One thing I have noticed is that some people who study Marxism struggle to understand wealth under socialism. I have, for instance, seen people try to calculate the “value” people have access to by dividing global GDP with the number of people in the world, etc.
Of course doing so is nonsensical, because the number you get is completely arbitrary, it is not accounted for in terms of increment of circulation or in terms of purchasing power, inflation, etc. It means absolutely nothing.
So precisely how does one calculate this?
The answer is surprisingly simple, and can be done with a thought experiment. All we must do is to imagine a world where citizenships are market commodities. So you are born in a country, and you get a citizenship. However in this world you can buy, sell or exchange this citizenship on the market.
You can sell it and become stateless, or you can buy another one, or even several. You can give it as a gift, etc. It’s like a product on the market, simply put.
So what then would determine the value of a citizenship? There is two kinds of value that’s of interest here, exchange value and use value. Exchange value is the pricetag value that you find in shops. It includes marketing, markups, reputation, demand, even fraud. It is literally the amount you pay for something, no matter the circumstances. As such, exchange value is subjective.
Then there’s use value, which is objective. It is thanks to use value that we can for instance determine whether or not someone has committed fraud. After all, let’s say you buy a fake property deed, like the guy who “sold” the golden gate bridge.
In a court of law, without use value, the defendant could simply argue that since all value is subjective, there’s no difference between a property deed that falsely represents the ownership of the golden gate bridge, and a property deed that accurately represents it. In fact you could argue that a cruise liner is worth the same as a unicycle, etc.
In liberal economics, this is known as market evaluation. You don’t know how much a product is worth until it is assigned a “use” value through transaction, since the way you “use” a commodity is by exchanging it on the market. That’s the difference between a commodity, and a thing.
For instance a bike that’s commodified no longer has the purpose of transportation. It has the purpose of exchange. Hence the labels, the adverts, the no return policy, the promotional deals, etc. Priority 1 is to sell the bike, they don’t care what you do with it.
But what about the use value of a bike that isn’t a commodity? That would likely be determined by things such as speed, reliability, handling, safety, etc. This bike would not be appraised by how well it is marketed, but rather by how well it is engineered.
I think you get the general picture here. So let’s examine the use value of a citizenship.
First off, which citizenship would have a higher value do you think? A US citizenship, or a German citizenship?
I think the US would have a very high exchange value, because they know how to market themselves. It might be the only country in the world with a marketing campaign. “Greatest country in the world.”, “American dream” etc. I cannot think of a single other country that has carried out an advertising campaign for immigrants.
However I also think Germany would offer higher use value. In the US, citizenship permits you basic legal protections that more or less covers the right to exist, and even then there’s exceptions. Homeless people for instance are frequently rounded up by police simply for taking up too much public space.
But Germany has a citizenship that offers some pretty neat perks comparatively speaking. Subsidised medicine, education and retirement for one thing, as well as a far more flexible legal system in terms of the right to exist. You also have better social security, and even certain kinds of state funded insurance programmes. So you get more use value for your money.
It’s like a reliable sedan versus a flashy sports car. One gives you status and reputation, but might not be the best choice in terms of reliability and quality, the other gives you a more modest status, but it functions far more efficiently.
Especially when we’re talking about German cars.
So what about socialism then? US and Germany are both liberal countries. How would a Marxist country affect use value?
First off, guaranteed housing. Secondly, subsidised public transportation, thirdly, guaranteed healthcare, fourthly, guaranteed employment, etc.
The Soviet Union had one of the world’s most advanced public transportation systems to the point of where driving a personal automobile was seen as a specialist profession since nobody needed it. Compare that to liberal countries where car lobbyists will force the government to set up infrastructure that makes cars more or less mandatory.
That means that a liberal citizenship sets you back the value of a car, whereas a socialist citizenship would provide you the value of a car.
Then following this we have employment guarantee. We all know how valuable this is, because it’s the reason why people are willing to put themselves into debt studying at private universities. Moreover, once again, the liberal labour market is set up to require such an education, so we see the contrast once more. In the USSR, you get the value of a higher education in the form of an employment guarantee, but in a liberal country, you are once more set back value wise.
The same is true about housing. As well as education for its own cultural and existential value.
So for every service privatised under liberalism, your citizenship has a negative use value, because you simply have to participate in the market or live like a caveman in the woods. Meanwhile, under socialism, these become positive values, meaning that the use value of a citizenship would reflect assets and services that could be worth millions over one’s lifetime.
And that’s why, curiously enough, every citizen under socialism is a functional millionaire. Not in the literal sense, I’m afraid there probably won’t be a lot of heated swimming pools and limousines, the Jeffrey Epstein lifestyle is off the table.
But in other more substantial ways there will be, in terms of security, recreation, living standard and even culture. Socialist countries have ministries of culture, so you can go to the opera, learn how to play musical instruments, get your book published, etc, etc.
Our ideas of what wealth is often get warped by advertising companies that focus entirely on exchange value. But fact of the matter is that glitz and glamour are very fleeting things compared to what Johnny Cash once referred to as A Satisfied Mind.
