Commodity Driven Economy?

In this paper I have focused on the position of labour in relation to commodities, matter and use-value. And it is in this relationship that we will find what Marx perceives the value of labour to be. I will also highlight the difference between what Marx believes an aimless expenditure of labour would be, and in doing so discuss the disjuncture present in South Africa in a commodity driven economy.

So let us dissect the terms. Firstly: Commodities. Commodities for Marx are constituted as commodities if they have either a) value or b) use value. Use value being the objects propensity to be useful. The qualities that Marx attributes to the use value of commodities are as follows.

11)      They are independent from the labour which produced them

22)      The use value of a commodity is only realised in its consumption

33)      It constitutes the substance of all wealth. Wealth being a societal construct. (What I believe this to mean is that the more useful a commodity is within a given society the more it is worth. For example a can opener in a society with no cans has no value, where as a can opener on an island full of canned food and no rocks would be an object of extreme use-value)

44)      The use value of a commodity is the material depository of exchange value

Now, how does labour relate to commodities? According to Marx if the same amount of work or labour time goes into the making of a product, then those products are of equal value. But value must also be measured in relation to quantity. The value of a commodity decreases as the quantity increases.  But increases as the quality and the amount of labour time that go into the commodity increase.  So we can see that more labour per commodity equals more valuable commodities, and conversely less labour per commodity equals less valuable commodities, in relation to quality and quantity.

In order for labour to create a commodity it must be introduced into productive labour in which it works with earthly matter in order to transform that matter into a commodity.  But in a capitalist society the labourer does not own the means of production necessary to produce commodities and so he must sell his labour power to a capitalist who owns the necessary equipment. In doing this the labourer exchanges his labour for money. The labourer must do this because wealth in a capitalist society is constituted by use-value, which is embodied in commodities.  He cannot purely do the amount of labour necessary to survive because the capitalist must create surplus value off of the commodities which he the labourer creates, but does not own. In order to create this surplus value the capitalist takes the production of commodities and reduces them to the effort of a group of labourers as opposed to a single individual. So if you look at a production line on a film set, take Labyrinth for example in which a mid-evil village is created out of poly euro thane. The set starts with the poly euro thane being set in moulds of brick walls. The moulded slabs which emerged must then be scrubbed, after scrubbing they are coated with coprox, and taken outside to dry. Once dry the base layers of paint are applied, and once again taken out to dry. Once dry they slabs are all taken to the set where they are constructed by the fabricators. After fabrication is complete another round of painting is done in order to accomplish the finished product. Each of these processes requires individuals to do specific tasks in order to create the greater commodity. So instead of producing one actual commodity each the necessary labours are divided. Because of this division and removal of the individual labourer from the commodity, the film set, the capitalist can make surplus value off his commodity because the value of it is related to labour power expended. But this, the labour power, is calculated amongst a group and not an individual. Surplus value is then further increased through extended working hours, and worker productivity.

So we can now see the relation of the value of labour to commodity under a capitalist system. It is clearly an exploitative one, in which the value of the labourer is degraded in the process of making surplus capital. It is a situation in which the labourer has very little control of his work hours and pay rate. But is forced into labour for he has no common land on which to survive with just simple modes of production like sustainable farming.

With this brief introduction to Marx’s theory of labour I would like to draw your attention to the difference between labour and the expenditure of labour power. Labour according to Marx is productive activity with an aim, whereas expenditure of labour power is productive activity without an aim. This baffles me slightly. What sort of expenditure of labour power does not have an aim? My guess is that because we are talking about a capitalist system the aim of the process of labour would be the production of commodity. This, I believe, is a terrible aim, probably worse than the Socratic drive for truth via logic. For this aim shifts the whole structure of society into a commodity driven economy. While it is true that commodities are a necessary part of an economy, the aim of a society should not be to produce commodities, but to ensure that people have the necessary commodities in order to live. As we can see in our South African society we have a surplus of wasted commodities, and a large rate of poverty and unemployment. The question I will pose you is how can this disjuncture be eradicated? 

