notes on capital
chapters 1: the commodity

(in general): terms one must be able to define--value (128), use-value (126), exchange-value (126), useful labor (133), simple average labor (or, abstract labor) (135), labor-power (136), relative form of value (139), equivalent form of value (139), universal equivalent (159)

(128): "exchange-value as the necessary mode of expression, or form of appearence, of value."

(129): pay attention to the critical point here. we are speaking, ostensibly, about commodities as "things", but Marx wants us to know that commodities are really processes. indeed, that is the essence of what makes a commodity (in that sense it is a definition embedded in the social relations that produce it).

(131): in the discussion of value, use-value is never absent. for if a thing that is produced is un-wanted, it cannot be realized as a commodity and therefore the labor contained in it is valueless.

(132): the divison of labor precedes commodity production, but the opposite cannot be true (i.e., you need a heterogeneity of use-values--you need a social division of labor, or different people producing different things).

(137): summary passage--"on the one hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power, in the physiological sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or abstract, human labour that it forms the value of commodities. on the other hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power in a particular form and with a definite aim, and it is in this quality of being concrete useful labour that it produces use-values"

(140): the idea that you cannot understand a commodity's value except in relation to another commodity (a different use-value) is, on reflection, trivial. but, on further reflection, it is critical, because it foregrounds the necessarily social nature of commodities.

(144): summary passage--"by means of the value-relation, therefore, the natural form of commodity B becomes the value-form of comodity A, in other words the physical body of commodity B becomes a mirror for the value of commodity A. Commodity A, then, in entering into a relation with commodity B as an object of value, as a materialization of human labor, makes the use-value B into the material through which its own value is expressed. the value of commodity A, thus expressed int eh use-value of commodity B, has the form of relative value."

(145): changes in the value of the equivalent (the coat, or commodity B) are important, in light of the history of the goal standard.

(148): important: "use-value becomes the form of appearance of its opposite, value"--in other words, a particular commodity comes to stand in for abstract value. this is critical when considering the problems with the gold-standard. As Marx writes two pages later, "concrete labour therefore becomes the expression of abstract human labour." (what he calls the second particularity) This automatically begets the third particularity--useful labour, which is the work of private, specific individuals here is also representing labour in its directly social form (i.e., abstract human labour).

(159-160): in a sense, if this argument about the ascent of the universal equivalent is meant to be historical, then he is making a point relevant to historical materialism, as well--namely, this notion that the ascendancy of a universal equivalent begins to reveal, to observers, the fact that all commodities share the property of being a product of abstract human labor. in this sense, a la Aristotle, one could not arrive at this prior to this era.

(160): summary paragraph--"the simple or isolated relative form of value of one commodity converts some other commodity into an isolated equivalent. the expanded form of relative value, that expression of the value of one commodity in terms of all other commodities, imprints those other commodities with the form of particular equivalents of different kinds. finally, a particular kind of commodity acquires the form of universal equivalent, because all other commodities make it the material embodiment of their uniform and universal form of value."

(162): It is important, what he is doing in this chapter, precisely because it demonstrates that the myriad contradictions (or, "particularities") of the money form begin earlier, at the level of the expression of one commodity (relative) in terms of another (equivalent). ("The simple commodity form is therefore the germ of the money-form"). And that can root monetary analysis in social analysis. It is perhaps too much to say that it frees us from the follies of the neo-classicals, but one can dream.

(167): space, here, to speak about Fields and the way in which these relations of production are ritualized to appear natural. in that sense there is also a distant connection to evangelical leninism--implicit in marx's exposition is the notion that a "scientific discovery" is necessary to unravel the fetishism that traps commodity producers. (but i think that "class consciousness", as a concept, is insufficient to discuss the "unveiling" being done here--of course, there is the basic notion that the bourgeois notion of equal exchange between worker and capitalist masks the deeper inequalities. but is this class consciousness? does every worker not live that reality? i'd like the leninists to make a list of what exactly one should teach a worker to make him/her "class conscious"? and how does one tell when it's been achieved?).

