Chapter 2: Complexity through the immanent deconstruction of simple totality

The speculative logic in Marx’s Das Kapital [132]

“It is…not the least of the paradoxes of Marxism, which has time and again accused Hegel of formalism, that it retains Hegelian form as valid, while condemning the perversion of content.”[133]

“Even the style of exposition of dialectical theory is a scandal and an abomination to the canons of the prevailing language, and to sensibilities moulded by those canons, because it includes in its positive use of existing concepts a simultaneous recognition of their rediscovered fluidity, of their inevitable destruction.”[134]

Both of these comments derive from two diverging effects of the explanatory force of Das Kapital, and the inevitable fact that its analytical power has affected different outlooks in similar historical contexts in different ways. However, the delight and inspiration with which the work’s moments of synthesis and negation inspired Debord must be put alongside the difficulties they brought to other readers, for instance those that treat the text either as an attempt at a positive science (the nub of Habermas’s general critique of Marx) or those autonomist readings that have tried to treat it foremost politically. Through the various acts of interpretation of the text, many lacunae open up that discredit its claim to grasp the totality of social relations. However, whether attention is drawn to the lack of adequate theorisation of the role of women in the reproduction of capital or its failure to finish its projected analyses of imperialism and class and the role of the state in the attenuation of class conflict, these criticisms are only ever partial. Within Marxist discourse one of the most drastic effects of the close analytical and political engagement with Marx’s theorisation of capital leads to a call for a total break with the system. Very often however, such a drastic break is impossible and even the most critical of attitudes towards the discourse can partly reaffirm any of its premises. Even if the system is seen as unworkable, its categories still inform the communities of knowledge producers, who gain clarity of their own position through the distancing from this particular conception of totality. Part of Spinoza’s appeal to Althusser was in providing a conception of science that worked on a set of premises and drew necessary conclusions from it. But Althusser’s more general comments about science are more aptly applied to intellectual theoretical production within Marxism rather than scientific production in broader society.  For Althusser this science had to be continuously working on its premises in order to uncover new ground; if not it would become dogmatic.

The misunderstanding of the form of Marx’s critique in Das Kapital has led it to be treated wrongly as either a positivist economic work or an attempt at a total theory of society. The positivist understanding is prominent in academic, intellectual and political movements that see in Marx an explanation of capitalism through the positive social forms of the commodity, money and labour enunciated there.[135] What is not sufficiently attended to, is the collapse of these social forms; the breaking up of their original simplicity and their coming into crisis. Far from sharing the preoccupation of classical political economy in showing the origin of commodity exchange and developing theories of the equilibrium and equality of commodity exchange, Marx is concerned with taking this simple totality of an abstract universal and showing how within its own relation it creates conflict, contradiction, dynamism and change. The real difficulty seems to lie in understanding quite what relation the categories have to the reality they express. What is the ontology of value for Marx and to what extent does its logico-deductive speculative presentation involve the positing and decomposition of simple totality? What is the nature of the existence of value? Is it a calculation, approximation made solely in the mind, or does value exist as a human property of things? Is value anywhere or at any time actual?

Exposing the holes in Marxist analysis has often been quite a fertile space in which those that continue to identify with the premises of the science have been able to recover and reinvent something of its critical power. Indeed by reading what is said whilst bearing in mind these absences, the wealth of reactions to it and its differing affects in mind it might be possible in certain instances to recreate the bond between content and representation and therein reassemble something of the totality and how it operates in its complexity.

Two of the debates that refer to subjectivity inside and outside of the totality are the domestic labour debate and the ontological status of labour in respect to capital.[136] Both of these questions have their origins in claim that Marx ignores an important realm of social life that is relevant to the inner structure of Das Kapital. Generally to approach a book by what it does not say can be a way of avoiding treatment of what it does say, but in the case of both of these issues, the reproduction of the working class and the reproduction of capital, they are important to an overall clarification of the subject area and Marx’s approach.

Only in so far as Das Kapital was an enterprise in some classical form of representation can one agree with Ilyenkov when he says we must look at the works Marx himself saw as best representing his system and not so much the rough drafts of analysis that went into its production.[137] It will be shown however how the exasperation with the Marx of Das Kapital has led several of his most serious and enthusiastic supporters into fundamental conceptual difficulties and so many lines of flight. One of these lines tries to resurrect the early Marx or another to restructure Das Kapital. In its foundations these problems have more or less always been heavily conditioned by the practice of political movements and the nature of the solidarities between them.  And yet almost because of this some of the more obvious questions about the nature of Marx’s critique of capital and the implications of them for our thought about the social and political have not had due hearing. Even something as apparently obvious to Marx, such as the very existence of ‘capitalist society’ as a totality, is not something socially self-evident but an expression of a politics, a language and a philosophical conception of the nature of social things. Using authors past and present we need to get to the bottom of the nature of this totality and ask to what extent it is in the nature of the science of totality so to speak (including therein the determinations of the desire/ inclination for totality, operative historical and subjective factors, metaphysics of the whole and the romantic sense of separation within social life) that creates the disposition towards it or rather the actual nature of the object of the science that determines the utilisation of totality and totalisation (and the developments out of simple totality we have identified). The question in studying capital then, seems to be how much totality depends on the nature of subjectivity and vice versa and if one can be understood to have ontological priority over the other.  Little qualification is needed to show that Marx tries makes his categories dynamic but is this because they can be made identical with their object; do they mirror it or are they adequate to it? Crucially this informs what Marx sees as his object. One major camp, now I believe largely discredited, believes it is history. Another, seemingly equally discredited, poses it as structure. Some light can be shed on this by looking at the mechanisms of presentation in Marx’s exposition, and observing what relation the presentation has to its object.

The significance of the presentational structure of Das Kapital

The initial significance of this discussion is to see how the totality is constructed and utilised by Marx. Does the critique of political economy retain critical insights into the forces of constitution of the social? The significance of the opening chapters is how these indicate the way into the totality and what kind of nature that denotes. It will be argued that the role of value in Marx’s treatment of the relations of production in their totality depends upon categories that are only valid as generalisations, that is to say abstractions from concrete activities raised up to the level of totality through simplification or reduction of their particularity. Value and abstract labour have no meaning as individual activities, and yet the ‘real’ social relations they are the abstract concept of do. Furthermore, the movements of value in the first questions show how inextricably linked the category of value is from its embodiment in the architectonic of totalising conceptual order. In the strong Hegelian interpretation of Das Kapital, the Hegelian movement is more than an order of explanation but in fact is a real movement that exists beneath the surface relations (such as retail trade) that are apparent to its participants. The representation is not external to the object of reflection in the sense that Hegel found Spinoza’s philosophy lacking, and in the sense used positively by Fichte,[138] so the autogenesis of the depth must somehow follow from the surface, and thus this brings quickly to the fore (as any questioning of this type does) the choosing of the starting point from which the successive determinations will follow. In so far as Marx recognised that the categories needed to follow a logical sequential derivation, he is following totalising principles used by the German idealist tradition. In the substance of those categories or their sociological content, however, there is a completely different ontological order; they do not follow logical derivation.[139] It cannot be said that they strictly follow a Hegelian process of negation either. There are limitations of this form of Hegelian presentation. What could equally or better be seen as a horizontal actuality, an ontological field or a rhizomatic form, Marx forces into a vertical and hierarchical order of representation. In the reproduction cycles of Volume II Marx describes the circularity and metamorphosis of forms of the commodity in a manner that does not involve the kind of hierarchical sublation evident in Volume I. He continues to adopt the approach of moving from the simple to expanded form of the process, but this is more of an analytical movement and lacks the kind of auto-genesis for which Volume I is renowned. 

