Chapter
2: Complexity through the immanent deconstruction of simple totality
The
speculative logic in Marx’s Das Kapital
[132]
“It
is…not the least of the paradoxes of Marxism, which has time and again accused
Hegel of formalism, that it retains Hegelian form as valid, while condemning
the perversion of content.”[133]
“Even the
style of exposition of dialectical theory is a scandal and an abomination to
the canons of the prevailing language, and to sensibilities moulded by those
canons, because it includes in its positive use of existing concepts a simultaneous
recognition of their rediscovered fluidity, of their inevitable destruction.”[134]
Both of these comments derive
from two diverging effects of the explanatory force of Das Kapital, and the inevitable fact that its analytical power has
affected different outlooks in similar historical contexts in different ways.
However, the delight and inspiration with which the work’s moments of synthesis
and negation inspired Debord must be put alongside the difficulties they
brought to other readers, for instance those that treat the text either as an
attempt at a positive science (the nub of Habermas’s general critique of Marx)
or those autonomist readings that have tried to treat it foremost politically.
Through the various acts of interpretation of the text, many lacunae open up
that discredit its claim to grasp the totality of social relations. However,
whether attention is drawn to the lack of adequate theorisation of the role of
women in the reproduction of capital or its failure to finish its projected
analyses of imperialism and class and the role of the state in the attenuation
of class conflict, these criticisms are only ever partial. Within Marxist
discourse one of the most drastic effects of the close analytical and political
engagement with Marx’s theorisation of capital leads to a call for a total
break with the system. Very often however, such a drastic break is impossible
and even the most critical of attitudes towards the discourse can partly
reaffirm any of its premises. Even if the system is seen as unworkable, its
categories still inform the communities of knowledge producers, who gain
clarity of their own position through the distancing from this particular
conception of totality. Part of Spinoza’s appeal to Althusser was in providing
a conception of science that worked on a set of premises and drew necessary
conclusions from it. But Althusser’s more general comments about science are
more aptly applied to intellectual theoretical production within Marxism rather
than scientific production in broader society.
For Althusser this science had to be continuously working on its
premises in order to uncover new ground; if not it would become dogmatic.
The misunderstanding of the
form of Marx’s critique in Das Kapital has led it to be treated wrongly
as either a positivist economic work or an attempt at a total theory of
society. The positivist understanding is prominent in academic, intellectual
and political movements that see in Marx an explanation of capitalism through
the positive social forms of the commodity, money and labour enunciated there.[135]
What is not sufficiently attended to, is the collapse of these social forms;
the breaking up of their original simplicity and their coming into crisis. Far
from sharing the preoccupation of classical political economy in showing the
origin of commodity exchange and developing theories of the equilibrium and
equality of commodity exchange, Marx is concerned with taking this simple
totality of an abstract universal and showing how within its own relation it
creates conflict, contradiction, dynamism and change. The real difficulty seems
to lie in understanding quite what relation the categories have to the reality
they express. What is the ontology of value for Marx and to what extent does
its logico-deductive speculative presentation involve the positing and
decomposition of simple totality? What is the nature of the existence of value?
Is it a calculation, approximation made solely in the mind, or does value exist
as a human property of things? Is value anywhere or at any time actual?
Exposing the holes in Marxist
analysis has often been quite a fertile space in which those that continue to
identify with the premises of the science have been able to recover and
reinvent something of its critical power. Indeed by reading what is said whilst
bearing in mind these absences, the wealth of reactions to it and its differing
affects in mind it might be possible in certain instances to recreate the bond
between content and representation and therein reassemble something of the
totality and how it operates in its complexity.
Two of the debates
that refer to subjectivity inside and outside of the totality are the domestic
labour debate and the ontological status of labour in respect to capital.[136]
Both of these questions have their origins in claim that Marx ignores an
important realm of social life that is relevant to the inner structure of Das Kapital. Generally to approach a
book by what it does not say can be a way of avoiding treatment of what it does
say, but in the case of both of these issues, the reproduction of the working
class and the reproduction of capital, they are important to an overall
clarification of the subject area and Marx’s approach.
Only in so far as Das Kapital was an enterprise in some
classical form of representation can one agree with Ilyenkov when he says we
must look at the works Marx himself saw as best representing his system and not
so much the rough drafts of analysis that went into its production.[137]
It will be shown however how the exasperation with the Marx of Das Kapital has led several of his most
serious and enthusiastic supporters into fundamental conceptual difficulties
and so many lines of flight. One of these lines tries to resurrect the early
Marx or another to restructure Das
Kapital. In its foundations these problems have more or less always been
heavily conditioned by the practice of political movements and the nature of
the solidarities between them. And yet
almost because of this some of the more obvious questions about the nature of
Marx’s critique of capital and the implications of them for our thought about
the social and political have not had due hearing. Even something as apparently
obvious to Marx, such as the very existence of ‘capitalist society’ as a
totality, is not something socially self-evident but an expression of a
politics, a language and a philosophical conception of the nature of social
things. Using authors past and present we need to get to the bottom of the
nature of this totality and ask to what extent it is in the nature of the
science of totality so to speak (including therein the determinations of the
desire/ inclination for totality, operative historical and subjective factors,
metaphysics of the whole and the romantic sense of separation within social
life) that creates the disposition towards it or rather the actual nature of
the object of the science that determines the utilisation of totality and
totalisation (and the developments out of simple totality we have identified).
The question in studying capital then, seems to be how much totality depends on
the nature of subjectivity and vice versa and if one can be understood to have
ontological priority over the other.
Little qualification is needed to show that Marx tries makes his
categories dynamic but is this because they can be made identical with their
object; do they mirror it or are they adequate to it? Crucially this informs
what Marx sees as his object. One major camp, now I believe largely
discredited, believes it is history. Another, seemingly equally discredited,
poses it as structure. Some light can be shed on this by looking at the
mechanisms of presentation in Marx’s exposition, and observing what relation
the presentation has to its object.
The significance of the presentational structure of Das Kapital
The initial significance of
this discussion is to see how the totality is constructed and utilised by Marx.
Does the critique of political economy retain critical insights into the forces
of constitution of the social? The significance of the opening chapters is how
these indicate the way into the totality and what kind of nature that denotes.
It will be argued that the role of value in Marx’s treatment of the relations
of production in their totality depends upon categories that are only valid as
generalisations, that is to say abstractions from concrete activities raised up
to the level of totality through simplification or reduction of their
particularity. Value and abstract labour have no meaning as individual
activities, and yet the ‘real’ social relations they are the abstract concept
of do. Furthermore, the movements of value in the first questions show how
inextricably linked the category of value is from its embodiment in the
architectonic of totalising conceptual order. In the strong Hegelian
interpretation of Das Kapital, the
Hegelian movement is more than an order of explanation but in fact is a real
movement that exists beneath the surface relations (such as retail trade) that
are apparent to its participants. The representation is not external to the
object of reflection in the sense that Hegel found Spinoza’s philosophy lacking,
and in the sense used positively by Fichte,[138]
so the autogenesis of the depth must somehow follow from the surface, and thus
this brings quickly to the fore (as any questioning of this type does) the
choosing of the starting point from which the successive determinations will
follow. In so far as Marx recognised that the categories needed to follow a logical
sequential derivation, he is following totalising principles used by the German
idealist tradition. In the substance of those categories or their sociological
content, however, there is a completely different ontological order; they do
not follow logical derivation.[139]
It cannot be said that they strictly follow a Hegelian process of negation
either. There are limitations of this form of Hegelian presentation. What could
equally or better be seen as a horizontal actuality, an ontological field or a
rhizomatic form, Marx forces into a vertical and hierarchical order of
representation. In the reproduction cycles of Volume II Marx describes the
circularity and metamorphosis of forms of the commodity in a manner that does
not involve the kind of hierarchical sublation evident in Volume I. He
continues to adopt the approach of moving from the simple to expanded form of
the process, but this is more of an analytical movement and lacks the kind of
auto-genesis for which Volume I is renowned.
The historical presence of
the totality described in Das Kapital is
only polemically grounded, nor indeed does it appear to be the objective of the
argument to ground history with metaphysical proof of its materiality. Indeed
the material reality of social relations is pre-supposed at the beginning and
throughout Das Kapital. This insight
of Althusser’s is fundamental to clarifying the fundamental incompatibility
with the formal pretensions of the Hegelian dialectic that declares that
philosophy must start its speculative order from a position lacking in any
presuppositions. That the investigation is into the essential nature of a
historically specific mode of production does not require that its historical
parameters are the starting point of how the object can be scientifically
apprehended. In fact Marx points out in the famous Introduction that the order of exposition is the reverse of the
order of historical emergence, which is taken to mean that the concrete
combination of different dimensions of the explanation of capital is at first
only a horizon of the analysis. Some of the theoretical complications in the
theoretical problematic of Das Kapital,
stem directly from the attempt to force abstract and simple models of
production schemes onto actual phases of historical development. Infamous is
the interpretation of ‘simple commodity production’ as a once actually existing
simple and undifferentiated stage in economic development out of which
capitalism arose. Marx is not directly concerned here with the origins of
capitalism nor indeed does feudalism somehow ‘contain’ capitalism in itself.[140]
For Marx the historical presuppositions of a system have a different set of
determinations to those involved in system reproduction.[141]
So when Marx says we must look at ‘its most developed form’ this also means
something of an idealisation or a totalisation of the object, known beyond its
actual historical instantiation. The critique of this initial simplicity to the
complex totality can be found within the humanist reading, as seen for instance
the work of Hegelian Marxists like Chris Arthur who otherwise seek to hold on
to the logical-derivative model, that is to say, the speculative logic at work
in Marx’s categories. Although Arthur’s attempt to judge Marx’s schema in
relation to how it holds up to Hegel’s categories produces some insights into the
method it mostly creates a set of irresolvable problems that re-emphasise the
tenacity of Althusser’s criticism.
Throughout Das Kapital empirical and historical
references to the ‘real development’ are plentiful – but these instances seem
to be overall secondary to an argument that is presented on a dialectical,
conceptual theoretical basis. The theory of capital cannot be made through
explaining the causes and origins of capitalist society. Rather the theory must
look at the practice of the system in reproducing itself. It is here that the
work of the Althusserian reading of Das
Kapital, often overlooked, adds an important conceptual qualification on
the distinction between capital as a real object and an object of
knowledge.
Marx expressed his intention
to present Das Kapital, ”as a
dialectically articulated artistic whole” in a letter to Engels dated 31 July
1865. But the architectonic of this whole was to vary considerably. Recent
research has established that there are at least four rough drafts of Das Kapital,
all with noticeable difference in methods of presentation: and most importantly
all beginning from what in the final version of Das Kapital appears as part 2, (the transformation of money in
capital).[142] This is
significant because deconstructing the play between ontological necessity and
presentation in the first part has proved to be an almost impossible matter.
In the introduction to a new
publication of Das Kapital in France
Althusser infamously recommended that readers should ignore the opening few
chapters of the book, as they were a distraction from the essential content of
the work. However he does draw our attention to a problem that, although he
does not correctly resolve, puts us in a better position to understand the
functioning of totality. Althusser states that in Marx, the materialist
totality is always presupposed. In contrast to Hegel’s philosophy, where the
idea is the result of its own process of estrangement from itself, the
existence of the material totality always presupposes the analytical approach
to it. The theory cannot begin from totality, but at the same time totality is
its premise.
Neither an analysis of
totality nor an analysis that uses totality as a conceptual tool to grasp an
object that forms a whole can begin from totality. To begin from totality is
either to impose, from the outside, a schema of demarcation of the field that
is foreign to it, or it is to begin from nothingness or emptiness. The empty
totality informs nothing and can only be further broken down by any successive
determinations that enter into it. Because totality as a point of departure is
either this externality or this nothingness, it can only appear as a result,
which means further that the starting point to arrive at totality, must actually
be a division of that totality. Even if premised on an initial unity, this must
be broken down in order to form the parts that are capable of producing a
totality that is a result of its own process of combination. Alternatively to
arrive at totality as a result, two or more unrelated parts can be forced into
relation, but if this is the case, there is still an initial division or
dividedness from whence the synthetic moment comes (whether exercised by the
external intellect that works on its objects and forms their relation – or
whether it is ostensibly the force of the part itself that forces it to
transform itself into an other). For Marx, the commodity may well be the
elementary component of bourgeois wealth, but this does not mean that it is in
itself a simple form. In opposition to Lenin’s analysis (on which so much
Hegelian analysis draws), the initial division - not in the being of the
commodity but in the commodity form- is only possible because of the complexity
of the system of production, circulation and exchange that continuously
reproduces this complex form.
The division in the commodity
form is crucial because the negative moment is a denial of the self-subsistence
of the immediacy of the point of departure of the analysis. The commodity, as a
discrete totality, is negated and through its break up it invites a
re-composition into a newer and more evolved form of complex unity. Hence
although totality is not the starting point, in the form of the commodity there
is something that although it must have determinations that belong to it, are
not self evidently present within it. It is the substance of the commodity that
allows for Marx’s elaboration of a concrete totality that, to use Lyotard’s
expression, is a textually organic and supposedly unitary body.
Real abstraction and the simple point of departure
i) Historical preconditions of synchronic totality
In the Grundrisse Marx writes:
“While in the completed bourgeois
system every economic relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois economic
form, and everything posited is thus also a presupposition, this is the case
with every organic system. This organic system itself, as a totality, has its
presuppositions, and its development to its totality consists precisely in
subordinating all elements of society to itself, or in creating out of it the
organs [which] it still lacks. This is historically how it becomes a totality.
The process of becoming this totality forms a moment of its process, of its
development.”[143]
Thus the most developed form
is where the process has become totalised (complete commodification). Marx
makes a virtue of necessity here. His theorisation of capital depends on the
presupposition of the completeness of its form. This is not the same as saying
he does not think its form can continue to evolve, but he can only present its
form in what is available to him.[144]
Here the perspective of totality can be seen to be partial because it adopts
the perspective of the system in itself: its permanence, its reproduction, and
its circulation. There is no doubt that Marx ultimately sees the system as
dysfunctional, to the point where in the organic composition of dead and living
labour it continuously reduces the proportionate rate of increase in the value
producing element and the management of this crisis can only be noted as
tendency and potential. The system cannot be viewed systematically from the
point of view of its dissolution, but only from the conditions of possibility
of that dissolution within its process of reproduction. As a totality of
interiority its dissolution would require an action and subversion of the
system from a subject position grounded within it, which in so far as it
provokes crisis would mean the end of the reproduction of the system. As such
crisis can only be envisaged as an inevitable tendency within system
reproduction that, by the continuous interiorisation of labour to capital,
reproduces the conflict inherent to its dissolution.
To say, as Althusser does,
that by necessity of a materialist presupposition Marx must presuppose the real
concrete totality, does not mean that the totality that is presupposed is
grounded. Rather it is the process of this grounding of the totality that
involves the textual process of producing a conception of it as result. According
to Marx, the capital relation can not be intuitively nor immediately grasped as
a whole, hence what is needed, if one accepts that the totalisation of the
object in ideal terms (itself questionable), is a determinate abstraction that
gets us to an essential inner form of the totality that is necessarily a
universal feature of the system in question. Ilyenkov and Lenin amongst others
have described this method as the ascent from the abstract to the concrete but
it has equally been understood as a development from the general to the
particular.[145] There is
an extensive debate on exactly which element of Marx’s analysis; whether the
commodity form or wage labour, takes on this role of abstract universal. It is
now generally understood that whereas in Marx’s initial plans for Das Kapital in the Grundrisse the book on wage labour was to form the ‘inner
totality’, he decided that the starting point required a prior analysis of the
commodity form. From this point on, the analysis moves towards concretisation
whereby as the result of a simple formula, based on the totality of commodity
exchange, a general formula (of accumulation) can emerge as a result.
By basing the latter analysis
on the identities and oppositions implied by an abstract evaluation of commodity
exchange, the more historical and specific determinations of the working of
real capitalist society can emerge organically, as it were, out of an
expository analysis that in creates its own ground through its process. For
this and other reasons Marx’s method can be seen to belong to the immanent type
of dialectical movement of categories as they relate to and posit each other,
and hence an analysis grounded interior to a totality. At the same time
however, this avoids the inwardness of the metaphysical gaze onto the nature of
the self or consciousness thereof. That is to say whilst following an immanent
development in the interiority of the analytics, its subject matter is a social
form that is outside of the metaphysics of self consciousness and on the plane
of exteriority. It is a method of exposing an ontological relation based upon
the historical precedent of a sum of actions that lie outside of the head.
