Chapter
2: Complexity through the immanent deconstruction of simple totality
The
speculative logic in Marx’s Das Kapital
[132]
“It
is…not the least of the paradoxes of Marxism, which has time and again accused
Hegel of formalism, that it retains Hegelian form as valid, while condemning
the perversion of content.”[133]
“Even the
style of exposition of dialectical theory is a scandal and an abomination to
the canons of the prevailing language, and to sensibilities moulded by those
canons, because it includes in its positive use of existing concepts a simultaneous
recognition of their rediscovered fluidity, of their inevitable destruction.”[134]
Both of these comments derive
from two diverging effects of the explanatory force of Das Kapital, and the inevitable fact that its analytical power has
affected different outlooks in similar historical contexts in different ways.
However, the delight and inspiration with which the work’s moments of synthesis
and negation inspired Debord must be put alongside the difficulties they
brought to other readers, for instance those that treat the text either as an
attempt at a positive science (the nub of Habermas’s general critique of Marx)
or those autonomist readings that have tried to treat it foremost politically.
Through the various acts of interpretation of the text, many lacunae open up
that discredit its claim to grasp the totality of social relations. However,
whether attention is drawn to the lack of adequate theorisation of the role of
women in the reproduction of capital or its failure to finish its projected
analyses of imperialism and class and the role of the state in the attenuation
of class conflict, these criticisms are only ever partial. Within Marxist
discourse one of the most drastic effects of the close analytical and political
engagement with Marx’s theorisation of capital leads to a call for a total
break with the system. Very often however, such a drastic break is impossible
and even the most critical of attitudes towards the discourse can partly
reaffirm any of its premises. Even if the system is seen as unworkable, its
categories still inform the communities of knowledge producers, who gain
clarity of their own position through the distancing from this particular
conception of totality. Part of Spinoza’s appeal to Althusser was in providing
a conception of science that worked on a set of premises and drew necessary
conclusions from it. But Althusser’s more general comments about science are
more aptly applied to intellectual theoretical production within Marxism rather
than scientific production in broader society.
For Althusser this science had to be continuously working on its
premises in order to uncover new ground; if not it would become dogmatic.
The misunderstanding of the
form of Marx’s critique in Das Kapital has led it to be treated wrongly
as either a positivist economic work or an attempt at a total theory of
society. The positivist understanding is prominent in academic, intellectual
and political movements that see in Marx an explanation of capitalism through
the positive social forms of the commodity, money and labour enunciated there.[135]
What is not sufficiently attended to, is the collapse of these social forms;
the breaking up of their original simplicity and their coming into crisis. Far
from sharing the preoccupation of classical political economy in showing the
origin of commodity exchange and developing theories of the equilibrium and
equality of commodity exchange, Marx is concerned with taking this simple
totality of an abstract universal and showing how within its own relation it
creates conflict, contradiction, dynamism and change. The real difficulty seems
to lie in understanding quite what relation the categories have to the reality
they express. What is the ontology of value for Marx and to what extent does
its logico-deductive speculative presentation involve the positing and
decomposition of simple totality? What is the nature of the existence of value?
Is it a calculation, approximation made solely in the mind, or does value exist
as a human property of things? Is value anywhere or at any time actual?
Exposing the holes in Marxist
analysis has often been quite a fertile space in which those that continue to
identify with the premises of the science have been able to recover and
reinvent something of its critical power. Indeed by reading what is said whilst
bearing in mind these absences, the wealth of reactions to it and its differing
affects in mind it might be possible in certain instances to recreate the bond
between content and representation and therein reassemble something of the
totality and how it operates in its complexity.
Two of the debates
that refer to subjectivity inside and outside of the totality are the domestic
labour debate and the ontological status of labour in respect to capital.[136]
Both of these questions have their origins in claim that Marx ignores an
important realm of social life that is relevant to the inner structure of Das Kapital. Generally to approach a
book by what it does not say can be a way of avoiding treatment of what it does
say, but in the case of both of these issues, the reproduction of the working
class and the reproduction of capital, they are important to an overall
clarification of the subject area and Marx’s approach.
