Indicative of the author's own predisposition is the subtitle of his as of now untranslated work 'The Science of Value: between scientific revolution and classical tradition', which you would have to be literate in German to study, as things stand.
A note which I would like to include, is an acknowledgment of the efforts of scholars such as Heinrich in Berlin and Anwar Shaikh in New York, who have chosen to present a Marxian legacy alive to its borrowings from, or rather debt - to use this now unscientific term - to English political economy; most noticeably a labor theory of value already in the work of Adam Smith, and Ricardo - which some may say, like the Hegelian dialectic, required inversion, however that came to be for Marx himself.
A brief word on this, if Smith chose to begin his presentation with a commodity, which gains a tradeable valence on the condition that we do not consume it ourselves; the Marxian mutation to this logic is a good old fashioned positing of presuppositions - to the point where we would have to admit that a commodity would have to first be produced by independent or contractualized laborers before any question of trade arises. The question of individuation, to keep abreast of recent (or classical) French theory these days is what we should take care to recall. Independent producers, even when working together make singular forms of commodities, or their services have determinable jurisdictions, of which they deliver their work. This is the division of labor, and it is what we forget, that which is happening behind our back as it were, while we make a bowl of soup for instance, that allows us to sit in front of whichever NetFlix show for a meal.
A theory of a trader would begin with the possession of a commodity. A theory of value however, would have to engage with its creation and consumption. A reminder, lest any forget why economics can never become a purely computational science, for a karrot is not the same to a toad and a rabbit, excuse my blaspheme.
And make no mistake, this is a blaspheme. Even by the letter of Marx's hand - for no bee ever pre-planned the hive they were constructing in advance. A characteristic which is indeed unique to human labour - of which we have attempted to say a little about. An act if you will which again may not be untouched by nature - just as it seeks to touch on one of her mysteries - fetishism.
The form of a work at hand, is perhaps how best we have learned to consider its qualities. When this changes hands, the classical economist notices a nectarine residue. Does he however ask why the emblem or seal as it were of such an exchange took this form? For after the critique of political economy; we cannot pretend to be in ignorance of this question.
However, within the tradition of classical political economy itself, we should take account of competing tendencies presented as theories regarding the expression and exchange of value in the economy. For apart from the labor theory of value (from the point of view of a trader or otherwise) we also have the utility theory of value which of course leads explanations based on marginal utility that have gained some preponderance in neoliberalism. These theories however tend to be based upon the satisfaction gleaned from the consumption of one more unit of a given article, and a comparison vis-a-vis this and a similar investment in another commodity.
To return to our lecture however we are reminded that it was indeed Adam Smith who presented a critique of a utilitarian theory of value by pointing out the inverted relation between the utility and price of two commodities - namely diamonds and water. The former relatively useless, though valuable, the latter infinitely useful but usually inexpensive. From this he derived that what made a commodity valuable was not its utility but the amount of labor which went into its production. A position, which it may be noticed emphasizes the commodity relation from the side of the producer and not the end buyer. It may be premature to say that the Marxian critique of the theory of value of classical political economy was already immanent in the work of Adam Smith, but the tendency to do so with the labour theory of value does arise.
So the question we have before us today is something like this: when does a trader have to consider not merely the perceived saleability of a commodity, but also production costs in terms of labor. In other words, when does a trader begin to perceive their social bond not as a token which stands in lieu for another commodity per se, but as a bond which can make a demand upon society, without a pre-given article already at hand for example.
From the other side when does a commodity producer, or laborer come to identify beyond his own class alliances ie. when do they see their product, nay their very actions to be contingent on a slew of other divisions of labor which happen behind their backs as it were - even as they are engaged in their work? The traceability of products at a marketplace is a response that intuits the site correctly, and even something of the relations. Yet it does not venture far enough to ask why do these relations take expression in the form in which they do - that is in money, the commodity whose only use is in exchange.