The historical presence of the totality described in Das Kapital is only polemically grounded, nor indeed does it appear to be the objective of the argument to ground history with metaphysical proof of its materiality. Indeed the material reality of social relations is pre-supposed at the beginning and throughout Das Kapital. This insight of Althusser’s is fundamental to clarifying the fundamental incompatibility with the formal pretensions of the Hegelian dialectic that declares that philosophy must start its speculative order from a position lacking in any presuppositions. That the investigation is into the essential nature of a historically specific mode of production does not require that its historical parameters are the starting point of how the object can be scientifically apprehended. In fact Marx points out in the famous Introduction that the order of exposition is the reverse of the order of historical emergence, which is taken to mean that the concrete combination of different dimensions of the explanation of capital is at first only a horizon of the analysis. Some of the theoretical complications in the theoretical problematic of Das Kapital, stem directly from the attempt to force abstract and simple models of production schemes onto actual phases of historical development. Infamous is the interpretation of ‘simple commodity production’ as a once actually existing simple and undifferentiated stage in economic development out of which capitalism arose. Marx is not directly concerned here with the origins of capitalism nor indeed does feudalism somehow ‘contain’ capitalism in itself.[140] For Marx the historical presuppositions of a system have a different set of determinations to those involved in system reproduction.[141] So when Marx says we must look at ‘its most developed form’ this also means something of an idealisation or a totalisation of the object, known beyond its actual historical instantiation. The critique of this initial simplicity to the complex totality can be found within the humanist reading, as seen for instance the work of Hegelian Marxists like Chris Arthur who otherwise seek to hold on to the logical-derivative model, that is to say, the speculative logic at work in Marx’s categories. Although Arthur’s attempt to judge Marx’s schema in relation to how it holds up to Hegel’s categories produces some insights into the method it mostly creates a set of irresolvable problems that re-emphasise the tenacity of Althusser’s criticism.

Throughout Das Kapital empirical and historical references to the ‘real development’ are plentiful – but these instances seem to be overall secondary to an argument that is presented on a dialectical, conceptual theoretical basis. The theory of capital cannot be made through explaining the causes and origins of capitalist society. Rather the theory must look at the practice of the system in reproducing itself. It is here that the work of the Althusserian reading of Das Kapital, often overlooked, adds an important conceptual qualification on the distinction between capital as a real object and an object of knowledge.   

Marx expressed his intention to present Das Kapital, ”as a dialectically articulated artistic whole” in a letter to Engels dated 31 July 1865. But the architectonic of this whole was to vary considerably. Recent research has established that there are at least four rough drafts of Das Kapital, all with noticeable difference in methods of presentation: and most importantly all beginning from what in the final version of Das Kapital appears as part 2, (the transformation of money in capital).[142] This is significant because deconstructing the play between ontological necessity and presentation in the first part has proved to be an almost impossible matter.

In the introduction to a new publication of Das Kapital in France Althusser infamously recommended that readers should ignore the opening few chapters of the book, as they were a distraction from the essential content of the work. However he does draw our attention to a problem that, although he does not correctly resolve, puts us in a better position to understand the functioning of totality. Althusser states that in Marx, the materialist totality is always presupposed. In contrast to Hegel’s philosophy, where the idea is the result of its own process of estrangement from itself, the existence of the material totality always presupposes the analytical approach to it. The theory cannot begin from totality, but at the same time totality is its premise.

Neither an analysis of totality nor an analysis that uses totality as a conceptual tool to grasp an object that forms a whole can begin from totality. To begin from totality is either to impose, from the outside, a schema of demarcation of the field that is foreign to it, or it is to begin from nothingness or emptiness. The empty totality informs nothing and can only be further broken down by any successive determinations that enter into it. Because totality as a point of departure is either this externality or this nothingness, it can only appear as a result, which means further that the starting point to arrive at totality, must actually be a division of that totality. Even if premised on an initial unity, this must be broken down in order to form the parts that are capable of producing a totality that is a result of its own process of combination. Alternatively to arrive at totality as a result, two or more unrelated parts can be forced into relation, but if this is the case, there is still an initial division or dividedness from whence the synthetic moment comes (whether exercised by the external intellect that works on its objects and forms their relation – or whether it is ostensibly the force of the part itself that forces it to transform itself into an other). For Marx, the commodity may well be the elementary component of bourgeois wealth, but this does not mean that it is in itself a simple form. In opposition to Lenin’s analysis (on which so much Hegelian analysis draws), the initial division - not in the being of the commodity but in the commodity form- is only possible because of the complexity of the system of production, circulation and exchange that continuously reproduces this complex form.

The division in the commodity form is crucial because the negative moment is a denial of the self-subsistence of the immediacy of the point of departure of the analysis. The commodity, as a discrete totality, is negated and through its break up it invites a re-composition into a newer and more evolved form of complex unity. Hence although totality is not the starting point, in the form of the commodity there is something that although it must have determinations that belong to it, are not self evidently present within it. It is the substance of the commodity that allows for Marx’s elaboration of a concrete totality that, to use Lyotard’s expression, is a textually organic and supposedly unitary body.

Real abstraction and the simple point of departure

i) Historical preconditions of synchronic totality

In the Grundrisse Marx writes: 

“While in the completed bourgeois system every economic relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois economic form, and everything posited is thus also a presupposition, this is the case with every organic system. This organic system itself, as a totality, has its presuppositions, and its development to its totality consists precisely in subordinating all elements of society to itself, or in creating out of it the organs [which] it still lacks. This is historically how it becomes a totality. The process of becoming this totality forms a moment of its process, of its development.”[143]

Thus the most developed form is where the process has become totalised (complete commodification). Marx makes a virtue of necessity here. His theorisation of capital depends on the presupposition of the completeness of its form. This is not the same as saying he does not think its form can continue to evolve, but he can only present its form in what is available to him.[144] Here the perspective of totality can be seen to be partial because it adopts the perspective of the system in itself: its permanence, its reproduction, and its circulation. There is no doubt that Marx ultimately sees the system as dysfunctional, to the point where in the organic composition of dead and living labour it continuously reduces the proportionate rate of increase in the value producing element and the management of this crisis can only be noted as tendency and potential. The system cannot be viewed systematically from the point of view of its dissolution, but only from the conditions of possibility of that dissolution within its process of reproduction. As a totality of interiority its dissolution would require an action and subversion of the system from a subject position grounded within it, which in so far as it provokes crisis would mean the end of the reproduction of the system. As such crisis can only be envisaged as an inevitable tendency within system reproduction that, by the continuous interiorisation of labour to capital, reproduces the conflict inherent to its dissolution.

To say, as Althusser does, that by necessity of a materialist presupposition Marx must presuppose the real concrete totality, does not mean that the totality that is presupposed is grounded. Rather it is the process of this grounding of the totality that involves the textual process of producing a conception of it as result. According to Marx, the capital relation can not be intuitively nor immediately grasped as a whole, hence what is needed, if one accepts that the totalisation of the object in ideal terms (itself questionable), is a determinate abstraction that gets us to an essential inner form of the totality that is necessarily a universal feature of the system in question. Ilyenkov and Lenin amongst others have described this method as the ascent from the abstract to the concrete but it has equally been understood as a development from the general to the particular.[145] There is an extensive debate on exactly which element of Marx’s analysis; whether the commodity form or wage labour, takes on this role of abstract universal. It is now generally understood that whereas in Marx’s initial plans for Das Kapital in the Grundrisse the book on wage labour was to form the ‘inner totality’, he decided that the starting point required a prior analysis of the commodity form. From this point on, the analysis moves towards concretisation whereby as the result of a simple formula, based on the totality of commodity exchange, a general formula (of accumulation) can emerge as a result.