Only in so far as Das Kapital was an enterprise in some
classical form of representation can one agree with Ilyenkov when he says we
must look at the works Marx himself saw as best representing his system and not
so much the rough drafts of analysis that went into its production.[137]
It will be shown however how the exasperation with the Marx of Das Kapital has led several of his most
serious and enthusiastic supporters into fundamental conceptual difficulties
and so many lines of flight. One of these lines tries to resurrect the early
Marx or another to restructure Das
Kapital. In its foundations these problems have more or less always been
heavily conditioned by the practice of political movements and the nature of
the solidarities between them. And yet
almost because of this some of the more obvious questions about the nature of
Marx’s critique of capital and the implications of them for our thought about
the social and political have not had due hearing. Even something as apparently
obvious to Marx, such as the very existence of ‘capitalist society’ as a
totality, is not something socially self-evident but an expression of a
politics, a language and a philosophical conception of the nature of social
things. Using authors past and present we need to get to the bottom of the
nature of this totality and ask to what extent it is in the nature of the
science of totality so to speak (including therein the determinations of the
desire/ inclination for totality, operative historical and subjective factors,
metaphysics of the whole and the romantic sense of separation within social
life) that creates the disposition towards it or rather the actual nature of
the object of the science that determines the utilisation of totality and
totalisation (and the developments out of simple totality we have identified).
The question in studying capital then, seems to be how much totality depends on
the nature of subjectivity and vice versa and if one can be understood to have
ontological priority over the other.
Little qualification is needed to show that Marx tries makes his
categories dynamic but is this because they can be made identical with their
object; do they mirror it or are they adequate to it? Crucially this informs
what Marx sees as his object. One major camp, now I believe largely
discredited, believes it is history. Another, seemingly equally discredited,
poses it as structure. Some light can be shed on this by looking at the
mechanisms of presentation in Marx’s exposition, and observing what relation
the presentation has to its object.
The significance of the presentational structure of Das Kapital
The initial significance of
this discussion is to see how the totality is constructed and utilised by Marx.
Does the critique of political economy retain critical insights into the forces
of constitution of the social? The significance of the opening chapters is how
these indicate the way into the totality and what kind of nature that denotes.
It will be argued that the role of value in Marx’s treatment of the relations
of production in their totality depends upon categories that are only valid as
generalisations, that is to say abstractions from concrete activities raised up
to the level of totality through simplification or reduction of their
particularity. Value and abstract labour have no meaning as individual
activities, and yet the ‘real’ social relations they are the abstract concept
of do. Furthermore, the movements of value in the first questions show how
inextricably linked the category of value is from its embodiment in the
architectonic of totalising conceptual order. In the strong Hegelian
interpretation of Das Kapital, the
Hegelian movement is more than an order of explanation but in fact is a real
movement that exists beneath the surface relations (such as retail trade) that
are apparent to its participants. The representation is not external to the
object of reflection in the sense that Hegel found Spinoza’s philosophy lacking,
and in the sense used positively by Fichte,[138]
so the autogenesis of the depth must somehow follow from the surface, and thus
this brings quickly to the fore (as any questioning of this type does) the
choosing of the starting point from which the successive determinations will
follow. In so far as Marx recognised that the categories needed to follow a logical
sequential derivation, he is following totalising principles used by the German
idealist tradition. In the substance of those categories or their sociological
content, however, there is a completely different ontological order; they do
not follow logical derivation.[139]
It cannot be said that they strictly follow a Hegelian process of negation
either. There are limitations of this form of Hegelian presentation. What could
equally or better be seen as a horizontal actuality, an ontological field or a
rhizomatic form, Marx forces into a vertical and hierarchical order of
representation. In the reproduction cycles of Volume II Marx describes the
circularity and metamorphosis of forms of the commodity in a manner that does
not involve the kind of hierarchical sublation evident in Volume I. He
continues to adopt the approach of moving from the simple to expanded form of
the process, but this is more of an analytical movement and lacks the kind of
auto-genesis for which Volume I is renowned.
