English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Three traditions and the difficulty of theoretical order 0:55 There's also a difficulty at the heart of our discussions, at the heart of this talk, which however does not depend on the speaker or on his reading, but which depends also on the thing itself, on the matter we're discussing. It's about theoretical order in general, let me explain quickly. For example, when Marx writes to the French translator of Capital, he warns him.
1:28 He has a lot of admiration for the French and he presents himself as a synthesis of three European traditions, as it happens. So let me give the floor to Marx, he says that his initiative is somewhat the confluence of the English economic tradition. Political economy is a relatively recent science. The French political tradition, for which there was enormous admiration.
1:58 And thirdly, the German theoretical tradition, which of course corresponds to the philosophical period of exceptional density that precedes Marx, what has been called German idealism, which is roughly post-Kantian. There you go. So we must never forget that Marx differs from his contemporaries, who are content to deplore the misery of some, saying we just need to, we just have to, we'll come back to points, even generous ones, but I mean, which amount to what in philosophy is called the ought-to-be. It ought to be like this.
2:28 We just need to, we just have to — that's the ought-to-be, you see. Without first analyzing what is. And if you look closely, Marx is known above all for having written, not about communist revolution, no, he wrote Capital. That's what's happening here, now, whether we like it or not, whether we like it or not, Marx did not like capitalist exploitation, since he was its chief adversary in his time. But if you want to get rid of it, modify it, or replace it, you have to start by knowing what it is, and analyzing it. And that's a bit what the whole history of the sciences did, the sciences that led to effective practice.
3:04 If astronomy became what we know it to be, if it left behind the astrological fantasy of Antiquity, it's precisely because, instead of looking at the stars from the top of an 80-meter tower thinking you'd see better — which is what the Babylonians did, that's an enormous mathematical point — I mean, astronomy took a detour through abstraction, through the difficult, through the theoretical, through equations. And it's through equations that we know the Sun better, isn't it, than by looking at it? By looking at it, I would have gotten something round like a plate, roughly, that couldn't be all that far away.
3:36 So there you go. So that reminds us that there's also a difficulty connected to what we're raising here. And when Marx warns the French translator of Capital, it's because he knows the French don't have a theoretical mind, especially at that time. That is, they have their heads close to their caps, as he puts it — that's a compliment, the expression 'to have one's head close to one's cap' — and Marx quotes it in French. And he actually borrows it from Hegel, it means to bleed off, so to speak, to say nothing much. That's what 'close to the cap' means. And if he insists on this, he's taking up a comparison from Hegel, taking up the relations between the political French and the theoretical Germans — I'll leave the English aside for now, the economic theorists.
4:14 Marx says, we Germans, we are profound. That goes without saying, of course. We are profound. We think about, we think about, the activity of others. The French made the revolution, we think their revolution. But they made it. You see? So I'm not at all saying that we should lose ourselves in abstract theory for the pleasure of it. But there is also a necessity to make an effort to become familiar with certain notions, not only because they are abstract or complicated, but also, and this is rather Marxian, what I'm about to say, if I may, because they run counter to what dominant ideology has made us think since birth.
The double reception of Marx, exoteric and esoteric 4:57 We mustn't forget that. So there's this difficulty, which is an ideological difficulty, not strictly a technical one, if you will. So, I'll move on quickly, since I hear talk of esoteric and exoteric, that comes at the right time, I'll move on to this fact that we also cannot bypass and which is specific to the image we have of Marx since the appearance of his first publications and his struggles.
5:30 It's that this body of work, compared to that of any philosopher or theorist or economist, has a double reception, has always had a double reception. A reception within the workers' movement, very early on — let's not forget it was Marx who organized, with the unions of his time, in Germany, the First International, let's not forget that. That's not theoretical work, it's organizational work. Unification — don't forget the last line of the Manifesto, it's so famous that we forget it.
6:04 Workers of all countries, unite. That's harder. Stop letting yourselves be divided, men against women, Hutu against Tutsi, Corsicans against the French. Capital dreams only of that. It does everything for that. Workers of all countries, unite. I recall that in passing. It doesn't mean say all the same thing, but agree on the essentials. So there's this double reception that adds to the difficulty of Marx's work. Sometimes it's a reception within the workers' movement.
6:34 You have to see how Marx's name began to circulate with popularity among the working class from the time of the Paris Commune, when they learned that Marx had attached enormous importance to what was happening with the working class. That even modified and accelerated some of Marx's revisions. First reception: Marx's reception within the movement, within militant action. Second reception of Marx, among — I'm simplifying enormously, so what I say is always a bit abstract, a bit vague, a bit general, as long as we don't go into detail.
7:07 Among intellectuals — that's a rather vague word. I think you understand me — from his own time up to today, and more than ever, even thanks to the crisis, which we've seen has never — we have a bookseller among us, I believe, who can testify — hasn't seen this many publications around Marx's ideas in ages. It's proliferating on all sides. No doubt because capitalism was being pointed at. So among intellectuals, to be a bit more precise, among economists, including those who criticize him, who tear him apart, who analyze him or raise counter-arguments — among economists, there were some before Marx — among philosophers, among anthropologists, it's not quite the same reception.
7:53 Moreover, this double reception has led certain contemporary Marxists — who, instead of taking these two receptions together as I do, which for me are complementary and inseparable, and there are plenty of passages in Marx where he says there's no pure theory, action relaunches theory and theory guides action, a dialectical back-and-forth between the two — some, on the contrary, have tried to oppose, instead of relating in complementarity, certain present-day Marxists, I'm thinking of Kurz for example, have wanted to oppose — hello — the reception within the workers' movement and the reception among intellectuals.
8:37 Very quickly. Reception in the workers' movement leading only to that horror which is the Gulag. That's a rather quick shortcut. And that's why I prefer to speak of it in terms of complementarity. Not at all to give my opinion over Kurz's, but to be faithful to what Marx says, which is that the two are absolutely inseparable. Militant activity allows theoretical advances to be made more quickly than certain intellectuals would achieve.
9:09 I'll give an example. Marx says for instance that the theory of surplus value — we'll see later that it's the very core of his analysis and his decisive contribution to economic theory — the theory of surplus value, he says, it's strange, a great professor of philosophy can spend 20 years failing to understand it while a worker would grasp it quickly. You see that for Marx, it's not that the workers accept it on one side because it suits them but understand nothing of the great philosopher that Marx is, and on the other side a few intellectuals who are on equal footing with this great philosopher Marx.
9:42 So, after this introduction which tries to bring together the exoteric Marx, that is, open to everyone, particularly to the workers' movement, and an esoteric Marx reserved only for those who studied philosophy — that's not a Marx-rite, of course. Philosophy's face is indeed written into it. That's what I mean. So, to get to the heart of what some call the esoteric side, at the heart of Marx's theoretical work independent of his militant work here, even if for him they are linked, of course — I'd even say he never militated as well as when he was hammering out his theory of value.
10:20 If you will, the core of this Marxian theory lies in the theory of value and in the law of surplus value that flows from it. But I'm not going to introduce it dogmatically right away — I'd like first of all to note that the questions that were raised, and Dominique Mazoui put it very well, got somewhat frustrating answers given the time allotted last time, since we were rushed. I'd like to start again from the question — I believe it was Simone who asked it — about the difference between activity and labor, which will bring us a bit to the heart of the theory of value.
Use value and exchange value 10:57 Good. So let me go back, but without drowning it in digressions this time. I go back to the distinction I made last time between labor that results in a product which has value for someone other than me and is therefore exchangeable and thus liable to become a commodity. You know where it's exchanged? At the market. That's where the market comes in.
