 I wanted this week to talk about the relationship between value and money. Most of Marx's theoretical discussion occurs using value terms, that is, labour values. Almost all of his empirical examples and almost all of the data we have about the world is of course expressed in pound shillings and pens in money terms. So the question arises what's the relationship between labour values as Marx theorized them and the money terms. Are we to assume that money is an accurate representation of value? If not, why not? If not, what are the consequences? Is it possible that money systematically distorts values in some ways, even as it represents them? I guess my history as a geographer comes in, I kind of think of maps and map projections and the realities and one of the things I think we should be aware of is if there are systematic distortions as occurs with all forms of map projections then we should be aware of what they are so that we don't actually misread the data in relationship to the value or vice versa. So this is for me a rather important topic because also in a lot of Marxist writings you find people kind of talking about the theory and value terms and then suddenly they produce a mass of data or all in money terms as if there's no potential problem in this whatsoever. No, I'm not saying that's illegitimate. I'm just saying that before we accept any of the data and any of the monetary information we have we should have a good idea as to what the critical relationship is between money and value. Without that, go back to my map projection thing. Without that it would be like trying to cross the Atlantic and the only information you had was an interrupted more wider projection which has of course a great big gap down the center of it and I think it would be rather difficult to do. Now let me go back to the foundation of this and I have a bit of a manuscript which I'm going to utilize. I have a few empty boxes which I want to take up towards the end. Value is a social relation that we established at the very beginning and as such it's immaterial but objective. I cite Marx when he talks about the phantom like objectivity of value arises because not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values. Their status as values contrast with the coarsely sensuous objectivity of commodities as physical objects. We may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish. It remains impossible to grasp it as a thing possessing value. The value of commodities is like many other features of social life such as power, reputation, influence, charisma and the like an objective social relation that craves a material expression. In the case of value this need is met, Marx claims, through what he calls the dazzling form of money. Now Marx is very careful with his language. He refers to money almost exclusively as the form of expression or as the representation of value. He scrupulously avoids the idea that money is value incarnate or that it is an arbitrary symbol imposed by convention on exchange relations which was a widespread view in the political economy of his time. Value, he argues, cannot exist without money as its mode of expression. Conversely, however autonomous it may seem, money cannot cut the umbilical cord that ties it to that which it is supposed to represent. Money and value are autonomous and independent of each other but dialectically intertwined. This dialectical intertwining has a long history and here is how Marx thinks of it. In the course of our presentation he writes it has become evident that value which appeared as an abstraction is possible only as soon as money is posited. On the other hand money circulation leads to capital and hence can only be completely developed on the basis of capital and in general it is only on the basis of capital that circulation can draw within its sphere all the moments of production. Hence in the course of analysis not only does the historical character of forms which belong to a definite historical epoch such as capital become evident but determinations like value which appeared to be purely abstract show the historical basis from which they had been abstracted and such determinations as belong to all epochs such as money show the historical modification which they undergo. Now for Marx as I've already mentioned all of the major categories and abstractions that he uses are grounded in the historical experience of capitalism and those categories many of them have a longer history than the history of capital itself. We've seen that in the cases of rent, interest and profit on merchants' capital all of which preceded capitalism. And this is also the case with money, money pre-existed. The problem however is how to distinguish between those characteristics of money that are unique to capitalism and the generic forms of money that pre-existed it and may for all we know continue to be a feature of human organisation after capital has been supplanted by some other mode of production. Now Marx in writing about this came to a lot of his conclusions relatively late in the day and to some degree he is at fault for sometimes leaving us the impression that value and money are integral and essentially identical with each other. And it was only just before he published in Capital that he realised that he needed to correct that misapprehension and there's an interesting distinction between the first edition of Volume 1 of Capital and the second edition which is considered the definitive edition and one of the main differences is the discussion of money and many of the things that surround it such as the fetishism of commodities the fetishism of commodities is in Volume 2 it was not in the first chapter of Volume 1 and the discussion of the money that I'm talking about now is also very much in the second edition not very clearly articulated in the first. So how do we find out the specific character of money under Capital? And on this the first chapter of the second edition of Capital is an object lesson on how to do this. Marx begins by noting how the classical political economists drew upon a fictional past that of Robinson Crusoe and the Robinson Crusoe myth and this enabled them to naturalise their categories as if they arose out of a state of nature and if they arose out of a state of nature they were immutable, unchanging and unchangeable immune to historical transformation. Marx however refers back to pre-capitalist societies instead to emphasise how categories are embedded in actual histories rather than derived from fictional stories. So after talking about the Robinson Crusoe myth and the classical political economists use of it he goes on to say let us now transport ourselves from Robinson's Island bathed in light to medieval Europe shrouded in darkness. But he then triangulates as it were on the specificities of Capital by imagining what the categories might look like after capitalism is gone, after capitalism is transcended. He uses the pre-capitalist past and what the French call the future anterior of communism as standpoints to understand the nature of contemporary Capital. The future anterior is not a utopian imaginary of what might happen but a specification of what will have happened before we get to communism. And Marx then spells it out this way. Let us imagine for a change an association of free men working with the means of production held in common and expending their many different forms of labour power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force. Under such unalienated circumstances the social relations of the individual producers towards their labour and the products of their labour are here transparent in their simplicity in production as well as in distribution. In this world there is no hidden hand of the market or laws of motion going on behind everyone's backs that limit our freedoms and certainly no state dictation. It is from these perspectives of before and after that Marx gets behind the veil of what he calls fetishism. It is evident that what I have been citing to you comes from the section on the fetishism of commodities. These fetishisms suffuse not only the writings of the political economists but also corrupt our common sense representations of commodity exchange and price fixing markets. Money is a supreme example of such a fetishism. We believe that money possesses social power over us as well as over others and of course to some degree it does the whole point of Marx's theory of fetishism. It is real but it's wrong. So how then are we to understand the dialectical relation between value and its representation as money and what contradictions flow there from? This was not an abstract theoretical question in Marx's time but a deeply contested political question that has contemporary epos and I think it's interesting to think about these. In 1840s long before he had worked out many of the central ideas of capital Marx found himself at odds politically not only with the Ricardian socialists in Britain but far more importantly with the imposing figure of Proudhon who had many followers among the French artisan class. Proudhon and his followers pose the following perfectly reasonable question Why are capitalists so rich and the working class is so impoverished when all the leading political economists of the time most notably Ricardo insisted that economic value was produced exclusively by labour If it was produced by them why did they not have the benefits of it? Proudhon concluded that the fault lay in the way that labour value was being represented in the market. The irrationality of money and of market exchange was the crux of the problem. What was needed he suggested was an alternative more rational way of measuring labour value a way which rested