The speculative logic in Marx

Chapter 2: Complexity through the immanent deconstruction of simple totality

“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 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.

“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.

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.

*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 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.

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]

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.

“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.

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 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]

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]

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.

Title, Intro and contents

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

Bibliography

[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

[142] Fred Mosely, Introduction to the four drafts of capital in Rethinking Marxism Volume 13, Number 1, New York p. 1- 10

[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.

[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

[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.

[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

[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

[162] Marx, Theories of Surplus Value Part. III p. 123

[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.

[168] This is what is understood by the idea of a ‘contradiction’ existing between exchange value and use-value.

[170] Forms of Value are different material expressions of value, simple, relative, equivalent and total expanded form.

[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.”

[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

[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

[185] Macherey, Lire le Capital IV p. 43 & 108

[186] Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Leeds: Anti/Theses Press, 2000) p. 93

[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)

[192] Naomi Klein, No Logo (London: Harper Collins, 2001)

[195] See Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically

[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.

[205] Simmel, The Philosophy of Money p. 157 see also p. 161

[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

[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…

[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

[220] Ibid. p.152 Knafo is clearly only drawing on Hegel’s Phenomenology.

[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

[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

[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

[242] Marx, Capital Vol. III (Progress Publishers) p. 857

[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

[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

[255] Foucault, Society must be defended (London: Penguin, 2003) p. 14

[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

[264] Negri, 20 Theses on Marx in C. Casarino & R. E. Karl, S.Makdisi (eds.) Marxism beyond Marxism (New York: Routledge, 1996)

[266] In generation- online email discussion thread ‘discount price’, 2001 Http://www.generation-online.org/other/discussion.htm Accessed: 06/09/2002

[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

[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