Two ideas (i.e. I think too much); the first is long, the second is very short:
1. (I preface this with a disclaimer that I'm not a Marxist, despite all the evidence to the contrary.)
I don't buy the labor theory of value, meaning that I don't think value can be reduced to some metaphysical amount of labor-force instilled somehow within an object. But I have often found this to be a fascinating aspect of Marxian theory because of how strange it seems; after all, Marx criticized Hegel for being an idealist, saying that Hegel scored right on the dialectic but that he had it turned upside-down. Marx's project aimed to "turn Hegel on his head," so to speak, giving a materialist flair to Hegelian philosophy. Given this ardent materialism, how could it be that Marx proposed a "labor theory of value," i.e. a theory of value that posited value as some kind of congealed substance of labor inherent in a produced object - that is, a commodity? Could it be that Marx just threw in the towel and accepted a massive cognitive dissonance in order to devise a theoretical model that catered to the laboring subjects whose time and efforts went to manufacture these commodities? This has been a subject of some conflict for me, and something that I've reluctantly admitted after moving away from Marx and into more postwar theoretical territory.
But this doesn't mean I've abandoned Marx's critical commentary on industrial capitalism (i.e. the basic and very general organization of market economics following the Industrial Revolution). I recently read something by Michael Taussig (a Marxist anthropologist, I admit - let's get all our cards on the table) that gave me pause, and brought me back to this question. I'll give the quote in full below - it's from a book titled
Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses:
Taussig said:
"The relation of producers to the sum total of their own labor," wrote Marx, "is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labor." This is the state of affairs that makes the commodity a mysterious thing "simply because in it the social character of men's labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor." Decisive here is the displacement of the "social character of men's labor" into the commodity, where it is obliterated from awareness by appearing as an objective character of the commodity itself. The swallowing-up of contact we might say, by its copy, is what ensures the animation of the latter, its power to straddle us.
Now, here's the really interesting part, Taussig's explication:
Marx's optical analogy went like this: When we see something, we see that thing as its own self-suspended self out there, and not as the passage of its diaphonous membranes or impulsions as light waves, or however you want to conceptualize "contact" through the air and into the eye where the copy now burns physiognomically, physioelectrically, onto the retina where, as physical impulse, it darts along neuroptical fibers to be further registered as copy. All this contact of perceiver with perceived is obliterated into the shimmering copy of the thing perceived, aloof unto itself. So with the commodity, mused Marx, a spectral entity out there, lording it over mere mortals who in fact, singly and collectively in intricate divisions of market-orchestrated interpersonal labor-contact and sensuous interaction with the object-world, bring aforesaid commodity into being.
Now, what the fuck does all that bullshit mean?
Long story short, I don't think that Marx's labor theory of value can be construed as a means of calculating actual value in a market setting, and I think that Marx knew this. I think that Marx's labor theory of value only makes sense in an idealistic vision of socialist utopia, the success of which is beside the point I'm currently trying to make (although it wasn't beside the point for Marx). In Taussig's articulation, Marx's LToV operates less as a metaphysical treatise on value and more as a critical analysis of what complex market relations do to the perceptions of human subjects. And according to Taussig, perception is immensely important in shaping the dynamics of intersubjectivity and social relations (a claim with which I happen to agree). Basically, he's suggesting that perception doesn't constitute a clean line of communication and distinction between subject and object, but proceeds to entangle them, to confuse the perceiver with the perceived, and to displace the distinction through which we identify ourselves as subjects and our commodities as objects - we get sucked into the object world.
So Marx's LToV isn't that value inheres in a commodity as a metaphysically congealed substance derived from workers' labor, but that the post-industrial commodity elides the distinction between producer and produced, that it's a medium of social relations - this is how the actual relations between human subjects reappears in the commodity as a relation between things. To put this in more concrete terms, when you enter a convenience store you see shelves of bad snack food, refrigerated shelves stacked with sugar drinks, etc. etc. Labor value does not inhere in these products, but these products act as a medium between human subjects. The occupants of the store will never meet (in all likelihood) the laborers whose work went into making these products, meaning that the products themselves become the only means by which most people are able to have any identification with those laborers. We thereby fetishize the commodity, elevating it as a social form (or hieroglyphic, in Marx's own words) that represents the relation between human subjects. The commodity begins to dance, as Marx writes. In this way, these commodities appear to reflect the labor of those individuals whom most of us will never come in actual contact with. This is the "labor theory of value" - not an argument that value inheres in commodities as a substance of labor, but that commodities function in a market society as a representational form of the relations between laboring parties.
In short - when you look at a bag of Doritos, you don't see/touch/eat the people that went into producing it. You relate to those people via your own experience of that commodity as a product of labor.
Now, I'm going to stop short of saying this in any way justifies a move to full-blown communism. None of the above is intended as a justification of political revolution toward socialist organization. I'm interested in how the labor theory of value can be reimagined as a materialist philosophy, and I think this is how. When we replace the notion of a sense of value inherent within objects with a notion of value as a representation of relations between laboring parties, then we arrive at a materialist theory of value. Value derives from how subjects perceive their relations with others through the lens of commodities.
and 2. The left has an ideology problem.
That is, critique emerges in the form of ideological constructs. We need to take a lesson from Deleuze and Guattari and realize that ideology only makes sense within the parameters of ideological thought - in other words, the left can be said to suffer from "the ideology of ideology."
I don't exempt myself from this diagnosis.
