RELATED TERMS: The Commodity; Design History; Libidinal Economy – Part 1
“Valuing is a form of ranking”
(Kelleher, 2015)
Preamble
The question for design practices running through the following text is whether they partake in keeping us focused on, in the words of Issberner and Lena (2023), “a naive faith in progress, consumerist ideology and powerful economic lobbies”.
Design is inextricably connected to value, for example, to use value, to economic value, to cultural value and to personal values. Andrew Liu (2020) discusses ‘value’ in terms that may prove a useful beginning for understanding the specific socio-cultural and socio-historical relationships between design and value and the potential of design as an ecological, social and cultural force.
Liu’s focus of concern is to understand how capitalism developed in rural India and China. He argues that, in seeking to grasp how the passage to capitalism took place under different conditions, it is necessary to break away from the emphasis on the experience of North America and Europe, such as, for example, the experience in England which took a path from dispossession to proletarianisation to mechanisation.
Value and Technical Innovation
Most economic historians, Liu contends, take capitalism to be historically distinguished by its technical capacities, manifested in higher productivity. However, Liu argues that Marx was critical of this technicist view. While acknowledging the greater proliferation of things, or ‘use-values’, this phenomenon was, for Marx, an expression of a more fundamental transformation. He called this transformation the ‘universalisation’ of the ‘commodity-form’. Through this ‘universalisation’, rather than the endless expansion of things, the end-goal of society became that of profit or ‘exchange-value’, which formed part of a historically novel form of wealth going by the name of ‘value’.
As Marx discussed in the opening chapter of Capital, the value of commodities in capitalist societies was tied to the average amounts of human labor needed to produce them, mediated by market competition. This was a departure from earlier eras, in which the value of goods was determined by non-market factors, such as monopolies, seasonal natural cycles, customs, arbitrage and so on.
Marx developed his insights from the British political economic tradition, from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), onwards. However, he was critical of that tradition for its assumption that the ‘value-form’ was and is a timeless state of nature rather than, as for Marx, a social dynamic specific to the modern world.
Gathering together these points, Liu argues that it was these predominant tendencies of ‘value’, more so than technical innovation, that distinguished the capitalist era from its predecessors. By the early- to mid-19th century, Western society was shaped by the transformation that, as already noted, Marx called the ‘universalisation of the commodity-form’, a situation in which it would seem that everything was for sale and, as a consequence, subjected to competitive pressures towards efficiency.
For Marx, the historical threshold for such a transformation was the emergence of hired labor for the production of goods. For most historians, Liu argues, the historical importance of wage labour was that it was more efficient from a technical standpoint than its counterparts: slavery, serfdom, and peasantry. Managers no longer needed to provide shelter and food to unfree workers. They could now employ and dismiss them at will. Equally, for historians, wage labour was considered important because workers, divorced from the land and facing higher costs of living, demanded higher wages, which in turn drove innovation.
While this technicist perspective is certainly important, Liu contends that it misses a crucial aspect of Marx’s historical argument: that it was only from the moment of the adoption of wage labour that the commodity-form of the products of labour becomes universal. The most crucial consequence of the adoption of wage labour for Marx was, now that human labour itself had become a commodity, commodities now animated the entire cycle of capital accumulation from beginning to end: purchasing labour in order to produce goods in order to earn a profit in order to hire more labour, and so on cyclically.
In earlier social formations, people may have made and sold commodities. However, the labor behind them was acquired through non-commercial measures, for example, secured through coercion, family obligation or independent production. The commodification of labour changed that.
In sum, the more human societies began to depend on the sale of labour and the purchase of goods for survival, the more their activities were folded into the logic of commodification and of ‘value’.
In Liu’s view, economic histories that focus on the technical dimension of industrialisation most often have little to say about the underlying social dynamic of value. However, for Liu, through his re-reading of Marx,
“it is ‘value,’ and the subtle, underlying dynamics of accumulation that enables us to understand capitalism more holistically, in all its historical dimensions, including the realms of ideology, culture, and social relations.”
For Marx, then, in Liu’s reading, the transformative power of the ‘commodity form’ was a more fundamental feature of the capitalist era than the innovations, however technically spectacular in terms of productivity, that historians have long taken as the substance of capitalism itself.
Design and Value
The implications of Liu’s argument for understanding design are that, throughout its modern history, it has unfolded within the cycle of capital accumulation: its products added to ‘value’. This recognition is as important if not more important than acknowledging the technical aspects of design innovations as utilities. Professional designers are purchased as labour. This professional practice incorporates unevenly the pedagogical lessons of design education, academic practice itself now having become a form of wage labour. This academicised, professional practice produces goods as commodities, in the the form of designs of increasing complexity that articulate ‘use values’ (as technical affordances) alongside cultural values (meanings and material public discourses including ideologies), to earn a profit in order to hire more professional and academic design labour, and so on cyclically. This may be especially the case since 1979-1980, with the advent of ‘neoliberal’ policies in the United Kingdom and the United States, which enabled what Thomas B. Edsall (2006) called the re-moralisation of the pursuit of wealth as a positive social good.
