The abstract value of pain – 2026

Two video brooches and a remote pin

copper, brass, ulexite stone, video screen and electronics.

Richard Wolff
www.youtube.com/watch?v=flFyaguUqIo
(…) So let me conclude by focusing in on what Marx thought labour would teach us. here is the answer: in a society the labor that gets done, to produce everything, has an interesting quality. The labor that’s done produces more than is given to the people, the laborers, who are doing the work. In other words, laborers always produce a surplus of goods and services beyond what they get, and the interesting question is who gets that surplus. In slavery, the workers are slaves and the master gets it; in feudalism, the workers are serfs and the Lord gets it; and in capitalism, the workers areemployees and the employer gets it. The labor theory of value looks at labor because it sees in this arrangement, who produces the surplus and who gets it, a key to what’s wrong with society and how it needs to be fixed. It’s a completely different question from conventional economics. They’re not interested in surpluses, they’re not much interested in labor. They are interested in the prices of things, why they bounce up and down. Very nice! I can see their interest. But it’s not my interest, because I’m trying to understand what makes a society work well or not, when do you need social change. For that, the Labour theory of Value is very helpful and the theory of price, of conventional ergonomics not so much.

Sylvia Federici
Boitempo Editorial
www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFSI4nEB6jI
(…) you know the analysis that we have made of the specific form of exploitation the women suffer in our society, in capitalist society, you know have led us to the conclusion that the marriage contract has actually been a labor contract. Because no we marry for love, but as I wrote in one pamphlet: they call it love we call it an paid labor. In reality marriage and the whole legislation, and all the rules that organize the nuclear family are part of the function that women’s work in the family and the family itself has in the reproduction of the workforce. In other words you know through marriage you have an exchange between men and women, the wage worker know becomes the supporter of his wife who provides services to him, but through these services you know the woman in particular and all women, reproduce the workforce so they were as it appeared the marriage is motivated by love, and it appears that housework is a personal service to a man or to children, in reality it’s a capitalist organization of the reproduction of the workforce. (…)

Nancy Fraser
Al Jazeera
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLoRoWrYo4E

(…) You don’t have the quote unquote liberation of the of the global North professional managerial class woman without this exploitation or expropriation of Migrant women of color from the global South.
– absolutely and you give an example of companies that now offer egg freezing uh to their childbearing employees. Now many see this is something that’s liberating, that someone can now choose to have children later in life if they want to, but you see the fact that it’s become commonly offered by big corporate firms as a strategy as a way of saying, wait and have your kids in your 40s your 50s hey even maybe your 60s devote all of your high energy productive years right to us right, that that’s a very different way of thinking about this.
– Yeah look that that’s that is a um a symptom of this care crunch. That that that uh women feel that they can’t afford to have kids in the way at the ages that people used to. And they have to go to these technological extremes. The other example I gave is um mechanical pumping of breast milk, so that you can work uh and you know still so-called breastfeed your child of course (…)

Hartmut Rosa
UNESCO
www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuXsoK7y1FQ
(…) when I speak of social acceleration, I do not just mean turbulent times, right? uh too fast um or periods of fast change. But the fact that you have a social fabric, a very solid social fabric like the modern capitalist world order is, it’s surprisingly solid because it’s been around for 200 years or more than that, right? And within this logic, to sustain the logic, you have to accelerate, to grow, and to innovate. And that’s totally new in history, right? Of course, we had periods of social breakdown, for example, of revolution or change, right? But then a new order is established. And normally cultures of all forms try to stabilize this order to keep it as it is. While in our modern society we have to permanently accelerate, grow and innovate technologically, socially, culturally with fashion waves and so on just to maintain the institutional structure as it is. I call this endogenous acceleration, right? It’s not speeding up because of some changes in the environment. It’s we we are forced to speed up, grow, accelerate, innovate just to keep order as it is. And that’s that’s new in history. (…)

