Ep. 360: Karl Marx on Economic Value (Part One)

The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

Mark Linsenmayer

Casey, Paskin, Philosophy, Linsenmayer, Society & Culture, Alwan

4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 February 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On Capital (1867), Ch. 1, "The Commodity."

What makes something we buy or sell valuable? Marx says it's ultimately the labor that goes into it, though there are some wrinkles in formulating this accurately, and the commodities and surrounding marketplace activity blind us to labor's role and its ethical import.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the partially examined life, a podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it.
0:14.0	Our question for episode 360 is something like, what's the connection between economic value, labor, and machines?
0:22.9	And we're continuing our discussion of Karl Marx, looking at the first chapter, primarily of
0:28.3	his book, Das Capital, first published in 1867. We read some other bits of it, and we added
0:34.2	his fragment on machines from 1858 for this week. More information about
0:39.3	the texts and the podcast, please see partially examined life.com. This is Mark Lintonmeier
0:44.1	commoditized yet not commodified in Madison, Wisconsin. This is Seth Paskin, obsessing over my
0:52.2	use value in Austin, Texas.
0:55.0	This is Wes Owen, welcoming you to the machine in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
1:00.1	This is Dylan Casey calling out the blue light special in aisle 6,
1:03.2	where our tires now cost only six coats in Madison, Wisconsin.
1:08.1	I expected most people to go with a fragment on the machine on machine's reference because it's
1:13.4	more potent and it's more, you know, but I'm the only one who did then.
1:17.3	Well, I almost preempted you because I had until this morning down and as my mama always told
1:22.6	me, welcome my son, welcome to the machine.
1:26.0	Yeah, I was worried about that, but I go third, so I knew I wouldn't be stepping on anyone's foot.
1:31.7	So last time, we were mostly talking about his methodology, and there's much more to say about his methodology, but we're not going to say it so much as try to really get into how he does it. Right. Of course,
1:45.2	with Feuerbach and Hegel were this obsession of how abstract are we going to be. And, you know,
1:50.8	when you're doing modeling, a model is abstract. And it's a really complicated model. We talked about
1:56.1	last time how he thought that British social economists, political economists, were focusing on the wrong things.
2:04.4	They were pulling things out of this complex system of production, consumption, distribution, exchange.
2:10.4	They were focusing, for instance, just on exchange.
	...

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