11:31 And the labor — I had taken the example of someone carving the face of his beloved on a tree or something, I mean, or labor that results in an object that has value only for the one who made it and which therefore has no economic, market value — use value. So, since we'll get confused if we keep going like this with the word value, let's see right away that the difficulty lies within the word value itself, which we now split in two.
12:05 When we say a soup is good, that it has value because I find it delicious to eat, that's what's called use value. And as Marx says, use value is realized precisely only at the moment of consumption. And if I take the objects around us in terms of use value, we're struck by how heterogeneous they are. There are chemical, physical, biological differences.
12:35 I was talking about fish soup, for example, which means soup won't have the same use as a screwdriver. You see, that's a qualitative difference. Whereas when we speak of exchange value, oddly, all of a sudden, things seem to become all comparable. One can very well say that the book I buy at Paris-Dominique has a value equivalent to 8 packs of cigarettes. That's already a nice book.
13:12 I hope you'll take some. It's an editorial thing, it's better. There you go. So... And there, look, all the qualitative differences disappear as if by magic. I can exchange cigarettes for a book. And 2000 years ago already, Aristotle had seen that the value of a sandal is twofold. He takes the example of sandals from his time. Sandals are in fashion right now, ancient sandals. It's a different era. Well. Aristotle says there are two ways. There are two uses for a sandal.
13:43 Either I use it to walk, or I use it to exchange at the market for another commodity. He had read it very well. Aristotle is one of the greatest feats of intelligence we've ever had. But he couldn't solve the riddle. He didn't understand, as a good Greek at the time, how one could exchange a bed for four pigs. That's not quite what he says — a pig is a certain quality and has a certain purpose. A bed has another. How can one be exchanged for the other? And so Marx's great discovery was to have dug into the question of what makes value — not use value this time, but exchange value, the one that has an impact on economics.
14:25 Because once again, a thing that has value only for me is not, by definition, by hypothesis, a commodity. And in wanting to dig into the notion of value, for convenience, when we speak of exchange value, we just say value, without specifying use value. Because in economics, we practically only talk about exchange value. If I say value without specifying, it's a convention between us, but one that goes back to the economic theories of Marx's time.
14:56 A convention between us — if I say value without specifying, it refers to exchange value, the value of gold, of money, the exchangeable. Otherwise I'll specify. But if I say the book my mother gave me for Christmas when I was 9 has value for me, that has nothing to do with exchange value. I wouldn't exchange it for anything. So, digging into this notion, what could there possibly be in common between that and a table, for heaven's sake?
Statement of the theory of value 15:26 Because it's the same, one can say that a pair of glasses is some fraction of a table, you see, in terms of price. One can very well calculate the quantity of glasses, even 4.7, we don't know, or 20.8, that would give the equivalent of the value of the table. And the first result that makes a step toward answering the question of value is the fact that what is common to everything around us — and this is where Capital begins — what surrounds us is, I quote Marx, an enormous accumulation of commodities.
16:02 So, what's proper to a commodity is that it results from labor. That's not enough to find what's common yet, but it points the way. It points the way, but not to just any labor, since I've also seen that I could work all day for my own purposes and make something that only had interest for me. But labor that is common to all commodities — what could be common to it?
16:36 And that's precisely what we don't see. Because we see the qualitative differences. You clearly see that this is made of wood and that is made of iron — that's valid for the eye. It's empirical, as we generally say. On the other hand, there is something invisible which is the very essence of the commodity, which doesn't show itself because it's not qualitative, it's quantitative. It's the time of labor it takes to produce it. Whether it takes a minute, an hour, or a year, that changes nothing about the matter. And I'll state it first dogmatically as Marx writes it, the theory of value, because it holds in one sentence, and I prefer to start from a sentence of Marx's and work backward, analyzing the words as we did last time for the social production of existence.
17:12 I prefer to come to Marx's formulation because it has the merit of being clear, so all the questions can then be raised. The value of a commodity is proportional to the socially necessary labor time for its production. I repeat, the value of a commodity is proportional to the socially necessary labor time for its production, and therefore inversely proportional to the development of the productive forces.
17:46 There you go, now let's try to speak plain English. First, socially necessary labor time. I don't think I need to dwell on this too much since it's becoming familiar to us now that we've been discussing together — it's social labor, that is, I believe a tool is a commodity that can serve someone other than me and is a creator of value, first of all. A value plain and simple, that is, an exchange value. And when he says 'and inversely proportional to the state of the productive forces,' well yes, it's obvious that a tablecloth made by my grandmother by hand, embroidered I mean, versus one made by machine, goes much faster, and so the labor time itself is a function of, say, the development of the productive forces.
18:33 The more developed the productive forces are, the less time is needed, and that's measurable, we're not in metaphysics here. Time is measurable. The more time it takes to produce something, the more its value decreases. That's why he says 'inversely proportional.' That's how the once-rich cotton industry, which was the largest in the world, the Indian cotton industry — of course I mean the Indies — was ruined; there was a time when for a piece of cotton cloth one would say 'an Indienne.'
19:12 Well, the Indian cotton economy was ruined — Marx analyzed this very well — by Manchester, in London. So the English, it's not to compete with the cotton industry with machines that India couldn't keep up with. It's clear that the price of cotton collapsed fairly quickly and that India could no longer sell its products. So you see, very concretely, what it means to say that the value of a commodity is — sorry, madam — the value of a commodity is proportional to the socially necessary labor time for its production and inversely proportional to the degree of development of the productive forces.
19:46 There you go, I've stated it abstractly, in general terms, but that's the core of the theory of value. Now, Marx is not alone at the origin of the theory of value. Among the economists — the ones called classical, the great English economists who preceded Marx since their founding — it wasn't just the English, there were the French too, the Physiocrats, but it's mostly the English because that's where economic reflection developed earliest, along with the industrial revolution and thought in England. Among the English economists, Ricardo, who comes after Adam Smith, had understood very well that labor time was the key to the problem of value.
20:24 That's why, if we stop there, we still haven't understood what is not just important — I mean it's crucial that it's about value — but what's going to be decisive. And that's where I'm going to get to surplus value. So I hope that's a bit clearer, Simone. I noted a lot of things on this, but I mean there are a thousand activities that have no market impact whatsoever, fortunately, where one can flourish without being caught up in economic warfare, in competition, and in exploitation.
Descartes and the true use of mathematics 21:02 I think there are levels here. Absolutely, absolutely. Descartes — I'm not straying, we're at the heart of the problem. Descartes, who seems to be quite far from social problems and from this whole story, belongs to an era where there's a place for everything and everything in its place. We're not thinking here of La Bruyère's Characters, where sometimes the peasant, the engineer, everyone... Descartes nonetheless, when he takes stock of his schooling, with a certain irony, makes it understood that he learned nothing solid, etc.
21:34 Everything had to be started over from scratch, a blank slate, tabula rasa, with his systematic doubt. Descartes makes an exception for mathematics. He was, of course, you know, one of the greatest figures in the history of mathematics, since we owe him nothing less than what all engineers work with today, the Cartesian graphs. Y and Y, X and X, it's a dimension for the fellows. Analytic geometry, I mean — not our subject. What is our subject, since we're talking about labor and value, is that Descartes says: 'I took the greatest pleasure in mathematics,' after criticizing rhetoric and theology, 'because of the certainty and evidence of their reasoning.'
