Gratuity

In Chapter 8, Marx presents the concept of surplus-value as the key to capital’s increase: “This surplus-value is the difference between the value of the product and the value of the elements consumed in the formation of the product, in other words the means of production and the labour-power” (317). He then establishes corresponding terms in constant capital (means of production) and variable capital (labour-power). I am convinced—at least for the time being—of the calculations explicating the constancy of constant capital (including depreciation). This, of course, leaves the variability of variable capital as the only possible source of increase. Marx has previously explained that “in its pure form, the exchange of commodities is an exchange of equivalents, and this it is not a method of increasing value” (261). I think it is worth noting how heavily Marx deploys polemics to support this argument whereas he uses formulations in his discussion of variable capital. But I think that the “in its pure form” caveat does the necessary heavy lifting to make this argument work.

I am interested in the continuing legacy the exploitation (or theft) of labour-power from the worker. I was listening to a conversation about the new minimum wage hike proposals; someone on the neo-liberal left was debating someone on the neo-liberal right when the topic of the minimum wage for tipped employees came up.  I had forgotten, since I left the hospitality industry a decade ago, one of the things I learned that shocked me the most. As many are aware, tipped employees don’t receive paychecks, or rather, they receive checks for zero dollars.

Tipped employees make $2.13. As long as employee tips make up the difference to $7.25, the employer does not need to pay them more. This difference is calculated at a fixed percentage of sales (something like 8%). As tips are taxable, the employer also withholds taxes also in accordance with that same percentage of sales. So, provided that overtime is not a factor (and overtime is really not much of a factor), then the employer is responsible for some (relatively fixed) percentage of sales for withholding for tax purposes. Beyond the payroll tax duties, it cannot exceed the payroll amount calculated at $2.13 per hour (Checks can be zero, but they can’t be negative). Tipped employees do have some rights in declaring actual gratuity, but in my experience this is typically not done. My first question was whether or not this represented some shift in labour-power from variable to constant capital since the percentage of withholding is based on a fixed percentage of sales plus the minimum per hour wage; the equation based on number of hours and percentage of sales is at least predictable. But then I considered the role of the server’s labor in the commodity—the other side of Marx’ argument. If it is agreed that the value of the commodity of a plate of food is increased or decreased by the quality of service, then the capitalist (the employer) provides a relatively fixed wage (though not necessarily received by the employee), while the value of the commodity increases in a manner that is potentially limitless. The hope of a gratuity isn’t a wage even if it spurs and improved commodity: better service, servers performing side-work, etc. The gratuity isn’t a factor in the purchase price of either the means of production or the labour-power. True, taxes are withheld on all wage workers. However, to withhold taxes on tipped employees is to withhold taxes on an imagined wage not provided by the employer.

(Note: I haven’t been associated with this stuff in a while, but I did do some poking around online. I may have a detail or two slightly off, but I do think the big picture is right. These practices do also vary from place to pace and state to state. I just know a lot of people that never got a paycheck even if they were raking in the cash.)

Money Conceals

For me, reading Marx is sometimes like wandering a maze, but then I read a sentence or passage that raises my line of sight over the tops of the hedges to see the whole.  I begin to see the progression of abstractions that Marx outlines.

One such sentence is in the section on Commodity Fetishism, when Marx writes that the money form “conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly” (169-70).  If we could see the labor and the material conditions in which the Dollar Store items ($1 in exchange value) are produced, then the exchange-value of these items may seem disproportionate to the labour expended by a worker in another country in comparison to our own.

It seems, then, that the discourse around, for example, the working conditions of those in China who make our iPhones, would be to reveal the reality behind the abstraction. That to me would be the point of some of the social justice discourse on the working conditions involved in the production of our commodities.

Value and the Service Economy

While I appreciate Marx’s analysis of industrial commodities (I can honestly say I have never thought so much about linen in my life).  Thinking about the process of value, prices, and their relation to wages left me wondering how elements of this theory play out in a more service oriented economy.  Marx seems to suggest these services are still commodities, as he notes that even things totally without value, such as an individual’s honor, may be sold and consumed (p. 197).  However,  when receiving haircut, having a mechanic service your car, receiving medical treatment, you may have the same time of labor performed for you, but the price of the labor is entirely different.  Even if we controlled for all of the materials consumed during the service (rent, tools, x-ray film), it seems that the doctor’s hour is worth more than the stylist’s hour simply on account of the profession and title. Do these services have different value because of the training? Are we paying now for all of the value of accumulated medical school?  Or is there some other force, beyond labor based value, that alters the price of these services?

