 This is going to be a bit of an unusual session for me because I'm actually working from a text. I think the last time I worked from a text was about 30 years ago and I'm not used to it. And I'm working at it using it this way for two reasons. One is I have a text which is also extremely unusual. I probably haven't had one for 30 years either. But the second reason is that the subject matter is a little bit complicated. And while I put riff on it and would do so, I thought it would be rather more important to lay things out in a systematic way. And to do that I think the text helps me do it. The topic this week is anti-value. And when I get to the end I think I'll be able to explain a little bit why this is such an important question for me. But I'll get into it in the following way. The closing sentences of the first section, the first chapter of Volume 1 of Capital Read. Nothing can be a value without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it. The labour does not count as labour and therefore creates no value. With this incisive thrust, Marx introduces us to the idea that the circulation of capital as value is vulnerable. That it can come to an abrupt halt, that the threat of devaluation, of loss of value always hovers over it as it circulates. The transition from the commodity form to the money representation of value is a passage fought with danger. That passage which you see on the main graph here in which we move from commodity which is produced to being realised in money form. Throughout Volume 1, as we've seen, Marx for the most part lays aside questions of realisation in order to concentrate on the process of production of material commodities and the production of surface value. He knows for well of course that, and I quote, while living labour creates value, the circulation of capital realises value. The unity that necessarily prevails between production and realisation is however a contradictory unity. Hence the warning shot of the outset of Volume 1. Commodities may be in love with money, as he later on points out, of course the true love never did run smooth. Now it will be very unlike Marx to formulate a key concept such as value without incorporating within it the possibility for its negation. In certain readings of Marx, much is made of the influence of Hegel's negation as a negation on his thinking. And he was certainly not averse, as he put it, to cockatting with Hegel in formulations. The bourgeois mind then has now considered dialectic a scandal and an abomination, he wrote, because dialectics includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation. It's inevitable destruction because it regards every historical developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion, and therefore grasps its transient aspect as well. And this comes from one of the prefaces to Volume 1 of Capital. The proposition I want to attain is that value in Marx exists only in relation to anti-value. While this may sound a strange formulation, physicists these days rely upon the relation between matter and anti-matter to interpret foundational physical processes. Marx often cited parallels between what he was doing with the physicists and had this analogy been available to him, he probably would have used it. The evolutionary laws of capital on submit hinge upon the unfolding relation between value and anti-value, in much the same way as the laws of physics rest on relations between matter and anti-matter. Now there's nothing mystical or obscure about the negation of value in the act of realisation. All capitalist commodity producers know that the success of their enterprise is assured only when their commodity has been sold for a money value that is greater than that which they initially expended. If they cannot do this then they are no longer capitalists. The value they imagined they had after they had put wage labourers to work disappears. But then the concept of the negation of value has an even more omnipresent role than this. In Marx's world it is not an unfortunate accident but a deep and abiding feature of what capital is about. And I quote him, Well capital is reproduced as value and use value in the production process. It is at the same time posited as not value, something which first has to be realised as value by means of exchange. In other words, both the prospects and the reality of anti-value are always there. Anti-value has to be overcome if value production is to survive. Capital is value in motion. And any pause or even slow down in that motion for whatever reason means a loss of value, which may be resuscitated in part if not in whole only when the motion of capital is resumed. And I quote, When capital takes on a particular form as a production process, as a product waiting to be sold, as a commodity circulating in the hands of merchant capitalists, as money waiting to be transferred or reinvested, then capital is virtually devalued. Capital lying at rest in any of these states is variously turned negated, valor, dormant or fixated. Or consider this, As long as capital remains frozen in the form of finished product, it cannot be acted as capital. It is negated capital. This virtual devaluation is overcome or suspended as soon as capital resumes its movement. Now I put together in those things a collage of statements from various parts of Marx. But I think it's fairly clear from these statements that he did not regard anti-value as hovering over value in motion. But the advantage of seeing devaluation as a necessary moment of the realization process is that it enables us to see immediately the possibility of a general devaluation of capital. In other words, a crisis. Any failure to maintain a certain velocity of circulation of capital through the various phases of production, realization and distribution will produce difficulties and disruptions. This is of course what the