Thread by @deontologistics

Here's a few more thoughts on economics, following up from last night's monster thread on money, infrastructure, and the going price of power.

Allow me to explain my take on Marx in a little bit more detail, in order to articulate the way he binds the descriptive (explanatory/predictive) and normative (ethical/political) elements of his theory, the consequences this has, and what's good/bad in this from my perspective.

Disclaimer: I am still in the process of really getting to grips with Marx and the tradition built around him. I am by no means ignorant, but I do not devote myself to the study of it as if it were rabbinical law or hermetic lore. As such, I will only attend to certain responses.

Disclaimer (§2): If your response is 'you should read more Marx' my answer will be 'yes, I will, but only as is compatible with my other priorities'. If your response is 'you should read more of [secondary source]', my answer will be 'maybe, but can you compress it for me?'.

Disclaimer (§3): I already know I need to read more Marx, and I have a list of what secondary literature I want to read to. If you want to add to that list, you need to convince me that you got something important out of it, and the only way to do this is to explain it.

Disclaimer (§4): I have had *innumerable* conversations over the years where I have been put in an asymmetric position where someone insists I must read something, but cannot tell me why, while they reject my own suggestions, even when I can. I have no time for this anymore.

Disclaimer (§5): Philology has it's own role, but that role is not to browbeat people with a copy of Beyond Good and Evil, Beiträge zur Philosophie, Das Kapital, or whatever *text* one has decided to treat like a *grimoire*. I suppose what I'm saying is:

Now that's out of the way, here's my most concise description of the way in which Marx modifies and extends Hegel's social thought: his analysis aims to show the sheer extent to which systems of *mutual recognition* can depend upon systems of *mutual reproduction*.

To this end, Marx begins by giving us an extremely compressed rational reconstruction of the ontogenetic story implicit in classical economics: the dialectic of use value, exchange value, and *value simpliciter* that emerges from the interface between man and nature (labour).

I lament Marx's choice to use the unqualified term 'value' (Wert) for the third dialectical term, as it implicitly suggests that this is an analysis of the notion of value as such (including epistemic, aesthetic, and cultural values) rather than some notion of 'economic value'.

There's reasons for this, and it is correct to say that just as one can see the recognition supervening on reproduction, one can see non-economic values supervening on economic ones. This provides a genealogical methodology for studying such things.

However, just as it allows one to talk about the ways in which capitalism substitutes economic value for truth, beauty, and solidarity, it equally allows one to deny that any of these things are really possible within capitalism. This is, in two words, *fucking stupid*.

To elaborate, I have had many debates with Marxists who use variants of this argument to reduce everything to 'the value form', such that there can be no analysis of anything that is not funnelled through the analysis of capitalism. Not art. Not science. Not even mathematics.

I spent a frustrating half hour in the back of a taxi cab trying to explain to an otherwise very intelligent person that logic, and even just modus ponens, has nothing to do with the value form. Abstraction does not derive from money, and money is not identical to capital.

I have also been present at a lecture where someone said, unironically, if for effect, that he did not care if we destroyed every last life-form on earth, as long as the final miserable dying mutant got to live outside the value form for a moment or two.

If you genuinely propagate this sort of apocalyptic Marxism, even if only for effect, I can have no solidarity with you. If it comes down to allying with capitalists against your fantasy of watching the world burn, then so be it. I have no time for insurrectionist cosplay.

If your vision of the future involves not being able to produce insulin, antibiotics, and synthetic hormones, then I would *genuinely* prefer the nightmare vision of endless automated neoliberalism embodied by Google and Facebook. I say this for effect, but it is also true.

Incidentally, this is why I hated the ending of the Battlestar Galactica remake:

Anyway, returning to Marx: if the domain of specifically *economic* value is restricted to the relation between *use* value and *exchange* value, how is this relation articulated? What is the dialectic here?

Here's how I see it. The use values of the two products/services/guarantees to be traded are potentially unique and thus primitively incomparable. The exchange value is then some common medium through which they can be compared. Difference, identity, that's so Hegel™️.

However, there is a question as to whether the relation between exchange values reached by the two parties (or the comparison implicit in the contract) is *actual equality*. There is a sense in which the parties in such exchanges can be *wrong* about the terms they are setting.

Here's a deliberately stupid example: if I promise to never utter the word 'blumpf' on condition that you never utter the word 'zooble', can we be said to have exchanged anything thereby? Not all contracts can are exchanges in the relevant sense.

Exchanges presuppose some genuine standard of equality that we might fail to meet: we can exchange unequal goods. To be a bit more mathematical: in order to individuate these *goods*, there must be an equivalence relation between *behaviours* through which we can quotient them.

It's important to see that this is *implicitly normative*, because this is what forms the basis of the transition from exchange value to economic value more generally. If we can miscalibrate exchange, the question becomes: what is determines the standard of calibration here?

Considered abstractly, economic value is a *norm* governing exchange. Considered concretely, it is some *substance* that gives content to this norm. Marx proposes that this is some *average* of the socially necessary labour time required to *produce* the relevant goods.