22:08 Well, there we sense the abstraction of mathematicians, 'the certainty of the evidence of their reasoning' — that might seem like a mere play of the mind. 'But I did not yet notice their true use.' There, look, use comes back again. Use comes from usus, uti in Latin, and 'utile' comes from the same word. Whether you say a thing has a use or a utility, it's the same thing. And in utility there's ut in Latin. I won't give you a Latin lesson, but all those who know old Latin know that ut means first and foremost — there are a thousand meanings of ut, it's the most polysemous, it's the word with the most dictionary pages.
22:38 So that, a supposed goal, an aim, if you will, an end, as Kant says in philosophy, a finality. 'I did not yet notice their true use.' Ah, what does Descartes call the true use of mathematics? 'And thinking that they should serve above all the mechanical arts' — there was no industrial revolution yet, far from it — 'and that they should ease the labor of men, I was astonished that, their foundation being so solid, nothing more exalted had been built upon it.'
23:13 So you see that the problem of the commodity, of use, and the fact of technical progress in itself — this is where we'll see, in political matters, we haven't yet posed the question — if technology were not appropriate, if the means of production and the productive forces were not appropriated by commercial interests for private ends, for the time being so to speak, ends that don't concern the community as a whole, that is not in itself condemnable.
23:45 What is condemnable, as we sketched a little last time, and that's why I want to say this — what is condemnable is the distribution of the wealth produced by the productive forces according to the regime of property, not the political regime, in which one lives. And thus — and here I'll please the ecologists, one strike for the left, one for the right, and I really mean this sincerely — Marx is the first to say that nature is part of the process of production.
Wealth and value; the always already complex 24:16 He says a very simple sentence: up to now, we have never fished fish out of waters where there were none. And he even says that nature is the source of all wealth. Don't make Marx say that the labor that has raised up a commodity, that I can exchange, produces value and therefore wealth. Don't confuse wealth and value — that's very topical. The crisis lets us see today where the real wealth lies. You see?
24:46 I visit a friend who is in a retirement home and who has the good fortune to be surrounded by many friends and to have, if you like, intellectual, friendly exchanges, etc. Whereas the majority of his companions in misfortune in the retirement home are poor wretches, no doubt abandoned by family, by friends. Where is the real wealth? There we clearly see that it's human relationship that is the great wealth, which makes one keep his spirits up while the other, well, gets depressed amid whatever artifice.
25:20 So wealth and value — don't make Marx say that labor is the origin of all wealth. It's nature that is the origin of all wealth. But watch out! That's why Marx sets himself apart from the naturalists. One might take one of those things into account, that would be naturalist. Careful, I mean, nature really is the origin of all wealth. Just as, if you go a bit more abstract, matter is the origin of all form.
25:51 With the same wood, one could have made a wooden spoon, a table, whatever. But you need a matter to start with. I can't hold here in my left hand the form of the ashtray and here its matter, glass for instance, I mean. You can distinguish them, you can't separate them, as with Aristotle. So of course everything starts from nature. But the origin is not the truth of a thing. When someone asks you what the Amazon is, you don't look at the little trickle that was its source.
26:23 You know, all the great rivers resemble one another at their source. If you go back up a great river, you reach what geographers call a receiving cone, and you no longer really know whether it's this little thread trickling between my fingers or the one two meters away that is truly the origin of the Amazon. An idle question. The Amazon actually begins when several threads have joined together, and that's when it becomes the river you think of when I say the Amazon, or the Nile, or the Rhine, or the Loire, or the Rhône. A mighty river is not a little trickle. There's a fairly current notion, very fashionable in the 1960s, that I'm reviving here.
26:54 These things are always-already complex. Always already complex. There is no pure and simple origin. I take the example of rivers here, which seem transparent about another source. I take a second example: jazz. I don't understand how they can lose the thread. Let me remind you I'm in the middle of saying yes, nature is the source of all wealth, but only the source. You see the thread, that's why I'm talking about rivers. Second example, jazz. One of the musical miracles of the 20th century. No doubt without precedent — there are some objectives that aren't a given today.
27:24 So I'll say quickly — no doubt the classical music of the 20th century. Take it in the conservatories — in 30 years we'll see that the great classics aren't... I don't know much, but personally you haven't had the science, but that's another story. Well, jazz. A miracle in the double sense of marvel and exception. What is the origin of jazz? Everyone tells you it's Africa. I don't want to deny Africa's part in it — I've worked with many African musicians. Well, not at all — who would ever have had jazz without Africa?
27:55 That's certain. Except there are more jazz clubs in the single city of Tokyo than on the entire African continent. First point. For example. And for jazz to appear, you needed the great African river, plus the English song. The song is a structure — we won't go into it, a song form, not ABA — but what matters for us, when we talk about Marx, is that the clientele at the time, for jazz musicians, was people who wanted to hear refrains that were well known to them, hits as we'd say today, right?
28:27 Which came from the American musical comedy — you know plenty of them. And if they wanted to earn their living they had to know how to play them, etc. So there you have African music, there's the English song. Who knows that ragtime comes from the polka, that is, from the polonaise? The first ragtime players are people who played polkas — look closely, it's not in three-quarter time, isn't it beautiful — and it's the coming together of all that which makes the magnificent impurity of jazz. Beware of those who claim a pure origin like that — it doesn't exist, it's always already complex, always already complex, a thing is only what it is once several things have begun to constitute it, and for the river and for jazz, that's it, I mean — if you go back, if you go back to the sources of jazz one by one, if you take the polka, the polka still isn't jazz; the African tom-tom, and God knows I've worked on that, it's a much greater, much more complex complexity than we think — pygmy polyphonies are at least as complicated as Bach's Art of Fugue, believe me — but that's not jazz. It's the coming together of all that because of, as you know, the slave trade.
29:37 'And you, boy, you're going to go to church on Sunday — first you're going to take off, first you're going to get dressed, put on your good clothes, and then you're going to sing what — the Lutheran chorale.' What's sung then — what do they sing, the Protestant chorale, great tradition, nothing to do with Africa, true, it goes back to Luther who said that music was the principal divine office after theology, if you've read the great tradition of the German musician from Bach onward — and there it is. But the African, the slave of African origin, who is docile but oh what resistance, what is his own way of resisting? Yes, I'll sing, I'll sing the chorale — but he's going to sing the gospel, he's going to create something no one had ever heard, he's going to sing the Protestant chorale off-key, he's going to sing on the scale he has in his head — technical matter, I won't bore you — the scale he has in his head where there are no half-tones, all that — he will never quite manage to do the Protestant chorale, he's going to do something else entirely, but by God he's going to leave us the gospel — that's his form of resistance, and it's still amusing, it's a story of a nearly tragic moment, that of the slave trade — it's still extraordinary to see that what makes white people dance on Saturday night across the whole planet, well, across almost the whole planet, for nearly a century now,
30:48 they are musics born of Black culture — it's still extraordinary that the former slave, for the first time in world musical history, in a nightclub in Tokyo, Paris, or Abidjan, they're playing more or less the same hits — between Michael Jackson and Les Pommes, they play the same hits between 10pm and 2am. So we must bear this in mind: nature is the origin of all wealth, but nature is only the origin — very Hegelian, what I'm saying, for those interested in philosophy, I'm thinking of Hegel, and it's clear that Hegel always mocks those who believe they can find the truth of a thing by going back to the origin, which is only the beginning and the weakest moment of the thing throughout — what counts is the development it will undergo. Of course the whole oak — ah, the acorn, the oak is in the acorn, I get there — so the whole oak is in the acorn, of course, in potentiality as those interested in the origin say, everything is already there. Yes, but I don't take my nap in the shade of the acorn — development
Origin is only the beginning; nature and matter 31:59 what comes after also counts. Of course the beautiful rosebush I have in my garden has all its determinations prefigured in the germ, of course — but still, if you hadn't watered it with love, if you hadn't cut off the bad branches, if you hadn't done all that work, the real rose, the actual rose, doesn't come only from nature, it also has a lot of work in it, its rosebush. So, nature as the origin of all wealth — but don't forget that Marxism is a materialism, and here I open a second parenthesis, not a digression, a parenthesis that deepens what I've just said — there's an enormous confusion, especially, we were discussing this, with the omnipresence of the word 'nature' in contemporary society and the stakes it can cover — there's a confusion between nature and matter. Since that's not today's central subject, I'll restrain myself — not as a provocation, I'm not saying this at all in a provocative spirit, but in all logical consistency: nature comes after human history. Yes — I didn't say matter, I'm not a fool.
