Disposable forces, disposable class

Thomas Chalmers undoubtedly cribbed his "disposable population" from Turgot's classe disponible. Turgot's meaning seems to be different from Chalmers's. Turgot uses the term to refer to the class's revenue coming from a surplus of produce and thus being available for use however the proprietor wishes. That is the revenue could be used for luxury consumption or it could be used for improvement of lands, purchase of machines, etc. I would take Turgot's classe disponible to be roughly equivalent to rentier.

The disposability of Chalmers's disposable population, on the other hand, has to do with the facility with which they could be reassigned to different occupations -- such as the military. That latter usage brings to mind that "disposable forces" was a term of military strategy that referred to military units that could be quickly moved to a new location in response to an enemy threat. The term appears to have been most widely in use in the 19th century.

Politics and the Pandemic: Why I Think Paul Krugman Is Wrong

 Krugman has a piece in the New York Times today that offers an explanation for why Republicans oppose every measure—vaccination, masking, limits on indoor gathering—that could reverse the pandemic.  He says it’s because the Democrats support them and that Biden would take credit for reduced caseloads, hospitalizations and deaths.  Since owning the libs is the guiding philosophy of Republican politicians and their minions, such actions have to be fought at all costs.

The problem is that pandemic denial is a feature of the far right worldwide.  You can find it in England, France, Germany, Poland, Brazil and points between.  Explanations based on US political dynamics are insufficient (although they might be correct in a more limited way).

Here is my candidate: The pandemic gives the lie to the rigid individualism that draws hard lines around each person’s body and mind—the “you are the king in your own castle” idea.  It’s the bedrock of such notions as personal responsibility being the sole determinant of life events, unrestricted individual autonomy and the belief that collective action is an assault on “freedom”.  Actually, we are interconnected in a myriad of ways, culturally, economically and, as the coronavirus demonstrates, physiologically.  We are really a “we” whether we like it or not.

Far right politics is based on hard line individualism.  So is a strand of alternative health, which promotes the notion that it is within the power of each person to “choose” to be free of disease by following one or another program.  If the pandemic refutes these simplistic ideas, their response is denial.

Cognitive dissonance.

Socially Ambivalent Labour Time IX: Chapters 12, 13, 14, 21 & 22 of Capital, vol. one.

There is nothing significant in these chapters regarding socially necessary labour time. 

Chapter 12, the concept of relative surplus value, would be a good place for Marx to tell readers that socially necessary labour time, per capital, entails the production of a relative surplus population. Instead, we get only an anodyne definition of the productiveness of labour:

By increase in the productiveness of labour, we mean, generally, an alteration in the labour-process, of such a kind as to shorten the labour-time socially necessary for the production of a commodity, and to endow a given quantity of labour with the power of producing a greater quantity of use value.

Chapter 13, co-operation, gives a slightly confusing discussion of what happens when one worker exceeds the time socially necessary to produce a commodity:

If one workman required considerably more time for the production of a commodity than is socially necessary, the duration of the necessary labour-time would, in his case, sensibly deviate from the labour-time socially necessary on an average; and consequently, his labour would not count as average labour, nor his labour power as average labour-power.

Typically "one worker" does not produce a commodity, especially if we are talking about "co-operation." The "duration of the necessary labour-time" refers, in this sentence to the portion of the working day that the worker is compensated for while the labour-time socially necessary refers to the average time required to produce the commodity. Those two durations would "deviate" from each other in any event, since they refer to times required for different purposes - reproduction of labour power and production of commodities, respectively. Marx's purpose here is to explain the rationale for assuming a fixed minimum of labour efficiency.

Chapter 14, division of labour and manufacture, explains that the rule of socially necessary labour time is enforced by competition, since "each single producer is obliged to sell his commodity at its market-price."

Chapter 21, piece wages, explains the piece-work is no different from hourly work in that the piece rates are established by observation of how long, on average, it takes to produce each piece, "Only the working-time which is embodied in a quantum of commodities determined beforehand, and experimentally fixed, counts as socially necessary working-time, and is paid as such."

Chapter 22, national differences in wages, relates wage differentials between countries to differences in the average intensity of labour in each country: "In every country there is a certain average intensity of labour below which the labour for the production of a commodity requires more than the socially necessary time, and therefore does not reckon as labour of normal quality."

