While Marx put forward the objectification of labor, he also put forward the concept of objectifying life. The information activity of integrating labor into brand has evolved from the objectification of labor to the objectification of life.
Economics is first of all a study of human beings and a theory about human activities; The schema of economic activities is firstly the schema of human activities.
Such a human activity, which integrates physiological and psychological life activities, can be diffracted by some people and enter the market in the form of "objectified" information, and non-materialized virtual value appears.
An important contribution of Smith's labor theory of value is to take labor value as the measure of value, and put forward two factors: labor time and labor intensity, so that human beings can find a negotiable social standard for measuring value for the first time.
Marx's Labor Alienation: "The more a laborer produces, the less he can consume;" The more value he creates, the less valuable and humble he is; The more perfect the workers' products are, the more deformed the workers themselves are; The more civilized workers create, the more barbaric they are; The stronger the labor force, the weaker the workers; The more skilled the worker is, the more stupid the worker is, and the more he becomes a slave to nature. "
Originally, labor is only a subsystem in the large system of human activity schema; Working life is only a narrow form of human life in a broad sense; Classical economics abstracts such local phenomena into a whole, an abstraction that materializes human activities.
In Marx's research, there is a huge watershed between "material" and "immaterial". Without the category of matter, Marx's research came to an abrupt end.
Smith's labor theory of value holds that the labor contained in value can be measured physically, that is, the labor time and labor intensity contained in labor can be measured by physical time and space. In view of Adam Smith's practical use of physical time-space scale to measure value and wealth, the labor that produces value and wealth can only be an activity based on human limbs, and its elements can be abstracted into two parts: one is the space of human limbs, and the other is the time of human limbs.
People's activities on any kind of material object can eventually be transformed into time, so time can always be used as the only measure in the end.
This economic theory based on Newton's absolute view of time and space (cosmology) temporarily abandons the complexity of social people, the subject of value enjoyment, and replaces the complexity of social life with the simplicity of physics. This simplification of understanding is a great progress in human history. This view of wealth is material-oriented, and the consideration of value is also material-centered, so it can be called material-oriented economy (real economy).
The so-called classical economics (national economics) is actually material basic economics. Matter-based economics is naturally the main logic to explain the economic activities at that time.
As the pioneer and founder of marginal utility theory, Ghosn is an incomplete materialist, because he did not regard man as a physical person completely and admitted the existence of the central theoretical role of value formation. This paper comprehensively and systematically discusses the utility axiology based on consumers' feelings. However, he is not a thorough humanitarian. When describing and discussing the utility theory of value, he did not dare to explore independent psychological needs, but returned to studying people's physiological tolerance for material desires as the object. It is precisely because he is a complex figure between materialism and humanism, and also because of the famous Ghosn's first law and Ghosn's second law.
Ghosn's first law: for a person, the utility of a commodity decreases with every increase in existing total consumption.
Gehlsen's second law: rational people should reach every point when spending on every commodity. At this time, the last unit of money spent on each commodity will bring the same satisfaction as the last unit of money spent on any other commodity.
The marginal utility theory of value only describes people's instantaneous psychological needs, and as a result, it is impossible to establish a complete humanistic thought in economics. The utility theory of value is the same as the labor theory of value, where people's psychological needs have not been recognized in a real sense, and its alienation of human nature still exists, and it has not returned to the life theory of value of objectifying life.
However, once people enter the field of pure psychological needs, such as the symbol of consumption wealth, there will never be a so-called law of diminishing utility demand, and of course there will never be a law of equal marginal utility.
Another example is consumer fashion. If the consumption point is fashion and style, then each different fashion has the same effect on consumers and cannot replace each other. When you spend the first unit currency, the effect is the same, not when you spend the last unit currency. Such a phenomenon, which is almost purely psychological, is more and more common in human life today.
Marked virtual value is never marginal, and unmarked virtual value is always marginal.
The alienation of human nature by the economic theory with the labor theory of value as the core in the material-based economy has become the experience of Marx's truth. Therefore, Marx criticized the theory of material-based economy from the standpoint of humanitarianism.
