On Marx' theory of value

Harvey, David. Marx’s Refusal of the Labour Theory of Value, March 1, 2018

Claim: "Marx’s value form is not a still and stable fulcrum in capital’s churning world but a constantly changing and unstable metric", influenced by markets, changes in technology, social reproduction and other factors.

Marx never aligned with labour theory of value and instead proposed his own "value theory".

Who deals with: Ricardo, labour theory of value.

Method: Picks up the main points of labour theory of value that add little to Ricardo's theory, but then claims that few Marxists notice that Marx went further, and shows where.

Notes:

Marx's theory of value is, in contrast to Ricardo's, who is looking only at production and circulation, argues that value is rather an outcome of negotiaton between competitive market processes, surplus value production and social reproduction. The latter is something that Marx devises after his comparative studies of living conditions and rationing among workers and prisoners.

Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism, is there no alternative

- p1 - 2006 film Children of men, 2005, V for Vendetta

- p2 - It's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism

- p3 - the new defines itself in response to what's already established; at the same time, the established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new

- p7 - postmodernism=capitalist realism.

- p8 - the horror about the ways that capitalism has seeped into the very unconscious

- p9 - Kurt Cobain and his struggling with realisation that he is a part of mainstream

- p2 - the film performes our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity

- p10 - Simon Reynolds, 1996, The Wire

- p.15 - what needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation. 

 - p.16 - Michael Schudson, Advertising, the uneasy persuasion, 1984

- p.17 - Badiou, modernisation;Zizek

 Zupancic: the rally principle is... ideologically mediated

- For Lacan, the Real is what any 'reality' must suppress

- p.18 - green issues, capitalism destroys the environment

- p.19 - privatisation of stress. Bureaucracy changed its form, didn't disappear

- 20. - education is the dominating imperative in capitalist realism

- p 21 - reflexive impotence, knowing that things are bad, but we can't do anything about it

- p22 - inability to pursue anything but pleasure, hedonism

- p22 - Kafka's The Trial, Ostensible acquittal and Indefinite postponement

 Working from home, homing from work.

 - 24 students: Post-literate 'new flesh' that is 'too wired' to concentrate

Page 33 - If the figure of discipline was the worker-prisoner, the figure of control is the debtor-addict

Page 33 - The attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Page 33 -C apitalism is profoundly illiterate

Page 34 - Teachers are caught between being facilitator-entertainers and disciplinarian-authoritarians

Page 34 - Control societies are based on debt rather than enclosure;

Page 35 - combine rapacious pursuit of profit with the rhetoric of ecological concern and social responsi- bility

Page 35 - Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralized bureaucracy

Page 36 - The persistent association of neoliberalism with the term ‘Restoration'

Page 39 - Michael Mann’s 1995 film Heat, ’

- p32 - R.Sennet. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism

- p33 - the situation of family in post-Fordist capitalism is contradictory. It requires the family, even as it undermines it.