directly on the time workers spent labouring Workers should be paid in labour time chits, labour hours coupons or even coins that represented labour hours This would cure the problem. The Proudhonist movement looked also to restructure the money system Organise the supply of free credit reform central banking and create mutual credit institutions so as to solve the problem of social inequality Marx vehemently objected to these ideas in the Poverty of Philosophy published in 1847 The first part of the Grundrisse, the unpublished notebooks from 1857 was also taken up with a lengthy rebuttal of the monetary ideas of Derrim on a close colleague with Proudhon Since this continues to be a matter of contention it's useful to pay close attention to the controversy Marx does not object to many of Proudhon's formulations Many anarchists depict Marx as doing so but as you recall from his argument about the precursor to communism is very much in the anarchist camp The principle of the association of labourers with means of production held in common as a necessary condition for communism crops up in capital several times and it is prominent in Marx's critique of the Gotha program which is one of the last programmatic statements he wrote Marx does have however a broader perspective on what might be involved or to be more honest he came to have a broader perspective on it His studies of the necessary proportionalities would have to hold between production of means of production and production of wage goods showed that if chronic waste and inefficiency were to be avoided within a complex division of labour then some way had to be found for associated labourers to come together to plan collectively how to manage and consciously plan production across such divisions Later Marx has concluded that this should be done by the state but nowhere in capital does Marx propose that Marx does not object per se to the idea that working hours should be remunerated directly according to time spent in production He was in the Gotha program in a limited way in favour of a time-based value system The problem he had with Proudhon and his followers was their failure to engage critically with the social relations that defined labour value Under capitalism it is socially necessary labour time and not actual labour time that counts The socially necessary implies the existence of some hidden hand or law of motion to which both the capitalist and the labourer are subservient As early as the 1844 manuscripts Marx had concluded the value under capitalism was alienated labour secured by private property and the enclosure of the commons These were the conditions that produced the social inequalities and degradations to which labourers were subjected in the act of valorisation The objective of socialist revolution was the transformation of the social relations under which work is laboured If there is anything irrational here it is value at itself the alienated labour dominated by alien class power Money was in Marx's view a rational representation of irrational labour values and not as Proudhon supposed an irrational representation of a rational value system And here I quote Marx To leave production relations intact while attempting to eliminate the irrationality of price formation on the market is inherently self-defeating since it assumes away the very irrationality of value production of which it is the expression And this was what was wrong with Proudhon's position Proudhon could hold to it because he accepted the view that money was an arbitrary convention that had been superimposed upon society and could equally easily be transformed or abolished by political action In Marx's account the umbilical cord that connects value with money dialectically is vital to the co-evolution of both For Proudhon that umbilical cord does not exist Even worse from Marx's standpoint to seek a better mode of representation like timechits of alienated labour without offering a critique of the social relations upon which the capitalist law of value is founded was simply to reinforce that alienation This is what Marx believed Proudhon and his followers along with many Ricardian socialists were embotically doing This is why Marx's depiction of the future anterior of communism in Volume 1 of Capital is so important It depicts associated labourers with means of production held in common making conscious and therefore unalienated decisions in utter transparency without the social necessities dictated by capital labour relations of domination or the interventions of any external power such as the state or the market Whether or not Marx was right to take this position is of course open to debate but the coherence of his argument is hard to deny It would in his view be a huge error to assume that the social relations expressed in the labour theory of value could be reconstructed by reforms of the monetary system and he puts it this way The bourgeois society is not to be remedied by transforming the banks or by founding a rational money system Just as it is impossible to suspend the complications and contradictions which arise from the existence of money alongside the particular commodities merely by altering the form of money although difficulties characteristic of a lower form of money may be avoided by moving to a higher form so also is it impossible to abolish money itself as long as exchange value remains the social form of products It is necessary to see this clearly in order to avoid setting impossible tasks and in order to know the limits within which monetary reforms and transformations of circulation are able to give a new shape to the relations of production and to the social relations that invest on the latter Now in that language he is not entirely foreclosing upon the idea that monetary reforms might be good simply saying it doesn't get you out of alienated labour to which capital is prone Marx in fact posed two basic questions Here I quote him Can the existing relations of production and the relations of distribution which correspond to them be revolutionized by a change in the instrument of circulation, the organization of circulation? His answer to this question is, as we've seen, a resounding no Further question Can such a transformation of circulation be undertaken without touching the existing relations of production and the social relations which correspond to them? And on this one Marx equivocates It would be part of this general question he says whether the different civilized forms of money, metallic, paper, credit money, labour money the last name as the socialist form can accomplish what is demanded of them without suspending the very relation of production which is expressed in the very category of money and whether it is not a self-contradictory demand to wish to get around essential determinants of a relation by means of formal modifications But he then goes on to say Various forms of money may correspond better to social production in various stages One form may remedy evils against which another is powerless But none of them, as long as they remain forms of money and as long as money remains an essential relation of production is capable of overcoming the contradictions inherent in the money relation and can instead only hope to reproduce those contradictions in one or another form In the same way that one form of wage labour may correct abuses of another but no form of wage labour can correct the abuse of wage labour itself So one form of money may be handier, more fitting may entail fewer inconveniences than another But the inconveniences which arise from the existence of every specific instrument of exchange of any specific but general equivalent must necessarily reproduce themselves in every form however differently We've seen a case of this last week when we were talking about the nature of credit monies Credit monies enter into the collection of instruments which are available to capital as a means to deal with differential turnover times and in particular to deal with the difficulties of long-term fixed capital investments creation of physical infrastructures in the built environment and also long-term investments in the consumption fund In order to avoid hoarding vast amounts of cash credit money becomes crucial In other words, here is a situation where as capital develops and becomes more and more reliant upon fixed capital and physical infrastructures more and more does it need to turn to the credit system as a way of actually alleviating the difficulties of its accumulation process So Marx is I think very critically aware that the form of money which is evolving is relating very much to the historical progress and development of the capitalist mode of production itself But nobody I think would suggest, and this was of course one of the major things I was mentioning last week that the credit system is actually leading us into an emancipated society free of any alienations In fact, it spreads alienations, you know, doubles down on the alienations very wide and this is exactly Marx's point that you're not going to overcome the alienations by inventions of the monetary system and here's an invention of the monetary system that deepens and widens the scope of such alienations Now, however, this brings us to a contemporary point There is a lot of course contemporary interest in time sharing, labour exchanges, alternative monies and local economic trading systems as pathways to constructing an anti-capitalist future and I think it's useful to say something about the relevance of this argument between Marx and Proudhon for our own times My own observation from the few experiments I know of firsthand and my anecdotal readings about these experiments suggests that Marx's core insight, that