" [...] From my first steps of thinking like an economist, to this very day, it occurred to me that Marx had made a ‘discovery’ that must remain at the heart of any useful analysis of capitalism. It was, of course, the discovery of another binary opposition deeply within human labour. Between labour’s two quite different ‘natures’: (i) labour as a value-creating (“fire breathing”) activity that can never be specified or quantified in advance (and therefore impossible to commodify), and (ii) labour as a quantity (e.g. numbers of hours worked) that is for sale and comes at a price. That is what distinguishes labour from other productive inputs such as electricity: its twin, contradictory, nature. A differentiation-cum-contradiction that political economics neglected to make before Marx came along and which mainstream economics is steadfastly refusing to acknowledge today.
Both electricity and labour can be thought of as commodities. Indeed, both employers and workers struggle to commodify labour. Employers use all their ingenuity, and that of their HR management minions, so as to quantify, measure and homogenise labour. Meanwhile prospective employees go through the wringer in an anxious attempt to commodify their labour power, to write and re-write their CVs in order to portray themselves as purveyors of quantifiable labour units. And there’s the rub! For if workers and employers even succeed in commodifying labour fully, capitalism will perish. This is an insight without which capitalism’s tendency to generate crises can never be fully grasped and, also, an insight that no one has access to without some exposure to Marx’s thought. [...]" These lines are a pretty good attempt to summarize - in a Greek nutshell - both the "pivot on which a clear comprehension of Political Economy turns" (Marx) and the "conversion of the law of appropriation." An addition: "The brilliancy of Aristotle's genius is shown by this alone, that he discovered, in the expression of the value of commodities, a relation of equality. The peculiar conditions of the society in which he lived, alone prevented him from discovering what, 'in truth', was at the bottom of this equality" - human labour. "Aristotle therefore, himself, tells us, what barred the way to his further analysis; it was the absence of any concept of value." "There was, however, an important fact which prevented Aristotle from seeing that, to attribute value to commodities, is merely a mode of expressing all labour as equal human labour, and consequently as labour of equal quality. Greek society was founded upon slavery, and had, therefore, for its natural basis, the inequality of men and of their labour-powers. The secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because, and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered, until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities, in which, consequently, the dominant relation between man and man, is that of owners of commodities." References (well known to PENners): Yanis Varoufakis: Confessions of an Erratic Marxist in the Midst of a Repugnant European Crisis http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2013/12/10/confessions-of-an-erratic-marxist-in-the-midst-of-a-repugnant-european-crisis/ Capital Vol. I https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S3a3 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
