No More Learning

This claim is difficult to sustain for two basic reasons. To start with, finan- cial intermediation, advertising and insurance - like every social activity - are invariably differential: they affect some aspects of production more than others. Changes to old-age security programmes or the shifting stance of monetary policy - just like the purchase of life insurance by a single employee or the extension of credit to a specific corporation - have different impacts on different sectors, firms and workers. The same with marketing: the overall
3 In fact, the reduction of uncertainty has had an important, if understudied, impact on the very direction of social development. The pre-historic Australian population, for instance, became nomadic partly because of the continent's infertile soil and the dearth of domesti- cable plants and animals. But there was another crucial reason: El Nin? o made agricultural production intolerably unpredictable, in contrast to the relative security offered by the diver- sity and flexibility of nomadic hunting and gathering (Diamond 1999: Ch. 15).
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sales effort creates what John Kenneth Galbraith (1967) called the 'propa- ganda on behalf of goods in general'. But the consequences of this general propaganda vary along the production chains, with some processes being affected differently and more extensively than others. Thus, if we are ready to accept that a certain social activity affects the production of value and surplus value in general, we also have to accept that this impact is distributed unevenly and therefore affects the relative structure of values and surplus values.
Unfortunately, though - and here we get to the second point - value and surplus value cannot be observed, detected or examined, so there is no way to ascertain the existence of these differential impacts, let alone their size. We cannot know if monetary tightening by the central bank alters the relative value and surplus value of microchips vs crude oil - and, if so, by how much. We don't know whether the effect of tax breaks to advertisers raises, reduces or leaves unchanged the value and surplus value of brand names relative to brandless commodities. We have no clue as to the impact of insurance legisla- tion on the value and surplus value in the production of mobile homes rela- tive to the production of university graduates.
But, then, if we are unable to say whether these so-called circulation activi- ties are productive or not, let alone to what extent, how can we ever separate them from production 'proper'?
Objective exchange values?
Eating the cake and having it too
In the final analysis, the difficulty of identifying the so-called sphere of production is rooted in a basic theoretical schizophrenia: the attempt to deduce objective exchange values from subjective use values - while denying this very deduction in the first place. 4
Marx believed that the boundaries of production were objectively delin- eated. They were given, he said, by 'the definite social form, the social rela- tions of production, within which the labor is realized' (Marx 1863, Part I: 152, emphasis added). In practice, though, the categories that Marxists consider definitive and objective almost always rest on subjective criteria.
A recent taxonomy of productive and unproductive labour by Savran and Tonak (1999) illustrates this uneasy derivation. Following Marx, they empha- size the need to distinguish clearly between two types of circulation: the circulation of use value typical to all advanced socio-economic structures, and the specifically capitalist circulation of exchange value embedded in commodities, money and capital (p. 142). However, when they come to distinguish the circulation of exchange value from its creation, their criteria are based entirely on use value:
4 This schizophrenia, of course, is hardly unique to Marxism. As we will see in Chapter 8, it underlies both the util of the neoclassicists and the abstract labour of Marx.
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[A] society can only increase its wealth through the purposeful transfor- mation of nature and only that amount that has thus been produced can be distributed among the individual members or social classes of society. No amount of exchanging parts of the social product already produced can increase this product itself. . . . This means that any activity which is not directly necessary for humanity's intercourse with nature in order to transform aspects of it in accordance with human needs cannot be regarded as productive labour in general, nor therefore, as productive labour under capitalism.
(143-44)
To see the difficulty, note that, according to this statement, any under- standing of objective exchange value requires prior agreement on no less than five different questions: (1) the definition of the 'product itself'; (2) the 'amount of wealth' this product represents; (3) whether or not the production of this 'wealth' involves a 'purposeful transformation of nature'; (4) whether or not the transformation is 'directly necessary' for humanity's intercourse with nature; and (5) the 'human needs' the product is made to fulfil. Now, since the answers to these questions are all subjective to a lesser or greater extent, and given that they are nonetheless necessary for separating the production from the circulation of exchange value, it follows that exchange values cannot be derived objectively from production.
Capitalist answers, pre-capitalist questions
The difficulty here is one of historical mismatch. Simply put, we are trying to give capitalist answers to pre-capitalist questions. In the feudal-agricultural order, the separation between productive and unproductive activity seemed fairly clear cut. On the one hand, there were the peasants who tilled the land, along with the artisans who crafted with their tools and serviced with their skills. One could reasonably argue that their 'direct and purposeful inter- course with nature produced wealth in accordance with human needs'. It seemed rather evident - certainly to their coevals - that they were productive.