I skipped chapter 15 in this post because I am going to include it with chapter 25 in a forthcoming post.

Antivax Memes

 Based on various sources, including the recent NY Times podcast with interviews of vaccine resisters/hesitants, here’s my list of common elements.

1. Assuming the sole criterion for whether to take the vaccine is its effect on your own health—not taking into account whether you may infect someone else.  Antivax people nearly always justify their choice in terms of their perceived risk of getting Covid and the personal risk posed by the vaccine and not in terms of the vaccine’s potential role (or lack of it) in reducing the extent and duration of the pandemic.

2. Bodily violation: resistance to accepting a foreign substance into their body.  Also resistant to pressure from others, such as employers and government, to allow this substance to cross the “skin line”.

3. Personal responsibility for health.  Some antivax people think that how sick you get from Covid depends on your general state of health, itself perhaps the result of the measures you’ve taken to protect it.  If you stick to what you think is a healthy diet, if you work out, or if you just think you just have “good genes”, you do not think you are at risk and need to vaccinate against it.  Some strands of alternative health are strongly invested in the view that there is no randomness to disease: if you get sick it’s because you failed to cleanse, build up your immune system, tune your energy or otherwise do what you should have done.  Conversely, if you’ve followed the program you’re not at risk and don’t have to vaccinate.

4. Apparent inability to think probabilistically.  A common remark is that you can get Covid even if you’re vaccinated, so what’s the point?  Risk is perceived in binary terms: it exists or it doesn’t.

5. Fatalism.  Whatever happens happens.  There’s no point to getting vaccinated; you’ll get sick and die sooner or later anyway.

6. Distrust.  These are experimental vaccines that haven’t been approved by the FDA yet.  And even when the FDA says it’s OK, who believes them?  The government and the media lie with abandon.  The vaccines are also being pushed by corporations that just want to make as much money as they can.

Efforts to persuade people to drop their resistance to the vaccines need to begin by listening to them and communicating with them where they are.

Socially Ambivalent Labour Time VIII: Capital, volume one, chapters 6, 7 & 8

Chapter six, the buying and selling of labour power, contains neither "socially necessary labour time" nor "labour time socially necessary." Instead it has a few synonyms:

Suppose that in this mass of commodities requisite for the average day there are embodied 6 hours of social labour, then there is incorporated daily in labour-power half a day’s average social labour, in other words, half a day’s labour is requisite for the daily production of labour-power. This quantity of labour forms the value of a day’s labour-power or the value of the labour-power daily reproduced. If half a day’s average social labour is incorporated in three shillings, then three shillings is the price corresponding to the value of a day’s labour-power.

This passage says no more than that the value of a day's average labour power is equal to the value of the labour time socially necessary to produce the subsistence goods that maintain the labourer. Nothing here about relative surplus population.

Chapter seven, the labour process and the process of producing surplus value, reiterates the determination of value by the socially necessary (average) labour time it takes to produce the commodity and gives the example of spinning cotton into yarn. 

Chapter eight, constant capital and variable, reminds the reader that,

If the time socially necessary for the production of any commodity alters – and a given weight of cotton represents, after a bad harvest, more labour than after a good one – all previously existing commodities of the same class are affected, because they are, as it were, only individuals of the species, and their value at any given time is measured by the labour socially necessary, i.e., by the labour necessary for their production under the then existing social conditions.

It strikes me as odd that in discussing the buying and selling of labour power, and the labour process, Marx omitted mentioning that labour power, like any other commodity, could be produced in quantities larger than the market can stomach, thus resulting in the creation of a relative surplus population or industrial reserve army.

My point is that nowhere in Capital did Marx make the simple and obvious specification of his value theory that the relative surplus population is inherent in the concept of socially necessary labour time. Not in chapters 6 or 7, not in chapters 1 or 3, and not in chapters 15 or 25. Nor in any of the other chapters of volumes one, two or three. Does that mean Marx "changed his mind" sometime after writing the Grundrisse?

Not according to Friedrich Engels, who wrote, in Anti-Dühring Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution In Science:

The fact that the value of a commodity is expressed only in terms of another commodity, and can only be realised in exchange for it, admits of the possibility that the exchange may never take place altogether, or at least may not realise the correct value. Finally, when the specific commodity labour-power appears on the market, its value is determined, like that of any other commodity, by the labour-time socially necessary for its production. The value form of products therefore already contains in embryo the whole capitalist form of production, the antagonism between capitalists and wage-workers, the industrial reserve army, crises. 

