From: glevy@PRATT.EDU
Date: Tue Feb 22 2005 - 13:21:15 EST
---------------------------- Original Message ----------------- Subject: Consumer behaviour From: "Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@hetnet.nl> Date: Tue, February 22, 2005 12:31 pm --------------------------------------------------------------- Jerry, Thanks for your comment. In his book The Making of Marx's Capital, Roman Rosdolsky emphasizes the importance of use-value in Marx's economic thought, while I.I. Rubin emphasizes "Value presupposes use value. The process of the formation of value presupposes the process of producing use values." http://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/rubin/ch04.htm Steve Keen also comments on this http://ideas.repec.org/p/wop/pokear/_026.html In fact Marx himself commented once that use-value played a greater role in his theory than among the political economists he criticised. In his "Notes on Adolph Wagner's "Lehrbuch der politischen Ökonomie" (1881) Marx states: "...only a vir obscurus who has not understood a word of Capital can conclude: Because Marx in a note in the first edition of Capital rejects all the German professorial twaddle about "use-value" in general, and refers readers who want to know something about real use-values to "manuals dealing with merchandise"-for this reason use-value plays no part in his work". http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/01/wagner.htm One aspect of the problem is simply that not all use-values can become commodities at any time for technical, economic and social reasons, and that the transformation or modification of use-values (including labour-power itself) in order to become commodities may affect how they are specifically supplied, structured, combined and consumed. Simply put, the supply and nature of many use-values becomes specifically designed so they will sell at a profit, and therefore, you can say that the value-form begins to affect the very nature of what is and is not produced, beyond any specific technical necessity. Out of different possible technologies and design options, some are chosen which are practicable within the framework of market sales and the need to show a profit. But this means that technical progress, and consequently capitalist culture, is not socially neutral, since it is at least constrained by whatever is compatible with market sales and profits, as well as legal controls. That's quite obvious if you look for example at the history of the development of petrol-fueled cars, or of computers. It's not a particularly novel insight, but presumably the aim in elaborating Marx's theory further would be to trace out the economic 'logic' in the sphere of consumption, showing how the contradictions of exchange-value and use-value are specifically mediated and resolved. As to the objection that, the level of abstraction Marx operates at, he cannot discuss the peculiarities of human subjects, I don't think this necessarily has a bearing on the theoretical argument, precisely because human needs and wants are also objectified as "a quantity of market demand" with a given structure, as reflected e.g. in household expenditure surveys. Those needs which can be satisfied through the cash nexus are emphasized, while those needs not able to be so satisfied are de-emphasized. There exist broad categories of use-values which correspond to basic human needs which are more or less permanent, and then the question arises how the satisfaction of these needs are structured in order to fulfill the requirements of the accumulation of capital, and how the conflicts between human needs and those requirements are resolved. Already at the beginning of Cap. Vol. 1, when he introduces the concept of use-value, Marx refers to the idea of consumer sovereignity: "In bourgeois societies the economic fictio juris prevails, that every one, as a buyer, possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of commodities" (Progress edition, p. 44). The doctrine of consumer sovereignity was criticised among others by Marc Linder (in Anti-Samuelson) and Francis Green/Petter Nore, Economics: An Anti-Text (Macmillan, 1977). As regards advertising, in the USA it is probably excessive, but some advertising is indispensable as an information basis for market knowledge; it is a necessary consequence of market expansion and an intrinsic characteristic of markets. A wide variety of different forms of advertising exists however, some useless, some useful. Surveys suggest that people accept a certain amount of advertising as useful, but beyond that regard it as a nuisance. The study of consumer behaviour on which much advertising is based is also undoubtedly a useful science, insofar as planned economy must aim to reconcile output and needs in an efficient way. I cannot provide precise references for this claim, but in the past I did read a lot of marketing and consumer behaviour literature in the course of my work, where empirical evidence for this insight was provided. So anyway then the general point is that the economic position of the worker is never defined simply by his existence as producer, but also as consumer; profit, interest, rent and royalties are also an impost on the consumer items s/he buys, affecting the value of labour-power and therefore indirectly the rate of surplus-value and profit. In this regard, it could with justification be argued that the potential for exploitation does not begin and end at "the point of production" at all. Finally, the worker is also as citizen in civil society a juridically constituted subject of the political state, who owns himself and has certain rights and obligations. Again not a particularly novel idea, but one which is rarely theorised systematically in a way consistent with Marx's theory. My impression is that Negri regards all commerce as necessarily a bad thing, but this seems to me a critique which lacks nuance and is really not warranted. Trade does generate human progress, but also "at a price". Hence Marx's attempt at a dialectical critique of trade, showing that it is not all good or all bad, but has contradictory results. I am not sure what "auto-valorisation" means. Marx uses the concept of valorisation to apply to the augmentation of capital within the production process. In the sphere of consumption, at issue is not primarily valorisation, but the realisation of value. As regards a rent strike, there is not much possibility yet of anything like that in Holland, although the government wants to abolish rent controls for 600,000 rented dwellings and impose market-based rents. The very idea of market-based rents is rather suspect though, since a rather small number of corporations own the bulk of the rental housing stock! Rent strikes require a high level of solidarity and organisation to be effective, which is probably why there are few successful examples in modern times where populations are much more mobile and local communities often do not have the type of social solidarity required. I did consider that "simply because there is exchange does not mean that there is value", but in my interpretation, this case would apply where the good being exchanged is not a labour-product (for example, unimproved land or some types of financial or legal claims or non-reproducible goods). I realise of course that the subordination of labor by the forms of value assumes developed markets, i.e. the social consequences of the fact that labor-products possess value will differ depending on the level of sophistication of trade that has been reached, and the social relations that accompany this. Jurriaan
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