Every other commodity in the marketplace, apart from exchange, also has a use-value that is a direct consumptive use-value for a consumer. The medium through which these commodities express their value, vis-a-vis each other remains money. And at this point, we begin to intuit something of the character of impersonal domination that these transactions may entail. A brief interjection may be made however, when Heinrich insists upon the purely social dimension of the abstraction called value 1. It may be in reference to what the likes of Alfred Sohn Rethel refer to as a real abstraction, that is while a customer as an individual may choose to or not choose to invest in any given commodity, exchanging it for a token, leasing it etc. or of course opting out; it is the exchange of commodities in the marketplace for such tokens which imbibe the basic commodity - money with the value he or she uses to make a purchase 2. Our capacity to abstract from the exchange of commodities in this way, and validate (or not) a token which can secure their exchangeability is in no way a property of any of these commodities themselves. It is a purely social relation. And here, I might add that the capacity to notice this itself may not be entirely social, or to speak plainly - common, according to Heinrich at least.
A point that is emphasized in the lecture is the distinction between concrete labor which produces use-values, and abstract labour, which produces value, a point which I have done a little to summarise - for it was important to Marx personally. To clarify the importance of this distinction - even someone in a managerial or supervisory role today, let us say overseeing a workshop or a factory floor would be privy to only the concrete labour being undertaken to produce a commodity, like a chef overseeing the recipe of a soup. The only way for us to abstract from the tastes and nutritional use values of the soup is to see if it was successfully sold or not ie. did someone on the shop floor place an order for it. A cashier hence, in this position would remain the person privy to the real exchangeability of a commodity.
Of perhaps some anamolous interest in Marx, is his insistence on a further inference it would seem - a substance of value ie. a material in which the abstract form of the relation we have presented above, is expressed. Yet, there may be a molar coordinate to this expressed by me in a perhaps flippant example. When I purchase a bulb, the shopkeeper may not have the exact change in coins to return to me for my principle. Here, it is common practice to offer an eclair or some similar logens when there is a remainder. This reiterates the point that value itself is social. A claim hence is actualized and you may say even tokenisticaly expressed in the substance of value. Value itself however, we are reminded is a real abstraction, abstracted as it were from any singular commodity and, even any singular exchange. As what makes exchanges commiserable. Money often does play the role of the substance of value, and here in this lecture at least, Michael Heinrich does not go much beyond exchanges in a marketplace it would seem.
What we should do well to keep in mind, before presenting any critique is the Marxian notion of value-form which the lecturer before our consideration appears to present as a correspondence.
We are informed by a wealth of some rather new innovations which have arisen in reading Marx, of which of particular interest to me are two.
1. Value-form theory. Here, working with the premise that a commodity's value is expressed not merely in the price it is sold for; or rather in taking into consideration the relationality of exchanges between commodities which defines any notion of price, we are led to consider the place of a certain commodity in the market vis-a-vis its competitors. This is all the more the case when a market is saturated, for in each case what a new invention reveals is that it is not the market itself that is saturated but a particular segment. To not overtly domesticate our idiom here, we would do well to recall that a serious criticism when Donald Trump proposed to make a 20 foot wall across the US border with Mexico was that it would simply raise a market for a 21 foot ladder.
There are however rather more sophisticated correspondences, especially in the domain of art and here it would be a shame were we to not mention some of the formal inventions in logic perhaps most noticeably Deluze's critique of the dialectic, which beyond France has been much hailed amongst American academia and the Anglo-phone world as what I have elsewhere described as that strange afterglow of post-structuralism.
This is a domain which would materially be representative in the mapping out of rivalries, whether political, as philosophic matters often are - or amorous, and, indeed between competing scientific perspectives, even if they are regarding the question of what is it. 2. The other major tendency which has informed reading of Marx as well as Marxist reading of our untimely present is of course to treat his mature work, especially Capital and beyond as a monetary theory. That is as a theory of relations which characterises the social sphere, by their mode of accumulation. In this sense, it remains very much a theory with class as its centrepiece, but with perhaps a greater emphasis on the divisions of the working day, in terms of the production of necessary and surplus value, in the composition of capital, wether organic or technical, and of course in the working of banks. Of this we may cite Fred Mosely and of course Michael Heinrich himself as notable examples.