Powerage and the Global Apartheid

Powerage – Protest to survive 7”EP (Neg. FX, France, 1985) – Front Cover

Powerage – Protest to survive 7”EP (Neg. FX, France, 1985) – Inside 1

Powerage – Protest to survive 7”EP (Neg. FX, France, 1985) – Inside 2

Powerage – Protest to survive 7”EP (Neg. FX, France, 1985) – Back Cover

Powerage – Protest to survive 7”EP (Neg. FX, France, 1985) – Insert 1

Powerage – Protest to survive 7”EP (Neg. FX, France, 1985) – Insert 2

There is something to be said about a South African punk rock EP being published in France in 1985. Most of those things would start with questions. Why could an anti-apartheid album not be published in South Africa? Or was it better off being published in France? What links did the South African punk scene have with the European punk scene during this time? How were these relationships formed? The answers to these questions seem simple, but the more one looks between the lines a strange picture of unity within estrangement emerges. It is this picture that I will focus on, for the former questions cannot be answered accurately without interviews.

It all starts in the context of apartheid, a framework of forced segregation. By 1985 a significant divestment movement throughout the world had begun placing pressure on investors to disinvest from South Africa. The global community was in a strong reactionary phase to the apartheid regime. And in Durban South Africa a small pocket of white resistance was making itself heard within the global community of punk rock.

Positioning themselves as anarchists against the discrimination of fellow men, Powerage sang out against apartheid, but more so than that against discrimination. For it is the plight of the punk rocker to be discriminated unjustly against for their modes of dress, musical taste, and beliefs about “the system”. And it is in this judgement from “civil” society that a connection of unity can be made between an estranged group of white punks in Durban to those suffering from the oppressions of apartheid mandate. In a recent conversation with Ampie Omo trombonist of monkee punk band BOO! A similar notion came up 17 years after the end of Apartheid with small communities fighting for their identities - the right to keep their languages and customs alive. What he said was that (although I do believe he was references an earlier conversation had with Chris Chameleon) all these communities are fighting the same struggle, the struggle for their own identity, and while their identities, languages and customs may be different, they are fighting against the same concept. Afrikaans, Pedi, Tswana. And they must unite in order to conquer.

While the struggle during apartheid was seemingly different, it was a fight for citizenship and recognition, to be part of a larger whole. The irony, it seems, is that now that apartheid has ended small cultural groups are becoming estranged from their cultural heritage’s and are being forced to become part of the global community. To be educated in English, to believe with all their might in consumerism, and the goodness of monetary wealth. They are controlled by large scale border controls. They have passports instead of pass books. We all have passports. We are all stuck in a global apartheid. But the oppressor is faceless, it has become a system of laws and regulations – hedged by corporates with their own wealth in mind and the well-being of those enslaved during colonialism has become a situation of adapt or die. And the punks still sing out. The fools of modern society, except that nobody is listening or laughing. Their ears and eyes blind folded and deafened by media and songs about Jimmy Choos and lady lumps. If only Plato could see his golden lie in action today.

While the hatred bred in apartheid between whites and blacks in South Africa keeps them living in the past, blind to the larger injustices of the world. The new regime of neo-liberalism spreads its blind octopussy tentacles and segregates the world into first and third, richer and poorer. Better off and worse. And the words written in 1985 by a group of anarchist punks still speak true “We as a band stand against any discrimination of fellow man, we believe that everyone should live in a state of equality, no matter of race, religion, wealth, music and way of dress. We therefore stand against any law that denies a person equality, their human rights. We strongly oppose the laws regarding Apartheid in our country.” Except that now it is the global apartheid to which we can refer.  