(173): more specific working out of historical materialism--nature of religion and relationship to commodity production, asiatic mode of production, etc. here, also, suggesting that the veil is only finally removed under socialist production, not once "it becomes production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control."

harvard needs a living wage, testimony two:
I clean 8am to 4pm at MIT and then 6pm to 10pm at Harvard. I've been cleaning at Harvard about 5 years now. I came to Cambridge from Barbados in '83, and ever since I first come here, I was always working two full0time jobs. 80 hours a week. I always do cleaning. always liked cleaning. The thing lots of work places try to do now is they try to get away from paying a lot of full-time workers. They see if they can cut the staff in half and get the same quantity of work done. and then they want part-tie people, because then they don't have to pay the benefits. That's just like what Harvard do.
I leave my house at about 6:30 in the morning every weekday. and I don't get back until 10:30 at night, so that's a lot of time from home. Sometimes it's not enough sleep. Depends on how the body feels. In the morning, your body wants to sleep but your mind tells you, you got to go, you got to go. I have three kids - 4, 9, and 21. On the weekends, I do spend a lot of time with my kids. I try not ot give to myself, to improve my kids.
Harvard is great as far as school is concerned, but in our department, it's not great for working. We work for a company - Harvard is a company. Sometimes a name fools a lot of people. When you say Harvard or MIT, you have a great name, but when you see the environment and you seewhat's going on, you're not happy just to have a good name. When people hear you're working at Harvard, they think you get a ot of money because it's a big college. But as far as I'm concerned, the working environment is bad. Right now, one guy's out sick, nearly seven weeks and he didn't get a paycheck yet. Every day they tell him, it's in the mail. How long will it take a paycheck to go from one part of Cambridge to another? You have to work with the worker to make him happy in the environment he's working.
You have people who don't want to talk because they scared to lose their job, or scared the supervisor is going to put more work on them. And you get treated sometimes different depending on where you come from. The boss is no going to say, because you from Haiti, I don't like you. I give you more work, but his actions speak louder than words. The money here in Cambridge is better than in Barbados, but I didn't really come here from the money. I come here because my family lives in this country. My grandfather lived in this country from the time he was a boy, so he sent for my mother and she brought me here. I used to live in Cambridge with my grandfather, but now I live in Malden.
It's bettter at MIT, because MIT is a better environment than Harvard. Sometimes my supervisor here talks to me, live we were talking about how to clean this desk, and I tell him so and so and he said, If you don't like it, you can go home, meaning to quit. He just talk down to me, so sometimes I get so mad. MIT pays better than Harvard. Other placdes for part-time pay more money than Harvard. Harvard needs to pay a little bit more money, because they want the work done nice and clean. No specks. As I say, I don't mind that, but pay me something to do that.
I haven't gotten a good raise since I've been at Harvard. I still don't get $10/hour. They freeze our raises for three years. You never get enough money, but you try to live with that, and you try to make ends meet. I put my money togethter with my wife to pay the bills. But other guys whose wives don't work or who don't make a good salary at their other job, I know they have a hard time. Sometimes they don't have money to buy groceries. I know one individual that works here - sometimes he can't buy any meat because he's back on his rent. But we try to strive to be thankful. We can't do no more.
-- Neil, Law School Janitor

harvard needs a living wage, testimony one:
I work at Harvard from 7:00 'til 4:00. Then I go to the Supermarket - that's my second job, bagging groceries. I do that 'til 10:30pm. I'm home by 11:30pm. In bed by midnight. Yeah, I'm tired physically, and I;m tired up here, in the head. I'm at the point where things start to bug me that normally don't. Sometimes I just need to back off and cool down a little bit before it's too much. I don't need to be a 50k man. All I'm talking about is a living. Basic stuff - a roof over my head, a meal. Right now, I've got that, but only because I'm at the supermarket 'til 10:20 each night... Of course, sometimes you have a day that's not too bad. But boy, I'll tell you, there are a lot of days when you're walking around in a fog. You're just pooped out. You just can't think on it too much. You just go. You run like hell... See, managers always try to cut expenses, and they see wages as expenses. They're trained that way. They get trapped in that mindset, and they forget that it's people they're talking about. It's a person, a guy, trying to live on that.
--Lewis, Harvard Custodian