assumption of everything exchanging anti-value in volume one of capital avoids. Continuity of capital flow is vital. The turnover time of capital becomes a crucial consideration. Crises will all result if inventory is built up, if money lies idle for longer than is strictly necessary, if more stocks are held for a longer period during production and so forth. And then he says this. A crisis occurs not only because a commodity is unsaleable, but because it is not saleable within a particular period of time. As long as capital remains in the production process, this is not capable of circulating and it is virtually devalued. As long as it remains in circulation, it's not capable of producing. As long as it cannot be bought to market, it is fixated as product. As long as it has to remain on the market, it is fixated as commodity. As long as it cannot be exchanged for conditions of production, it is fixated as money. In other words, when you look at this schema I'm looking at, you have to look at its continuous flow. And any break in the continuity of that flow signals a crisis. Capitalists are therefore locked in a perpetual battle, not only to produce values, but to combat their potential negation. The passage of production from production to realisation is a key point in the overall circulation of capital where that battle is right royally brought out. So what circumstances might make it impossible for value to be realised in the market? To begin with, if no-one wants, needs or desires a particular use value on offer in a particular place and time, then the product has no value. It is not even worthy of being called a commodity in Marx's view. Potential buyers must also possess sufficient money to pay for the use value. If one or other of these conditions is not met, then the result is no value. We will later investigate in some detail why these two conditions may not be fulfilled. But plainly, the production and management of new wants, needs and desires has had a huge impact on the history of capitalism, turning what we like to call human nature into something necessarily changing and malleable rather than constant and given, if it ever was. Capital messes with our heads and our desires. But there is one feature at the moment of realisation of great significance. The foundational social relation involved in realisation is that between buyers and sellers. Even the lowest paid worker enters the marketplace in doubt of the sacred rite of consumer choice. This is very different from the capital labour relation that dominates in the process of valorisation. To be sure, the encounter between capital labour and the marketplace is an encounter where the rules of market exchange formally apply. The capital rules both demand supply conditions through the production of an industrial reserve army. But in the case of valorisation, it is what happens in the hidden abode of production that really matters. And for that, there is no equivalent in the process of realisation. In the latter case, the buyers of commodities of no matter what class exercise some degree of consumer choice, either individual or collective. While it is broadly true that the wants, needs and desires of the buyers have been manipulated over time by all sorts of direct and indirect means into patterns of rational consumption as defined by capital, there have always been pockets and sometimes whole social movements of resistance to such manipulations. Collective consumer choices can be exercised in a variety of ways, including for example through state policies with regard to the social wage, forced through by legislation that there has to be longstanding political movements. Resistances arise on moral, political, cultural, aesthetic, religious and even philosophical grounds. In some instances, the resistance is to the very concept of commodification and market rationing of access to basic goods and services such as education, healthcare and potable water. Many would regard such goods as basic human rights rather than as commodities that are going to be bought and sold. The anti-value that arises from technical glitches and holdups in circulation of capital morphs into the active anti-value of political resistance to commodification and privatisation. Anti-value therefore defines an active field of anti-capitalist struggle. Consumer boycotts are rarely successful of one sign of this kind of politics. But all movements against conspicuous or even compensatory consumerism constitute a political threat to realisation. Capitalists have to organise to counter this threat, but the existence of multiple ongoing struggles in and around the politics of realisation is undeniable. Organised struggles, resistance and agitations of a daily life issued in urban settings are commonplace, no matter whether they are explicitly meant as anti-capitalist struggles or not. Marx did not investigate these questions. He merely notes them in passing. But here I think the virtue of the overall framework that he constructs to represent the circulation of capital becomes more evident. In other words, when you start to look at this flow process, you start to look at those points where there are potential barriers, potential blockages to the continuity of the flow. Of course, once capital is realised, then it can remain capital only by circling back into production to be valorised by the further application of labour in production. And it is at the point of valorisation that when money returns to refinance the labour process, the capital encounters its other most persistent threat of active negation in the persona of the alienated and recalcitrant labourer. The work in class, however defined, is the embodiment of the negation of capital of anti-value. It is on the basis of this conception of alienated labour, the Conti Negri and the Italian autonomistas, to build their theory of labour resistance