at the end of the day it is the social relations that matter, is crucial Alternative money and exchange systems can work only if the participants refrain from the temptation to gain the system for their own personal advantage or to establish power relations within or over it Systems can work well among people who know and trust each other and are willing to share and for this reason such systems tend to remain rather limited in numbers they're still always vulnerable The advantage of small groups is you can look people in the eye and find out whether you trust them but none of us I think have ever lived in a world where at some point you thought you trusted them and you couldn't actually you often find yourself not trustworthy as well but this is I think a very important point it has in fact proven much harder of course to construct large scale more generalizable alternative money and exchange systems among distant others for precisely this reason that it's very difficult to create networks of trust and networks of sharing which are not open to abuse Contemporary experiments of new monetary forms that do seem to work like Bitcoin it turns out nothing more than conventional money under a different name and with a different source of issue When as in Argentina after 2001 and in Greece after 2011 breakdowns occur in the normal systems of exchange then alternative monetary systems often arise but they typically do not last long when normality returns Hardly surprisingly the proliferation of experiments with local monies and exchange systems has not radically transformed how capitalism in general works and given Marx's conclusions I think we should be very surprised if they did The technologies of money forms and uses have however been revolutionized several times over throughout capitalist history What do we do make for example of the labor theory of value when central banks are engaging in quantitative easing or when credit creation within the banking system seems to be so out of control whereas the discipline supposedly imposed by values and labor values upon money forms in an insanely speculative economy Marx recognizes the existence of such problems and he attempts to find answers by going back to the very foundation of his investigations and asking the question to what degree are the money systems in accord with the value systems When commodity exchange becomes a normal social act then one or two commodities crystallize out to play the role of the general equivalent In the capitalist era gold and silver became the preferred form of expression of value but this leads immediately to certain contradictions The use value of gold, sensuous commodity, becomes the form of appearance of its opposite value which is a social relation The concrete physical labor embodied in gold production becomes the mode of expression of its opposite abstract human labor The private labor involved in gold production takes the form of its opposite, namely labor in its directly social form Finally and perhaps most significant of all, money itself becomes a commodity an external object capable of becoming the private property of any individual Thus the social power that derives from social labor becomes the private power of private persons something that's impossible to do with the sociality of value Furthermore the individual carries a social power and their bond with society in their pocket Now there are a lot of distortions here and the distortions set up are systematic and major rather than accidental and minor While the alienation of labor in the valorization process is foundational for the production of capital It is mighty convenient to have a monetary system that locates social power in general in the hands of a privileged few outside of production itself and within the totality of capital is value in motion In other words class power is very much a product of the monetary system in ways that it is not inherent in the labor system So it is that balance between class power which is outside and what that class power does in confirming and instantiating the exploitation of living labor in production It's that balance which then becomes absolutely critical when we look at that whole notion of the totality of capital as value in motion Furthermore with the proliferation and increasing complexity of the social division of labor and exchange relations so grows the power of money This is where the fetishistic side of money gets constructed And this occurs such that the exchange relation establishes itself as a power external to and independent of the producers What originally appeared as a means to promote production becomes a relation alien to the producers As the producers become more dependent on exchange exchange appears to become more independent of them That leads into the idea that nobody is in a position to actually control the market Money is introduced as a servant of exchange but soon becomes a despotic master Adam Smith's hidden hand begins to take over Producers become price takers rather than price makers The gap between the product is product and the product is exchange value appears to widen Money does not create these antithesis and contradictions Marx explains It is rather the development of these contradictions and antithesis which creates a seemingly transcendental power of money We come across this also in the credit case That something that began as a servant becomes the despotic master And the despotic master of the transcendental power of money I think says it all Money then becomes a measure of individual wealth and power As a result money becomes a supreme object of desire Even more importantly as a means of production in its own right it forms the basis of class power and class rule That is you could not have the nature of the class power we have in society Without the specific distortions that money exerts upon value production These contradictions echo across all of Marx's writing His account of the labour theory of value is inextricably entangled with them The topic becomes even more complicated as Marx delves into the multiple functions of money It can be a measure of value, a mode of saving, a standard of price, a means of circulation Work and function as money of account, as credit money And last but not least as a means of production to produce capital Several of these functions it turns out are incompatible While gold is excellent as a measure of value, as a standard of price and as a vehicle for saving Because it is a metal that does not oxidize It is hopeless as a means of circulation The latter is better served by symbols of money like coins Fiat monies issued by the state and ultimately electronic monies These forms of money cannot exist without guarantees as to their qualities Initially in relation to the metallic base Marx, the business of coining like the establishing of a standard measure of prices Is an attribute proper to the state and here the state and the capitalist system becomes crucial The different national uniforms worn at home by gold and silver as coins Are taken off again when they appear on the world market Indicating a separation between the internal or national spheres of commodity circulation And its universal sphere, the world market The question then arises as to the interrelations between these radically different forms of expression of value Gold or silver versus coins versus central bank money And national versus international monetary instruments Just to complicate matters even further, Marx notes the possibility of a quantitative incongruity Between money, price and magnitude of value He suggests that this is inherent in the price form itself Prices realized in the market can yo-yo all over the place But this is precisely what makes this form the adequate one for a mode of production Whose laws can only assert themselves as blindly operating averages between constant irregularities Value is equated here in a sense with equilibrium prices Or natural prices in the language of classical political economy And these natural prices are defined as those prices which prevail when demand a supplier in equilibrium But that equilibrium can only be reached in a market where prices freely move up and down In response to demand and supply conditions in such a way as to converge on that equilibrium So the distortion which enters with the fact that the money form does not correspond exactly to value Is actually very helpful in a market situation of this kind Because it allows the flexibility and allows trading to go on in demand and supply unevenness And to bring you to an equilibrium point Even more troubling, and I want to come back to this a bit later Is that the money form may also harbor a qualitative contradiction And it's typical of Marx that he introduces this idea and doesn't make much of it But when you think it through, you find actually this is a pretty serious matter And this qualitative contradiction exists where the result that the price ceases altogether to express value Despite the fact that money is nothing but the value form of commodities Things which in and for themselves are not commodities Things such as conscience and honour can be offered for sale by their holders And thus acquire the form of commodities through their price Hence a thing can, formally speaking, have a price without having a value The expression of price is in this case imaginary like certain quantities in mathematics On the other hand the imaginary price form may also conceal a real value relation Or one derived from it, for instance the price of uncultivated land Which is without value because no human labour is objectified in it Labour as opposed to labour power is not a commodity either Any more than land and money are