Not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values;
in this it is the direct opposite to the costly sensuous objectivity of commodities
as physical objects. 
                                        –Marx, Capital I

David Harvey doesn’t like Wittgenstein, but Harvey could be paraphrasing Wittgenstein when Harvey interprets Marx as saying “value is immaterial but objective.“ That is, Wittgenstein would argue that, say, a painting’s value isn’t in the painting itself, but rather in the response to the painting, in the language game(s) that determines a painting’s aesthetic qualities and other merits. The relation is immaterial in that one cannot say exactly what it is (per Marx materially, atomically; per early Wittgenstein the nature of the form itself–the nature of, say, a painting’s likeness to what it represents). Money gives this immaterial relation, like any commodity, its objective nature.

If there is a difference between the two, it must be that Wittgenstein is concerned with the commodity’s effect (i.e., pragmatic response or “nonsense” that can only be shown), while Marx is interested in the social process bearing the commodity and the exchange process when “abstract and concrete labor come together.” Yet these processes make value immaterial but objective.

It is interesting to note that some orthodox Marxists believe Harvey here to be suggesting that value isn’t sourced in labor (LTV), which is material. Harvey, however, knows that Marx
does not mean to say that immaterial social relations don’t contain very real, material
bodies. For Marx clearly states, “Now we know the substance of value. It is labour.
We know the measure of its magnitude.
It is labour-time” (Capital I). Value
as a social relation contains both fixed
capital that includes machines and factories and the variable capital of human workers, and these are material in nature. But for Marx value is historical and contextual, too,
a social relation that one cannot get
to or contain in any absolute sense. It is in fact money that gives this immaterial social relation its objective form. Money is the objective representation of value, and value, again, an
immaterial but objective social relation. Money not only measures what is
otherwise unmeasurable and hence gives value its objectivity, but money appropriates
social wealth as individual property (Harvey).

Money “congeals”–conceals–the immaterial social relation, that is, when “exchange processes produce a representation of value in the money commodity, the money form, the universal equivalent” (Harvey). 

There is, however, a difference between material wealth and value:

“And the first thing [Marx] notices [ … ] is that ‘an increase in the amount of material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous fall in the magnitude of its value.’ Value is dependent upon human productivity. Highly productive people can produce a large amount of material wealth
very quickly. And they can work less hours, so actually the amount of value that they make can be very low but the amount of material wealth they generate can be enormous. So again, he’s going to emphasize that distinction between material wealth and value. And he goes on to point out that while changes in productivity affect material wealth, they don’t necessarily have any effect at all on value creation. We will see instances where this is the case, but,
nevertheless, the change in productivity
is itself not directly connected to transformations in value” (Harvey).

Book 1, Ch. 8: Of the Wages of Labour

“[13] We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people.”

“[15] A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation. Mr. Cantillon seems, upon this account, to suppose that the lowest species of common labourers must everywhere earn at least double their own maintenance, in order that one with another they may be enabled to bring up two children; the labour of the wife, on account of her necessary attendance on the children, being supposed no more than sufficient to provide for herself. But one half the children born, it is computed, die before the age of manhood. The poorest labourers, therefore, according to this account, must, one with another, attempt to rear at least four children, in order that two may have an equal chance of living to that age. But the necessary maintenance of four children, it is supposed, may be nearly equal to that of one man. The labour of an able-bodied slave, the same author adds, is computed to be worth double his maintenance; and that of the meanest labourer, he thinks, cannot be worth less than that of an ablebodied slave. Thus far at least seems certain, that, in order to bring up a family, the labour of the husband and wife together must, even in the lowest species of common labour, be able to earn something more than what is precisely necessary for their own maintenance; but in what proportion, whether in that above mentioned, or in any other, I shall not take upon me to determine.”

“[22] It is not the actual greatness of national wealth, but its continual increase, which occasions a rise in the wages of labour. It is not, accordingly, in the richest countries, but in the most thriving, or in those which are growing rich the fastest, that the wages of labour are highest. England is certainly, in the present times, a much richer country than any part of North America. The wages of labour, however, are much higher in North America than in any part of England. In the province of New York, common labourers earn three shillings and sixpence currency, equal to two shillings sterling, a day; ship carpenters, ten shillings and sixpence currency, with a pint of rum worth sixpence sterling, equal in all to six shillings and sixpence sterling; house carpenters and bricklayers, eight shillings currency, equal to four shillings and sixpence sterling; journeymen tailors, five shillings currency, equal to about two shillings and tenpence sterling. These prices are all above the London price; and wages are said to be as high in the other colonies as in New York. The price of provisions is everywhere in North America much lower than in England. A dearth has never been known there. In the worst seasons they have always had a sufficiency for themselves, though less for exportation. If the money price of labour, therefore, be higher than it is anywhere in the mother country, its real price, the real command of the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it conveys to the labourer must be higher in a still greater proportion.”