33:09 as Marx, a materialist. Once man arrived, as it were, he created nature — I mean, if we distinguish natural flowers from artificial flowers, we feel the need to say they're natural, that means one had to be external to nature in order to name nature. That's what I'm saying. So the word 'nature' here only muddles things; to be rigorous one should say there is natural matter — fine, that works, natural flowers — and there is matter that comes from the history of labor, artificial, cultural, whatever you like — that's already more accurate, I don't know, but there wasn't simply a nature that preceded man — there was a universe, moreover scientists don't agree among themselves about the universe, whatever, as long as it fits your equations. That's why we are responsible —
34:19 not in science but in the ideological field, for the precision of the words we use. That's it, and I wanted to make that distinction between nature and matter, because by replacing 'matter' with 'nature' there's that 'nat-' which comes from 'naître,' birth, which gives the affair a religious side that isn't scientific, which in turn gives it a maternal, nurturing side, etc. — you see, no need for a psychoanalyst to invest the notion of nature that way. So, to come back to the theory of value — I don't think we ever left it, quite the contrary, because Marx does say the first kind of wealth is indeed nature, but how does this wealth become value? There we come back to it — well, it's because it has undergone a transformation, it's a starting matter that has undergone labor, and the great advantage of the theory of value as it was announced — stated a bit like a theorem earlier, like a notion, like a definition — the great advantage is that it lends itself to confirmation or refutation. We're no longer in metaphysics here, we're no longer in faith or morality
Measurable labor time and ownership of the means of production 35:29 or in moral values — labor time can be measured, clock, stopwatch, whatever you like, it's measurable. And remember that most of the great social struggles since the birth of industrial society up to today — not all, but the majority, the fiercest — turn exactly around increasing or decreasing this labor time. Look at the debate on retirement, it's still the stake — you'd still need to work more, wouldn't you — look, retirement at 67, at 62, that's understood. So, having made this distinction between nature and matter, and coming back to the notion of value, I take up again this definition — the theory of value — I repeat it because unfortunately I don't have a big board with light-up letters to write it on, that would be simpler — allow me to say, in passing, thanks to the devotion and kindness — sorry, I'm making you blush — of Dominique Mazuet, who's going to put this talk online, he's had the kindness, for those who've watched the first edit, to scroll abstract, difficult texts that are hard to grasp
36:39 orally the first time — spoken words fly away, writings remain, as they say — verba volant, scripta manent. So thanks, for everyone's sake, for the fact that we have time to reflect as we go along, to grasp the notions and assimilate them faster than that speech of which Rimbaud said that to understand my words, they must flee and fly. There you are, writing remains — to move from the theory of value to the mystery of surplus value, that's where Marx's contribution lies: the theory of value, Ricardo had already seen well that the labor time necessary for producing a thing was the key to what all the commodities around us have in common — they express, to speak like Spinoza, they express, so to speak, a certain amount of labor time, and in that sense they are comparable and therefore exchangeable, in fact, and only in that sense. But you see, their common point is invisible — why?
37:34 because there, I see this table here as a result, I see the history that precedes it — the merchant, sorry, let me put it right — but there, as matter, we don't know whether it is — say I'm a slave-driver having this made by a Sri Lankan in my workshop out back, or whether it was made by a machine that turns out 20 an hour — you see, it's not specified, the result is there. Mystery — what is a mystery? The essential thing, what determines the value on the market of this thing. So, if I start again from that statement: the value of a commodity is proportional to the socially necessary labor time for its production, and therefore inversely proportional to the development of the productive forces. And if nature — I began with these two points — is the source of all wealth, fine, but if it's the source of all wealth, and if market values are produced by the way we transform this nature, then the political stake is indeed property
38:45 of the means — the equipment, the means, could even be persons, remember with slavery — the means of production, which can just as well cover a productive force as a workforce — so from the moment he raises the problem of property, he's the first theorist to have done so, and forcefully, in the philosophical field — no one spoke of these things in philosophy, at most people were beginning to speak of it militarily, a few economists — I'm thinking of Rousseau, of course — a few economists spoke of it in technical terms of property, in a fantasized way. Rousseau is the first to put it at the center of the debate, and that's why he was so ill-regarded in his time, including by the most enlightened minds of his time, by the intellectuals, as we'd say today, of his time — yes, Voltaire — I pay him tribute because he fought infamy, that's it, 'crush the infamous thing,' that is, intolerance, of tolerance — and the fiercest adversary, whom I pay tribute to, who showed in the fury of fanaticism, demanded Rousseau's head on the block, in the famous
39:56 Letter to the Citizens of Geneva — I mean, when Rousseau dared to criticize his intention to establish a theater in Geneva, because Voltaire — everything we know of philosophical right today was nothing to him beside his dream, which was to be Racine, a bit late for that, his dream — no one told him — Voltaire's tragedies, I reassure you — but his dream was to be complimented on his plays, of course, everyone has the right to some narcissism, it's only human. And when Rousseau opposed this project to create a theater in Geneva — not because he was anti-festive, people want to make him out to be a puritan, that's not the point, so I won't say — but not for what people think he meant — there are popular festivals which are far more interesting for bringing people together and which give more of a spectacle than your theater with its audience — for that, he demanded Rousseau's head on the block, he asked that he be, as they said then, subjected to what was called an arrest warrant, meaning that he be immediately arrested, executed, capital punishment. You see why such hatred? Because he's the only one of the Enlightenment authors who tackles the problem of property — I come back to it — whereas for all the others, property is a natural right — well yes, I was born, my father owned the factory, naturally.
41:06 And there, you see, I'll read — yes, gladly — so I'll read the ideal passage for this, the passage Dominique picked out from Rousseau — yes, just to introduce it, if you have the text — you all know property, the famous phrase of Proudhon that libertarians adore: 'Property is theft' — that is, to take up my example again from last time, it's not a product, is it, the miner who has spat his lungs out for 50 years down the mines and who buys himself his first Renault at retirement, when he's lucky enough to get there, if he hasn't died of silicosis — is he a thief? But Rousseau is going to correct this — Rousseau, who attacked property quite differently from Proudhon, believe me — is going to correct what was missing in Proudhon's phrase — if you can say, perhaps also in which work — in Émile, sorry — in Émile, you know that the theme of Émile is the first example of a genre that will flourish afterward, in the 19th century, what's called in Germany a Bildungsroman, a novel of formation, which follows the subject from his birth and shows his development quite readily in his contacts
Reading from Émile: every idle citizen is a rogue 42:16 with the world and with others — the great successors are Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe, and Flaubert's Sentimental Education. 'He who consumes in idleness what he has not earned himself is a thief, and a pensioner whom the state pays for doing nothing differs little, in my eyes, from a brigand living off passersby.' Outside of society, outside it — so, modernized: the isolated man, owing nothing to anyone, has the right to live as he pleases; but in the society where he lives, necessarily at the expense of others, he owes them in labor the price of his keep. This holds without exception. Working is therefore an indispensable duty for social man, rich or poor, powerful or weak; every idle citizen is a rogue. There's Proudhon's 'rogue,' 'thief,' it's the same — ah yes, but there's one small word more: every idle citizen is a rogue. He'd gone a bit fast.