By basing the latter analysis on the identities and oppositions implied by an abstract evaluation of commodity exchange, the more historical and specific determinations of the working of real capitalist society can emerge organically, as it were, out of an expository analysis that in creates its own ground through its process. For this and other reasons Marx’s method can be seen to belong to the immanent type of dialectical movement of categories as they relate to and posit each other, and hence an analysis grounded interior to a totality. At the same time however, this avoids the inwardness of the metaphysical gaze onto the nature of the self or consciousness thereof. That is to say whilst following an immanent development in the interiority of the analytics, its subject matter is a social form that is outside of the metaphysics of self consciousness and on the plane of exteriority. It is a method of exposing an ontological relation based upon the historical precedent of a sum of actions that lie outside of the head. Although this realist perspective is paramount to understanding Marx, it is often confused because Marx did not only work upon the empirical reality of capitalist exchange; but equally took the existing conceptualisations of these processes as his subject matter. For this reason, a doubly critical relation is always in use: the abstraction from concrete reality, and the retracing of existing conceptual abstractions back into reality.[146]

It is this dimension of Marx’s method that makes it illegitimate to regard it as a form of positivism. Marx is not simply concerned with the process of capitalist production but also with the forms of social consciousness that arise from within it and that enable it to function. In this conception economic science is shown in its intimate connection with the exercise of social power. Moreover, it is not the prioritisation/ naturalisation of labour as a species activity that provides the possibility for Marx to have this conception of science. It is rather the specific social form of labour, in particular, abstract labour, whose real totalised existence allows for the whole possibility of market economy, that in Marx’s eyes authorises and mandates an analysis that can proceed immanently from an abstract universal. As we shall see, one difficulty with this initial reduction of all labours to simple abstract labour is that it develops out of a historically specific period when the discipline techniques of the factory regime were becoming generalised.[147] Rather than arising out of a humanist ontology of labour as species activity, this analytical adoption of an actually existing universal, in fact derives from his ontological commitment to the notion of an overarching totality of capitalist social practice. For Marx, analysis can produce by abstraction, separation and reduction because the social processes that it observes themselves form abstractions, separations and reductions. The difficulty lies in the correspondence between the thought form and the real process. Are they parallel? Or are they concepts adequate to the processes they describe though of a different nature to them. Can a dialectical sequence make them more than approximations to social reality?

The role of the notion of totality in Marx is not foremost a methodological principle as Lukács claimed. Rather if this principle was present, it was doubly amplified by a demand upon thought to give adequate explanation of a concrete system of relations that appeared to exist in the world as a totality the like of which had only hitherto been imagined in thought. This is to perform in political economy something like that which Spinoza did in the interpretation of scripture in the grounding of his political treatises i.e. to find its meaning entirely within its history. Spinoza himself based this on an idea of natural reason, that which sought knowledge of nature in nature alone.[148] Marx’s critique of the fetishism of the commodity in capitalism, of the ‘inverted’ appearances, and of its scientific justifications and mystifications, sought the explanation in capitalism alone. To develop the concept of capital as a system, Marx did not base his analysis on its historical origins.

In one of the places where Marx does approach this relation from the point of view of its historical formation, in The results of the Immediate Process of Production, Marx theorises that a formal subsumption (interiorisation) of the worker into the labour process is followed by a more thorough real subsumption of labour under capital. This totalising process of the universal commodification of labour, is that on which the discovery of the labour theory of value is based. For Marx the theorists of classical political economy only chanced upon the theory of value – but this was only possible in so far as its preconditions have become developed within civil society and the practices and consciousness of its agents. The theories of value in ‘bourgeois’ political economy developed ‘solely’ through the analysis of price, but the categories of political economy as ‘forms of thought which are socially valid and therefore objective.’[149] Commenting on this matter, Jameson rightly argues that,

“…It became possible for the first time to separate the unique quality and concrete content of a particular activity from its abstract organization or end, and to study the latter in isolation…we can think abstractly about the world only to the degree to which the world itself has already become abstract.”[150]

If in fact, for Marx, “...the whole system of bourgeois production is presupposed before exchange value appears as the simple point of departure on the surface,” then the adoption of this simple point of departure demonstrates that the path followed by the analysis is not the same as that which created the conditions for capitalist accumulation. Whereas, ‘the starting point of the development that gave birth to the wage-labourer and to the capitalist was the enslavement of the worker”[151], the initial stages of the analysis in Das Kapital do not theorise the inferior power of the workers, nor the command of capitalists over him, but in fact assume an equality between them as exchangers of commodities on an equal footing. This shows that Marx begins his critique of capitalist society by adopting the presuppositions of its rationalisation in contemporary science. These presuppositions, in the process of the analysis, are either perfected or rejected. What is most important however is that the analysis is not working directly on the empirical reality of capitalist society, but critically working at the level of the discourse internal to it. This discourse has practical, experiential and sensuous origins but within society these experiences have already been reflexively mediated through public and private systems of thought. Only when these scientific systems are related to themselves, to each other and to the empirical facts of capitalist accumulation, can the contradictions that are produced be made to correspond to the actual experience of social conflicts that the analysis initially put aside.

ii) The simple abstractions of value and abstract labour in the architectonic of Das Kapital

In the survey of the literature on Marx’s relation to Hegel and the dialectics of the commodity form it will be investigated if Marx intended to give Das Kapital a speculative unity. This is a significant issue for Marx himself and in the introduction to the work he makes the following claim.

“The method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connection. Only after this work is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.”[152]

Through the critique of commodity fetishism Marx confronts the reader with two different orders of perception; one of ordinary perception and one of scientific deconstruction. Repeating and embellishing a theme of the relation between surface and depth developed in the Grundrisse, Marx snatches from the perceptible surface an element that can be conceptually worked upon; that of the simple commodity.

“The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its most elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.”[153]

In Reading Capital, Macherey states, “Pour retrouver la problématique hégélienne derrière la métaphore de la ‘surface’, il suffit de lire l’identité entre la surface et ‘la conscience ordinaire des agents de la production eux-mêmes’.[154] In this view Volume I of Das Kapital is the ‘en soi’ the in itself of the essence of the process that moves from this abstract to the concrete, from individual to global, and from essence to phenomena. This view though lacking nuance is basically correct in saying the text follows a Hegelian order of exposition that gives it its coherence. For Macherey this exposition does not work although different conclusions can be drawn as to why. The Althusserians end their book with the question, why does Marx, in presenting a new method adopt an ancient and specific mode of exposition – the dialectic – that is incompatible with it?