Although this realist perspective is paramount to understanding Marx, it is
often confused because Marx did not only work upon the empirical reality of
capitalist exchange; but equally took the existing conceptualisations of these
processes as his subject matter. For this reason, a doubly critical relation is
always in use: the abstraction from concrete reality, and the retracing of
existing conceptual abstractions back into reality.[146]
It is this dimension of
Marx’s method that makes it illegitimate to regard it as a form of positivism.
Marx is not simply concerned with the process of capitalist production but also
with the forms of social consciousness that arise from within it and that
enable it to function. In this conception economic science is shown in its
intimate connection with the exercise of social power. Moreover, it is not the
prioritisation/ naturalisation of labour as a species activity that provides
the possibility for Marx to have this conception of science. It is rather the
specific social form of labour, in particular, abstract labour, whose real
totalised existence allows for the whole possibility of market economy, that in
Marx’s eyes authorises and mandates an analysis that can proceed immanently
from an abstract universal. As we shall see, one difficulty with this initial
reduction of all labours to simple abstract labour is that it develops out of a
historically specific period when the discipline techniques of the factory
regime were becoming generalised.[147]
Rather than arising out of a humanist ontology of labour as species activity, this
analytical adoption of an actually existing universal, in fact derives from his
ontological commitment to the notion of an overarching totality of capitalist
social practice. For Marx, analysis can produce by abstraction, separation and
reduction because the social processes that it observes themselves form
abstractions, separations and reductions. The difficulty lies in the
correspondence between the thought form and the real process. Are they
parallel? Or are they concepts adequate to the processes they describe though
of a different nature to them. Can a dialectical sequence make them more than
approximations to social reality?
The role of the notion of
totality in Marx is not foremost a methodological principle as Lukács claimed. Rather
if this principle was present, it was doubly amplified by a demand upon thought
to give adequate explanation of a concrete system of relations that appeared to
exist in the world as a totality the like of which had only hitherto been
imagined in thought. This is to perform in political economy something like
that which Spinoza did in the interpretation of scripture in the grounding of
his political treatises i.e. to find its meaning entirely within its history.
Spinoza himself based this on an idea of natural reason, that which sought
knowledge of nature in nature alone.[148]
Marx’s critique of the fetishism of the commodity in capitalism, of the
‘inverted’ appearances, and of its scientific justifications and
mystifications, sought the explanation in capitalism alone. To develop the
concept of capital as a system, Marx did not base his analysis on its
historical origins.
In one of the places where
Marx does approach this relation from the point of view of its historical
formation, in The results of the Immediate Process of Production, Marx
theorises that a formal subsumption (interiorisation)
of the worker into the labour process is followed by a more thorough real subsumption of labour under
capital. This totalising process of the universal commodification of labour, is
that on which the discovery of the labour theory of value is based. For Marx
the theorists of classical political economy only chanced upon the theory of
value – but this was only possible in so far as its preconditions have become
developed within civil society and the practices and consciousness of its agents.
The theories of value in ‘bourgeois’ political economy developed ‘solely’
through the analysis of price, but the categories
of political economy as ‘forms of thought which are socially valid and
therefore objective.’[149]
Commenting on this matter, Jameson rightly argues that,
“…It became
possible for the first time to separate the unique quality and concrete content
of a particular activity from its abstract organization or end, and to study
the latter in isolation…we can think abstractly about the world only to the
degree to which the world itself has already become abstract.”[150]
If in fact, for Marx, “...the
whole system of bourgeois production is presupposed before exchange value
appears as the simple point of departure on the surface,” then the adoption of
this simple point of departure demonstrates that the path followed by the
analysis is not the same as that which created the conditions for capitalist
accumulation. Whereas, ‘the starting point of the development that gave birth
to the wage-labourer and to the capitalist was the enslavement of the worker”[151],
the initial stages of the analysis in Das Kapital do not theorise the
inferior power of the workers, nor the command of capitalists over him, but in
fact assume an equality between them as exchangers of commodities on an
equal footing. This shows that Marx begins his critique of capitalist society
by adopting the presuppositions of its rationalisation in contemporary science.
These presuppositions, in the process of the analysis, are either perfected or
rejected. What is most important however is that the analysis is not working
directly on the empirical reality of capitalist society, but critically working
at the level of the discourse internal to it. This discourse has practical,
experiential and sensuous origins but within society these experiences have
already been reflexively mediated through public and private systems of
thought. Only when these scientific systems are related to themselves, to each
other and to the empirical facts of capitalist accumulation, can the contradictions
that are produced be made to correspond to the actual experience of social
conflicts that the analysis initially put aside.
ii) The simple abstractions of value and
abstract labour in the architectonic of Das
Kapital
In the survey of the
literature on Marx’s relation to Hegel and the dialectics of the commodity form
it will be investigated if Marx intended to give Das Kapital a speculative unity. This is a significant issue for
Marx himself and in the introduction to the work he makes the following claim.
“The method of
presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to
appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of
development, to trace out their inner connection. Only after this work is done
successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a
mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.”[152]
Through the critique of
commodity fetishism Marx confronts the reader with two different orders of
perception; one of ordinary perception and one of scientific deconstruction.
Repeating and embellishing a theme of the relation between surface and depth
developed in the Grundrisse, Marx snatches from the perceptible surface
an element that can be conceptually worked upon; that of the simple commodity.
“The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production
prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the
individual commodity appears as its most elementary form. Our
investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.”[153]
In
Reading Capital, Macherey states, “Pour retrouver la problématique hégélienne derrière la métaphore
de la ‘surface’, il suffit de lire l’identité entre la surface et ‘la
conscience ordinaire des agents de la production eux-mêmes’.[154]
In this view Volume I of Das Kapital
is the ‘en soi’ the in itself of the essence of the process that moves from
this abstract to the concrete, from individual to global, and from essence to phenomena.
This view though lacking nuance is basically correct in saying the text follows
a Hegelian order of exposition that gives it its coherence. For Macherey this
exposition does not work although different conclusions can be drawn as to why.
The Althusserians end their book with the question, why does Marx, in
presenting a new method adopt an ancient and specific mode of exposition – the
dialectic – that is incompatible with it?
This question posed by those
readers of Das Kapital in the
Althusserian circle can be answered by drawing on some contemporary strong
Hegelian interpretations of Marx’s work. For Chris Arthur;
“Hegel’s logic
can be drawn on in the study of capitalism because capital is a very peculiar
object, grounded in a process of real abstraction in exchange in much the same
way as Hegel’s dissolution and reconstruction of reality, is predicated on the
abstractive power of thought.”[155]
Like many others, and
supported by Marx’s own statements, for Arthur, Marx could not think the
concept of capital without the influence of Hegel. This might be true but it
does not prove that there is an identity between the two objects. Just because
the two systems share knowledge of a process of abstract, should not lead us to
conclude that both objects can be treated in the same way. Moreover what it
certainly does not account for (nor even recognise) is the Althusserian
criticism of this kind of comparison. For a start, it might be questioned from
the Spinozian theory of knowledge implied by the remark that the concept of a
triangle is not triangular.[156]
Whereas for Hegel the concept is its own abstraction, capital is a real
material socially actual process, it might be apprehended by concepts but its
structure as a concept does not need to mirror the activity or being of its
object; rather it belongs to a different order, not representational but based
upon adequacy. Arthur can only say that capital is ‘grounded in a process of
real abstraction’ because that abstraction is treated in a manner that
centralises and reduces it, rather than seeing the relation of abstraction
(separation) as manifold and aggregate i.e. with many centres. The head appropriates it, abstracts it if
one pleases, into a central and single relation. To say that the methodological
and speculative abstraction in Hegel is symmetrical with the process of
exchange is an absurd statement in ontological terms. In ontological terms
Hegel and Marx’s objects are completely different. How could the minds
speculative deconstruction of itself ever have a ground outside of itself?
Arthur’s theory rests on a notion of tele-causality: this is what Althusser has
to say about ‘expressive causality’:
"Presupposes
in principle that the whole in question is reducible to an inner essence of
which the parts are no more than the phenomenal forms of expression, the inner
principle being present at each moment in the whole, such that at each moment
it is possible to write the immediately adequate equation: such and such an
element (economic, political, legal, literary, religious, etc. in Hegel) =
inner essence of the whole."
Marx’s
value theory does not treat the actual relations that constitute value as
singular and reducible but as always polyvalent and the expression of structure
in its effects. This fundamentally questions the identity of the two
totalities, no matter how much they share a principle of immanent Dastellung. More support for why Marx
adopted this mode of exposition can be found by looking further into the
discursive field within which Das Kapital
was to intervene. An instructive comparison can be drawn between Marx and
the work of the Ricardian writer Thomas De Quincey. This unusual literary
figure was a well known adherent of the Ricardian school of economics, but
argued in a manner that is reminiscent of Spinoza’s proposition in the third
part of the Ethics that adequate ideas are active and inadequate ideas
passive; he felt that the science of political economy was not developing
because of logical errors within the existing science.[157]
In declaring his office to be the correction and perfection of the methods of
the Ricardian school, De Quincey pays particular attention to the need for a
proper exposition of the categories of political economy that, albeit in a much
more limited way, pre-empts Marx’s attempt at the same. What is particularly
interesting about this, is that De Quincey was a devoted student of German
metaphysical philosophy, and of course Spinoza, and this influence on his
attempt to give an inward self-positing expression to the categories of
political economy produces some results that are very similar to Marx.[158]
In De Quincey, just as will be seen in Marx, the outline of the logic of political economy commences
from a simple awareness of value to a necessary and contradictory subdivision
within this simple term. The subdivision produced between the useful article
and the article in demand, is further elaborated as the double form of value,
representing a division within the article that must be present simultaneously
for it to be exchangeable.[159]
Following a deconstructive route wherein complexity is derived from the
clashing together of these simple forms, De Quincey develops out of the dual
affirmative and negative side of the commodity an argument for the labour
theory of value.[160]
This derivation of the labour theory of value and De Quincey’s dismissal of the
question of the measure of value is a useful balancing act to any theory of a
special link between Hegelian dialectics and Marx’s method in Das Kapital. This is because it serves to
demonstrate other independent attempts to elucidate the categories with a
speculative argument and draws our attention to the special applicability that
the classical science of political appeared to have as an object to the
treatment of dialectics.
Marx
was clearly familiar with De Quincey’s work although it did not appear to
impress him too much, only serving to elucidate problems with the Ricardian
outlook but failing to resolve these difficulties.[161]
However Marx is not overtly hostile to De Quincey and appears to spare him from
the most savage of ad hominem attacks
reserved for the likes of Samuel Bailey, an opponent of the Ricardian School.
He does suggest however that Quincey’s Teutonic metaphysics are more
superficial than substantial, claiming that they are ‘affected rather than
real.’[162] However
given the similarities that can be exposed between these two thinkers there is
much evidence that will inform the Foucauldian link of Marx to the Ricardian
episteme.
Hegel’s
shadow
By
means of various intermediaries, Hegel undoubtedly cast his shadow over the divergent
interpretations of Das Kapital:
“The categories have to be derived
(and not taken arbitrarily or mechanically) (not by "exposition", not
by "assurances", but with proofs)
proceeding from the simplest, most fundamental (Being, Nothing, Becoming)
(without taking others) - here, in them, "in this germ, the whole
development."[163]
For
Hegel indeterminate being is the beginning.[164] It is the
first affirmative proposition. The beginning could start from a negative as
well, but Hegel shows that this is circular, the negation would be the same in
content as the affirmative - in so far as we are dealing with nothing, that it
is so is an affirmation - i.e. rather than nothing we have a non being, an affirmative
negation - a negative that requires a positive. The beginning of the science
thus contains all that must there be within. Thus the beginning must in
essence, be some part of absolute, but all this means is that it follows the
absolute in the manner of it having nothing outside of itself; it is perceived
that the dynamic that arises out of being and non being, allows for the
inauguration of a process of pure becoming.
If
this is the beginning for Hegel, in what sense can we talk of the commodity as
being the same abstract indeterminate beginning? The following type of
statement on the question written by Lenin has informed Marxian understanding
on the analysis in Das Kapital for
too long:
“The beginning - the most simple, ordinary, mass, immediate “Being”: the
single commodity (“Sein” in political economy). The analysis of it as a social
relation. A double analysis,
deductive and inductive - logical and historical (forms of value). Testing by
facts or by practice respectively, is to be found here in each step of the
analysis.”[165]
Irrespective
of whether we can agree with Marx on whether capitalist wealth ‘appears’ first
as an immense collection of commodities, it is clear that where Lenin tries to
equate the commodity with Hegel’s being he is diverging from how Marx himself
understood the question. Rather than being simple, ordinary or immediate, the
commodity is determinate. It is produced. It is necessarily plural. It has its
basis in a developed system of social exchange. This is what Althusser argued;
the commodity is determinate and is presupposed by the totality of social
relations that produce it. The dialectic cannot be the same thing as the
essence in Capital - though this does not yet mean that it does not constitute
the logic of capital. And yet we find justification for this point of view of
Lenin’s in Marx’s writing:
“In and for itself, the exchange of commodities implies no other
relations of dependence than those which result from its own nature“[166]
The commodity can be the
beginning in Marx’s sense only because it finds its truth in the process that
goes on behind it and produces it, the process which is more fundamental to
capitalism, as the theory goes; production for exchange. Marx takes as the
point of departure the, “simple, most underdeveloped shape’[167]
because it can divide into two planes, one of identity and one of difference.[168]
Althusser is right only in so far as he is arguing against theorists that
uphold a Hegelian identity between the dialectical processes of Marx and Hegel.
His contribution can be misleading however, because it obscures the lengths
that Marx went to in elaborate a simple totality out of the reflection
relations in the commodity form, in order to separate the apparent unity of
commodity producing society into different layers. It is the ontological status
of these divisions that are important. The first edition of Das Kapital Volume I had this as the
closing paragraph but it was omitted from later editions,
"The commodity is immediate unity of UV and EV thus of two opposed
entities. Thus it is an immediate contradiction. This contradiction must enter
upon a development just as soon as it is no longer considered as hitherto in
analytic manner (at one time from the viewpoint of UV and at another from the
viewpoint of EV) but it is really related to other commodities as a totality.
The real relating of commodities to one another, however, is their process of
exchange."
In the division within the
‘doublet’ of the commodity the analysis can open out on two levels – one is the
real differentiated actuality of commodity production and exchange. This level
is properly socially differentiated and is comprised of the totality of man’s
concrete activity as it relates to capital (omitting for a moment the question
of Marx’s neglect of the theorisation of reproductive labour). The second level
is arguably purely ideational, or, in the opinion of Uchida, a critical
idealism.
“The relationship
of equality is thus relationship of value, but the value relationship is above
all expression of the value or the value being of the commodity which expresses
its value”[169]
But it requires a different
(another) commodity (that counts of being equal essence) to express itself.
Here then is the important move, actual concrete difference is sublated and
retained in what is to become the explanation for a regime of the necessary
forms of value expressions.[170]
In another strong Hegelian
interpretation of Marx’s mature writings, Uchida’s attempt to draw out a
fundamental systematic complicity between Hegel’s shorter logic and Marx’s
category development in the Grundrisse, argues that in the second plane, Marx
‘intends critically to absorb Hegel’s idealism.’[171] Thus the idea becomes a kind
of stand in for what is really the ‘social logic of value –consciousness’ and
allows for the development of the theory of commodity exchange and the various
levels of value expression.[172] Later Uchida argues that
what both thinkers share, is a derivation of the complex out of a simple
generality which for Hegel means that the simple generality must be the
starting place for the notion because of the necessarily mediated difference
within the concrete. Uchida’s book is a strange contribution to this debate and
an extremely one-sided treatment but it does draw attention to this necessary
position within Hegel’s thought. And we reproduce here what he quotes from
Hegel: “The general is in and for itself the first moment of the notion because
it is the simple moment, and the particular is only subsequent to it because it
is the mediated moment: and conversely the simple is the more general, and the
concrete, as in itself differentiated and so mediated, is that which already
presupposes the transition from a first.”[173] The point however is, not so
much how much Marx drew on Hegel’s Logic to develop the categories, but
how much the development of categories in itself results in this hierarchy
between simple and concrete. Hegel argues that ‘the progress proper to the
Notion, from universal to particular, is the basis and the possibility of a
synthetic science, of a system and of systematic cognition.’[174]
Hegel continues to say that
the method must be proper to cognition itself, and thus cannot conceivably
start from the complex, as this is that which cannot be intuitively grasped.
