the minnesota review
Special Forum:
“After
the Law of Value Is 'Blown Apart': Labor as Value in the Contemporary”
Edited By Rob Wilkie
This
forum of the minnesota review is situated in the contemporary
dogma that “the future,” as Yann Moulier Boutang writes, “is already
here for those who know how to read it” (2011). This is the future in
which “the so-called ‘law of value’ (according to which the value of a
product is determined by the amount of labor time that went into it),
which Marx considers the keystone of modern social relations, is,
however, shattered and refuted by capitalist development itself” (Virno
2004). To argue, then, for the centrality of the law of value in
contemporary capitalism (or sometimes even to bring up the issue) has
become a mark of an unacceptable orthodoxy within Left circles in the
global North that have embraced the orthodoxies of the “communism of
capital” (Beverungen, Murtola, and Schwartz 2013)—from its “common” to
its “commonsense”—which declares, “There is no conflict here between
reform and revolution” (Hardt and Negri 2004). Returning to the theory
of the law of value from diverse perspectives, however, the writers
included in this forum propose that contrary to the declaration that the
law of value “is completely bankrupt” (Hardt and Negri 1994), the
central issue for cultural theory today is that labor (not just work)
needs to be understood as the structure of contemporary culture.
Introduction: After the Law of Value Is “Blown
Apart”: Labor as Value in the Contemporary
Rob Wilkie
Gaming Labor: Class, Video Games, and the
“General Intellect”
Rob Wilkie
Bound to Labor: Life and Labor in (Early) Marx
and (Early) Derrida
Benjamin Noys
Jameson's Spiritual Reawakening: Labor Theory in
the Time of Wal-Mart
Robert Faivre
The Oil Paradox and the Labor Theory of Value
George Caffentzis
New Materialism and the Labor Theory of Value
Jennifer Cotter