A Brief Reply to Kalindi Vora’s “Others’ Organs: South Asian Domestic Labor and the Kidney Trade”

 
Basing itself largely on an emergent body of ethnography concerning the contemporary traffic in human organs, and especially on the buying and selling of human kidneys in South Asia, Kalindi Vora’s “Others’ Organs: South Asian Domestic Labor and the Kidney Trade” can certainly lay claim to a considerable degree of ethical and political urgency. It quite rightly insists as well on the need to view this horrific new form of globalized commerce as inseparable, from the standpoint of the logic of capital, from the no less desperate circumstances leading to the export of “whole” South Asian laboring bodies themselves, here the Sri Lankan women who make up a large proportion of the domestic “care” workers in wealthy enclaves such as the Gulf State of Dubai. To the extent that it draws the attention of its readers to this real and sinister index of the South Asian economic “miracle” even now still being touted in the pages of mainstream media and among the diehard apologists for neoliberal economics and development policies, its appearance in the pages of Postmodern Culture is a welcome occurrence.
 
Less fortunately, however, “Others’ Organs” regards these “vital commodities” insofar as they are products of what Vora also terms “affective and biological labor from the Global South” as, when viewed from a “cultural studies framework and building upon feminist and postcolonialist theories of value and production,” arguments for “the need to rethink the terms of Marx’s labor theory of value” (par. 3). The bulk of the essay attempts to make good on this theoretical claim. The results are disappointing, and purport to engage in a debate with or somehow emend the theoretical axioms laid out in the first chapter of volume I of Capital in which the latter, for this reader at any rate, have become virtually unrecognizable. At one point Vora does offer the following reasonably approximate gloss on what she refers to only as the “labor theory of value”:
 

 

For Marx, value in its multiple forms can be quantified through labor time, or time spent expending the energy of the body and mind in producing an object, which under capitalist production becomes a commodity. He argues that at the level of the commodity, value can exist as both exchange value and use-value, but these are ultimately different moments in the life of value produced by labor.
 

(par. 6)

 

One wonders what “multiple” can be referring to here, but otherwise fair enough. Yet with what is virtually this one exception, the word “value” itself undergoes a bizarre and, it would seem, symptomatic process of continuous ambiguation or conceptual slippage throughout the pages of “Others’ Organs.” So, for example, Vora’s opening anecdote concerning the tragic death of the Pakistanti/Afghani airborne stowaway Mohammed Ayaz, fallen from the undercarriage of a plane at Heathrow airport in 2001, becomes a “story [that] also forces us to think that … lives [such as Ayaz’s], their labor, and their value may circulate outside the logic of capital” (par.3; my emphasis). “Outside”? For anyone the least bit attuned to the argument of Capital I, this is a sheer oxymoron: value, or valorization, is the logic of capital: “buying in order to sell,” or, in Marx’s celebrated formula, M-C-M’, the conversion of money, or a quantum of value, via its conversion into its commodity form and sale, into more money (Marx 247-257). To be “outside” value in this sense—and Vora never specifies any other that connects in any way to the terms of Marx’s theory of value—surely, is eo ipso to be outside the other, capital. “Value” that circulated outside the logic of M-C-M’ would not be value any longer.

 
But “Others’ Organs” proceeds as though some other, intermediate sort of “value,” neither the socially necessary abstract labor that, per Marx, constitutes the “substance” of value and whose duration constitutes the latter’s “magnitude” (Marx 125-130) nor the common sense cultural or ethical sense of the lexeme as, say, “norm” or subjectively-held judgment or belief were discoverable in the organ-trafficking and the “affective” labor of South Asian care workers. “I recognize,” writes Vora,
 

the labor theory of value advanced in Marx’s Capital as the dominant logic of the way new forms of commodities and commodified labor forms behave under capital, but at the same time, as subaltern historiographies and feminist materialist scholarship have established, I suggest that other economies are made illegible within the dominant logic. These other articulations of value establish multiple meanings of commodities and labor, and therefore the lives and bodies entangled in systems of value.
 

(par. 8)

 

But to insist however stubbornly on the point in question here: if the “meanings” of these “other” economies are in fact articulable (and therefore, in the end, surely “legible”) within the dominant and contradictory logic of value (of capital)—and surely, on this precise point, Vora is right: other, non-capitalist relations of production may still persist in a subordinate position within the capitalist mode of production as a whole—then what sense does it make to refer to them as articulations of “value” at all? It is not that value has no other. It is that the other of value is something other than value. Value, like the Hebrew deity of the book of Exodus, “shall have no other gods before” it. That, as the great, systematic and unequalled concretion of Marx’s thought throughout his mature work makes clear over and over again, is precisely the historical specificity of “self-valorizing value,” i.e., of capital. By settling for what soon enough becomes the transparent and facile rhetorical sleight in which one speaks of “value” as at one and the same time the “dominant”—and consummately objective—”logic of capital” and as nevertheless a function of how people are represented (“valuable” or not?), of “value” as something “assigned to people as labor-commodities” (Vora par. 19) may alleviate some immediate multiculturalist anxiety lest one be suspected of failure to respect difference. But it does so at the cost of effacing what is precisely the historical difference of value, i.e., of the commodity-form, as, to use Moishe Postone’s invaluable phrase, a “form of social mediation.”

 
The word matters here, because the concept, and the theory, and the critique towards which it beckons and refers, matter, and this not only for purposes of mere intellectual rigor but ultimately for the lives of the South Asian—as of all—victims of capital over whose plight Vora evinces her unquestionably sincere and deeply felt agony in this essay. In this sense it is worth considering (as Vora appears to do at one point; see par. 24)¹ whether in fact the terrible, barbaric necessity that forces South Asian villagers to sell their kidneys in the vain attempt to escape from debt-peonage no longer obeys the logic of the labor theory of value at all but that of its historical crisis and breakdown—the fact that the de-valorized, in effect (to use Robert Kurz’s term) “unexploitable” labor-power of the vendor—and of an immense proportion of the globe’s pool of potential wage-laborers—makes of her organ (in Scheper-Hughes’s term, as cited by Vora) the “last commodity” precisely because the labor-power of its “owner” is itself no longer saleable as a commodity. Here the theoretical terms of Capital allow us to be quite precise:² the kidney, we might reason, is sold not for its value—it has none in this case—but for its price. It takes the form of a commodity, but is not itself a commodity—here because it is literally all that remains to the seller when what is truly the “last commodity,” labor-power, now no longer commands any market whatsoever. Contra “Others’ Organs,” there can, in fact, be no “supplement” (par. 34) to the labor theory of value—no more than there can be a “supplement” to the history that produced it and that now seems well on its way to driving it, with what for now at least appear to be the immediate prospect of even more catastrophic social consequences, to its own self-abolition.