Now it is very clear that the Grundrisse
and Das Kapital have different
starting points, and Marx’s original intention was to begin with the inner
totality of wage labour. Hegel’s logic fits with the abstract universal of
labour, but it does not fit with the rendering in Das Kapital where Marx does in fact start from the phenomenological
actuality of concrete determinateness.
For in fact the commodity is not a simple universal but a composite
form, it may be simple in comparison to the more complex determinations of
capital, but it is itself a unity that needs to be divided to arrive at the
point of the real abstract universal which as we shall see, self-evidently in
the Grundrisse, but obscured in Das Kapital, is the category of abstract
labour.[175] The
difference between products of labour is fundamental (and analytically prior)
but only in so far as it is the basis of a greater identity between the
commodities in their sharing of a value element.
The relationship of one
commodity to another is its simplest ‘value expression.’ Again it requires
expression in a ‘commodity body’ that is elsewhere described as a ‘mirror of
its own value being’ different from itself’.[176]
There is a ‘polar opposition’ in the form of value given that the ‘same
commodity never possesses both forms at the same time in the same value
expression.’[177] Hence
although it has differentiation as the ground of possibility for identity, the
relational form becomes subsumed to the expression of exchange value itself.
This does not depend upon solely another singular commodity for its expression,
but upon the totality of commodities that by necessity must be mediated through
a general equivalent form. A mono-valent language of sameness is properly the
form of value requiring that one relate to the other; it is properly a
relational entity, depending upon a generality for its unity. From this point
on, from the subsequent development of abstract labour, Marx has integrated
concrete differentiated subjectivity into an analytics of a relation.[178]
The relation is intangible but substantial and ontological.
In the Grundrisse Marx is more explicit; exchange value is not simply the
product of labour, it is the basis of man’s social bond. Through division of a
simple and apparently self evident entity Marx, clearly looking from the
perspective of capital, divines ‘labour power in general” which is the ‘value
substance’. Viewed from the perspective of capital, this labour power as the
value substance has both a qualitative and a quantitative determinacy. Its
magnitude is qualitatively established in respect to the ‘proportion in which
the other commodity body is related to it.’ Marx lists a series of
peculiarities of the equivalent form, the second and most important of which
being ‘concrete labour becomes the appearance form of its opposite, abstractly
human labour’. There are few clearer examples than this expansion from the
simple relation to the total relation than the dialectic of externalisation and
separation out of the initial separation of commodity A from its natural form.
Clearly, in these two texts
on the form of value there is no question that the ontological derivation of
value is not a sequence of historical emergence. In fact quite the opposite is
the case and it is in explaining this that the non-historical Hegelian
interpretations of Marx’s analysis of capital are the most persuasive. The
possibility of treating capital as a system, and the possibilities of a bourgeois
science of political economy are the same. It is because capital ontologically
exists in a system based upon separations and only fleeting associations that
it contains within it its own force of idealisation, i.e. its existence in the
money form. The compulsory nature of this idealisation, i.e. the necessity of
an active symbolic mediation of exchange through money, appears to correspond
to a necessary synchronic orientation in thought, wherein through their
existence in the universal, particulars can be made commensurable. In the Grundrisse Marx is more explicit in
describing exchange value as an ideal entity. It is a socially existent
mediation of human activity in a non-human, ideally not even sensuous, form.
Its basis is in the indifference of dependent individuals forced to exercise
their social bond through a mediated form.[179]
Just
because the categories that Marx deconstructed and used were historically valid
thought forms does not necessarily mean that the analytical development follows
a historical sequence. So much is clear from strong Hegelian interpretations
like Arthur’s and Uchida’s that demonstrate this well. However despite the
strength of this refutation it does not imply that the derivation of the forms
of capital is in fact adequately reducible to forms of thought, nor the indeed
the ‘being’ of capital in a Hegelian sense. Even if it could be stipulated that
the development of the categories in Das
Kapital reflects their inner necessity; they are derived logically, but do
not exist as such; this would not give any proof of the inner collapse of
capital unless the categories could properly correspond to actual social
events.
What
complicates the analysis is the necessary shift from thinking through what is
implied by the concept of value, to thinking of the actual reality of commodity
exchange. Totality is a crucial device here because it is comfortable to think
of the correspondence between the real and the thought form through this
figure. The very grammar of totality is especially interesting in concealing as
much as it exposes the ontological placement of the object of the statements
that it uses. Without conceptual clarity concerning the ontological commitment
to understanding the totality of capital relations, something that Marx never
questions, it is impossible to get closer to seeing how from the analysis of
value the exploitative and repressive dimensions of capitalist accumulation can
be delineated. Without the anticipation of the totality as a knowledge
production that is adequate to the real totality one would merely arrive at
something like the subjectivism of Simmel and be forced to conclude that the
objectivity of value was only the result of the aggregation of individual
assessments of worth, or to in some other way reduce a question of ontology to
a question of epistemology or more simply to a form of perspective.
As
such the whole debate has been forced to centre on the appropriateness of the
starting point and the enigmatic first chapters of Das Kapital. The impossibility of using the commodity as the proper
speculative point of departure has led many of the more astute commentators to
dwell on this appearance of the
commodity as the surface form of the total process of capital and to treat the
reference to wealth appearing as such is to the manner it first comes known to
the ordinary perceptions of agents within capitalist relation. Some theorists
like Banaji argue that the simple commodity, or the commodity as such is only
the superficial and immediate aspect of the speculative development. Quoting
Marx, Banaji states that capital must be the starting and finishing point of
investigation, “but as the starting point, capital must be taken in its ‘immediate being’ or as it appears
immediately on the surface of society.”[180]
Others insist more on the ‘cell form’ of the commodity as if it is the
elementary component part of a larger structure. What is fundamental to
recognise is the importance of a immanent deconstructive critique here; the
establishment of a simple totality that in deepening its gaze through its
divisions simultaneously embellishes its scope.[181]
This
is only possible if the commodity contains within itself determinations that
can be drawn out of it, most notably its substance, abstract labour power. It
requires that the commodity be seen as the result of something else, and is in
fact concrete and composite. If it is however, far from being an indeterminate
point of departure, as Banaji and so many others has noted it implies that it
‘comprises a relation within itself’ and as concrete it is internally
differentiated.[182]
This evidence makes very difficult any easy substitution of the movement of
capital and the movement of the idea in Hegel’s system of logic. As the latter
makes clear in the Science of Logic,
the ‘beginning can not be made with anything concrete, anything containing a
relation within itself’. This is because the concrete is clearly the result of
a process that has occurred prior to it, and as has already been demonstrated
it is the essential and distinguishing purpose of Hegelian philosophy to posit
the absolute as its own result.[183]
But although Marx privileges
a specific starting point, one sanctioned by the a realm of appearance and
hence appropriated by political economy, there could be many others, indeed,
the world does not present itself as an immense wealth of commodities, it presents
itself also as driven by greed, also as a divided society, also as an
aggregation of independent parts and so on.
So Banaji proceeds, the
commodity is something analysable, this allows us to reconfigure it as
immediacy, a moment of capital, what Hegel would call “a mediated immediacy.”[184]
Yet this mediated immediacy, Hegel makes clear, is a posited existence - it is
a further stage from pure abstract simplicity. In Hegel the process of becoming
is auto-genetic; it can be a positive germ of development because the idea is
estranged from reality. In contrast, the premise of capital as a social system
is the forced estrangement of the
producer from the object produced. The production of commodities for money
determines the form of interaction that people have within society. In order to
understand this, Marx bifurcates the social activity that goes into producing
commodities by bifurcating the labour that goes into them. This separation is
so clear-cut it can be represented in a tabular form (see Figure 1).
Marx does not perform the
bifurcation of the commodity and the division in labour in order to hold both
in their distinction on an equal footing. At each stage of the analysis, Marx
rejects the concrete and complex actual form of the commodity and labour and
reduces it to its simplified general social form under capitalism. The whole
left side of the table is rejected at each step of the way although its brief
presence serves to elaborate the social form of that side of the analysis that
Marx regards as appropriate to study capital. Concerned only with value and not
any one particular commodity the analysis proceeds only by subsuming the
differential into an equation wherein a universal can be found. The common is
strained out of the multiple. The multiplicity is the form of existence and the
necessity of the generalised universals, as for example for quantitative
exchange to be possible, different qualities must exist, but the differentiated
is always in service of the non- differentiated.
Figure
1: Twin bifurcations in the commodity and labour*
|
Simple Commodity (Appearance form of wealth)
Divides into: |
|
|
Use value Quality Natural/ physical Complex Heterogeneous Concrete Specific Form |
Exchange value Quantity Social Simple Homogeneous Abstract General/ total Essence |
|
Type of Labour |
|
|
Useful labour Qualitative *Natural/ Physical/ Actual Complex Concrete Heterogeneous Specific Form |
Social labour Quantitative Social/ force/ total
potential Simple Abstract Homogeneous General/ total Essence |
|
Means of Production |
Relations of production |
*NB Several commentators on Das Kapital have devised similar
schemas. Macherey’s presents something similar, on the basis of division
between ground and surface.[185]
Cleaver presents the division in the commodity form.[186]
The
logic of the progression to general equivalence
“The labour of
individuals in the same branch of work, and the various kinds of work, are
different from one another not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. What
does a solely quantitative difference between things presuppose? The identity
of their qualities. Hence, the quantitative measure of labours presupposes the
equivalence, the identity of their quality.”[187]
“It is only the
expression of equivalence between different sorts of commodities which brings
to view the specific character of value creating labour, by actually reducing
the different kinds of labour embedded in the different kinds of commodity to
their common quality of being human labour in general.”[188]
Use value is almost
immediately rendered a redundant, trans-historical category in Das Kapital; ‘powder is powder’, and use
value is an ‘excuse’ for producing exchange value.[189]
Value, an immaterial relation depends on the materiality of things in use-values,
but it is of complete indifference to value which ‘particular object serves
this purpose.’[190]
When it functions in developing the idea of the universal equivalent, in simple
exchange relations, the value of one commodity is related to the use value of
another. But once there is a general equivalent that can be changed for any
particular commodity, use-value no longer has any place in the exposition.
However it opens up the two- fold character of labour, exchange value enables
abstract labour to be identified. But like use-value, concrete labours are
pushed aside once the identity between types of labour in abstract labour is
made. It is a step in the deconstruction of the commodity that for Marx opens
up a dimension of social substance seen in materiality, or substantiality. Just
like the Ricardian thinker Thomas De Quincey, Marx believes that consideration
of use value falls outside of the domain of political economy.[191]
The use-value of labour is
not its social use and does not lie in the types of commodity it produces; its
only relevant use-value is that from the perspective of capitalist private
appropriation. That is its power of valorisation and of producing surplus value
within its exchange value. Marx’s violent abstraction pushes him to claim that
even the capitalist himself is little concerned with the actual type of
concrete labour; the capitalist is only interested in its value capacity and is
morally divorced from any consideration of the utility, ethical worth of his
commodity nor in Marx’s words, the ‘crappy shit’ that he produces, nor from an
identification with the virtues of the product i.e. having to believe in it in such a manner as
today’s corporations invest into the brand identity of products in the plethora
of ways described by Naomi Klein and others.[192]
The derivation of abstract
labour as something implied entirely by the exchange of commodities themselves
and not by the actuality of actual concrete practices of work is critical to
the whole system. Without such a development there can be no theory of money
nor of the exploitation of labour, which occurs only within the semblance of
equivalence. As an abstract universal, derived from the developing one side in
the duality of the commodity form, labour is both the real substance of the production
of wealth and the abstract force on which the possibility of an advanced
monetary economy is based.
In the third section of
Chapter 1 of Das Kapital, money is
posited as the ‘necessary form of appearance of abstract labour”. Furthermore,
all of the chapter on money in the Grundrisse is about the necessary mediation
of labour time in the form of money e.g. “Labour time always exists only in the
form of particular commodities (as an object): being a general object, it can
exist only symbolically, and hence only as a particular commodity which plays
the role of money.” But this is only because “labour time itself exists as such
only subjectively, only in the form of activity. In so far as it is
exchangeable (itself a commodity) as such, it is defined and differentiated not
only quantitatively but also qualitatively, and is by no means general,
self-equivalent labour time.[193]
The general exchangeability of labour must require that labour take on “ an
objective form, a form different from itself, in order to attain this general
exchangeability.”[194]
For the system of exploitation of labour to exist, requires an intermediary
form to allow for the inequality within equality to take shape. As Hegel says,
‘all symbols call up significations’, but Marx is contesting money’s
signification as simple means of exchange and trying to demonstrate that it is
a necessary form of mediation of a system of subordination, describing it as
”the pimp between man and the object of his desire”. This is a far cry from its
pure and ideal signification of equality that will be seen as the effect that
this particular symbol generally has on Simmel. For this reason, many readings
of Das Kapital and the Grundrisse have concluded that rather
than being a neutral means of exchange and possible basis for a more equal
society, money is itself a ‘weapon in the hands of the Bourgeoisie.’[195]
What troubled Marx about how,
“Hegel conceives wealth…only in its thought form,’[196]
led him later to employ a Hegelian mediation in the explanation of the concrete
appearance forms of alienated labouring money. “The truth is that the exchange
value relation – of commodities as mutually equal and equivalent
objectifications of labour time – compromises contradictions which find their
objective expression in a money which is distinct from labour time.”[197]
It is this very necessity of
an actual societal mediation wherein labour becomes general through the
externalisation in the means of exchange that the speculative development is so
attractive, with the caveat that the idealisation is made possible by the
historical totalisation of the wage-labour relation. The particular form of
capitalist command that characterised the historically most developed
capitalist formations that Marx studied through the homogenisation and
reduction, both formally and substantially, of labour to labour power, namely
the factory form, licensed the idealisation of elements of the system into a
measurable universe wherein an intrinsic contradiction could be exposed. Thus
the more total the system, the more it could apparently correspond to the
special treatment of the method of the dialectic; that is the study of a system
which is its own cause. So what Hegel perceived philosophically as ‘the
innermost ‘drive’, ‘the need’ of spirit to detach itself from what is abstract
by absolving itself into the concreteness of absolute subjectivity and so
freeing itself for itself” [198]
is reposed here as a reclamation of all relations between the reflections in a
mirror-like thought totality presented in a dialectically articulated artistic
whole.
In the first volume of Das Kapital, Marx is interested in
deducing the general formula for
capital and how it valorises and for this reason, use-value simply doesn't come
into the equation. He wants an abstract universal that works on the basis of
identity but has its conditions of possibility in difference. What Hegel
criticised in Spinoza for not properly reducing the infinite attributes of the
absolute to thought and extension and their inner contradiction, has a curious
repetition here in value theory. Spinoza tries to remain on the horizontal
plane where the absolute is God or nature, a purely immanent plane of the being
of one substance. Marx, like Hegel, seeks to bundle this up into a hierarchical
scheme where, through the progression of the categories, the inner nature of
capital can be uncovered in itself
without the giving the impression that their expression has been aided by
external reflection. Whilst there may well be positivist elements in Marx’s
outlook and in his method, in the elaboration of the theory of capital, he
seeks to build an artistic whole that posits its own determinations. But the
same difficulty remains, real commodity exchange does not arise out of its
logical order - meaning that its historical preconditions cannot be advanced in
the architectonic, and, where introduced, always appear external to it. Where
Marx asks us to analytically accept the imposition of the necessary social form
of labour in commodity production in its form as a homogenisation - though he
morally protests against it and tries to show its fundamental weaknesses - many
thinkers have seen this as kind of complicity with the social forces that have
enacted that reduction, and thus accuse him of ordering his thoughts in the way
that capitalists order their social relations. Yet into this very complicity,
from another perspective, where concepts can be conceived of as adequate but
distinct from their objects might be one place where the ‘royal road to
science’ might arrive.
Marx’s pedagogic structure
attempts to be an act of guidance that leads thought from the abstract to the
concrete. It can only do so by totalising relations, that is to say theorising
a process of colonisation at its apex and completion. It is an act of
representation but one sutured to its object, and in this case the object is
the force of capital’s command over labour. There is a violence of abstraction
because a step is taken away from the concrete, mediated differentiated world.
But the step away is a determinate step, and ostensibly a necessary one because
it is grounded in the abstract universal of exchange. Hence abstraction, as a
logical separation, is quite specifically mandated by the nature of its object,
it is not a method for all objects of thought, but one valid because of the
nature of the social form.
The important point here is
that a relation can be treated in this totalised manner when it is objectified
in relation. Its apprehension in thought, as a conceptual totality, relies upon
the type of identity in its relations. The similarities here with Hegel are
important. But the particular form of presentation, the appropriation from
Hegel of the ‘rational kernel’ for representation has the effect of giving the
appearance of idealism to Marx’s work.