Engels's statement is the only time in the entire Marx-Engels Collected Works that the words socially necessary labour, and either industrial reserve or surplus population occur within 100 words of each other -- that is, even after leaving time, army, and relative out of the search! That is remarkable because in the Grundrisse, there are three passages of considerable length that discuss precisely  the inversion in capitalism between superfluous (überflüssig) and necessary (notwendig) labour time and surplus population (i.e., labour capacity). I will discuss those passages in a future post.

How Marx saved The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties from falling into oblivion.

Friedrich Engels in the 1885 preface to volume two of Capital: 

On page 609 of the first volume (Das Kapital, 2nd ed.) we find the following quotation, “The possessors of surplus-produce or capital,” taken from a pamphlet entitled The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties. A Letter to Lord John Russell, London, 1821. In this pamphlet of 40 pages, the importance of which should have been noted if only on account of the one expression “surplus-produce or capital,” and which Marx saved from falling into oblivion, we read the following statements:

“...whatever may be due to the capitalist” (from the standpoint of the capitalist) “he can only receive the surplus-labour of the labourer; for the labourer must live” (p. 23). 

...

Marx makes the following comment (manuscript Zur Kritik, p. 852): “This little known pamphlet — published at a time when the ‘incredible cobbler’ MacCulloch began to be talked about — represents an essential advance over Ricardo."

...

Our pamphlet is but the farthest outpost of an entire literature which in the twenties turned the Ricardian theory of value and surplus-value against capitalist production in the interest of the proletariat, fought the bourgeoisie with its own weapons.

So how did Marx save this "farthest outpost of entire literature," this "essential advance over Ricardo" from "falling into oblivion"? Engels already told us. On page 609 of volume one of Das Kapital, Marx included a rather innocuous quote from the pamphlet in a sampling of similar quotes from other authors.

That's it. That's the rescue. 

Whatever else Marx may have had to say about the pamphlet was buried in manuscripts that would remain unpublished during Engels's lifetime.

Why does this even matter? Because what Marx called his "absolute general law of capitalist accumulation" is indistinguishable from the "two things" that the author of the pamphlet allegedly "overlooked." 

The cornerstone of Marx's critique of political economy was a (mostly friendly) critique of a critique of political economy. I say "mostly friendly" because it seems Marx overlooked exculpatory evidence against the charge that the pamphleteer overlooked those two things. But that story is for another time.

Israel Pays For Bibi's Successful Campaign Against The JCPOA Iran Nuclear Agreement

 In the last few days for the first time in many years northern Israel has been on the receiving end of rockets fired out of southern Lebanon, territory under the control of the Shia Hezbollah group long supported by Iranian interests, although apparently some think that it was Palestinians living in this area who fired the rockets. Even if it was, clearly this would not have happened without approval from Iran.

Also in the last few days an oil tanker in the Persian Gulf controlled by the Israelis has been attacked by drones apparently from Iran.  Israel has been suddenly on the receiving end of attacks either approved by Iran or actually from Iran. Why now?

The obvious reason is that Iran got a new hardline president, al Raisi, on Tuesday.  He is ahowing his hardline credentials, and the word is out that this is showing Iran's unhappiness at the economic sanctions it is under due to the US withdrawal from the JCPOA nuclear agreement, with so far, much to my unhappiness, President Biden has failed to get the US and Iran back into the agrement.

Of course probably the worst enemy of the agreement, who played a major role in convincing then President Trump to withdraw from the agreement, was former Israeli PM, Bibi Netanyahu. He openly wanted Iran to be under economic sanctions to make it harder for it to arm Israel's enemies among its neighbors. But now the ultimate result of that has arrived: Iran attacking Israel.  Bibi's campaign has come home to roost.

Barkley Rosser

The American Right Schmoozes Hungary's Orban

 Fox News's biggest star, Tucker Carlson, is broadcasting this week from Budapest where a political festival is happening under the aegis of Hungarian leader, Victor Orban.  As observers have noted, Orban has engaged in a gradual process of turning Hungary from a functioning EU democracy into an authoritarian state that maintains a veneer of democracy. Crucial to this is control over most of the media as well as the judiciary. His actions have put him in a running conflict with the EU's leaders, but he avoids pushing them too hard as EU financial aid to Hungary amounts to about 4% of its GDP, a lot.