One set of questions that arises concerns the adaptability of this value cycle. Can it adapt such that it can incorporate into its logic of accumulation and commodification the ‘value’ of that upon which it depends and takes for granted, in other words, that which it seriously undervalues or whose value it disavows. This dependency extends across the sustainability of ‘natural’ phenomena, such as the geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere and the biosphere. It reaches into the geopolitical management of those ‘natural’ spheres, nation states that are un-naturally divided and unevenly governed. It further depends on the ethno-national and ethno-cultural divisions within nation states that sustain that geopolitical order in a state of disorder; and penetrates the psycho-dynamics of the subject-citizens who inhabit those ethno-national and ethno-cultural domains within the nation states of the geopolitical formation in its bio-physical context. To complicate matters yet further, access to understanding this complex, overdetermined situation is granted by means of an information environment characterised by overload, mis-information, dis-information, conspiracy theories and media saturation.
A second set of questions concerns the possibility of design practices themselves being able to escape, transcend or deconstruct the value cycle in which it has incubated through various practices such as critical design, social design, participative design and so on. This process might be initiated in the context of professional practice and in the context of academic design education, leading to design outputs that break with the cycle of accumulation and which foster forms of action and creation of symbolic meanings that are not locked into the desire for wealth as accumulation of ‘value’, in short, the existing self-harming libidinal economy.
The question overall is whether design practices should align themselves with the logic of accumulation in order to find a path that breaks out of the (‘vicious’) cycle of ‘value’-creation to open up a (‘virtuous’) cycle of ‘value’ equivocation, a new metastable equilibrium, in Simondon’s terms. Alternatively, must design practices align themselves with some variant of anti-capitalism, given the historic failures, according to Confino (2015), of experiments in socialism and communism. That is, should design work with or against capitalism in order to get beyond capitalism? This is assuming that a transition to a ‘post-’ of capitalism is possible. In philosophical terms, this is a question of what is the potential immanence of capitalism as against the need to transcend it.
This conjuncture itself opens a new field for design, economic-ecological-system design, because, as suggested by John Fullerton (2012), “mainstream economists and financial theorists still do not get the vital interconnection between the true nature of the (economic) system and a healthy ecosystem”. Fullerton points out that the existing economic-ecological system, was, “designed for a set of circumstances that applied in the past – a huge planet, small economy, abundant resources, unlimited waste sinks – but which are no longer relevant”.
The significance of design practices more generally in this context is that, as Alice Fisher (2019) states, while design may make your sofa comfortable and your clothes look on trend, perhaps more importantly, “it could also save the planet if we find the right sustainable practice. In architecture, interiors, products, art, fashion and the groundbreaking innovations of experimental building materials, it is design that drives the world forward.” This is perhaps an overstatement of the power commanded by design as a ‘driver’. It also raises the question of whether a single ‘right’ sustainable practice is possible, as any path taken is likely to require constant revision. It also clear that any path taken, as well as being guided by design decisions also requires political decisions because, as Ollie Cotsaftis (2021) says, “To design is a political act … reality is constructed or reinforced through design, and our beliefs, biases, and privileges influence our design choices.”
We need, in other words, to re-design or un-design the geo-political system, before we can unlock the ecological, social and cultural power of design. Otherwise, as noted by Issberner and Lena (2023) at the top of this post, we remain locked into, “a naive faith in progress, consumerist ideology and powerful economic lobbies”.
References
Confino, J. (2015) Beyond capitalism and socialism: could a new economic approach save the planet?, Guardian, 21 April. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/apr/21/regenerative-economy-holism-economy-climate-change-inequality (Accessed: 29 September 2024).
Cotsaftis, O. (2021) The Politics of biodesign. Biodesigned, 5. Available at https://www.biodesigned.org/ollie-cotsaftis/the-politics-of-biodesign [Accessed on 29 September 2024]
Edsall, T. B. (2006) Risk and reward, New York Times, 5 December.
Liu, A. (2020) Notes toward a more global history of capitalism, Spectre, (6 July). Available at: https://spectrejournal.com/notes-toward-a-more-global-history-of-capitalism/ (Accessed: 28 September 2024).
Fisher, A. (2019). Editor’s letter. Design [Magazine]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2019/apr/07/green-design-waste-not-want (Accessed: 20 April 2019).
Fullerton, J. (2012) It’s time to redesign our economic system, Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/link-ecosystem-capitalism-crisis (Accessed: 29 September 2024).
Fullerton, J. (2015) Regenerative capitalism: How universal principles and patterns will shape our new economy. Stonington, CT: Capital Institute. Available at: http://capitalinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/2015-Regenerative-Capitalism-4-20-15-final.pdf (Accessed: 29 September 2024).
Issberner, L.-R. and Léna, P. (2023) Anthropocene: the vital challenges of a scientific debate, UNESCO Courier. Available at: https://courier.unesco.org/en/articles/anthropocene-vital-challenges-scientific-debate (Accessed: 2 October 2024).
Kelleher, W. J. (2015) Formal axiology and the proof of Karl Marx’s Humanism, in Eighteenth International Conference for a New Political Science, University of Havana, Cuba, November 17 to November 20, 2015. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/13222978/Formal_Axiology_and_Karl_Marx (Accessed: 30 September 2024).
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