Mis-Measure for Mis-Measure

If measure allows labour to be converted into value, it is also wielded against the chronic devalorisation that thwarts processes of capital accumulation. Here, S. Artesian sizes up measure as a means to deflect crisis, and finds it wanting

1. We're a calculating, counting species, always situating ourselves in time and space through the use of numbers: 'How far is it to the restaurant?' 'How long until dinner?' 'How many cheeseburgers can I, should I, will I buy?' Food is one way we measure time and distance. Food makes us count, as it makes us do most other things.

Image: Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, 1936

Everything we can, we objectify. Everything we can objectify, we can, we shall, we must express as numbers. That's our way of accessing the world, of making it intelligible to ourselves and others. We give everything a distance, a space, a duration, so we can figure what it takes to get there. Then we can tell others. Numbers are our equivalent of the bee's waggle dance. Shoe size, age, height, velocity, cost... We measure the world and kit it out in a wardrobe of numbers. Sooner or later everything we know can be expressed on a flat screen as numbers, and all those numbers can be expressed as an arrangement of just two numbers, 1 and 0. Zero, the measure of nothing, the placeholder. One, the measure of anything not nothing. Our universe is complete. One and zero, anything and nothing, on and off, if and then. And there it is, from counting we get ... logic. We create our logic not out of the stuff of our mind, but out of our engagement with the physical world, out of our own materiality. Out of our stomachs.

2. In his critique of Hegel's dialectic, Marx determines that the appropriation of nature constitutes the real movement of human beings through history. The movement is the realisation of human beings as self.

Moving way, way beyond Feuerbach in the critique of Hegel, Marx also determines that the appropriation of nature doesn't occur in isolation, in a 'state of nature', but rather appropriation occurs as a social process, in a social relation. As a social process, labour can project, anticipate, and satisfy needs through time.

In the social appropriation of nature, human beings create the conditions of their own existence through their reproduction of themselves as social beings. The real movement of human beings through history is the social reproduction of their labour. The realisation of human beings as self means nothing other than the emancipation of that social labour.

So how far is it to that condition of self, to that emancipation of labour? And how long until we get there? We want the numbers, don't we? We always want the numbers.

The process of appropriation has its own logic, however. Appropriation is the appropriation of nature by labour and appropriation of the product of that labour. Appropriation of nature is subsumed in and by the conditions of social labour, the mediation of that social labour. That condition of labour is the property form of the society. Labour appropriates nature, property aggrandises labour. That ability of social labour to project, anticipate and satisfy needs through time is lost through its conversion into private property. Quality is inverted into quantities, into commodities. Labour's loss becomes the measure of wealth.

Now when we measure, we're measuring the efficiency of the conversion of that human quality into the currency of property.

We are no longer just counting, calculating creatures. We are counting, calculating creatures living in a society where counting and calculating are tools of a counting, calculating, accumulating and scheming class. Measure serves accumulation.

3. When labour is measured in its mediation in this system of loss, the peculiarities of the subject, the labourer and the object, the product of labour, are more or less annihilated in their very presentation. The topography of the particular is obliterated. What remains is quantity, but a quantity that exists in, and only in, its relation to all other quantities. We establish rates, ratios, frequencies. We get the measure of/for measure.

The bourgeoisie count their wealth in things. Accumulation appears as a mass and is expressed as quantities. However, with rate and ratio, with measure of/for measure, the bourgeoisie are assessing performance. Accumulation cannot simply exist as things, and in quantities. It must be accomplished relative to a level of effort; relative to the effort of others.

In the measure of measure, value appears to shed its historical origins in the specific mediation of labour. Value assumes an identity outside of history, presenting itself as a purely mathematical expression, albeit one you can put in your wallet. Since we know numbers are eternal, value masquerades as an eternal condition, a natural expression, a universe unto itself. The universe is infinite even as it is measured. Value is universal.

The bourgeoisie have their all-in-one tool with rate. Disproportion can be expressed as proportions. Inequalities can be made equivalent. Irrationality can be expressed rationally as ratio and rate. What supply and demand are to the 'free markets', what 'free markets' are to capital, rate and ratio are to value, that is to say nothing and everything.