This question posed by those readers of Das Kapital in the Althusserian circle can be answered by drawing on some contemporary strong Hegelian interpretations of Marx’s work. For Chris Arthur;

“Hegel’s logic can be drawn on in the study of capitalism because capital is a very peculiar object, grounded in a process of real abstraction in exchange in much the same way as Hegel’s dissolution and reconstruction of reality, is predicated on the abstractive power of thought.”[155]

Like many others, and supported by Marx’s own statements, for Arthur, Marx could not think the concept of capital without the influence of Hegel. This might be true but it does not prove that there is an identity between the two objects. Just because the two systems share knowledge of a process of abstract, should not lead us to conclude that both objects can be treated in the same way. Moreover what it certainly does not account for (nor even recognise) is the Althusserian criticism of this kind of comparison. For a start, it might be questioned from the Spinozian theory of knowledge implied by the remark that the concept of a triangle is not triangular.[156] Whereas for Hegel the concept is its own abstraction, capital is a real material socially actual process, it might be apprehended by concepts but its structure as a concept does not need to mirror the activity or being of its object; rather it belongs to a different order, not representational but based upon adequacy. Arthur can only say that capital is ‘grounded in a process of real abstraction’ because that abstraction is treated in a manner that centralises and reduces it, rather than seeing the relation of abstraction (separation) as manifold and aggregate i.e. with many centres.  The head appropriates it, abstracts it if one pleases, into a central and single relation. To say that the methodological and speculative abstraction in Hegel is symmetrical with the process of exchange is an absurd statement in ontological terms. In ontological terms Hegel and Marx’s objects are completely different. How could the minds speculative deconstruction of itself ever have a ground outside of itself? Arthur’s theory rests on a notion of tele-causality: this is what Althusser has to say about ‘expressive causality’:

"Presupposes in principle that the whole in question is reducible to an inner essence of which the parts are no more than the phenomenal forms of expression, the inner principle being present at each moment in the whole, such that at each moment it is possible to write the immediately adequate equation: such and such an element (economic, political, legal, literary, religious, etc. in Hegel) = inner essence of the whole."

Marx’s value theory does not treat the actual relations that constitute value as singular and reducible but as always polyvalent and the expression of structure in its effects. This fundamentally questions the identity of the two totalities, no matter how much they share a principle of immanent Dastellung. More support for why Marx adopted this mode of exposition can be found by looking further into the discursive field within which Das Kapital was to intervene. An instructive comparison can be drawn between Marx and the work of the Ricardian writer Thomas De Quincey. This unusual literary figure was a well known adherent of the Ricardian school of economics, but argued in a manner that is reminiscent of Spinoza’s proposition in the third part of the Ethics that adequate ideas are active and inadequate ideas passive; he felt that the science of political economy was not developing because of logical errors within the existing science.[157] In declaring his office to be the correction and perfection of the methods of the Ricardian school, De Quincey pays particular attention to the need for a proper exposition of the categories of political economy that, albeit in a much more limited way, pre-empts Marx’s attempt at the same. What is particularly interesting about this, is that De Quincey was a devoted student of German metaphysical philosophy, and of course Spinoza, and this influence on his attempt to give an inward self-positing expression to the categories of political economy produces some results that are very similar to Marx.[158] In De Quincey, just as will be seen in Marx, the outline of the logic of political economy commences from a simple awareness of value to a necessary and contradictory subdivision within this simple term. The subdivision produced between the useful article and the article in demand, is further elaborated as the double form of value, representing a division within the article that must be present simultaneously for it to be exchangeable.[159] Following a deconstructive route wherein complexity is derived from the clashing together of these simple forms, De Quincey develops out of the dual affirmative and negative side of the commodity an argument for the labour theory of value.[160] This derivation of the labour theory of value and De Quincey’s dismissal of the question of the measure of value is a useful balancing act to any theory of a special link between Hegelian dialectics and Marx’s method in Das Kapital. This is because it serves to demonstrate other independent attempts to elucidate the categories with a speculative argument and draws our attention to the special applicability that the classical science of political appeared to have as an object to the treatment of dialectics.

Marx was clearly familiar with De Quincey’s work although it did not appear to impress him too much, only serving to elucidate problems with the Ricardian outlook but failing to resolve these difficulties.[161] However Marx is not overtly hostile to De Quincey and appears to spare him from the most savage of ad hominem attacks reserved for the likes of Samuel Bailey, an opponent of the Ricardian School. He does suggest however that Quincey’s Teutonic metaphysics are more superficial than substantial, claiming that they are ‘affected rather than real.’[162] However given the similarities that can be exposed between these two thinkers there is much evidence that will inform the Foucauldian link of Marx to the Ricardian episteme.

Hegel’s shadow

By means of various intermediaries, Hegel undoubtedly cast his shadow over the divergent interpretations of Das Kapital:

“The categories have to be derived (and not taken arbitrarily or mechanically) (not by "exposition", not by "assurances", but with proofs) proceeding from the simplest, most fundamental (Being, Nothing, Becoming) (without taking others) - here, in them, "in this germ, the whole development."[163]

For Hegel indeterminate being is the beginning.^[164] It is the first affirmative proposition. The beginning could start from a negative as well, but Hegel shows that this is circular, the negation would be the same in content as the affirmative - in so far as we are dealing with nothing, that it is so is an affirmation - i.e. rather than nothing we have a non being, an affirmative negation - a negative that requires a positive. The beginning of the science thus contains all that must there be within. Thus the beginning must in essence, be some part of absolute, but all this means is that it follows the absolute in the manner of it having nothing outside of itself; it is perceived that the dynamic that arises out of being and non being, allows for the inauguration of a process of pure becoming.

If this is the beginning for Hegel, in what sense can we talk of the commodity as being the same abstract indeterminate beginning? The following type of statement on the question written by Lenin has informed Marxian understanding on the analysis in Das Kapital for too long:

“The beginning - the most simple, ordinary, mass, immediate “Being”: the single commodity (“Sein” in political economy). The analysis of it as a social relation. A double analysis, deductive and inductive - logical and historical (forms of value). Testing by facts or by practice respectively, is to be found here in each step of the analysis.”[165]

Irrespective of whether we can agree with Marx on whether capitalist wealth ‘appears’ first as an immense collection of commodities, it is clear that where Lenin tries to equate the commodity with Hegel’s being he is diverging from how Marx himself understood the question. Rather than being simple, ordinary or immediate, the commodity is determinate. It is produced. It is necessarily plural. It has its basis in a developed system of social exchange. This is what Althusser argued; the commodity is determinate and is presupposed by the totality of social relations that produce it. The dialectic cannot be the same thing as the essence in Capital - though this does not yet mean that it does not constitute the logic of capital. And yet we find justification for this point of view of Lenin’s in Marx’s writing:

“In and for itself, the exchange of commodities implies no other relations of dependence than those which result from its own nature“[166]

The commodity can be the beginning in Marx’s sense only because it finds its truth in the process that goes on behind it and produces it, the process which is more fundamental to capitalism, as the theory goes; production for exchange. Marx takes as the point of departure the, “simple, most underdeveloped shape’[167] because it can divide into two planes, one of identity and one of difference.[168] Althusser is right only in so far as he is arguing against theorists that uphold a Hegelian identity between the dialectical processes of Marx and Hegel. His contribution can be misleading however, because it obscures the lengths that Marx went to in elaborate a simple totality out of the reflection relations in the commodity form, in order to separate the apparent unity of commodity producing society into different layers. It is the ontological status of these divisions that are important. The first edition of Das Kapital Volume I had this as the closing paragraph but it was omitted from later editions,

"The commodity is immediate unity of UV and EV thus of two opposed entities. Thus it is an immediate contradiction. This contradiction must enter upon a development just as soon as it is no longer considered as hitherto in analytic manner (at one time from the viewpoint of UV and at another from the viewpoint of EV) but it is really related to other commodities as a totality. The real relating of commodities to one another, however, is their process of exchange."

In the division within the ‘doublet’ of the commodity the analysis can open out on two levels – one is the real differentiated actuality of commodity production and exchange. This level is properly socially differentiated and is comprised of the totality of man’s concrete activity as it relates to capital (omitting for a moment the question of Marx’s neglect of the theorisation of reproductive labour). The second level is arguably purely ideational, or, in the opinion of Uchida, a critical idealism.