Say, a French classical economist, once said: "Supply yourself and create demand", which is the famous "Say's Law". Unexpectedly, the capitalist world was in crisis in the 1920s. At this time, neither Say's law, marginal revolution, nor Marshall's neoclassical economics as a compromise between them worked, so Keynesianism appeared, which put forward the opposite view to Keynesianism: "Demand creates supply by itself". But in fact, careful observers will find that under the advocacy of Keynes, the "New Deal" of expanding domestic demand made by the Roosevelt administration at that time mostly invested in public facilities. From the perspective of value, this kind of investment is also a kind of supply. It is precisely because this supply creates the possibility of a new life that supply can stimulate the generation of new demand layer by layer, just like pulling out bamboo shoots.
The universality of man, that is, the essence of man is to subordinate the whole natural material world to himself and become his own inorganic body state, which is called the objectification of life. In such an object of life, people are conscious and dynamic. People have not only physiological (physiological) purposes in life, but also spiritual (psychological) purposes. And the design of the whole social economy should also follow such an idea.
We should point out that in the era of generalized virtual economy in which life is objectified, if we follow the well-known concept of labor, today's "alternative labor" that creates virtual value is not as cruel as traditional labor, but more and more close to people's social life and more integrated into the history of human life.
Marx called traditional labor "alienated and externalized labor". Then, the "alternative labor" that people create virtual value today is obviously moving towards assimilation and internalization. The so-called assimilation is the convergence with human nature, and the so-called internalized labor shows that such "alternative labor" is not something outside people's lives.
From labor objectification to life objectification. From people's concern about use value to virtual value (perceived value), from real economy (material-based economy) to generalized virtual economy (people-oriented economy), we can find that it has undergone a change from physics to psychological thinking.
Marx believes that under the condition of objectification of labor, labor creates labor as a commodity, which is also a true portrayal of material-based economy; Then we can see that under the condition of objectifying life, it is life that creates life as a commodity. Obviously, such a life as a commodity cannot be explained by materialization. Must be the unity of materialization and non-materialization. Among them, non-materialized factors will dominate. The so-called dematerialization is caused by fog, which is a part of people's life that expresses their psychological needs. And this part is the information state shown by the collection of social psychology.
Maslow, an expert on social psychological needs, put forward five levels of people's basic needs atmosphere: (1) physiological needs; (2) Safety requirements; (3) the need to love and be loved; (4) Respect for needs (5) Self-realization of needs. Half of these five needs are psychological needs, because safety needs can be understood as psychological needs and physiological needs accounting for 50% respectively, and the latter three needs are psychological needs. That is to say, in the basic needs of human beings, psychological needs account for 70%, and psychological needs are the main body of human needs, but it is precisely such an important human demand that has been marginalized by economic research.
In the study of economics, the change from physics to psychological thinking is tantamount to the disappearance of the concept of absolute time and space and the establishment of relative time and space in natural science.
It is the establishment of this psychological concept of time and space that truly establishes the application of the new schema of human activities from the objectification of labor to the objectification of life in economics, and makes the people-oriented harmonious economy enter today's era.
Adam Smith realized the objectification of labor, and founded the labor theory of value on this basis, pointing out that labor is the basis of commensurability and exchangeability of goods. Marx discovered the objectification of life and the general schema of human life-the objectification of subject power. The objectification of manual labor is only a narrow understanding of the objectification of life, and the objectification of life has a broader significance. This is Marx's first contribution to economics. Or the most important creation of Marxist economics lies in the discovery of the objectification of life.
Only in this way can we understand the unity of Marxist dialectical materialism and historical materialism with Marxist economics. From the perspective of historical materialism, the starting point of human social history and logic is human life practice, and the starting point of Marxist economics must also be human life practice. In this sense, Marxist economics should first be humanistic economics.
For us, the most important thing is to interpret life and realize that differentiated life is the most essential thing in commodity exchange.
Value and wealth belong to realistic people whose spirit is in the body and nature is in the society and system, but not to abstract economic people. The view of time and space adhered to by humanistic economics is a psychological view of human beings as a class, which has strong sociality and subjectivity. People objectify their own lives, so the value elements in life can be exchanged between people. It is precisely because of the differences in life that communication is needed. An objectified life is the object of others' lives.
