Capitalist Commodity Production Research Articles

The Agricultural Settlement of the Arabah and the Political Ecology of Zionism

AbstractAgricultural settlement geared to capitalist commodity production and accompanied by massive ecological interventions has historically been central to the Zionist colonial project of creating a permanent Jewish presence in the “Land of Israel.” The hyperarid southern region known as the Central Arabah is an instructive edge-case: in the 1960s, after the expulsion of the bedouin population, cooperative settlements were established here and vegetables produced through “Hebrew self-labor,” with generous assistance from the state. In the 1990s the region was again transformed as the importation of migrant workers from Thailand enabled farmers to expand cultivation of bell peppers for global markets. But today ecological destruction, depletion of water resources, and global warming cast doubt over the viability of settlement in this climatically extreme region. I locate the settlements of the Arabah within the historical political ecology of the Zionist movement, arguing that their current fragility exposes the essential precarity of capitalist colonization.

The Transformation Problem: Labor Theory or Command Theory of Value?

Values and prices are two dimensionally different measurements of the weights of commodities in exchange: one expressed in units of time, the other in money. Between the two there is a factor of proportionality such that the annual sum of activated productive labor time is re-expressed as a definite quantity of monetary output. This is maintained both at the level of individual commodity units in their exchange with money and for the totality of commodity units turned over in a given period of time. This factor of proportionality obviously fluctuates over time. The exchange of commodities at prices proportional to values does not also imply that the sum of values should ever be equal to the sum of prices, nor the sum of surplus values be equal to the sum of profits. Yet Marx, in Capital III, nevertheless elaborates a specific analytical break between the conditions of exchange that dominate ‘simple’ commodity production and capitalist commodity production, but claims to have reconciled the two by invoking these criteria. He does so by constructing an alternative system to account for the average rate of profit in which the value of capitalist commodities are represented, not by their embodied labor content, but by the labor content of the money commodity against which they are exchanged prior to becoming future components in the circuit of productive capital. This paper offers an alternative solution to the transformation problem and incorporates the average rate of profit within the pricing framework of Capital I. It seeks to show why other attempts, both hostile and friendly, to resolve the issue along the proposed lines of Capital III necessarily replace the labor theory of value with a command theory of value. In this, Marx failed to transcend the classical dilemma and became, instead, a prisoner to it.

Consumption, Capital, and Class in Digital Space: The Political Economy of Pay-per-Click Business Models

Theories of digital capitalism explore two interrelated conceptual problems: how seemingly “free” use of social-networking websites is compatible with capitalist commodity production and how the Marxian class-exploitation conceptual apparatus can be extended to understand newly emerging digital social relations. This essay’s dialectical approach problematizes digital production in relation to digital consumption, connecting these two moments to the organization of the surplus in digital space via a fundamental and subsumed class framework. A link is shown between capitalist and noncapitalist human activity in digital space, distinguishing between commodity and noncommodity forms and displaying the dialectic of free versus forced consumption. This identification is nonneutral to how we conceptualize digital production and class relations. While clients consume commodities, users are lured into providing the conditions of existence (network formation; e.g., Facebook) necessary for this concrete form of capital to accumulate, globally extracting unpaid surpluses from direct producers via capitalist as well as noncapitalist modes of appropriation and distribution.

Commodity Fetishism, Legal Fetishism, Converted Forms, and Aesthetic Fetishism

In this paper, we analyse two recent contributions to the Marxist critique of the political economy of art: the article “Artistic Labor and the Production of Value: An Attempt at a Marxist Interpretation” by José María Durán and the book Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics by Dave Beech. While Durán emphasizes the emergence of the legal category of intellectual property rights as crucial for value production in art, Beech has reached the contrary conclusion that artistic labour does not produce value and that artistic production is therefore excepted from capitalist commodity production. In our paper, we criticize both conclusions. While agreeing with Beech that artistic labour does not produce value and is thus excepted from the ideology of commodity fetishism, we believe that through the ideology of converted forms it nevertheless becomes part of capitalist commodity production. We would argue that the sector of artistic production, through the converted form of monopoly rent, establishes a production relation with other, competitive, sectors of capitalist economy. This production relation is enabled by the ideology of aesthetic fetishism, supported by the ideology of legal fetishism through the category of intellectual property rights. Contrary to Durán, we thus conclude that intellectual property rights allow for a hidden transfer of surplus value produced by the workers in the competitive sectors of the capitalist economy.