commodities, but they all have a price So this is not a minor question, this is a major question And what it is about uncultivated land which conceals a real value relation He doesn't say, and at least it tantalizingly open And I want to come back to that Any monetary system will create plenty of opportunities for anti-value to flourish Independently of the forces regulating valorisation If capital pours into speculating on the price of uncultivated land that has no value Then this constitutes a threat to the reproduction of capital Since it averts capital flow from productive to unproductive functions This is troubling for the labour theory of value because as the neoclassical economists early on complained If so much is going on in the price realm that is outside of what the value theory is about Then why bother with some shadowy phantasm of a concept such as labour values that have no material existence This is a classic critique of Marx's theory of value from neoclassical economics Why not stick with an analysis of market price phenomena and movements directly And just work from prices and that's that This is particularly important when money appears to go rogue on its own account With economic agents engaging in all manner of speculative binges And arbitrary credit creations in ways that seemingly bear no relation whatsoever To what valorisation is about This question of how to handle this issue of prices and value then becomes critical Now the arguments of the neoclassicals would be correct if value theory was simply meant to be a theory of price determination But this is not what the labour theory of value is about By rejecting Marx's theory of value as opposed to rejecting the classical political economic version Neoclassical economics buries Marx's question Why does labouring take on the alienated form it does under capitalism And why can it not escape this alien character If value is about alienation then this is something that takes us onto a different terrain Now there is of course not a word about alienation in any contemporary economics textbook The neoclassicals reduce the labour along with the consumer and the capitalist to a data point to a factor of production They abstract entirely from the person and his or her experiential world And this is the focus of Marx's complaint in his examination of the fetishism of commodities That social relations between people are reduced to relations between things Even as relations between things take on a mysterious and phantasmagoric social character And of course neoclassical economics studies the relations between things The neoclassicals construct magnificent theorizations based on the monetized categories of land, labour and capital as fixed things While forgetting entirely about labourers, capitalists and landlords in their unstable social relations And it is of course unstable and evolving social relations and their ramification That lie at the heart of Marx's enquiries It is alienated labour that defines the labour theory of value under the rule of capital When bourgeois economics interestingly realizes its own social emptiness, the lack that pervades its characteristic formulations In response by giving noble prizes to psychologists in the vain hope they can quantify a scientific material answer to non-material questions Such as economic expectations, the state of consumer confidence, or the fear of economic insecurity When things go wrong it's amazing how much they resort to all kinds of moralistic terms like animal spirits, infectious greed, irrational exuberance, moral hazard It goes all over the economics literature, it's absolutely astonishing And these are all conjured up to explain a way that which is inexplicable and visible to bourgeois economic theory Only Keynes seems to have understood the problem But most economists read Keynes if they continue to read him at all these days for his technical formulations While leaving the many pages devoted to the psychology of market behaviors and expectations unturned Contemporary economists would be horrified at Keynes's view on money And here I am going to give you a long quote from Keynes When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have haggred us for 200 years By which we have exalted some of the most distasteful human qualities into the position of the highest virtues We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money motive at its true value The love of money as a possession, as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyment and realities of life Will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity One of those semi-criminal semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shutter to the specialist on mental disease All kinds of social customs and economic practices affecting the distribution of wealth and economic rewards and penalties Which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and just they may be in themselves Because they are tremendously useful in promoting the cumulation of capital We shall then be free at last to discard all of these So that was Canes' contribution on this matter In an economy where the fetish desire for money and the form of wealth it represents is omnipresent When the surface appearance of well-being is measured in monetary units and when class privileges are conferred and consolidated by a combined of a money power And in a theory that places at its centre the idea of alienated social labour offers a standpoint from which to build a serious critique of capitalism Money, says Marx, destroys the community only ultimately to become the community And if we are to keep Marx's labour theory of value alive these days it has to be for its power of social critique Including that of the money forms rather than for technical reasons The fact that all forms of money permit social power to be appropriated by private persons does not stop at individuals It extends of course to states, particularly those like Germany, that practice mercantilist policies And it also extends of course to supranational institutions and corporations The complex territorialities of money systems add yet another layer of complexity to the foundational question of the relation between values and their monetary representation Perhaps the ultimate irony here is that the chronic need to find a material expression and representation for social values That led to the adoption of an italic base for global money in gold and silver could not function without social representations of what these metals were supposed to represent The gold and silver, the materially represented values, in turn required a non-material form of representation that could satisfy the needs of an ever expanding base of commodity exchange And packing the contradictions and the problems that flow therefrom is one of the most compelling questions of our time Now there are two issues that I would want to add to this. I've got to the end of the part of the manuscript that is firmly written The two issues, I want to go back very much to this question of those items which have a price but have no value There's been a great deal of literature in recent times on something called reputational value Of course they don't like value in this, but it points out that the market price of many commodities is set up in the normal way of cost of production and profit But then added to it is something which is representational that the price of Nike shoes is partly to do with reputation And it's partly to do, and so reputational value starts to become significant And the creation of reputational value is seeing into something which is outside of the value theory because it's not a product of labour Except insofar as the advertising and all of that is involved, but it can be seen as an addition And what this means is that this raises the general question which is set up in cognitive capitalism and the like as to what is contributed By knowledge and by reputation and by all these elements of advertising and all the rest of it What is contributed? Is there a form of value which has gone underappreciated within the Marxian lexicon Or are we simply dealing with another way in which prices are deviating from value, deviating systematically because of reputation And this is a serious kind of question because at some point it also tracks back to the way in which knowledge can be created and used in a certain kind of way And the importance of cultural artefacts and all the rest of it in terms of production Now on this Marx has I think some very interesting kind of questions about what is productive and what is unproductive And I'll give you perhaps the most famous quote that Marx provides us with on this He deals with Milton and he says, Milton who wrote Paradise Lost was an unproductive worker On the other hand a writer who turns out work for his publisher in factory style is a productive worker Now go back to the definition of productive and unproductive here Productive for Marx is productive of surplus value Not productive of a thing or anything like that, it's productive of surplus value Milton produced Paradise Lost as a silkworm produces silk as the activity of his own nature He later sold his product for five pounds and thus became a merchant But the literary proletarian of Leipzig who produced his book such as Compendium on Political Economy And the behest of his publisher is pretty nearly a productive worker Since his production is taken over by capital and only occurs in order to increase it A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker If she sells her song for money she is to that extent a wage labourer or merchant But if the same singer is engaged by an entrepreneur who makes her sing to make money Then she becomes