thing that the other person has. It doesn't work that way. So, you know, very early on in ancient societies, you have coins circulating and you know, you get paper pretty quickly as well, at least in ancient China, because coins are too difficult to carry around. So you go deposit them the bank and someone gives you a piece of paper and says, I'm holding your coins. You can give this to someone as if you were giving them coins and they can come to this little coat check, coin check and take them out when they want so.

7:21 Mark: Or come and rob the coat check and take all the coin.

7:24 Wes: Money is largely a matter of convenience, right. When we look at it historically. But what he's doing here is. Yeah, he's trying to get at, I would say, at a sociological and psychological level that's a large part of what this account is about. So gold itself has a certain psychological effect on us. He uses this word glittery over and over again when we look at gold. It's not just some arbitrary. Gold is convenient for a lot of reasons. It's, you know, it doesn't corrode and it can be cut up easily. There's lots of reasons of convenience and the scarcity.

Why? Why it can serve as a currency initially along although it no longer does today. We live in a with fiat money. There are lots of problems that come with tying the value of money to gold as well, because it could fluctuate. The value can fluctuate. But also there's a psychology to this where to express the value of one commodity over here on the left side, I need something that looks valuable subjectively. So in this case, it's not the glitter, glitteriness of gold, but it's the use value of the coat. So if coats were the thing were the currency of my society.

Right. It's much more intuitive than paper because I can say, oh, look at this, this thing can give warmth to someone. I can understand how 20 yards of linen would be worth this thing over here because it actually does have a worth inherently does. It actually does have a use value. So it's much, much more psychologically basic. And that's the starting point here.

8:59 Seth: Yeah, this is where I'm glad you made that point about the reality or unreality of a true barter economy. So we can go through conceptually the structure of this too in a slightly different way. Kind of do like a genealogy type thing. It's like, okay, one thing use value, two things exchange value. Then what if you have more than two things, 40 things that are somehow all equal. It makes it more clear that if you were trying to represent that in whatever 40 factorial combinations, whatever, they of equal exchange value without talking about another thing to which they're all equal. Like if you say one coat equals 20 yards of linen, okay, that's fine

9:45 Wes: if 20 yards of linen equals one coat. Because those are two very different things. The equations are not reversible clearly.

9:50 Seth: Example, I don't care. It's purely an example. When you're.

9:53 Wes: It's just going to be confusing if you switch it around.

9:55 Seth: If you're saying that 1x is equal

9:57 Wes: to 2y, it's not reversible. You cannot simply switch the positions in the equation. That's one of the big points here.

10:05 Seth: I'm saying that if you say that two, a definite quantity of two different commodities are equal. You can talk about that in a kind of practical way without representing a third thing, which is the value to which they're both equal. But as you multiply, if One of those two commodities becomes the common standard, so 1x is equal to 2y 4c 5a, 1b, and you start going on and on and on like that, then the only way you could, you can either represent that as 1×1, 2y, 1x3z, 1x1b, or you can say X is this abstract common value that all these other things have. That's the conceptual leap from we're talking about two things in relation to each other to an abstract third concept. That is, the value is a definite quantity of value that can be attributed to multiple, multiple, multiple, an infinite number of commodities.

11:10 Wes: It sounds like you're getting to the expanded form of value. This point where we take the left side of the equation and say, this could be equated to any number of different other commodities. I mean, that's way later in the argument.

11:24 Mark: I feel like this is the value. I'm not sure what. As I was discussing with Wes before we started out, part two, I stopped taking notes in section three here and skipped 15 pages ahead because, like, I had already listened to this, and I have the point, which is that point that Seth just made, I think is the point that follows directly on what Wes was saying. That, you know, you start by gauging one thing, just measuring one thing against another, but which one is going to be the yardstick? Well, let's just pick one to be the yardstick, and then that can be measured. And even if the value of that one thing, like gold, goes up or down, well, that's going to affect every other thing equally. So it doesn't really matter. Like their relations to each other are going to be. Still be consistent.