Commodity Fetishism, Legal Fetishism, Converted Forms, and Aesthetic Fetishism

In this paper, we analyse two recent contributions to the Marxist critique of the political economy of art: the article “Artistic Labor and the Production of Value: An Attempt at a Marxist Interpretation” by José María Durán and the book Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics by Dave Beech. While Durán emphasizes the emergence of the legal category of intellectual property rights as crucial for value production in art, Beech has reached the contrary conclusion that artistic labour does not produce value and that artistic production is therefore excepted from capitalist commodity production. In our paper, we criticize both conclusions. While agreeing with Beech that artistic labour does not produce value and is thus excepted from the ideology of commodity fetishism, we believe that through the ideology of converted forms it nevertheless becomes part of capitalist commodity production. We would argue that the sector of artistic production, through the converted form of monopoly rent, establishes a production relation with other, competitive, sectors of capitalist economy. This production relation is enabled by the ideology of aesthetic fetishism, supported by the ideology of legal fetishism through the category of intellectual property rights. Contrary to Durán, we thus conclude that intellectual property rights allow for a hidden transfer of surplus value produced by the workers in the competitive sectors of the capitalist economy.

Value is Still Labour: Exploitation and the Production of Environmental Rent and Commodities for Nature Tourists in Rural Senegal

Monetary incentives such as nature-based tourism and payment for ecosystem service (PES) mechanisms have become increasingly promoted as a means for protecting the environment. Critical scholars are interpreting these developments as forms of accumulation based upon the commodification of nature, prosumption and institutional power that make labour progressively irrelevant in the production of value. Drawing on the case of two Senegalese villages and on Marx's concepts of commodity and value, this paper suggests that such perspectives are inaccurate and that they serve to silence workers’ experiences of exploitation in these contexts. The paper proposes to go beyond generalising conceptualisations of the green economy such as “accumulation by conservation” and to be specific about the ways in which production and therefore working conditions relate to capital accumulation. It distinguishes between nature-based tourism and PES mechanisms: the former a profit-driven commodity production process, the latter a means for depoliticising environmental problems associated to capitalist commodity production through the payment of an environmental or climate rent that does not generate any value. Through this perspective it shows how in rural Senegal villagers’ working day needs to be long, intense and poorly rewarded to reduce PES project costs and facilitate the extraction of surplus value by owners of nature-based tourism businesses as well as how labour hierarchies go hand in hand with relations of exploitation between workers. Capitalists, donors and local intermediaries’ ability to take advantage of workers’ labour is facilitated by the agrarian crises that capital has generated in these Senegalese villages, but it is also contested as workers rise up against exploitation. Capital's ability to survive to its own ecological contradictions therefore rests upon workers’ shoulders and not exclusively on the formation of class hegemonies.

The Tragedy of the Commodity and the Farce of AquAdvantage Salmon®

The US Food and Drug Administration is expected to approve AquAdvantage Salmon as the first genetically modified animal for human consumption. The genetic modifications allow the proprietary fish to grow at a rate twice as fast as a wild salmon, leading to greater ‘efficiency’ in terms of reduced costs and reduced time to market. This article provides an analysis of the ways in which AquAdvantage Salmon exemplifies capitalist market forces controlling and guiding the terms of salmon recovery and conservation. The authors trace historical developments within the salmon industry to demonstrate how capitalist commodity production has impacted fishing communities. They reject the oft-cited ‘tragedy of the commons’ hypothesis offered to explain fisheries crises. In its place, they offer the conceptual framework of the ‘tragedy of the commodity’ to explore how capitalist market forces and complicit state regulations amplify rather than resolve global environmental problems.

The Tragedy of the Commodity

This article develops a critique of the tragedy of the commons theory that is frequently applied to explain fisheries decline. In its place the authors offer the tragedy of the commodity as an alternative framework that better explains resource overexploitation and environmental degradation. They use a political economic analysis to discuss the social and ecological transformations that have occurred in the Mediterranean bluefin tuna fishery, with an emphasis on the Sicilian traditional trap fishery. Examining this case, the authors argue that Marx’s explanation of capitalist private property, commodity production, and the general formula for capital provide powerful theoretical guides for clarifying the social relations of production that have driven the overexploitation of fisheries in the recent past. Relying on historical and qualitative data, the case study illustrates the ways in which the social imperative of capitalist commodity production toward accumulating surplus-value directs production, reorganizes social relations, and transforms nature into an instrumental input that can more easily serve the needs of capital. The resulting ecological problems demonstrate the tragedy of the commodity.