The historical presence of
the totality described in Das Kapital is
only polemically grounded, nor indeed does it appear to be the objective of the
argument to ground history with metaphysical proof of its materiality. Indeed
the material reality of social relations is pre-supposed at the beginning and
throughout Das Kapital. This insight
of Althusser’s is fundamental to clarifying the fundamental incompatibility
with the formal pretensions of the Hegelian dialectic that declares that
philosophy must start its speculative order from a position lacking in any
presuppositions. That the investigation is into the essential nature of a
historically specific mode of production does not require that its historical
parameters are the starting point of how the object can be scientifically
apprehended. In fact Marx points out in the famous Introduction that the order of exposition is the reverse of the
order of historical emergence, which is taken to mean that the concrete
combination of different dimensions of the explanation of capital is at first
only a horizon of the analysis. Some of the theoretical complications in the
theoretical problematic of Das Kapital,
stem directly from the attempt to force abstract and simple models of
production schemes onto actual phases of historical development. Infamous is
the interpretation of ‘simple commodity production’ as a once actually existing
simple and undifferentiated stage in economic development out of which
capitalism arose. Marx is not directly concerned here with the origins of
capitalism nor indeed does feudalism somehow ‘contain’ capitalism in itself.[140]
For Marx the historical presuppositions of a system have a different set of
determinations to those involved in system reproduction.[141]
So when Marx says we must look at ‘its most developed form’ this also means
something of an idealisation or a totalisation of the object, known beyond its
actual historical instantiation. The critique of this initial simplicity to the
complex totality can be found within the humanist reading, as seen for instance
the work of Hegelian Marxists like Chris Arthur who otherwise seek to hold on
to the logical-derivative model, that is to say, the speculative logic at work
in Marx’s categories. Although Arthur’s attempt to judge Marx’s schema in
relation to how it holds up to Hegel’s categories produces some insights into the
method it mostly creates a set of irresolvable problems that re-emphasise the
tenacity of Althusser’s criticism.
Throughout Das Kapital empirical and historical
references to the ‘real development’ are plentiful – but these instances seem
to be overall secondary to an argument that is presented on a dialectical,
conceptual theoretical basis. The theory of capital cannot be made through
explaining the causes and origins of capitalist society. Rather the theory must
look at the practice of the system in reproducing itself. It is here that the
work of the Althusserian reading of Das
Kapital, often overlooked, adds an important conceptual qualification on
the distinction between capital as a real object and an object of
knowledge.
Marx expressed his intention
to present Das Kapital, ”as a
dialectically articulated artistic whole” in a letter to Engels dated 31 July
1865. But the architectonic of this whole was to vary considerably. Recent
research has established that there are at least four rough drafts of Das Kapital,
all with noticeable difference in methods of presentation: and most importantly
all beginning from what in the final version of Das Kapital appears as part 2, (the transformation of money in
capital).[142] This is
significant because deconstructing the play between ontological necessity and
presentation in the first part has proved to be an almost impossible matter.
In the introduction to a new
publication of Das Kapital in France
Althusser infamously recommended that readers should ignore the opening few
chapters of the book, as they were a distraction from the essential content of
the work. However he does draw our attention to a problem that, although he
does not correctly resolve, puts us in a better position to understand the
functioning of totality. Althusser states that in Marx, the materialist
totality is always presupposed. In contrast to Hegel’s philosophy, where the
idea is the result of its own process of estrangement from itself, the
existence of the material totality always presupposes the analytical approach
to it. The theory cannot begin from totality, but at the same time totality is
its premise.
Neither an analysis of
totality nor an analysis that uses totality as a conceptual tool to grasp an
object that forms a whole can begin from totality. To begin from totality is
either to impose, from the outside, a schema of demarcation of the field that
is foreign to it, or it is to begin from nothingness or emptiness. The empty
totality informs nothing and can only be further broken down by any successive
determinations that enter into it. Because totality as a point of departure is
either this externality or this nothingness, it can only appear as a result,
which means further that the starting point to arrive at totality, must actually
be a division of that totality. Even if premised on an initial unity, this must
be broken down in order to form the parts that are capable of producing a
totality that is a result of its own process of combination. Alternatively to
arrive at totality as a result, two or more unrelated parts can be forced into
relation, but if this is the case, there is still an initial division or
dividedness from whence the synthetic moment comes (whether exercised by the
external intellect that works on its objects and forms their relation – or
whether it is ostensibly the force of the part itself that forces it to
transform itself into an other). For Marx, the commodity may well be the
elementary component of bourgeois wealth, but this does not mean that it is in
itself a simple form. In opposition to Lenin’s analysis (on which so much
Hegelian analysis draws), the initial division - not in the being of the
commodity but in the commodity form- is only possible because of the complexity
of the system of production, circulation and exchange that continuously
reproduces this complex form.