and class struggle at the point of production. The act of refusal to work is anti-value personified. This class struggle occurs in the hidden abode of production. It entails a quite different politics from that between buyers and sellers that dominates at the moment of realisation. In producing surplus value, the labourer produces capital and reproduces the capitalist. The refusal to work is a refusal to do either. In the same way that Marx invokes the idea of contradictory unity between production and realisation in the standpoint of continuous capital accumulation. So there is a parallel need for anti-capitalist movements to recognise the contradictory unity of struggles over production and those waged around realisation. On the surface, the politics of realisation struggles have a very different social structure. They're not class-defined in the way the struggle is defined and in point of production. For this reason, they are often treated on the left as being prioritised as more important. Yet both sorts of struggles, and this is the point about seeing the totality this way, both sorts of struggles are subsumed within the overall logic and dynamism of capital circulation viewed as a totality. Why would their contradictory unity not be recognised and addressed by anti-capitalist movements? The study of this contradictory unity revealed, pregnant by its opposite, to the degree that all economy ultimately reduces itself to the economy of time. So even after the capitalist mode of production has abolished and here I'm quoting Marx, those social production remains. The determination of value still prevails in the sense of the regulation of labour time and the distribution of social labour among various production groups becomes more essential than ever as well as the keeping of accounts of this. So that Marx, the abolition of the capitalist law of value. The other is that he's arguing for his revolutionary transformation into another form of the law of value which is not the same as the capitalist law but addresses the question of how do we calibrate and think about the social labour we do for others. This would be so, for example, as associated labourers in command of their own labour processes and means of production set about coordinating their capacities while satisfying their own wants, needs and desires for the help of those others. A perpetual jousting goes on in Marx's text between what value currently is and what it might be in an anti-capitalist world. The aim as I interpreted or the one I prefer is not to abolish value whether or so I'm going to put it that way but to transform its meaning and its content and in this jousting I'm going to put it that way. In this sense anti-value constitutes the subterranean soil in which anti-capitalism can flourish in both theory and practice. While Marx is undoubtedly correct in seeing the struggle against capital and the hidden abode of production as different in kind and therefore a deeper political significance and struggles in the marketplace we now clearly see production is not the only place where anti-value is of significance. Value and anti-value relate in different ways. The role of anti-value is not always it turns out oppositional it also has a key role in defining and securing the future of capital itself and in fact internal revolutions within the capitalist mode of production out of some degree a product of anti-value. This brings me to what I think is one of the more important ideas that I want to explore. It's the idea of debt as anti-value. Now how does debt arise and what is its role within a capitalist mode of production? Consider the case of long-term fixed capital investments. Capital is laid out to purchase a machine which has a relatively long life. The use value of the machine over its lifetime is to augment the productivity of the laborer and thereby produce the product on an annual basis of the lifetime of the machine. The machine lasts 10 years and one tenth of its value goes into the product every year. The transfer of value is, of course, ideal rather than material which is a mental activity rather than material activity. The proportion of the value of the machine received each year by the capitalist in money form has to be hoarded, saved as we've seen earlier, dead capital and devalued capital. Anti-value in the form of negated capital accumulates annually until enough is being saved to purchase a new machine when the time is right. The savings of consumers divided by ticket items like cars and houses are similarly structured. Last amounts of dead capital or fellow savings hidden under the mattresses and savings increases with increasing mechanization. The credit system comes to the rescue. The industrial capitalist has, in fact, a choice either borrowed to buy the machine and paid back the debt in installments over the lifetime of the machine or buy the machine outright and place the annual depreciation on the money market to earn interest until it is needed to replace the machine. In either case, debt is anti-value as an active element within the financial system. This creates greater liquidity in the credit system which transforms hoarded and hence devalued capital into an active form of capital in motion. That is, instead of capital being put to one side and you're unable to use it, what debt does is it allows and the credit system allows all of that hoarded stuff to be extracted out of the resources that the debt has at some point to be redeemed through value production. Collisions between value and anti-value within the credit system spark periodic monetary and financial crises. In the long run, capital has to confront ever escalating claims on future values to redeem the anti-value building up within the credit system. Instead of an accumulation of values and of wealth, capital produces an accumulation of capital. The anti-value of debt