I think this is the key move in Marx's system, precisely because it entwines his predictive ambitions (e.g., explaining *price variation* through organic composition of capital) and his normative commitments (e.g., the essential *unfairness* inherent in surplus value extraction).

However, there is a lot more left implicit in the transition from the formal to the substantive notion of economic value, and it is here that the concept of mutual reproduction is essential, because it reveals the extent to which the normative has priority over the prescriptive.

Allow me another silly example: imagine we are playing Monopoly, to teach children about capitalism. The in game money encodes a clear standard of exchange, but it is clearly stipulated. It has no connection to investment in production beyond our personal investment in the game.

What we want to say here is that there is 'no skin in the game' when one plays Monopoly. There is no *real* risk. But what is the *reality* of risk involved the real 'game' of investment in production for exchange, surplus value extraction, and capital accumulation?

The risk is always tied to the material needs associated with the reproduction of life in the last instance. This is true even of the capitalist, who may pass from riches to rags, even though the cumulative momentum of their capital tends to keep them aloft, all else being equal.

What this means is that, though the use values associated with the goods to be exchanged are *potentially* unique they tend to be individually significant in virtue of their location within the system of means and ends through which we survive and thrive.

Moreover, things with singular value, such as sentimental objects, tend to be less closely tied to surviving than thriving. Although we can imagine exceptions, such as not being able to live without the possessions of one's dead spouse, these are thoroughly specific in character.

The common features of the conditions under which we as individuals can survive (e.g., oxygen, water, calories, shelter, companionship, etc.) determine the semantic parameters through which we can see goods to be exchanged as in any sense equal in value.

Another example: if by some cruel twist of fate I possess your dead partner's ashes, and you possess mine, we can see that there is some parity to be achieved by exchange, even though they are uniquely valuable to us as individuals, and there is no labour embodied therein.

If we were each entirely self-sufficient, with our own personal system of production that met all our material needs, then these would be the only type of exchange for which there was any meaningful parity, and everything else would be adversarial negotiation: pure game theory.

Labour is able to mediate between use and exchange in determining economic parity insofar as it is bound up within some system of *production* upon which we both depend for *reproduction*. This ranges from 'sharing the same biosphere' to 'complex/intractable division of labour'.

It is the fact that the reproduction of individuals is entangled in something like a (distributed) collective division of labour that makes it possible to talk about 'average socially necessary labour time'. Economic value presupposes an economy.

The implicit question of economic parity is: what must each *contribute* to production in order for each to *receive* the goods required for their reproduction. If you add ought-implies-can, then this becomes 'from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs'.

To summarise: if we are to make sense of complex norms governing patterns of exchange from which actual exchanges diverge, then we require some notion of a concrete economy with an actual division of labour. This holds *before* we get to commodities, money, or capital.

Compare this with Hegel's idea that abstract mutual recognition must be made concrete in the form of social institutions that mediate our relationships and constitute specific forms of status through specific sorts of peer relations attached to different activities and expertise.

The Marxian variant of this is that abstract mutual reproduction must be made concrete in the form of economic institutions that mediate our exchanges and constitute specific forms of industry and investment therein. This is all *independent* of the account of capitalism.

This is the cash value of my claim that neither economic value nor the use of money as infrastructure for keeping track of it is specifically capitalist in nature. There can be other ways of configuring a system of mutual reproduction through exchange, storage, and investment.

Marx's account of commodity fetishism, capital, wage labour, and surplus value, are all downstream from the initial account of exchange and *economic value* proper. However, it is this initial articulation of LTV that lays the foundation for the predicting and critiquing capital.

What all this means is that Marx's version of classical economics allows us to view the mediating role of labour in the constitution of economic value from two perspectives: the real (explanation/prediction) and the ideal (evaluation/prescription).

I think that the purchase that it offers us upon the real is increasingly tenuous, as it is precisely the configuration of concrete economic institutions and complex infrastructure that really does the mediation, making the 'average' of labour time increasingly meaningless.

But the purchase it offers us upon the ideal is increasingly pertinent, as we need to analyse, criticise, and revise the concrete economic institutions that make all of our lives possible. Debord understands this best: *free* time is not *spare* time, but personal destiny.

To add one final point, this ideal/real split becomes even more pertinent as we try to replace pieces of our political and economic infrastructure with automated (and autonomous) systems. If one does not appreciate the difference, one recreates the powers one seeks to eliminate.

Bitcoin was supposed to decentralise currency control and free us from the forms of power associated with its infrastructural sedimentation. It took less than ten years for it to independently reinvent banks. I suspect the same will happen with smart contracts and legal systems.

If one doesn't appreciate the problems that the existing institutions and infrastructure evolved to solve, then one will simply put oneself in a position where one inevitably recreates them, maybe in a less desirable form. From blockchains to chains in three generations.

However, if we are serious about understanding how things actually work, and understanding how we would like them to work better, or just differently, then we might be able to use these tools correctly. From smart contracts to smart jurisprudence.

In short: (1) don't underestimate the extent to which power differentials determine price differentials for labour and 'reproduction' between contexts (e.g., conspicuous consumption); (2) try to design better alternatives in accordance by understanding both the real and ideal.

Right, that was another monster thread, if somewhat spread out of the day. I'm going to try compiling these later.