On the other hand, there were the nobility and the clergy who merely appropriated, along with the merchants, money lenders, usurers and taxmen who mostly 'exchanged and redistributed the already produced social product'. Since neither group participated in production as such, it wasn't too hard to conclude that they were unproductive. Even the Church found it diffi- cult to deny what everyone could see. 5
5 A 1020 poem by Bishop Adalbero of Laon provides a succinct summary of the feudal division of labour: 'The community of the faithful is a single body, but . . . human law distin- guishes two classes. Nobles and serfs, indeed, are not governed by the same ordinance. . . . The former are the warriors and the protectors of churches. They are the defenders of the people. . . . The other class is that of the serfs. This luckless breed possesses nothing except
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There was relatively little ambiguity: the division between those who laboured and those who didn't was fairly trenchant; needs and subsistence were practically synonymous and wealth a self-evident residual; product diversity was miniscule and the items on offer fairly well-defined; joint production was limited and technical knowledge diffused. In this pre-capi- talist context, use value seemed pretty straightforward - indeed, almost 'objective'. It was an obvious yardstick for separating the productive from the unproductive.
But these clear ecological, occupational and legal distinctions began to melt with the arrival of capitalism. Nowadays, use value is no longer evident, let alone agreed upon. It cannot be an 'objective' yardstick, or even a rough rule of thumb, for delineating what Marxists call the sphere of capitalist production. The remainder of this section illustrates the impasse.
The product itself and the amount of wealth
Take our first question regarding the notion of the 'product itself'. Even in the simplest cases, products are no longer well-defined. When a New York resident buys a loved one flowers flown in from Mexico, does she purchase just 'flowers' - or specifically 'Mexican flowers'? This distinction is crucial since the latter entails the additional costs of air transport, insurance and hedging against currency changes - expenses without which Mexican flowers would be unavailable in New York. If the 'product itself' is merely flowers, these additional costs are socially unnecessary and therefore count as unpro- ductive circulation expenses. But if the product is Mexican flowers, these expenses are necessary costs of production. Now, which of these two defini- tions is correct? Do we have an objective basis to decide? And if we do not, what then constitutes the 'product itself'?
Next, turn to the second question, regarding the 'amount of wealth' prod- ucts supposedly represent. What is the quantity of wealth contained in a modern anti-depressant drug, in a barrel of oil, or in software used in the production of nuclear missiles? Do these amounts exist as objective quanta? And if they have no objective quanta, how can we know what 'amount of wealth' is available for distribution?
The transformation of nature
The third question concerns Savran and Tonak's claim that a society can increase its wealth only through the purposeful transformation of nature. This delineation, meant to exclude purely social activities that merely circulate an
at the cost of its own labour. . . . The serfs provide money, clothes, and food, for the rest; no free man could exist without the serfs. . . . We see kings and prelates make themselves the serfs of their serfs; the master, who claims to feed his serf, is fed by him' (quoted in Le Goff 1988: 255, emphases added).
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already-transformed nature, is far trickier than it seems. To point out the difficulty, consider the service sector. Commodities ranging from health care and telecommunication, to tourism and entertainment, to engineering and personal services, now account for roughly two thirds of social reproduction in money terms. The production of these service commodities normally requires a certain transformation of nature, but it also has another compo- nent that is purely social.
And so, as Marxist researchers, we are now faced with a dilemma: when calculating the contribution of the service sector to social wealth, should we exclude the purely social component - and if so, how big should the deduc- tion be? Is there an objective way to calculate this deduction - and if so, what is it? And if we end up excluding the purely social component from the production of services, shouldn't we do the reverse for the sphere of circula- tion? The latter includes, in addition to its purely social components, a certain purposeful transformation of nature. If we are to be consistent, don't we need to classify these latter components as productive? 6
Human needs
The fourth and fifth questions concern the related notions that productive labour is one that is 'directly necessary' for the transformation of nature in accordance with 'human needs'. Activity that does not fulfil these two related conditions is supposedly unproductive. One issue, then, is how to decide what constitutes 'human needs'. Food is a human need, but is the daily consump- tion of a 10-ounce steak or of expensive caviar also a human need? Laughing and excitation are human needs, but does it follow that all forms of commer- cial entertainment fulfil a human need? Based on the popularity of crime and horror movies, violent sports and the daily news, should we conclude that aggression, cruelty and war are basic human needs - or are these merely the result of brainwashing and the anxiety of capitalist alienation? Alternatively, can't we say that all human activity is geared toward fulfilling human needs? And if we accept this latter proposition, wouldn't that make all labour productive? How do we choose between these alternatives?
