Goodreads listing here: goodreads.com/book/show/438628…

A vital read for anyone interested in the inner workings of capitalism's most fundamental institution.

This has immediately become one of the best books I've ever read. If you want a systematic takedown of the Ricardian labour theory of value, you will not find a better text.

Bailey is ferocious and utterly uncompromising in his immanent critique. At first he simply shows the flawed logic used by Ricardo, Mill et al. when progressing from their theory of value to even the most minimally fleshed-out examples, but later in the book he goes ham ripping the LTV's basic premises to shreds.

He does all of this with precise and taut chains of argument that are a joy to read; and he peppers them with understated yet devastating zingers. I can't count the number of times I said "hey [partner name], listen to this...!"

Bailey, like Marx, takes seriously the importance of the ontology of value. He understands that the form of production and exchange have huge ramifications for society as a whole. And while Marx is definitely more sociological, Bailey lays vital groundwork for effectively doing this kind of sociological analysis

Given that I'm a Marxist and that I read this book to further my knowledge of the value-form, I'm going to start with Marx and work from there.

So, some of you may also know that Marx explicitly critiques Bailey's book in his 1861-1863 manuscripts, but unfortunately Marx's criticism of this is lacking.

And while I love chapter 1 of Capital as much as any Wertform nerd, Marx definitely hung on to the LTV a bit too hard by virtue of his "third thing" argument.

Marx's (very angry) critique of Bailey mostly reduces to this "third thing" position: he believes that in order for commodities to be commensurable (ie, able to be be exchanged for one another on a quantitative basis), they must have some substance in common, which Marx terms abstract labour. Likewise, Marx believes (at least in the manuscripts) that each commodity as such only has one value, which can then be expressed in some quantity of another commodity.

So Marx's model looks something like this:

Abstract Labour -> Value -> Expression of Value

There are some problems with this model, however. First, like utility in neoclassicism, abstract labour is completely unmeasurable, and it can be inferred only in retrospect.

Second, this model explicitly does not handle other subjects of exchange that use the value form but are not products of labour (land being the obvious example, something Marx only gets around to later and unsuccessfully, c.f. the transformation problem debate).

The problem is that if there are things that use the value form but don't have value, then price and value are two different phenomena, of which price is a mere surface expression. This then creates the transformation problem and the questions of whether or not capitalists are evolutionarily pressured to maximise value or price, and so on. It becomes a huge mess that at best requires extensive exegetical work to make functional.

Bailey on the other hand dispenses with all this in one fell swoop, by showing that value is inherently relational and nothing but relational.

In other words, something may have use, completely outside of exchange or comparison: bread is food, iron can be used to make tools. But we do not call this value, typically. We would say "what is the use of iron," but not "what is the value of iron," for this purpose.

"The value of iron" inherently implies comparison and the choice between alternatives: do I want X more than Y?
And so it is impossible to express the value of a thing except through some other thing. And this is true even prior to the mode of production: this is a deeply, fundamentally human process, and is effectively just the process of making any decision between alternatives. If we ask someone "what do you value in a partner?," for example, what it really means is something like "what traits do you select for?."

So when Marx (or Ricardo, or Heinrich) say that a commodity has both a real AND nominal price, or is "trading above it's value," or the like, what can that possibly mean? What would it mean for a thing to have a value as a property inherent in itself prior to any act of exchange?

To be clear someone can list anything for any price at all: I could list my boots on eBay for ten million pounds of I so desire, but no one will buy them. But if they do sell, say for five hundred pounds, you would be well within your right to say "I don't think they're worth that much," but all that actually amounts to when you get down to it is the fact that you wouldn't make that exchange. Which is a perfectly valid position, but it doesn't erase the reality that this act of exchange did actually occur.

Bailey's insight is that even in a world dominated by commodity fetishism, this is ultimately a mental process: neither uses nor different kinds of labour share anything to render them commensurable with each other. Instead, they are rendered commensurable only via the real abstraction of exchange, of which there is no fundamental substance beyond people deciding to do the specific act of exchange.

Much like Austen's performativity whereby to say "I promise" is itself the action of promising, to act out exchange between 2A and 10 pounds is itself to render A as being worth 5 pounds. At least at this moment in time and space.

One has to take Occam's Razor to Marx's model: what is the point of maintaining that labour (even in abstracted form) is the source of value? When we know there are things like land, monopoly/market power, and one-off collectors' items that both break this pattern constantly? And (at least in the case of the first two), these are fundamental to the everyday functioning of capitalism. It's not helped by the fact that what abstract labour even is is highly controversial within Marxism, and numerous completely incompatible understandings exist.

To his credit, Marx is hitting at something very important here, it's just that abstract labour is a suboptimal tool to represent it. What he is hitting at is fourfold:

First, he's hitting at cost of production in general, which sets a hard limit to the viability/profitability of a product, and which said product will orbit more closely around the greater the competition between producers.

Secondly, he's hitting at the cost of maintaining the life of the average worker (the reproductive cost of the average worker, also known as the "real value of labour" in the political economic literature), which is both a cost of production and a transcendental minimum necessary for any work to be carried out at all (you need your workers to be alive to do their jobs).

Thirdly, he's pointing out that different labours are worth different amounts. It's impossible to tell whether a professor writing a paper is working harder than a bricklayer for instance, they're just not commensurable activities. But more than this, social prestige effects the price of labour power also: female-dominated industries are generally considered less valuable and have lower pay rates.