The division in the commodity
form is crucial because the negative moment is a denial of the self-subsistence
of the immediacy of the point of departure of the analysis. The commodity, as a
discrete totality, is negated and through its break up it invites a
re-composition into a newer and more evolved form of complex unity. Hence
although totality is not the starting point, in the form of the commodity there
is something that although it must have determinations that belong to it, are
not self evidently present within it. It is the substance of the commodity that
allows for Marx’s elaboration of a concrete totality that, to use Lyotard’s
expression, is a textually organic and supposedly unitary body.
Real abstraction and the simple point of departure
i) Historical preconditions of synchronic totality
In the Grundrisse Marx writes:
“While in the completed bourgeois
system every economic relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois economic
form, and everything posited is thus also a presupposition, this is the case
with every organic system. This organic system itself, as a totality, has its
presuppositions, and its development to its totality consists precisely in
subordinating all elements of society to itself, or in creating out of it the
organs [which] it still lacks. This is historically how it becomes a totality.
The process of becoming this totality forms a moment of its process, of its
development.”[143]
Thus the most developed form
is where the process has become totalised (complete commodification). Marx
makes a virtue of necessity here. His theorisation of capital depends on the
presupposition of the completeness of its form. This is not the same as saying
he does not think its form can continue to evolve, but he can only present its
form in what is available to him.[144]
Here the perspective of totality can be seen to be partial because it adopts
the perspective of the system in itself: its permanence, its reproduction, and
its circulation. There is no doubt that Marx ultimately sees the system as
dysfunctional, to the point where in the organic composition of dead and living
labour it continuously reduces the proportionate rate of increase in the value
producing element and the management of this crisis can only be noted as
tendency and potential. The system cannot be viewed systematically from the
point of view of its dissolution, but only from the conditions of possibility
of that dissolution within its process of reproduction. As a totality of
interiority its dissolution would require an action and subversion of the
system from a subject position grounded within it, which in so far as it
provokes crisis would mean the end of the reproduction of the system. As such
crisis can only be envisaged as an inevitable tendency within system
reproduction that, by the continuous interiorisation of labour to capital,
reproduces the conflict inherent to its dissolution.
To say, as Althusser does,
that by necessity of a materialist presupposition Marx must presuppose the real
concrete totality, does not mean that the totality that is presupposed is
grounded. Rather it is the process of this grounding of the totality that
involves the textual process of producing a conception of it as result. According
to Marx, the capital relation can not be intuitively nor immediately grasped as
a whole, hence what is needed, if one accepts that the totalisation of the
object in ideal terms (itself questionable), is a determinate abstraction that
gets us to an essential inner form of the totality that is necessarily a
universal feature of the system in question. Ilyenkov and Lenin amongst others
have described this method as the ascent from the abstract to the concrete but
it has equally been understood as a development from the general to the
particular.[145] There is
an extensive debate on exactly which element of Marx’s analysis; whether the
commodity form or wage labour, takes on this role of abstract universal. It is
now generally understood that whereas in Marx’s initial plans for Das Kapital in the Grundrisse the book on wage labour was to form the ‘inner
totality’, he decided that the starting point required a prior analysis of the
commodity form. From this point on, the analysis moves towards concretisation
whereby as the result of a simple formula, based on the totality of commodity
exchange, a general formula (of accumulation) can emerge as a result.
By basing the latter analysis
on the identities and oppositions implied by an abstract evaluation of commodity
exchange, the more historical and specific determinations of the working of
real capitalist society can emerge organically, as it were, out of an
expository analysis that in creates its own ground through its process. For
this and other reasons Marx’s method can be seen to belong to the immanent type
of dialectical movement of categories as they relate to and posit each other,
and hence an analysis grounded interior to a totality. At the same time
however, this avoids the inwardness of the metaphysical gaze onto the nature of
the self or consciousness thereof. That is to say whilst following an immanent
development in the interiority of the analytics, its subject matter is a social
form that is outside of the metaphysics of self consciousness and on the plane
of exteriority. It is a method of exposing an ontological relation based upon
the historical precedent of a sum of actions that lie outside of the head.