6 The notion that wealth is created only by purposeful transformations seems unnecessarily restrictive. Our quest for knowledge is driven, at least in part, by idle curiosity, and our learning about nature is often serendipitous. Since production ends up using this purposeless knowledge, should we prorate our measurement of wealth to include only the 'purposeful' part - or should we simply assume that a little bit of purpose somewhere in the process is enough to make the entire transformation intentional? Similarly, what do we do with nega- tive transformations of nature - such as deforestation, pollution, the destabilization of the climate and the extinction of species? The dilemma here is that these transformations may represent a reduction of use value, so, on the face of it, they need to be deducted from our social wealth. At the same time, these latter transformations are often unintentional, so perhaps we should simply ignore them?
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The other side of the problem is that, even if we can somehow agree on what constitutes human needs, we still need to know which labour activities are 'directly' necessary to fulfil those needs. Assuming that transportation is a human need, we may be tempted to conclude that the workers of Volkswagen and ChevronTexaco are directly necessary to its fulfilment. But, then, wouldn't universal public transportation fuelled by nuclear energy make these workers unnecessary? Can these questions ever be answered objectively?
Non-capitalist production
The slope becomes even more slippery when we move to identify the so-called 'non-capitalist' spheres of production, particularly the state. During Marx's time, the problem was easy to disregard. Until the late nineteenth century, state spending was miniscule by contemporary standards, as was the ratio of government to private employment. But the capitalist state has since expanded to account for a very significant portion of overall 'economic' activity, so the issue could no longer be ignored.
The classical Marxist position is that employees of the capitalist state may in certain cases be productive of use value, but usually not of surplus value. State activity is customarily divided into three categories: one that deals with the reproduction of the social order as a whole through the judiciary, police, army, taxation, etc. , and is deemed unproductive of use value, exchange value and surplus value; a second, more ambiguous, category that provides useful social services like education and health care - yet remains unproductive of surplus value to the extent that it is not controlled by capitalists; and a third that comprises government-owned enterprises whose capitalist-like nature makes them productive of surplus value. 7
Reproducing the social order
Consider the first category, the one responsible for reproducing the social order itself. Since this sphere produces no use value as such, it cannot, by defi- nition, produce exchange value or surplus value, and it therefore must be deemed unproductive (a conclusion that is not very different from the liberal view, in which a parasitic public sector freely rides the productive private sector).
7 Neo-Marxists, insofar as they abandon the labour theory of value, offer a rather different classification of state activity (see, for instance, O'Connor 1973). Alternatively, some clas- sical Marxists, such as Michael Kidron (1974), take the unorthodox position that the state actually serves to boost accumulation. Kidron argues that surplus wasted on military expen- ditures is akin to the production of luxuries. The relative growth of such spending therefore offsets the expansion of productive capital, which in turn counteracts the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (a relationship first shown by Bortkiewicz 1907a). For a critical review of Marxist analyses of fiscal policy, see Miller (1986).
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The difficulty with this assertion resembles our earlier discussion of circu- lation. For a start, it is hard to accept that this type of state employment produces no use value. It is certainly true that government taxation, expendi- tures and subsidies, the legal code and the organized use of violence are all matters of power. But don't these power activities also affect the organization of production and therefore the creation of use value? Indeed, is there a single historical example of a hierarchical social order without taxation and subsi- dies, without a legal or other code of conduct, and without the institutional use of force? What evidence do we have - from Neolithic cities, through ancient empires, to feudalism, capitalism and communism - that the produc- tion of so-called use value is at all possible without these broader institutions of power? And if we accept, as we should, that these institutions do have a use value, then isn't it possible that they also affect exchange values and surplus values?
Although Marxists may deny it, according to their logic the answer must be positive. The impact of these power institutions and processes, just like the impact of financial intermediation and commerce, is inherently differential. State spending and taxes affect not only the overall process of production, but also its minute details. Indeed, this is often their very purpose. And if that is the case, we should expect them also to bear on the value and surplus value associated with individual commodities.
To illustrate, take the example of electricity. Taxing coal-fuelled utilities while subsidizing windmills is bound to alter their respective cost and profit structures; this change would likely lead to diverging growth patterns in the generation of electricity; and as these different patterns reverberated through- out the chain of production, the result according to Marx's framework would be to alter the entire pattern of relative values and surplus values. In this sense, the labour involved in planning and administering the taxes and subsi- dies becomes part of the capitalist production process and therefore poten- tially a bearer of value and surplus value (we say potentially since, in order to create value and surplus value, labour needs to be not only productive, but also subjugated to capitalist authority - an issue with which we deal below).
