on the outline of political economy list, i have been playing around
by analogizing the "pupations" in the monetary measurement of
commodity value to the collapse in quantum measurement:
In short, at what point do commodities acquire value? In A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx did not evade
the difficulty:
But the different kinds of individual labour represented in these
particular use values, in fact, becomesocial labour only by being
actually ex-changed for one anotherSocial labour-time exists in
these commodities in a latent state, so to speak, and becomes evident
only in the course of their ex-change. The point of departure is not
the labour of individuals considered as social labour, but on the
contrary the particular kinds of labour of private individuals, i.e.,
labour which proves that it is universal social labour only by
supersession of its original character in the exchange process.
Universal social labour is consequently not a ready made
prerequisite, but an emerging result. Thus a new difficulty arises:
on the one hand, commodities must enter the exchange process as
materialized universal human labor, on the other hand, the labour
time of individuals becomes materialized universal human labour time
only as the result of the exchange process.
In trying to understand how the propensity of a quantum system was
drawn out in different ways according to how it was surrounded by
measuring devices, Werner Heisenberg was led to think of the
system's potential as a "quantitative version of the old idea of
'potentia' in Aristotelian philosophy. It introduced something
standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual
event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between
possibility and reality." For Marx, value also seems to exist in
potentia; money measurement is thus more than the passive
ascertainment of a pre-existing property but rather the production of
a datum (value) through the active involvement of measurer and thing
measured. In other words, value seems to describe a system--the thing
being measured and the measurement being made--rather than being an
independent description of the thing being measured.
It would seem then that value is best understood not in terms of the
now outmoded distinction between primary and secondary qualities but
rather in terms of the contrast between possessed and latent ones.
Until the impact of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, it was
tenable to categorize attributes as primary and secondary (so thought
Anaxagoras, Galileo, Descartes, Locke); the former was supposed to be
a feature which an object possesses independent of an observer.
Classic examples were supposed to be mass, position or size. Primary
qualities, that is, were thought to be resident within their object;
inalienable from it and make up their essence. An observer simply
measured or read a primary quality, but the quality is in no sense
dependent upon the observer. Secondary qualities arise from the
interaction between the object and an observer. Taste and color are
typical of this type.
That distinction has broken down since with relativity theory: mass
for example does vary with the relative speed of the object and
observer. In short, if every quality is secondary, then the
distinction between primary and secondary is simply uninformative.
As already noted, Heisenberg tried to replace the old distinction of
primary and secondary attributes with the idea that qualities of an
object are either essential or potential; possessed or latent. With
the uncertainty principle latent qualities manifest themselves as
clearly present only upon measurement; that is, position and momentum
appear as latent qualities.
This conceptual innovation is helpful in understanding Marx for
whom value is a kind of latent quality of commodities which manifests
itself as clearly present only upon successful monetary ex-change or
"collapse" onto the money price "vector" (of course not everything
which has assumed the commodity form and sold for a price possess the
quality of value, but no commodity which has not sold for a price is
a--or possesses--value). To extend the analogy: Monetary measurement
forces a collapse of commodities into one of two eigenstates: value
or no value. That is, a commodity undergoes a change from one state
to another in the process of measurement.
There are of course at least two places where the analogy breaks down:
(1) In quantum mechanics, measurement supplies a determinate value
for the observable while we are not supplied with such a determinate
value by money measurement. That is, we cannot go from the price at
which a commodity sells to its value.
(2) In quantum mechanics, we have definite probabilities for the
values measurement will
return.
However, like measurement in quantum mechanics, money measurement
seems to invert common sense: while the commodity only possesses the
quality of having value after that quality has been quantitatively
measured in a successful exchange, we would find it absurd that if
only after a quantitative measurement of a thing's quality ("it's
eleven feet") can we say that it in fact possesses the quality ("it
has extension"). It is as if objects do not "have" extension until
they are forced to adopt a particular value through a measurement.