factory work in china:
(...) There, she was expected to work 360 days a year, from 7.30am to as late as 9.30pm, with only a half-hour break for lunch and fines for taking too long on the toilet. As in many Chinese factories, military drills were often yelled: "Long live the company!" If anybody argued back to the managers, they could be punched in the face.
(...) She was forbidden by her bosses from going to take care of it - so she became angry and fainted. She forced herself to keep going to work for the next fortnight, but eventually she became so exhausted she collapsed - and died before she reached the hospital. The autopsy indicated gulaosi - heart and organ failure caused by extreme exhaustion.
(...) Some 50,000 fingers are sliced off in China's factories every month. Tao Chun Lan was a 20-year-old woman from Sichuan province at the heart of China who moved to Shenzhen and got a job working in a handicrafts factory. One night, she discovered the factory was filling with smoke - and the workers were locked inside. Some 84 workers were burned or trampled to death. Lan jumped out of a window, irreparably damaging her legs. She has received no compensation. "They don't care if I am crippled for life," she says.
(...) The dissident-killing Chinese Communist Party didn't propose this change out of a sudden flush of benevolence. They did it because the Chinese people have in increasing numbers been refusing to be tethered serfs for the benefit of Western corporations. Last year, there were 300,000 illegal industrial actions in China, a huge spate of "factory kidnappings" of managers, and more than 85,000 protests.
(...) Groups representing Western corporations with factories in China sent armies of lobbyists to Beijing to cajole and threaten the dictatorship into abandoning these new workers' protections. The American Chamber of Commerce - representing Microsoft, Nike, Ford, Dell and others - listed 42 pages of objections. The laws were "unaffordable" and "dangerous", they declared. The European Chamber of Commerce backed them up.
(...) But now the corporations that they claimed would bring freedom and democracy are in fact lobbying to crush freedom and opposing the plain democratic will of the Chinese people. As James Mann, the former Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Beijing, puts it after years of observing the behaviour of big business in China: "The business communities of China and the United States [and, he might have added, Europe] do not harbour dreams of democracy. Both profit from a Chinese system that permits no political opposition, and both are content with it."
(...) Scott Slipy, the director of human resources for Microsoft in China, bragged to BusinessWeek, "We have enough investment at stake that we can usually get someone to listen to us if we are passionate about an issue."
(...) Of course, these market fundamentalist economists claim this situation is in fact good for the Chinese people, because this system is the best way to enrich them. The obvious response is: let them decide. If they don't want to join trade unions, if they don't want workplace protections, nobody will force them. But give them the freedom to choose. Or are these economists saying the Chinese people are too stupid to know their own interests?
(...) After lobbying from trade unions and human rights organisations, Nike has now denounced the position of the American Chambers of Commerce to which it belongs and backed the law. The remaining Wal-Martian corporations need to be damned one by one - and subject to legal sanctions - until they relent and accept the rights of Chinese workers.

britain and india:
Britain's industrialisation was secured by destroying the manufacturing capacity of India. In 1699, the British government banned the import of woolen cloth from Ireland, and in 1700 the import of cotton cloth (or calico) from India. Both products were forbidden because they were superior to our own. As the industrial revolution was built on the textiles industry, we could not have achieved our global economic dominance if we had let them in. Throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries, India was forced to supply raw materials to Britain's manufacturers, but forbidden to produce competing finished products. We are rich because the Indians are poor.
(...) The impact on British workers will be devastating. Service jobs of the kind now being exported were supposed to make up for the loss of employment in the manufacturing industries which disappeared overseas in the 1980s and 1990s. The government handed out grants for cyber sweatshops in places whose industrial workforce had been crushed by the closure of mines, shipyards and steelworks. But the companies running the call centres appear to have been testing their systems at government expense before exporting them somewhere cheaper.
(...) It is not hard to see why most of them have chosen India. The wages of workers in the service and technology industries there are roughly one tenth of those of workers in the same sectors over here. Standards of education are high, and almost all educated Indians speak English. While British workers will take call-centre jobs only when they have no choice, Indian workers see them as glamorous. One technical support company in Bangalore recently advertised 800 jobs. It received 87,000 applications. British call centres moving to India can choose the most charming, patient, biddable, intelligent workers the labour market has to offer.
(...) So is the flight to India a good thing or a bad thing? The only reasonable answer is both. The benefits do not cancel out the harm. They exist, and have to exist, side by side. This is the reality of the world order Britain established, and which is sustained by the heirs to the East India Company, the multinational corporations. The corporations operate only in their own interests. Sometimes these interests will coincide with those of a disadvantaged group, but only by disadvantaging another.
(...) For centuries, we have permitted ourselves to ignore the extent to which our welfare is dependent on the denial of other people's. We begin to understand the implications of the system we have created only when it turns against ourselves.