Each of the moments of the
explanation forms a totality but because its content exists in a state of
opposition and the unity must come through the cancellation of one of its
terms. Here dynamism is certainly created by juxtaposing contradictory
conceptions. But it takes more than the concept to determine what ontological
status these relations have within reality. Could the dynamism of the
analytical progression belong only to the movement within the conceptual
totality, in what sense can these relations of relative complexity be said to
exist in reality? Even though Marx attempts to show that the categories of
political economy are valid forms of consciousness derived from the presence of
these material structures, does not the very idea of presenting it in
systematic and scientific form necessitate a structuring through an external
mode of thought? Macherey argues that it is having adopted the Hegelian form of
the development of the content, i.e. by making it self- positing, that the plan
of organisation of the work, the creation of an analytical totality, should
fail to realise its plan of organisation. That is if it does not have a
scientific coherence but an ideological coherence taken from Hegel.[199]
On the other hand, by adopting these abstractions Marx claims to have seen
through the mystery of the commodity form and presented these categories in a
manner that correctly pertains to their nature.
Simply holding a realist
ontological commitment to the existence of social entities outside of our
reflections upon them does not necessarily provide us with the right formula
for the appreciation within reflection of their ‘inner nature.’ A rigorous
distinction between the ideological and the scientific cannot be upheld. In
adopting the ‘social point of view’, although it may be the most important,
must by necessity be only one perspective upon a system. By disregarding the
phenomenological form or rather only presenting it in order to subdue it to the
more adequate and substantial scientific presentation, Marx progresses to
increasingly more adequate representations of the totality of the ‘inner
relations of capital.’ One way around this problem of developing the concept of
capital is by drawing on the Spinozian distinction between extension and thought.
These are two equally valid attributes of the existence of the same substance.[200]
In Ilyenkov’s words, in Spinoza’s system,
“…Thought
and extension are not two special substances as Descartes taught, but only two
attributes of one and the same organ; not two special objects, capable of
existing separately and quite independently of each other, but only two
different and even opposite aspects under which one and the same thing appears, two different modes of existence,
two forms of the manifestation of some third thing.”[201]
If the multiple and diverse concrete types of labour and its products are disregarded in the analysis this is not to deny them an ontological statement. On the other hand by developing the thought form of an idealised and totalised object, the system can be presented under its own infinite cause, which in Spinozian terms is the only possible way to treat substance. If the daily, physical and embodied actions of agents in capitalist society form are finite and perishable modes of what capitalist production in itself involves, then the scientific presentation treats the system in its inward self-causing eternity. Although most recourse to Spinoza in the explanation of Marx’s method takes the form of ‘thought-experiments’ and it is clearly against the prevailing evidence to draw Althusser’s conclusion that Spinoza is Marx’s only true philosophical ancestor, it is nevertheless extremely helpful to perceive the difference between the concrete corporeal totality and the ideational totality in this way. In fact this very distinction found in Spinoza has a precedent in Marx’s own comments on the matter:
‘Even with philosophers who gave their work a systematic form, e.g. Spinoza, the real inner structure of their system is quite distinct from the form in which they consciously presented it.’[202]
If capital can be looked at
as one substance which can be presented through a science peculiar to it, this
invalidates the wider appropriation of the method used in Das Kapital to a science of social objects per se. The
peculiar nature of capital identified by the Hegelian reading, which claims
capital forms a distinct object because of the idealisation in the appearance
form of social labour, has in some studies such as Simmel’s been turned around
to such an extent that the money form can be used to shed light on philosophy
concepts. The critical distinction between these two systems is that by showing
capital in its simple, expanded and total forms Marx aims to demystify the
supposed neutrality and commensurability of the exchange of labour power for
money whereas in the sociology of Simmel this ideal form is taken to be a
realisation of a system of equality. However, Marx’s system has been subject to
attack for reducing the consideration of labour purely in respect to what can
be drawn out from it as scientific matter: its quality of being temporally and
quantitatively measurable. Curiously this criticism has been most strongly
articulated by Negri, a post-modern thinker who draws strongly on Spinoza’s ontology.
The exact role that labour time has as the measure of value and the notion of
money as the necessarily objective practical expression of contradictions
within commodity production has in Marx’s work will follow the treatment of
Simmel’s Philosophy of Money.
Subjectivist conceptions of value
One aspect of Simmel’s
thinking in the Philosophy of Money clarifies
an important aspect of why the exposition of economic categories can take a
speculative level for Marx. It is useful to contrast Marx and Simmel as there
is much that both share in the analysis of value and money. For instance both
insist upon the fundamental relativity of economic value and both decry any
attempt to derive objective value from the inner nature of the commodity object
– that is to say qua use-value - itself,
“No matter how closely the inner nature of an object is investigated,
it will not reveal economic value which lies exclusively in the reciprocal
relationship arising between several objects on the basis of their nature.” [203]
This mirrors Marx’s infamous
critique of commodity fetishism where it is mistakenly held in common
consciousness that it is the property of individual commodities, their demand
and supply that governs their worth. There are however some fundamental differences
that make Simmel a strange heir to the title of having completed the most
important sociological work on money since Marx’s Das Kapital. What is different about Simmel’s conception is that he
approaches money first as a general problem not specific to capitalist forms of
accumulation and a related issue is that he does not address it from the point
of view of production. What this amounts to is that Simmel does not develop a
labour theory of value. For this reason what he holds in common with Marx is
all the more interesting.
Simmel follows a similar line
of argument from the relational to the measurable. Just as Marx argues, for
Simmel, for two different objects to be measured there must be at some level an
identity in one of their qualities.[204]
Now whereas Marx develops from here the idea that, as products of labour, these
values are measurable by the labour time expended on their production, Simmel
in fact argues something that would appear tautological to Marx; that in fact
what commodities have in common is that they are all exchangeable for money.
Simmel theorises the general equivalent as itself the common denominator of the
relationship of commodity exchange (his question is actually whether money has
a value). What Simmel’s theory amounts to is claiming a kind of neutrality and
an enormous utility for money (it can be exchanged for the totality of goods,
but any particular good can only be exchanged for money) whilst retaining the
notion that it has a symbolic function which registers not only the objective
totality of the relations between commodity values but also the subjective
assessments of their worth.
Simmel describes the
development of money as aspiring towards a purely ideal realm, that comparable
to Plato’s philosophical idea, and he talks of it as if it were a formula of
all being. However it is important to note that as an ideal, it is never
attained.[205] He even
goes so far as to suggest that it is reality that is not adequate to the
concept of money.[206].
He further argues that money cannot become a pure symbol, as it must, due to
value of the money material,[207]
retain its own relative worth as standard.[208]
Like Simmel, Marx sees the
conditions of possibility for money in distantiation.[209]
Termed ‘alienation’, the separation of subject and object, of producer and
product is a necessary social form for money to appear as a mediating form of
relations between people. However, it could be argued that every relation, and
not just those between people, involves some kind of separation, division or distinction.
What possible purpose could
there be in defining value as the totality of the relations of commodity
exchange? Simmel is right to say all measure is relative to something. If Marx
is right in saying that single physical objects do not have value, but rather
it is the totality of all abstract labour that comprises the value of labour
power, then why is this so integral to the analysis?[210]
Value is not a neutral
relation of one commodity to another, or the total amount of exchange values to
the abstract labour that produces them. For Simmel, value is a psychological,
subjective estimation of worth.[211]
This is clearly a functional reality of capitalist society, in that it allows
for estimation of sale prices and prediction of returns. For Simmel value is a
socially valid category for a perspective on reality, indeed, money for Simmel
is a special social form because therein one can develop a form of the totality
that is completely adequate to itself.
“For money represents pure interaction in its purest form; it makes
comprehensible the most abstract concept; it is an individual thing whose
essential significance is to reach beyond individualities.”
What is special about money
for Simmel then, is that out of subjective considerations of worth, of demand
and sacrifice that accompany all exchange, an objective realm of value emerges
based upon the coincidence and settling out of all of the individual
considerations.
“The decisive fact in the objectivity of economic value, which makes
economics a special area of investigation, is that its validity transcends the
individual subject….exchange presupposes an objective measurement of subjective
valuations…in the sense that both phenomena arise from the same act”[212]
If Simmel’s formal sociology
is characterised by an emphasis on the individual forms rather than the total
social form,[213] then his
concept of money can be read as coming the closest to bringing out the
significance of the totality of individual actions to the point of an objective
social reality where individuality is both surpassed and retained.[214]
Indeed if Simmel’s method, for all its quirks, has been criticised for
employing too abstract and general analytics, it would appear that money and
its concept presented an object suitable to his approach, a view in fact
partially confirmed by Simmel when he wrote that The Philosophy of Money was a work he considered truly his own.[215]
Value and command
The implication of Simmel’s
subjectivist conception of value is that it has no veritable material being. It
is a form of perspective in consciousness and does not exist outside of the
mind. Does Marx’s concept of value differ from this? Marx is clear that value
does not contain an, ‘atom of matter’, yet he regards it as real social form.
Marx does not want to imbue value with any physiological properties, any less
than the abstract labour that goes into its production.[216]
The question remains; what is the ontology of value?
It appears that value is
purely a neutral perspective of measurement of the quantities in which articles
are exchanged for one another. Neither Marx nor Simmel believe that it is in
and of itself the property of the things that are exchanged that gives them
value. Both agree that the tendency is towards the subordination of use-value
to exchange value. Both in fact believe that money is the form of the social
bond, which the worker carries in his pocket, so that the mediation of social
intercourse through money attains a political character and refers to a regime
of rights and proprietorship.
However, Marx and Simmel
differ on what they think value is an expression of. For Marx it is labour-time,
but Simmel passes over this moment almost completely. For Simmel, both value
and money are representations of a social consideration of worth; a subjective
and psychological evaluation. On the contrary, Marx’s notion of value does not
have this status of a neutral category of evaluation. Value might not have any
tangible being; it might well be a category of political economy, but most of
all it has the positive and necessary status of social force. Although it
cannot be known or conceived outside of the creation of the mind, it has a real
social existence outside of the philosophical and ideational approximations to
it. Hence Marx’s ontology of value is a thoroughly realist approach.
This force of the relation of
values could be described in terms of value as command. Just as it is possible to say that 10 coats are
exchangeable for say 5 pairs of shoes or a certain quantity of money, it is
also possible to say that this quantity of coats commands (Simmel uses the term
‘demands’) a certain quantity of shoes, just as a quantity of money (capital)
commands more or less labour power (where exchange of commodities is
generalised to the commodity form of labour power).[217]
The benefit of seeing it in this way is that one can isolate, in the manner
Marx sought to, the inner properties of the object exchanged from the general
set of relations that comprise the economy of the totality of commodities
produced and which is quintessentially a social and general category based upon
the general productivity of labour
power and its value in exchange, rather than the productivity of any particular
concrete labour.
So the question of the
ontology of value leads us to a consideration of the value of labour power in
general. The value of labour power can only generally relate to its commodity
producing capacity as the existence of many capitals militates against any
single control over or determination of what the cost of reproducing the
labourer (variable capital) must be. Given the diffusion of the division of
labour this must be a general social determination. Value might appear to exist
only in consciousness, but in Marx’s view at least, value expresses the power
of exchangeability, which is ostensibly an objective relation between labour,
capital and commodity. Yet what is complicated about value is that as a social
form, the more it becomes totalised, the less it is related to any particular
determinate process of production. The more total the more value becomes an
ontological category wherein human activity, in its generality, is represented.
In another yet different
subjectivist concept of value, Knafo shows that for many Marxists capital
replaces Geist as the materialist
version of Hegelian dialectical development.[218]
He argues rightly that this assumes that the dialectic can be stripped of its
content and turned into a method of formal logic. However Knafo makes this
criticism in order to recuperate the dialectic in ontological terms as the very
being of subjectivity itself. The dialectic is taken out of its scientific
meter and placed back into its classical role of a developmental notion of
subjectivity based in experience and consciousness: “The use of the dialectic is
justified because it represents the way by which we rationalise the world.”[219]
Knafo argues, quite plausibly that this aspect of dialectics in capital is
overlooked because in the book “social rationality is grasped through its
manifestations, and not through the intentions of subjects.”[220]
Knafo wants to break with the debilitation of seeing causal necessity within
objective relations, because it cannot account for the subject, or for the
historical dimensions of viewing capitalism as a process of class struggle.
Yet, the way he does so is to consider objective forms as only limitations upon
consciousness upon the shaping of our experience.[221]
“Social value
might appear to be something autonomous, existing and acting on its own and
apart from the will of any particular agent. But a market is still simply the
reflection of the acts of all of its participants, not something that acts by
itself. We only experience it as an external force imposing upon us the
conditions through which we interact with others.”[222]
To his credit Knafo has
identified the problem in the ontological status of the law of value, and
correctly tried to locate its site as internal to the constitutive activity of
subjects. Hence he rightly rejects the idea that the structure is
self-subsistent and impervious to the class struggle. But this results in a
refusal of formal abstractions as being only subjective measures of
signification given to social activity. Value is treated as a phenomenon lying
only in the head, to the point of rejecting entirely the notion of value as a
positive product of the worker’s activity.[223]
This move is deemed necessary to undermine the subjective dialectics of
capital. However, it is at precisely this point of defining labour as the
‘universal value- creating element’ that Marx states the need for science as
such a notion falls outside the frame of reference of the everyday
consciousness.’[224]
By adopting the dialectic as an ontological form of experience over the
dialectic as an expository device, the relationship of the objectivity of the
categories to the objectivity of external life becomes purely incidental. In
these subjectivist concerns, objectivity is incomprehensibly taken to imply a
nullification of activity, whereas Marx appeared to believe that activity could
only be understood from the social point of view, i.e. not the everyday
experiential of work and products but their abstraction to the formal
generalities presented in Figure 1.
It is not just the Hegelian
orientation that questions the objectivity of value, such challenges can
equally be found within post- structuralist academic Marxism like that of the
post- Althusserians Ruccio and Amariglio. In their work, value is further
dissociated from any substantial material form and perceived as a completely
discursive construct. Their claim is that value can be neither objective nor
subjective but is a mere lens through which certain relations are viewed and as
such move away from any labour theory of value, Ricardian, Marxian or
otherwise, because value has no ‘universal ontological referent.’[225]
Such a claim that detaches value from material production is a move out of the
Marxian domain of inquiry, whereas they could have used the non-Marxian
theorisation of discursive formation
to allow themselves to stay within it. The utility of Foucault’s notion of the
discursive formation lies in the capacity to understand how common epistemic
and discursive structures of knowing arise in relation to their conditions of
possibility.[226] At the
time of Marx’s writing of Das Kapital,
value could fulfil the ubiquitous role of an abstract universal because the
form of capitalist command over labour had a dominant form and tendency towards
the reduction of complex labour to the disaggregated factory form. The
discourse over value was not a one-sided academic pursuit but entirely endemic,
interior and necessary process of the actual working out of the nature of
capitalist production as a social function within that system of appropriation.
The important question is the
value of the commodity labour power and how this is determined. Marx, somewhat
counter-intuitively, defines the objective of capitalist production to increase
profit by decreasing the value of labour power, which means increasing its
productivity. Increases in the general productivity of labour-power in Marx’s
view, decrease the cost of reproducing the labour power. However this only
works if we assume, as has been shown, that any work that goes into the
reproduction of the labourer is unpaid and secondly that the workers needs do
not rise at the same level as the cost of the goods required to make the
labour-force available to work. Whilst recognising that the rate of ‘necessary
labour time’ varies between epochs and countries, at any given time capital
requires a fixed standard. Here, where the need for the measurable is at its
highest is equally the point where no fixity can be found.[227]
The functional need on behalf of capitalists to measure is countered by the
existence of social struggle over the value of labour power, both in terms of
time worked, the payment for work and the set of economic and cultural
expectations that workers have. This contradiction from the actuality of
capitalist society expressed by struggles over pay, conditions and time worked
must fall out of the categorical presentation. In adopting the ideal form, Marx
adopts the ideal for capital so to speak, and argues that only by fixing
a standard of necessary labour can the exposition later show its fluidity.[228]
By assuming that labour power is never exchanged below its value, Marx is
essentially able to delineate the temporal dimensions of quantitative
exploitation in the theory of absolute and relative surplus value production
that represent extensive and intensive forms of exploitation.[229]
As will be shown this simplification rests upon a treatment of labour power as
a commodity that like any other has a cost of reproduction. Essential to the
construal of a total theory of capital this assumption in Marx has received
some strident criticisms from many quarters.
