New Kapital

Some people say that State-run economics died when the Berlin Wall fell; but since then the free-market of Capitalism has also collapsed - only to be saved by state intervention. Few people know where to turn next; but I think we need to work out what was right and wrong about the old ideologies before we can move forward. 

I remember some US commentary on Das Kapital talking about Marx’s theory of value being redundant in the face of the supply and demand calculus of capitalism. However, as a humanist I have always understood the conversion of a commodity’s intrinsic value to a (need determined) use-value and a (market determined) exchange-value as being the basis for working class alienation from, and exploitation as, a means of production.

I had thought that knowledge workers, in the knowledge economy, carrying with them mental capital as the new ‘means of production’, riding the wave of an information revolution, protected by their new intellectual property rights, would reconcile this alienation. I envisaged some sort of natural law forcing all forms of communication to be maximally efficient and economic – ‘why speak if you having nothing to say?’ sort of thing – so that any exchange of information had to be useful as well as possible, within the means of the individual's resources.

However, reviewing all the hyperbole that is ‘exchanged’ per second by the global media, the national politicians, the markets and the local fishwives, it seems there is an overproduction of ‘information’, very little of which, in any way, could pass as useful ‘knowledge’. It is grandstanding, persuading, entertaining, sensationalising, dramatising and catastrophising but it is not useful. This daily diet is similar in nutritional content to Coca-Cola and chocolate in comparison to vegetable soup and bread.

But now it occurs to me that the Big Society is indeed a call for a return to the intrinsic worth of people and things; a Tory recognition that the extrinsic price of a commodity (the worker) at auction is indeed a poor estimate of its (his/her) real worth. In a way I'm glad about this because I really do believe that there can be no exchange-value without use-value, no extrinsic value without intrinsic value.

I also believe, therefore, that all production begins with the (free-) exchange of commodities according to their use-value, and not vice versa as the markets/Tories would have us believe. Each party to the exchange then automatically has some use-value to the other party. In a stalled negotiation I call this maneouvre 'give some, get some, got some'. This free-exchange, I believe, is the basis of trust, contract, and the investment of otherwise competing self-interests towards mutually desirable goals. What I am saying is that use-value binds an in-group together in a very organic communal and humanistic way. Markets cannot do this, infact markets have a habit of reversing this. When you are at the bottom of the pile you are more likely to think along the lines of: 'got nothing, give nothing, get nothing'.  

Exchange values, on the other hand, occur when one group needs to exchange its products in return for another group’s products. At this point, the group not the indiivdual becomes party to the exchange; the individual psychologies merge into a collective psychology; the members of the group value themselves in terms of the value they attribute to their group in comparison to other groups; not the value of the individual to the other group members as individuals. Often there is a delay in the exchange of products and so tokens of value are exchanged instead. Tokens represent groups in the same idealised abstract forms as 'in-group identities', 'branding' or 'stereotypes' do. The risks and dangers (of lying, cheating, stealing, starvation and warfare) increase when individual accountability is subsumed within a superordinate, abstract and idealised collective identity. In short the ideological politics of exchange are very different to the raw economics of utility.

Individuals do compete and hierarchies do form internally to an in-group, but usually only in relation to the use-value of the individuals involved, not in relation to their ‘exchange value’. The leader of an in-group has little or no value to the members of an out-group; otherwise they would not be so ‘out’, more ‘in’ as it were. However, when out groups compete it is very definitely on the basis of exchange values - the out group becomes replaceable, surplus to requirments, expendable. I believe this is the basis upon which Marx and Mao envisaged class divisions could arise and class struggles would take place. But I think we recognise now that our respect for any out-group depends more upon our psychological classifications of our own in-group membership, and political self-interests, than upon our respective histories of material wealth or deprivation.

At this point in history, I believe, it is probably wiser to caution that our psychological classification systems are becoming more porous, chaotic and malleable, under the prevailing conditions of information overload and global connectivity; Group membership and group leadership are likewise becoming amorphous, dynamic propositions, not stable traits or states.

However, if we assume for instance that the group we are interested in is defined by the geographical borders of the UK; the group members are its inhabitants (of a certain duration, qualification, belief, criterion, etc.?) called UK citizens; and that the group leader is the UK PM/Queen, we might suppose that the use-value of all the members could be defined by the average productivity of each and every citizen (GDP). This statistic puts the UK in the top ten economies of the world.

But what then do we make of the UK trade deficit? The UK has the third worst trade deficit in the world. We are some of the most highly efficient producers, but apparently have to consume products from almost everywhere else in the world. Surely this demonstrates how alienated we have become from our own productions.

So what do we produce? We are told that a few of us produce technological know-how, most of us produce consumer and financial services, and a few of us produce manufactured goods. Think about that for a while. Does that mean that we are the cause of the information overload that is engulfing us? The sales, commercials, fashions, fantasies? Do we rationalise all our emotional attachments, sell them to the highest bidder, and in so doing cut ourselves off from everything that we actually need? Watch X-Factor, think Beckham, play Wii? How do we price this production and consumption of information goods and services? How do we price real knowledge? How do we price our own mental health and wellbeing? Are we even aware of it? Or do we stuff our faces and fall over drunk in order to ignore our emotional needs for community?

When I think about the credit crunch, and I start to think in terms of community health and well being; when I look at income inequality rising year after year only stunted by the occasional recession; when I think about ‘market confidence’, and trust, and ethics; I start to think maybe Marx was right, alienation is killing us and making us wealthy at the same time. So I am starting to believe that no-one in the UK has more of a need of all this information and knowledge, this non-nutritional entertainment, these goods from all over the rest of the world, than the richest people, who just get richer by the day.

Im starting to feel sorry for them. They have more mental health needs than any of us, because they are the most alienated from themselves, the most alienated from the realities of everyday life, the most alienated from us the workers, and the most alienated from the rest of the world; But they are intent on sucking us all into their vacuum of greed and hopeless, helpless, despair, like tyrannical spoilt children who have all the power and money in the world but no meaning at all to their sad little lives.

And when I think like that the dialectic replies - the only way to reverse this alienation is to start saying and seeing me, I, and we, in place of they, that, and them? Am I the rich? Am I the vacuum? What can I do to make this right? So the popular answer is the 'Big Society', which nobody understands but everyone 'gets'.

It’s a strange world – it really is.