Shoshana Zuboff
CCWA From the Archives
www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtHt1BMpCXs
(…) people have long observed in the history of capitalism the way that it evolves. And the idea is that it evolves by taking things that live outside the market dynamic and bringing them into the market. You know the term commodities bringing them in to the market to turn them into commodities that can be sold and purchased. So famously industrial capitalism claimed labor, sorry claimed nature for the market dynamic, bringing it into the market dynamic to be reborn as land or real estate that could be sold and purchased. It claimed work for the market dynamic, the kinds of activities that people did in their homes and their cottages and their gardens and their fields, bringing that into the market to be reborn as labor that could be sold and purchased. Well surveillance capitalism diverges from many aspects of the history of capitalism, but in this way it actually emulates this earlier pattern, but with an unexpected and even perhaps we might call it a dark twist, in this case surveillance capitalism claims private human experience for the market dynamic. And in claiming private human experience it treats it as a free source of raw material, to be translated into behavioral data. These behavioral data are then shipped through pipelines as it were, into a new kind of manufacturing process. This manufacturing process is characterized by something that Jim is an expert in, what we call today artificial intelligence, machine learning, machine intelligence, and with that combination of these flows of behavioral data and machine intelligence what comes out the other end are predictions. Predictions of human behavior, and I call these prediction products. These products are then sold in a new kind of marketplace, a marketplace that trades exclusively, in if you will, behavioral futures (…)

Moishe Postone
Helle Panke / Marcin Wierzchowski Milk&Water
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqjiznDQ3Ho

(…) when Marx introduces – he has three major chapters on Kooperation, Manufaktur and Grosse Idustrie – when he introduces cooperation he talks about how the workers working together, just by virtue of working together they have a productive force which is greater than the sum of their parts. Snd that productive Force belongs to the capitalists, good. If that would be as far as Mark’s got then the negation of that would be:  you do away with the capitalist and the productive force created by the workers belongs to them, is theirs collectively. In manufacture it’s already a little tricky. It’s a little tricky because the nature of the labor itself is terrible, it’s terrible, each person, you know Adam Smith has this famous example of the pin Factory where somebody pulls a piece of wire 48 000 times a day! If you do away with the capitalist what is left: somebody pulling 48 000 times a day except now he’ll get the pins, that for Marx is not emancipation. (…)

Clara Mattei
Dr Myriam François
www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=fyb4HsJC4T0&ra=m

(…) what capitalism is about is about mediating all our needs through private investors profits. Okay. So anything we want from what we’re wearing to the chairs, happens because capitalists decide to invest because they see an expectation for profit. Okay. And so this is the whole point is that we’re mediating our needs through private investors, profits, and market relations. That’s not what China did with the eradication of poverty, right? There was a plan. The plan was not mediated. It was the idea is that we have an objective that is a political objective and this takes priority over any economic criteria. Right? So this is the opposite of what happens in the west because in the west what happens is that anything that is not compatible with the logic of profit is considered utopian right so you know yes it would be good to have better social housing but our debt doesn’t allow us to do it or there’s like some economic constraint but this is the whole point about planning that is has been done in this case for China is like the planning is actually the idea that you are putting political projects that are affirming themselves beyond the logic of profit and in priority to the logic of profit. And you know we there’s a big discussion about is China capitalist is it not I would say China is not capitalist has not of course overcome uh wage labor which is a very important point to make a society fully democratic because I would I believe that in the future we should overcome wage labor which is really where the anti-democratic um pressures come in but in a way they are able to assert political priority over private investors in a way that um relies on planning and control which is something that we’ve never experienced (…)

Yanis Varoufakis
The Institute of Art and Ideas
www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_TMuVQPfxw

We’ve moved to a stage beyond capitalism after capitalism which has elements of feudalism in it, uh but only at the abstract level at the conceptual level. What are these two elements? Well, remember I was saying that under feudalism the source of power was ownership of land. Now it is no longer ownership of land. under capitalism was owner ownership of of machinery. Today it’s still ownership of machinery but it’s this new form of mutant machinery which is not a produced means of production but it is a produced means of behavioral modification. So Bezos owns a machine that can modify my behavior and owning that machine allows him to collect a rent from the capitalist that has produced the traditional capitalist
(who has produced the electric bike). (…)

Naomi Klein
The Maybe
www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=iEf-MNsyUiE&pp=ugUEEgJlbtIHCQmjCwGHKiGM7w%3D%3D&ra=m