becomes one of the principal incentives and levers to ensure the further production of value and surplus value. The traditional conventional view has always been that the search for profit on the part of individual capitalists has there been the primary incentive driving the endless circulation and accumulation of capital. This is an ideological view of the United States. The figure of the small business entrepreneur hemmed in by government regulation emerges as the hero of whatever it is is supposedly makes capitalism of the United States so great. The small business, you know, kind of. This evocation is probably more rhetorical mask than the reality. But as we saw in the equalization of the rate of profit through competition, profit signals do not lead and the profit signals are misleading if not downright wrong. Following them may lead to falling profits and crises such as they were the 1930s. Falling profits, actually at some point makes individual entrepreneurs say they're not going to be bothered to continue producing because it's unprofitable. Two solutions then emerge. The centralization of capital in large corporations to lessen the force of competition through the manipulation of the conditions of realization. That is, the incentive no longer is located in the valorization process, it's actually located in the realization process by the manipulation and organization of effective demand. This broadly became the case from 1945 to 1980 throughout much of the capitalist world. Competitive capitalism seeded ground to what some like to call state monopoly capitalism while Keynesian state policies were on quite different lines focusing on aggregate effective demand. The trouble was of course that this empowered significant segments of the working class whose anti-value and anti-capitalist sentiments became all too clear. Hence the shift towards greater and greater reliance on the current dominant incentive structure constituted by finance capital that is, you can't go to valorization the effective demand realization arena where you go to the distributed one. Hence the shift towards greater and greater reliance on the channeling of vast flow of interest bearing capital into the circulation process indebting anything of everything in sight that moves. This locks in value production way into the future and effectively forecloses upon alternatives unless a massive disruption breaks open away to default on such obligations. To so confidently claim there is no alternative you have to retire your debts and that's it. Valorization, realization and distribution have always been in play of course as independent but interrelated centers within the circulation of capital where incentives to endless accumulation could be constructed but their relative importance has shifted with changing circumstances. The massive deployment of anti-value within the financial system to ensure future value production has also been geographical shifts until very recently capital accumulation in China has been dominated by state investments in productive consumption physical infrastructures and therefore it's taking the realization part but in recent last two or three years there's been a dramatic shift underway towards the liberation of the financial system. Now this recent shift towards indebtedness poses serious problems for anti-capitalist opposition. It becomes harder and harder to put a face to the class enemy while the tentacles of indebtedness spread far and wide to indicate every one of us who carries as much as a single credit card in their pocket. Capital in the first instance cultivated debt as anti-value as a solution to specific problems such as the dangers of excessive hoarding. The power of anti-value was used to release all the dormant value but I think it's a wonderful moment when Marx talks about the difference between a miser and a capitalist. The boundless drive for enrichment may be common to the capitalist and the miser he says in Volume 1 but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad the capitalist is a rational miser. The ceaseless augmentation of value which the miser seeks to attain by saving his money from circulation is achieved by the more acute capitalist by means of throwing his money again and again into circulation and this he could only do with his credit system an open money market. I always think of Balzac's novel Louisiana Grande which is about the miser and the end of the story he's trotting off and to convert his gold into rents into credit system. Now Marx does lightly touch upon his problem in Volume 1 of Capital he notices that the role of creditor or debtor results from the simple circulation of his business. This relation is implicit in market exchange but then Marx goes on to hint rather darkly as to how this role is only a reflection of an antagonism which lies deeper at the level of the economic conditions of existence and it's not clear from this text what this deeper antagonism is about it's Marx referring here to the hidden dialectic of value and anti-value relation I like to think so. Relations between debtors the issue for Marx and for us and as in the case of Renton Profit and the Merchants Capital is how the debt credit relation is perpetuated and transformed into a fundamental driving force of value in motion and with what consequences. The development of microfinance in India recently now has some 12 million individuals hooked into having to pay off loans by producing as much value as they possibly can. If they can't do so they're closed upon. This is the famous trick of the subprime mortgage. Piling up debt on vulnerable and marginalised population is in short the way to discipline the borrowers into being productive labourers productive defined as productive of value that can be appropriated by capital in the form of an exorbitant interest rate. More close to home the future