“The relationship of equality is thus relationship of value, but the value relationship is above all expression of the value or the value being of the commodity which expresses its value”[169]

But it requires a different (another) commodity (that counts of being equal essence) to express itself. Here then is the important move, actual concrete difference is sublated and retained in what is to become the explanation for a regime of the necessary forms of value expressions.[170]

In another strong Hegelian interpretation of Marx’s mature writings, Uchida’s attempt to draw out a fundamental systematic complicity between Hegel’s shorter logic and Marx’s category development in the Grundrisse, argues that in the second plane, Marx ‘intends critically to absorb Hegel’s idealism.’[171] Thus the idea becomes a kind of stand in for what is really the ‘social logic of value –consciousness’ and allows for the development of the theory of commodity exchange and the various levels of value expression.[172] Later Uchida argues that what both thinkers share, is a derivation of the complex out of a simple generality which for Hegel means that the simple generality must be the starting place for the notion because of the necessarily mediated difference within the concrete. Uchida’s book is a strange contribution to this debate and an extremely one-sided treatment but it does draw attention to this necessary position within Hegel’s thought. And we reproduce here what he quotes from Hegel: “The general is in and for itself the first moment of the notion because it is the simple moment, and the particular is only subsequent to it because it is the mediated moment: and conversely the simple is the more general, and the concrete, as in itself differentiated and so mediated, is that which already presupposes the transition from a first.”[173] The point however is, not so much how much Marx drew on Hegel’s Logic to develop the categories, but how much the development of categories in itself results in this hierarchy between simple and concrete. Hegel argues that ‘the progress proper to the Notion, from universal to particular, is the basis and the possibility of a synthetic science, of a system and of systematic cognition.’[174]

Hegel continues to say that the method must be proper to cognition itself, and thus cannot conceivably start from the complex, as this is that which cannot be intuitively grasped. Now it is very clear that the Grundrisse and Das Kapital have different starting points, and Marx’s original intention was to begin with the inner totality of wage labour. Hegel’s logic fits with the abstract universal of labour, but it does not fit with the rendering in Das Kapital where Marx does in fact start from the phenomenological actuality of concrete determinateness.  For in fact the commodity is not a simple universal but a composite form, it may be simple in comparison to the more complex determinations of capital, but it is itself a unity that needs to be divided to arrive at the point of the real abstract universal which as we shall see, self-evidently in the Grundrisse, but obscured in Das Kapital, is the category of abstract labour.[175] The difference between products of labour is fundamental (and analytically prior) but only in so far as it is the basis of a greater identity between the commodities in their sharing of a value element.

The relationship of one commodity to another is its simplest ‘value expression.’ Again it requires expression in a ‘commodity body’ that is elsewhere described as a ‘mirror of its own value being’ different from itself’.[176] There is a ‘polar opposition’ in the form of value given that the ‘same commodity never possesses both forms at the same time in the same value expression.’[177] Hence although it has differentiation as the ground of possibility for identity, the relational form becomes subsumed to the expression of exchange value itself. This does not depend upon solely another singular commodity for its expression, but upon the totality of commodities that by necessity must be mediated through a general equivalent form. A mono-valent language of sameness is properly the form of value requiring that one relate to the other; it is properly a relational entity, depending upon a generality for its unity. From this point on, from the subsequent development of abstract labour, Marx has integrated concrete differentiated subjectivity into an analytics of a relation.[178] The relation is intangible but substantial and ontological.

In the Grundrisse Marx is more explicit; exchange value is not simply the product of labour, it is the basis of man’s social bond. Through division of a simple and apparently self evident entity Marx, clearly looking from the perspective of capital, divines ‘labour power in general” which is the ‘value substance’. Viewed from the perspective of capital, this labour power as the value substance has both a qualitative and a quantitative determinacy. Its magnitude is qualitatively established in respect to the ‘proportion in which the other commodity body is related to it.’ Marx lists a series of peculiarities of the equivalent form, the second and most important of which being ‘concrete labour becomes the appearance form of its opposite, abstractly human labour’. There are few clearer examples than this expansion from the simple relation to the total relation than the dialectic of externalisation and separation out of the initial separation of commodity A from its natural form.

Clearly, in these two texts on the form of value there is no question that the ontological derivation of value is not a sequence of historical emergence. In fact quite the opposite is the case and it is in explaining this that the non-historical Hegelian interpretations of Marx’s analysis of capital are the most persuasive. The possibility of treating capital as a system, and the possibilities of a bourgeois science of political economy are the same. It is because capital ontologically exists in a system based upon separations and only fleeting associations that it contains within it its own force of idealisation, i.e. its existence in the money form. The compulsory nature of this idealisation, i.e. the necessity of an active symbolic mediation of exchange through money, appears to correspond to a necessary synchronic orientation in thought, wherein through their existence in the universal, particulars can be made commensurable. In the Grundrisse Marx is more explicit in describing exchange value as an ideal entity. It is a socially existent mediation of human activity in a non-human, ideally not even sensuous, form. Its basis is in the indifference of dependent individuals forced to exercise their social bond through a mediated form.[179]

Just because the categories that Marx deconstructed and used were historically valid thought forms does not necessarily mean that the analytical development follows a historical sequence. So much is clear from strong Hegelian interpretations like Arthur’s and Uchida’s that demonstrate this well. However despite the strength of this refutation it does not imply that the derivation of the forms of capital is in fact adequately reducible to forms of thought, nor the indeed the ‘being’ of capital in a Hegelian sense. Even if it could be stipulated that the development of the categories in Das Kapital reflects their inner necessity; they are derived logically, but do not exist as such; this would not give any proof of the inner collapse of capital unless the categories could properly correspond to actual social events.

What complicates the analysis is the necessary shift from thinking through what is implied by the concept of value, to thinking of the actual reality of commodity exchange. Totality is a crucial device here because it is comfortable to think of the correspondence between the real and the thought form through this figure. The very grammar of totality is especially interesting in concealing as much as it exposes the ontological placement of the object of the statements that it uses. Without conceptual clarity concerning the ontological commitment to understanding the totality of capital relations, something that Marx never questions, it is impossible to get closer to seeing how from the analysis of value the exploitative and repressive dimensions of capitalist accumulation can be delineated. Without the anticipation of the totality as a knowledge production that is adequate to the real totality one would merely arrive at something like the subjectivism of Simmel and be forced to conclude that the objectivity of value was only the result of the aggregation of individual assessments of worth, or to in some other way reduce a question of ontology to a question of epistemology or more simply to a form of perspective.

As such the whole debate has been forced to centre on the appropriateness of the starting point and the enigmatic first chapters of Das Kapital. The impossibility of using the commodity as the proper speculative point of departure has led many of the more astute commentators to dwell on this appearance of the commodity as the surface form of the total process of capital and to treat the reference to wealth appearing as such is to the manner it first comes known to the ordinary perceptions of agents within capitalist relation. Some theorists like Banaji argue that the simple commodity, or the commodity as such is only the superficial and immediate aspect of the speculative development. Quoting Marx, Banaji states that capital must be the starting and finishing point of investigation, “but as the starting point, capital must be taken in its ‘immediate being’ or as it appears immediately on the surface of society.”[180] Others insist more on the ‘cell form’ of the commodity as if it is the elementary component part of a larger structure. What is fundamental to recognise is the importance of a immanent deconstructive critique here; the establishment of a simple totality that in deepening its gaze through its divisions simultaneously embellishes its scope.[181]

This is only possible if the commodity contains within itself determinations that can be drawn out of it, most notably its substance, abstract labour power. It requires that the commodity be seen as the result of something else, and is in fact concrete and composite. If it is however, far from being an indeterminate point of departure, as Banaji and so many others has noted it implies that it ‘comprises a relation within itself’ and as concrete it is internally differentiated.[182] This evidence makes very difficult any easy substitution of the movement of capital and the movement of the idea in Hegel’s system of logic. As the latter makes clear in the Science of Logic, the ‘beginning can not be made with anything concrete, anything containing a relation within itself’. This is because the concrete is clearly the result of a process that has occurred prior to it, and as has already been demonstrated it is the essential and distinguishing purpose of Hegelian philosophy to posit the absolute as its own result.[183]

But although Marx privileges a specific starting point, one sanctioned by the a realm of appearance and hence appropriated by political economy, there could be many others, indeed, the world does not present itself as an immense wealth of commodities, it presents itself also as driven by greed, also as a divided society, also as an aggregation of independent parts and so on.