(…)The promise of generative AI is that it can think for us, right? And that is a truly fascist idea, the idea of outsourcing thinking. And so our powers is in our ability to think with each other, to generate, genuinely new ideas. If they get what they want, like if they summon their digital God and get a AGI, It kills all the jobs. Right? (…) Once they feed enough data and have enough power and have enough compute, eventually they’ll have this very ill-defined thing called AGI or, super intelligence, the point at which the majority of human economic activity can be replaced by AI. There’s a tragedy here, I have to say. (…)

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Milton Friedman
Brittle 13
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rls8H6MktrA

(…) We have constructed a governmental welfare scheme which has been a machine for producing poor people. We have induced people to come under control of welfare we’ve I’m not blaming the people don’t misunderstand me, it’s our fault for constructing so perverse and so ill-shaped a monster, as the whole set of welfare programs we have under which we encourage people, the families to break up, we encourage people to move from one part of the country and come to another, under which we have in effect made many people poor! And yet when all this is said and.. – have I ever been where?
-Have you ever been on welfare or poor?
– I have certain… of course! of course more so than most of the people in this room! [Applause] How many of you have worked at 12 hour a day and gotten paid 78 cents… but let me go back to the.. because but you know that’s all irrelevant. Is there one of you who is going to say that you don’t want a doctor to treat you for cancer unless he himself had cancer?.[Laughter] (…)

Friedrich Hayek
Liberty Pen
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz9TzbyIHFw

(…) – Well is it a part of your position, that unemployment compensation is enough of a disincentive to neutralize the force of the marketplace?
-I can’t speak about this country I really don’t know enough about how important it here is. In the country which I know much better, England, of course it’s a main factor. And there you have the ridiculous situation where unemployment compensation is paid to the wives of people on strike. Well the people even if they’re going on strike to push up for higher wages they don’t run any risk. The government has to look after their families. Now to a minor extent, I think the same thing is probably operating here. (…)

Ursula von der Leyen
European Commission
www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=HItXWeZ_siw&ra=m

Dear members of Parliament, ladies and gentlemen, it is a pleasure to be here with you today to see trade unions, employers, government, civil society gathered in one place. I think this is the spirit of partnership that is the foundation of Europe’s social model and it reflects our conviction that economic progress and social rights go hand in hand. 80 years ago, it’s a long tradition that we have,  one of the founding fathers of modern Europe, Conrad Adenauer, put it very simply. He said: « The economy should serve the people and not the
people the economy. » End of quote. (…)

Christine Lagarde
The daily Show
www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=bmA4z24I7Xc&ra=m

– How do we get labor to benefit more efficiently from all that money?
– You have two  -you know those things. You have two components: capital, labor. And you bring these together, and you create value. The two have to be compensated. And for decades, capital has been better remunerated than labor, and the labor share in the value production has been reduced. Then it’s a matter of give and take. So if the labor market is tight, as it is now, it is for the labor to actually say: excuse me! I think that should be remunerated as well, and probably better than it has for many, many years. So it’s a question of…
– Is there a way to do it
– Negotiations, discussions, and persistence.
– Right. [Laughter] Is there a better way? [Laughter] [Applause] Because it seems like for corporate subsidies, they don’t have to fight so hard. It seems like labor has to really fight for that seat at the table, whereas the larger entities don’t have
– I think the balance of lobbying forces is obviously skewed to one side, in most countries around the world.
– So you would recommend poor people get better lobbyists.[Laughter] That would be… [Applause]

Elon Musk
Sky News
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMdFGrnp5XI

(…) I guess in the in the case of Tesla,  the really, the the value of the company is primarily uh on the basis of autonomy. So uh, in my opinion um because if you look at our total vehicle output it’s um you it’ll be almost 2 million vehicles this this year something like that. Um but that’s that’s still only 2% of total vehicle production. So then why is our market cap so high? It’s because the potential for autonomy, um is uh that the value of autonomy is so high, um that even even if you have a discounted percentage probability of autonomy happening, um that is still incredibly valuable. Um so the average passenger car is uh used only about 10 hours a week. So an average of about one and a half hours a day. But if you have an autonomous robo taxi, the utility is, might be 50 or 60 hours a week out of 168 hours. So now you’ve got a vehicle that costs the same but has five times the utility. So it’s so gigantic a change that that’s really I think, uh the main driver of our value. Um and uh although I’ve said this before, I think we will solve autonomy soon. (…)