freedoms of debt-encumbered students and debt-encumbered homeowners are severely curtailed. The Merchants Capital finds it harder and harder to organise value production along conventional lines and to incentivise that by any other means. On the other side of the ledger my pension fund is invested in debt in the belief that that debt will be redeemed. But that future if that future does not materialise and the debt is not redeemed then the fictitious value of my pension fund disappears into the black hole of anti-value. This looming of unfunded liabilities stretching endlessly into the future. National debts appear even more intimidating in the same way that individuals are controlled by their debts so states are weighed down with the anti-value wielded by their bondholders. The danger exists that the economic system will collapse under the dead weight of anti-value. What happened to Greece after 2011 is a small scale example. When debt becomes so huge that there is no prospect then debt peonage rules. The formation and circulation of interest-bearing capital is in effect the circulation of anti-value. Now it may seem strange to think of the main financial centres of today's global capitalism such as the city of London, Wall Street, Frankfurt, Shanghai and the like as centres of anti-value formation but that is what all the debt-bottling plants that dominate the skylines of these global cities truly signify. The danger which Marx hinted at in his writings on banking, finance and fictitious capital formation is that in the absence of any firm material base as to what money is about and in the context of political forces dominated by a global oligarchy armed with self-serving but erroneous economic theories reinforced by clear ideological preferences for unregulated market freedoms then capital in general will degenerate into one vast Ponzi scheme in which last year's debts are retired by borrowing even more money The central banks are currently creating sufficient new money to prop up stock exchange and asset values for the benefit of the oligarchy in the here and now This then leaves the central bank with the problem of how to retire the debts they have accumulated on their balance sheets The scenario of his escalating social inequality that Marx depicted in his conclusion to volume one of capital will become even more emphatic though achieved this time by different mechanisms of financial manipulation The rich grow richer by financial manipulations while the poor become poorer through the necessity to redeem their debts both individual and collective as in state borrowings Meanwhile, valorisation seems almost an afterthought left to the poorest countries on planet Earth to struggle with The concept of anti-value reaches an apogee in the massive devaluations that occur at times of major crises In volume one of capital Marx provides us with a concrete example of how this works Marx's law, accepted by Ricardo which states that since every sale implies a purchase then sales and purchases must always be in equilibrium Acceptance of this so-called law implies that general crises are impossible This would be the case in a pure barter economy In a monetised economy, however simple circulation takes the form of commodity to money to commodity and backing care There is nothing that impels somebody who is sold for money If all economic agents decide, for some reason easier breakdown of faith in the system to hold and save money then circulation ceases and the economy crashes as value is negated This is what Keynes later defined as the liquidity trap Anti-value prevails over value because value can remain value only through continuous motion The cumulative loss devaluation of asset values in the United States in the crisis of 2007-2008 was, for example, calculated to be something of the order of $15 trillion which is close to the market value of one year's total output of goods and services The importance of pairing of value and anti-value in Marxist thinking is either ignored or given short-shift in presentations on the subject But a dialectical formulation based upon the negation of value and formulation of classical and neoclassical economics can't possibly grasp the example to understanding the crisis tendencies of capital When the Marx himself understood all the implications of this is an interesting question His lengthy and often confusing investigation of the British financial system in Volume 3 of capital show he understood very well that an accumulation of money capital means for the most part nothing more than an accumulation of claims to future production Banking and credit were becoming the most powerful means while the continuation of this system is incentivized They were also becoming the most effective vehicle for crises and swindling An unchecked accumulation of fictitious capital could mean that all connection with the actual process of capital's valorisation is lost right down to the last trace The effect would be to confirm the illusion that capital is automatically valorised by the belief which is widespread in the population I put money in a savings account and it accrues the interest of a compounding rate over time It appears magical I do nothing and it grows But now that seems to be the way much the whole economy is supposed to grow No wonder Marx thought of the financial system as the height of the fetish tendencies of capital The credit system he says is an imminent form of the capitalist mode of production I quote The valorization of capital founded on the antithetical character of capitalist production permits actual free development only up to a certain point which is constantly broken through by the credit system The credit system hence accelerates the material development of the productive forces and the creation of the world market At the same time credit celebrates the violent outbreaks of this