Carlson claims that Orban is admirable and apparently a role model for the US for three reasons: his defense of western civilization, his defense of the family, and his innovations that improve democracy.  It would look that the first is based on his strong opposition to immigration from Muslim nations.  The second is supposedly due to the birth rate in Hungary having recently risen, although it remains below those of most other Eastern European nations. Carlson has made less of a fuss about it, but this also would seem to be based as well on his anti-LGBTQ attitudes and policies.

As for democracy, this is the one that is scary, looking like a blatant misrepresentation similar to the sorts of things we see the GOP doing in the US, spreading the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election, with many state governments passing voter suppression laws and even making it possible for state legislatures to overturn election results. This all seems to be part of a plan to have Trump seize power in 2024, even if he loses the election. Yeah, anti=democracy is democracy!

I note one other thing beyond the suppression of media and judiciary that has happened in Hungary under Orban. This is his driving out of Hungary the Central European University, founded in 1991 by George Soros.  Orban has engaged in a smear campaign against Soros, accusing him of being both a Nazi and a Communist, neither of which he ever was, founder of the Open Societies Foundation. But his anti-Semitic screeds have been gleefully picked up by GOPsters in the US who also like to  focus on Soros as a super bad guy supposedly funding all Dems in the US.  Oh, we really should not be surprised that Carlson and other US rightists are really getting into Victor Orban.

Barkley Rosser

The absolute general law of capitalist accumulation is what "our pamphleteer" overlooked..

Our pamphleteer overlooks two things:

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labour power at its disposal.

This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation:

As a result of the introduction of machinery, a mass of workers is constantly being thrown out of employment, a section of the population is thus made redundant; the surplus product therefore finds fresh labour for which it can be exchanged without any increase in population and without any need to extend the absolute working-time.

Any questions?

What Does Vaccine Effectiveness Mean?

 When technical specialists adopt an everyday word, they often give it a meaning that differs from its everyday use.  This can be misleading for nonspecialists, especially when little effort is made to explain the difference.  A well known example is “significance”, which means one thing when used in statistical work and another when it just denotes whether something is important.

Let’s look at another example, vaccine “effectiveness”.  What do people most want to know about the coronavirus vaccines?  How much protection they give you against the risk of getting infected with the virus, right?  And how much protection they give against more severe symptoms, such as those requiring hospitalization or resulting in long Covid.  When public health authorities throw out numbers about vaccine effectiveness, that’s probably how most people interpret them.

But that’s not what effectiveness means in medical research.  When pharmaceutical companies or public health outfits conduct effectiveness tests, they assemble and compare two groups, a treatment and a control (or multiple treatment groups with different protocols).  The treatment group gets the vaccine, the control group doesn’t.  Who gets assigned to which group is determined randomly, and participants don’t know which one they’re in.  (The controls get injected with a placebo.)  Then they go about their life, monitored to see if they get infected or not.  Vaccine effectiveness is a ratio, the fraction of the control group that gets infected divided by the corresponding fraction of the treatment group; it’s a ratio of two ratios.  You can also calculate effectiveness within subgroups, like treatments-over-65 and controls-over-65.  If the trial is conducted properly, the samples are representative and large and the public health context, including the virus variant, is stable, you can generalize effectiveness in the samples to the population as a whole.

Now notice a subtle difference in language.  The everyday use of “effectiveness” is effectiveness against the virus.  The research use is effectiveness relative to the control group.  This is immense, but widely misunderstood and seldom explained.

Here’s a numerical example.  Suppose a typical unvaccinated person going about life in a typical way faces a 1% risk of getting infected with Covid over the course of a month.  Suppose also that a vaccine is introduced with 95% effectiveness, as that term is used in medical research.  This means that a vaccinated person exposed to the same risk factors would have only a .05% chance of getting infected during the same time period.