on the chinese miracle:
If real wages and the share of wages in national income have fallen sharply in recent times, and if inequalities have risen dramatically at the same time, the answer to the riddle lies in this quiet accretion, cashed in on by China-based corporations who have set the pace. The logic of capital has inveigled the entire world into a race of totalitarianisms--which inevitably enrich the few and pauperize the many in every country.
(...) Democracy is a nuisance for capitalism. The success of China should demonstrate even to the most ardent of liberals that capitalism works most efficiently under despotic conditions. If capitalism coexisted with democracy in the Western world for some decades, the rise of China shows it up for what it was: a coincidence of history brought into relief by the fight for freedom and human rights by large sections of the working population of the West since the early days of 19th century British Chartism. The gains of working classes were consolidated by the institutionalization of the welfare state since Bismarck's Germany first brought in social legislation in the 1880s. They took a big step forward with the implementation of Roosevelt's New Deal in the US in the 1940s. Much of this was made possible, needless to say, by the spoils of war and imperialism, which enabled Western elites to maintain labor aristocracies within their own geographical boundaries. A prosperous domestic social peace was arranged on the ample backs of Third World super-exploitation of labor--and maintained internationally through arm-twisting "multi-lateral" agencies like the IMF, the World Bank, GATT and the WTO.
(...) What history is revealing now is something altogether different: that far from being the precondition for political freedom, capitalism may be the growing thorn in the flesh of democracy, a thorn that democracy nourishes in the very core of its body-politic, a juggernaut of tyranny, remorselessly hungry for power both within and outside the country, without which its appetite for profits, growth and expansion cannot be met. As capital has had to bare its fangs, the dove of freedom and democracy has flown out of the window.
(...) To subscribe exclusively to the growth imperative is to be necessarily forced to sideline all other social or political goals and sign on to the charter of (global) corporate tyranny. The private interest--the hunt for ever higher profits, justified by the promise to grow, invest and employ--is the public interest. No need to distinguish between the two any more. Thus, unsurprisingly, as the unfolding logic of capital has revealed its despotic character, even liberalism has lurched feebly towards a quiet grave.
(...) To keep the World Bank happy the government has to open the door to "development" projects of doubtful social value and destructive environmental effects. To find the ear of the WTO it has had to sell the rural poor down the river, allow subsidized Western imports of foodgrains, remove price supports for farmers and dismantle the public distribution system, thus (especially given the collapse of rural public investment in infrastructure, one of the consequences of IMF-diktat) making it ever more likely that more and more people will find agriculture an unviable option over a period of time--and will be willing to sell their land to corporations or the government.
(...) "When I expand, it is always in a capital-intensive, and not in a labor-intensive direction." - Dinesh Hinduja, to Edward Luce of The Financial Times.
(...) That employment in India was growing more rapidly in the 1980s, when the economy was growing much more slowly than it is today, is of little account. That the entire private organized sector of the economy has generated fewer than a million jobs during the past 16 years (and still employs less than 9 million people), when over 12 million people are getting added to the Indian workforce every year should make our policy-makers worried whether we will be a sustainable society at all in the future--whether we will not dissipate ourselves in a welter of frustrated social violence, the kind that Star TV had the misfortune of experiencing in Mumbai the other day. None of this seems to alarm them.