Similar considerations apply to the law, propaganda, organized violence and other state policies. Regardless of how universal they seem, they all affect the allocation and pattern of societal activities. They alter the progress of science and knowledge, they bear on the choice of techniques, they modify the organization of production (however defined). From a Marxist perspective, therefore, they must be seen as affecting the creation of surplus value - not only in the aggregate, but also in detail. If we are to keep with Marx's own logic, we need to label employees who administer these institutions productive.
Social services
The second state category - made up of social services - is also deemed unpro- ductive. Here, though, the services are considered useful, which means that if
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the state were to produce them for profit - for instance, through the third category of government-owned enterprises - the labour involved would become capitalistic and therefore productive of surplus value (Savran and Tonak 1999: 139-40).
Let's examine this proposition with a hypothetical example. Suppose the government decided to 'go private' and instead of financing water services out of taxes on surplus value, sold them for a fee with an eye to making a profit. In order to actually earn this profit, the government would need to either cut the wages paid to water-service employees or otherwise mark up the price of water above its wage cost (which for simplicity we assume to be the only cost). According to the classical Marxist scheme, the first option is impossible since water-service employees, like all workers, are already paid their own value, so any reduction here will push their wages below subsis- tence. The only avenue therefore is to make the fee (price) higher than the wages. 8
And here arises the puzzle. The shift from free to fee-based water services alters neither the use value of these services nor the labour producing them, which in turn means that, on its own, the redesignation of these services can create no surplus value. So where does the government profit come from?
One possible source is lower real wages elsewhere in the economy, as workers bear the brunt of the new fees (since consumer prices rise but wages do not). The problem is that such a decline would push these wages below subsistence, again violating the Marxist assumption that workers are always paid their value. The only route is for capitalists to allow overall wages to rise by the difference between the new fees and old taxes, and accept the conse- quent decline (of an equal amount) in their own profit.
Yet this possibility does not solve the puzzle either. Although the govern- ment now acts as a productive, profit-making capitalist for all intents and purposes, its workers are not productive of surplus value! Instead, they merely help their employer - in this case, the government - scoop up part of the surplus value produced by capitalists elsewhere in the economy.
What is non-capitalist?
Finally, we should consider, if only briefly, the meaning of non-capitalist production. Recall that, according to Marx, labour can be productive only if it is controlled by capitalists. It must be 'directly consumed in the course of production for the valorization of capital' - that is, tied to capital through the wage contract (Marx 1864: 1038). The problem is that, even if we accept that capitalist control is a prerequisite for the creation of value, it is not clear why the only gauge for such control is the wage contract.
8 The Marxist subsistence wage, of course, is not carved in stone but rather 'socially deter- mined'. This determination, though, is unaffected by our theoretical reclassification of government employees.
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To clarify the difficulty, consider LockheedMartin, one of the world's largest military contractors. The owners of LockheedMartin certainly control the work performed by their employees. But don't they also have some impact on the work performed at the U. S. Defense Department, with obvious bear- ings on their own business? The latter impact may be indirect, but is it smaller than the former? Similarly with the US government. The government controls the employees of its own Defense Department, but doesn't it also control to some extent, through its laws and procurement policies, the employees of LockheedMartin?
The answers to these questions are crucial for the computation of labour values. For, if we accept that government workers are controlled by capital- ists at least to some degree, we can no longer treat such workers as unproduc- tive. And likewise, but in reverse, with privately employed workers: if we concede that they are not entirely controlled by capitalists, perhaps we should no longer treat them as strictly productive.
We can go on with such examples and queries, but by now the problem should be clear. There is no objective way to separate 'production' in general - and the sphere of 'capitalist production' in particular - from other forms of social reproduction. Consequently, the notion that surplus value and accumulation are rooted exclusively in this sphere has no definite meaning. Any theory of capital based on such an assumption becomes unbounded and impossible to implement.
A qualitative value theory?
Taken together, the challenges to the labour theory of value seem insur- mountable. To recap, the theory depends on an objective definition of pro- ductive labour that is impossible to devise. It faces a trying dilemma of having to choose between logical consistency and meaningful explanation. It is inher- ently partial in that it recognizes but is unable to theorize the role of factors other than labour. And it is analytically and empirically impenetrable since labour values cannot be conceived and observed in the first place.