D.G. Monrads liberale manifest fra 1839

D. G. Monrad’s Political Manifesto from 1839:The first issue of Ditlev Gothard Monrad’s Flying Political Papers, published in Copenhagen in 1839, may be regarded as a manifesto of the early Danish liberal movement in its struggle to overcome the existing absolutist conglomerate state in favour of a constitutional national state, a result gradually achieved with the constitution of 1849 and the national centralization of the ensuing years. Influenced by Hegelian political philosophy, Monrad regarded his own times as marked by a great historical crisis and transition, evincing the political acknowledgment of the ‘people’ and its national unity as the outcome of a long-term dialectical development towards a synthesis of order and liberty, with existing absolutism representing a historically necessary, though now obsolete, stage. Further strengthening of the nation and the state now implied the political involvement of the ‘core of the people’, i.e. the educated middle class, whose culture allegedly rendered it capable of representing the interests of the people as a whole. Thus, Monrad’s liberalism was an ideological defence of the rule of a quite narrow social layer, a particular political reflection of an internationally conditioned transition to capitalist commodity production carried out in Denmark mainly via the state as an avenue between a dominantly agrarian production and the world market.

Eyes, Which Do Not See: Liners, Airplanes, Automobiles

This article situates the contemporary position of architecture within a more general analysis of the transformation of commodities from tradabie objects to the commodified experiences of subjects. To understand this paradigmatic shift from the material properties of the object to the effects it generates for the subject, a conceptual analogy to Le Corbusier's book Towards a New Architecture is proposed. In the chapter “Liners, Airplanes, Automobiles,” Le Corbusier explores the programmatic and aesthetic attributes of contemporary commodities and their conditional relationship to the economic, social, and technological forces that formed the zeitgeist of the modern era. The article investigates how the very same products discussed in Le Corbusier's manifesto still apply to architectural discourse today, yet with other prefixes and other possible conclusions that pertain to the information age. Departing from the premise that architecture is a cultural commodity that supports and substantiates aspects of late capitalist commodity production, current consumer trends are examined in order to speculate on the potential of architecture to act as a catalyst for new experiences and perceptions.

Power Relations, Industrial Clusters, and Regional Transformations: Pan-European Integration and Outward Processing in the Slovak Clothing Industry

Since the late 1980s the East European clothing sector has witnessed a dramatic transformation. Driven by increasing costs in Western Europe, Western clothing retailers and buyers have increasingly outsourced production to lower-cost regions of postcommunist Eastern Europe. One consequence of these changes has been a dramatic growth of clothing producers in Eastern Europe, locked into supply relations with Western buyers while simultaneously involved in dense networks of relations between firms in regional clusters. This article focuses on the form that power relations take, which knit together pan-European supply linkages and regional clusters of clothing firms in Slovakia. In drawing on a weak form of actor-network theory and an understanding of capitalist commodity production, the article explores the uneven nature of these power relations, as well as their fluidity at three levels. First, attention is given to relations between Slovak firms and Western buyers that largely involve a tenuous form of price competitiveness, which is simultaneously under threat from lower-cost production zones elsewhere. Second, the variant power relations between producers in regional clusters of clothing firms in Slovakia are explored. Production flexibilities have been built through a network of locally agglomerated workshop production units and domestic home-based workers to whom work is outsourced when required. Third, the implications of these forms of outsourcing are explored in relation to workplace and wage-level pressures. The article therefore suggests the importance of understanding dynamic and fluid power relations in the economic geography of regional clusters and the globalization of outsourcing in the clothing sector.

The Crisis of Feudalism

Environmental historymayhelp explain feudalism’s demise and capitalism’s ascent in the 16th century. Medieval Europe was riven by profound socio-ecological contradictions. Feudalism’s environmental degradation pivoted on the lord-peasant relationship, which limited the possibilities for reinvestment in the land. Consequently, feudalism exhausted the soil and the labor power from which it derived revenues, rendering the population vulnerable to disease. The Black Death decisivelyaltered labor-land ratios in favor of western Europe’s peasantry. This new balance of class forces eliminated the possibility of feudal restoration and led the states, landlords, and merchants to favor geographical expansion—an external rather than internal spatial fix to feudal crisis. This external fix, beginning in the Atlantic world, had capitalist commodityproduction and exchange inscribed within it. Capitalism differed radicallyfrom feudalism in that where earlier ecological crises had been local, capitalism globalized them. From this standpoint, the origins of capitalism mayshed light on today’s ecological crises.

Sport and popular culture: The temporary triumph of process over product

Abstract This article examines the question of pleasure in popular culture. Specifically it discusses the pleasures involved in the consumption of sport, and the role heroes, as figures for identification, play. The analysis draws on three separate elements; Richard Dyer's concept of Utopian sensibility, Roland Barthe's concept of jouissance and Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque. It is argued that because it is a form of performance rather than an artefact, the sport event, at its best, represents the temporary triumph of process over product, the moment when the spontaneous inspiration of performance escapes, fleetingly, the tendency of capitalist commodity production to transform all such cultural processes into calculated packaged objects for consumption. Sport holds out the possibility of remaining playful, of grasping pleasure and of holding reality at bay.