The Politics of the Law of Value
“There can be no
exchange without equality, and no equality without commensurability.”[230]
Both Laclau and Mouffe and
the Regulation School talk of the fiction of treating labour power as a
commodity.[231] However
they do so for different reasons. As has been seen, in so far as Marx does so,
it is from the structural perspective of capital. This is the premise of the
whole system. As is well known, Laclau and Mouffe’s criticism of economic
essentialism is a broad attack on the limitations of Marxism.[232]
For these theorists, the caricature of economism is effectively a caricature of
Marxism, defined by 3 criteria: i) the neutrality of the productive forces ii)
the unity of social agents at an economic level through the impoverishment and
homogenisation of the working class iii) that these productive relations are
‘the locus of historical interests’ transcending the economic sphere (the
project of socialism).[233]
They want to demonstrate that the process of production requires forms of
control and coercion; they suggest that the idea of neutral laws of development
can not account for this,[234]
and that furthermore the fiction of labour-power as a commodity is developed
and sustained in order for capitalist production to be seen developing
according to its own dynamic. Superficially this kowtows to Operaismo and
workerist accounts of the production process that will be investigated later,
but it is important to note the simplifications that they use in the caricature
of Marxist economism. Laclau and Mouffe argue,
“If it
[labour-power] were merely a commodity like the others, its use-value could
obviously be made automatically effective from the very moment of its
purchase.”
This is a highly questionable
notion of what makes a commodity.[235]
Furthermore, it is difficult to find any claim in Marx to the effect that
labour-power is a commodity like all others. There was never a question of
labour-power being a commodity “like the others.” Marx himself is unusually
unequivocal about this: the commodity labour power is a special type of
commodity because it is value producing, its use value lies in its capacity to
produce exchange value. As other commentators have noted the Marxian analysis
of the commodity is actually that its use-value as a commodity is especially
that it creates value when it is consumed: “Marx shows that an increase in
value can only occur in the consumption of the commodity purchased.”[236]
In this sense it is distinguished from all other commodities. Un-deterred the
authors go on to say that if the coercive dimension of the wage-labour relation
is missed out than we lose sight of how much the capitalist apparatus is
concerned with perfecting this regime of control. But why is this related to
the fiction of labour-power as a commodity? The theorists believe that such a
fiction makes labour completely subservient to the rule of capital. In a
similar way to Knafo the authors want the constitutive force of activity
represented too. They turn to Tronti and the Regulation School to establish it.
Tronti, whose work Operai e Capitale
was a considerable influence on the autonomist movement in Italy and the
theories of Negri, tries to reassert the constituent power of the worker in the
generation of capital’s crisis. In this somewhat more nuanced view:
“Labour must see
labour-power, as commodity, as its own enemy…[so as]…to decompose capital’s
intimate nature into the potentially antagonistic parts which organically
compose it.”[237]
The problem with this
peculiar argument is that the commodity labour power is only paid for once it
is consumed. As such the very commodity form of labour power itself is one of
the principle mechanisms of its subordination. It also creates the illusions,
such as those described by Marx, that the capitalist pays the worker out of his
own pocket. Faced with capitalist monopoly over the means of production, the
worker is coerced into a situation where he needs to sell his labour.
Labour-power is exchanged for
money; the very possibility of this reality of capitalist societies, the wage
form, is given by a fundamental move to the symbolic universal equivalent,
labour time/power as a general societal force. Commodity exchange is
inconceivable outside the commodification of labour as much as the
commodification of labour is inconceivable outside the development of exchange
value. That it is exchanged for money shows its inner connection with the
commodity form and the essential role of money in mediating social relations
between people. Moreover it follows that after the consumption of the
commodities that reproduce the same need and the same necessity to sell ones
self to an employer – at this point the commodity form of labour, its form of
exchange with the universal equivalent and inherent coercion of the relation, is
reproduced.
In presentational terms one
of the most historical and least theoretical chapters in Das Kapital is the one written on the working day. Marx construes a
conversation where the worker speaks for himself as a commodity: “I demand a
normal working day because, like every other seller, I demand the value of my
commodity.”[238] Although
the ‘economism’ of this language might jar our humanist sensibilities, the
substance of this fictional worker’s speech is unmistakeably about the
implications that result from the capitalist process of the sale and purchase
of labour power as a commodity. Far from taking us away from struggle and into
some neutral ground of the productive forces, the acceptance of the reality of
the process of the wage form/ the commodity form of labour takes us right back
into the real site of social conflict within the economic, which is to do with
the very real capitalist processes of attempting to valorise and subdue labour
that Laclau and Mouffe would want to talk about if they had not forced all
consideration of the non-fixity of social relations to outside the relations of
production. This is not to deny the multifarious forms of proletarian
resistance to the commodity form of labour power itself that involve the
refusal of work, the destruction of machines and the creation of political
organisations that create a space for social activity outside of a direct
wage-labour relation with capital.
The crucial point of all this
is to see Das Kapital as a work that
views the power of capital as actualised in order to show what is under
contestation. It strategically totalises the achievements of the capitalist
class, in order to develop an immanent critique. Hence at every point of the
development of the categories it is assumed that capital has overcome, won a
victory over workers and valorised. This is because its theoretical object is
to get to the root of this valorisation and what its implications and
contradictions are. This took the form of system and law and the perfection of
the categories of political economy, rather than a heterogeneous history of
conflict because it was believed that the subject matter of political economy
could be systematically grasped in this way. Its interesting however that in
adopting this approach, no matter where the author’s sympathies lay, it is
almost inevitable that the worker will be analysed only in so far as his
activity does relate to capital. Indeed, most clearly visible in Volume II, the
worker, or the fund for the reproduction of the worker (variable capital) is
treated as a type of capital and hence is considered inside - as a factor of
the process of accumulation - rather than as the object of a conflict of
refusing to become capital, which is the emphasis of much of Negri's writings.
The historical precedent of the systemic treatment is the incorporation of
living labour into capital.[239]
But the system qua system is only reproduced if this incorporation is
continuously re-affected. Indeed in the analysis of the metamorphosis of the
forms in Volume II, that which Marx calls ‘abstraction in action’, these
dialectics most clearly do not follow a hierarchical teleology in the manner of
Hegel’s dialectics.[240]
Rather the increase in complexity by the totalisation of the behaviour of
single capitalist in respect to his own workers follows an analytical
totalisation rather than one based on negation. Negation is present in this new
fluid totality that is the complex unity of the phases of passage through
forms, but this is a structural or even functionalist type of organic totality
that cannot negate itself through simple contradiction into a higher unity but
requires separation to form a unity.
“As a whole, then, the capital is simultaneously present, and
spatially coexistent, in its various phases. But each part is constantly
passing from one phase or functional form into another, and thus functions in
all of them in turn. The forms are therefore fluid forms, and their
simultaneity is mediated by their succession…in the unity of the three
circuits…the continuity of the overall process is realized…”[241]
For this functional circuit
to work however requires the over-coming of the resistance of the labourer to
the alienation of his labour power. But when discussing the issue Marx chooses
to describe the possible interruptions to its functioning that might result in
its overall standstill only in respect to failure to realise the sale of a
commodity, not for instance in workers’ agitation. This is for the simple
reason that the circuit presupposes forms of class relations in order to
re-posit them. The real subsumption of labour into capital has provided the
conditions in the political that make it possible to adopt the ‘the social
point of view.’ In Marx’s early writings he talks in Hegelian terms of needing
to find a universal class that has radical chains – i.e. one whose universality
would break with the particular form of domination. By the time of writing Das Kapital he believed he had found it.
When Marx
recapitulates on the developmental stages from the commodity to labour in the
penultimate chapter of Volume III, he does so in order to show that there are
not one, but several presuppositions: the wage form of labour, landed rent, and
industrial capital. The commodity is the starting point because it is the
“dominant” form of the product of labour.[242]
There is however something behind it: “this implies first and foremost” that
the wage labourer comes forth as a free seller of commodities.[243]
The world behind it does not emerge materially out of the simple forms of
relations between commodities; rather it is the social ground, the very basis
on which the production of commodities occurs. Hence the presupposition of
commodity production that advanced commodity production implies is the
imposition of a new mediation between social beings’ capacity to reproduce the
conditions of their own life and to benefit from the collectivisation and
increase in general social power – i.e. the power that capital valorises for
itself in its vampire like nature. In short this is only possible because of
the pre-existence of labour as ‘wage-labour’ and the means of production in the
form of capital.[244]
In Volume II of Das Kapital Marx repeats with insistence
the abstraction of Volume I, yet this time, it is a more embedded abstraction
in a sociality that determines that ‘although the form of labour as wage-labour
is decisive for the form of the entire-process…it is not wage labour which
determines value. In the determination of value, it is a question of social
labour time in general…”. Directly after this passage Marx makes a not unusual
comment about workers and capitalists both being the mere personifications or
the ‘bearers’ of these economic forms. Often the reaction when faced with these
passages is defensive and it is responded to by invoking the young Marx. There
are difficulties with these formulations of Marx, as their reception has made
clear. Yet there is a deeper point lost here, that for Marx, the real substance
of social existence is found in the generalities of common forms of social
relations. Hence this is not so much anti-humanism but an extreme form of
anti-individualism. Irrespective of whether the degradation of individualist
standpoints on human life is something to be lamented, Marx seems to be saying
that a consideration of the totality excludes adopting the standpoint of
activity as the activity of individuals as much as the intellectual
construction can rest content with basing itself solely on one standpoint.[245]
It is in our social combination that productive force resides. It is in the
general social average of productive time from whence value can be derived.
This is characteristically of the perspective of ‘society’s standpoint’[246]
or the ‘social point of view’. ‘Human labour’ is a general social force which
is for Marx wildly different from concrete manifestations of the individual
forms and in so doing he takes for granted the reality of social co-operation.[247]
Through capital: “not only do
we have an increase in the productive power of the individual, by means of
cooperation, but the creation of a new productive power, which is intrinsically
a collective one.”[248]
Furthermore the sociality of this new situation stimulates “the animal spirits”
of the worker in rivalry and so on. It is not a great leap to link these passages
to a Spinozian ontology of productive power e.g. “If two men unite and join
forces, they together have more power, and consequently more right against
other things in nature, than either alone; and the more there be that unite in
this way, the more right will they collectively possess.”[249]
As such Marx demands more from the analysis of capital, as Negri says, its
analytic requires constant reduction of work to labour power.[250]
That is to say the actuality of the substance of the aggregation of total social
labour, takes place in and through time. The analysis is sutured to the generic
and the postures of individual worker and capitalist are an imaginary repose.
This represents a positive
increase in power that the political ontology of the Frankfurt school could not
perceive or could only see as negative, marred by the experience of fascism (as
Krahl said of Adorno). Their view of power became increasingly blinkered to
seeing only authority and order rather than potentia
as power to. For them the co-option of subjectivity into the mechanics of
social production could only be at the expense of ethics; capitalism revenges
history as its necessity. Marx’s confidence in different forms of large- scale
production is put aside and instrumental rationality and purposive power is
seen as inherently a form of power over rather than power to. It is partly for
this reason, whereby the thought totality is identified with totalitarianism
that Marxists began to turn away from Das
Kapital and look to the Grundrisse
for inspiration, wherein this social point of view of productive power is
connected more intimately with revolution and the actual struggle of workers,
beyond the scope of the formal categorical interiorisation into the schema of
Marx’s later works.[251]
In the Inaugural Address to the
Working Men’s Association Marx comes the closest to giving a positive political
potential to associations of labour. Cooperative factories are a,
“Victory of
political economy of labour over the political economy of property…by deed instead
of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord
with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of
a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of
labour need not be monopolised as a means of dominion over, and of extortion
against the labouring man himself; and that, like slave labour, like serf
labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to
disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready
mind and a joyous heart.”
There is certainly fuel here
to support Adorno’s comment that Marx wanted to turn the world into a huge
factory. But it could be responded that in the actualised system of
accumulation that Marx drew out from the inner processes he observed,
capitalism had already achieved this. In the scientific reduction of capitalism
to capital then, Marx was actually, far from ignoring concrete labour,
exhibiting the strength of its extension in its contemporary factory form.
However this means that his analytics of value were only made possible given
the domination of a certain factory form of concrete labour. At his time of
writing this was a minority form that was increasingly becoming the dominant form,
but as we shall see, historical development has made it increasingly difficult
to share the same set of simplifying assumptions as Marx. It could only be
possibly represented so much in abstraction in so far as the regimented
necessity of capital’s command had levelled it down in the very concrete
processes described in the historical detail in Das Kapital.
Class in the dialectics of the equivalent form?
Harry Cleaver seeks
to locate class struggle directly in the simple dialectics of the equivalent form.[252]
Hence he tries to support Marx’s statement that the “simplest commodity form,
contains the whole secret of the money form and with it in embryo, of all of
the forms of the bourgeois product of labour.”[253]
In so doing, Cleaver seeks to establish a direct connection between the product
of labour and the class struggle inserting it into Marx’s phenomenological
deconstruction of the form of value where Marx himself expresses claims it does
not belong. Cleaver argues:
“…This
relationship of reflection [in the reflex determination of the value form - EE]
is an aspect of the commodity form of the class relations themselves…in the
simple polarity/unity…relative value form and equivalent form stand as opposite
poles just as do the working class and capital.”[254]
For Cleaver, just
because the expression of value contains a form where one thing expresses its
value in another, this is somehow the same form of relation that bears forth
when the working class is understood as only existing as class in respect to
its relation with capital. Now despite inadequately terming this relation
reflection, one is left wondering wherein lies the actual need to reduce the
dialectics of class struggle to the dialectics of the form of expression in the
commodity. It could be that one reason for such a point of view lies in the
tendency to amplifying the commodity form of social relations to a far greater
extent than is legitimate. Indeed Foucault has directly criticised this notion
of power as something possessed rather than exercised where power ‘is modelled
on the commodity.’[255]
The treatment of capital politically
thus serves to perform a more serious reduction to the economic than Marx was
ever prepared to make himself for power could never be defined in a more
complex way than the transferral of possession without any alteration in social
form.
Zizek, utilising a
different aspect of these primary chapters dealing with the form of value,
likewise tends to draw out a logic of process that appears to work with any
number of social relationships. According to Zizek these dialectics of
separation in the commodity form “offer[s] a kind of matrix enabling us to
generate all other forms of the ‘fetishistic inversion.’”[256]
Here not only are the inverted appearance relations of commodity exchange the
explanation of capitalist exploitation, they explain the whole psychological
apparatus of subjectivity too.
According to Zizek
political economy is blown over by the discovery of the source of wealth but
Marx is concerned with why the product of labour should assume the value form.
Hence like many other Marxists, Zizek draws the conclusion that the real
mystery lies in the form itself. So rather than taking the developed forms of
the commodity form, like the money form, which for Marx was the starting point
of analysis, the commentary rests happy with the relations between the simple
undeveloped forms.
The measure of Value or the value of measure?
“The hours of
folly are measured by the clock; but of wisdom no clock can measure.”[257]
Clearly there have
been all sorts of attempts to find a political identity in what Marx posits as
a simple totality and what has been argued to be largely a process of
deconstruction and abstraction into the analytic of the forms of capital. Negri
is right in so far as he claims that the analytical form always involves a
reduction. The point for Marx, is that rather than reproducing the separated
object, the dialectic is the process of this separating. He defines the
capitalist process as the effectuation of a real social power of reduction.
Seen in this way, the ‘silences of capital’, where Marx is criticised for
failing to provide accounts of how particular elements function, is rather his
greatest strength. That is to say it is amazing how far Marx can abstract from
concrete labours into a generalisable social conception of labour, how far he
is not limited by historical contingencies. It is through the rendering ideal
or the viewing the particular from the point of view of the universal, that the
particular universal of the positive properties of labour can be identified.
Arguably the underlying attempt of Marx is to ground the crisis in the social
form of capital in and through the analytic of the labour theory of value.
However in so doing it would appear that Marx remains very much within the
classical episteme of the modern criticised by the new generation of
Spinozists, who oppose the reduction of difference into identity.
In this view it is
contended that Marx’s theory of value was in fact a theory of the measure of value.
If Marx’s concern is still the substance of value, then he can be assimilated
properly to the episteme of classical political economy.[258]
And yet if his object is to describe the exploitative and dysfunctional
elements of capital, then in what sense is objective measure of exploitation
either possible or desirable? If capital is ultimately a relation of command
between class- based and opposing agencies, is there a non-exploitative ground
on which that relation can be measured? It seems that measure in Marx has a
transitive function too, in that it is through measure, and through
qualitatively simple identity that a radical non-parity can emerge.