TALKING LIONS TALKING LION: RHETORIC, RIGHTS, AND THE TYRANNY OF TAXONOMY

Rhys
Southan’s provocative editorial on non-human animal rights (“The Enigma of
Animal Suffering” NYTimes) demands rhetorical understanding. Southan suggests, “For
human analogies to animal farming to have force, the experience of being a
farmed animal should be equivalent to the human experience in superficially
similar circumstances.” Southan’s logic is deeply rooted in well-worn classificatory
schemes. When, for example, Wittgenstein declares that “If a lion could talk,
we could not understand him,” his reasoning is itself an Aristotelian language-game
that makes interspecies experience unbridgeable, a tyranny of taxonomy.
Wittgenstein goes into the problem already biased by biological-behaviorist
definitional categories: a speaking lion’s speech acts are intricately woven
into—as—a lion’s experience (what it is to be a lion) to which
humans have no access, i.e., no access to the form of life that is the speaking
lion’s speech acts, to the shared behavior that would constitute “the system of
reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language” (P.I.), whether
or not a Cartesian lion sufficient for “BAT-itude” and so on (Hofstadter et
al.). Yet experientialist demarcation rooted in preconceived taxonomic notions of
human and lion collapses if on some level or to some degree (physically,
experientially) a human’s scream and a lion’s roar share some pragmatic function or family
resemblance. Otherwise it would seem that Wittgenstein contradicts himself,
especially given his Beetle in a Box thought experiment that rejects private
language and makes inner workings irrelevant. Furthermore, the old taxonomy doesn’t
differentiate between information, meaning, and understanding, a difference that would suggest that the
all-or-nothing “only humans have language” falls short as an experientialist
category or hard descriptor. If information is passed from lion to
human then a human can have understanding without meaning made between
them, i.e., without normativity. Per Robert Brandom’s reading of Hegelian normativity, reciprocal recognition and inference are not necessary for unidirectional
interspecies understanding. Likewise one ostensibly
understands a computer’s message without knowing what it’s like to be a computer, whether or not a
computer is conscious or has BATitude (Dennett et al.). The commonalities and the
message are only clearer if the lion speaks.  

The new memes reminding us that the police serve to protect people and that Obama should be more outspoken about the recent shootings of police officers are no doubt in response to the strong resentment and growing hostility aimed at police. But this latter resentment is not really about any one police action, e.g., an instance of police brutality, whether racially motivated or not. The resentment is due to the fact that the police, a repressive state apparatus, protect the socioeconomic system categorically. It makes no difference if the system and its laws are hurtful, unfair, and so on, including the ostensible means to bring about positive social change that are already built into the system, e.g., voting. The police are “just doing their job.” And they are.

One here should recall the genius in Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes and the way the text defamiliarizes the relation between subject and state apparatus, citizen and police. Boulle’s gorillas (military-police) help reproduce the orangutan-chimp State (economics, science, and ethos) without ever a moment of reflection or doubt. The gorillas have their guns and horses, and they enforce the law. That’s it.

Now none of this is to suggest that a police officer is a gorilla, or that there is no such thing as a kind cop. Rather, as an institutional, material body, the police are a force that prevents social change unconditionally by protecting and reproducing class relations spontaneously. Like Boulle’s gorillas, the police act on behalf of the State (which, by the way, has itself been defamiliarized as a functionary for the capitalist class, i.e., to legislate on behalf of monopoly and our robber barons as Marx suggested so long ago).

This state apparatus–the police–is indeed a powerful one and certainly in some instances violent and racist. Yet the recent deaths and brutalities (Eric Garner, Sarah Bland, Michael Brown and the events of Ferguson, MO) merely lay bare the larger relation between subject, apparatus, and State. Police racism is absolutely inexcusable and intolerable, but it’s also beside the point. Until one recognizes that larger structural reality, the change one really wants won’t come.