Or instead of thinking of these as commodities, are we truly just paying wages?  if that is the case, why does the doctor or the mechanic not have the same race to the bottom as the industrial laborer?  I am additionally troubled by thinking of service economy simply as wages because this labor does have direct use value to us, suggesting we consume it like other commodities. While these questions may not have been as central to Marx, as the service economy was not as fully developed, I hope for some further discussion of these ideas, as I could not get passed them as we read the accounts of industrial commodities.  Thus I look forward to our discussion of the evolution of Marx’s theories of capital as we apply them to an era less dominated by industrial labor. 

Marx's Value of Labour

Great discussions,

It is amazing what one can notice when a specific lens is fresh in our eyes.  This week’s readings on Marx’s Capital have inevitably filtered the way I view the world.  If my wife asked to watch Shark Tank with her, I knew not how to avoid its paradoxical gravity; albeit I could see the capitalist doing its work first hand, I also found myself cheering for the contestants to achieve a business partnership that would surely result in some form of exploitation. 

The most poignant episode of this recently acquired lens was manifested in a phone conversation with a childhood friend earlier this week.  Our typical conversations cover the basic generic questions like “how you’ve been,” etc.  When he asked about how I was doing, I could not help but to mention the difficult time I was having with my recent subscription to theory.  Normally this is his cue to say “I’ll leave you to it, then” as he proceeds to say his goodbyes.  For whatever reason, he asked the question of no return: “how so”?

Better known as Alex “the plumber,” I thought my friend would appreciate a snippet for the irony of his nickname (in the Marxist sense, of course).  Still, I had to be cautious.  Boredom and irrelevancies are equivalents to Alex “the plumber,” as much as conversations about metaphors and allegories lose their appeal to him beyond the points of symbolic representation.  To the best of my appealing abilities, I tried to explain to him Marx’s value of labor (among other concepts), though I may have been employing his ear to see if I could have a better grasp of these concepts myself. 

At first, I was impressed by how much Alex “the plumber” actually listened to my long-winded diatribes.  I was even more surprised to hear his reaction: thinking himself the exception to the production of surplus value (that is, selling his labor for the capitalist), he explained how recently he did a job for a lady whose husband supervises a number of Walmart stores in the area—or so he found out during the course of the job.  “The plumber” confessed that learning this detail prompted him to charge his customer almost twice as much the amount as he normally would for similar jobs.  (He is the smartest plumber I know).

While trying to avoid a sermon, I explained to him that his labor is still subject to exploitation, and that the fact that he charged a larger amount on this specific occasion was only one sign for the average value of his labor.  I did not want push the issue any further, lest I abused his patient attention.  My only rebuttal was to point out how shopping at Walmart—though seemingly saving money—was in turn helping pay for his client’s high salary.  I thought Alex “the plumber” would then think about what his overpriced bill meant in the larger picture, but he seemed ever more satisfied—if justified—for his deed.

This conversation with Alex “the plumber” made me think about the ways we view our labor and to consider the price we sell it for:  what an irony it is that it essentially shapes our identity.  (By the way, most of my friends including Alex “the plumber” know me simply as “the Professor”—the kind of emphasis they put to the nickname reveals that it is just as much a career label as it is a comedic adjective).  

Marx and Used Cars

Marx’s scientific retelling of use-value and exchange-value was, at times, dragged down by helpful yet antiquated examples of commodities.  But the strengths of the concepts themselves elicited a powerful, hopefully accurate,  contemporary example of use-values and exchange values. Every teenager who inherited a broken, decrypt, or altogether questionable mode of transportation is already acquainted with the differences between the two types of values inherent within all commodities.

Officially and legally, a car, bus, motorcycle, or truck’s value is recorded by Kelly’s Blue Book.  Their formula for value appraisal reads something like an evasive teenager, as their website explains. “it is derived from actual new vehicle sales and extensive knowledge of the marketplace,”(KBB.com).  Despite being unwilling to make their exact calculations known, the general logic follows that every year after its production vehicles begin to lose value as represented by currency. The vehicle’s general condition further detracts from its already deflating price.

The Marxian explanation of de-valuing of a commodity would be an interesting and thoughtful enterprise, but it is not one that I concern myself with here. Instead, I turn to Rhonda. A recent claimant on Judge Judy’s television show. Rhonda was the unfortunate victim of a particular vicious car accident that rendered her older Ford totaled(totaled being an interesting economic term in itself as it refers to the value being completely extinguished from the car as a commodity).  Upon hearing her case, and  finding the defendant legally responsible for the damages Judge Judy awarded Rhonda a measly $400. Rhonda’s functional yet elderly car’s appraisal value meant that even after winning her case, she would still be unable to purchase a functional dependable car like the one that was ruined by the irresponsible defendant.