The theory of value,
which has labour-time not labour as its basis, is not just a theory of the
measure of value it is a notion of the substance of value, which as we know was
contested in Marx's day and still is today. Surplus value is the crucial
element that subordinates others, for there is no motive for capital to produce
value equal to that expended in production. For some this leads to the
conclusion that the theory of value is just a matter of measure – as it is
intrinsically derived from the analytic of socially necessary and surplus
labour time.[259] Here the
process of the derivation sutures the argument that capitalism is a form of
exploitation to an ontology that depends upon measurable time of work.
C.J.Arthur and Negri
both draw our attention to a specific and enduring fallacy that confounds the
understanding of Marx on this issue and it has a significant political
importance. This fallacy lies in seeing somehow that necessary labour is valid
reward for time spent working, and surplus labour time, i.e. unpaid labour, is
the criminal aspect of the process. This notion arises from taking the division
of the working day between necessary and surplus labour time literally. Marx’s
hostility to this notion is clearly visible in his polemic on Senior’s last
hour, where he goes against an economist who argued for manufacturers against
the reduction of the working day to ten hours and endeavoured to show it that
would cripple the industry, as the contemporaneous rate of profit meant that it
was only in the last hour that profit was generated.[260]
Against this, Marx argues that his division of the working day is simply to
point out that the worker only gets paid for a fraction of it in respect to the
total production of commodities. However the distinction between paid and
unpaid labour-time does remain crucial to the general theory of accumulation,
whereby the absolute limits of the working day can be posited and the intensive
theory of exploitation elaborated. This is to say that whenever the issue is
the command of capital over labour, Marx asserts the substantiality and
totality of aggregate labour, considered firmly in its unity and non-dependent
upon measurable quantities of exploitation and only on the ideal explanatory
dynamic of the reduction that capital performs. The idea that profit is
generated in only a section of working time is for Marx so much ‘bosh’ and yet
as Arthur has pointed out the fallacy remains astonishingly present in
reformist political strategies.
Marx’s claim that ‘the rise
of wages is … confined within limits that not only leave intact the foundations
of the capitalist system, but also secure its production on an increasing
scale’ is particularly instructive to show the limits of the politics of the
reformist notion that through the wage an egalitarian social capitalism can be
attained. This is directly opposed to political struggles over wage demands
that take seriously’ the maxim of ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’. The
implications of this critique is that the total time of work is an imposition
and that the equivalence at the level of income, the false notion of a fair
wage, is an extension of the appropriating power of capital. Because the
separation is an analytical one that attempts to isolate the dynamic of
reduction at work it introduces a political quality into the dialectic of
labour as social substance that is intrinsic rather than extrinsic to the
speculative path. The inequality of the labour-capital contract does not lie in
unpaid work, it is not a factor that corrupts from the outside but in lies
within the political basis of real subsumption, the power of one to put the
other to work. Marx generates this criticism from within the operative
assumption of political economy i.e. that the two "subjects" confront
one another as equal owners of commodities – and shows the immanent
deconstruction of this postulate. As he points out, “Between equal rights,
force decides.”[261]
Negri takes this
further than Arthur, as the latter is locked within negative dialectics and the
problematic notion of negative labour, whilst Negri asserts an intrinsic
‘expansive power to labour’. But it is important to interrogate further Negri’s
charge that the theory of value depends on an analytics of measure. This is
crucial to the interconnection of post-modernity, totality and subjectivity. In
more recent writings by Negri, the theorisation of real subsumption has passed
over to the theorisation of total subsumption – the interiorisation of
political and social life appropriate to the analytics of Empire. In this
theory the actualisation of the system and the total subordination of labour to
capital, only ideally posited by Marx, has been actualised historically, to the
point where there is ‘no outside’. Indeed Negri claims that it is, “in the
passage to post-modernity, one of the primary conditions of labour…that it
functions outside measure.”[262]
Clearly this is not something that can be directly contrasted with Marx as
Negri is making a totalised statement concerning the contemporary world.
However Negri has already attempted to go beyond Marx on this issue in
theoretical terms. In Marx Beyond Marx
Negri uses the Grundrisse to
experimentally escape Marx’s own formalist strictures intrinsic to the
phenomenological exposition in Das
Kapital. In this text the contradictions are not resolved and the tension
between capital and labour is laid bare. It offers the opportunity for the
tensions to remain in a process of becoming. This text captures an important
symbolic point in the reorientation of the process of reading and
investigation. On the one hand there is the modernist preference for the
completed systemic work and on the other, stands the post-modern sensibility
that is drawn to the anarchic, fragmentary and open discourse. In many ways the
whole question of the break between the modern and the post-modern concerns
this question of measure.
For Marx, a lot hangs upon the argument that the substance of value is labour power, and its measure labour time, but this is only one side of the analytic. In real terms the market measures value through its day-to-day operations that are observed by changes in price. In the Grundrisse, Marx describes the law of value as only the average time, a mean average of the fluctuations in price.[263] Do market prices still represent in kind the concrete working out of the law of value? If the point for Marx was the assertion of labour time as the measure of value as a scientific description of the ontological reality of labour power as the source of value - with all its political implications - then Negri does not necessarily lose any of this by dropping the idea of measurability. In fact he continues to argue that when it comes to labour as the source of value, "the abstract is more true than the concrete,"[264] and affirms the 'real abstraction' of commensurable activity, and cooperative form of social labour. Although Marx seems to deem it critical to demonstrate that labour is both qualifiable and quantifiable, he does appear to hold onto anything of what Negri regards of metaphysics which ‘hates the immeasurable because of its ideological necessity to give a transcendental ontological foundation to order.”[265] In adopting the ‘social point of view’ there is little evidence of Marx’s use of a metaphysical standpoint in order to advance the argument that capital is a form of exploitative social power. However, at the same time value does not actually have to be measured to make that argument. In fact, Marx only makes abstract approximations to it; he never measures actual value but in fact uses these criteria to pass over to the question of the substance of value. It is the possibility of measure that forms the possibility of the commensurability of commodities and labour. Negri does not seem to think these approximations are either possible or desirable, but then how is exploitation to be explained - simply as political power? With total subsumption does exploitation become meaningless, or is it the case that measuring exploitation is impossible or undesirable? It would seem to only have a function from a capitalist point of view.
Ultimately this is the conclusion that must be
drawn. If the social form of labour makes it commensurable in value, the value
form - exchange value - is predicated upon the increased abstraction of labour,
which involves its separation from the direct needs of the producer. Its
precondition remains the commodification of labour power as something that must
be sold, through the mediatory capacity of money, to account for the worker’s
needs. In theorising the advanced state of this separation Negri parts company
from Marx. Negri’s claim is that all labour is complex labour. The strong
analytical separation insisted upon by Marx throughout his work, between
concrete labour as producing use-value, and abstract labour as producing
exchange value, is rendered impossible by a social upheaval in the nature of
commodity production. It would be wrong to think of this as the effect of an
exterior force, such as technological innovation in production, rather, it is
in fact a working out of those tendencies toward abstract social labour
identified by Marx.
Crucially, Negri thinks that
all concrete labours have become abstract and social, and he draws on the more
prophetic moments of the Grundrisse
called the ‘fragment on machines’ that predict the appearance of the ‘social
individual’ to substantiate the point. Put in another way, this claim amounts
to that the struggles over work conducted by the political and moral agencies
of living labour, have created a social subjectivity in a value producing
context that invalidates any kind of measurable demarcation between necessary and
surplus labour power. The periodisations that are introduced into the forms of
value and the reductions of labour, demand new configurations of social power
and a theory of what might be called total exploitation, or exploitation
interiorised to power of control or command. In Thesis 5, of the 20 Theses on Marx, Negri's criticism of
Marx is not academic; his claim is that the historical conditions have changed
to the degree that it no longer makes sense to build a theory of exploitation
and crisis in quantitative terms. This is because socially necessary labour
cannot be equated to simple labour, and our productive activity is no longer
that which directly reproduces capital, but that which reproduces the whole of
society. In this respect, it would seem that for Negri the very point where
capital becomes the absolute ground and presupposition of productive activity,
is the point where its own internally generated division between productive and
unproductive work can no longer be sustained - all work becoming socially
productive living labour - and thereby the law of value is upset.
As Pier Paolo Frassinelli has
pointed out, it is integral to insist on the speculative dimensions of the
transformation of money into capital.[266]
Money is not the final form of capital but an existing transitory dimension of
it. As has been pointed out, money is a form of mediation or a weapon. It is
only where Marx is talking of the ‘relation between value and market or nominal
value’ that money is introduced, not in the theory of capital as such. Thus at
the beginning of chapter 3 the claim that “money as measure of value” is a
“phenomenal form” is necessarily assumed by “that measure of value immanent to
commodities, labour time.” Again it must be pointed out that the commensurability
and identity of abstract human labour is analytically prior to this designation
in time. Negri’s response, in Time for
Revolution, is to break up the homogeneity of time, or rather to give the
homogenous aspect over to the time of command, and recuperate a substantialist
doctrine of the duality of time of work and time of liberation which itself
transmogrifies into a pluralist and heterogeneous conception of proletarian
time of collective practice as an other to the time of command.[267]
And yet in these exertions, through the attack on con-measurability that Negri
returns to the authentic Marxian analytical line. Negri does not drop the
Marxian insight that all commodities have value because they are the result of
social activity. Rather the radical heterogeneity of this activity -
paradoxically the result of the forces of homogenisation - results in the
impossibility of regarding it in terms of time. This does not however result in
a change in the view of workers as the producers of social wealth.
For Marx, the possibility of
having money as the medium of universal exchange is presupposed by the
commensurability of labour as simple abstract labour - for Marx this has
nothing to do with the utility of objects exchanged. He always seems to
maintain the distinction that, in so far as he is looking at exchange value, it
is not to do with the substance of the object and it doesn't have anything to
do with the material embodiment of the workers activity as is expressed by the
claim that in so far as the tailor makes a coat, he does not produce an ounce
of value. It is only general labour power that produces value. Now, according
to Negri the production of value can not even be reduced to the time the worker
spends in the service of the capitalist, it is produced during all of the
waking hours of social life.
Negri states that, “the limit of Marx’s
consideration consists in his reducing the form of value to an objective
measure”.[268] Rubin,
like Negri, argues that Marx is concerned primarily with the social form of
value. Even the most developed forms of classical political economy had
faltered by fixing the social form of the commodity immutably. Zeleny makes
this point of Ricardo: the latter took the commodity form as eternal, and hence
tried to resolve why the practical processes threw up contradictions within
this form. Marx, in a number of instances, pointed out that the great merit of
political economy was to have, in wading through the swamp of empirical first
order reflections, stumbled upon abstract and general relations of labour,
value and money and so on, on which it constructed the edifice of the science
of political economy. The empirical manner that the political economy arrived
at these considerations became however, its limitation, as demonstrated for
instance by Ricardo’s confusion of value and cost- price.[269]
The possibility of the a-historical character of the scientific exposition of Das Kapital – its multifarious
historical evidence withstanding - is testimony to the debt owed by Marx to
these conclusions of his pre-cursors. However we cannot see what made this
science possible as a hindrance upon explaining the real empirical and
historical developments. The ‘simplifying assumptions’ of the science, - what Henryk Grossman was to unfairly
hypostatise as the very basis of Marx's method - mainly found in Volume I,
perform a disservice to the posited content of Das Kapital, that is the appreciation of capitalist system as the
total synthesis of both production and circulation, the conclusion aimed at in
the incomplete Volume III. Althusser is a friend of this point of view,
infamously recommending in an introduction to a French edition that readers of Das Kapital ignore the first section of
the work. In so far as the abstract starting point of Kapital has led to so
many confusions e.g. as we have seen: the idea of 'simple commodity production'
as both historical and logical premise of capital - these views are justified.
But as for the immeasurability of value, they also introduce confusion and a
misrepresentation. Marx, as Rubin argues, was concerned not so much to:
"seek a practical standard of value which would make possible the
equalization of the products of labour on the market. This equalization takes
place in reality every day of the process of market exchange. In this process,
spontaneously, a standard of value is worked out, namely money, which is
indispensable for this equalization."[270]
What follows in Rubin's argument is pertinent to Negri's criticism of Marx.
Negri looks at Marx's project through the distorted
lens of Marxism, wherein above all Marx's theory of value is understood as
positing that labour time is the practical means of the measure of value. Rubin
on the other hand understands that because Marx was concerned with the social
form of value, his emphasis was really on demonstrating that labour power is
the substance of value. The argument is theoretical, or ontological: the point
is not a practical standard of value of labour, but to demonstrate how 'in a
commodity economy the equalization of labour is carried out through the
equalization of the products of labour". Rubin introduces material from Theories of Surplus Value, a text that
incidentally cannot be disqualified for treatment by the standards of aleatory
materialism due to the absence of a strict phenomenological and dialectical
schema of exposition. Here Marx treats the theory of value, not as an external
pre-established criterion of measure, but as the "immanent standard"
and "substance" of value. What Rubin introduces us to here, is a
possible misinterpretation of 'measure' as being a quantitative consideration,
a simple matter of addition and calculation.
In the Hegelian dialectic, measure is understood as
a "qualitative quantum". In 'measure' Hegel finds an immediate
identity between quantity and quality. Something 'lurks behind' quantitative
changes, which makes measure an antinomy. The example that Hegel uses in the Encyclopaedia Logic is the ancient Greek
problem of whether the addition of a single grain makes a heap of wheat: at
what point does a quantitative change equal a qualitative change? There is for
Hegel a necessary qualitative aspect of measure that has an ontological
significance. In ratios, which are relative kinds of measure (quantitative
ratio), ‘quantity seemed an external character not identical with Being, to
which it is quite immaterial’. The contradiction of quantity then, is that it
is an, ‘alterable’ which, in spite of alterations still remains the same’. The
resolution of this contradiction is not just a return to quality, ‘as if that
were the true and quantity the false notion’, but ‘an advance to the unity and
truth of both, to qualitative quantity, or measure.’[271]
Hence though this unity produces the immeasurable, this is a relative form and
‘measureless’ is also a measure. The pearl in this oyster is the claim that
‘Measure is implicitly essence.’ If it is assumed for the moment that Rubin is
right in thinking that Marx's notion of labour time as the measure of value is
informed by Hegel - the dialectics of quantity and quality are certainly
central to Marx, but by no means uniquely Hegelian - then a different way of
perceiving the first stages of Das
Kapital is opened up. That is, measure serves as the basis of registering
the qualitative aspects of the value form, of identifying it in substance, not
practically as a quantum to be measured, but theoretically to establish its
ground. This Hegelian moment informs what has been claimed all along. There are
no external scientific considerations to be brought upon the material: what the
dialectical approach uses to expound the relational form of its object must
belong to the object as one of its essential forms.
Of course the post-modern scepticism of measure goes
deeper than this, and as a metaphysician Hegel stands charged with the absolute
confidence in the measurable, from the facts of nature, fossils, rivers and
chemistry to the practical social world of politics - which incidentally,
become more less and less indefinite the further removed they are from inorganic
nature. In this sense, Hardt and Negri are right to dismiss the measurable as a
practical standard through which to estimate the value of commodities, but
wrong in so far as they believe measure must be dispensed with, in order to
prove the ontological nature of labour and its results. Yet what makes this
process fascinating is how prescient the Hegelian reading of Marx was in a case
like Rubin’s. For it is exactly the nature of social labour in commodity
exchange that Rubin was arguing for. It is exchange,
not the technical nature of the labour process, nor the mind of the scientist
that makes the reduction to simple labour possible. The science of political
economy can make this assumption, because it takes market society as the
established premise of labouring activity and Marx adopts it because he
believes that production follows this reduction of human labour power to an
abstract measure of quantity. However if Negri were right to claim that social
networks are prior to capital, the reality of this inner reduction would be
undermined and exposed only as a tendency that can be offset. For the modernist
reading, abstract labour under capitalism, as Sohn-Rethel and Simmel would
describe it, is a ‘real abstraction’. On the sociality of abstract labour Rubin
is worth quoting at length.
