On Friday, October 6, the art world was stunned by a pretty predictable Banksy prank. The street artist's famous "Girl With Balloon" sold for $1 million pounds to an unknown buyer. This was a "new auction high for a work solely by the artist," London's Sotheby claimed. But at the very moment the buzz of the buy began filling the room, a device built into the work's thick frame started shredding it. All of that money was destroyed before the eyes of the art world. Banksy had struck again. Facebook feeds exploded. There was much emoji laughter with the tears in the eyes. According to the New York Times, Sotheby’s made this statement on Saturday: “The successful bidder was a private collector, bidding through a Sotheby’s staff member on the phone. We are currently in discussions about next steps.”
None of this, as you can see, is deeply interesting. The picture and the prank emerged from the same so-so imagination. Equally uninteresting was the icon-loud laughter the incident generated. It had as its source the image of a rich person getting royally screwed in public. The power of their money was reduced to trash in mere minutes. How much is the painting worth now? A fool and his money. LOL. But let's stop the social media laughter for a moment and seriously consider the actual value of the work.
But where did the value of this work come from in the first place? How did it end up being worth $1.4 million? And is this high value exceptional? Does it only explain the madness of the art world alone, or the madness of those with too much money? Or is it consistent with how all things are valued in our society?
Let's begin with this: The question that puzzled the founders of economics (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx) was the source of value. It was understood that a commodity had a use value and an exchange value. But where did profit come from? An entrepreneur has the basic goal that the money they put into the capitalist circuit will return, not as the same amount of money, but as an increased amount. What was the source of this increase? All believed, to some degree, it was labor. But it was Marx who argued that it was not just labor but surplus labor. The worker was paid less than they produced. But how exactly does one measure the "less" for the worker? There had to be in the society an amount that was necessary for the reproduction of the labor's power: food, shelter, clothes. Anything above these necessities is the source of surplus labor, which represented surplus value. This part of value was, at the end of the capitalist circuit, transformed into profits.
The theory of surplus value is solid, but it does not answer or name exactly what value is. For example, can we describe it as the sheer transference of brain and muscle power into an object? If so, is this the same for all societies? And if such is the case, then value must be just food (purely biological/natural) in another form. But clearly it isn't because not all of the necessitates are natural. Indeed, most are cultural—clothes, Bibles, and spices. The mistake made by early economists was to see all necessities (natural and cultural) as just natural. The cultural, which is variable, was eclipsed by visions of the biological, which is constant (and as such, quantifiable: how much energy can an average body extract from the products of photosynthesis).
But from its beginning, capitalism has been driven not by raw needs but by wants. Needs can be satisfied, and therefore have a hard limit; wants, on the other hand, are only limited by the imagination. Nature determines the former; culture, the latter. And so we see what the early economists missed, and what neoclassical economics (which followed the classicals in the 1870s and is still the dominant mode of economic thinking) avoided with the utilitarian concept of utility, and thereby displaced the question of value (which is objective) with a question of demand (subjective), or, put another way, a question of prices (what is one willing to pay for something). The truth of the matter is there can be no science of value in a capitalist system because it is historical rather than transhistorical. Meaning, value is cultural, not immediately natural.
The late historical theorist Moishe Postone grasped a part of this fact by separating material wealth from value. He saw that capitalist material wealth was the source of value, but that the former was specific to capitalism. What the entrepreneur wants is more value, and the medium for value is use-value (material wealth). But because value is infinite, the productions of capitalism must also be unlimited. This is why commodities must constantly change or be improved; and it's also why the means of making things must be revolutionized. For Postone (who entirely focuses on the latter—the advancement of the means of production), this constant change, which is driven by want rather than needs, is the source of historical time in capitalism, which has one direction: forward (rather than cyclical). If this is grasped, then one can better understand the current environmental catastrophe.
But Postone's framework does not include what it is that drives capitalist change or revolutions. And this occlusion means that his theory does not break completely with the original notion of necessity—the idea that capitalist value is measurable, that it is trans-historical, and therefore natural. To see how value is cultural, we need to turn to the work of another important thinker, Noam Yuran.
Value as want must depart from value as simply useful. For this reason, the genealogy of Yuran's economics has luxury as its point of departure. The standard genealogy of a history of economics begins with Adam Smith's sober The Wealth Of Nations (but even this Scottish philosopher is mostly ignored by the neoclassical school, which is indifferent to history, and in this way does not have a genealogy). This book was published toward the end of the 18th century. Yuran's genealogy, on the other hand, begins with a scandalous poem by Dutch-born social philosopher Bernard Mandeville, "The Fable of the Bees." Published near the opening of the 18th century, this work, which Smith disliked, places not the sober self-interest of bakers and brewers at the heart of capitalism, but the intoxicating passions of epicureans: envy, lust, greed, pride. And things that excite these passions are not "absolute needs" but luxurious goods—merchandise.
Capitalism is powered by things that were once only available to the elite. This is why its formative period in the Dutch moment is defined by commodities that are nutrition-less (tobacco, tea, sugar, coffee). These stimulants owe their production and demand completely to culture. If this fact is grasped, then much of the world we see around us today will be better understood. Its explanatory power is considerable. An urban theory based on this concept of the passions will be able to explain the strong resistance to public transportation. It is not a luxury. It is practical, and therefore inexpensive. It will also explain surburbanization and single-family homes and luxury apartments, forms of living that increase value because they generate a great deal of waste.
My point: Very little in capitalist value is natural (or related to absolute needs or to anything close to efficiency—the first line of defense for the justification of the free market). This is not to say that other and older cultures have nothing in them that's unnecessary. It is instead to point out that capitalist value is not only almost entirely immaterial but has little to do with what most think defines the subject (or "science") of economics.