Richard Baldwin
New Economic Thinking
www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=3MqgMgGCIng&ra=m

(…) In the great transformation, automation lasted a century and then globalization took off. In the second one, automation, the robotics stuff, advanced from say 1970 to about 1990 when most of it was automation replacing certain jobs. From 1990 the ICT revolution enabled a change in the global organization of production. In particular ICT allowed G7 firms, rich country firms, to put some of their stages of production in nearby developing countries and still coordinate the whole thing. So before ICT just imagine Bombardier who makes jets, business jets, now they make some of the tails in central Mexico, they make the rest of it in Quebec and they assemble them together. Like before ICT they would have had to coordinate that with airmail letters, or fax, and just imagine hoping that the tails from central Mexico would show up in Quebec and fit if the best you were doing was email. But with ICT it became quite easy to organize. So to me that was the gate, they opened the gate to allow complex coordination across borders, and so instead of just goods crossing borders we had factories crossing borders. But that wasn’t the key thing that led to increasing disruption. The key was that the G7 firms took their knowhow, and moved it to the developing countries. And what that created for the first time was a combination in manufacturing where we had high tech and low wages. So before this global value chain revolution, or whatever we wanna call it, you either had to produce something in say Germany with high tech, high wages or in India with low tech, low wages. (…)

Jesus Huerta de Soto
Misesmedia
www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=IWfpON8LyBY&ra=m

(…)For the first time, it has been scientifically demonstrated that estates in any of their forms are neither necessary nor viable! That society understood as a process of voluntary human interactions does not need anyone to govern it! Because it regulates and organizes itself spontaneously. And that the attempt to coordinate society on the basis of social engineering and state coercive commands is impossible! Doomed to failure and gives rise to all kinds of distortion, social conflicts and violence that continually hinder and block human progress. [snorts] (…)

Walter Block
Misesmedia
www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=2_iQFLserVY&ra=m

(…) okay so the argument in favor of the minimum wage is like it’s a floor under wages, and the higher the floor and and no one can get below the floor, and the higher we raise the floor the higher wages are are, and since we all want wages to be higher than they are, uh we have to favor the minimum wage law. And this is just totally wrong, rather the minimum wage law is not a floor under under wages and raising wages, rather the minimum wage is a way to cut off employment and the way I like to illustrate this sometimes, is here’s an employment ladder and there are rungs in the ladder, and when you put a minimum wage in there what you do is you cut off the bottom rungs of the ladder, and the way you sometimes you rise in the ladder is through schooling, but another ways on the job training and if you knock off the bottom rungs of the ladder you’re not going to uh be helping people at the bottom of the economic pyramid. It’s not a floor under wages, this mechanical analogy is all wrong, rather it’s a barrier over which you have to jump in order to get a job! So if the minimum wage law is $2 an hour you have to have a productivity higher than $2 an hour, and if the minimum wage is $5 an hour you have to have a productivity of five an hour. And if it’s um $100 an hour you have to have a productivity of $100 an hour. The higher the minimum wage law is the higher you have to jump over in order to get a job in the first place. (…)

Jeff Bezos
CNBC Television
www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=BxG_ysI3xr4&ra=m

(…)There are so many smart people, and they are smart and they are saying, oh my god, you know, there’s going to be no more radiologists because, you know, AI can read x-rays better than a radiologist can. And they’re going to be no more software engineers because AI can program better than a software engineer can. These people are wrong! so what’s really going to happen is that it’s going to elevate all of these people. And there’s going to…  it’s like, it’s like you’ve been digging, let’s say you’re a software engineer, right? what is the analogy i can give you is you’ve been digging out a basement for your house with a shovel, and somebody is about to hand you a bulldozer. You’re, you’re, you should be so happy, if you’re digging the basement to your house and somebody says, hey, how about this? I have a tool here that’s going to… and what’s really going to happen is we’re going to have so much productivity in our economy that, for example, this is just one effect: a lot of people who have two earner income households, one of the people is going to drop out of the workforce. That’s why we’re going to have a labor shortage, people, because of the productivity gains, you’re going to be able to afford things, we’re going to have… i predict, will actually have deflation of certain core, assuming we let this technology play out and don’t hamstring it with regulation too early, we will actually have everything will get, food will get cheaper and housing construction will get cheaper, and so on. and so on. (…)