It is precisely because people are people that other people's lives can become their own. Just because people are people, their lives will inevitably become others' lives. People not only produce various means of subsistence, such as food, clothes, housing, transportation and so on. These materials are not only the objectification of their own essential strength, that is, the objectification of life, but also an integral part of other people's lives and also produce other people's lives. Even people's life experience will become the object of evaluation by others, especially some dramatic characters will reappear as cultural products in the form of comedy and become the object of people's life.
Understanding value and wealth from these two different ways of thinking will inevitably lead to different conclusions. The value and wealth understood from the objectification of manual labor are first of all material and objective, while the value and wealth understood from the objectification of life must be subjective and social, because life, as the essential attribute of value, is spiritual, subjective and social.
The essential attribute of wealth is harmonious life, and wealth is the condensation of objectification of human life. This kind of condensation is not only materialization, but also objectification of human life. This kind of condensation is not only materialized, but also non-materialized. As a commodity, such an objectification of human harmonious life not only meets people's physiological (material) needs, but also meets people's spiritual (information) needs, which constitutes a brand-new concept of wealth.
First of all, the value of wealth still includes use value, but not only use value, but also virtual value to meet psychological (information) needs. Wealth without utility is not wealth, but it is not wealth that people can't feel. Not only has the use value but also has the psychological feeling value (virtual value), which is the primary attribute of wealth.
Secondly, wealth must be a right, so that people have the right to rent and realize. They can neither rent nor realize it, but what they consume can only meet people's temporary (material) and (psychological) needs, instead of becoming their wealth, they can only become necessities of life, not wealth.
It is necessary to make a new definition of rent-seeking. Modern economy often refers to the behavior of using public resources to seek benefits for itself and some people as rent-seeking, so rent-seeking is a derogatory term. Rent-seeking in this book is not derogatory, but is defined on the basis of this thinking: because the most profitable value is virtual value, which has stronger social attributes. The most typical one is real estate, which is defined as value rent-seeking.
Finally, wealth must also have the property of satisfying people's expectation of maintaining and increasing value, as well as the property of capital.
The limitation of people's understanding of the scale of wealth is largely due to the limitation of people's understanding of the elements of value. When Adam Smith thinks that the word "value" has two different meanings: "Sometimes it refers to the utility of a particular commodity, and sometimes it refers to the ability to buy other commodities when you own it. The former can be called "use value" or "exchange value"
In the era of material economy, people are exchanged with use value. In the era of generalized virtual economy, use value and virtual value enter the exchange field at the same time.
That is to say, the value of goods changes from the duality of use value and value to the duality of use value, virtual value and value, which will greatly increase the complexity of value measurement. ?
The value of virtual value depends entirely on the feelings and recognition of the creator outside the whole, and has nothing to do with the time paid by the creator, or has a negative correlation (for example, reprinting old stamps will make stamps depreciate rapidly).
Obviously, the so-called recognition cannot be measured by traditional physical space-time. This kind of recognition or concern, the social attribute of formal virtual value far exceeds the strong proof of use value.
What are the attributes of virtual value?
(1) Virtual value tends to be formalized; (2) Virtual value has the ability of rent-seeking and realization; (3) Virtual value has the ability of maintaining and increasing value.
The objectification of human life is the basis of virtual value and generalized virtual economy, which is determined by the schema of human activities.
Therefore, the birth of the wealth symbol is the first time that people focus their needs on economic activities.
Wealth symbol exists as a carrier (form) of objectification of human past life, that is, it is produced in such a "recorded" memory. This kind of "memory" is more and more, which is a summary of wealth signs.
At first, money was regarded as the equivalent of commodity exchange, which eventually developed into a special commodity. However, when people consume (hold) this special commodity, it is precisely the "memory" (wealth symbol) as the objectification of life. Such wealth symbols have such a function that they can store the past human life (objectification) and, if necessary, convert different spaces or different times into human life (objectification). This understanding restores what Smith called the "circular wheel" movement. According to Smith, it is the full value of money, that is, the wheel of circulation and distribution, that is added to the money that circulates and distributes with it.