(...) 22-year-olds fed on the dreams of unabashed consumerism are not going to sit idly and watch the rich race past in their speeding cars. Thus, it was not surprising when an ex-Union Minister was so taken by a 2000 visit to Shenzhen, China, where a Special Economic Zone has generated huge amounts of unprecedented wealth during the past generation. 20-30% has been the annual rate of growth, sustained over a quarter century. Over 10 million people have found employment in an area the size of Jaipur. The city has generated 14% of China's exports. [BUT...] among Chinese economic planners, Shenzhen's recipe is increasingly seen as all but irrelevant: too harsh, too wasteful, too polluted, too dependent on the churning, ceaseless turnover of migrant labor. "This path is now a dead end," said Zhao Xiao, an economist and former adviser to the Chinese State CouncilAfter cataloguing the city's problems, he said, "Governments can't count on the beauty of investment covering up 100 other kinds of ugliness." As the limits of the Shenzhen model have grown more and more apparent, other cities in China's relatively developed east are increasingly trying to differentiate themselves, emphasizing better working and living conditions for factory workers or paying more attention to the environment. "Some inland cities have started to provide migrants social security, including pension and other insurance," said Wang Chunguang, an expert in class mobility at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. "In Chengdu, in Sichuan Province, residency controls are loosening up and education for migrant children is getting more attention."
(...) The province of Guangdong, where Shenzhen is located, recorded 10,000 protests last year--in what is known to the world as a totalitarian society.
(...) The answers are to be found in the peculiarities of the Indian situation and the utterly odd world in which our corporate and policy-making elites find themselves today. The economy has been growing at a internationally impressive 8-9% for about 5 years now. ... However, there is immense corporate frustration--still--right here at home in India. Some of the cheapest labor in the world is at their command. And yet, because of the inconvenience of democracy they can't be hired and fired in sync with the impulses of the business cycle, as it happens in China. Some of the most readily accessible natural resources are at their disposal. Except that there is the nuisance of bureaucracy in the shape of clearance of industrial projects by pollution control boards and the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests. They have firm control over the hearts and minds of politicians. But, from their point of view, there are still too many taxes to be paid. There is infrastructure in the country, but it is either in the city and already burdened or it is near fertile agricultural land (and must be somehow acquired: the reason that the conflict between agriculture and industry is arising in SEZ land acquisition in the first place). And so on.
(...) SEZs offer a relief from this entire nettle of hurdles. All that can't be attempted in the civilized world outside will be the norm in SEZs. American corporations routinely abuse labor and the environment in Shenzhen in ways unacceptable to the Western world (though no one seems to mind the cheap shoes and clothing). In India, SEZs will provide a profitable refuge from the Indian Constitution, an effective waiver from democracy. The Development Commissioner and the SEZ Authority will have overwhelming powers, making local, provincial, national and international laws all but irrelevant. "Little Chinas" and Shenzhens can be developed.
(...) What else does it mean? Recent concessions (like the liberalization of foreign direct investment in real estate), the rush of builders and developers to acquire SEZ land, the fact that only 50% of the area under an SEZ has to be dedicated to processing (whose definition is stretched liberally to include everything from mining to agriculture), the fact that industrialists are all too often being granted land well in excess of their production requirements (whether Tata in Singur or Reliance in Dadri) all point in the direction of an engineered real estate boom through SEZ growth. Huge amounts of capital are pouring into the real estate market, both from within India and abroad. Returns of 30, 40, even 100 per cent in many segments of the market are becoming common--making Indian real estate markets one of the most attractive places anywhere to invest for global finance capital.
(...) With private airports, luxury housing, super-deluxe hotels, world-class shopping malls and multiplex plazas, SEZs offer us a window into the world of corporate consumer dreams. They also portend the end of effective democracy in this country. The surrounding sea of human misery and squalor is bound to give rise to repeated and violent rebellions. Which is why the private armies of security guards are being trained and readied for approaching inevitabilities.
(...) There are a thousand alternatives to this impasse. But to discover them and forge the collective imagination and will to develop them in practice will require a thriving public culture of democracy--precisely that which SEZs are being created to undermine. Globalization, far from bringing freedom to the world, is taking it away--in the name of freedom.