The Market Universe of Doom

There is no doubt that there is wealth in South Africa, and conversely there is no doubt that there is poverty. And in between this wealth and poverty there is mass unemployment that is slowly decreasing according to the Quarterly Labour Force Survey in South Africa October to December 2011, even though it is still sitting at 23.9%, that is roughly 4244000 unemployed people out of a population of 32670000 people between the ages of 15 and 64. The most trouble lies in youth unemployment with the unemployment rate being 51% among 15 to 25 year olds (Jones: 2011). The question then is where is the money going? Why is it not being invested into business – which would create employment? Why are there no jobs for the youth of South Africa?

The truth of the matter is the world has changed - not only in the technological shift where unskilled labour is becoming less of a commodity because of the mechanical take-over - if Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma are correct, another change occurred in 1973 – the year which marked the end of the Bretton Woods agreement and of the gold standard. The old model has been undermined and a new model has taken its place while the rest of the world seems unable to keep up with the change. The economy no longer drives the market, it is now the market which drives the economy. (Benjamin and LiPuma 2002: 203-205)

Model one: Marx. In a very simplistic explanation of Marx’s model productive labour was the basis of an expanding economy. Labour itself was a commodity, and a necessary part of the production of commodities. The key was to drive the cost of labour down in order to create surplus capital off of the selling of commodities. (Benjamin and LiPuma 2002: 203)

Model two:  Derivatives. And here things get murky for I am delving into the realms of the market. A place I have no authority on. Derivatives are defined as “financial instruments that derive their monetary value from other assets, such as stocks, bonds, commodities, or currencies.” (Benjamin and LiPuma 2002:204) What a derivative does is it gives individuals the opportunity to sell certain assets at a specified date. I shall use the example that Lee and LiPuma use: “One might purchase a call option for $500 to buy one hundred shares of IBM at some future date for $100 a share  - the strike price. If at that future date IBM shares were valued at $120, the buyer would realise a profit ..” (Benjamin and LiPuma 2002:204) The process is far more complicated than this, but as you can see it seems as if profit or capital is being made from nothing. An abstract instrument which “circulates in its own universe”. (Benjamin and LiPuma 2002:204)

So now we can see the shift, capital is no longer solely created by productive labour, as the capital that was initially made off of the old model is now circulating in the market which has its own means of capital expansion (although Marx did predict this shift). There is no longer a need for those with monies to invest in productive labour, and when they do it is invested in bigger developing economies. The exploitation of labour now seems to be the in which newbie entrepreneurs can use in order to gain access into the new model. 

Where does that leave the masses of the unemployed youth? In yet another mode of estrangement, for without money they cannot enter into the new model of money for mahala in the market. And those in the market seem to be living in a different universe with minimal plans for the upliftment of the impoverished. Perhaps the time is coming where these two worlds will have to sever ties in order for the former to survive on their own terms without the influence of a greed driven economy on their minds. It is already happening in some parts of the world – as some are calling it “The Fourth World War.” And perhaps this is where a new imagining of the future could occur, outside of the system in developing a sustainable area – in terms of shelter and food supply - outside of governmental rule. Is it a better option than waiting around for the government to do something, or for the world to change?

The second option would be to look at Brazil’s rapidly increasing economy in 2010 due to their focus on agriculture and resources - with a current growth rate of 8.4% in their agricultural sphere. (Fick 2012) Although The Economist doubted the likelihood of the continuation of this boom which has now slowed down because of Brazil’s tendencies to save too much, invest too little, and spend dubiously to keep growth up, as well as their need for more skilled labour. (The Economist 2010) There is still room for learning from this example in the case of South Africa and other African nations when it comes to looking at how to re-involve the youth within the working sphere.