a productive worker since she produces capital directly A schoolmaster who instructs others is not a productive worker But a schoolmaster who works for wages and an institution along with others Using his own labour to increase the money of the entrepreneur Who owns the knowledge and mongering institution is a productive worker But for the most part work of this sort has scarcely reached the stage of being subsumed even formally under capital And belongs essentially to a transitional stage Well of course you've gone through that transitional stage and this has become as it were A major kind of question of how do we deal with the cultural products How do we deal and in what ways do they integrate with the kind of system of value production And monetization with which Marx is working We kind of I think say reasonably well That if all everybody ever did was to write the equivalent of Paradise Lost We wouldn't live very long that other things need to be done And so the question brought a much broader question But I think the question of cultural labour and what cultural labour is about And how that can be caught up and this gets caught up Of course obviously with the issues of reputation and knowledge and cognitive capitalism and the like So there's a whole sphere of action in which this issue of the relationship between prices On the one hand and the price system on the one hand and the value theory on another Is in a way up to grabs and one of the reasons I completed this manuscript is I'm not quite sure where I'm coming down on it I'm thinking about it and worrying about it And I think I'll try and figure it out in the next few weeks There's something very important about this that needs to be taken up But parallel to this there's something else too And it is contained in the diagram Which is what is the role of free goods in capitalist production The free goods of nature and the free goods of human nature What Marx does is to actually talk about this in a very specific way And I can give you some hints as to what this is about He says there are certain things which we can take from the world Which cost us nothing Which are use values And these use values are critical for the way in which capital works They're not product, they're free gifts because they're not products of labor directly But these free goods are very important to the actual reproduction From the production of valorization and the reproduction of capital As he calls a free gift of nature he says an object of labor Something provided by nature free of charge As in the case of metals, minerals, coal, stone etc Of course such things may acquire a price Even though they have no value, if they are enclosed They become the private property of another And their owner extracts rents from them But in principle we have free goods coming in from nature The same would be true in terms of human nature And Marx says this about that That the maintenance of the reproduction of the work in class Remains a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital And the capitalist may safely leave this to the workers' drives For self-preservation and propagation Even the self-learned skills of the laborers Can be appropriated by capital free of charge And this is what capital seeks to do as much as it can Marx kind of puts it this way The socially productive power of labor develops as a free gift to capital Whenever the workers are placed under certain conditions And it is capital that places them under these conditions Because this power costs capital nothing While on the other hand it is not developed by the workers Until this labor itself belongs to capital It appears as a power which capital possesses by its nature Now this has become a very important issue again Around some of the arguments that occur around cognitive capitalism A lot of appropriation of free gifts of human nature Have been extracted from particularly with respect to computing Powers and peer-to-peer computing and the like I hope it was the sobering case of contemporary digital labor Michelle Bowens, who was a founding member of the peer-to-peer movement Put it this way That under the regime of cognitive capitalism Use-value creation expands exponentially But exchange value only rises linearly And is nearly exclusively realized by capital Giving rise to forms of hyper-exploitation While in classic neoliberalism Labor incomes stagnates In hyper-neoliberalism Society is deproliteranized i.e. wage labor is increasingly replaced by isolated And mostly precarious freelancers More use-value escapes the labor form altogether And the use-value creators go totally unrewarded In terms of exchange value Which is solely realized by the proprietary platforms The average hourly income of those actually doing the work Does not exceed $2 Which is way below the U.S. minimum wage The price-form here conceals the hyper-exploitation And what Bowens considers to be a new neo-futile-value regime That is even worse than traditional capitalism This regime relies increasingly on unpaid Corvée And creates widespread debt-peer-nage Now these forms of exploitation Which exist I think have to be entered into Have to be brought together with Marx's classic Understanding of the value theory And this brings me back to I think One very important point To go back to Marx's argument We cannot derive our categories Simply theoretically We always have to go back to The actual situation and try to derive them In some ways I think there's even a case to be made The distinction between Proudhon and Marx Over the money question Can be best understood In terms of the kind of class background With which they became very familiar Proudhon was in the 1840s Deeply enmeshed in the culture Of the independent artisan Or workshops in Paris So he was dealing with artisans And artisanal labour And the structure of the production In those workshops was quite simply That the workshop was at the back The shop was at the front And you sold your goods you produced at the back You sold it at the front And it was that kind of thing This was not exactly a situation In which you would look and say There's alienated labour going on here What was clear was that The value of the product Was not recompensing the labour put into it And therefore when Proudhon starts to talk About what's going on in the market And talking about money And reform of the monetary system And trying to get things priced In labour value terms In labour hours terms Would make some sense I think To the artisan groups With which he was working And you might make the argument That he was drawing his ideas About mutualism and associationism And all the rest of it out of That culture and reflecting that culture Marx of course is reflecting A very different culture And I think the best way to look at this Is not to look so much at Marx But at Engels When he came to Manchester in 1844 And wrote The Condition of the Working Class In England in 1844 The introduction to that I think Is worthwhile reading Because Engels of course Was familiar with artisanal labour In Germany and workshop style Labour practices and processes But in the introduction He's completely astonished At the nature of the social relations Which he saw in Britain And of course when he got to the factories In Manchester he kind of looked At my God this is something That is absolutely different Now we of course from our perspective Kind of maybe did not see The difference but to him And I think to Marx also This was a shock A total shock And Marx of course We had The Condition of the Working Class And that's what put him together with Engels And Marx started to recognize That the factory labourer Was that was the site from which He was going to draw his thinking And many respects of course The theory of alienation of labour Which is coming out comes out very much About the factory worker in Britain And the situation of the factory worker in Britain And I think there's a very interesting Kind of question of how people at the time Came to terms with all of this It's a very nice book by Marcus Professor of English at Columbia Which is about Engels in Manchester And what he points out was That Engels description of labour In Manchester in 1844 Was the first time That anybody had written down To come to terms with what the hell This was all about Dickens who didn't write about this To a relatively late in life And Dickens was always talking about Subproletariat in London And all of the kinds of merchant stuff And all of that But Dickens couldn't write about it Until he finally got around to Writing about Coke Town And when he did he didn't write about it From the standpoint of the industrial labourer He wrote about it from the standpoint Of the practices of the industrial working class As he shocked by the practices Of the owners But the point here is that That this difference Between what categories You would draw from Looking at a factory system And what categories you would draw Looking at an artisanal labour system This difference is maybe one of the big Differences that underlies The way in which Proudhon Approached the question The theoretical question And the way in which Engels The way in which Marx Approached it And of course Marx felt that The factory system was the way Of the future That was the future you were looking at The future of capitalism And you're looking at all those factories In Manchester But if that is the case Then there's also kind of says To us How do we go about Rethinking the value categories Of Marx and rethinking their relationship To the price system Based upon contemporary Conditions Contemporary conditions are such as that You compare to the factories of Bangladesh And Shenzhen and things like that Imagine you're in Manchester