Next, imagine that a new virus variant appears, combined with more relaxed public behavior—more indoor gathering, less masking.  Let’s say that an unvaccinated person now has a 5% monthly risk of infection.  If the vaccine is equally effective against the new variant, our typical vaccinated person now has a .25% risk of infection.  The numerator and denominator have both risen fivefold, but the effectiveness ratio of treatment vs control is unchanged.  Suppose further that the vaccine loses effectiveness against the new variant; it is now just 40% rather than 95%.  40% of 5% is 2%, the new monthly infection risk of those who have been vaccinated.

Effectiveness in the research sense has fallen from 95% to 40% from the first scenario to the second, smaller but still noticeably positive, but the risk of infection faced by someone who has been vaccinated in the second scenario is greater than the risk faced by someone unvaccinated in the first.

These numbers were made up, and of course the notion of a typical individual is a gross oversimplification, but the point applies to the current situation.  We now have vaccines against the coronavirus, and we also have a new, much more transmissible variant.  Effectiveness as researchers understand it has fallen, perhaps to about 40% for those vaccinated more than four months ago.  It’s still very important to get vaccinated, since it reduces both the risk of infection and the risk of infecting others relative to not being vaccinated, but even so you may well be at greater risk of infection now than you were a year ago before the vaccines were introduced.

The bottom line: vaccine effectiveness measures the risk faced by vaccinated individuals compared to those who aren’t vaccinated.  If the risk rises for the second group it rises for the first, even more if effectiveness is also falling.

Question

 1. If both x and n are positive whole numbers, can x + n < x?

(show your work)

K-12 Schools Opening In July

I long knew it was coming, but it has arrived.  I learned of this because some have closed due to heat and or the pandemic surging, K-12 schools.  This happened in Arizona.  They opened in July.  Really.  People in those districts may think this is fine, but I am horrified.  I view this as a situation where a frog has been in a pot of increasingly hot water that has now boiled, almost literatlly given some of these schools having to close temporarily due to extreme summer heat. What were they thinking?

They were not thinking.  It just crept up on them, and I know of districts near me that will open in just over a week, early in August, while others will open later. How did this come about?

It has come on gradually. Control over timing of school schedules has always been locally controlled, although sometimes state governments have intervened somewhat. When I was in school long ago it was a norm throughout the whole country that K-12 schools did not open until after Labor Day. That began to break down in the 1979s in many places, although there are still places that hold to that old norm and do not start until after Labor Day.

One thing that encouraged this was coming from higher education.  When colleges and universities start after Labor Day, the first semester does not end until in January after the Christmas break, which many did not like. There is a certain virtue of finishing the semester before that winter break, but in most places that means starting a bit earlier, basically in late August.  And that is what has been the case where I have been teaching, JMU, since I started 44 years ago, and still holds. This year classes will start on August 25, not too bad and getting us done for the fall semester before the winter break.

So many local school systems moved to start earlier, but why did they not keep their starting times in late August?  The problem is that if one does not think about it and make appropriate adjustments every few years, there is a tendency for the starting time to creep earlier by a day each non-leap year and two days earlier during leap years.  This year August 25 is a Wednesday, but the equivalent Wednesday last year was on August 26, and the year before it was August 28.  If a system does not have some external rule such as starting after Labor Day, there is no clear incentive for local school boards to make the adjustment of moving the starting date to nearly a week later than it did the previous year, which must be done once every several years if one is going to avoid having that starting date creep earlier and earlier.

Well, obviously there are lots of school boards that have been just too stupid, frankly, to figure this out and have simply let this go on and on. So now we are here where some are starting in July.  As I started with, this is absurd, and even early August is just too darned soon.  But I do not hold my breath that these places will figure this out and make proper adjustmenst.  Heck, we may end up with schools starting in June is some especially stupid places some day.

Barkley Rosser 

Socially Ambivalent Labour Time VII: Capital volume 1, chapters one and three.

Afterword to the Second German Edition [of Das Kapital, Buch 1] (1873):

I must start by informing the readers of the first edition about the alterations made in the second edition. One is struck at once by the clearer arrangement of the book. Additional notes are everywhere marked as notes to the second edition. The following are the most important points with regard to the text itself:

In Chapter I, Section 1, the derivation of value from an analysis of the equations by which every exchange-value is expressed has been carried out with greater scientific strictness; likewise, the connexion between the substance of value and the determination of the magnitude of value by socially necessary labour-time, which was only alluded to in the first edition, is now expressly emphasised.

