Reciprocity, Recognition and Labor Value: Marx's Incidental Moral Anthropology of Capitalist Market Exchange

Talcott Parsons, the Sick Role and Chronic Illness

“…Valuing people's contribution here is based neither just on their potential (capacity), nor just on how much of their potential people are ready to realize, that is, to what extent they contribute their capacity. The value of actualized labour power is qualified by what is socially defined as its relevant skill (Varul, 2010) -and so too are individual healths as different capacities.…”

“…The use of money as symbolic recognition and as material realisation of that recognition (Varul, 2010) enforces the existential nature of the anomie constituted by illness. In a society championing 'universalistic achievement values', tokens of approval for specific performances are the central element in the social reward system.…”

“…Given the way the sick role is embedded in a capitalist moral economy it seems nonetheless appropriate to retain the notion of even purely physiological incapacity as deviant. Valuing contribution here is based neither just on one's potential (capacity), nor just on its motivated realization -the value of actualized labour power is qualified by what is socially defined as its relevant skill (Varul, 2010) -and so, too, are individual healths as different capacities.…”

“…In his medical sociology, as in his general theory, he was interested not so much in concrete behaviours as in the normative expectations structuring and structured by ordinary practices in capitalist societies (Arluke, 1988: 176;Parsons, 1964: 257ff.). Although those practices have changed considerably in the various transitions described under labels like 'post-Fordism' and 'the New Economy', both the success orientation of economic practices and the fundamental patterns of capitalist reciprocity and recognition (Varul, 2010) have remained intact and may even have become more accentuated (Gorz, 2005: 6). With this tension between a shrinking field of application and a persisting moral plausibility in mind, I will suggest that the obsolescence of the Parsonian sick role is not due to the marginalization of its field of application but to its expansion beyond its temporal and spatial boundaries.…”

The cultural tragedy of production and the expropriation of the brickolariat: The Lego Movie as consumer-capitalist myth

“…Contemporary myths are unstable, and one reason for this instability, which does not allow any one myth to settle in as unquestioned truth, is the instability of the reality that contemporary mythical interpretation deals with. Not only is capitalism as an economic-moral system inherently contradictory (Varul, 2010), but its very life principle is critical volatility. That current capitalism is in crisis is nothing new: Capitalism always is in crisis.…”