The retreat
With this onslaught of criticisms, many Marxists have chosen to retreat to the so-called qualitative labour theory of value. 'While the idea of value as an accounting tool or as an empirically observable magnitude plainly had to be abandoned', conceded David Harvey (1982: 36), 'it could still be treated as a "real phenomena with concrete effects". . . . It could be constructed as the "essence" that lay behind the "appearance", the "social reality" behind the fetishism of everyday life'.
This retreat isn't new. It had already begun with Engels' 'Law of Value and Rate of Profit' (1894), which defended the labour theory of value on histor- ical rather than analytical grounds and gave rise to the 'value epoch' debate;
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it continued with Hilferding's (1904) reply to Bo? hm-Bawerk, which empha- sized Marx's 'conceptual revolution' while downplaying its quantitative shortcomings; and it received its seal of approval from Sweezy (1942: Ch. 7), who claimed that the qualitative implications of the theory are logically sepa- rate from its quantitative assertions.
The labour theory of value, Sweezy argued, is not essential for under- standing the price structure of capitalism - a structure far better explained by bourgeois economics. But this quantitative deficiency, he continued, in no way undermines the qualitative significance of the theory. The notion of labour value, even if quantitatively flawed, is still essential to dialectically demystify the economy. It has the indispensable role of reminding us of exploitation, and that the only source of profit is unpaid labour.
And so developed a large literature focused exclusively on the qualitative nature of accumulation. The hallmark of this literature is its selectivity: it discards the quantitative conclusions of the theory while upholding its concepts. Labour value and surplus value, even if quantitatively meaningless, are nonetheless taken as a solid starting point for qualitative analysis. Armed with these truncated concepts, the qualitative theorist then proceeds to examine the many features and processes of capitalism - from the restruc- turing of production and class conflict, through alienation and the institu- tions of power, to the business ethos, political organization and the dynamics of culture, among others.
Very few Marxists see anything wrong with exclusively qualitative anal- yses. Most feel that removing Marx's quantitative theory leaves much of his broader conclusions and insights intact, if not enhanced (a claim laboured by Hodgson 1982). Some believe that the whole quantitative/qualitative debate has been misconceived, premised on the erroneous notion that Marx was trying to create a critical political economy 'intended to operationalize the law of value in order to explain the workings of the market' (Postone 1993: 133). And others take this point even further, arguing that Marx's isn't really a labour theory of value but rather a 'value theory of labour' (Elson 1979).
Marx's science
Needless to say, we do not find these arguments persuasive. The notion that Marx was concerned with the qualitative rather than quantitative aspects of capitalism seems to us apologetic and unfounded. More significantly, in our view the belief that his theory of capitalism - or any theory of capitalism for that matter - could be fractured into two independent subsets leads to a dead end.
Begin with the issue of Marx's emphasis. His work was certainly a critique of capitalist ideology. But it was much more than that. Marx tried to create an alternative science, a framework that could replace both bourgeois polit- ical economy and the positivist social management of Auguste Comte. This scheme stood on two main foundations. One was a dialectical history that
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provided the basis for revolutionary consciousness. The other was a value theory that broke the front window of prices and offered a starting point for future democratic planning.
It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that, unlike today, science was still highly rated in the nineteenth century. Marx followed Hegel in viewing the rise of science as part of the broader development of history. But that view never led him to treat science merely as a matter of fashion and power. He truly believed he could create a new science, one that would both debunk conventional political economy and explain the reality of capitalism.
The task was revolutionary, and revolutions cannot be achieved by mere critiques. Einstein transcended Newtonian physics partly by questioning its epistemology, but mostly by inventing a new one. And the same is true for Marx. To challenge bourgeois economics he needed to construct an alterna- tive capitalist reality, and this new episteme required a different theory of prices. To argue that Marx was not concerned with prices is to argue that his key theses about capitalist development - including the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the immiseration of the proletariat and the tendency of capi- talism to generate recurrent profitability crises - were meaningless gibberish. These tendencies can be expressed only in terms of price ratios. To theorize them is to theorize prices, and that is precisely what Marx and many of his followers tried to do.