Wealth symbols are exquisite in today's society. An article can be a symbol of wealth (such as real estate and gold), and a credit can also be a symbol of wealth, such as a strong currency, securities, and even a profession (such as a surgeon and a financier). Not only a country's currency is a symbol of wealth, but also a country's right of abode (green card) and a city's right of abode (hukou) can be a symbol of wealth. They have both emotional value and rental liquidity, which can meet people's expectations. It can be said that we are in an era of generalization of wealth symbols.
Undoubtedly, history and civilization are a process of accumulation, and wealth is naturally a process of accumulation. This accumulation process needs more and more wealth symbols to carry, which means that the objectification of human life is constantly jumping to a higher level. Accordingly. The generalization of wealth symbols becomes inevitable.
The generalization of wealth symbols includes two factors: (1) the type of wealth symbols; (2) the scale and quantity of wealth signs
The rigorous method of human economic thinking follows such a track: with the objectification of labor and life, a large number of symbols bearing his wealth were born, and people's pursuit of wealth labels made wealth symbols generalized, which is the initiator of today's economic bubble.
The biggest watershed between real economy and generalized virtual economy is actually a philosophical problem. The real economy is pessimistic about human beings, while the generalized virtual economy is optimistic about human beings.
When people are consuming (holding) wealth symbols, there will never be such an incredible problem as the satisfaction of the last unit utility. It is precisely because of the infinity of wealth symbol consumption that the transfer of psychological needs becomes inevitable. Once this transfer happens, the symbol of wealth, as a building based on people's psychology, will inevitably collapse and an economic bubble will appear.
The persistence of the popularity of a social information collection, especially as a symbol of wealth, needs the support of an institutional platform. Such an institutional platform is the modern credit system.
In fact, whether in the narrow virtual economy or in the broad virtual economy, virtual value exists independently and is based on a wide range of value information states, which is the "popularity" mentioned above.
If the information in nature can be concentrated by material, then the wealth symbol is the concentration of this wealth value information state. The information state of such a kind of wealth is condensed by many wealth values, which can be released and restored to specific wealth values in economic activities. Such a reciprocating process is the evolution of wealth value, constantly accommodating new information media in economic activities and realizing the sublimation of value. This is an evolution based on information, which actually constitutes today's generalized virtual economy.
The premise of this information-based adaptive state (evolution) is the duality of value. Today's economic value has such duality. Physiological (material) needs and psychological (information) needs constitute its duality; Wealth and wealth symbols also constitute its duality; Use value and virtual value also constitute its duality. It is this duality that makes economic value constantly accommodate information media, and realizes the evolution based on information movement and the state of dual value accommodation.
With the development of economy, signs born of material wealth have appeared. The wealth symbol originally used as wealth has almost completely evolved into wealth itself in people's minds, which is what we call the generalization of wealth symbols.
The extreme state of wealth symbol generalization has emerged, that is, many wealth symbols do not need to use scarce and expensive materials as carriers, but only need a reliable credit system to maintain their form. The "credit" created by "popularity" has become very important and can even become a commodity.
Virtual economy in a broad sense has changed our substantive view of social life, including economy. Its fundamental view is that people communicate with the world not only through labor, but gradually through their own lives, and people also communicate with the world not only through labor, but gradually exchange all the value elements in their lives. This is the adaptive state of human social and economic activities.
Communication is always accompanied by human beings, but the breadth and depth of communication develop with the development of society; Communication began in the era of human civilization, but the breadth and depth of communication in different eras are also different. The essence of exchange is accommodation, the expansion of economic life is accompanied by the expansion of exchange, and the essence of economic development stage is the development stage of exchange.
Human's essential strength is the objectification that can be expressed in social life and understood and accepted by people, which is human culture (information state). Since everything in nature exists objectively without exception, let alone human society. All human activities, that is, life-social existence, are the objectified products of its internal essential strength (the procedure and orientation of human activities are referred to as culture for short). This is the basic viewpoint of Marxist historical materialism and dialectical materialism.
The social reflection and realization of people's intrinsic strength is culture, and only this kind of culture (information) can be exchanged by human beings, that is, it changes according to culture (information).