12:02 Wes: So let me repeat these points about the psychology here. So on page 141, in this relation, the coat counts as the form of existence, of value, as the material embodiment of value. For only as such is it the same as the linen. So again, we're not saying, phenomenologically, we're not saying that labor time comes into this. The use value expresses the exchange value. The use value of the coat expresses the exchange value of the linen. So on page one or going into one, page 142. So while we know commodities are congealed quantities of human labor, and this accounts for abstract value, this quote does not give them a form of value distinct from their Natural forms its value.

Character emerges through relation to a second commodity. I think this is a very subtle and interesting point. And it's going to inform everything that comes after this weird idea, right, that even after he's pooh poohed, use values, that they come back into this as a phenomenological expression of abstract value, even though its referent is labor time. So human labor is not itself value. As he says on page 142, the coat is the thing in which value is manifested. It becomes this tangible, natural form of value. So you can see, right, this is already the roots of fetishization.

We have to fetishize in this sense to find it, find value in something material, even though it's really something abstract, like human labor.

13:43 Seth: So there's a form of value that emerges when commodities come into relationship with each other, different commodities, that does not exist when you're just looking at the commodity itself in isolation.

13:54 Wes: Once you start talking about multiple commodity equivalents, you're getting into what he calls the expanded conception of value, which is on the way to money, right? It's not quite money yet.

14:04 Seth: Yeah, I'm not trying to put a name to it. I'm just saying this is why I'm trying to bring this back to Dylan's original question about where use value fits. And doesn't it all boil back down? And you know, what Marx is saying is you can totally understand use value of something simply by using and consuming it. But if you used and consumed it, it would make. You would have no sense of its value relative to any other commodity that only exists and actually only makes sense when you say, oh, this X commodity 5, whatever quantity X of commodity A is equal to quantity Y of commodity B.

That notion of value and exchange value is not inherent in the object. It doesn't even exist in the material structure or the use value of the object in the sense that you cannot abstract or infer from the isolated commodity what the exchange value for some other commodity might be. It's only when you actually do the trading and actually only in that very moment of exchange that the value exists. And that's what's interesting. As Wes was saying, it seems like there never really was a time where we had an economy that was 100% bartering. Like bartering is a conceptual move.

It's not really a practical move. Of course, people trade things for things. But.

15:29 Wes: Okay, I want to keep hammering home the point that this section is about, which is. So here's another one moving from 143 to 144. So the linen. He has the linen speak the language of commodities at some point. And it would tell us, if it could talk, that, hey, the labor in me is equal to the labor in the coat. That's why we're exchangeable. That's the language the linen speaks, but that's not what we hear. It does this only by expressing it as something different from its own material existence, its starchy body, which is to say, in the appearance of the coat.

So I don't want us to leap past this point in the argument, which is that exchangeability appears in this very weird way. It doesn't appear as equal labor times, even if that's what it is down deep. He calls this on 149A. Or, sorry, 144. Value gets its sublime objectivity in this way. This, to me, is the, like, the most valuable part of the whole argument.

16:34 Mark: So there's still a question of when you do find a standard that is going to. You're going to judge everything else by is, does that have value itself? So we could ask that of money, we could ask that of labor. And he wants to say, actually, labor does not have value because it is value, right? The thing that is providing the standard. It's like asking, is this meter stick a meter long? Well, if the meter stick is actually providing the standard, then. Well, by definition it is. So, like, it doesn't even make sense to say it, because when you say something has this value, it's supposed to be a synthetic quality.

It's not supposed to be just an analytic quality. You know, is God good? Well, if you think God is the source of all good, then the question is God good? Doesn't even make sense. God is, by definition, God creates the goodness of things. But if you think that even the meter stick. Well, the stick itself, maybe in weather it might shrink a little bit or extend a little bit. But it was the meter when it was established as the standard. So on that day, whenever that was, that's when the standard. So now actually the standard is abstract. And so we can say the meter stick is a meter long because it meets that abstract standard.

So, yeah, that's the question. Can we say that money is. Yeah. I mean, is there anything to make of that?

