Glossary of Terms
In order to make my dissertation easier to follow, I provide here a glossary of terms that I will maintain with feedback from readers. In the future, I will try to make a link to this glossary accessible from any of the relevant pages at this site.
Here, I layout several terms indispensable for my thesis. My understanding and use of these terms no doubt deviate from the colloquial use of the terms and will likely deviate from other academic and Marxian treatments of these terms. These deviations make it even more important to provide this glossary. These definitions are only preliminary and they may indeed raise more questions than they answer. However, I believe they wil aide readers in understanding my thesis.
- Overdetermination
- Overdetermination is an entry-point for my thesis into understanding theory (epistemology) and being (ontology). Overdetermination presumes that all things are complexly and contradictorily related to all other things. It rejects the often prevailing presumption that the role for theory is to concentrate on the essential qualities of its object and ingore or penetrate past the inessential. Rather, overdetermination asserts that any analysis is necessarily partial: a merely partial and finite discourse always confronts an enormous, infinite (in the sense of beyond a total and complete comprehension) object(s) of analysis.
- Class Processes
- Class processes are the processes by which surplus labor is performed, appropriated and distributed. Within any particular social formation, the ways that surplus labor is performed, appropriated and distributed can differ in myriad ways. Consequently, we may name a class process according to the ways its other (its conditions of existence) overdetermines that class process. Such a class process may be deemed a: communist, ancient, slave, feudal, or capitalist class process through an analysis according to the prevailing conditions of existence. We may differentiate distinct moments of any class process such as:
- Fundamental Class Processes
- The fundamental class process includes the simultaneous processes of performing and appropriating surplus labor.
- Distributive Class Processes
- The distributive class process is the process of distributing and receiving surplus labor.
- Subsumed Class Processes
- Included within the category of distributive class processes are subsumed class processes wherein surplus labor is consciously distributed to deliberately secure conditions of existence for fundamental class processes.
- Non-Class Processes
- This term is a catch all for the other infinite processes that are not the performance, the appropriation nor the distribution of surplus labor. These non-class processes are the conditions of existence for any concrete class process. Labor processes, market processes: these non-class conditions of existence overdetermine, shape and constitute the class processes. Within this category of non-class processes, distributive non-class processes figure prominently within my thesis where value that is not appropriated surplus value is distributed to or received from others.
- Capital Process
- A non-class process of self-expanding value. Whenever a process results in more value (in money form or otherwise) than which it began it is a capital process. A capital process may result from a fundamental class process, a distributive class process or from some non-class distributive processes.
- Capital
- Money, means of production and commodities as they participate in a capital process.
- Capitalist class process
- A class process wherein surplus labor is appropriated or is received from an original appropriator in the form of an expansion of value.
- Capitalism
- A social-formation where capital processes and/or capitalist class processes predominate physically, culturally, economically or politically.
- The advocacy of such class processes or such a social-formation.
- Capitalist
- A body that personifies or occupies a position turning value into more value.
- One who advocates capitalist class processes or capitalist social formations.
- Industrial Capital
- Industrial Enterprise
- A capitalist enterprise that realizes greater value by appropriating surplus value through the employment of productive capital and productive labor.
- Non-Industrial Capital
- A capitalist enterprise where value is transformed into greater value through the receipt of distributive class or non-class distributions of surplus value and value and not the direct appropriation of surplus labor in the form of surplus value (including e.g., merchant, money-dealing, financial, and speculative capital)
- Commodity Exchange Process
- The process where two individuals, legally constituted as free, exchange one or more different objects between one another within juridical contract institutions.
- Commodity
- One of the objects of a commodity exchange process. We can break down the category of commodity into two sub-categories:
- Commodity-value
- A commodity resulting from some deliberate intervention of human labor.
- Quasi-commodity
- The opposite of commodity-value. A commodity existing independent of any deliberate human intervention into its production. The magnitude of value embodied by a quasi-commodity is zero.
- Circulation
- This is the complex aggregate of all commodity exchange processes within a particular social formation or a particular social sphere.
- Value
- The expression of labor’s result in commodities. (often used as a short hand for magnitude or measure of value — see below). Value is first a qualitative thing: a product of human labor. It is only quantiative in the sense that it can be counted or otherwise measured like through its mass, its volume or measureing its value (i.e., measureing the socially necessary labor-time required for its production).
- Magnitude of Value
- Measure of Value
- The expression of a specific quantity of abstract labor, aka socially necessary labor-time or abstract labor’s result (i.e., value). Typically the magnitude of value is measured in a particular commodity singled out as the measure of value: the money commodity. Whatever commodity occupies this equivalent pole (e.g., money), when placed in a value relation, it measures the quantity of value forming abstract labor. A magnitude of value may be considered as residing in a particular commodity or production process or one may talk of a magnitude of value independent of its form (money, means of production, commodity)
- Surplus value
- Surplus labor when appropriated as commodity-values. This is in contrast to, for example, feudal modes of appropriating surplus labor including corvée or in-kind appropiation of surplus labor.
- Exchange-value
- The magnitude of value paid for a commodity regardless of its form (money-form or ordinary commodity-form).
- Price
- A magnitude of value in the form of money paid for a commodity.
- A proposed quantity of value (in money form) requested in exchange for an ordinary commodity (e.g., the quantity of money written on a price tag).
- Value-token
- A commodity whose value approaches zero (a quasi-commodity), yet whose price or exchange value is significantly greater than zero. A commodity representing a magnitude of value through an exchange value different than its value.
- Use-value
- A useful thing.
- The usefulness of a useful thing: i.e., its utility.
- composition of capital
- The specific applied combination of means of production and labor-power as capital, i.e., a certain number of laborers apply their labor-power (variable capital) using instruments of labor to transform raw materials (together both constant capital) into finished products in the production process.
- technical composition
- The actual set of labor-powers, instruments of labor and raw materials involved in a given production process.
- value composition
- The ratio value expended in a capitalist production process where the value expended on constant capital appears in the numerator and the value expended on variable capital in the denominator.
- organic composition
- The value composition of capital only in so far as its movement primarily reflects the technical composition of capital. In other words as the value of composition changes because of increases and decreases in expenditures on labor-power and means of production due to actual increases and decreases in the labor-power and means or production applied in the production process and not due to changes in the prices of those capital commodities.
- fictitious capital
-
A commodity or value-token that participates in a capital process of self-expanding value, but are not themselves productive capital: i.e., neither labor-power nor means of production participating in a productive capital process.
- strictly fictitious capital
- fictitious capital where the expansion of value arises from a subsumed class or non-class value distribution outside of the sale of the commodity.
- speculative fictitious capital
- Fictitious capital where the expansion of value comes through the sale of a commodity at a price above it’s original purchase price. This may involve either intentional speculative trading or merely the fortunate coincidence of turning value into more value through the side-effect of other exchange behavior.