Originally I had intended to go through the unpublished "Chapter Six" of Capital before dealing with the originally published volumes. I must confess that in the meanwhile I became transfixed by what I was noticing in chapters one and three and so will get to "Chapter Six" in due course.

A careful reading of the above Afterword will note that Marx referred separately to exchange value and the magnitude of value. These are two different entities, which Marx made clear in section 1 of chapter 1: "exchange-value, generally, is only the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it." The magnitude of value is, generally, distinct from exchange-value. Why "generally"? Because money is an exception. The value of money and its expression in exchange value are indistinguishable, as Marx will make clear in chapter 3.  

Right from the get-go, Marx tossed a grenade into the classical dichotomy of value in use versus value in exchange. Marx's socially-necessary labour-time theory-of-value is not a labour theory-of-exchange-value or even a labour-time theory-of-exchange-value. 

So let's hear what the imaginary abstract socially average reader takes away from this dialectical bombshell: "use value bla-bla bla-bla exchange value murble murble labour time brr-zzz-zzz value..." Meanwhile, our average reader has begun to wonder just how many yards of linen it takes nowadays to buy a coat and what style of coat it would be. "Where can you buy a coat with linen, anyway?"

Value is not some "substance" of labour time "embedded" in the commodity. The substance of value is a quality, its use value, not a quantity. The magnitude of value of a commodity, comprising the quantity of labour time socially necessary for its production, is a historically specific social relationship between people represented as a relationship between things. A commodity is only an aliquot part of all the commodities of its type. Value is what society has evaluated it to be, nothing more and nothing less.

Exchange-value is something different than, but not independent of value. It is the mode of expression of value and its measure. But don't let the word "measure" fool you. The units on the measuring rod of money are not fixed. The same value magnitude that measures as $2 today might measure $2.10 or $1.90 tomorrow.

The total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labour power of society, and takes effect as such; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary. The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time.

In case this account of "labour time socially necessary required to produce an article" should strike us as a natural property of the article and not of the historical society in which its production is taking place, Marx placed a section at the end of chapter one explaining the fetishism of commodities.

The character of having value, when once impressed upon products, obtains fixity only by reason of their acting and re-acting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary continually, independently of the will, foresight and action of the producers. To them, their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them. It requires a fully developed production of commodities before, from accumulated experience alone, the scientific conviction springs up, that all the different kinds of private labour, which are carried on independently of each other, and yet as spontaneously developed branches of the social division of labour, are continually being reduced to the quantitative proportions in which society requires them. And why? Because, in the midst of all the accidental and ever fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labour time socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of Nature.

"Like an over-riding law of Nature." Which is to say not a law of Nature but only seeming to be. Is it just me or doesn't "their own social action" seem a bit closer to a "revealed preference" than to an "embedded substance"?

In chapter one, section one, Marx dealt with the substance and magnitude of value. That's even the parenthetical elucidation of the subtitle of section one. In chapter three, section one, Marx dealt with the measure of values. But wait. Isn't measure a synonym for magnitude? Sometimes -- but not always and not in this case. There is even such a concept as a qualitative magnitude.

Suppose two equal quantities of socially necessary labour to be respectively represented by 1 quarter of wheat and £2 (nearly 1/2 oz. of gold), £2 is the expression in money of the magnitude of the value of the quarter of wheat, or is its price. If now circumstances allow of this price being raised to £3, or compel it to be reduced to £1, then although £1 and £3 may be too small or too great properly to express the magnitude of the wheat’s value; nevertheless, they are its prices, for they are, in the first place, the form under which its value appears, i.e., money; and in the second place, the exponents of its exchange-ratio with money. 

The form under which value appears, the expression in money of the magnitude of the value, is not the same as the magnitude of value. This is not a confusion on Marx's part or an obfuscation. It is a distinction -- and an important one. Value can only be produced in the sphere of production. It can only be realized in the sphere of circulation. There is thus an antagonism between production and circulation of commodities. 

In section two of chapter three, Marx introduced the market-demand qualification of socially necessary labour time:

Lastly, suppose that every piece of linen in the market contains no more labour-time than is socially necessary. In spite of this, all these pieces taken as a whole, may have had superfluous labour-time spent upon them. If the market cannot stomach the whole quantity at the normal price of 2 shillings a yard, this proves that too great a portion of the total labour of the community has been expended in the form of weaving. The effect is the same as if each individual weaver had expended more labour-time upon his particular product than is socially necessary.