Although this realist perspective is paramount to understanding Marx, it is
often confused because Marx did not only work upon the empirical reality of
capitalist exchange; but equally took the existing conceptualisations of these
processes as his subject matter. For this reason, a doubly critical relation is
always in use: the abstraction from concrete reality, and the retracing of
existing conceptual abstractions back into reality.[146]
It is this dimension of
Marx’s method that makes it illegitimate to regard it as a form of positivism.
Marx is not simply concerned with the process of capitalist production but also
with the forms of social consciousness that arise from within it and that
enable it to function. In this conception economic science is shown in its
intimate connection with the exercise of social power. Moreover, it is not the
prioritisation/ naturalisation of labour as a species activity that provides
the possibility for Marx to have this conception of science. It is rather the
specific social form of labour, in particular, abstract labour, whose real
totalised existence allows for the whole possibility of market economy, that in
Marx’s eyes authorises and mandates an analysis that can proceed immanently
from an abstract universal. As we shall see, one difficulty with this initial
reduction of all labours to simple abstract labour is that it develops out of a
historically specific period when the discipline techniques of the factory
regime were becoming generalised.[147]
Rather than arising out of a humanist ontology of labour as species activity, this
analytical adoption of an actually existing universal, in fact derives from his
ontological commitment to the notion of an overarching totality of capitalist
social practice. For Marx, analysis can produce by abstraction, separation and
reduction because the social processes that it observes themselves form
abstractions, separations and reductions. The difficulty lies in the
correspondence between the thought form and the real process. Are they
parallel? Or are they concepts adequate to the processes they describe though
of a different nature to them. Can a dialectical sequence make them more than
approximations to social reality?
The role of the notion of
totality in Marx is not foremost a methodological principle as Lukács claimed. Rather
if this principle was present, it was doubly amplified by a demand upon thought
to give adequate explanation of a concrete system of relations that appeared to
exist in the world as a totality the like of which had only hitherto been
imagined in thought. This is to perform in political economy something like
that which Spinoza did in the interpretation of scripture in the grounding of
his political treatises i.e. to find its meaning entirely within its history.
Spinoza himself based this on an idea of natural reason, that which sought
knowledge of nature in nature alone.[148]
Marx’s critique of the fetishism of the commodity in capitalism, of the
‘inverted’ appearances, and of its scientific justifications and
mystifications, sought the explanation in capitalism alone. To develop the
concept of capital as a system, Marx did not base his analysis on its
historical origins.
In one of the places where
Marx does approach this relation from the point of view of its historical
formation, in The results of the Immediate Process of Production, Marx
theorises that a formal subsumption (interiorisation)
of the worker into the labour process is followed by a more thorough real subsumption of labour under
capital. This totalising process of the universal commodification of labour, is
that on which the discovery of the labour theory of value is based. For Marx
the theorists of classical political economy only chanced upon the theory of
value – but this was only possible in so far as its preconditions have become
developed within civil society and the practices and consciousness of its agents.
The theories of value in ‘bourgeois’ political economy developed ‘solely’
through the analysis of price, but the categories
of political economy as ‘forms of thought which are socially valid and
therefore objective.’[149]
Commenting on this matter, Jameson rightly argues that,
“…It became
possible for the first time to separate the unique quality and concrete content
of a particular activity from its abstract organization or end, and to study
the latter in isolation…we can think abstractly about the world only to the
degree to which the world itself has already become abstract.”[150]
If in fact, for Marx, “...the
whole system of bourgeois production is presupposed before exchange value
appears as the simple point of departure on the surface,” then the adoption of
this simple point of departure demonstrates that the path followed by the
analysis is not the same as that which created the conditions for capitalist
accumulation. Whereas, ‘the starting point of the development that gave birth
to the wage-labourer and to the capitalist was the enslavement of the worker”[151],
the initial stages of the analysis in Das Kapital do not theorise the
inferior power of the workers, nor the command of capitalists over him, but in
fact assume an equality between them as exchangers of commodities on an
equal footing. This shows that Marx begins his critique of capitalist society
by adopting the presuppositions of its rationalisation in contemporary science.