china´s coal mines

articulating economies by disarticulating elsewhere:
The low prices enjoyed by shoppers at British supermarkets are paid for by poor wages, job insecurity and a denial of basic human rights for workers in some of the world's poorest countries, a report has concluded. The growing power of big supermarkets is the driving force behind a mode of doing business that is made possible by exploiting workers, particularly women, in developing countries, the report says.
(...) The document, produced by the development agency ActionAid, accuses the supermarkets, who take £7 out of every £10 spent on the high street, of using their vast market power to drive down prices at their overseas suppliers.
(...) ActionAid claims that shopping could become a "tool for poverty reduction" if supermarkets treat their suppliers better so that more of the millions of pounds spent every day on grocery shopping in the UK flowed back to the workers producing what Britons buy. "This is how development happens," it says. An investigation into how bananas are grown in Costa Rica found that workers' rights, pay and conditions have suffered from the intense price war that rages between UK grocers. Suppliers are forced to absorb the costs of the banana price battle because they need the business: supermarkets typically take between 70 per cent and 90 per cent of a banana supplier's stocks. [it´s the logic of the individual capitalist, mr. actionaid]
(...) In the Indian cashew growing industry, ActionAid found that for every pound shoppers spent on the nut in UK supermarkets just 1p went to the women workers who processed the nuts. Another 22p was shared between Indian farmers, traders, processing companies and exporters, leaving 77p for importers, roasters and supermarkets in the UK.
(...) Bindi, a 58-year-old mother of six, from Kerala in India, works for a large processing company that exports cashew nuts to the UK market. "I have severe pain in my toes and knees and sometimes back pain. But I have to work to fend for myself and my family," she said. Bindi's hands are covered in blisters. Asked why she does not wear protective gloves, she said: "We have to buy the gloves ourselves; the management does not provide us with gloves. Besides, I will only be able to shell five kilos if I wear gloves instead of the usual 10." She said: "The managers use malpractices and underweigh the shelled nuts." A survey found that 45 per cent of cashew workers experience respiratory illnesses, compared with 9 per cent of the wider population. "They will make us sit in the smoke-filled sheds where they fry the nuts and it causes suffocation," said Bindi. Cashew workers' main concern is their earnings and, in Kerala, most women want their unions to bargain for higher wages.

Canto XII from The Heights of Macchu Picchu (neruda):

Arise to birth with me, my brother.
Give me your hand out of the depths
sown by your sorrows.
You will not return from these stone fastnesses.
You will not emerge from subterranean time.
Your rasping voice will not come back,
nor your pierced eyes rise from their sockets.

Look at me from the depths of the earth,
tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepherd,
groom of totemic guanacos,
mason high on your treacherous scaffolding,
iceman of Andean tears,
jeweler with crushed fingers,
farmer anxious among his seedlings,
potter wasted among his clays--
bring to the cup of this new life
your ancient buried sorrows.
Show me your blood and your furrow;
say to me: here I was scourged
because a gem was dull or because the earth
failed to give up in time its tithe of corn or stone.
Point out to me the rock on which you stumbled,
the wood they used to crucify your body.
Strike the old flints
to kindle ancient lamps, light up the whips
glued to your wounds throughout the centuries
and light the axes gleaming with your blood.

I come to speak for your dead mouths.

Throughout the earth
let dead lips congregate,
out of the depths spin this long night to me
as if I rode at anchor here with you.

And tell me everything, tell chain by chain,
and link by link, and step by step;
sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,
thrust them into my breast, into my hands,
like a torrent of sunbursts,
an Amazon of buried jaguars,
and leave me cry: hours, days and years,
blind ages, stellar centuries.

And give me silence, give me water, hope.

Give me the struggle, the iron, the volcanoes.

Let bodies cling like magnets to my body.

Come quickly to my veins and to my mouth.

Speak through my speech, and through my blood.

on how the Holocaust should teach us about the present (freedman):
And thus, while “never forget” is a worthy and worthwhile refrain, it rings a bit hollow if all we do is remember without taking the next step and actively confronting abuses, wherever in the world they flourish unchecked.