Having introduced in a few ways how the question of value is broached in a discourse we are live to today, we move to the other points of focus of Michael Heinrich's lecture, that are fetishism and impersonal domination. It is indeed comical that Heinrich introduces fetishism as a term which has its own history, which initially may have been introduced by European colonisers upon witnessing the construction, reverence, and fear of totems. Yet he also cites Marx as the person who would turn this around and point out how fetishism is operating among bourgeois society where effectively relations between people take on the guise of relations between things; which then appears to have qualities which the people do not.
Heinrich is of course cognizant of layers of relations which may surface in these interactions. A capitalist for instance may observe the changes of prices of commodities and decide whether a certain deal is profitable or not. Similarly, the labourers employed by a capitalist are dependent on the movements of the market regarding whether the capitalist may require their work or not. These mutual dependencies as it were, characterising contractualisation and bonds in capitalist societies.
We would do well to note that Heinrich is not presenting an ideological critique here. In bourgeoise society, these intervalent dependencies mean that objectively things do have qualities that people do not, in this sense what he presents is some variation of an unmasking gesture.
Fetishism would hence name the relation between people where bonds are secured in the transaction of the most 'social' of all commodities, given that each commodity is exchanged in it - money. It objectively carries a valence which people don't have - this being the fetishistic moment.
This may be looked at from a more favorable angle however. The act of exchange was identified by Adam Smith as what makes a human being distinctly human in any social sense.
Indeed, progressing to this state may even be viewed as an advance made in society as at the very least it removes the bonds of personal domination, replacing them with exchanges which are not of a zero-sum nature. That is I today would not obey a master because of a commandment, but within the terms of a contractually agreed upon arrangement where I offer my labour in return for a wage, beyond which we go our separate ways.
This of course marks a crucial difference between ancient slavery and modern wage slavery. In the former world a slave tries to escape the domination of a master. In the latter, perhaps current one a slave seeks the master who may exploit him, if only to secure the means of their own livelihood. And here, I am tempted to read the figures of ancient slavery as corresponding to a retiring, and modern slavery corresponding to an emergent labour force. Of course, the prime difference between the figure of the master in the ancient and the modern world is that in this contemporary moment even the capitalist has to subject themselves to the marketplace, in their effort not merely to find profitable relations, but to outcompete other capitalists who may also be trying to secure for themselves relations that may allow them to command labour.
This sequence does present to us the importance of noticing social structures in our critique of the relations of production, and not persons themselves.
Michael emphasises however that Marx's critique begins not necessarily with capitalist relations themselves, but with commodity production. Indeed in this logic which Heinrich subscribes to - to get ride of capitalism would entail at some point abandoning commodity production itself.
Inasmuch as presenting our own use-values as commodities entails the structure of impersonal domination. In this sense the new reading of Marx which is emerging which following Heinrich, let us call value theory, would observe the experiments of a market socialism as may have been attempted in the Eastern Block, with cynicism as they may have been aiming at ridding themselves of capitalist relations, and its entailing structures without abandoning commodity production itself.
Noticeable, in this approach which a questioner Stipe Corcovik does point out after the talk is just how different this new reading is as it were from the cultural analyses practiced by the Frankfurt School, and in some respects even the Maoists. This is however a strictly non-revisioninst account of Marxism that sticks to commodity production and the relations that facilitate it as its bedrock.
The struggle against the fetishism of commodities, and relations bound or occasionally submitted to them however is yet enunciated in this supposedly a-cultural critique, finding common ground with the above two mentioned schools, which are perhaps better identified as tendencies.
In terms of the objections which Heinrich does face, as a representative of this new reading - which we should also note here, is that he presents a circulationist theory of value, where a commodity becomes converted into a value only in its act of exchange, and not in production itself. The professor would present that value however as conceptualised by Marx, is a relational phenomenon, and also how precisely values get converted into prices is a rather old Marxian debate. He does emphasize however that value exists in exchange, a position shared by Marx, yet it is not merely exchange which regulates value. Here, production as it were would continue to have an instrumentalist role, but may also as it were withdraw its services were terms to be unmet.
The bear in the room as it were, which we have to address is how is the transition from capitalism envisioned, and here there are no easy answers. The argument for an enlarged public sphere does nothing to account for the increasing privatisation of the public sphere - which is where any real battle is fought in any case. Yet were we to solicit an answer Heinrich would point to free associations of workers in communication with each other making products cooperatively.
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