These presuppositions, in the process of the analysis, are either perfected or
rejected. What is most important however is that the analysis is not working
directly on the empirical reality of capitalist society, but critically working
at the level of the discourse internal to it. This discourse has practical,
experiential and sensuous origins but within society these experiences have
already been reflexively mediated through public and private systems of
thought. Only when these scientific systems are related to themselves, to each
other and to the empirical facts of capitalist accumulation, can the contradictions
that are produced be made to correspond to the actual experience of social
conflicts that the analysis initially put aside.
ii) The simple abstractions of value and
abstract labour in the architectonic of Das
Kapital
In the survey of the
literature on Marx’s relation to Hegel and the dialectics of the commodity form
it will be investigated if Marx intended to give Das Kapital a speculative unity. This is a significant issue for
Marx himself and in the introduction to the work he makes the following claim.
“The method of
presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to
appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of
development, to trace out their inner connection. Only after this work is done
successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a
mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.”[152]
Through the critique of
commodity fetishism Marx confronts the reader with two different orders of
perception; one of ordinary perception and one of scientific deconstruction.
Repeating and embellishing a theme of the relation between surface and depth
developed in the Grundrisse, Marx snatches from the perceptible surface
an element that can be conceptually worked upon; that of the simple commodity.
“The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production
prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the
individual commodity appears as its most elementary form. Our
investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.”[153]
In
Reading Capital, Macherey states, “Pour retrouver la problématique hégélienne derrière la métaphore
de la ‘surface’, il suffit de lire l’identité entre la surface et ‘la
conscience ordinaire des agents de la production eux-mêmes’.[154]
In this view Volume I of Das Kapital
is the ‘en soi’ the in itself of the essence of the process that moves from
this abstract to the concrete, from individual to global, and from essence to phenomena.
This view though lacking nuance is basically correct in saying the text follows
a Hegelian order of exposition that gives it its coherence. For Macherey this
exposition does not work although different conclusions can be drawn as to why.
The Althusserians end their book with the question, why does Marx, in
presenting a new method adopt an ancient and specific mode of exposition – the
dialectic – that is incompatible with it?
This question posed by those
readers of Das Kapital in the
Althusserian circle can be answered by drawing on some contemporary strong
Hegelian interpretations of Marx’s work. For Chris Arthur;
“Hegel’s logic
can be drawn on in the study of capitalism because capital is a very peculiar
object, grounded in a process of real abstraction in exchange in much the same
way as Hegel’s dissolution and reconstruction of reality, is predicated on the
abstractive power of thought.”[155]
Like many others, and
supported by Marx’s own statements, for Arthur, Marx could not think the
concept of capital without the influence of Hegel. This might be true but it
does not prove that there is an identity between the two objects. Just because
the two systems share knowledge of a process of abstract, should not lead us to
conclude that both objects can be treated in the same way. Moreover what it
certainly does not account for (nor even recognise) is the Althusserian
criticism of this kind of comparison. For a start, it might be questioned from
the Spinozian theory of knowledge implied by the remark that the concept of a
triangle is not triangular.[156]
Whereas for Hegel the concept is its own abstraction, capital is a real
material socially actual process, it might be apprehended by concepts but its
structure as a concept does not need to mirror the activity or being of its
object; rather it belongs to a different order, not representational but based
upon adequacy. Arthur can only say that capital is ‘grounded in a process of
real abstraction’ because that abstraction is treated in a manner that
centralises and reduces it, rather than seeing the relation of abstraction
(separation) as manifold and aggregate i.e. with many centres. The head appropriates it, abstracts it if
one pleases, into a central and single relation. To say that the methodological
and speculative abstraction in Hegel is symmetrical with the process of
exchange is an absurd statement in ontological terms. In ontological terms
Hegel and Marx’s objects are completely different. How could the minds
speculative deconstruction of itself ever have a ground outside of itself?
Arthur’s theory rests on a notion of tele-causality: this is what Althusser has
to say about ‘expressive causality’:
"Presupposes
in principle that the whole in question is reducible to an inner essence of
which the parts are no more than the phenomenal forms of expression, the inner
principle being present at each moment in the whole, such that at each moment
it is possible to write the immediately adequate equation: such and such an
element (economic, political, legal, literary, religious, etc. in Hegel) =
inner essence of the whole."