So Banaji proceeds, the commodity is something analysable, this allows us to reconfigure it as immediacy, a moment of capital, what Hegel would call “a mediated immediacy.”[184] Yet this mediated immediacy, Hegel makes clear, is a posited existence - it is a further stage from pure abstract simplicity. In Hegel the process of becoming is auto-genetic; it can be a positive germ of development because the idea is estranged from reality. In contrast, the premise of capital as a social system is the forced estrangement of the producer from the object produced. The production of commodities for money determines the form of interaction that people have within society. In order to understand this, Marx bifurcates the social activity that goes into producing commodities by bifurcating the labour that goes into them. This separation is so clear-cut it can be represented in a tabular form (see Figure 1).

Marx does not perform the bifurcation of the commodity and the division in labour in order to hold both in their distinction on an equal footing. At each stage of the analysis, Marx rejects the concrete and complex actual form of the commodity and labour and reduces it to its simplified general social form under capitalism. The whole left side of the table is rejected at each step of the way although its brief presence serves to elaborate the social form of that side of the analysis that Marx regards as appropriate to study capital. Concerned only with value and not any one particular commodity the analysis proceeds only by subsuming the differential into an equation wherein a universal can be found. The common is strained out of the multiple. The multiplicity is the form of existence and the necessity of the generalised universals, as for example for quantitative exchange to be possible, different qualities must exist, but the differentiated is always in service of the non- differentiated.

Figure 1: Twin bifurcations in the commodity and labour*

*NB Several commentators on Das Kapital have devised similar schemas. Macherey’s presents something similar, on the basis of division between ground and surface.[185] Cleaver presents the division in the commodity form.[186]

The logic of the progression to general equivalence

“The labour of individuals in the same branch of work, and the various kinds of work, are different from one another not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. What does a solely quantitative difference between things presuppose? The identity of their qualities. Hence, the quantitative measure of labours presupposes the equivalence, the identity of their quality.”[187]

“It is only the expression of equivalence between different sorts of commodities which brings to view the specific character of value creating labour, by actually reducing the different kinds of labour embedded in the different kinds of commodity to their common quality of being human labour in general.”[188]

Use value is almost immediately rendered a redundant, trans-historical category in Das Kapital; ‘powder is powder’, and use value is an ‘excuse’ for producing exchange value.[189] Value, an immaterial relation depends on the materiality of things in use-values, but it is of complete indifference to value which ‘particular object serves this purpose.’[190] When it functions in developing the idea of the universal equivalent, in simple exchange relations, the value of one commodity is related to the use value of another. But once there is a general equivalent that can be changed for any particular commodity, use-value no longer has any place in the exposition. However it opens up the two- fold character of labour, exchange value enables abstract labour to be identified. But like use-value, concrete labours are pushed aside once the identity between types of labour in abstract labour is made. It is a step in the deconstruction of the commodity that for Marx opens up a dimension of social substance seen in materiality, or substantiality. Just like the Ricardian thinker Thomas De Quincey, Marx believes that consideration of use value falls outside of the domain of political economy.[191]

The use-value of labour is not its social use and does not lie in the types of commodity it produces; its only relevant use-value is that from the perspective of capitalist private appropriation. That is its power of valorisation and of producing surplus value within its exchange value. Marx’s violent abstraction pushes him to claim that even the capitalist himself is little concerned with the actual type of concrete labour; the capitalist is only interested in its value capacity and is morally divorced from any consideration of the utility, ethical worth of his commodity nor in Marx’s words, the ‘crappy shit’ that he produces, nor from an identification with the virtues of the product i.e. having to believe in it in such a manner as today’s corporations invest into the brand identity of products in the plethora of ways described by Naomi Klein and others.[192] 

The derivation of abstract labour as something implied entirely by the exchange of commodities themselves and not by the actuality of actual concrete practices of work is critical to the whole system. Without such a development there can be no theory of money nor of the exploitation of labour, which occurs only within the semblance of equivalence. As an abstract universal, derived from the developing one side in the duality of the commodity form, labour is both the real substance of the production of wealth and the abstract force on which the possibility of an advanced monetary economy is based.

In the third section of Chapter 1 of Das Kapital, money is posited as the ‘necessary form of appearance of abstract labour”. Furthermore, all of the chapter on money in the Grundrisse is about the necessary mediation of labour time in the form of money e.g. “Labour time always exists only in the form of particular commodities (as an object): being a general object, it can exist only symbolically, and hence only as a particular commodity which plays the role of money.” But this is only because “labour time itself exists as such only subjectively, only in the form of activity. In so far as it is exchangeable (itself a commodity) as such, it is defined and differentiated not only quantitatively but also qualitatively, and is by no means general, self-equivalent labour time.[193] The general exchangeability of labour must require that labour take on “ an objective form, a form different from itself, in order to attain this general exchangeability.”[194] For the system of exploitation of labour to exist, requires an intermediary form to allow for the inequality within equality to take shape. As Hegel says, ‘all symbols call up significations’, but Marx is contesting money’s signification as simple means of exchange and trying to demonstrate that it is a necessary form of mediation of a system of subordination, describing it as ”the pimp between man and the object of his desire”. This is a far cry from its pure and ideal signification of equality that will be seen as the effect that this particular symbol generally has on Simmel. For this reason, many readings of Das Kapital and the Grundrisse have concluded that rather than being a neutral means of exchange and possible basis for a more equal society, money is itself a ‘weapon in the hands of the Bourgeoisie.’[195]

What troubled Marx about how, “Hegel conceives wealth…only in its thought form,’[196] led him later to employ a Hegelian mediation in the explanation of the concrete appearance forms of alienated labouring money. “The truth is that the exchange value relation – of commodities as mutually equal and equivalent objectifications of labour time – compromises contradictions which find their objective expression in a money which is distinct from labour time.”[197]

It is this very necessity of an actual societal mediation wherein labour becomes general through the externalisation in the means of exchange that the speculative development is so attractive, with the caveat that the idealisation is made possible by the historical totalisation of the wage-labour relation. The particular form of capitalist command that characterised the historically most developed capitalist formations that Marx studied through the homogenisation and reduction, both formally and substantially, of labour to labour power, namely the factory form, licensed the idealisation of elements of the system into a measurable universe wherein an intrinsic contradiction could be exposed. Thus the more total the system, the more it could apparently correspond to the special treatment of the method of the dialectic; that is the study of a system which is its own cause. So what Hegel perceived philosophically as ‘the innermost ‘drive’, ‘the need’ of spirit to detach itself from what is abstract by absolving itself into the concreteness of absolute subjectivity and so freeing itself for itself” [198] is reposed here as a reclamation of all relations between the reflections in a mirror-like thought totality presented in a dialectically articulated artistic whole.