17:51 Seth: This is actually. I think this is the very interesting and philosophical part of this. So I was trying to make the point just a second ago that Marx is saying exchange value is. In a weird way, it's like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It doesn't exist until it happens. Until you Measure it. There's no exchange value until something actually gets exchanged in the sense that two things stand in a relationship. Okay, I get that if we're not comparing two commodities, then we don't have any notion of exchange value of those commodities. But what's really even more interesting is that he's Wes pointed out, the exchange values represented as an equivalency. Five coats equals 100 yards of linen. X, you know, B's equal Y.

18:35 Dylan: A's.

18:36 Seth: Or just, let's just say A equals B. It's an equivalency. But Marx says, weird, the equivalency is not symmetric. There's one term doing one kind of work and the second terms doing the other kind of work. One is the relative and one is the equivalency. It wouldn't make sense to say five coats is equal to five coats. That just doesn't make sense. Where one of these things has to be the establishment of what value is, so to speak, in this one particular instance of exchange representation. And the other thing is the thing that is being related to that value. Wow. Okay, so, right.

19:11 Wes: So say in section three, the coats in equivalent form.

19:15 Mark: Right.

19:16 Wes: The magnitude of its value of its own, the coat's own value ceases to be expressed quantitatively. And I think he thinks this confuses previous economists. So if you say 20L 20 yards of linen equals 1C, you may think that you just have this reversible symmetric equation where there's some underlying unit that explains their exchangeability. And at the level of labor, that's true. But at the level that he's talking about, it's not true. So. Because what the coat is doing is it's taking quantitative form of value on the left side and it's expressing it in a qualitative form, which is, again, quite profound.

So, yeah, as Seth pointed out, it can never express the magnitude of its own value. Right. You know, you could reverse the equation and say one coat equals 20 yards of linen. In which case, the role that the linen is playing now is as this physical experience, you know, object whose use value can be used as a metaphor for the exchange value of the coat.

20:21 Seth: Exactly.

20:22 Wes: Yeah.

20:23 Seth: Yeah. That's the conceptual move that's really important here, is that it's not an equivalency. This is not mathematics. The two sides are not equal. The second term is the term. And you're implying it's implicit in that if you say one coat equals 20 yards of linen, you're implying that you could say something like two chairs equals 20 yards of linen, something like that, that you're already working towards creating an abstract representation. Taking the concrete material item on one side of this equivalency, the term, and turning it into something abstract. And if you reverse them, 20 yards of linen equals one coat, that role switches to the coat.

21:05 Wes: The use value becomes the form of the appearance of its opposite value. That's on page 148 as well. He's going to make much of this contradiction, right? This contradiction is part of the dialectic that will drive us forward towards money.

21:23 Seth: Get your Hegel on.

21:24 Wes: So that's when you know. It's after this point, as Mark was pointing out, getting into page 149, that we can think about weight in a similar way.

21:34 Seth: So I love this.

21:36 Wes: Weight is not something tangible. A sugarloaf has weight, but it's not something tangible. And we have to express it by way of relation. So we can relate it to some iron, you know, standard unit of iron and iron. It's not that iron, right. Looks like weight or something like that. It's not the form of appearance of weight, as he puts it. It's symbolic. It's a metaphor for weight in its pure form in relation to the love. But only within that relation. Right. We don't look at iron outside of that relation, say, oh, look, there's weight. So in that sense, iron is playing this analogous role to the coat.

He understands that. There's a disanalogy too, here, by the way, which is that weight is natural property and value is not. So it's not quite the perfect analogy. Although it does point us to this weirdness of the concept of value, which is that it is, quote unquote on page 49, purely social. It's supernatural. So I think we are in the realm here of social construction as well, which makes it even more complicated.

22:40 Mark: Initially, when we had assigned ourselves this chapter, we were like, section 4. Fetishism and commodity is the essential one. You can sort of skim to get to that point, and then we sort of revise it. Well, you definitely have to understand section one, which we discussed at great length. I still does. Anybody besides Wes before? I'm happy to let you talk as much as you want about this, Wes, but does anybody besides Wes have substantial things they wanted to say about the second half of section three?

23:05 Seth: Here, give me a page range.

