Introduction

     In my recent aggregates-grounded Synopsis of Marx’s ‘project’ in Capital (see previous post), I capitalized (pun foreseen, not intended) certain terms of art, promising a Glossary as sequel. This is that Glossary. Some of the terms are my own, most are Marx’s as glosssd by myself in specific connection with my Synopsis.

     One needn’t grasp all of these terms, I don’t think, to understand the Synopsis – that is the point of the Synopsis. But explicating the terms in the light of the Synopsis might nonetheless aid the reader in deepening her understanding of Marx’s aims, as well as of much jargon that now fills the secondary and tertiary literatures that are or purport to be about Marx. 

     (Wittgenstein once lamented that ‘the only seed I am likely to sow is a certain jargon.’ Such has certainly been Marx’s lamentable fate.)

     The terms are elaborated not in alphabetical order, but in a cumulative order pursuant to which later-defined terms can be readily understood by reference to earlier-defined terms. The order as a whole, in turn, is for its part intended to track the order of exposition imminent in the Synopsis. 

     (Capitalization of one term within the explication of another term signals that this term, too, is briefly explicated in the Glossary.)

The Terms of Art

Value: To the individual person, the importance or significance, understood in terms of the willing sacrifice of effort or Labor Time, that objects or actions (in Exchange, ‘Goods’ or ‘Services’) have for a person or persons. (The contemporary orthodox notion of ‘opportunity-cost’ is  closely akin to Value thus understood.) To the community, the amount of ‘socially necessary‘ Labor Time, at a particular level of technical development and hence productivity, that must be expended on average to make the relevant object or action available – that is, to Produce it. (This is all that is meant by ‘the Labor Theory of Value’ often attributed to Marx, which is not to be confused with a theory of Price or of Price-formation but rather, again, is more closely akin to the contemporary concept of opportunity-cost.) Value thus generically understood can be further differentiated into more specific ‘Use’ and ‘Exchange’ Values according as that which is valued is valued, in a particular context, for purposes of either direct consumption or, instead, trade.

Use Value: The (qualitative) ‘Consumption’ significance (including Consumption for Production) that objects or actions might have for a person or persons. Alternatively put, the reasons a person or persons might have for seeking or wanting things that they don’t intend simply to trade or to ‘sell’ – i.e., ‘Exchange.’ Use Value thus defined overlaps with most understandings of the contemporary orthodox notion of ‘utility,’ though no Benthamite or ‘hedonic’ implications are assumed. 

Exchange Value (not Price): The (quantitative) ‘trading’ significance, relative to other objects or actions, that particular Use-Valued objects or actions (now ‘Goods’ or ‘Services’) might possess in a field of Exchange, i.e., of trade or purchase on a ‘market.’ For example, where Exchange occurs through barter, three apples’ trading for six oranges translates to one apple’s bearing an Exchange Value (or ‘orange-price’) of two oranges, or equivalently one orange’s having an Exchange Value (or ‘apple-price’) of half an apple. Where Exchange occurs through monetary purchase rather than barter, it is common to refer to the Exchange Value of a Good or Service as its ‘money-price’ or, more commonly now, simply as its Price.

Exchange:  The ‘trading,’ ‘bartering,’ or ‘purchasing’ process through which useful objects and actions (again, in Exchange, ‘Goods’ and ‘Services,’ which might become ‘Commodities’) are indirectly allocated or distributed in a community where allocation and distribution are not effected through exercises of collective agency or ‘central planning.’ In mixed cases, a society relies upon both indirect Exchange and Direct Distribution to allocate. 

Direct Distribution: The provision of useful objects or actions by some central clearing house acting on behalf of recipients rather than itself or some party or parties other than the recipients.  

Distribution: Generically speaking, the process by which the proceeds of Production flow to and reach the community’s members. Rough synonyms that I use include ‘Dissemination’ and, more canonically Marxianly, ‘Circulation.’

Commodity: A Good or Service that is not merely acquired in Exchange, but is Produced or Provided for (purposes of) Exchange, typically in order to Profit. 

Social Surplus: That which a community Produces in excess of what is necessary for the Subsistence of its members. (So far as I can tell, this is all that Bataille meant by what he called ‘the Accursed Share.’ For Marx, it is the what I’ll call the blessed share – the material substrate of all human progress and self-enlargement, all species-growth in potential and realization.)

Subsistence: That which must be Produced for an individual or group of individuals to live over a biologically normal lifespan and reproduce as a species. 

Productive Capacity: The community’s capacity to generate Subsistence and Surplus.

Absorptive Capacity: The community’s capacity, via its Modes of Distribution (a.k.a. ‘Dissemination’) and Circulation, to direct the proceeds of its Production to useful deployments. In other words, to endure that the Use Values that it Produces flow to their actual uses.

Surplus Value: In aggregate, the Social  Surplus as it appears in Exchange. Hence, the quantum of Value generated in Production beyond what’s required for mere Subsistence. In the case of the individual laborer, the Value she produces in excess of the Value of her own Labor Time – i.e., in excess of the Labor Time necessary to produce her own Subsistence.

