Labor-value is elusive in today’s postmodernity because of the constant overlooking of labor-power from the informal economy, the largest influence on biopolitical labor as value translates into affect. A radical break is to consider value from below, starting from labor-power.

I do not think that, in the polemics that have now for two hundred years accompanied the development of the theory of value, political economists have ever succeeded in decoupling value from labor. Even the marginalist currents and the neoclassical schools, whose vocation is dedicated to this decoupling, are forced to take this relationship into account (along with its support, mass living labor) every time they confront political economy in the concrete. In neoclassical theory, the analyses of market, entrepreneurial, financial, and monetary relations all refute in principle every reference to labor: in fact, it is no surprise that neoclassical theorists have nothing to say when they are faced with political decisions. The theory of labor-value springs forth again-and they are frozen in their tracks by it-precisely where the founders of the discipline situated it. The place of the conflict (and the eventual mediation) of the economic relationship as a social relationship reveals the ontology of economic theory. What has irreversibly changed, however, from the times of the predominance of the classical theory of value, involves the possibility of developing the theory of value in terms of economic order, or rather, the possibility of considering value as a measure of concrete labor, either individually or collectively. The economic consequences of this difficulty are certainly important, but equally important are its anthropological and social presuppositions. These latter elements are what I will focus on here-on this novelty that transforms the theory of value "from below," from the base of life. In the centuries of capitalist modernization (in the passage, that is, from manufacturing to large-scale industry, to use Marx's terms), the possibility of measuring labor, which had functioned more or less in the period of accumulation, progressively declined for two reasons. In the first place, the possibility of measurement declined because labor-as it became more highly qualified and more complex, both individually and collectively--could not be reduced to simple, calculable quantities. Secondly, the possibility of measurement declined because capital, which was becoming more financially oriented and more embedded in State regimes, made increasingly artificial and manipulable, and thus more abstract, the mediation between diverse sectors of the economic cycle (production, social reproduction, circulation, and the distribution of incomes). But all this is prehistory. In the global market, in postmodernity, the problem of measure itself cannot be located. It is certainly true that in the period of the passage to postmodernity, in the phase of the anti-imperialist and anticolonial struggles, the theory of labor-value seemed to rise up again in macroeconomic terms, as a theory of the international division of labor, of "unequal exchange," of postcolonial exploitation. But this renaissance quickly proved illusory, as soon as it became evident that the set of productive processes, beyond being immersed in the multinationalization of industrial activity and financial globalization, was further intensified by the technological processes of cybernetics and communication, as well as by the investment of immaterial and scientific labor. This does not mean that the international division of labor and postcolonial exploitation have come to an end. On the contrary, they have been extraordinarily accentuated. But at the same time, they have lost their specificity (and thus the possibility of reactivating the theory of value in concrete instances) because that type of exploitation has itself become globalized, has flooded metropolitan territories, and the measure of exploitation has definitively declined. In the economy of postmodernity and in the territories of globalization, the production of commodities comes about through command, the division of labor is given through command, and the articulation of the measures of labor is undone in global command. That said, however, my theme here, "value and affect," has not been broached thus far except through the suggestion of a reconsideration of the problem of value "from below." In effect, when we look at things from the point of view of political economy-in other words, "from above"-the theme of "value-affect" is so integrated into the macroeconomic process that it is virtually invisible. Economics ignores the problem without any recognition of difficulties. Among the numerous cases, consider two that are exemplary. The first case concerns the domestic labor of women and/or mothers/wives. Now, in the tradition of political economy, this theme can in no way be posed outside of the consideration of the direct or indirect wage of the worker (male, head of family), or rather, in more recent times, outside of the disciplinary techniques of the demographic control of populations (and of the eventual interests of the State-the collective capitalist-in the economic regulation of this demographic development). Value is thus assumed by stripping it from labor (the labor of women-in this case, mothers and wives), stripping it, in other words, from affect. A second example resides at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum. This case deals no longer with the traditional paradigms of classical economics but with a really postmodern theme: the so-called economy of attention. By this term, one refers to the interest in assuming in the economic calculation the interactivity of the user of communication services. In this case, too, even in the clear effort to absorb the production of subjectivity, economics ignores the substance of the question. As it focuses attention on the calculation of "audience," it flattens, controls, and commands the production of subjectivity on a disembodied horizon. Labor (attention) is here subsumed, stripping it from value (of the subject), that is, from affect. To define the theme of value-affect, we have to leave behind the ignorance of political economy. We have to understand it precisely on the basis of an apparent paradox that I would like to pose in this way: The more the measure of value becomes ineffectual, the more the value of labor-power becomes determinant in production; the more political economy masks the value of labor-power, the more the value of labor-power is extended and intervenes in a global terrain, a biopolitical terrain. In this paradoxical way, labor becomes affect, or better, labor finds its value in affect, if affect is defined as the "power to act" (Spinoza). The paradox can thus be reformulated in these terms: The more the theory of value loses its reference to the subject (measure was this reference as a basis of mediation and command), the more the value of labor resides in affect, that is, in living labor that is made autonomous in the capital relation, and expresses--through all the pores of singular and collective bodies-its power of self-valorization.