In the first volume of Das Kapital, Marx is interested in deducing the general formula for capital and how it valorises and for this reason, use-value simply doesn't come into the equation. He wants an abstract universal that works on the basis of identity but has its conditions of possibility in difference. What Hegel criticised in Spinoza for not properly reducing the infinite attributes of the absolute to thought and extension and their inner contradiction, has a curious repetition here in value theory. Spinoza tries to remain on the horizontal plane where the absolute is God or nature, a purely immanent plane of the being of one substance. Marx, like Hegel, seeks to bundle this up into a hierarchical scheme where, through the progression of the categories, the inner nature of capital can be uncovered in itself without the giving the impression that their expression has been aided by external reflection. Whilst there may well be positivist elements in Marx’s outlook and in his method, in the elaboration of the theory of capital, he seeks to build an artistic whole that posits its own determinations. But the same difficulty remains, real commodity exchange does not arise out of its logical order - meaning that its historical preconditions cannot be advanced in the architectonic, and, where introduced, always appear external to it. Where Marx asks us to analytically accept the imposition of the necessary social form of labour in commodity production in its form as a homogenisation - though he morally protests against it and tries to show its fundamental weaknesses - many thinkers have seen this as kind of complicity with the social forces that have enacted that reduction, and thus accuse him of ordering his thoughts in the way that capitalists order their social relations. Yet into this very complicity, from another perspective, where concepts can be conceived of as adequate but distinct from their objects might be one place where the ‘royal road to science’ might arrive.

Marx’s pedagogic structure attempts to be an act of guidance that leads thought from the abstract to the concrete. It can only do so by totalising relations, that is to say theorising a process of colonisation at its apex and completion. It is an act of representation but one sutured to its object, and in this case the object is the force of capital’s command over labour. There is a violence of abstraction because a step is taken away from the concrete, mediated differentiated world. But the step away is a determinate step, and ostensibly a necessary one because it is grounded in the abstract universal of exchange. Hence abstraction, as a logical separation, is quite specifically mandated by the nature of its object, it is not a method for all objects of thought, but one valid because of the nature of the social form.

The important point here is that a relation can be treated in this totalised manner when it is objectified in relation. Its apprehension in thought, as a conceptual totality, relies upon the type of identity in its relations. The similarities here with Hegel are important. But the particular form of presentation, the appropriation from Hegel of the ‘rational kernel’ for representation has the effect of giving the appearance of idealism to Marx’s work.

Each of the moments of the explanation forms a totality but because its content exists in a state of opposition and the unity must come through the cancellation of one of its terms. Here dynamism is certainly created by juxtaposing contradictory conceptions. But it takes more than the concept to determine what ontological status these relations have within reality. Could the dynamism of the analytical progression belong only to the movement within the conceptual totality, in what sense can these relations of relative complexity be said to exist in reality? Even though Marx attempts to show that the categories of political economy are valid forms of consciousness derived from the presence of these material structures, does not the very idea of presenting it in systematic and scientific form necessitate a structuring through an external mode of thought? Macherey argues that it is having adopted the Hegelian form of the development of the content, i.e. by making it self- positing, that the plan of organisation of the work, the creation of an analytical totality, should fail to realise its plan of organisation. That is if it does not have a scientific coherence but an ideological coherence taken from Hegel.[199] On the other hand, by adopting these abstractions Marx claims to have seen through the mystery of the commodity form and presented these categories in a manner that correctly pertains to their nature. 

Simply holding a realist ontological commitment to the existence of social entities outside of our reflections upon them does not necessarily provide us with the right formula for the appreciation within reflection of their ‘inner nature.’ A rigorous distinction between the ideological and the scientific cannot be upheld. In adopting the ‘social point of view’, although it may be the most important, must by necessity be only one perspective upon a system. By disregarding the phenomenological form or rather only presenting it in order to subdue it to the more adequate and substantial scientific presentation, Marx progresses to increasingly more adequate representations of the totality of the ‘inner relations of capital.’ One way around this problem of developing the concept of capital is by drawing on the Spinozian distinction between extension and thought. These are two equally valid attributes of the existence of the same substance.[200] In Ilyenkov’s words, in Spinoza’s system,

“…Thought and extension are not two special substances as Descartes taught, but only two attributes of one and the same organ; not two special objects, capable of existing separately and quite independently of each other, but only two different and even opposite aspects under which one and the same thing appears, two different modes of existence, two forms of the manifestation of some third thing.”[201]

If the multiple and diverse concrete types of labour and its products are disregarded in the analysis this is not to deny them an ontological statement. On the other hand by developing the thought form of an idealised and totalised object, the system can be presented under its own infinite cause, which in Spinozian terms is the only possible way to treat substance. If the daily, physical and embodied actions of agents in capitalist society form are finite and perishable modes of what capitalist production in itself involves, then the scientific presentation treats the system in its inward self-causing eternity. Although most recourse to Spinoza in the explanation of Marx’s method takes the form of ‘thought-experiments’ and it is clearly against the prevailing evidence to draw Althusser’s conclusion that Spinoza is Marx’s only true philosophical ancestor, it is nevertheless extremely helpful to perceive the difference between the concrete corporeal totality and the ideational totality in this way. In fact this very distinction found in Spinoza has a precedent in Marx’s own comments on the matter:

‘Even with philosophers who gave their work a systematic form, e.g. Spinoza, the real inner structure of their system is quite distinct from the form in which they consciously presented it.’[202]

If capital can be looked at as one substance which can be presented through a science peculiar to it, this invalidates the wider appropriation of the method used in Das Kapital to a science of social objects per se. The peculiar nature of capital identified by the Hegelian reading, which claims capital forms a distinct object because of the idealisation in the appearance form of social labour, has in some studies such as Simmel’s been turned around to such an extent that the money form can be used to shed light on philosophy concepts. The critical distinction between these two systems is that by showing capital in its simple, expanded and total forms Marx aims to demystify the supposed neutrality and commensurability of the exchange of labour power for money whereas in the sociology of Simmel this ideal form is taken to be a realisation of a system of equality. However, Marx’s system has been subject to attack for reducing the consideration of labour purely in respect to what can be drawn out from it as scientific matter: its quality of being temporally and quantitatively measurable. Curiously this criticism has been most strongly articulated by Negri, a post-modern thinker who draws strongly on Spinoza’s ontology. The exact role that labour time has as the measure of value and the notion of money as the necessarily objective practical expression of contradictions within commodity production has in Marx’s work will follow the treatment of Simmel’s Philosophy of Money.

Subjectivist conceptions of value

One aspect of Simmel’s thinking in the Philosophy of Money clarifies an important aspect of why the exposition of economic categories can take a speculative level for Marx. It is useful to contrast Marx and Simmel as there is much that both share in the analysis of value and money. For instance both insist upon the fundamental relativity of economic value and both decry any attempt to derive objective value from the inner nature of the commodity object – that is to say qua use-value - itself,

“No matter how closely the inner nature of an object is investigated, it will not reveal economic value which lies exclusively in the reciprocal relationship arising between several objects on the basis of their nature.” [203] 

This mirrors Marx’s infamous critique of commodity fetishism where it is mistakenly held in common consciousness that it is the property of individual commodities, their demand and supply that governs their worth. There are however some fundamental differences that make Simmel a strange heir to the title of having completed the most important sociological work on money since Marx’s Das Kapital. What is different about Simmel’s conception is that he approaches money first as a general problem not specific to capitalist forms of accumulation and a related issue is that he does not address it from the point of view of production. What this amounts to is that Simmel does not develop a labour theory of value. For this reason what he holds in common with Marx is all the more interesting.