43:26 his labor, still — well anyway, still, if we take Proudhon's phrase without the enormous specification Rousseau brings — not to give it a concrete content, just take Proudhon's phrase — listen, that's a tribute to parasitism, at that point — let me explain, I think we have anecdotes — I was, I believe, in Africa, doesn't matter which country, in sub-Saharan Africa, in a forest region, and I say this because it's important to understand what follows — there were quite a few Italian planters there, in pineapples, and we were with, whatever we were doing, camping — and I heard on the radio — I say radio because they're isolated, deep in the bush — and radio listeners — and I heard some Italian compatriots, they were crossing the clearing, we could talk to each other — I told them in Italian to come, once they were near the settlements, to come see us, we're compatriots, they're from my region, very well, good — I'll pass over this quickly — the Italians arrive, Range Rover, 'Italia,' out steps someone very warm, I think it's beautiful, a moment of value — and among them they had a Frenchman they'd picked up hitchhiking
44:36 in an era that proclaimed itself marginal — I made him understand that the migrant worker was far more marching against society than he was, marginal and thus subversive, so more revolutionary than me. And so, at the meal, I tell you, I was against a local, I wasn't for opulence, I earned like a professor within the system, yeah — and he had a material problem, etc., but 'do like me, I don't need to work to live, look, I wanted to cross the circle, I wanted to see Africa' — well, the guy who'd picked him up hitchhiking, I told him quietly, he shouldn't spill the beans, he shouldn't say it, because if everyone did like you, who's going to pick people up hitchhiking — yes, yes, it'll be the guy who picks them up — if everyone did like you — it's fine, your system, take advantage of it, but don't spit in the soup and don't say it, because on top of it he'd want to be right and lecture us — it's really extraordinary, isn't it, do your own little scheme quietly, me, I'm delighted, I'm very happy you're seeing the circle, and there, I hitchhiked too actually, I was quite happy that people had cars that would pick me up — there, simply — so, every idle citizen is a rogue, and I take up right away the most Marxist —
45:46 one might even say the most Marxist word in this passage of Rousseau — the most pre-Marxian, let's be clear — Rousseau, Marx had a lot of consideration for Rousseau, he also saw the limits proper to his era, of course. So here's the man — I take up again what you just read — outside of society, the isolated man owes nothing to anyone, Robinson has the right to live as he pleases, but in the society where he lives — and here's the crucial word — necessarily at the expense of others — that's a necessity in the mathematical sense — a triangle can be right-angled or any other kind, a dog can be yellow, black, white, but it's not possible for a triangle not to be a polygon — that's necessary, it's part of its definition; it's not possible for a dog not to be a mammal, you see — he's distinguishing the necessary from the accidental in his framework — if Rousseau, who knows theoretical language well, says that in society we live necessarily at the expense of others, and right after — me too, I work, so I benefit normally — if we necessarily live at the expense of others, he owes them in labor the price of his keep — there, that's not nothing —
46:56 you see, Rousseau is talking about duties, about debts — we agree, we're talking about debt right now, we've never talked about it so much — and he's talking about a debt that's the opposite of the one with which today's powers make us feel guilty — they make us feel guilty, not only in France, you can imagine, they make us feel guilty about an accumulated debt because you wallowed in consumption like pigs — oh yes of course, you too have too many subscriptions, you too have — you've got the best phone, the best motorbike, well known — and me, I think I don't consume enough, I'm one of those people, since I'm not in poverty, I think I don't consume enough, I shouldn't have consumed more, that should go to some Chadian — so we're made to feel guilty because of the debt, whereas here Rousseau turns everything upside down — no, he says, those who talk like that, aren't they the ones who owe — who owe us, don't they, the labor that allows them to be kept? It's an extraordinary reversal. That's why I made this detour through Rousseau, who inaugurates modern theoretical reflection on property — and the people weren't fooled, you know, when — you've all read Hugo's Les Misérables —
48:06 when they used to sing, as Gavroche dies, he sings: 'We die at Nanterre, it's Voltaire's fault, we die at Palaiseau, it's Rousseau's fault, I fell to the ground, it's Voltaire's fault, nose in the gutter, it's Rousseau's fault' — luckily the people didn't lump the two rival brothers together, one holding the economic side, the other the political side — good, we're heading toward Marx, what's still missing is the theoretical side — they don't only owe the upkeep — when you draw your analogy today with the holders — not of the debt, but the holders of debt claims — it's us who are the debtors, but the so-called creditors — and that's just a bridge to bring us back to surplus value — they also owe many other things, that is, their surplus of wealth — yes of course, its origin — so it was just — and even capital itself — a bridge so we could talk about surplus value again, of course. So I'd like to make a small clarification here, which I hope I won't have to repeat, it seems so obvious to me and yet it's not at all — it should be present in all my critiques: when I mock those powers that make me feel guilty, I'm not attacking any physical person, I'm not pointing at anyone —
Classes, not persons; the mystery of surplus value 49:16 — pointing anyone out as a physical person — I'm not a Nazi leader, yes, I go that far, I'm Marxian, I deal in classes, not in Stalin, I'm not — it's not by suppressing physical persons that one suppresses social classes. I wanted to make this point, which is crucial, precisely where Stalin is not at all Marxist is when he goes after physical persons, when he blames the individual — 'you, you're a petty bourgeois,' etc., 'you own such and such,' as if by liquidating — one can perfectly well liquidate a social class without scratching a single individual, all it takes is changing the property relations. That's what I wanted to say today — don't think I'm — so, the relations shift — toward carnage, on the contrary, that's it — that's Marx's contribution, that's what leads us to turn to surplus value, that's another theory, surplus value, which is the very heart of his analysis, what's called the Marxist secret — it's Marxism that was esoteric, but precisely it isn't, and he addresses it to you, writing Capital, and he sums it up very well — I recommend it, if you're discouraged by the enormity, the difficulty
50:26 of part of Capital, in this little pamphlet, which I've just learned is no longer available, but it should be findable secondhand — it's a very small booklet, in the same collection, but out of print, called Wage Labour and Capital, sorry, Value, Price and Profit — I recommend it, it's very short, dense, and truly clear, extremely clear, and in it you'll find, for instance, something so relevant today, this story of the soup ladle, because the bosses of the time used to say, regarding wage demands: it's not by making the size of the spoons bigger that everyone will get more soup. That's the argument, you see, it hasn't changed. The Marx-ists, well, that means the quantity of soup is constant, which might suit the degrowthers, but it doesn't suit me at all, and the workers even less. There, it's production that decides it: the more soup we produce, the more spoons we can make, so there's enough for everyone. You have to be careful — I told you about Africa — we're marked, all of us, including me, by a scarcity mentality, you know, we have in our millennial unconscious the haunting fear of scarcity — don't blame me
51:37 for making digressions, because I'm right at the heart of the debate — I ran a musical training center in Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, and I had the good fortune that my students, whom we trained, were selected among a thousand African orchestras by UNESCO to go to a festival in Abidjan, and so the young people who left by plane — those who hadn't been selected in my center, I learned they tried to see a marabout so the plane would crash. That seems monstrous to you, but no, it's quite classic — I'm Corsican, it's the same — well yes, I bomb the other guy's café because he's doing business and I'm not, there are grudges over working, it's not that it's a scarcity mentality, there won't be enough for everyone, you're forced to cut that off because the Corsicans bombed us, I'll send you cousins who are killers — that's what I mean, there won't be enough for everyone, watch out, because what I'm saying is very topical — we're being told, you know, the world is finite, the earth is limited, you hear that, don't you, I had a moment of that, yes, no, no, is it — and so sharing will be a bit