And you wouldn't be far wrong But there are a lot of other things going on as well Which make it a much more complicated Kind of thing My own view of this is that The relationship between Value and price system That Marx sets up Is a good foundation But it's a foundation for something That has to be somewhat broader And if I take up these questions Of what to make Of these things that have a price But which have no value What to make of reputational value How to integrate questions of that sort That we understand better And in particular how to deal with Not so much The basic contradictions Which I think Marx Very cleverly spells out as to why Why money is not the same as value And why money in many ways is the opposite Of value and opposed to value Of the contradiction there But what are the further And more detailed contradictions which exist So this is the kind of constructive work That it seems to me we need to do To understand much better Our own kind of condition And the conditions under which Of labour on which we're now living Now there's no question in my mind That we live in a society Where alienation is widespread In other words I don't think We'd argue that we're anywhere close To emancipation in fact alienation Seems to me to be one of the crucial Issues of the day so in that Sense I think that Marx was correct To kind of insist That the social relation Of alienation is foundational Of what it is that we need To be looking at No matter whether we're looking At reputational value or Can there be alienation attached To compensatory Consumerism and the like There are all sorts of questions Which need to be addressed there But I think it's an Interesting way Of using capital Again as a foundation For further investigations And using I think Marx's Own method of kind of saying These things are changing You find things which are at one point In capitalist history seem to be A reason to be benevolent In relationship to the dynamics of the system Only to become Horror stories as you move Forward and the same thing I think applies when we start to think About what the left Proposes and how it thinks About the alternatives And in what ways we set up And decide what are the valid Alternatives to a capitalist system That is plainly in a lot of trouble Okay so I'm going to leave it there And let's have a discussion About some of these ideas Anybody want to make some comments Comments anyone I would like to know what's the role Of appropriation in this debate Of price without value Appropriation Yes because We talked about Reputation of price What about other kinds of things That don't have value with the price For example sperm That is sold in the market So what is the ideal Of appropriating those things When the price gets Abstracted from value And as Marx says The price appears as the thing That just specifies Things Yeah I mean again This comes back to Things That should be free gifts of nature I mean what Marx Sort of says okay There are lots of things that should be free gifts Of nature and were free gifts of nature But then they got enclosed And the same is true of Knowledge There's a big battle going on About the enclosure of knowledge Or freedom of knowledge And as soon as It gets enclosed of course It can Be commodified and it has Therefore A rent attaches to it And so rental appropriations Become very widespread On these free gifts Now it's possible Also for working people To extract rent Sometimes Somebody who's worked for capital Can build a certain fund of knowledge And certain experience And can at a certain point Actually say I have this knowledge You want this problem solved I'm the only one who can solve it Because I'm the only one who has the experience And knowledge to do it So it's possible to build And A monopoly rent on what could be A free gift What Marx Is arguing for In his Future Ontario Kind of discussion Is a different kind of society Where the free gifts are indeed free gifts And should remain free gifts But we're surrounded Precisely by Systematic appropriation of anything And privatization And the closure of almost anything And that's again What Marx would argue Is the spread of alienated relations Rather than Anything that's going on In the cause of human emancipation So do you think that we should think About social infrastructure As the public? Well I think There are many aspects of contemporary society Again you get A difference between revolutionary transformation And reformist kind of practices And I don't I like to think of revolutionary reforms You know those reforms which actually push you In a path towards something different And I think that For instance banking should be considered A public utility I think that A lot of the innovation that has gone On inside of banking Which we think came unplugged In 2007-2008 it didn't It's actually tripled Since then I mean this is the astonishing Thing that's going on And you start to look at the debt figures We were talking about it last time You see kind of A lot of stuff which We were being force fed Without even Even knowing it because The experts Are the ones who control The knowledge and the policies and the politics And You know Then there's an attempt Which is not unreasonable attempt To set up alternative institutions Like Say credit unions or something of that kind Which you know Is better than Wells Fargo Which will give you 18 accounts That you didn't know you had And charge you You know although again Many of those things You like to think Can be trusted But But again having The knowledge That can actually allow us to Regulate And deal with them It's another question but I think The more we can roll back This kind of privatization of everything The more we can treat things Belonging in the public domain And social domain and socialized The problem is that A lot of that is seen In terms of state ownership but As I think you can see from Marx's rhetoric It's associated forms of labor Which is the foundation Of the alternative not I mean there's many interesting things I mean you know Anarchists are fond of looking at Marx As being some sort of total state determination He doesn't mention state power once Capital He does in the Communist Manifesto That the instruments of credit should be In the hands of the state But In capital it's not about that at all But he does say You can't imagine associated laborers Working things out successfully By just Little groups here and everywhere Doing what they like I mean there's an issue of how do you Make sure enough electricity is flowing And how do you work that out He does say we've got to have Associated laborers working together And planning, conscious planning And of course conscious planning Is immediately associated with state functions And so people get turned up But Marx is kind of saying My analysis of how Capitalism works Says the only way we can get out of this System is by conscious planning Of this sort and whether it could be Decentralized to the point where That little thing would take any notice Of anybody else Is another question Yeah At the risk of something very simplistic It seemed to me that representation was Of the core of the way in which money Is basically a system of representation And that it seems like equivalences Will follow from that But your analysis seemed to almost reverse that So that it is actually representation First and then equivalences Follow from representations Is the question of what is it that capital Cannot represent What are all these things that somehow Are not who you talked about Milton for instance And all these other forces That basically fall by the sideways Or are misrepresented because The representation is inaccurate So I was just thinking If you could speak a bit more about The question of why is it that This question of representation is so key Because Well it's key in the relationship Between Value And money And that's why Marx His language is money As an expression or A representation Of value And it needs a representation Because Value is Social And has No material Immediate material Way of Being expressed So it needs a representation So that's Why representation comes up In this instance Now how Capitalists would represent The alienation of labour Well capitalists don't represent How the left represents alienation Of labour is very important Is that Proudhon was accepting Certain kinds of aspects Of the representational schema That set up about The relationship of money To value And Proudhon is not seeing them As dialectically related He's seeing them as That you could work on the money thing And if you work the money thing out Then everything would be okay So What Proudhon was doing Was accepting a certain form of representation Which Marx thought was wrong And that the form of representation Was one in which There was an autonomous And independent but dialectically Intertwined Is the way The language Marx tends to Utilize And that If you then represent That dialectical relation But also accept The independence and the autonomy That exists within it Then you can understand the dynamic That goes on and you understand What it is you can do By reforms of the monetary system As you see Marx is not saying Don't reform the monetary system He says reforming all the time But we can do all kinds of Maybe we can do some impressive Progressive things with it Like aid banks, mutual banks And all that kind of stuff We can do those sorts of things But there's a limit to that Because we know that the exchange Value Structure is such that it is Representing, always representing Alienated labour Until we get to Unalienating labour As he describes as being the condition Of a communist society Until we get to that point So that's The way you're playing Now can Neoclassical