Rhonda’s case reflects the dialectical nature of commodities specifically as related to use-value and exchange value. The use-value of Rhonda’s car is potentially not measurable as easily in currency given that it is not mediated by labor. It is inherently extrinsic. However, one might imagine the vehicle’s use in transporting Rhonda to work, picking up children, delivering meals to elderly grandparents meant that the car had real use to Rhonda. In this case, the exchange-value of the car as elaborated by Kelly’s Blue Book meant that Rhonda’s car had an asymmetrical use to exchange-value. Under California law, even though the defendant effectively destroyed Rhonda’s working car. Rhonda is only entitled to the exchange-value of the car but not in fact to another working car. As the focus on currency by capitalists removes the true focus from labor as value, such a focus values as expressed exclusively monetarily potentially marginalizes use-value. Marx’s explanation of commodities gives us language to question where we might find a commodities worth. Such language also affords us the opportunity to question the legal privileging of a certain type of value over another.

Commodities and World

The whole first chapter focuses on the relationship between private individuals (their use and production of material things) and the web of society that acts on the individuals both prior to and after that labor. What society does prior to the individual is provide a meaningful world: it teaches the individual how to understand the things and their uses—what is good to eat, how to make linen or coats, why have coats to stay warm and not snuggies or anoraks or those chemically activated handwarmer packets or whatever. It shows the individual what is useful/meaningful in that culture and place. Then the individual does her magic on the world, takes a thing, applies her specific and particular labor, and objectifies herself as a product: 20 yards of linen, a coat, 100 mass produced snuggies, a few jars of homemade bourgeois applesauce. Then society gets to work again, and starts its free-market weighing of things—exchanging them for other forms of labor, for porridge or mukluks or Beyoncé albums. This is the “world of commodities”—which is really, it seems to me, a world of human uses which is always appearing (Capital 155). Through this process of exchange, the things reveal their dialectic nature: they all contain each other negatively because they can all be exchanged for each other in varying proportions—this is their “two-fold nature” (152). And its because of the people. Money is the realization of that abstract property of equivalence. Prior economic systems mostly functioned by C-M-C exchange and circulation. Capitalists turn money into commodities to turn it into more money, harvesting the worker’s surplus labor.

I find especially interesting the beginning of the section of commodity fetishism where Marx points out some of the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” of things we exchange. He talks about how labor transforms wood into tables, from a sensuous thing into a thing which “transcends sensuousness” (163). To explain this odd occurrence, which is “nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things” he points us to religion and fetishism (165). But doesn’t this whole concept complicate his earlier claim of a material conception of history, and the vulgar Marxist version of history? I know this resonates with our discussion last week, and certainly with the formal qualities of dialectic thinking, but I’m still unsatisfied with the idea of a giving material things primacy, of that being the thesis and social interactions be the antithesis. What about the socialness of the world that Marx keeps acknowledging? How do we know that’s not the thesis and the material world is the antithesis? Am I just being too Heideggerian for Marx? Do my questions here even make sense or am I just importing skepticism as a brainwashed apologist for capitalism? What do you think Jameson say, and is this just me understanding hegemony wrongly?

Commodity as a Fetish

It's interesting how Negri claimed, as Marco mentioned, that Marx's "antagonism" has disappeared in Capital.  When Marx refers to the commodity as a "fetish" or "mystical" or "necromancy," it sounds to me like a backhanded compliment,  i.e, the engine of capitalism is not built to last, after all. Maybe I'm misreading it. In any case, that idea that individualized human labor, working with one's hands to produce, is what gives he commodity this mystical quality provoked me to think about certain products made today. For ex, if we're talking about a wooden sailboat or piece of antique furniture, or any "handmade" item not mass produced, then yes, the skill and craft of the builder and the appeal of the design and shape are very important to the product's value. But most products, whether it's a compact car or a stapler, depend more on function and consistency for its value. So the "hands" that build these products are less valuable, perhaps because these individuals are not crafting the product but only regulating the machines that make the product. On the other hand, I would argue that Steve Jobs and Apple -- with their emphasis on aesthetics of a computer or cell phone -- have turned the tide and made the labor, at least in terms of product design,that goes into tech devices more important.

One more thing:  Marx's feeling that the beauty of a commodity lies in its impurity reminds me of a key feature in the best novels: the most compelling heroes and villains are "impure" and have traits of each. Therefore, a complex hero is a "commodity" because of their pliability. They can conform and appeal to the desires of different readers and viewers. (And thus, their use-value to their authors is the ability to sell more books!)

Those are my Deep Thoughts for the week.
-Tom