A summary of Marx’s theory of value presented in Part 1 of Capital, with special attention to (i) his use of Aristotelian concepts of power, substance and form, (ii) how our social practices assign new roles and properties to the people and objects recruited to fulfill them, (iii) why abstract labor is not labor abstracted, but the exercise of abstract power, (iv) how the total labor-power of society is continually allocated to perform concrete tasks that satisfy effective demand (the law of value) via unequal exchange of quanta of abstract labor (commodities) for symbolic representations of quanta of abstract labor (money); in other words, how our collective spending determines the spending of our collective time.
30 mins talk, 1 hour audience discussion, 15 mins closing remarks.
Presented to the Oxford CCS on May 30th 2024.
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