Simmel follows a similar line of argument from the relational to the measurable. Just as Marx argues, for Simmel, for two different objects to be measured there must be at some level an identity in one of their qualities.[204] Now whereas Marx develops from here the idea that, as products of labour, these values are measurable by the labour time expended on their production, Simmel in fact argues something that would appear tautological to Marx; that in fact what commodities have in common is that they are all exchangeable for money. Simmel theorises the general equivalent as itself the common denominator of the relationship of commodity exchange (his question is actually whether money has a value). What Simmel’s theory amounts to is claiming a kind of neutrality and an enormous utility for money (it can be exchanged for the totality of goods, but any particular good can only be exchanged for money) whilst retaining the notion that it has a symbolic function which registers not only the objective totality of the relations between commodity values but also the subjective assessments of their worth.

Simmel describes the development of money as aspiring towards a purely ideal realm, that comparable to Plato’s philosophical idea, and he talks of it as if it were a formula of all being. However it is important to note that as an ideal, it is never attained.[205] He even goes so far as to suggest that it is reality that is not adequate to the concept of money.[206]. He further argues that money cannot become a pure symbol, as it must, due to value of the money material,[207] retain its own relative worth as standard.[208]

Like Simmel, Marx sees the conditions of possibility for money in distantiation.[209] Termed ‘alienation’, the separation of subject and object, of producer and product is a necessary social form for money to appear as a mediating form of relations between people. However, it could be argued that every relation, and not just those between people, involves some kind of separation, division or distinction.

What possible purpose could there be in defining value as the totality of the relations of commodity exchange? Simmel is right to say all measure is relative to something. If Marx is right in saying that single physical objects do not have value, but rather it is the totality of all abstract labour that comprises the value of labour power, then why is this so integral to the analysis?[210]

Value is not a neutral relation of one commodity to another, or the total amount of exchange values to the abstract labour that produces them. For Simmel, value is a psychological, subjective estimation of worth.[211] This is clearly a functional reality of capitalist society, in that it allows for estimation of sale prices and prediction of returns. For Simmel value is a socially valid category for a perspective on reality, indeed, money for Simmel is a special social form because therein one can develop a form of the totality that is completely adequate to itself.

“For money represents pure interaction in its purest form; it makes comprehensible the most abstract concept; it is an individual thing whose essential significance is to reach beyond individualities.”

What is special about money for Simmel then, is that out of subjective considerations of worth, of demand and sacrifice that accompany all exchange, an objective realm of value emerges based upon the coincidence and settling out of all of the individual considerations. 

“The decisive fact in the objectivity of economic value, which makes economics a special area of investigation, is that its validity transcends the individual subject….exchange presupposes an objective measurement of subjective valuations…in the sense that both phenomena arise from the same act”[212]

If Simmel’s formal sociology is characterised by an emphasis on the individual forms rather than the total social form,[213] then his concept of money can be read as coming the closest to bringing out the significance of the totality of individual actions to the point of an objective social reality where individuality is both surpassed and retained.[214] Indeed if Simmel’s method, for all its quirks, has been criticised for employing too abstract and general analytics, it would appear that money and its concept presented an object suitable to his approach, a view in fact partially confirmed by Simmel when he wrote that The Philosophy of Money was a work he considered truly his own.[215]

Value and command

The implication of Simmel’s subjectivist conception of value is that it has no veritable material being. It is a form of perspective in consciousness and does not exist outside of the mind. Does Marx’s concept of value differ from this? Marx is clear that value does not contain an, ‘atom of matter’, yet he regards it as real social form. Marx does not want to imbue value with any physiological properties, any less than the abstract labour that goes into its production.[216] The question remains; what is the ontology of value?

It appears that value is purely a neutral perspective of measurement of the quantities in which articles are exchanged for one another. Neither Marx nor Simmel believe that it is in and of itself the property of the things that are exchanged that gives them value. Both agree that the tendency is towards the subordination of use-value to exchange value. Both in fact believe that money is the form of the social bond, which the worker carries in his pocket, so that the mediation of social intercourse through money attains a political character and refers to a regime of rights and proprietorship.

However, Marx and Simmel differ on what they think value is an expression of. For Marx it is labour-time, but Simmel passes over this moment almost completely. For Simmel, both value and money are representations of a social consideration of worth; a subjective and psychological evaluation. On the contrary, Marx’s notion of value does not have this status of a neutral category of evaluation. Value might not have any tangible being; it might well be a category of political economy, but most of all it has the positive and necessary status of social force. Although it cannot be known or conceived outside of the creation of the mind, it has a real social existence outside of the philosophical and ideational approximations to it. Hence Marx’s ontology of value is a thoroughly realist approach.

This force of the relation of values could be described in terms of value as command. Just as it is possible to say that 10 coats are exchangeable for say 5 pairs of shoes or a certain quantity of money, it is also possible to say that this quantity of coats commands (Simmel uses the term ‘demands’) a certain quantity of shoes, just as a quantity of money (capital) commands more or less labour power (where exchange of commodities is generalised to the commodity form of labour power).[217] The benefit of seeing it in this way is that one can isolate, in the manner Marx sought to, the inner properties of the object exchanged from the general set of relations that comprise the economy of the totality of commodities produced and which is quintessentially a social and general category based upon the general productivity of labour power and its value in exchange, rather than the productivity of any particular concrete labour.

So the question of the ontology of value leads us to a consideration of the value of labour power in general. The value of labour power can only generally relate to its commodity producing capacity as the existence of many capitals militates against any single control over or determination of what the cost of reproducing the labourer (variable capital) must be. Given the diffusion of the division of labour this must be a general social determination. Value might appear to exist only in consciousness, but in Marx’s view at least, value expresses the power of exchangeability, which is ostensibly an objective relation between labour, capital and commodity. Yet what is complicated about value is that as a social form, the more it becomes totalised, the less it is related to any particular determinate process of production. The more total the more value becomes an ontological category wherein human activity, in its generality, is represented.

In another yet different subjectivist concept of value, Knafo shows that for many Marxists capital replaces Geist as the materialist version of Hegelian dialectical development.[218] He argues rightly that this assumes that the dialectic can be stripped of its content and turned into a method of formal logic. However Knafo makes this criticism in order to recuperate the dialectic in ontological terms as the very being of subjectivity itself. The dialectic is taken out of its scientific meter and placed back into its classical role of a developmental notion of subjectivity based in experience and consciousness: “The use of the dialectic is justified because it represents the way by which we rationalise the world.”[219] Knafo argues, quite plausibly that this aspect of dialectics in capital is overlooked because in the book “social rationality is grasped through its manifestations, and not through the intentions of subjects.”[220] Knafo wants to break with the debilitation of seeing causal necessity within objective relations, because it cannot account for the subject, or for the historical dimensions of viewing capitalism as a process of class struggle. Yet, the way he does so is to consider objective forms as only limitations upon consciousness upon the shaping of our experience.[221]

“Social value might appear to be something autonomous, existing and acting on its own and apart from the will of any particular agent. But a market is still simply the reflection of the acts of all of its participants, not something that acts by itself. We only experience it as an external force imposing upon us the conditions through which we interact with others.”[222]

To his credit Knafo has identified the problem in the ontological status of the law of value, and correctly tried to locate its site as internal to the constitutive activity of subjects. Hence he rightly rejects the idea that the structure is self-