4. Labour's ability to project, anticipate, and satisfy needs through time is the ability to produce surplus. It is the capacity to provide more quantities and means for subsistence and production than are required for subsistence and production. Society organises around necessary production and in so doing generates surplus product.

Capitalism isn't just any society fashioned around surplus product. Capital is organised around the transformation of surplus product into value; into objects of exchange for the accumulation of capital itself; into the re-production of expanded, greater, surplus value. Value, like measure, in fact as measure, is a solvent, dissolving all the peculiarities and particularities of the subject, of labour, by extinguishing all those specific qualities of labour. What remains is the quantity common to all labour, which is the time expended production. Time is the melting down, the clarification, the rendering of social labour. Value is the rendering, the dismemberment of social time. Value is the reconstitution of time as a condition extracted from but opposed to the power of social labour.

Marx puts it this way in The Poverty of Philosophy: 'Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at most time's carcass.' And he puts it this way in the Grundrisse: 'Economy of time - to this all economy ultimately reduces itself.' He wasn't kidding.

For capitalism, its economy of time is in the ratio of necessary labour time to the total working time. Its economy is the reduction of the time necessary for wage-labour to work up values equal to its own needs. Its accumulation is the expansion of that portion of the working day beyond that reproduction of wages. Its economics ultimately reduces itself to measuring the increase in that ratio of surplus working time to necessary working time. Time isn't money (ask anyone forced to work overtime), but value certainly is the loss of time; accumulation is certainly the amplification of the rate of loss.

Human labour is time's carcass? Only because time itself has been pithed, severed from its existence as the medium for the social development of all, only because time has become value's carcass.

5. Management specialists have their mantra, sometimes shouted, sometimes whispered, and often mumbled. It is, after all, a mantra, a meaningless phrase that, when repeated over and over, is supposed to produce a calming effect on its mutterers. 'You can't manage what you can't measure' is the motto inscribed atop the application for admission to the Harvard MBA programme. When times are tough, which is most of the time, the meaning of the meaningless phrase is, of course: 'you're going to need to cut more things than a trimmer on the Hormel pig nasty bits trimming line. You need to reduce labour and/or the portion of the working time equivalent to wages. You can increase the surplus labour time, relatively. You can extend working time, absolutely. You can lower wages. You can do all three.' Sooner or later, measuring value means measuring the devaluation of labour, the devaluation of its time of reproduction.

The corollary to our management mantra is the well-travelled 'cost-benefit' analysis. Here our blissed-out, chanting management team measures the anticipated expanded value against the anticipated expended value. Everything costs the bourgeoisie, except, of course, surplus labour time. Benefit is derived solely from the reduction in the overall time necessary for recouping the value embodied in the various components of production, human and mechanical. At the same time that capital demands the amplification of surplus labour time through the expulsion of labour from the production process, the mechanisms for accomplishing that expulsion become more 'robust', more efficient, capable of sustaining longer, faster production runs. In short, these mechanisms transfer less of their own value to the final products. The overall time for recapturing the total value embedded in the materials of production lengthens. The period for the return on this investment expands. The rate, the measure of the measure falls. The benefit declines as the result of its amplification.

Capital has taken its own measure and it doesn't measure up. It's always a day late and a dollar or a million short. The bourgeoisie have nowhere to go and nothing to do but return to that source one more time and press harder for the devaluation of labour. Anything and everything that enhances the reproduction of labour, and the labourers, as social beings is the target.

Education? What's the cost? Immediate. Actual. What's the benefit? Deferred. Potential. So cut education.

Public health and public healthcare? What's the cost? I mmediate. What's the benefit? Healthy poor people? Who wants that?

Job training? What's the cost? Immediate. What's the benefit? None, since the jobs themselves are not being created and will not be created. Negative, since the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries can import their workers trained by and at the expense of the less-developed countries.

Prisons? What's the cost? Hmm ... well, there is a cost, but the benefits? Immense! The poor, the unemployed can be isolated from their class. They can be forced to exist, suspended in dead time.

This is the accounting of capitalism when attempting to offset the decline in its rate of return. It is the accumulation of devaluation, accumulation through devaluation.

S. Artesian <sartesian AT earthlink.net> is a retired railroad officer, living in New York City, where he has become, to his own chagrin, a pillar of the community