52:47 — how do you say it — cheap — I've had as much wealth — good, so what is surplus value, but what difference is there from the words that already existed before, what's the point of talking about surplus value, it's a bit mysterious, since there are already profits, rents, gains, that existed before him, and Marx makes clear that surplus value can't be reduced to any of those words — it explains them, but none of those words explains surplus value. Right, of course — well, let's show it, since we're talking about labor and production — here, a ton of raw wood, one of, say, precious wood, and here, a ton of chairs or tables or furniture made with that wood, let's suppose, to simplify, true, there's no wood shavings, no losses — a ton of raw material in the world, and a ton of finished product made with that material. Let's admit the ton of wood is worth 1000 euros, whatever number,
53:57 I say 1500 euros just to name a number, 2500, doesn't matter, more — what happened in between? You go along, well, there's labor. So the 'more' is what — it's the measure of the value added by labor, yes or no? Yes. Well it's simple. Well it's crazy, that's what Marx says. Do you know many economic systems where — right, the wood cost me 1000 euros, labor costs the time, I sell it, stuff — my profit, it changes nothing if I pay labor at its value, I make nothing at all. So you'll tell me, ah well, so the profit — I'm doing this as if surplus value didn't exist, as it was explained before Marx — the 'more,' well, we'll say, well let's say if I calculate labor at its value it comes to 1500 euros, well I'm going to sell it at 1700, that way I have 200 euros — 2900, I have the right, he has every right to do it, it's not for our beautiful eyes, for love of those who love beautiful voices I do this for exchange value, he's right, there's a nobility in the tradition of trade — well, I won't do it at 1700, I'll do it at 1900, at 2600 —
55:07 look, you can go on like this — and what stops him from raising his price indefinitely, what stops him? No — you'll answer, bravo, you've understood everything about Marx — the trouble is I'm not the only capitalist, and there are others on the market, I'm caught between two fires: my will to make a gain, and the competition of others which forces me to lower — ah, the slider, where will I set it — so we're beginning to approach surplus value, agreed — so the 'more' there isn't good, because there's competition there, you know very well those who win out — look at Amazon, because that's the community today, rather those who win by cutting prices — Marx's genius was to have understood that the trick was in the 'less,' the key was in the 'less' — well, there's one thing not paid at its value in all that. That's what Marx says: there's a segment in the process of production going from the ton of wood to the ton of wood furniture, there's a segment that isn't paid at its value. So what is it?
56:04 — 'It's the machines?' 'That's it, and...' 'sorry?' — 'labor' — yes, but not just any labor. The machine works, so to speak, also metaphorically — I'll say something about this metaphor — but trying not to pay a machine at its value means not giving it what it needs. Try to drive a car saying I'll give less gas, that way I'll save on oil — after a kilometer it's finished, the machine doesn't run, it's not like us. Why? I'm now moving to the other end of the process of production, on the boss's side — I'm now taking the labor side — moreover, it's the unprescribed labor that isn't paid — sorry?
Subsistence, productivity, and the reserve army 56:38 it's the unprescribed labor — there we are, we're getting there — we knew it too well but, as Hegel says so well, what is well-known because it's familiar is not [really] known, what is familiar — there, there, there. And if I look from the worker's side, why is he there in the first place? It's not love of fine wood either, it's not to please the boss he's there — it's to earn his subsistence, we'll come back later to the ambiguities of this term, for now I'll simplify: to earn his subsistence, we understand each other, he comes to have enough to subsist on — that doesn't mean progress, it means, if he could go two meters as far as today, that would already be not bad, I'm simplifying — that's what subsisting means, the animal subsists, only man exists, bees have been doing the same process for a million years, in Japan or in France, etc.
57:38 they don't have access to existence — another debate. So to have this subsistence, he must receive, as the price of his labor, enough to reproduce his productive strength — to put it in somewhat inhuman and technical terms, but that's exactly why he's there. So how long must one work in a day to earn a value, a wage — the wage is only the price of labor for earning my subsistence — well, there's the problem, it depends on the era, that's what Marx — it depends on the level of the productive forces. There was a certain era when one had to work — I told you last time that when there were social struggles in England to move from the 14-hour day to the 13-hour day, including for 6-year-old children, when the financiers, the philanthropists, as the famous book says — I told you, because the Quakers used to say, we put them in the factory otherwise they'll be hooligans in the street — they're philanthropists, that's always come along with great values and great intentions.
58:50 moral. So the more the productive forces increase, if you've followed the theorem of value, the less time I need to devote in the day to reproducing subsistence. Let's take a more current example, the Popular Front, which brings us to today — all of a sudden, thanks to the Popular Front and to the struggles — not just people's ideas here and there but embodied in struggles — right, thanks to the Popular Front we move to the 40-hour week — 40 hours, how many do we have today?
59:24 '5 less,' 'two months' — 5 less, from '36 to today, we gained 5 hours — still, they're going to take them back — 35 hours, that's where it comes from — as if the crisis had come from France, from Chicago, we gained 5 hours. Productivity in the meantime, between 1936 and now, has multiplied by how much? — 'ten' — but not just ten, it's in the hundreds, productivity — that is, you know that productivity is production in relation to time, of course, the time needed to reach the same, the same production, the same product — 20 years in one era, 20 minutes in another, extraordinary, that's the history of technology and human intelligence. How long should we be working today?
1:00:15 maybe we should be working two days a week, you see, we're right at the heart of the debate, and we're made to feel guilty for not working enough — the slider — those who fight, fight to work less, not because they're lazy or whatever, they're just like their employers, they like leisure time too — it can be worth something, after all, other than losing one's life earning it, but leisure is dangerous, because we're taught idleness is the mother of all vices, traditional bourgeois morality — oh yes, that's why we're quite right to put 5-year-olds to work, they're not vicious — take a square circle, generational cell, that's a reactionary scoop and a gene, well, go figure — 'a malcontent is a poor man who thinks' — right, all that goes in the same direction, I see you — you see that the abstract is very concrete, you find illustrations of flesh and blood for these apparently abstract notions. So Marx's genius lies in this 'less,' there's a part
1:01:25 that I pay less for — the advantage, compared to the machine which starts grinding and giving up if I don't give it what it needs, is the advantage of the fellow — what Marx calls the productive force, roughly, is human labor in Marx, and, crucially, the decisive part of the means of production — if he can, in two hours, have worked enough to earn his subsistence, that doesn't stop me from keeping him eight, nine, ten hours, depending — he doesn't want to, in fact there's another one, like misery, there's another who will accept — England deliberately kept Ireland — the reactionary English bourgeois, I'm not talking about the English people — kept Ireland throughout the 19th century in black poverty, in order to put pressure on those poor wages — historians know this — so that if there was a strike in Manchester, in Liverpool, or in Bradford, or in the Black Country, you'd say: you don't want to work? The Irish are hungry, don't worry, we'll call them right away — we call in scabs, and 'scabs' comes from the Belgians who were dressed in yellow
1:02:35 and who used to come to the coal-mining basin whenever there was a strike in France — they were called 'the Belgians,' who were paid much less at the time — these are old stories, the reserve army [of labor] — there you go.