23:06 Mark: You're talking about, like one where. Where WES has stopped 149 through 163. When section four starts free to move

23:14 Wes: us, move us on. Okay. You know, if we want to get to fetishism.

23:17 Mark: Yeah.

23:17 Wes: If anyone wants to sort of advance the argument quickly towards the whole end. Yeah. Before fetishism, we could do that. Sure.

23:24 Seth: Well, there's. There were. I had a couple questions. He has a nice discussion of Aristotle here that's worth. Worth reading. I have a note here. You know, that this congealed, abstract human labor unit seems to be represented as physical. And I was wondering, like, what about in the structure that he's describing, you have people who own capital, you know, and you have laborers, the labors. All labor is physical labor. It seems like. Even though we know that that's not true. And so I did have a question. It's like, well, what would congealed knowledge work or white collar labor look like?

24:04 Mark: It's. Right. It's. It's a human being is there putting their. Physically putting their time in. And even we could even say remote work. You know, you're still sitting at a computer putting your time in. Whatever that's. He does later say, well, I understand some people charge by the piece and not by the hour. But still these are things, you know. Well, that's a complication that we ultimately. It's reducible to the hours.

24:27 Seth: It's just the language that I was struggling to find how to characterize forms of work that did not involve the expenditure of physical activity as something that would make sense in the system. I thought, I'm sure somebody has. But that was a struggle for me. So you're asking one part, and then there's the historicity. He talks about different forms of society.

24:49 Wes: My suggestion is that if we want to mint ourselves some money, if we want to get to money and then get to fetishism, we could just jump to the expanded form of value on page 154.

24:59 Seth: All right.

25:00 Wes: But Seth. Yeah. Unless you have other.

25:02 Seth: No, no, no. I really like this section and I think there's some nuggets in there. But rather than go through my notes and try to summarize it on the fly, why don't we just go.

25:10 Wes: So I think you guys. So really. 155 1. The expanded relative form of value. I think you have all pointed to this in one way or another. At this point we realize. Right. Even though the use value of the coat in a way expresses the value of the linen, we can equate the linen to a bunch of different things. It doesn't have to be a coat. We could say it's exchangeable with butter or with this or with that. And what that reveals is that the particular Use value is not actually interesting or it's a matter of indifference. So in other words, we didn't pick coats because warmth of coats is somehow particularly important to expressing the value of things. It doesn't matter what use value there is. There's nothing inherently essential about the warmth of coats in expressing value. Any sort of use could express value.

26:02 Mark: Can we boil everything down to orgasms? The number of orgasms, how many orgasms?

26:07 Wes: I was thinking, like, of a Buffalo wings as a currency where the deliciousness. I was thinking of all these different examples where you, you know, the fetishism could be in the deliciousness of the buffalo wings. So I look at a Mercedes and I think, ooh, that's really delicious. Even though I know it's not literally delicious, it's just metaphorically delicious. And that's the way I understand the value of the Mercedes. But anyway, so, yeah, you get this equation where you can express the value of linen towards in terms of all kinds of different commodities.

And then we get some defects in section three. And the defect is we kind of get this infinite series. So you never really. You might have the impulse to say, okay, I want to figure out what linen is equivalent to in terms of every other commodity in the world. And then that's. If I can sum up, if I can do every equivalency, then somehow I have completed my concept of the value of linen. The value is just equals a coat or this or that. And I go, or this should remind you of Kant and German idealism, by the way, this disjunctive series. But it's never complete.

And that's the problem. It's never complete because it could always be a new commodity.

27:16 Dylan: So I just wanted to point out on 156 where he's sort of summarizing the relationship between commodities as it becomes plain that it's not the exchange of commodities which regulates the magnitude of their values, but rather the reverse the magnitude of the value of commodities which regulates the proportion in which they exchange. And it seemed to me that was a key point. This is the opposite of supply and demand, right?

27:46 Wes: Yeah. This is the. It's restating the very controversial thesis, even though we know it doesn't look that way. That's what he should say. If we looked at the way things were actually working, it wouldn't look that way, but that's the way it somehow under. Underneath is outside of the distorting forces of capitalism.