World-state formation: historical processes and emergent necessity

Recent studies of processes operating in the modern world system imply that the continued existence of the interstate system—the system of multiple, competing, and unequally powerful states—may be a luxury which humanity cannot afford. Because of the destructiveness of modern weaponry the continuation of the legitimacy of warfare as a method for resolving disputes is incompatible with the survival of our world civilization and perhaps also with the survival of life on Earth. This paper examines theories which purport to explain the longevity and structural basis of the contemporary interstate system. These have implications for the possibility of global state formation. Comparative research shows that the modern interstate system is unusually long-lived. I argue that the emergence of capitalist commodity production accounts for the structural resistance of the contemporary interstate system to transformation into a ‘universal empire’. The processes of hegemonic rise and fall of states which operate within the modern system differ significantly from earlier world systems in which capitalist commodity production was less fully institutionalized. Modern hegemonic core states support the multicentric political structure of the interstate system, while dominant states in earlier systems tried to create system-wide imperium. This analysis of the relationship between the logic of accumulation and processes of political centralization has implications for the possibilities of developing a world polity which can prevent the usage of weapons of mass destruction.

The Resurgence of Sharecropping: Historical Anomaly or Political Strategy?

Although traditional economic theories regard sharecropping as inefficient and likely to dwindle in systems of capitalist commodity production, sharecropping has exhibited remarkable persistence under a range of historical conditions. This article explores the reasons for the unexpected tenacity of share farming and considers its implications for the analysis of rural class structure and agrarian change. Using the example of the resurgence of sharecropping in the California strawberry industry, the paper demonstrates that political constraints on agricultural production are key determinants of the contemporary adoption of sharecropping, establishing a context in which sharecropping not only facilitates but is recreated by capitalist accumulation.

Exploitation comes home: a critique of the Marxian theory of family labour

Social scientists, demographers among them, are slowly beginning to acknowledge that inequalities based on age and sex may have a significant impact on household behaviour. Yet the influence of what is now commonly termed 'patriarchy' on household decisions is almost always pictured in political or ideological terms. The economic consequences of patriarchy are often overlooked, despite the fact that they clearly hold important impli cations for the analysis of production and distribution within the family. Neglect of this particular issue may be partially attributed to the influence of neoclassical economic theory, a theory which not only excludes the possibility of exploitation in any voluntary exchange, but also ignores the way in which individual tastes and preferences are presumably merged into a joint utility function. Yet Marxian theory is equally deserving of blame. While many Marxists are sympathetic to the political perspective of socialist fem inism, most cling to an interpretation of Marxian theory which effectively excludes the very possibility that exploitation could take place within the family. This common interpretation grows out of Marx's exposition of the labour theory of value. Marx was convinced that the labour theory of value could not operate outside the realm of capitalist commodity production because the labour embodied in one good might vary arbitrarily between producers. The actual amount of labour time devoted to pro duction could not be used as a standard of value, because some workers might work more or less efficiently than others. Labour value, he reasoned, should be determined by 'socially necessary' labour time, and the concept of socially-necessary labour time is relevant only if some social forces operate in such a way as to eliminate inefficient producers. Without socially-necessary labour time, there can be no analysis of labour value, and without an analysis of labour value, there can be no analysis of exploitation. The logic of this argument is impeccable. The logic, however, conceals an assumption that seems somewhat inconsistent with the spirit of Marx's theory: the assumption that capitalist competition is the only force that can lead to the systematic elimination of inef

Locational Patterns and Dynamics of Industrial Activity in the Modern Metropolis

This paper attempts to review and re-structure a mass of published ideas on the geography of industrial activity in the modern metropolis. The argument proceeds in a series of stages. First, some basic locational factors in the city are examined. Second, a critical discussion of the literature on economies of agglomeration and scale in cities is undertaken. Third, a brief description of manufacturing activity in nineteenth-century cities is provided by way of motivating and orientating the succeeding discussion. Fourth, the phenomenon of industrial decentralisation in twentieth-century cities is described. Fifth, an attempt is made to construct a composite theory of intra-metropolitan industrial location on the basis of the historical process of the substitution of capital for labour in capitalist commodity production. Sixth, a schematic re-statement of the theory is presented, and its implications for the spatial-cum-organisational evolution of modern industry are elucidated. Seventh, some of the main policy issues raised by the continued loss of industry from the cores of large metropolitan areas are briefly treated.

Funktionale Erklärungen bei Marx

Abstract In the following attempt at a further clarification of the methodological aspects of Marxian theory construction it is demonstrated that central arguments in the first part of the Kapital, especially the description of the development from simple to capitalist commodity production, can be analysed as functional explanations in the modern logical sense. At the same time it becomes clear that some questionable conclusions which have been arrived at on the basis of this description, e.g. the development of capitalism being a necessary condition for the later formation of socialism, can be understood as results of certain methodological defects in Marx’ functional explanations.