Indeed, for the nineteenth-century intelligentsia, the magic of Marxism lay precisely in the novelty of its scientific structure. Its historical laws of motion seemed as inevitable as the movement of the stars, pushing capitalism toward change, crisis and imminent collapse. Even with the advent of Leninism, when determinism was partly sacrificed in favour of political vitality and party discipline, the thirst for quantitative analysis remained unquenched. In this sense, the Bolshevik apparatus, particularly Lenin and the Comintern, calculated their historical moves just like today's financial strategists, trying to time the coming economic crash and the best entry point for their 'world revolution'. For this purpose, Lenin employed experts such as Nikolai Kondratieff, whose long-term technical analyses (denominated in prices, by the way) were supposed to identify the opportune moment (1926; 1928). Stalin executed Kondratieff and gave his job to Eugen Varga (1935). The latter, coming to his senses, ended up in a gulag. But the quest for the quan- titative magic bullet has remained strong, as evident from the long-wave analyses of contemporary Marxists such as Ernest Mandel (1995).
The fact that Marx erred in trying to anchor prices specifically and some- what mechanically in labour values is secondary. It certainly requires no cover-up or apology. Many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century physicists now seem dated, if not irrelevant. Yet, without their breakthroughs physics would not be where it is today. The same is true for Marx's labour theory of value. It was the first theory to put the study of society on a systematic footing. Had it not been for the stifling influence of the Soviet Union, the spirit of that theory would likely have kept Marxism a vibrant science.
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Quality without quantity?
And here we come to the second and more fundamental point - the notion that we can somehow disconnect the quantitative and qualitative aspects of capitalism, and then discard the former and keep the latter. This path betrays a deep misunderstanding of the subject of inquiry. To study the rationalist order of capitalism without quantities is like studying feudalism without reli- gion, or physics without mathematics. According to Marx, and here he was right on the mark, capitalism, by its very nature, seeks to turn quality into quantity, to objectify and reify social relations as if they were natural and unassailable. In this sense, a qualitative theory of value necessarily implies a quantitative theory of value; it means a society not only obsessed with numbers, but actually shaped and organized by numbers. This organization is the architecture of capitalist power. To understand capitalism therefore is to decipher the link between quality and quantity, to reduce the multifaceted nature of social power to the universal appearance of capital accumulation. The two aspects of the theory rise and fall together. If one is proven wrong, so is the other.
The question, therefore, is not which aspect of value to emphasize, but what the basis of value should be in the first place. The neoclassicists base their value theory on the util, whereas Marxists base it on abstract labour. As we shall see in the next chapter, these elementary particles are deeply prob- lematic. And it is these insoluble difficulties that make both the utility and labour theories of value impossible to salvage.
8 Accumulation of what?
Una fides, pondus, mensura sit idem Et status illaesus totius orbis erit - Let there be one single faith, weight and measure, and the world shall be free from harm.
--Guillaume Bude? (1468-1540) His labor took him about one minute to learn.
--Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
Physicists commonly speak of five fundamental quantities: distance, time, mass, electrical charge and heat. These quantities are fundamental in the sense that every other physical quantity can be derived from them. Velocity is distance divided by time; acceleration is the time derivative of velocity; force is mass multiplied by acceleration; etc. The elementary particles of the phys- ical world - be they electrons, quarks, taus, positrons or strings - as well as the relationships between them and the larger structures to which they give rise - are all characterized by these fundamental quantities. 1
Political economy pretends to mimic this structure. Here, too, we have elementary particles: the neoclassical util and the Marxist abstract labour. Presumably, these are the basic particles that all higher entities of production, consumption and wealth are made of and can be reduced to. But there is a difference. As we shall see in this chapter, unlike the elementary particles of physics, utils and abstract labour are not counted in terms of fundamental quantities. On the contrary, their quantitative dimensions are derived from production, consumption and wealth; that is, they are deduced from the very phenomena they are supposed to explain. And as if to make a bad situation worse, even this reverse derivation is problematic, not to say impossible, since the assumptions it is based on are patently false.
1 There is a debate on whether all five quantities are in fact 'fundamental', and indeed on the very existence of 'fundamental' quantities to begin with (see for instance Laughlin 2005). But these deeper questions need not concern us here.
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These considerations serve to further deepen the enigma of capital. We have already seen that political economists find it difficult to theorize why capital accumulates. The measurement riddle shows that they don't even know what gets accumulated.
What gets accumulated?
To a lay person, the question may seem simple to answer: money. Capitalists accumulate when they grow richer; they decumulate when they become poorer. And that is certainly true, but not entirely. To see what is missing, suppose that the actual holdings of a capitalist haven't changed but that their prices have all risen by 10 per cent, thus making him 10 per cent richer. Now assume further that the overall price level - measured by the GDP price deflator - has also grown at the same rate of 10 per cent, so that the 'amount' of commodities the capitalist can buy with his assets remains the same. The capitalist has certainly accumulated in nominal terms, but this increase was merely a price phenomenon. Since the process has affected neither the 'productive capacity' of his assets nor their 'purchasing power', from a material perspective he has ended right where he started. For this reason, political economists - conservative and critical alike - insist that when measuring accumulation we ignore the price of capital and concentrate only on its material, or 'real', quantity.