28:03 Dylan: Yes. So he started out with, okay, there's a surface appearance about how commodities work. Let's Go and look at them. We've been through this derivation for a couple dozen pages, and now we've gotten to the point where we now know that it's not supply and demand underneath.

28:21 Wes: We get some money. When we kind of slip that equation where linen equals all the other commodities in the world at various proportions, we flip it and put all those commodities on the left, and then linen goes on the right and voila, linen is our money. Yeah, that's a very simplified way of putting all this. So this gives us the general. I think what he calls the general expression. That's after the general form of value,

28:51 Mark: the general relative form of value.

28:53 Wes: Oh, well, the C is the general form of value. And then we get different sub things.

28:59 Seth: The general form of value, on the other hand, can only arise as a joint contribution of the whole world of commodities. A commodity only acquires a general expression of its value if at the same time all other commodities express their values in the same equivalent. And every newly emergent commodity must follow suit. It thus becomes evident that because the objectivity of commodities as values is the. The purely social existence of these things, it can only express through the. Be expressed through the whole range of their social relations.

29:28 Dylan: And then we get the general form becomes the money form.

29:31 Seth: Right?

29:32 Wes: Yeah, because.

29:33 Dylan: So gold is like any other commodity except we end up picking it.

29:37 Wes: So it's sort of, in a way, socially sanctioned. I think this is where. Especially where we get to the social construction part. And if people listen to our episode on social construction, and especially I think the part on Searle, his very helpful book on social construction, where money is an example of something unlike other things that are not really socially constructed, as far as I'm concerned. Money definitely is because it's. It's a matter. It's money by way of human agreement. And that's what he's pointing to here. So there's a quote unquote, specific social function we give money.

We give gold in particular, not winning this social monopoly, the commodity that is the universal unit of exchange. But. Right. That's just like being a chess player and saying, hey, I'm going to play by this set of rules. We just say, yep, we're going to agree to play it by this set of rules. And that's how gold becomes the standard.

30:31 Dylan: And it.

30:32 Wes: Right. It doesn't have to be gold. There are historical reasons of convenience for it to be gold. And there are even better historical reasons of. For convenience for it to be not anything, just fiat money. Although I don't think Marx would like Me saying that. But yeah, gold confronts the other commodities as money only because it previously confronted them as a commodity. So he thinks that's very important. Doesn't like the idea of fiat. He thinks there's. He's said something important about the chosen instrument, money itself, having value, exchange value. Right. It could be put on the left side of the equation.

31:08 Seth: Right. So I want to tie this back in with something we said just at the beginning of this conversation. So this, conceptually, you can't get here without comprehending the totality of the world of commodities in exchange with each other and is sort of infinitely exchangeable. In other words, if you believe, if you don't, if there are commodities that can't be exchanged or if you haven't settled. I don't want to say that the only way to settle on a commodity that can represent this common set of exchange is to essentially adopt this system of commodity exchange.

You can't get to this notion of value without accepting that structure. But he, you know, this is not an abstract concept. I know he's trying to find. He's talking about. Trying to find common themes across other. But the commodity form of exchange is part of a specific, historically determined economic system. Right. So this is not theory in the abstract. He is very definitely trying to describe something specific to capitalism, specific to the historical period he was in, et cetera, et cetera. So we're highlighting the philosophical and conceptual moves that he's making.

But this is not speculative philosophy. Just wanted to point that out.

32:42 Mark: Right. The commodity is a something. You're saying money is socially constructed. Well, even the commodity products don't become commodities.

32:52 Seth: Right.

32:52 Mark: Everything with a use value is not a commodity if you make it for yourself. If you don't exchange it, it's not a commodity. If you make it in a family, it's not a commodity. It's only a commodity when the market is present.

33:02 Seth: Right.

33:03 Wes: Yeah. When you produce something with a view to being. A view to its being exchanged to being used by you.

33:12 Dylan: Yeah. And the social circumstances matter tremendously. In fact, they matter completely here. Right. You can just pick things that matter now as commodities that at other times never would have. Like oil. Oil didn't matter hardly at all as a commodity until machines were built.