economics Represent alienation? No, not at all Can't do it at all And then you kind of say well does that mean alienation Doesn't exist and as far as neoclassical economics Is concerned it doesn't exist Because you can't represent it And so the representational System becomes very very important And when Marx is challenging Neoclassical economics Challenges Marx by kind of saying Hey this kind of Very kind of notion of You know, labour values And alienated labour is just to You know Mushy to really Bear weight of any kind of scientific Theorizing But Marx is saying that's not the case We can do some scientific Theorizing on the basis of it But it's dialectical, not you know Because the neoclassicals have a Positive model and they can't possibly So what can be represented What can't be represented is of course Very important discussion But that's a broader discussion What's going on in this case Is simply what's the relationship To value and its monetary Representation And it's a very specific kind Of question of representation That is involved in that Yeah So in the commodity form Marx always talks about how Labour and nature are sort of married But could you maybe Talk a little bit about When we get into questions of Cognitive labour It seems like that division Is harder to think about Or is it, you know Well You know The metabolic relation to nature Is foundational cause for all human Action The reason Marx doesn't deal With it very much In relationship to capital Is because he sees it as a universal Category, it's true Of all human societies that They have to manage Their metabolic relation to nature Somehow or other So to talk about a metabolic relation To nature under capitalism Is not To examine the metabolic Relation to nature is not a way Of specifying what's particular About capitalism And Marx is interested in What is particular to capitalism Some people would argue And I think there's some truth to this That by kind of excluding Metabolic relation to nature From any discussion of The specificity of Capital He missed an opportunity In the same way he kind of says How many other societies have had money But under capital looks like this He could have said Well every society Has a metabolic relation To nature Capital Here it is He does some of that A lot of the time he doesn't do enough I mean people like Paul Birkitt and John Bellamy Foster And so on have been trying to argue That Marx did a lot more of it than everybody says On the other hand they're saying He said more than he really did say There's a problem with that But I think it's better To admit that Marx missed an opportunity On that one And Again this is something that we can reconstruct And I think that the kind of work Of people like Foster and Birkitt And so on helps reconstruct Some of that even though From my taste they get into a sort of Apocalyptic visions and the song Which I don't share But I think there is a way in which That question can be approached In terms of what's the distinctive Metabolic relation to nature Which is characteristic of a capitalist economic system And I think we're seeing that Coming to the fore very much In the nature of debates right now That issues that were an art of significance In the 19th century And Marx are now Coming very prominent So we have to take that one very much Into account So the role of free goods Last week though In focusing on Anti-value In the moment of evaluation I felt that At least the Certain types of political practice That comes from not coming off that Mainly experiments With alternative currencies and so on Which seem to figure more In the Prudonian Count at least in terms of How you laid it out today So I mean how do we think About how those two moments Are connected more Namely on the production moment And the valorization moment And so in that way I think going back To the banking issue Might be interesting And of course in those literatures Today I think Marxist approaches Are condemned or Realized at any rate for Overlooking a certain autonomy That the monetary system Attains within the capitalist economy I recently read a paper That focuses on the Hybridity of capitalist money Referring to the fractional reserve system As a key feature Of the capitalist money And how do you think that Might figure into this? Well I think that figures in a lot In a way I think some of the Marxist Writing about this is Much too I mean why I emphasize The idea That Money is autonomous And independent But dialectically related Is precisely I think to try to Set up a framework of thinking Which is Which can address Some of the questions Is if it's seen as If the money form Is seen as being determined By value And that's What some people do And then I think You're lost Because you lose the fluidity But it doesn't seem to me That was what Marx was doing That's not what I sense that Marx Is doing at all If the critique is Of those people who see it As being determined Or broadly determined Or something like that But the money is determined By the value I think it's that Relation Which is very important And there aren't that many texts Which emphasize that The one I think is kind of Very interesting And I find he's familiar with it Which is Actually very interesting on this And he actually Sort of One of the theses is he says Marx is far more of an anarchist Than anybody ever thinks Quotes all those kinds of passages That Marx of the sort I read Which is kind of pretty much Straight anarchist thinking To some degree So I think that Keeping the The dialectical Relation in mind And not separating them And saying they're entirely Separated from each other Because I think then you get into a thing Of saying well we don't have to be bothered With the value stuff at all We just simply analyze The dynamics of the monetary system Which is a lot of neoclassical Economic thinking does Whereas I think it's very important But exactly what the relationship is I think we need a good deal Of work to Figure that out And I don't have The skills I think to do some of that Particularly on the financial front You need people who are On the inside of the system Who know the system pretty well Somebody like Michael Hudson And people like that I think are More on the inside And can do some of that stuff It takes collaborative work I think To try to Answer some of those questions Yeah Yeah Yes Is there also a Temporal aspect to these Things that have prime but not value In the sense that they are Behaving Somehow as a claim Of a future value approach The way in which Time would be Workable and in that way They behave somewhat like credit Well yes no The temporality of all of this is Kind of a Very Important question There are some very interesting books About time and marks And how to think through the temporality And of course I argue that You can't think through temporality Without spatiality as well Kind of rather critical That's the next lecture Yeah Yeah The idea of universal basic income Seems to Raise exactly this The Relationship between value and money When you think about how you're Deciding what the university is So I'm curious to hear Why do you think about it What can you say about it I mentioned this in the First class I mean Universal basic income Who's in favor of it and why I mean the Silicon Valley crowd Are in favor of it And are pushing it And You know Just simply Being conspiratorial about it I'd say well they have a vested interest In this because All of the technologies they're inventing Are displacing labor like crazy So we're going to end up With even more Vast Unemployed disposable Population that has no income And Then they're looking and say well god Who's going to Buy our stuff So they turn It's typical they hate government But then they turn to governments To give them enough income Give them enough money so they can Or get Netflix or something You know I mean it's So And The The autonomous left The negrie Crowd They're in to this too For other reasons I think that People wouldn't have to work And zero work Is part of what Their aim is And That people should just be given enough money To get a basic income Receive a basic income And we should work towards a zero work society And maximize free time So There's a progressive way of doing this And a non-progressive way now A basic income comes out Which way will it be Well you've got a good idea I guess And to the degree that We've seen programs of this sort I mean let's face it They're both familiar in Brazil Was a little bit down this way And The Silicon Valley crowd Are talking about Not just simply basic income But Basic income which Carries with it certain responsibilities In much the same way that The Bolsa Familia in Brazil Arrested on that you have to Take your kids to school In order to get The Bolsa Familia So that was A redistributive requirement And There's plans sort of being suggested Out of Silicon Valley That everybody should put in a proposal For something they do I don't know culturally Or voluntarily Or they would have to suggest Some activities And then they would qualify For the basic income So there may be things like that In the works But I'm Again To the degree that I mean of course part of the argument Right now It comes from these passages in the Grunderie where Mark says basically Well as technological innovation Progresses So it's going to diminish The possibility of employment And turn the labourer away from being Actively involved in anything Although he'd become his machine Minders if anything And the words are something like The theory of value Will no longer really apply Except the capitalist will try To use it As a means to Try to order Their own society They need something like that To order their own society Now Again there's a Big debate