1:05:25 Time means nothing to the owner, he has a thirst to find labor power wherever it may be found. Where it can be taxed and worked to the bone, as they say. Because that's precisely where he extracts the surplus value we're reflecting on. So you see, what I was saying was wrong. A ton of wood, 1000 euros. The wood in the form of furniture, 1500 euros. Net operation, as they say. I can't permanently raise the price, since there's competition.
1:05:55 So I'm going to look at the segment of production where I can do the least. And that's labor power. And the part of the day. I say "of the day" to simplify. We've annualized it. But in Marx's time, people fought over the working day. Day laborers, as they were called. And many want to go back to that. If you talk about it a bit around you. But an age of counter-revolution, that's what it is.
1:06:25 And... An age of a tendential fall in the rate of profit. Yes. The... The part of the day when the employee, the worker, the laborer, whoever it may be. It could be a small post office clerk. Whom everyone grumbles at, as if he were responsible for the staff cuts and the line in front of him. He arrives at the counter and the people in line say, you voted for this. Well, no one forced you. Yes indeed. I think I've talked a lot about labor. It's really interesting to bring Marx's definitions of concepts up to date with the present.
Question on unemployment; reading from Kurz 1:06:58 Because it's true it was very much under attack. Now we see it's coming back very strongly. There you go. That said, I have a question about the role of unemployment. Because you talked a lot about labor. But there's also unemployment. So unemployment, which is much talked about. And I think unemployment, I admit this is just my own view, plays a role in the definition of value. That is to say, it's... It's because there are many unemployed that wages are low. We can put pressure on wages.
1:07:28 And then, there's an analysis that's starting to spread. Which says that if growth returns, it will be jobless growth. That is, with the increase in productivity, we'll have fewer and fewer people working. And we need a pool of unemployed people that's bigger and bigger to keep this machine oiled, so to speak. So could you perhaps explain how the two connect? Thank you. I'll try to keep this in mind.
1:07:58 Absolutely. So, regarding unemployment, I'll begin. Thank you for the questions. It's a question about labor. Thank you, sir. First, a misunderstanding, I'll use a polite word. A misunderstanding that people try to drum into your skull until you can barely breathe from birth. That is, that at the origin of unemployment there would precisely be technical progress. Oh really, what do you want? That's how it is now, you can do this in three minutes with machines, we don't need you anymore.
1:08:28 There were older folks who knew the ticket-punchers in the metro. Well, they were eliminated, as you know. To remind the older ones. Thousands of little pieces of cardboard. The little holes, the song by our friend. Thousands of little bits, etc. You see what that is, right. Well, there you go, the machine creates unemployment for the ticket-punchers. But it's not overproduction. No, overproduction doesn't mean we produce too much. It means too much, because there is a "too much," that's true. It's too much relative to the profit margin I wanted to make.
1:09:00 Now I'll come back to your question. When I can no longer, because there's a social struggle, let's say, then the price of labor, of the worker, etc. had to be raised. Well, margin gone, I'm laid off. There, I'm answering your question. By reflecting, by letting the word "overproduction" speak. We don't produce too much use-value. But relative to the surplus value I wanted to make, if I keep going like this, what will I get? 3%. I wanted to make 15%. You know this is very topical.
1:09:30 You know, the pressure from shareholders to invest for a few months, just long enough to collect the bonuses for job creation, etc. And then clear off to another country, leaving people out on the street. That is to say, the goal, once again, is not the use of the products that come off the assembly line in series. The goal is to make a certain margin. When I, the employer, am no longer assured of that margin, I have this variable left, as they cynically say, it's an adjustment variable.
1:10:01 What unemployment? I'll lay them off and you'll see. In a few years, they'll be working. That's what's happening now. I just wanted to bring up, just quote a short passage from an author who was mentioned at the beginning, with whom we completely disagree, but who gives an idea of what Dominique was talking about earlier, the difference between the so-called exoteric Marx and the so-called esoteric Marx. That is, the Marx understood only by the workers' movements, and the one understood only by intellectuals. Now, one proponent of this thesis, who is moreover a specialist in Marx's theory of value, which Dominique began to sketch out, nevertheless sees something that we have all understood, and which largely answers your question, what he considers to be truly esoteric, precisely, in Marx, and which he thinks still gives Marx value today, whereas the Marx of the workers, of the communist parties, of the workers' movement, of the dictatorship of the proletariat, all that is completely outdated, it was fine for simpletons at the time, perhaps even in Marx's own day, but it's no longer relevant.
1:11:04 But he salutes something that lies deep at the heart of Marx's theory, and that's quite true, and it's in line with what Dominique just said, which proves that there isn't an exoteric Marx and an esoteric Marx, it's the same, the same discourse, there isn't one that's outdated and another that's still relevant, because he evokes this supposedly ever-present Marx precisely regarding what you're talking about. I'll try to read it as quickly as possible, then we may get there, Dominique will conclude the evening.
1:11:34 So, but the other Marx, the hidden Marx, celebrates his true theoretical triumph for having predicted that the society founded on abstract labor—we don't have time to go into that, but Dominique will probably talk about it later, or next time—would raise an inner, objective barrier. What after the Second World War appeared as a vague premonition of the rise of a crisis of the labor society, in quotation marks, that's a phrase from Hannah Arendt, is today not only a tangible reality, but had already been theoretically foreseen, analyzed long ago by Marx.
1:12:08 He achieved this feat, perhaps the most astonishing of his theory, what the author presents as something of the esoteric Marx, which we supposedly didn't understand, we the Marxists who used to be called orthodox and are now called exoteric. So, he achieved, Marx did, this feat that no one had really seen, but which is in reality understandable today, since it stands before us, it's the problem of crisis in reality. This feat, perhaps the most astonishing of his theory, through a logical deduction from the internal contradiction that marks the capitalist mode of production.
1:12:41 On one hand, human energy expenditure is treated as an end in itself, and on the other hand, labor is made superfluous by the use of science in an anonymous competitive universe on an ever-growing scale. This contradiction is the deepest cause of capitalist crises and, as such, the very premise of the Marxist theory of crisis, which we haven't discussed, but which follows from what Dominique began to explain to you. This is also the context in which Marx explicitly uses the prophetic term "collapse."
1:13:13 The periodic structural fractures in which capital, thirsty for the substance of labor, is compelled to remain thirsty, end up leading to a dead end, because due to its own conditions, capital is—and this is the answer to your question—capital is no longer able to ensure a sufficiently profitable consumption of quantities of labor. We come back to what lies at the heart of Marx's theory of value. Afterward, he gives an explanation, he explains that where this becomes particularly noticeable today is due to dematerialization.
1:13:47 That is to say, since we can no longer squeeze anything more out of the physical thing, we dematerialize value and labor. He talks about the digital revolution, but I won't dwell on that. So we come back once again to surplus value, to the theory of value, but this is a way of answering your question by explaining that from a theoretical point of view, there's nothing esoteric about it, because we, old orthodox Marxists as we're supposedly called, had all understood this very well, that this is what has been at the heart of Marx from the beginning. I'll hand it back to you for a possible conclusion.
Surplus value as the mystery of the modern world 1:14:19 Quite in line with that. Which amounts to saying, it's as if the employer said, I set my cursor right here, if you will, below this limit, your ticket is no longer valid. I'm putting you out of work. Below the rate of profit I had set for myself, as long as I'm below it, I'm no longer interested in keeping you, in employing you. That's the reality of it, isn't it? Of course. And I should point out that this relationship is only possible because the employment contract, from the outset, between employer and employee, is fabulously unequal.