Surplus Labor: In aggregate, the portion of aggregate social laboring that generates the Social Surplus. In an Exchange economy, it is thus also the portion of aggregate social laboring that generates aggregate Surplus Value. In the case of the individual laborer, the Labor she expends in excess of what is necessary for her own Subsistence. 

Aggregate Profit: The form in which aggregate Surplus Value appears community-wide when legally appropriated by the owners of Means of Production who rent Labor (i.e., purchase Labor Time) in the production or provision of Commodities – i.e., Goods or Services for Exchange. 

Individual Profit: The revenue gleaned by a seller in excess of the seller’s costs of Production or provision.

Price: In a non-barter, monetary Exchange economy, the Exchange Value of an object or action (again, a ‘Good’ or ‘Service’) as expressed in what ever medium of exchange (‘money’) is employed in trade. (Note that idiots who, following Bortkiewicz and Sweezy, purport to find a ‘transformation problem’ and hence ‘inconsistency’ in Capital‘s Volume III between the Values and Prices of Commodities simply commit the category-erroneous atomist blunder described at the beginning of the Synopsis to which this Glossary is appurtenant. Capital is not a work of ‘microeconomics’ or ‘price theory,’ and the Prices of individual Commodities would never, in Capital, be taken as functions of the Labor they ’embody’ alone – or even as particularly interesting – in an account of a systemconstituted by Production, Exchange, and Competition as treated in Capital.)

Production: The process through which Subsistence, then Surplus, is generated.

Means of Production (not Capital; closer to orthodoxy’s ‘capital assets’): The technical, non-human ‘natural’ resource, and other non-Labor ‘inputs’ to the process of Production. Not to be confused with ‘Capital,’ as one finds in orthodox ‘economics.’ 

Productive Assets: A term I sometimes use as rough synonym for ‘Means of Production.’

Labor: The deployment and use, by human beings, of Means of Production in processes of Production.

Labor Power: The capacity to Labor.

Labor Time: Any temporal interval over which Laboring occurs, hence over which Labor Power is expended. A purchaser of such Time or renter of such Power under Capitalism acquires the right to direct Labor’s efforts, hence use Labor Power over the duration of the purchased interval. In this sense, the purchaser of Labor Time or renter of Labor Power can be loosely said to rent the Laborer, by analogy to the way in which a slaver under an earlier mode of social Production would have purchased the Laborer.

Capital (not Means of Production or orthodoxy’s ‘capital assets‘): Money used to purchase Labor Time and Means of Production with a view to Profiting under Capitalist Relations of Production. Symbolically, the M in Marx’s central M-C-M’ Production sequence under Capitalism. Not to be confused with orthodox economists’ ‘capital,’ understood as heterogeneous ‘capital assets,’ with its attendant ‘capital controversies’ between this and that ‘Cambridge.’ Note that in various uses for particular purposes, Capital can appear as Fixed or Circulating, and as Constant or Variable, but these distinctions need not detain those pursuing a merely synoptic, or ‘big picture’ understanding of Marx’s Capital. Those who ultimately determine to go deeper will of course reckon with these modalities later.

Relations of Production: The roles, and relations between roles, played by human beings as individuals and as members of Classes of individuals in the process of aggregate social Production. These include crucial juridical relations that find expression in role-defining, hence action-constraining, caste systems, guild systems, ‘property’ rights systems, and ‘promissory’ or ‘contract’ rights systems.

Class: In connection with Relations of Production, groups of individuals whose roles in Production are saliently determined by what they own or don’t own. Under Capitalism, for example, ‘workers’ or ‘proletarians’ – Laborers – own no input to Production but Labor Power. Capitalists by contrast own non-Labor inputs to, or Means of, Production. 

Capitalism: The system of Social Surplus -generation constituted by Relations of Production pursuant to which a relative and ever-shrinking few persons (a) purchase the Means of Production and rent the Labor and, at more advanced stages at greater scale, Money of others to Produce with those Means; and (b) do this Producing in pursuit of continually recycled or Reinvested, hence self-augmenting, Profit. 

Capitalist Mode of Production: Production as conducted under Capitalism, i.e., pursuant to Capitalist Relations of Production. 

Reinvestment: The recycling of Capitalist Profit (in the contemporary idiom, ‘returns on investment’ or ROI) into further Capitalist Production with a view to generating yet more Profit.

Social Reproduction: The community’s generation of sufficient Value to continue over time at a specific level of material Consumption and Production. In effect, what might be called ‘steady state’ production. 

Expanded Reproduction: The community’s generation of aggregate Social Surplus at a growing rate, such as results in ascending levels of material Consumption, Production, or both. In the literature, the material result of Expanding Reproduction is sometimes referred to as Accumulation.

Accumulation: The material resultant of Expanded Reproduction. Volume II of Marx’s Capital famously, but incompletely, analyzes Reproduction, Expanded Reproduction, and Accumulation. Rosa Luxemburg completes the analysis. 

Collective Action Problem: A choice situation the structure of which leads multiple individually rational decisions to aggregate into a collectively irrational outcome. 

Recursive Collective Action Problem: My old article, ‘Recursive Collective Action Problems,’ indicates how the most calamitous instances of this species of challenge – hyperinflations, debt-deflations, ‘crises,’ etc. – are simply iterated cases of this basic conundrum-type, which lack stable equilibria and hence end only in disaster.