33:37 Seth: Right.

33:37 Wes: It was only good for massages.

33:39 Dylan: Yeah, exactly.

33:40 Wes: Sorry.

33:40 Dylan: Yeah, yeah. Or. Or even more like oil.

33:45 Mark: Petroleum massage oil in the form of

33:49 Dylan: petroleum bath petroleum became valuable in the advent of. Particularly of like combustion engines and organic chemistry before that. It's not. It's just not worth anything.

34:01 Wes: So are we ready for fetishism?

34:03 Mark: Sure.

34:04 Wes: Anyone ever ready?

34:05 Dylan: You just keep coming back to this, Wes. You keep coming back. I'm sorry.

34:09 Seth: It's one of the great words in our language. I love that word.

34:13 Wes: I mean, what is a fetish for the word fetish?

34:18 Seth: Oh, my God, am I fetishizing fetish?

34:22 Mark: One of the things that keeps coming up just before we move into section four here, is just to what extent is he talking about the particular form of capitalism that we have now? So this commodity sounds. When you consume it and it is used up, you have to make more. But what about an object that is permanent and everybody can consume it just by looking at it? So I used my opening here. I was looking up. What am I supposed to say? Commoditized or commodified? And like this podcast, like, is this fundamentally different than. Because we have mechanisms like commercials, like subscriptions for getting money, whereas somebody producing exactly the same product that doesn't have those things?

Well, they are not commoditizing it, but it's distributed and it's consumed in exactly the same way. So what does that mean? Are we even talking? Can we talk about this podcast as a commodity? Because we're making money off it?

35:18 Wes: Yes, It's a service. There is an exchange service industry.

35:22 Seth: There is an exchange that happens. We produce it, it gets distributed. Somebody exchanges money and receives it, and

35:29 Wes: they don't get charged for five years because our system doesn't work. That's the way the exchange works.

35:36 Seth: But if you sit on a. The edge of a cliff and you watch the sunset, you're consuming, in some sense, you're consuming the experience of the sunset. But that's not a commodity because you're not exchanging anything for it.

35:50 Mark: Well, I bought a sunset pass. Was that. Well, should I not have done that? Some guy came to the door and like, you can see, you have to pay me $200 right now. And I bought this Brooklyn Bridge, too.

36:00 Seth: Yeah. Well, I'm just wondering if somebody consumes the podcast without. But they don't have to exchange anything for it other than their time. Is it a commodity? I guess. I mean, because. Well, I don't know. You know, it's incomplete, commoditized. He talked about air and water and all this stuff. There are things that exist that we consume to say it's commodity.

36:21 Wes: Right.

36:22 Seth: And there's labor.

36:23 Wes: It has an exchange value. Yeah.

36:25 Dylan: So water now is a commodity in the way air isn't yet. But you can imagine air becoming a commodity, too.

36:32 Wes: Well, to the extent that water is Produced or has to be cleaned or.

36:36 Seth: I mean, air has become a commodity in Southern California.

36:40 Wes: Well, it's not a product of labor, though.

36:42 Seth: Well, no, you have to buy a machine to clean the air, buy masks to filter the air to create breathable.

36:47 Dylan: Same thing with water. Right. You have to get water from here to there. Right. You know, to be able to use the water. Right.

36:53 Wes: You know, good point.

36:54 Mark: Let's all break into folk songs. Right.

36:56 Wes: Border cases. Yeah. Well, I suggest we don't try to force our way through fetishism.

37:03 Mark: Let's at least open the door on fetishism. And then we'll have a second episode to talk more about that and machines and everything else that we want to talk about. Because I think we've already laid out the main point, which is just that he's given this deep analysis, he says, of a commodity in terms of labor, but we fetishize, or at least political economy. The economist, he's reacting to fetishize the exchange of commodities as being the basic thing, and overlook this deep structure.

37:33 Wes: So that's your summary.