contradiction, crises and the supportive of capitalist production enrichment by the exploitation of others later into the purest and most colossal system of gambling and swindling and restricts even more the already small number of the exploiters of social wealth On the other hand however it constitutes the form of transition towards the new mode of production It is this that gives the principal spokesman for credit a nicely mixed character of swindler and profit Now Marx in writing the masters of the universe that the Wall Street is often called have performed far better of swindlers even as they cultivate the art of false prophecy to justify their swindling Alas also there are a few signs that the evolution of the credit system and the clearly increasing power of the circulation of interesting varying capital that take futures constitutes a transitional stepping stone towards the emergence of some new mode of production Indeed the imaginary we are left with is a hoard of insatiably greedy investors to buy off almost any serious opposition force feeding the rest of the world a diet of indigestible credit money that then has to be redeemed later down the line by everybody working under conditions of debt peonage Why would financiers celebrate the violent outbreaks of crises At first glance this seems counter intuitive but when it comes to the circulation of anti-value then the crisis is indeed a moment of triumph for the forces of anti-value even as it is to despair and realisation of value In a crisis said the banker Andrew Mellon way back in the 1920s assets returned to their rightful owners i.e. him Crises typically leave in their wake a mass of devalued assets that can be picked up at fire sale prices by those who have the cash or privileged connections to pay for them This is what happened in 1997-8 and East and South East Asia Perfectly viable firms went bankrupt for lack of liquidity were pulled out by foreign banks In crises Marx typically evokes the possibility of 1. The physical destruction and degradation of use values 2. The forced monetary depreciation of exchange values and 3. A concomitant devaluation of values as the only rational way to overcome the irrationality of over accumulation Notice the language here Each of the forms involved use value, exchange value and value is subject to a specific form of obligation One form does not automatically imply the other Devaluation and depreciation of exchange values does not necessarily mean the physical destruction of the use values The latter can become free goods for the revival of capitalist accumulation This is one of the ways in which anti-value works to restore the conditions of value production The subway system that went bankrupt devaluing the subway and depreciating the investors capital left behind the use value of the tunnels that we still use when we travel the London Underground The depreciation of housing values in the crisis of 2007 and 2008 in the United States left behind a huge stock of housing use values that could be bought up by private equity companies and hedge funds for a song and put back into profitable use Now Marx was fully aware of these sorts of possibilities He notes how capital undertakes investments which do not pay and which pay only as soon as they have become in a certain degree devalued and in many undertakings where the first investment was in the capital and may not mean any substantial improvement in use values At this point I need to push the theory of anti-value onto another topic The theory of anti-value also has to embrace a whole range of activities which are not productive of value even though they are essential and necessary for the functioning of capital This brings us to the fourth question of unproductive labour which was discussed at great length by Adam Smith Marx agreed that workers employed in marketing do not produce value otherwise he would have to concede that value could be produced by market exchange They can, however, be a source of surplus value There are other machines which can produce value but whose use can increase relative surplus value by lowering the cost of wage goods options in circulation times amounts, says Marx, to reducing the negation of creative values But it less has to be deductive because of increasing the rate of exploitation of unproductive labour then more surplus value is left over for the capitalist Unproductive but socially necessary activities like bookkeeping, retailing and proper state regulation and law enforcement are not inherently anti-capitalist But if everyone tries to make a living by such means while nobody engages in production then capital would die out The conclusion is obvious excessive as opposed to socially negative value along with hyper-bureaucratisation that produces no value with corporations as well as in the state sector These are all a threat to the reproduction of capital even without being specifically anti-capitalist in form or intent It is one of the accidental ways in which value and motion can come up Loaded costs and increasing inefficiency of circulation, regulation of bureaucratic support including policing can absorb vast amounts of value far too much of the U.S. economy is currently directed to busy but useless activities and this acts as a drag upon value and surplus value production and circulation Hence, some hypothesise the great stagnation of contemporary capitalism And this of course is standard fair and almost all right-wing critiques of the state but excessive regulation and bureaucratisation is the big enemy of market freedoms and hence a full-fledged capitalist development which supposedly benefits everyone There was of course one of capital that totally unregulated free market capitalism would not benefit everyone but merely concentrate on more wealth and power than the top one in the sand But the right-wing critique has more than an