References

·         Fick, Jeff. March 2012. 2nd Update: Brazils’s Weak Industry Slows Once Booming Economy. http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20120306-708430.html

·         Jones, Michelle. 2011. Half of SA’s Youth are Unemployed. http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/half-of-sa-s-youth-are-unemployed-1.1019783

·         Lee, Benjamin and Edward LiPuma. 2002. “Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity.” Public Culture 14(1):191-213

·         Quarterly Labour Force Survey, Quarter 4 2011, www.statssa.gov.za

·         The Economist. May 2010. Brazil’s Booming Economy: Flying Too High For Safety. http://www.economist.com/node/16167612

The Body of Christ in a Mass Merchandised Burger

While reading Jean Comaroff’s paper on the Politics of Convinction I couldn’t shake the ghost of a passage in Robert M Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance. The passage goes as follows:

“You go through a heavy industrial area of a large city and there it all is, the technology. In front of it are high barbed wire fences, locked gates, signs saying NO TRESPASSING, and beyond, through sooty air, you see ugly strange shapes of metal and brick whose purpose is unknown, and whose masters you will never see. What it’s for you do not know, and why it’s there, there is no one to tell, and so all you can feel is alienated, estranged, as though you didn’t belong there. Who owns and understands this doesn’t want you around. All this technology has made you a stranger in your own land.”(Pirsig; 1976:16)

It was this idea of alienation from something so present in one’s society that really struck me. We never really think about how the structure and means of production are alienating – unless you read a lot of Marx. And I came to focus on the fast food industry and in particular about fast food’s being served with messages of the Lord on its packaging. And the connection between the known and the alienating force of the fast food industry. Processed food that bears no resemblance to a home cooked meal, or even the thing  which it is supposed to represent. If you have ever watched the movie Clerks 2 and seen a processed egg, which comes in the shape of a large polony roll, you will know what I’m talking about. There is something unnatural about it, yet you still eat it, but hate the fact that you are eating it. You know you shouldn’t, but it is convenient. Right there all the time, 24 hours a day 7 days a week. And you hate it, in a sense it alienates you from yourself with your love hate relationship with it. And then it started coming in religious wrappers as Comoroff puts it “mass-merchandised hamburgers now come wrapped in biblical homilies.” (Comoroff 2009; 18)

 Two thoughts occurred at this point in the text for me, firstly Comoroff’s point that religion had started using the means of capitalism to spread its word. This was nothing new, driving past Rhema Church on a regular basis you cannot help but be overwhelmed by their massive sign board slamming some message of faith into your brain whether you want it or not. But perhaps the extent that it is happening in the states is on a far more worrying scale as to make it seem like a cultural phenomenon to be examined. The second idea was this: Do those slogans of faith on one’s burger wrappers dealienate one from their processed food by putting something familiar on the face of an alienating product? Instead of thinking about the grossness of what one is about to eat, all the factory farming, deforestation, and general making into machinery that those employed by fast food establishments have to suffer, do people instead get distracted and think rather about their love or hate of religion? Or perhaps if God loves these burgers I can love them too? Seeing as I have not encountered this phenomena in South Africa, yet, I could not say from personal experience. But it seems like a canny means of shaking off the preconceived negative connotations that are attached to fast foods - by replacing them with positive messages of faith.

I guess at the end of it you really have to ask yourself “What would Jesus eat?”

References

·         Comaroff, Jean. 2009. “The politics of Convivtion: Faith on the neoliberal Frontier.” Social Analysis 53(1):17-38

·         Pirsig, Robert. M. 1976. “Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance.” Corgi Books: London 

Unemployment and the World Class African City

Johannesburg, South Africa, 2012, a city striving to be world class. One, like many developing countries, that is constrained by neo-liberal policy and a structural adjustment programme. And within the city and country and continent we find some of the highest unemployment rates of the newly independent states after the so called breaking away from the colonies in the twentieth century. While it was first opined that it would be the east that would fall and Africa that would flourish economically – this has turned out to not be the case. And a growing discourse around estrangement begins to surround the ever present decline in employment opportunities. Which I shall discuss in terms of the Comoroff’s picture of this estrangement being more related to a generational divide as opposed to class or race. But, before one can even begin to start looking at estrangement within these societies now suffering from the growing gap between the employed and the not so lucky – two questions must be asked. Firstly – what is this concept of a “World Class African City”? And secondly, if the underlying law of capitalist society is that the rate of profit is inversely related to labour costs, why is no body exploiting our desperate masses? A grim thought indeed, but this is the position we find ourselves in, with a very wealthy elite and a huge gap to the impoverished. Where is the money going?

