<div>In response to Adam's post on the labor theory of value -- I'm almost willing to be convinced by this, but in the interest of keeping the discussion going, I'll forward a few observations in defense of the labor theory of value and a couple of challenges to Adam's claims. </div>
<div>First, it is worth noting that the labor theory of value and the valorization of labor via its commodification are analytically distinct. That is to say, it is one thing to claim that value is a function of labor (that, for example, air is free because it doesn't require labor to create it -- at least not yet) and another to describe a particular set of social relations that allow for the capture of this value (i.e., the commodification of labor made possible by the privatization of productive resources). </div>
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<div>It is the failure to make this distinction that leads to the claim that "labor only creates value in so far as it is commodified, that is in so far as it is scarce. But if labor and life coincide, then labor is per definition no longer scarce and the process of commodification no longer operates." While it may be true that if labor is not scarce it cannot be commodified, it is demonstrably not the case that labor which is not commodified does not generate value. If this were the case, slavery and feudalism would not have produced value (one might argue that, in some systems of slavery, laborers were commmodified -- but that is not the same thing as commodifying labor). In other words we know that there have been economic systems with markets and prices in which labor is not sold as a commodity. In these systems surplus is also extracted, though by other means than the commodification of labor (but not without the human labor required to create value). In other words it is important to distinguish between the claims that labor is the source of value and that wage labor is the source of surplus value. </div>
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<div>The reason that labor cannot be priced at zero within capitalist relations is a function of scarcity, but not quite in the way Adam describes it. In sheer numeric terms the goal of capital is decidedly not to make labor a scarce resource in any particular labor market -- as Marx notes, the goal is the creation of a reserve pool of unemployed or underemployed to reduce the bargaining power of labor. But if there is a surplus of labor -- as there is in many capitalist economies, why doesn't this drive the cost of labor down to zero? Because the price of labor is a function of the socially determined cost of its replacement. This is the level at which scarcity operates. Were scarcity to truly disappear (if food, shelter, and other elements of the socially determined replacement cost of labor were to have no cost because they were available in the way air is to us -- that is, they required no labor), the price of labor could, theoretically, go to zero (as would the incentive to sell one's labor power). In such a scenario, by assumption, prices would also go to zero, and the mechanism for capturing surplus value would disappear. Nothing from nothing leaves nothing (Preston, 1975). The result would be not an overabundance of labor, but its disappearance, at least from an economic perspective (presumably activity would continue in such a scenario, but it would not generate economic value). Perhaps this is what Adam means by the disappearance of scarcity and the consequent end of the labor theory of value.</div>
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<div>Regardless, this is decidedly not the situation in the examples of the online economy adduced by Adam. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, the ability of users to engage in activities that generate value for companies like Google and Facebook (which recently turned a profit for the first time) is reliant upon existing regimes of wage labor. We have not (yet?) reached the point, in the miraculous online economy, that we can all feed ourselves (and manufacture the physical infrastructure for our communication networks, etc.) by browsing, networking, and posting. The so-called online economy piggybacks on the offline one -- it is not (yet?), I'd argue, a conceptually independent system (let alone a post-capitalist one). </div>
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<div>One takeaway point from these observations is that the fact that productive activity (the creation of commodities that can be sold in the marketplace) is unwaged and uncoerced (if, indeed, this is the case) does not mean that it cannot generate value (so long as scarcity has not yet disappeared in the sense described above). The unwaged character of the activity does raise the question regarding how and whether one might want to conceive of this activity as subject to the critique of the exploitation of labor. One thing that is becoming increasingly clear in a range of professions is that activity once assumed to be distinct from the waged sphere of working life (and thus not subject to the same power imbalances that structure the "freely" agreed upon terms of wage labor) is being folded into it. Blogging as a means of promoting one's work, managing consumer concerns or spinning product lines, social networking as a means of building client lists, recruiting new employees, finding customers, and so on. More on this at the conference...</div>
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