1:14:52 Whereas the whole of liberal ideology, and this is something Marx addressed, makes us believe that the great advantage of liberalism is that it's the meeting of two men. An employer, an employee. One of them needs to secure his subsistence, the other needs his labor power. We're made to get along. It's a harmonious world. It's as sugary and unrealistic as can be. We're made to get along. What relation of equality is there between two commodities, if I may put it that way, one producing labor, the other surplus value, between someone who is watching his children work evenings, there, of whom we've penetrated a little into the heart of the atomic pile.
1:15:26 If you please. The heart of the Marxist atomic pile, of surplus value. And I would like us not to forget what I said in the little preamble, that agrégés in philosophy still ask themselves whether Marx's manuscript makes people understand very quickly. On the ground, they understand very well what this labor is. So, it really is this mysterious core. And since we're on the subject of mystery, I'll conclude with a look back. It's not objective. I'll conclude by going back. I'll return to Marx Plage 1, from last time.
1:15:59 I still apologize for the somewhat confused side there was to the first session. But still, I spoke at length, it's true it seemed a bit complicated, about the symbolism of the unconscious. Because the poster's title was "the unconscious of the unconscious." I tried to show a thesis that was put forward by the only contemporary Marxist, now dead, who dared to propose this formula. That Freud's unconscious itself has an unconscious, which is precisely the world of praxis, as Marx says, the world of collective forces, of relations of production, and to say economico-political, in an economic way, is a misreading.
1:16:42 Marxism is not economism. We've seen the importance of property relations, of production relations, which are political. Each era, an economic system is characterized by a purely material given, and that isn't material at all, it's rather the relation of the self to the thing, but of the self to the other, and property relations. There you go. So I'm going back simply to say that from the moment—what am I saying—that surplus value is a mystery. And we come back to the symbol. The symbol is always a bit more mysterious than the comparison.
1:17:14 If I tell you, he's as black as ebony, there's not much mystery there, that's not great poetry. He's as strong as a Turk, he's as black as ebony, he's as strong as an ox, etc. Why is there no mystery? Because I give the comparing term and immediately the compared term. Those who know literature and poetry well, that is, all of you, I'm sure, know very well that the symbol is not that at all. If Baudelaire says "you are a clear and rosy autumn sky," there's no "like." You see, an element is missing. And Freud said that this is the essence of the symbol, the tertium quid, the third something, the whatever-you-call-it.
1:17:47 We don't know what it is. It's that I don't give the solution. He's as black as ebony, implying, as ebony is black. There's no riddle in that. Now, Baudelaire said, the beautiful is always strange. Mystery. Not a riddle. At the heart of the mystery of the modern world lies the extortion of surplus value. The extortion of surplus value lies at the heart of the mystery of the modern world. It's important to understand that. That's why we don't understand it abstractly the first time. It's something to dig into precisely because we are unaware of it, everything is done so that we remain unaware of it, but, and this is where I'll conclude, these inner and hidden things, like the working time we mentioned earlier that we don't see on the table, remember, the working time that was hidden behind it, these hidden things.
1:18:34 The interior, remember, from last time, expresses itself, externalizes itself, that is, in a symbolic way, the real catches up with us. On the other side, there's the quasi... And the excerpt Dominique just read shows well that this internal contradiction is one the bourgeoisie doesn't master. It would like to have its cake and eat it too. And in a way, in arriving at the crisis we're in today, it got there through its own ends, by pursuing its own purpose.
1:19:06 There is an internal contradiction, as Marx says. It's not like an opposition, like one army against another army. The contradiction is internal. We saw this earlier. We saw the essential thing, and it's the cursor of the value of the commodity. It's stuck all the time between making maximum margin and staying competitive. It's an internal contradiction. I'd like to conclude on that, because that means we'll conclude on the notion I'll develop next time, that's it, looking back so as to renounce the situation, a step forward. Last time, we'll see regarding what Marx says, that I'm at the crossroads, we're dealing with English economics, French politics, and theoretically we'll also need to address a bit what is meant, since we're talking about opposition, about contradiction, about dialectics.
1:19:51 There's another word that gets bandied about a lot. It has a very common meaning, including the most everyday one. "Oh, you and your dialectics," meaning you're a smooth talker, at the limit. You see, it has many very different meanings. So I'm announcing this in advance for those who might want to prepare the question, next time we'll talk about the discipline—I won't say the science—the discipline whose object is precisely the notion of contradiction, which for us is the truth, that Marx, of course, inherited from Hegel, whom we'll have set back on his feet, we'll come back to that.
Reading from Bernard Friot on economic value 1:20:23 That's the program for next time. There you go. Thank you. Just one last thing you'd asked to mention, to conclude on value, well, provisionally. It's simply to mention the fact that... Is that it, is it over? No, Marx isn't over, there are still, there are continuators of Marx, there are people who know how to effectively use not only dialectics but the Marxist heuristic, including his theory of value, and who are capable of doing much better than the people who marvel at the supposedly ever-true esoteric Marx, only to actually rehash, in reality, relative to what was once in action, formerly, in the age of the great progressive narratives.
1:21:06 No, the two are homogeneous in Marx and it continues, it's renewed, and it happens that there's someone whom people who frequent the bookshop or progressive circles, French or Parisian, shall we say, know a little, named Bernard Friot, who took up the purely Marxist theory of value, and I'll just quote a definition because he took the trouble to define the words, as Dominique said, specifying in his own way what we're talking about when we talk about value.
1:21:40 So I'll keep it brief since this is the conclusion, just one paragraph, the definition of what he calls economic value, which is precisely in a dialectical relationship, something Dominique will talk to you about in two weeks, since there won't be a session next Thursday, since it's the 15th of August, well, how, dialectically, starting from everything that has just been said, we can arrive at something very concrete, since Friot's ideas lead to concrete demands, like in 1936, like in the Grenelle agreements negotiated by Séguy, which led to the doubling of the minimum wage, additional weeks of leave, union rights, etc.
1:22:17 That is to say, these are truly progressive advances in our way of living. So Friot, who is exactly in this logic and directly in line with Marx's dialectic on the theory of value, defines what he calls economic value, or value. Not all use-values are equal, not by nature, but because social relations decide it that way. Not everyone is recognized as a producer. Not all goods and services carry economic value. Not all activities are productive.
1:22:47 Not all the wealth represented by use-values is recognized as value. We've just summed up what was just said. An expression of economic value, and therefore of power relations in a society—what we've called property, quite simply, what Marx calls the superstructure. Money, which we've spoken little about, but which we'll certainly have occasion to discuss. Money is therefore not the simple transparent quantification of use-values. It is a stake of power. If, in capitalism, where we live, economic value is exchange-value, it's not because use-values must be exchanged, it's because the extortion of surplus values we just told you about in production goes through exchange—between labor power and wages on the labor market, and between product and selling price on the product market.
1:23:43 In the wage-setting convention—goods continue then—the wage-setting convention is Friot's demand, we'll discuss it if you're interested in Friot, he has a strong online presence, we'll explain another time what his project for a wage-setting convention is—in the wage-setting convention, goods continue to be exchanged, but labor-value is replaced by personal qualification, the capacity to act—we come back to the original question of being active, the relation between activity and labor—labor-value is replaced by personal qualification, economic value is no longer an exchange-value. Point. Now, thank you Dominique, thank you all for being here, and I'll wrap up, thank you.
1:25:03 Thank you.