37:36 Mark: That was my summary of the section. Well, this is the problem I'm running into throughout this is. I felt like. And again, I've. I've sort of taken in many, many of the chapters, like, almost all the way through Capital Volume 1 at this point, in audio form. And I feel, okay. He has some detailed discussions, something. But I can basically boil the given chapter down to about a paragraph of material. And it seems like that gets. That's what philosophically I'm getting out of it. It seems like you are finding much more on a step by step, page by page basis that you feel like is worthy of dwelling.

38:08 Seth: Yeah, I mean, I'm totally with West.

38:11 Wes: Yeah. It might just be my obtuseness in a way, but, like, I. And I'm serious. But I can't tell if it's me being confused or if it's something inherently interesting. But. Yeah, so let's look at the first right quote. As soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. Ooh. See, that by itself just gets me excited.

38:35 Seth: Where are you?

38:36 Wes: Because we're getting into something.

38:38 Dylan: Bottom of 163. Bottom 163. It's the last complete sentence.

38:42 Seth: Okay, go ahead.

38:43 Wes: Fact here he's getting into, like, a sociology and a psychology more obviously, more directly, is just by itself more exciting to me. But so commodities have a mystical character. It's not, he says, because of what determines their value, which is to say labor or the duration of labor.

39:01 Dylan: Or the use value.

39:02 Wes: Yeah, or the use value. So where does it come from? What is this enigmatic character and where does it come from? And he's ultimately going to say in a way it comes from social relationships between producers. So that the, in other words, relationships between human beings get replaced by relationships between things. And in a way, we almost understand commodities as if they were social entities relating to each other, related in a social way. And as if we were the things. This will kind of leads into fragment on machines, but as if we were the things relating to each other as things.

We get this weird. The commodity produces this weird reversal where there's this mysterious appearance of commodities having social relationships. So the commodity quote reflects the social characteristic of men's own labor as the socio. Natural properties of these things. Yeah, I still, I find that confusing. It gets a little bit clear towards the end, but yeah, so we lose

40:14 Mark: track of the fact that this is fundamentally a social relation. And this is going to have reverberations throughout his whole. Right. The whole point of this is to make some sort of ethical argument that what seems like a very natural. Oh, we're in the system, you, you workers are here of your own free will and we're engaging in this mutual exchange. Exchange. And this is all very natural that actually this is not natural that we are, you know, we're overlooking the fact that, you know, we're just, oh, this is just the way the market is working.

I'm not oppressing you, I'm not hurting. So in other words, I could have all the goodwill toward my workers if I'm a capitalist. But if the way that, the fundamental social way that I'm dealing with them is that I'm essentially stealing a lot of each of their days because they sort of recoup their value in working, let's say four hours a day for me and you know, they're earning all the money that I'm paying for them. And that's enough to, you know, allow them to reproduce and to support themselves. But then the rest of the day, which, you know, on his time is not another eight hours, it's another.

Sorry, another four hours. It's another eight hours or more. Because they're talking about 12 hour, 15 hour work days here. That, yeah. That you capitalists think you're, you're being, you know, you're going to Sunday school, you have goodwill toward men, but in your business relations, because we have overlooked the fact that these are social relations and we think that they're just object versus object, you know, the impersonal market. You are actually directly harming a lot of people.

41:41 Seth: Yeah, I would kind of make it even kind of more structural than that. Let me tie it back to what we talked about in the last episode on the Grundrisse. I mean, he's, he's trying to make, in a certain sense the point that fetishization here is the equivalent to what we've described many times in previous episodes as reification. It's like you've reified the commodity and then you think that that's this abstract fundamental grounding starting point for all this stuff. But in reality, the commodity arises as a thing only on the basis of a complex set of human needs and human relationships that involve production of the commodity.

And you're ignoring all that stuff. It's like you can't just talk about an LOL doll as if it's just a toy. No, an LOL doll is the product of a corporation, you know, trying to satisfy a need and consume natural resources in order to be able to generate a profit. I mean, it's like there's a whole web and it's. When you buy an LOL doll, you are indirectly in relationship with the labor that produced it. The labor that produced it is part of that commodity. It's part of its value.