There is, of course, nothing very unusual about this insistence. After all, political economy is concerned primarily with material processes, so it seems only sensible that the same emphasis should apply to capital. The only problem is that in order to focus on 'real' quantities, we first have to separate them from prices; and surprising at it may sound, in general the two cannot be separated.
Separating quantity from price
To understand the difficulty, let's put aside the theory for a moment and look at what the statisticians do. Their procedure is straightforward: they assume that the dollar market value of any basket of commodities (MV) is equal to its 'real' quantity (Q) times its unit price (P), and then they rearrange the equa- tion. Symbolically, they start from:
1. MV = Q * P Which is equivalent to:
2. Q=MV P
These formulae are taken to be completely general. They apply to any basket of commodities at any point in time - from the contents of a supermarket cart
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pushed by a London shopper in 2008, to the annual output of the Chinese economy in 2000, to the global stock of 'capital goods' in 1820. Given data on the market value and price of any set of commodities, calculating its 'real' quantity and growth rate is a simple matter of plugging in the numbers and computing the results.
To illustrate, suppose the U. S. Bureau of Economic Analysis wishes to calculate the 'real' rate of accumulation in the automobile industry from 1990 to 2000. The statisticians know that, over the decade, the market value (at replacement cost) of the industry's capital stock (MV) grew by 93 per cent and that 17 per cent of that increase was due to a rise in unit price (P). Based on these data, the statisticians can easily tell us that the 'real' rate of accumulation - measured by the rate of growth of Q - was 65 per cent (1. 93 / 1. 17 -1 ? 0. 65). 2
A clean, simple computation, no doubt, only that it never works.
The failure is as general as the formulas. The calculation fails with 'capital goods', just as it fails with GDP, private consumption, gross investment or any other collection of heterogeneous commodities. And the reason is embar- rassingly simple. Equation (2) above tells us that in order to compute the quantity we first need to know the price. What it doesn't say is that in order to know the price we first need to know the quantity. . . .
To see the circularity, consider the following facts. An automotive factory is made of many different tools, machines and structures. Over time, the nature of these items tends to change. They may take less time and effort to produce; they may become more or less 'productive' due to technical improvement and wear and tear; their composition may change with new machines replacing older ones; they may be used to produce different and even entirely new output; etc. The result of these many changes is that today's automobile factories are not the same as yesterday's, or as last year's. The price index of automobile factories, however, is supposed to track, over time, the price of the very same factories. The obvious question, then, is: 'How can such an index be computed when the underlying factories - the "things" whose price the index is supposed to measure - keep changing from one year to the next? '
Clearly, in order to measure the price of capital - or of any other collection of different commodities - we must first denominate its underlying 'sub- stance' in some homogenous units. And here we come to the Cartesian 'crux of the matter'. Like Heraclitus, we face the permanent flux of an ever- changing capital stock. Yet, in the spirit of Parmenides, we cannot accept this flux since we need an eternally stable entity to price. And so we fall back on the compromise position of Democritus. According to this compromise,
2 The data in this example pertain to the 'net stock of private fixed assets' in the sector defined as 'motor vehicles, bodies and trailers, and parts'; they are taken from the Fixed Asset Tables of the U. S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
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capitalist phenomena indeed are ever-changing - but this permanent shift is merely the rearrangement of the capitalist atoma. What the naked eye sees as a maelstrom of different commodities, the political economist interprets as the reshuffling of identical, irreducible particles.
For the neoclassicists, the common substance of commodities is the 'utils' they generate. 3 Like any other set of commodities, a collection of machines, factories and structures may be heterogeneous and constantly changing. But no matter how varied and variable its components, say the neoclassicists, they can all be reduced to 'standard efficiency units', elementary particles of productive capacity counted in terms of the utility they create. In this way, an automobile factory capable of producing 1,000 utils is equivalent to two factories each producing 500 utils. As factories change over time, we can simply measure their changing 'magnitude' in terms of their greater or lesser util-generating capacity.
In contrast to the neoclassicists, Marx approached the problem from the input side, arguing that capital, like any other commodity, could be quanti- fied in terms of the socially necessary abstract labour required to produce it. So if we begin with an automotive factory that takes, on average, 10 million hours of abstract labour to construct, and add to it another factory that takes, on average, only 5 million hours to build, we end up with an aggregate capital whose 'magnitude' is equivalent to 15 million hours of abstract labour.