No matter whether culture (information) is simple or complex, conservative or radical, it can't change its nature as the procedure and orientation of human activities, so in a sense, what people can exchange is nothing more than culture (information). Therefore, all wealth is neither in agriculture (the school that emphasizes agriculture), nor in commercial circulation (the school that emphasizes business), nor even just created by labor (classical economics). Because the basis of exchange is not all these things, but the essential strength of human beings in human culture (the procedure and orientation of human activities). Without the recognition of this essential power, that is, the information state represented by "popularity" and "people's heart", there is no possibility and basis for exchange. This is the fundamental prerequisite for human beings to exchange. In other words, the objectification of life makes it possible to exchange in a universal sense.
Objectization alone obviously does not constitute all the necessary conditions for exchange, because people objectify the essential forces in various things, and unity is dismembered by differences. Without unity, people can't exchange, so human beings spent a period of ignorance with only exchange and no exchange, until one day smart human beings "objectified" the scattered unity on some wealth symbols (shells, gold and silver, etc.). ), which laid the foundation for communication. In other words, it is because of the symbol of wealth that exchange becomes a reality.
The baptism demand and spiritual demand that could not be monetized can now enter the exchange field, which is the inevitable appearance of generalized virtual economy.
Culture is actually the creation of human's essential strength. It is the inherent stipulation of culture that determines the basic form of human life. And "popularization" is the yeast and catalyst in this basic form, which promotes and guides its changing form and direction. Because of this, in the era of generalized virtual economy, the information desk expressed by "popularity" has undoubtedly become the unprecedented first resource.
In 1960s, Schultz first put forward the concept of human capital. He believes that human capital is the sum of workers' knowledge, skills and health, and the improvement of human capital contributes more to economic growth than the increase of material and labor.
Once the theory of human capital was put forward, it soon fell into an embarrassing situation that it could not be clearly distinguished from the traditional concept of human capital, and even the phenomenon of confusing human capital with human resources appeared.
In addition to the elements of capital, creating use value must also be put into the "indiscriminate labor" of human beings; To create virtual value, besides the "undifferentiated labor" of capital and people, we should also invest in two more important human activities.
"Non-undifferentiated human labor" is a kind of human intellectual activity paid by human beings in economic activities, which cannot be simply measured by time.
Monetary capital and human resources can create goods with only use value. According to the traditional materialist economic theory, monetary capital should occupy surplus in time. However, it is difficult to create virtual value effectively only by adding human resources to monetary capital. Only by joining the human activities of "non-indiscriminate labor" can virtual value be effectively created. At this time, the surplus value of an enterprise is no longer possessed by money alone, but should actually be shared with human capital.
What human resources can contribute in enterprise activities is the value of human's "undifferentiated labor" in objectification; The value of objectifying human intelligence activities in enterprise activities is human capital.
More and more enterprises, especially those whose main purpose is to create virtual value, have made equal contributions to the development of enterprises with human capital.
Just as labor theory of value is the basic theory of human capital theory, accommodation theory is the basic theory of generalized virtual economy. Because the intermediary movement is actually an evolutionary and qualitative movement when the original information body IQ adapts to the new foreign aid information, this movement is also a form.
Only those who create value in the activities of enterprises are human capital, otherwise they can only be human resources.
Mental workers are not necessarily human capital, and manual workers are not necessarily human capital. The key is to see whether the labor paid by practitioners is "undifferentiated" or "non-undifferentiated"; It depends on whether the process of creating value by practitioners is an introduction activity, that is, whether the value created by practitioners does not contain information such as "non-indifference", rather than a "indifference" activity that can be abstracted as time as the same measure.
In fact, not only the employees who are mainly engaged in mental work can become the human capital of enterprises, but also many employees who are mainly engaged in manual work on the surface should become the human capital of enterprises.
In today's generalized virtual economy era, when the creation of virtual economic value accounts for an increasing proportion in economic development, the amount of human capital investment will increase significantly. So it is very important to determine the value of human capital in what kind of market.
-Excerpted from "Dual-value Accommodation Economy in Generalized Virtual Economy" by Lin Zuoming.