43:00 Dylan: Yeah, but isn't this the. This is the mystery, right? And I agree with that. He's going to. He's making ultimately an ethical argument about the amount of labor that's involved, that goes into a commodity as being part of that. And that there is embodied in that social relation, ethical relationships. And that seems like it's worth being attentive to. But the mystery still remains. And to me, you see it most the further away you get from the cascade of events that generated the commodity as something that required labor, human labor, in order to create it, but which it becomes more like a tree where it just ends up being stuff in the world that now, depending upon what use you have for it, you can harvest it as now other found things.

And that happens with commodities. That happens with stuff in the world all the time. And it happens with stuff in the world in our universe, I mean, in our like sort of time time. But you see, in most like, it becomes most clear when I think of things like post apocalyptic stories where you're, you know, you're not all of a sudden scavenging the world. Right. There's no capability to produce any of those things, you know, anymore. It's just finding them. They're all now like gold. There's a finite amount of it in the world. Or it's like coal.

There's a finite amount of it. And you have to go. Just harvest it. And then it becomes raw material for new activity. And I think that's the mystery, Right. Is when stuff is in that gets to that state, you realize it doesn't matter how much human labor went into it in terms of its value to you. It matters not a whit.

44:52 Wes: I think in a way, he's talking about alienation, even though he doesn't use that word. So he thinks the exchangeability of commodities is a metaphor. It's a metaphor for a certain type of relationship between human beings. And it's a relationship in which all types of labor are equal.

45:14 Dylan: Yes.

45:15 Wes: By equating. So this is on page 166, I think by equating products and exchange values, basically, we unconsciously equate kinds of labor. So every product of labor, he says, is a social hieroglyphic. And the message is, is it doesn't matter what kind of labor produced me. All labor is right just for exchange. It's just about, yes, getting the money that I need to subsist. This is really a psychological and social observation about labor. The nature of labor changing for us because we no longer see it as something inherently worthwhile. For instance, or for Robinson Crusoe, like, I need to make this thing to. You know, I need to make the spear that I'm going to use, the hunt, and I need to hunt to feed myself. That sort of direct connection between labor and what we're doing it for. Right.

46:12 Dylan: Yep.

46:12 Wes: And use value that disappears. And that disconnection, I think he thinks, represents alienation from labor. And I think that's the kind of mysterious social quality that commodities take on. In a way, they are a picture of alienation.

46:33 Dylan: Yes. I think we should keep talking about this and move to the next time and move to the machines. Because one, as of. I would like to also talk about the way in our language that we have about valuing just work. You know, there's. We talk about, well, you didn't do that much work. Right. And, you know, like, we have a whole nother language about a whole parallel language where it's not the commodity, but we're talking about how much work was involved and how we're valuing that.

47:04 Wes: And he gives us a little picture of communism here at the end. So I do think, yeah, next time we should do it, finish up the section. Because it's one of the few places where we get Marx's like, positive vision, even though it's just, just a glimpse of what a different way of doing things would be.

47:18 Mark: Well, and it comes down to some of what, right, the criticism of the, the capitalists is that they don't work enough, which is, you know, strange given the way that, oh, we, you know, Elon Musk deserves all the money. Look how much he does. Look how hard he works, look how he barely sleeps. But that's not Marx's picture is, yes, you did some work to initially get things off the ground, and yes, you do some work supervising, but does that give you the right to have basically the unpaid labor of everybody that works onto you, you know, after their first four hours, that that's all you know.

So then there's a lot of arguing with, with bourgeois economists of his time over when does profit start? That there were real people that were arguing in recent history for him for if we let workers work less than 20 hours a day, we're not making any profit. All of our profit comes from the 19th to 20th hour. And so we absolutely need 20 hours. You know, it was, I don't think it was that. I'm not giving the right number, but it was something equally absurd to that. Yeah, I think we definitely can use one more and plus a nightcap perhaps to finish us off here before we move on to some other things.

We do have some other topics in the hopper, but yeah, this is what we got for right now. Thanks everybody for listening. Please feel free to reach us out to us pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com you can comment a blog post on the episode on the website, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Good night, everybody.

48:48 Dylan: Good night.

48:49 Seth: Good night.

48:50 Wes: Good night.