These brave reductions, though, do not help us in the least. In fact, they are totally redundant. After all, had we known the 'util productivity' or 'abstract labour contents' of capital, this knowledge would already tell us its 'real' magnitude, making the whole statistical exercise unnecessary. . . .
Quantifying utility
Let the price tell all
The neoclassical notion of universal utility got off to a bad start. 4 The initial proclamations were decidedly optimistic. In the eighteenth century, mathe- matician Daniel Bernoulli stated that 'people with common sense evaluate money in proportion to the utility they can obtain from it' and went ahead to build on this conviction the quantitative law of diminishing marginal utility (Bernoulli 1738: 33). In the nineteenth century, Philosophical Radical Jeremy Bentham promised his adherents that, in the utilitarian calculus of pleasure and pain, 'Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry' (1825: Book 3, Ch. 1). He was also convinced that utility could be compared between individuals, though he never bothered to indicate how.
3 The term 'util' was coined by Irving Fisher in his doctoral dissertation (1892: 18).
4 For a sympathetic history of utility theory, see Stigler (1950).
? Accumulation of what? 129
The early neoclassicists, however, weren't nearly as sanguine. Cooled down by the less egalitarian John Stuart Mill, they didn't like the idea of interpersonal comparisons (which implied that society could benefit from greater income equality). But their doubts went deeper. They didn't think the 'quantity of pleasure' from a game of pushpin could be compared to that of music and poetry. In fact, they admitted quite openly that universal utility is impossible to measure and, indeed, difficult to even fathom. The interesting thing, though, is that this recognition did not deter them in the least. 'If you cannot measure, measure anyhow,' complained their in-house critic Frank Knight (quoted in Bernstein 1996: 219). Although the neoclassicists conceded that utility is unquantifiable, they went ahead to build their entire science of 'economics' on the util, an unquantifiable unit. In hindsight, it is hard to think of a more fitting beginning for a successful religion.
In his discussion of utility, Francis Edgeworth, one of the early mathemat- ical economists, admitted that these 'atoms of pleasure' do present 'peculiar difficulties'. Like the invisible Ether, 'they are not easy to distinguish and dis- cern; more continuous than sand, more discreet than liquid; as it were nuclei of the just-perceivable, embedded in circumambient semi-consciousness'. But not to worry:
We cannot count the golden sands of life; we cannot number the 'innu- merable smile' of seas of love; but we seem to be capable of observing that there is here a greater, there a less, multitude of pleasure units, mass of happiness; and that is enough.
(Edgeworth 1881: 8-9)
In fact, Edgeworth was so enthralled with the prospect of quantifying the semi-conscious that he offered to build a 'hedonimeter' that would contin- uously register 'the height of pleasure experienced by an individual' (ibid. : 101). 5 And Edgeworth wasn't alone in disregarding the odds. His contempo- rary, Stanley Jevons, was equally ardent:
A unit of pleasure or pain is difficult even to conceive; but it is the amount of these feelings which is continually promoting us to buying and selling, borrowing and lending, labouring and resting, producing and consuming; and it is from the quantitative effects of the feelings that we must estimate their comparative amounts.
(Jevons 1871: 11, emphases added)
Jevons' last sentence here should strike a chord with neoclassicists. It justifies a logical U-turn that Paul Samuelson would later call 'revealed preferences' (Samuelson 1938). The reason for the U-turn is simple. We cannot measure
? 5 On the early quest for measurable utility, see Colander (2007).
130 The enigma of capital
the utility that drives behaviour, but there is always the option of going in reverse. All it takes is to examine actual behaviour ('the quantitative effects of the feelings') and then assume that, in a perfectly competitive equilibrium, this behaviour 'reveals' the underlying relative utilities ('comparative amounts').
And so arose the infamous neoclassical circularity: 'Utility is the quality in commodities that makes individuals want to buy them, and the fact that indi- viduals want to buy commodities shows that they have utility' (Robinson 1962: 48, original emphases). This circularity, though, operates only at the theoretical level. At the practical level, neoclassicists go in one direction only: from the phenomena to utility. And the phenomenon they find most revealing is price:
Utility is taken to be correlative to Desire or Want. It has been already argued that desires cannot be measured directly, but only indirectly, by the outward phenomena to which they give rise: and that in those cases with which economics is chiefly concerned the measure is found in the price which a person is willing to pay for the fulfilment or satisfaction of his desire.