To answer the first question I would like to go back to the beginnings of the African Nationalist Movements. Where did they evolve from? And the answer to this is that during colonialism there was a demand for local intermediaries – teachers, court interpreters, medical orderlies and agricultural extension workers – these intermediaries bridged the communication gap between the colonised and the coloniser, and became a small movement of Westernised black elite. While the movement paraded themselves as a liberation front the truth of the matter was they too wanted to enjoy the spoils of colonialism. A system which was not designed to develop the productive capacities of the colonies, but rather to extract the countries raw materials and ship them back to the mother land for processing and manufacturing.  So at the turn, when Africa became independent what replaced the colonial elite was now the new black elite.  And the exploitation of the black masses continued. (Mbeki 2009:6-7) This to me is the underlying premise of our World Class African City. One that is merely an extension of colonial rule. An exploitation vehicle.

The second question I do not have in my capacity to answer, yet, although I have an inkling it has something to do with the relationship between the private sector and the politics that rule it. But the picture I have so far painted is that of the emergence of a new elite, one that is still bound in some way to colonial ideals. And it is in this that we find the roots of the problems that have shaped mass unemployment in our country. If the World Class African City is the ideal towards which South Africa is striving, then there is no hope for the poor, for a world class city is a capitalist city, one where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And it is out of this that the so called estrangement has emerged. But is it really anything new?

The Comoroff’s boldly state that estrangement is no longer mainly a problem of class, but of generation. (Comoroff 1999:284) Of shifting culture in a dynamic world. Perhaps in part they are right. When one looks at the rise of occult economies – the uneasiness of the youth and their need to blame the older generation for the rise in unemployment rates, for the lack of change in the post-apartheid system. And in turn finding new magic to do so, burn the witch – sell the body parts. (Comorof 1999:279-303) When cultural norms are flipped in Madagascar and it is women that emerge as the new provider, and the trade of sex becomes less of a taboo and more of a way of life. (Cole, Jennifer 2004:573-588) Where the youth in Senegal, although highly educated cannot find work, and kill time by perfecting the art of tea making. This now symbolises as a lack of productive activity - as opposed to a traditional art of the former generation. (Ralph 2008:1-29)

But to state that the problem of estrangement is that of a generational gap and put class on the back burner cannot be right in its entirety. Yes it is a new discourse, or perhaps an old one with new stories, for hasn’t it always been the way that the younger generation shall rebel against the old?  And while there may be shifting ideologies between the youth and their predecessors, are they all still not involved in the class struggling together? A struggle which still has its roots, and its present, in a colonial mind frame.

To speak of shifting identities with in a new context, is to bring an old topic back into the forefront. All we are asking is of the identity of the unemployed today. How are people evolving to fit into society today, and is that not the perpetual question of the new school anthropology? What is happening to people today in relation to the past? Because it seems that all our studies from the colonial era to now have been the study of people in a world changing due to western ideals being integrated into a global conscious. The identity of the unemployed hasn’t changed since the reclaiming of the commons in the 1600’s, they are still the peasants, and the elites are still the elite.   

References

·         Comoroff, Jean and John. 1999. “Occult Economies and The Violence of Abstraction: notes from the South African Postcolony.” American Ethnologist 26(2):279-303.

·         Cole, Jennifer. 2004. “Fresh Contact in Tamative, Madagascar: Sex, Money, and Intergenerational Transformation.” American Ethnologist 31(4):578-88.

·         Mbeki, Moeletsi. 2009. “Architects of Poverty.” Picoador Africa, Johannesburg.

·         Ralph, Micheal. 2008. “Killing Time.” Social Text 26(4):1-29