Surplus Value (a truly jaw-dropping toy recall) [View All]

[Plaid Adder]

There are toy recalls publicized virtually every day. Now that I buy toys, I have to keep track of them. Some of them can be written off as the result of an overly litigious, security-and-safety-crazed society. But here's a headline that'll really make you snarf your morning coffee:

Chemical-Laced Toy Made Toddler 'Drunk'

Turns out there's a popular Australian toy called Aqua Dots (produced, like the vast majority of children's toys, in China) which uses an adhesive that contains the compound gamma hydroxy butyrate, better known on the street as the "date rape drug" GHB. So, basically, any child who sucks on this toy is slipping him/herself a mickey. Not surprisingly, several toddlers who encountered this toy have passed out and been taken comatose to the emergency room, where they all so far have eventually recovered.

Here's my favorite four paragraphs:

The toys were supposed to use 1,5-pentanediol, a nontoxic compound found in glue, but instead contained the harmful 1,4-butanediol, which is widely used in cleaners and plastics.

The Food and Drug Administration in 1999 declared the chemical a Class I Health Hazard, meaning it can cause life-threatening harm.

Both chemicals are manufactured in China and elsewhere, including by major multinational companies, and are also marketed over the Internet.

It's not clear why 1,4-butanediol was substituted. However, there is a significant difference in price between the two chemicals. The Chinese online trading platform ChemNet China lists the price of 1,4 butanediol at between about $1,350-$2,800 per metric ton, while the price for 1,5-pentanediol is about $9,700 per metric ton.

What do you mean "it's not clear why 1,4-butanediol was substituted?" It's blindingly fucking obvious!

I suppose it's fitting in a way that the world's last remaining major Communist power has dedicated itself to demostrating for the Western world some of Marx's basic theories about what's wrong with capitalism. Marx's understanding of capitalism has had to be heavily re-thought and revised by later theorists to keep it up to date with the protean shifts that capitalism has undergone during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; but apparently in China they're still making stuff the way they did it back in the bad old days of the industrial revolution. So in a way, they're staying true to their Communist identity by keeping Marx relevant--by performing everything that Marx critiqued about industrial-age capitalism.

What distinguishes capitalism as a process, from Marx's point of view, is its dependence on the circulation of the commodity. From Marx's perspective, the purpose of production in a capitalist economy is not to make, say, shoes, or bread; it's to make money. The commodity--the actual thing that is produced for exchange--is of interest to capitalists only as the means by which a small amount of money can be transformed into a larger amount of money. The difference between the money the capitalist puts into making and selling the commodity and the money that the capitalist eventually receives in exchange for the commodity is called "surplus value." Marx's argument was that the only thing capital really cares about producing is surplus value, and that one of the essential components of a capitalist system is an insatiable, unstoppable drive to maximize surplus value by any means necessary. In an economy where there is widespread competition (another essential component of capitalism, though how "free" this competition ever is is another story), it is impossible to raise your commodity's surplus value simply by raising its price; commodities are worthless if they are not consumed (and thereby transformed back into money), and if your product costs more than a similar product made by a competitor, then nobody will buy your product, and as a commodity, it's dead. So the way to succeed in the surplus-value game is to keep the end price of your product as low as you can while a) depressing the cost of production, so that you are no longer paying full value for either the labor or the raw materials that go into it and b)selling as many of these commodities as you possibly can so that the little bits of surplus value that you can extract from them start to add up to something.

Marx was concerned primarily with what he considered the real source of surplus value, which was the exploitation of labor: the "extra" value is created by extracting from your workers an amount of labor which is worth much more than what you actually pay for it. We're familiar with that; it's the main reason that so much of what we buy is produced in China, where labor costs much less than it does in, say, the U.S. But the other way to create surplus value is to find ways to put less money into the raw materials out of which you make the product while continuing to sell it for the same price. Obviously, one way to do that is to replace an expensive chemical with a cheaper chemical that has most of the same properties and will perform the same function. The fact that this chemical might poison the commodity's consumers is of no interest to the capitalist--unless and until that fact starts to affect the commodity's exchange value.

Of course, satisfying ironies aside, China is only one piece of this commodity circuit. The reason Chinese manufacturers are racing each other to the bottom by pulling crap like this is that they are competing for the business of Western-owned and operated corporations, and what they are really selling to these corporations, apart from the toys, is extra surplus value. And although these companies all have to profess themselves horrified when they discover where that surplus value comes from, they're all still trying to buy up as much of it as they can.

So that's what's really sending these toddlers to the hospital. Surplus value.

Criminy,

The Plaid Adder