"The unified act of equalizing commodities as
values puts aside and cancels the properties of labour as private, concrete,
qualified and individual…in Kapital these definitions are developed by Marx
with such clarity and rigor that the attention of the reader must grasp the
close relation between them as expressions of different aspects of the
equalization of labour in the process of its distribution. This process
presupposes: 1) interconnection among all labour processes (social labour); 2)
equalization of individual spheres of production or spheres of labour (abstract
labour); 3) equalization of forms of labour with different qualifications
(simple labour) and 4) equalization of labour applied in individual enterprises
within a given sphere of production (socially-necessary labour). Among the four
definitions of value-creating labour (mentioned above), the concept of abstract
labour is central. This is explained by the fact that in a commodity economy,
as we will show below, labour becomes social only in the form of abstract
labour. Furthermore, the transformation of qualified labour to simple labour is
only one part of a larger process of transformation of concrete labour into
abstract. Finally, the transformation of individual into socially necessary
labour is only the quantitative side of the same process of transforming
concrete labour into abstract labour. Precisely because of this, the concept of
abstract labour is a central concept in Marx's theory of value."[272]
What these points address is that the assumptions of
simple labour and incidentally of labour being sold at its value, are not
permissible because of method (as in Grossman) but because of the content which
they are the working conceptualizations of. The reduction to simple labour is
possible because the market makes labour commensurable. Hardt and Negri restate
the social dimension of abstract labour without recourse to the market, and
only through the subjective properties of proletarian activity in the global
constitution of their identity. For Hardt and Negri what renders it
immeasurable is the growing complexity and differentiation of work, the
technical nature of the labour process developing beyond the factory form –
becoming immaterial, ideational and more fragmented - alongside the separation (abstract in this social sense) from
the total product. In Chapter Three, sociological theories of differentiation
will be investigated with the aim of seeing if the discourse of totality more
broadly can accommodate these changes at the level of production, and whether a
total theory of capitalist production has become impossible given its movement
away from the homogenising factory form. If work now permeates the totality of
social life, then the theory of capitalist production can no longer separate
the concrete, heterogeneous nature of products and production processes from
their abstract representation. The paradoxical suggestion is that through
becoming an all embracing totality; an accomplished totalisation, and in
annihilating the outside, the utility of a totalising thought construct has
become itself an impossibility: total being invalidates total representation.
On one side, the restatement of production in
contrast to the relative independence given to consumption in post-modern
theories, re-directs the question to the nature of labour in classical
ontological terms. However how much has it changed the problematic? For Rubin,
political economy needed to explain how 'private' labours or the products of those
labours could be exchanged. Thus 'universal labour' or 'abstract labour' was
restated as central, because it enabled us to look past the world of
commodities and the differentiated concrete private realm, and individual
labours that produced them, to the deeper structures that actually represented
the premises of that world of commodities. "Value presupposes use value.
The process of the formation of value presupposes the process of producing use
values. Abstract labour presupposes a totality of different kinds of concrete
labour applied in different branches of production. Socially necessary labour
presupposes a different productivity of labour in various enterprises of the
same branch."[273]
Arguably what changes in Negri's consideration is that "private" labour
is no longer an adequate first term of the problem. The sociality of activity,
the priority of the social, is more clearly the premise of our activity, i.e.
our activity presupposes the whole activity of social networks of reproduction,
and the new immaterial form of labour. The problem is no longer the alienation
of the direct producer of value. To play with the Hegelian mutual
transformations of quantity and quality, it could be said that the
socialization of labour has created a new qualitative dimension by positing a
change in the essence of accumulation.
The question posed by post-modern materialisms is
really; how does the full interiorisation of labour under capital, termed total
subsumption, redefine the operative dimensions of the law of value? For them
“The first and fundamental consequence is that there is no possibility of
anchoring a theory of measure on something extraneous to the universality of
exchange”.[274] Quite so,
but that is - as has been shown - exactly Marx’s point in the definition of the
‘immanent standard’. The second consequence is that the immeasurability of
value – or labour - does not deny that the substance of value is labour. To
make what point? That the “abstract is more true than the concrete.” This claim
is however pretty much explicit in the modernism of Rubin evidenced by his
insistence of the social validity and integrity of the concept of abstract
labour. The crux of their difference with Marx and his modernist commentators
seems to lie in the new technical character of variable capital and the
instruments of production. In itself this is quite a Marxian claim and
represents a return to the notion that the technical development of the forces
of production lead to new relations of production. But they claim more than that,
in fact Hardt and Negri claim that this change has led to the direct identity
between the forces and relations of production.[275]
This is the nub of the disagreement with other similar emphasis of the social
form of value, like Rubin’s. Rubin believes in the analytical separation of the
mode of production, the treatment of the technical conditions of production and
the relations of production as independent spheres. The new mode of production
considered by Negri, with communication and mobility as its essence,
deconstructs and articulates subjectivity in the same moment. The domination of
the law of value is equally its practical deconstruction, because value is only
ever an effect of the enactment of creative productive energy that is
understood as the immanent basis of communism. There is no political moment in
this venture, because the process is political from start to finish:
“In the orthodox Marxism of the 19th century, and in
any case before 1968, the functions of destruction and reconstruction were separated
from the act of insurrection. The immediate strategy of struggle had to
articulate destabilization and de-structuration, moments of a war of movement
and a war of position.”[276]
The law of value then is a political form that is
enacted and contested. The form of value is the determinate character given to
the combination of productive forces and relations between producers. In Marx’s
arguments, with Ricardo and Bailey (which concern the relation between
cost-price and value), the argument has a political basis too. The insistence
on the immanent standard of measure is political too in the sense that it is
formulated against those that insisted upon some other criteria on which not
only to measure value, but to argue for its origin. Marx’s insistence on the
measure of value is, to restate the point, not because he, as Negri
understands, wanted to reduce the form of value to objective measure, but
because the only basis on which to show the absolute substance of value (labour
power as the substance of all value) was by undermining the notion that value
somehow existed in the mind of the exchangers, or inhered in the products (as
use-values) themselves. Rather than reducing the form of value to objective
measure then, Marx shows that the objectivity of the market equalization of
products of labour is the material basis of the form of value. In Marx, as with
Hegel, measure is a matter of quality. The new mode of production does not
subvert this form, rather the increased abstraction of labour and communication
as the new mode of commensurability, reinforces the peculiar features of
capitalist commodity exchange economies and the basis therein for communism,
the profound equalization that results from increased complexity and
diversification. Hence the resistance is to the real form of equilibrium and
counter-crisis economics.
"Since with the development of the real
subsumption of labour under capital or of the specifically capitalistic mode of
production, it is not the individual worker, but more and more a socially
combined-faculty which becomes the actual functionary of the total process of
labour, and the various labour-capacities which compete and form the total
productive machine participate in the extremely diverse manner in the immediate
process of commodity/ product formation: one man works more with the hand, and
the other more with the head: the one as 'manager', engineer, technologist,
etc. the other as overseer', the third as direct artisan, or even mere manual labourer."[277]
The transformation problem
and transforming problems
As will be seen, the developing theory of affective labour developed by Hardt
and Negri that puts a productive emphasis back into French philosophical
treatment of affect, integrates this moment of Marx and offers something of a
solution to the otherwise unresolved ‘transformation problem’. Marx only
ideally resolved this more general problem in political economy by assuming
that the total price was always equal to the total value. In and of itself this
exhibits the importance of use of totality in mediating the separation of the
real concrete phenomenal realm and the constructions in thought forms of the
law of value. However such a totalisation has been shown to have a more
sinister side where the totalised system must theorise the conflict between
wage-labour and capital at the point of its accomplishment (i.e. not just
historically but theoretically, where labour is rendered totally internal to
capital) and as such the intrinsic conflict is analytically assumed to have
been overcome successfully by capital. Thus from the abstract premises of
labour as substance of value, the analysis can never really arrive at the
actual analysis of a concrete situation, any more than it can specifically
determine difference in rates of profit and prices of production as these
factors are never outside the particular class configuration and resistance at
any point in the productive cycle. This cannot be forecast by a predictive,
positive or historical method, even though the crisis can be understood as
being immanent to social relations that take the generalised form of commodity
exchange.
The ideas of
immaterial labour and value as affect do implicitly address the criticisms of
the transformation problem, if only by shifting to the idea of the
immeasurability of the effects of labour, dropping the idea of exploitation as
unpaid work, which was never very satisfactory and moving to the idea of
capital as a mode of control over body, time, quality of life: new sites of
conflict and measure. Furthermore the focus on the transformation problem has
shifted the attention away from an important element in Marx, that is
substantialist thought about labour as productive activity, not reducible to a
positive economics or predictive social science.
Marx is theoretically forced to idealise the system of capital (he is
analytically forced to regards the system in so far as it has triumphed/
interiorised over labour), thus leading to explaining its contradictions not in
direct reference to the open conflict between worker and capitalist but the
internal conflict between constant and variable capital - that is to say the
catastrophe of the system almost irrespective of action on behalf of the
working class. This is partly why what Marx thinks of as a structural
contradiction that has an immanent collapse has been interpreted as the
necessary historical demise of capitalism. It is in fact quite the contrary.
Marx believed that the worker had ultimately more social power than capitalism
and that the cooperation between workers would produce a society organised in a
fashion better disposed towards ameliorating the general condition of humanity.
There is no doubt that he understood that as a historical struggle. And yet Das Kapital was overall a book designed
to show that what in his times were perceived to be the wrongs of man that
capitalism was a solution to, were in fact the wrongs of capital that could
only be addressed through political association amongst humankind. He agitated
for working class organisation whilst theoretically trying to demonstrate in
the only scientific fashion that appeared to provide a conceptual framework
adequate to his object, that systems of private appropriation of social labour
were intrinsically relations of exploitation whose dynamic led to a
catastrophic collapse and where the ruthless drive to expansion met its own
limits. It is not surprising that the retrospective treatment has discovered
that the more the coherence of the system becomes the object of the analysis
the less it is able to accommodate variations within it. As Lyotard opines:
"…Marx's attempt and failure to make the
system (and his book on the system...) self replicating can only appear
illegitimate, whatever the Althusserians may say: what prevents Marx from
making a 'scientific' description, is that he must fulfil the function of the
prosecutor assigned to him by his desire for an integration of goods, means and
persons into a single body. Sraffa's 'body' is as elusive as the body of
capital, commodities are themselves only evident there as the limits of an
endless metamorphosis; which suggests the congruence of capital's endless
metamorphosis; which suggests the congruence of capital's operation with that
of a theoretical system."[278]
Conclusion: the architectonic of Das Kapital and its relation to totality
This problem of
looking for a politics in these relations, and especially where Marx expressly
states that they would be inappropriate, is the mark of a more general problem
in trying to locate the ground of production of the social totality whilst
allowing simultaneously for its possibilities of dissolution. Theoretically
this necessity has become as apparent as it has done politically to projects of
transformation orientated to systematic change of the social. This entails the
supersession of the aporia that is the result of the angle of analysis that
sees in the completion of universal commodification not new forms of practice
and composition but a defeat of the
subject in politics. The rapprochement of the German and French traditions in
theorists of the post-modern is still however limited to a imagination of the
political quite specific to the generational outlook of the new left. The
rapprochement is possible in its convergence in the two figures of the negative.
Non-identity whether celebrated or despised, is still largely seen as the result of a fracturing and
decomposition, or it is seen negatively, its positive explanatory potential
only presenting itself in antithesis to the apparent hierarchy of the emancipating
dialectic.
The difficulty with
the speculative structure of Das Kapital
is that beyond showing the movement within the system it becomes too rigid.
Historical developments and shifts in its nature cannot be integrated into its
interpretative development without disturbing the whole structure. In Marx, the
production of relative surplus value for instance is grounded both historically
after the formal subsumption of labour to capital and in the dialectical
derivation as the passage from simple aggregated production extended in
duration to intensification of labour that now has place in time. If
historically the tendency is to dominate both the space and time of production,
and this has arrived, how can we maintain that one is prior to the other i.e.
how can we derive the one from the other? Rather we have a qualitatively new
instantiation of the form of historical time. Typically when Negri looks at
this element of Das Kapital he is
forced to argue that there is a quasi return to absolute surplus value
production in the form of time itself as differentiated but collective social
substance. The most prosaic of criticisms of Das Kapital turns out to be the most accurate: it ossifies a
mutable system. The real question however is does it succeed in representing
the actual dynamics that must be in play within the system?
In the rendering
redundant of the speculative method a notion of totality is introduced as an
aggregation without any reflexive cognition on behalf of the parts of their
overall belonging to part of the totality. The conventional reading of the
totalities of social labour in the mature Marx sutures them to their
speculative absorption and reduction into the analytic of capital. Hence Rubin
argues abstract social labour is prior to any concrete labour and Negri
provocatively claims the abstract is more real than the concrete. Yet this
speculative integration dissolves and what we are left with is a
reconfiguration of totality into aggregated being, into an assemblage, which,
because of the horizontality of its elements has a different ontological
structure of immanence as their cause. Plurality is not dissolved into a higher
unity but maintained in its differentiation. Complexity is not reduced here but
amplified because each singular aspect must be understood in its concatenation
with any other element that it determines or comes into contact with. Such a
complexity is the denial of any inner simplicity or origin that would provide,
through the speculative force of reduction to identity, its coherence.
But this is a
troubled complexity and again it is Negri who has done the most to introduce us
to its contours. Marx’s procedure of abstraction in Das Kapital tends to equilibrium, whether it is the violent
abstraction into exchange value, or a general rate of profit he idealises by
cancelling what is aberrant to the abstract form. The totality is in one sense
always the identical, even if it is structured by crisis and non-identity, the
totality is composite and most importantly (assuming that we can reach it in a
speculative manner) as a totality it must be identical with itself. The role of
the structural totality in Marx is then a taming of the infinite into forms of
the universal: the analysis manufactures, deduces or observes particular forms
of generality that exist at the level of the system.
The logic of a
systematisation that is simultaneously a differentiation, a totalisation and a
colonisation is a compelling one. The recurrence of such systems within
philosophy at the birth of the social sciences and within anti-systemic social
movements has continued. It is a banality to say that these systems of complex
totality have suffered most acutely from real changes in social life. But then
this does provide some kind of measure of how well these systems accounted for
these changes which, in so far as they can be taken up as totalities, would
have to account for subjectivity from within.
Marx’s theory is a
theory of crisis based upon the subsumption of the worker into capital. What
was posited ideally has by and large occurred practically. This does not mean
that the soul of the worker is money it simply means that the process of
capitalist exploitation is the established ground of social production itself.
The material process of this becoming totality, the interiorisation of the
worker into the capitalist relation, in autonomist Marxian language – total
subsumption – does not mean that the system functions in the sense of a stable,
integrated system with consensus. Rather the Marxian insight that the crisis of
capital is an internal crisis of inwardly generated barriers to accumulation
poses, at least ideally, a sense of the inherently dysfunctional nature of the
system. Any analysis of contemporary
capitalism must take into account the embedded structural counter-crisis
measures, whether in the form of the state or in civil society, that act to
either stabilise or guarantee system reproduction. The work of the French Regulation
School was indicative of the attempt within Marxism to produce a more
thorough explanation of these mechanisms; especially in respect to the widely
perceived crisis of ‘Fordist’ regimes of capitalist accumulation in the 1970s.[279]
The manifold contradictions and responses that are generated in Fordism show
the imperfectability of capitalism as a social system and the impossibility of
reading into it a logic or rationale; whether as a justification or a critique.
It is often claimed the total interiorisation of the worker into the capital relation, necessarily entails the impossibility of overcoming the system and the abandonment of revolutionary politics. As will be seen this is a common criticism of postmodernists like Jameson. This is, it will be argued, based upon a fallacy regarding the nature of the political and the nature of democratic aspirations in modernist representationalist ontologies of social integration and interaction. Consensus is found in the sociological imagination, in exactly the same place that Marx discovered crisis: in the basic exchange of equivalents. For example, Talcott Parsons turned such elementary ‘interaction’ in classical political economy into the paradigmatic form of wider complex interactions. [280] Marx of course did not do this; he posits this identity to immanently explode the relations of force and inequality it presupposes. Parsons writes consensus into basic exchange. Marx crucially shows that consensus is an ancillary weapon in the process of subsumption. Not just theoretically, but politically, when difference is sublated into identity it provokes crisis.
Chapter 1: Simple and complex totalities of interiority
Chapter 3: Differentiation, complexity and the exhaustion of totality
Chapter 4: The war on totality: subjectivity, total refusal and social composition
Chapter 5: Conclusion: The limits of totality
[132] Firstly some points about the role of this debate in my thesis: a) the initial investigations of this debate are not directed at trying to understand the current reality of capitalism, although often the insights into the theoretical subject are very much informed by claims concerning it past and present, a more contemporary discussion of these will be found in the second part of Chapter 3 in this thesis. This chapter concerns the interconnection between method and object and how levels of uniformity and difference can exist considered as the sites of subjectivity, power and agency. b) The debate over capital is a particularly intense battlefield for broader discussions of structure and agency debated in the social sciences – though they are by no means reducible to one another, this is a ground where we can draw out the political stakes in these debates in a determinate way. This will be discussed at the end of this chapter and in Chapter 4 c) In fact, though my initial reasons for engaging with Das Kapital in this thesis were more orthodox, it has been an important focus and had an important heuristic role in discovering how totalities have been deconstructed and the difficulties of maintaining an iron fidelity to the work of any writer.
