Economic Review, Vol. 66 No. 3, 2015.
Other
LABOR AND VALUE IN DISRUPTION
Matko Meštrović
Abstract
Economics traditionally uses “capital” to signify both a set of objects (material and immaterial) and quantities of a property of those objects, market-value. Such doubleloading of a symbol does not necessarily lead to confusion, but Piketty’s book is a case in point. He is saying that in his book “capital” will signify a set of objects, all forms of property and forms of financial and professional capital, and before he has finished the paragraph “value” slips in as “both a store of value and a factor of production”. Only in a capitalist society abstract labor is represented in value, objectification of alienated social connections. Value is not just limited to the “economic sphere” but its structure is imposed to the whole society. It is a “total social fact”. Value-producing labor must be seen as the object of critique in any critical theory directed at the social conditions and forms of domination that constitute the modern world. A form of wealth bound to human labor time expenditure, Marx constrasts to the gigantic wealth-producing potential of modern science and technology. Value becomes anachronistic in terms of the system of production to which it gives rise; the realization of that potential would entail the abolition of value.
Keywords
abstract labor; value critique; objectification; form of wealth; microelectronic revolution; living labor; fictitious capital; financial superstructure; crisis; capital as “automatic subject”
Hrčak ID:
144127
URI
Publication date:
28.8.2015.
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