element of truth in emphasising the deleterious effects upon value production and circulation of excessive resort to unproductive labour Economies and increasing efficiencies and the necessary costs of circulation are therefore crucial, Marx argued If unproductive labour will not to become a major if unwitting locus One unsurprising result is that conditions of exploitation of living labour in these unproductive activities can be as vicious in some instances even more so than they are in production The balance between socially necessary and excessive unproductive labour is hard to define Much of political debate about the regulatory environment is precisely caught up in trying to establish adequate norms On this point, Marx's discussion about the working day provides an interesting template Fierce inter-capitalist competition for absolute surplus value leads to such extensions of the working day and intensity of labour as to endanger the worker's life health and ability to labour It was therefore necessary even for the standpoint of capital to institute some collective forms of regulation to put a floor under competition as it were so as to protect capital from the destructive effects on the labour force The balance with other interests became increasingly powerful so as to restrict the length of the working day even more dramatically This would constitute an anti-capitalist threat from the other direction The adjudication between the rights of labour and the rights of capital over working hours depends on the balance of class forces Marx's famous line Between equal rights, force decides The balance between productive and unproductive labour in any capitalist social formation is likewise arrived at But the main point that I want to make here is that there is a connection to anti-capital to anti-value which is significant in that state regulation can actually support capital but there comes a point where state regulation can go the other way and be antagonistic to capital which brings us to the question of the direct politics of anti-value which Marx frequently writes about by the way Anti-capitalist activities and politics based in devising alternative ways of living outside of commodity production and exchange are widespread, though often small scale If, as both are often insist, value is alienated labour then the political quest for an unalienated existence entails the active and conscious negation of the capitalist royal value of individual and collective lives which leads us to the point that there is a connection between the values of anti-value politics Solidarity economies and intentional communities for example may seek to ensure their own reproduction beyond the reach of the royal value Their estranged relations amongst themselves and wealth with others will not necessarily be based on market mechanisms anarchist communes, religious based communities and indigenous social orders constitute heterotopic spaces within the interstices of the capitalist system but outside of the royal value There is always the danger of course that such non-value producing activity appropriated by capital as a basis for value production i.e. appropriated as a free gift of human nature will function as some kind of reserve for the reproduction of the industrial reserve army of increasingly redundant and disposable labourers Capital creates openings for oppositional politics and circulates and expands We can imagine capitalist activity at almost any point and this whole circulatory process that we're looking at and at the same time through its mobilisation of the powers of art, science and technology which despite itself creates an opposition between the rule of value of socially necessary labour time on the one hand and disposable labour time or not labour time on the other It tends on, again quite marked on the one side to create disposable labour time on the other to convert it into surplus labour time If it succeeds too well at the first then it suffers from surplus production and unnecessary labour is interrupted because no surplus labour can be realised by capital The inability to realise value then becomes an insurmountable valid barrier which is the point that we started with The more this contradiction develops the more does it become evident that the growth of the force as a production can no longer be bound up with the appropriation of alien labour but that the mass of the workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour which is of course the transitional thing of the power of social production such that disposable time will grow for all but real wealth is a developed productive power of all individuals the measure of wealth is then not any longer in any way labour time but rather disposable time The workers can recover that immeasurable sense of value that they lost in the original fictional wage labour contract with capital to convent them to an alienated existence in which the valorisation of capital became their singular destiny Here we encounter some interesting political paradoxes Much of the concern in recent critical commentaries has been to incorporate knowledge and science unpaid household work and the free gifts of nature into the value calculus Are they not, after all, a source of value? Marx's answer that they are analogous to the case of machines they cannot be a source of value as capital defines it even as they are a source of relative surplus value for the capitalist class insofar as they contribute to the productivity of labour power but currently has a widespread desire to incorporate the hithitude not valued into the regime of capitalist value and production and circulation This strategy is understandable partly because of the positive connotations that a term like value has and the understandable demand for recognition and what is all too often ignored but it gets things entirely the wrong