[133]
Althusser, Spectres of Hegel
p. 140
[134] Debord, The Society of the
Spectacle (Cambridge MA: MIT Press,
1999) p. 144
[135] A good example of the attempt to turn
Marx’s critique of political economy into a positivist political economy is
found in the work of the Krisis Group – http://www.krisis.org
[136] These lacunae in Marx open up a wider
issue that concerns the structure of his dialectical logical derivations in the
analysis of capital. It is not that Marx forgets women or is blinded to their
position in the division of labour; the problem is more that in adopting the
logical over the historical method it is impossible to introduce the question
of domestic labour into the analysis with the same force of necessity given the
other components. The subjugation of women, beyond functionalist explanations
of their role in reproducing the male worker, can only be appreciated
historically; it cannot be entered into the analysis of the capital relation
derived in speculative fashion. This is extremely important issue with regard
to the dialectic of the measurable and the presentable within Marx’s theory of
capital and the limitations of its speculative framework. However various
points can be raised that question exactly how far this undermines Marx’s
understanding of value; they will be exploited again in our discussion of
feminism in chapter 4. Until then it
suffices to say that Marx understood capital as tending towards the full
exploitative integration of women and children into factory work and often he
describes this tendency with a moral critique of the breaking up of the
domesticity of women’s work. ‘Even women are made to work in this way!’ is the
kind of formulation the issue gets. He recognises that they get paid lower
wages but pays little attention to the social causes of this inequality.
[137] Ilyenkov, The Dialectics of
abstract and concrete in Marx’s Capital (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982)
[138] “We must represent objects as they are
– in our belief – without our cooperation; our representation must be
determined by their being” Fichte, Science of Rights p. 33
[139] This is Lukács’s position, although
he believes the categories are characteristics of the real social being. See
Lukács, Ontology of social Being: Marx p. 19
[140] See Althusser, The Humanist
controversy (ed.) F. Matheron (London: Verso, 2003) p. 296- 297
[141] Marx, Grundrisse p. 459- 461
[142] Fred Mosely, Introduction to the
four drafts of capital in Rethinking Marxism Volume 13, Number 1, New York
p. 1- 10
[143] Marx, Grundrisse p. 278
[144] It is critical to see that there are
both logical and historical precedents for the possibility of presenting
capital as a totality of interiority. The logical reduction to simple
categories already exists in the concepts of classical political economy, and
the historical reduction lies in the factory form of the administration of
labour.
[145] Lukács, Ontology… p. 19
[146] Althusser draws out a one-sided
interpretation of Marx in this respect. He argues that dialectical materialism
is characterized by working solely on the concepts of the existing science. He
ignores this double movement whereby Marx not only seeks to express the real
relations, but also to return to how the existing concepts of those relations
have their basis in their practical social nature.
[147] This assumption is outlined very
clearly in Marx, Value Studies p. 9
[148] Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise p. 100
[149] Marx, Capital Vol. I p.
168-169
[150] F. Jameson, The Political
Unconscious p. 66. With a startling
prescience of later debates, Sohn-Rethel, on whom Jameson draws significantly,
takes this so far as to say that even abstract intellectual thinking is based
upon commodification and commodity exchange. Sohn- Rethel, a fellow traveller
of the Frankfurt School, also finds favour in the work of Zizek where he is
described as having taken the implications of the formal analysis of the
universal commodification of labour the furthest. See Zizek, The Sublime
Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1998) p. 16
[151] Marx, Capital Vol. I p. 875 –
because the “expropriation of the agricultural producer…is the basis of the
whole process” (p. 876). It is easy to see that Marx theorises capital with the
assumption that this process is completed or idealised/ reduced to completion.
[152] Marx, Capital Vol. I p. 103
[153] Marx, Capital Vol. I p. 125
[154] Macherey, Lire de Capital IV
p. 108
[155] C.J. Arthur, The Infinity of
Capital p. 17
[156] Marx himself uses this analogy (where
the triangle is reduced to an expression of a common entity completely
different from its visible figure) see Marx, Value Studies p. 8
[157] Spinoza, Ethics p. 130
[158] De Quincey details his passion for
Kant and Hegel in his autobiographical work. Therein he also claims to have
dedicated himself to composing one single encyclopaedic work named after
Spinoza’s unfinished treatise on the emendation of the intellect. See De
Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium- Eater and Other writings
(London: Penguin, 2003) p. 71
[159] De Quincey, The Logic of Political
Economy and other papers (Boston: Tocknor and Fields, 1859) p. 77
[160] De Quincey, The Logic… p. 71- 75
[161] Marx, Grundrisse p. 549- 554
[162] Marx, Theories of Surplus Value
Part. III p. 123
[163] Lenin, Conspectus… Vol. 38 CW
[164] Because, “the principle ought also to
be the beginning, and what is the first for thought ought also to be the first
in the process of thinking” that with which the science begins, must also be
its real origins.
[165] Lenin, Conspectus… p. 310
[166] Marx, Capital Vol. I p. 270-1
[167] Marx, Value Studies p. 49
[168] This is what is understood by the
idea of a ‘contradiction’ existing between exchange value and use-value.
[169] Marx, Value Studies p. 52
[170] Forms of Value are different material
expressions of value, simple, relative, equivalent and total expanded form.
[171] Uchida, Marx’s Grundrisse and
Hegel’s logic http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/uchida.htm
(1988) p. 12
[172] Uchida, Marx’s Grundrisse… p. 13
[173] Hegel, Science of logic p. 801
[174] Ibid. p. 801
[175] It is this division within the simple
form that distinguishes it from the models of complexity approach criticised by
Arthur in Capital and Labour (SPT seminar, University of Sussex, January
2003) where he points out that the sequence is not of un connected stages but
of the development of the forms of the same object. Further see Marx, Capital
Vol. III p. 25 “The various forms of capital, as evolved in this book, thus
approach step by step the form which they assume on the surface of society, in
the action of different capitals on one another, in competition, and it, the
ordinary consciousness of the agents of production themselves.”
[176] Marx, Value Studies p. 53
[177] Marx, Value Studies p. 51
[178] When Marx talks of the ‘totality’ of
the relative form, all he seems to mean is that summation of the
characteristics of commodity in relational and equivalent forms i.e. its discovery
of its own being in the other and thus its ‘value form’ – independent and
autonomous from its natural form. So total refers to the abstract elements seen
in their concatenation.
[179] The individual carries his social
power ‘in his pocket’. Marx, Grundrisse p. 156-7
[180] Jairus Banaji, From the Commodity
to Capital: Hegel’s dialectic in Marx’s Capital in Value (London: CSE, 1979) p. 30
[181] Paul Mattick Jr. is right to argue
that the mode of presentation can not be separated from the exercise of the
critique of for-going political economy, though he assumes Marx successfully
detaches himself p.66
[182] Hegel, Science of Logic p. 75-
83
[183] “But the absolute can not be a first,
an immediate; on the contrary the absolute is essentially its result.” Hegel, Science
of Logic p. 537
[184] Hegel, Science of Logic p. 99
[185] Macherey, Lire le Capital IV
p. 43 & 108
[186] Cleaver, Reading Capital
Politically (Leeds: Anti/Theses Press, 2000) p. 93
[187] Marx, Grundrisse p. 168-173
[188] Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of
Value (Detroit: Black & Red, 1972) p. 142
[189] Baudrillard, The Mirror of
Production (New York: Telos Press, 1975)
[190] Marx, Capital Vol. I p. 311
[191] De Quincey, Logic… p. 68
[192] Naomi Klein, No Logo (London:
Harper Collins, 2001)
[193] Marx, Grundrisse p. 171
[194] Ibid.
[195] See Cleaver, Reading Capital
Politically
[196] Marx, Early writings p. 384
[197] Marx, Grundrisse p. 169
[198] Heidegger, Pathmarks p. 331
[199] Macherey, Lire le Capital p.
107
[200] Spinoza defines an attribute as ‘that
which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance’ see Ethics
Part I Definition IV
[201] E. Ilyenkov, Dialectical Logic:
Contribution to the Problem of a dialectical materialistic critique of
objective idealism (1974) http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay2.htm
Accessed: 06/01/2003
[202] Karl Marx, Letter to Ferdinand
Lassalle (May 31,1858) MECW Vol. 40 p. 319
[203] G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money
p. 101 see also p. 141 -147 Here Simmel talks of each single commodity being
related to the totality of commodities through money.
[204] Simmel, The Philosophy of Money
p. 131
[205] Simmel, The Philosophy of Money
p. 157 see also p. 161
[206] Simmel, The Philosophy of Money
p. 165
[207] Simmel, The Philosophy of Money
p. 155
[208] Simmel, The Philosophy of Money
p. 158
[209] Simmel, The Philosophy of Money
p. 73
[210] It is important to recognise that
although the exchange value of labour is determined by the totality of labour
processes, it is not an absolute determination of the cost of production - it
remains relative. See Marx, Grundrisse p. 817
[211] Simmel, The Philosophy of Money
p. 130
[212] Simmel, The Philosophy of Money
p. 81
[213] Tenbruck, Formal Sociology in
L.A.Coser (ed.) Georg Simmel (New Jersey: Spectrum 1965) p. 79
[214] This does not however lead Simmel as
far as developing an optimism for knowing the ‘totality of existence’ (he
advises us that an adequate concept of money would not be equal to this) which
is only accessible to us through abstractions and ‘general sentiments’ see
ibid. p. 81
[215] Letter to Heinrich Rickert 1904
(quoted on back cover of Simmel, The Philosophy of Money…
[216] Rubin, Essays… p. 136
[217] In fact Marx does use the term
‘command’ in this way, especially when he comments on De Quincey who uses this
word and many similes for it in the description of use and exchange value as
the power of attraction of a commodity and the power of resistance of its
price. See Marx, Theories of Surplus Value III p. 124 and Thomas De
Quincey, The Logic… p. 51-52
[218] Knafo, The Fetishizing Subject in
Marx’s Capital in Capital and Class #76 p. 151
[219] Knafo, The Fetishizing Subject
p. 152
[220] Ibid. p.152 Knafo is clearly only
drawing on Hegel’s Phenomenology.
[221] Knafo, The Fetishizing Subject
p.158
[222] Knafo, The Fetishizing Subject
p. 160
[223] Knafo, The Fetishizing Subject
p. 165
[224] Marx, Capital Vol. I p. 681
[225] D. F. Ruccio; J. Graham; and J.
Amariglio, The Good, the Bad, and the Different': Reflections on Economic
and Aesthetic Value in The Value of Culture: On the Relationship between
Economics and Arts, (ed). A. Klamer (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
1996) p. 44-73
[226] M. Foucault, The Archaeology of
Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1997) Chapter 2
[227] Negri explains this contradiction
well in Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (New York:
Autonomedia, 1991) p. 132
[228] Marx, Grundrisse p. 817- 818
[229] Marx, Capital Vol. I p. 655
[230] Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
(ca. 300) quoted in Capital Vol. 1 p. 151f
[231] Laclau & Mouffe, Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985) p. 78-9
[232] “Even those Marxist tendencies which
struggled to overcome economism and reductionism maintained, in one way or
another, that essentialist conception of the structuring of economic space”,
Laclau & Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist strategy p. 76
[233] Laclau & Mouffe, Hegemony…
p. 77
[234] “…In order that this general law of
development of the productive forces may have full validity, it is necessary
that all of the elements of the production process be submitted to its
determinations” Laclau & Mouffe, Hegemony… p. 78. The authors do not substantiate
what they mean by this law and the only reference they give for further
explication is to the work of G.A.Cohen. Although the latter attempts to
distance Marx from Hegel, he does so by producing a strongly criticised,
functionalist reading of Marx.
[235] Similarly I have found no precedent in political economy,
Marxist or otherwise, on which to ground this definition of a commodity.
[236] Martha Campbell, The Commodity as
‘Characteristic Form, in R. Blackwell et al. (eds), Economics as worldly
philosophy, (London: Macmillan, 1993) p. 274
[237] Negri, quoted by S.Wright, Storming
Heaven p. 39
[238] Marx, Capital Vol. I p.
342-343: “suddenly, however there arises the voice of the worker, which had
previously been stifled in the sound and fury of the production process, ‘The
commodity I have sold you differs from the ordinary crowd of commodities in
that it creates use value, a greater value than it costs. That is why you
bought it….”
[239] Marx, Theories of Surplus Value
Vol. I p. 389
[240] Marx, Capital Vol. II p. 184-185
[241] Marx, Capital Vol. II p. 184
[242] Marx, Capital Vol. III
(Progress Publishers) p. 857
[243] Ibid.
[244] Ibid.
[245] Marx, Capital Vol. II p.382
[246] Marx, Capital Vol. II p.285
[247] “We acknowledge the co-operative
movement in capitalism as one of the transforming forces in the present society
based upon class antagonism. Its great merit is to show practically, that the
present pauperising, and despotic system of the subordination of labour to
capital can be superseded by the republican and beneficial system of the association
of free and equal producers….” Quoted in L. Vygodski, The story of a great
discovery: how Marx wrote “Capital” (Kent: Abacus Press, 1974) p. 127
[248] Marx, Capital Vol. I p. 443
[249] Spinoza, A Political Treatise (New
York: Dover, 1951) p. 296
[250] Negri, Time for Revolution (London,
Continuum Books, 2003) p. 79
[251] We want to talk later about how the
capital-labour relation – is not a relation of centred power in the way it is
often imagined, it represents in fact a diffuse power with no single centre, a
general social power. The implication is to see this conflict as embedded and
over-determined in all areas of social life. The state attempts to claim the
centre for economic power in terms of political power but as we shall see this
too is seriously undermined.
[252] Cleaver, Reading Capital
Politically p. 143
[253] Marx letter to Engels (1867) quoted
in Cleaver, Reading Capital… p. 139
[254] Cleaver, Reading Capital… p. 143
[255] Foucault, Society must be defended
(London: Penguin, 2003) p. 14
[256] Zizek, Sublime object… p. 16
[257] Blake, Il Matrimonio del cielo e
dell’inferno (The marriage
between heaven and hell) (Milan: SE, 2003) p. 20
[258] Baudrillard, The Mirror of
Production (New York: Telos Press, 1975) In his polemical break with Marx,
Baudrillard argues that the former does not escape either the form of
representation or the dominant system of political economy that it reflects.
[259] “ The sum of necessary labour and the
surplus labour, i.e. the sum of the periods of time during which the worker
respectively replaces the value of his labour power and produces the surplus
value, constitutes the absolute extent of his labour-time, i.e. the working
day.” Marx, Capital Vol. I p. 339
[260] Marx, Capital Vol. I p. 333-9
[261] Marx, Capital Vol. I p. 344
[262] Hardt & Negri, Empire p.
357
[263] Marx, Grundrisse p. 137
[264] Negri, 20 Theses on Marx in C.
Casarino & R. E. Karl, S.Makdisi (eds.) Marxism beyond Marxism (New
York: Routledge, 1996)
[265] Negri, Empire p. 359
[266] In generation- online email
discussion thread ‘discount price’, 2001 Http://www.generation-online.org/other/discussion.htm
Accessed: 06/09/2002
[267] Negri, Time for Revolution p.
70-81
[268] Negri, 20 Theses on Marx §
2
[269] See Marx, Theories of Surplus
Value Part III. It is interesting to note that Malthus made this criticism
of Ricardo before Marx.
[270] Rubin, Essays on Marx’s theory of
Value p. 125
[271] Hegel, Logic § 105 - 111
[272] Rubin, Essays… p. 128
[273] Rubin, Essays… p. 40
[274] Negri, 20 Theses on Marx § 2
[275] Ibid.
[276] Negri, 20 Theses on Marx § 7
[277] Marx, Value Studies p. 134
[278] Lyotard, Libidinal Economy p. 152
[279] See Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and circuits
of struggle in high- technology capitalism (Illionois: IUP, 1999) p. 55- 56
[280] Parsons: the ‘simplest case’ “is that of reciprocity of goal orientation, the classical economic case of exchange value, where alters’ action is a means to the attainment of ego’s goal, and vice versa” Parsons, The Social System (London: Tavistock Publications, 1951) p. 70 See also Morse in The Social theories of Talcott Parsons p. 100