| This question <54|162> overall <57|59> Hans: <55|59>. |
| Question 82: Is Marx's concept of “value material” attached to commodities, but separate from their physical material, a metaphor? Is it a phantasy, an invention, which Marx needs to hold his labor theory of value together? Is Marx going overboard here? Or does it really exist? |
| [58] Hans: Are Marx's Metaphors Really Metaphors? Ozz is not alone when he says in [54] that the value material is a metaphor. His “blanket of comfort” is an excellent example how a social interaction can metaphorically be equated to a thing. Most conventional readings of Marx have a similar interpretation; they take much of what Marx says in these early pages to be metaphorical. |
| Question 82 is a challenge to this conventional interpretation of Marx. I think that Marx takes those issues much too seriously, and he treats them much too consistently, for them to only be a metaphor. My Annotations try to take the concept of a social substance seriously. |
| We are entering here the area of philosophy of social sciences which asks “what is a society?” Margaret Thatcher famously remarked that “society does not exist,” meaning that the word “society” allows us to talk about all the individuals in society in an abbreviated fashion, but there is nothing other than these individuals which this word refers to. This is the methodological individualist point of view. |
| Marx had a different point of view, namely, that society consists of social relations. You may wonder: how can one talk about social relations without the individuals which have these relations? But one can! The social relation of father, husband, teacher, existed long before any presently living father, husband, or teacher was born. Marx says that society provides “character masks” into which individuals slip, sometimes temporarily (we all are sometimes sellers and sometimes buyers), and sometimes on a more permanent basis (like being a capitalist or a wage laborer). |
| Often such social relation take the form of rules which govern our interactions with other individuals. But this is not the only possibility. The language we all use is also a social relation, the school system trains us in certain behaviors which we need to live in this society. Social relations come in many different shapes. |
| The social substance which Marx calls “value material” is an interesting addition to this colorful menagerie of forms potentially taken by social relations. In a commodity society, everybody is obligated to act as if the labor needed to produce a commodity is still attached to the commodity as an invisible quasi-physical substance. This is what we have to pay for when we buy the commodity, and the cost of things is a consideration for everybody using a thing. |
| These are things I said this morning in the in-class session (and I will try to say similar things next Tuesday evening), and I also tried to explain it in [2007SP:38]. I do not expect you to buy this explanation and parrot it back to me -- Ozz is getting full points for his thoughtful answer -- but I recommend to mull this over and consider it as a possibility. |
|
|
|||||