"The effect is the same as if..." In other words, each weaver did not actually expend more labour time than was socially necessary but all the weavers collectively spent too much time. There were too many weavers. It is thus accidental whether the "transubstantiation" of the commodity's value into money can be accomplished at a price equivalent to its value. But it is not totally arbitrary. Otherwise people would soon stop producing for markets.

Recall that in these early chapters, Marx was dealing with simple commodity production and exchange. He was not yet concerned with buying of labour power and the extraction of surplus value. Or the equalization of profits, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall etc. etc. etc. But already at this primitive stage of analysis, the crucial distinction is made between the magnitude of value and its mode of expression in money. One of these things is not like the other. 

In closing, I'm always wondering how many of the 70 or so hits these posts on snlt get are actual readers. 5? 3? I would be very happy with 12-16 readers. But I suppose if I have ONE attentive reader it should be enough.

Past installments in this series:

1. Oedipus Marx and the Chimera of Socially Necessary Labour Time June 26
2. Socially Necessary Labour Time: outline of a review June 28
3. Socially Necessary Superfluous Labour Time -- a digression July 1
4. Socially Ambivalent Labour Time I: Grundrisse July 2
5. Socially Ambivalent Labour Time II: Theories of Surplus Value, chapter four July 4
6. Necessary labour. Surplus labour. Surplus population. Surplus capital. (The Return of "Disposable People") July 6
7. Disposable People March 4
8. Socially Ambivalent Labour Time III: <i>Theories of Surplus Value</i>, chapter 7 and addenda to part 1 July 8
9. Socially Ambivalent Labour Time IV: TSV part 2, chapters 8, 9, 16, and 17 July 11

10. Socially Ambivalent Labour Time V: TSV part 3, chapter 20 July 13

11. Socially Ambivalent Labour Time VI: TSV part 3, chapter 21: "Our pamphleteer overlooks two things" July 18

12. The Ambivalence of Verfügbare Zeit July 20

13. Socially Ambivalent Labour Time VII: Capital volume 1, chapters one and three. July 30

Has The Arab Spring Finally Come To A Full End?

 Arguably the Arab Spring ended a long time ago.  It was after all, Spring 2011, to be precise in terms of when the spring was.  It had arguably started a bit earlier, in December 2010 when an informal street vendor in Tunisia set fire to himself and died as a result of unhappiness over corrupt authorities demanding bribes from him he could not pay.  This led to massive demonstrations against the super corrupt and dictatorial regime of Tunisian President Ben Ali. This led soon after to him fleeing to Saudi Arabia where he died some years later.  A more or less democratic regime came to power then there.

As I am sure pretty much all readers here know, the demonstrations in Tunisia were soon followed that spring by demonstrations in numerous other Arab nations, with some of those also leading to the overthrow of existing governments in several nations, most notably in Egypt and Yemen.  Unfortunately the succeeding regimes were not too long after replaced by newly anti-democratic and authoritarian regimes, with the case of Yemen especially sad given the ongoing civil war there that is being exacerbated by various outside powers and is associated with serious famine and some of the worst conditions for a population anywhere in the world.

In various other nations demonstrations were successfully resisted by in-place authoritarian regimes that remained in power, although in some of them there were some minor reforms put in place in response.  But most of the Arab world remained ruled by non-democratic rulers, with the arguable exception of Lebanon, a currently disastrous economic basket case, and, after the Arab Spring, the place it all started, Tunisia.

But now there seems to have been a coup in Tunisia that seems to have brought to an end its democratic system and put in place an apparently authoritarian new system.  However, like Trump tried to get on January 6, this was an example of an "auto-coup" where an in-place leader effectively seized an autocratic power, upending standard rules and procedures.

The person doing this is current President Kais Saied.  He has fired the in-place prime minister and also suspended the parliament.  Furthermore, he had fairly recently blocked the appointment of judges to the nation's constitutional court, leaving it not functioning. This body could have ruled his actions illegal, but is unable to do so.  When the Speaker of the parliament, Rachid Ghannouchi, attempted to enter the parliament, he was blocked by armed forces figures obeying the orders of President Saied. This looks like the end of democracy in Tunisia, and the final end of the Arab Spring of a decade ago.