way around politically It fails to understand the dialectical role of not or anti-value and of unalienated labour and disposable time in oppositional politics of unalienated value and unalienated labour that a deep and widespread popular critique of the capitalist mode of production and its distinctive form of value and its alienations can be mounted and it is from these sites too that the liniments of a past post capitalist economy might best be identified To be a producer of value and surplus value within a capitalist mode of production is, and Marx noted, not a blessing but a misfortune Knowledge, information, cultural activities and the like can all be commodified into capitalists At the same time their potential for unalienated and free activity forms a cutting edge for anti-capitalist politics From this contradictory position cultural producers of all sorts form a significant potential block for radical political action The search for an unalienated life among cultural producers and the place of the appropriation of their products or a parasitical long-tail class is a growing point of tension but for the most part their politics revolves in a more contested terrain of capitalist control Likewise, the fact that household labour does not enter into the value calculus suggests this as another potential site for the articulation of an anti-capitalist politics presuming that its own internal contradictions and alienations with respect to gender patriarchy, sexuality and childbrew and practices and the like can be resolved Even as more and more household labour activities become commodified and taken to the market with food, nails and hair cutting labour time spent in the household increases in spite of some would say because of the advent of labour-saving household technologies washing machines and robot vacuum cleaners and the like but the labour done for others within households and across the broad and social solidarity is configured around the production and protection of the commons can become a powerful antidote for the dominance of capitalist commodity production and its associated social relation granting wages for household labour should be reassured this that household labour can in principle be integrated into the capitalist mode of production and accorded the status of alienated labour the wages for household campaign or for families from the 1970s was a brilliant intervention the focus attention on the gross and aggressive gender questions in the Marxist tradition was entirely wrongheaded as some of its proponents later freely admitted in the political remedies it proposed none of this I would have occurred if I had been more fully appreciated there have been parallel moves to integrate the free gifts of nature into the stream of value production by some arbitrary valuation devices those proposed particularly by environmental economists this amounts to nothing more than sophisticated greenwashing and commodification of a space from which a fierce attack upon the hegemony of the capitalist mode of production and it's an alienated relation to nature through commodification to be mounted in a fashion yet the predominant political movement in recent times is the integration into the value theory framework if value under capitalism is about the production of alienated labour and the alienated labourer then why on earth would anyone who has a progressive campaign to be subsumed within such a regime devaluation finally can also hit the labourer a terror of the commodity labourer wages up curtailed and the health and wellbeing of the labourer's personal labour capacities during the effective nationalisation of General Motors in 2008 for example a dual employment structure emerged in which the older workers maintained their wages and benefits while new workers were hired much lower wages with far weaker benefits the devaluation of labour power and depreciation of its values when prolonged or deepened can lead to physical destruction of the labouring population even as capital usually falls in some sort of political response from the labourers both individual and collective the power of anti-value has to be confronted in relation to the value theory if as I suspect this is the deeper antagonism buried in the gut of capital circulating this value in motion then making this contradiction legible is one important step towards confronting the depth here in it which increasingly seems to enable seems enabled to dictate the fact that so many people find it harder to envisage the end of capitalism and the end of the world has everything to do with the fact that the future of capital accumulation is foreclosed in a towering volume of debt as anti-value for many the only seeming hope is that some external intervention or a collective event of some sort will save us it will not the only thing that could save us is an explicit winding down if not demolition of capital circulation it prefigures how capital's crisis tendencies can take different forms and move around from one moment e.g. production to another e.g. realisation this insight is also crucial alas it is often ignored crises do not, Marx tells us contrary to much popular opinion necessarily spell the end of capitalism but set the stage for its renewal it is here that we see most clearly the dialect parole of anti-value in the reproduction of capital and violent solutions for the existing contradictions says Marx violent eruptions that reestablish the disturbed balance for the time being but the reconstitution of capital is insecure and has limits and accumulation of debts claims on future value production may outrun the capacity to produce and realise values and surplus values in the future even if the debts are successfully redeemed the obligation to repay them forecloses on alternative futures debt peonage and I am going to take out my way of conclusion so thanks