Finally and most innovatively is what Sohn-Rethel calls the social validation of labour: every society must decide how to expend it's ability to labour, and labour can be wasted. It's only at the point of successful exchange that the labour expended in the production of a commodity in a sense joins the mass of successfully utilised labour. And what makes capitalism unique is that this decision of expenditure is fundamentally decentralised and uncontrolled.

But why put these multifarious causes inside the value-form itself, when the value-form clearly doesn't actually give a solitary crap any of these issues? In fact it is the sheer dumb simplicity of the value-form that causes so many problems:

The value-form has no concept of society, survival or necessity, so welfare and collective bargaining by workers becomes necessary in the face of capital accumulation.

The value-form has no mechanism to analyse why one kind of labour is worth more than the other. The costs of production, misogyny and bargaining power are all downstream of the form itself, and the form doesn't say anything about how valuable any specific article should be.

The value-form has no way of rewarding inventions as such, only the sale of units of commodities, so intellectual property rights emerge.

The value-form has no way of rewarding infinitely reproducible articles, like digital data, and so artificial limits (DRM), artificial scarcity and moralistic claims like "developers need to eat and deserve a reward for their hard work" are leveled to try to squeeze digital objects into the value-form as best as possible, despite it not at all being a natural fit.

The value-form does not know what an externality is and has no mechanism to account for externalities.

The value-form does not have a concept of corruption, or the external legal institutions required to make a capitalist society actually functional, and will erode them naturally.

The value-form is entirely empty of all specific content. There is a void at the heart of capitalism.

Bailey also presages Marx and Roy Bhaskar in other important ways: the inherent emergent necessity of the money-form, and a stratified ontology with many interacting powers, but this review is already far too long, so I will leave the details as an exercise to the reader.

This is a book that should be widely read by Marxists of all stripes, as it will rip the guts out of any lingering Ricardianism rattling around your brain.

Chris Arthur is the name in particular if you want to read more in this direction (in fact, his paper The Spectral Ontology of Value is very good, and put me on this track in the first place). Other thinkers that Arthur lists in this tendency (of moving incorrect or downstream specifics out of the value-form) are I. I. Rubin and Moishe Postone.

Finally, I will share my view of the origin of the value-form:

Use -> evaluation -> pre-monetary forms (like debt and credit) -> the money-form (the generalised unit of exchange) -> the commodity-form (large-scale production for exchange) -> commodity fetishism and capital (the universalisation of commodity production and the self-expansion of money).

Okay, I found this on Reddit and I had to share it.

A guy shows up in r/bbs, a subreddit dedicated to classic and new computer bulletin board systems. I'm a big fan. Anyway, this guy shows up and says: Hey, does anyone remember the BBS game my dad wrote? It was called Buccaneer, and it was a pirate game you played on BBSes. Dad died six and a half years ago and I just wonder if anyone heard of his game?

Turns out... people have heard of Buccaneer.

One person has it running on their board. Another person was able to share the ZIP file for others to put it on their boards. Oh no! It was software you had to buy if you wanted the full version of it. But Dad is gone, and the kiddo has no idea how to open up the software to everyone.

No problem, someone posted a quick C programme that will generate keys for you. The kid might be crying because now even more people can play his dad’s game.

There’s some kinda lesson here in abandonware, but also in humanity. This kid may or may not own the copyrights to his dad’s stuff. Who knows? But one thing he certainly doesn’t have is the ability to make it work.

But because of a few folks on the Internet, running some old software, and someone who took a few minutes to write a keygen? Well, his dad is still out there somewhere, and he’s playing pirates.

reddit.com/r/bbs/comments/1b62…

"Climate change could cause 'generational trauma' in great apes"

cbc.ca/news/climate/apes-clima…

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"They're facing a lot of threats that are much more imminent than climate change," said Stefanie Heinicke, a postdoctoral researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
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"What you see, as a result of humans then trying to survive in these desperate circumstances, is that they turn to the forest for resources," Kalan said, describing it as a source of food and fuel such as charcoal.
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...

Paper here: journals.plos.org/climate/arti…

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For the first time, we showed that African ape sites have already experienced changes in climatic conditions and are likely to be exposed to extreme events in the future. We found that temperatures have increased over the past decades at the majority of ape sites, and in line with a previous study [14], we found a consistent increase in future temperatures. Bonobo sites covered the narrowest temperature range, which indicates a potentially lower physiological tolerance that might make bonobos more sensitive to climate change impacts [65]. We also showed that the majority of ape sites will be exposed to a high frequency of heatwaves. It has been shown that chimpanzees occurring in an area with high temperatures experience heat stress [18]. The impact of heatwaves on primates has not yet been studied, but high mortality of humans during heatwaves [35] and mass die-offs for some taxa (e.g., flying foxes [36]) have been observed. Thus, given the projected prevalence of heatwaves across ape sites, there is a need to understand sensitivity of apes to this extreme event. Thermoregulation behaviours have already been observed in apes (e.g., higher drinking frequency, nocturnal behaviour, sitting in caves and pools [18–20]). Though the behavioural flexibility of apes allows them to adapt to higher temperatures to some degree, these behaviours have only been observed for a few study sites, and it is not known how effective these adaptation strategies are, given, for example, that apes compete for access to standing water sources with humans and their livestock in dry habitats. In addition, these adaptive behaviours entail trade-offs, such as less time for feeding, or increased predation pressure at night. When more energy is used for thermoregulation this can reduce other physiological processes such as reduced functionality of the immune system, as observed for birds [22]. Behavioural and physiological trade-offs can result in a decline of body condition, as well as lower survival and fertility (Table 2).
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#ClimateChange #apes #extinction #deforestation #hunting