The legal basis for this action is that the president has the authority to do this if there is "in a state of imminent danger threatening the integrity of the country and the country's security and independence." Unsurprisingly a WaPo story today quotes one figure as saying that Saied's "interpretation of imminent threat is now being perceived as a little bit over-interpreted."  And indeed there seems to have been no clear or immediate threat from any source to the nation's security or independence.

There have been lots of largely peaceful demonstrations in Tunisia, which is suffering from a depressed economy as well as a serious pandemic situation.  It is a deep disappointment that the post-Ali regime, while reducing corruption somewhat, has failed to get the economy growing noticeably. The upshot has been high unemployment, including of many highly educated people.  There has been a long building frustration and unhappiness with this stagnation. 

As it is, while there are multiple political parties in Tunisia, the main split has been between Saied's pro-secular party and a moderate Islamist party, the Ennadha, which has been in power for periods of time in the last decade without imposing strict Islamist rules as the Muslim Brotherhood did in Egypt when they came to power after the fall of the Mubarak regime.  However, there has been fear of them, with especially unveiled urban women supporting Saied's move.  Mobs have apparently fought with each other in the streets of Tunis since Saied made his move. I might share the general view of these women, but it seems that there was neither a likelihood of Ennadha coming to power in the near future, or if they were to do so they would impose strict Islamist rules, anymore than there was any other "imminent threat."  As far as I am concerned this is a very sad outcome and situation.

Barkley Rosser

Why Did Trump Initially Support The Saudi-UAE Effort To Overthrow Qatar's Government?

 One of the more curious things in 2017 in the first year of the Trump presidency was how when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) placed a boycott on Qatar and more directly attempted to overthrow the government of Qatar, President Trump openly supported this effort initiallly.  He would later be pulled back from this position his first Secretary of Defense and that of State also after they noted that Qatar hosts the largest US air base in the Middle East, al-Udeid, from which many operations are carried out, including much of the drone warfare by the US. Less well publicized is that these secretaries also attempted later to get Trump to host a peace-making summit between the leaders of those three nations and some others in an effort to bring an end to the boycott campaign against Qatar, but for some reason Trump lacked enthusiasm for this idea and it never happened.

Juan Cole now reports that there was a common thread to these and related somewhat surprising developments: the behind the scenes influence with Trump of his longtime associate, Tom Barrack, a California real estate billionaire who also served as chair of Trump's troubled inaugural committee.  Barrack was better known for this latter activity, but Cole makes it clear that Arabic-speaking Barrack, whose family came from Lebanon originally, was really much more important as an influencer of Trump on his Middle Eastern policies in ways that did not receive any publicity but were much more important than the basically petty corruption going on in connection with Trump's inauguration.

So Barrack has now been indicted for these activities, in particular as acting on behalf of the UAE without registering as a foreign agent.  Not only that he also has been indicted for lying to the FBI about this under oath, something that somehow a lot of Trump associates somehow thought they could get away with.  Indeed, Barrack did get away with it for some time as the FBI initially investigated him for these things in 2018, but the DOJ under Trump did not move forward on this.  It took Biden becoming president and a change in leadership at the DOJ for this indictment to finally move forward.

It turns out that Barrack was also a long time go between for the Saudis, dating from the 1970s, but his closest relationship was with Emir Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahayan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi, whose wealth is about $1.3 trillion, making him the world's wealthiest man, not Jeff Bezos, and who also controls the $15 trillion sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi, the richest of the 7 emirates that constitute the UAE, with bin Zayed having bailed out much better known Dubai when it got into financial trouble, with that bailout giving bin Zayed ownership of much real estate in Dubai.

Cole also reports that bin Zayed has apparently had a long and close friendship with Vladimir Putin and that in the fall of 2016 bin Zayed managed to secretly visit Donald Trump in New York without then President Obama even knowing about it.  Cole suggests that bin Zayed was in cahoots with Putin in aiding the Trump presidential campaign secretly.  Much of this was aided by Barrack.

At least Barrack did one good thing, although it did not work out.  He apparently urged Trump to work to have a smooth transition after he was defeated by Biden in the 2020 election.  But obviously on that matter he was not listened to.

Barkley Rosser