over That passage We'll talk about this next time There's a big debate over that passage In the Grunderie Where Mark's talks about the general intellect And the way in which the general intellect Is Leading to A radical transformation Of labour processes to the point Where labour becomes redundant In which case if labour becomes redundant Then what's the point of having a labour theory of value It doesn't make any sense So That's the argument That Mark's made The trouble with the Grunderie series Is that it's a great piece of writing And everything, but a lot of it Is thought experiments Mark's saying if the world is like this Then that happens That was interesting Now I'm going to do another one And I think that They are interesting But I think the other interesting thing About that passage Is really talking about the qualities of fixed capital He wasn't talking about knowledge The way knowledge gets embedded in fixed capital It's being read as if he's talking about knowledge Without the fixed capital In which case you would say All forms of knowledge are a form of value So any old crap you write down Anywhere is valuable I mean it's kind of obviously nonsense No, Mark's is kind of saying it's only the knowledge That gets incorporated in the fixed capital In a certain kind of way Which actually changes the productivity of labour That's the only form of valuable knowledge So it's not that all knowledge is valuable No, actually Most of it's not There's only a small bit of it is Which is that part Which gets embedded in Intelligence The intelligence that gets embedded in the machine Which is put there By human ingenuity That kind of knowledge is what he's talking about In those passages of fixed capital Not talking about Knowledge in general But it's been taken as knowledge in general Is value producing Kind of go wow, that's great I can just sit down and write any old thing And think anything And it's value producing Which of course It's not Would you talk about Historical forms of value And the origin of the value In the classical capitalist societies Like England What do you think about Mexico Is the same value In the classical societies Like Mexico Or Latin America Well it would depend Again Okay there are a couple of issues You're talking about here And I will talk about this Next time There is an assumption In the Marxist literature That there is one value And I don't know where that assumption comes from The passage I read about Money When Marx talks about Money putting on Different national costumes The money system Is territorialized So there are currency regimes Around the world Marx also talked about National differences in wages Which are due to the fact that The cost of reproduction of labor power Vary from one part of the world to another Now What this would say to me is If there is a relationship between Money And value And the money system is territorialized Why would we say that the value system Is not territorialized also Well nobody talks about that Everybody assumes value is Value is And Marx certainly talks about World money But then the relationship between World money and national money becomes Problematic So we could talk about A world value schema We might want to talk also about Different territorialized value regimes And actually If you look politically You'll see that actually A lot of geopolitics these days Is about constructing that What is the trans-Pacific agreement about It's about trying to create A distinctive value regime Which is opposed to China And to Europe And which is therefore a Secluded arena Within which certain value relations Can be constructed What was the euro About European Union about It was doing exactly that So in fact what we see Going on is geopolitically Construction Of what seems to me are territorialized Value regimes So when you ask the question How does this all work in Mexico The answer is well It depends which value regime You're in and since you're in the NAFTA You agree inside of The proposals For the trans-Pacific agreement That's where you're embedded Now what we see In all those other examples Is there's usually a hegemonic power Within each value regime Which is dominating that value regime And which benefits primarily from that regime Germany undoubtedly benefited From the European Union in the way That clearly Greece did not In Portugal nor did Italy So that there is And the trans-Pacific agreement Entirely it's kind of weird Because you know Bernie Sanders and now Clinton And everybody else is going on about how This is going to destroy U.S. jobs actually This is a way of trying to Preserve U.S. jobs And trying to Well not necessarily U.S. Preserve U.S. hegemony In the face of Now whether that leads to jobs Or not another question But it's about U.S. Preserving its hegemony In relationship to all of the countries Around it including Mexico Which means that you know To the degree that you're inside of the U.S. regime Value regime You're caught in The dynamics of what that regime Is about. So I'm in favour of Something to think about distinctive Geographical value regimes And I don't see why that has not been Discussed in the Marxist literature As far as I know at all But it would seem to me logical Given that This again comes out You know Either the money thing is so Completely wacky a relationship to value That it can be territorialised And value cannot Or there is a reflection Within the monetary system Of some territorialisation going on And I think there's I think I would take that That position. So again What that would mean Is that we would need to do an analysis Of various value regimes And obviously They're porous in relationship to each other Given the nature of trading structures But The totality The health of the whole system One of the key indicators Of the health of capitalism Is the volume of international trade And the volume Of international currency Transactions Rather good predictors Of where capital is going And If you look at them What does that mean? It means that Actually the porosity between value regimes Is very open And what we're beginning to see right now Is a closing down. In fact In the last couple of years What we've seen is a diminution Of global trade And a diminution of currency transactions And I think that This signals Some possible problems For the totality And times ahead So we can use that kind of analysis Creatively and constructively Okay, one more I wanted to go back to this idea That there was a proliferation Of things having value Sorry, price but not value So in the commodification Of knowledge and honor And I was thinking about this in terms of last week In the discussion around anti-value Which it seemed to me had At least in part to do with Failure or refusal to be tagged With a price, things that would not be And so I was wondering If you could talk a little bit about how Politics of anti-value From last week which seemed very much To be kind of focused on the credit system How might that kind of give us Insights in what to do or think about With the monitors? Without going into great detail I mean a lot of Quite a lot of political Activism around the world right now Is mediated By what I call Cultural producers And the whole question of cultural production Is a very interesting one A lot of people Engaging in cultural production Don't like the market But at some point around Like Milton they have to go off and sell Something for five pounds To get enough money to live But there's a lot of resistance To commodification within What you might call the cultural mass And There's a lot of international relations Which is set up Which money gets channeled Through all these biennialies And god knows what Incredible kind of Boondoggles in lots of ways But people are living off it And it's a bit like having a universal Basic income But people have to do things In order to get into it and do things So there's a lot of radicalism Within this Some of the major eruptions If you look at For instance the Gazy protest In Turkey The role of cultural producers Was really Pretty big in that Backed up by It wasn't a classic working class Revolt at all It was A movement of strata in the population Middle class And Others So this Would come back to this Area of things that Have no value but which have a price Potentially have a price And who puts the price on them and how And it comes back to knowledge also Who puts the price on knowledge Who encloses knowledge And there's a big fight over this Who gets the right to enclose knowledge The same thing would apply to cultural products Who decides What is a good painting Who decides what is a good video Who decides what is A good cultural Event And there's And should it be rendered through the market And of course there are people Who are completely embedded in the market And people who are deeply antagonistic To the market I mean punk rock when it started Was totally anti-market And Music gets totally anti-market Then it gets commoditized Then it gets brought into the market So this is a site of Struggle Where it seems to me value and anti-value are Clashing all of the time And it gets articulated through the art itself Actually in many instances And you can see it at work Through the form Of artistic presentations And the like At least I've seen a lot of it in those forms Up with graffiti and all that kind of thing I mean I don't know where Banksy gets His money from, you know But he gets around and Does lots of things So I think there is A very interesting area here About value And price And non-price and free gifts Of human nature and free gifts of nature There's a very interesting kind of set of overlaps Which I think are open For discussion Okay we're going to stop here And we'll see you in November