Marx’s
value theory does not treat the actual relations that constitute value as
singular and reducible but as always polyvalent and the expression of structure
in its effects. This fundamentally questions the identity of the two
totalities, no matter how much they share a principle of immanent Dastellung. More support for why Marx
adopted this mode of exposition can be found by looking further into the
discursive field within which Das Kapital
was to intervene. An instructive comparison can be drawn between Marx and
the work of the Ricardian writer Thomas De Quincey. This unusual literary
figure was a well known adherent of the Ricardian school of economics, but
argued in a manner that is reminiscent of Spinoza’s proposition in the third
part of the Ethics that adequate ideas are active and inadequate ideas
passive; he felt that the science of political economy was not developing
because of logical errors within the existing science.[157]
In declaring his office to be the correction and perfection of the methods of
the Ricardian school, De Quincey pays particular attention to the need for a
proper exposition of the categories of political economy that, albeit in a much
more limited way, pre-empts Marx’s attempt at the same. What is particularly
interesting about this, is that De Quincey was a devoted student of German
metaphysical philosophy, and of course Spinoza, and this influence on his
attempt to give an inward self-positing expression to the categories of
political economy produces some results that are very similar to Marx.[158]
In De Quincey, just as will be seen in Marx, the outline of the logic of political economy commences
from a simple awareness of value to a necessary and contradictory subdivision
within this simple term. The subdivision produced between the useful article
and the article in demand, is further elaborated as the double form of value,
representing a division within the article that must be present simultaneously
for it to be exchangeable.[159]
Following a deconstructive route wherein complexity is derived from the
clashing together of these simple forms, De Quincey develops out of the dual
affirmative and negative side of the commodity an argument for the labour
theory of value.[160]
This derivation of the labour theory of value and De Quincey’s dismissal of the
question of the measure of value is a useful balancing act to any theory of a
special link between Hegelian dialectics and Marx’s method in Das Kapital. This is because it serves to
demonstrate other independent attempts to elucidate the categories with a
speculative argument and draws our attention to the special applicability that
the classical science of political appeared to have as an object to the
treatment of dialectics.
Marx
was clearly familiar with De Quincey’s work although it did not appear to
impress him too much, only serving to elucidate problems with the Ricardian
outlook but failing to resolve these difficulties.[161]
However Marx is not overtly hostile to De Quincey and appears to spare him from
the most savage of ad hominem attacks
reserved for the likes of Samuel Bailey, an opponent of the Ricardian School.
He does suggest however that Quincey’s Teutonic metaphysics are more
superficial than substantial, claiming that they are ‘affected rather than
real.’[162] However
given the similarities that can be exposed between these two thinkers there is
much evidence that will inform the Foucauldian link of Marx to the Ricardian
episteme.
Hegel’s
shadow
By
means of various intermediaries, Hegel undoubtedly cast his shadow over the divergent
interpretations of Das Kapital:
“The categories have to be derived
(and not taken arbitrarily or mechanically) (not by "exposition", not
by "assurances", but with proofs)
proceeding from the simplest, most fundamental (Being, Nothing, Becoming)
(without taking others) - here, in them, "in this germ, the whole
development."[163]
For
Hegel indeterminate being is the beginning.[164] It is the
first affirmative proposition. The beginning could start from a negative as
well, but Hegel shows that this is circular, the negation would be the same in
content as the affirmative - in so far as we are dealing with nothing, that it
is so is an affirmation - i.e. rather than nothing we have a non being, an affirmative
negation - a negative that requires a positive. The beginning of the science
thus contains all that must there be within. Thus the beginning must in
essence, be some part of absolute, but all this means is that it follows the
absolute in the manner of it having nothing outside of itself; it is perceived
that the dynamic that arises out of being and non being, allows for the
inauguration of a process of pure becoming.
If
this is the beginning for Hegel, in what sense can we talk of the commodity as
being the same abstract indeterminate beginning? The following type of
statement on the question written by Lenin has informed Marxian understanding
on the analysis in Das Kapital for
too long:
“The beginning - the most simple, ordinary, mass, immediate “Being”: the
single commodity (“Sein” in political economy). The analysis of it as a social
relation. A double analysis,
deductive and inductive - logical and historical (forms of value). Testing by
facts or by practice respectively, is to be found here in each step of the
analysis.”[165]
Irrespective
of whether we can agree with Marx on whether capitalist wealth ‘appears’ first
as an immense collection of commodities, it is clear that where Lenin tries to
equate the commodity with Hegel’s being he is diverging from how Marx himself
understood the question. Rather than being simple, ordinary or immediate, the
commodity is determinate. It is produced. It is necessarily plural. It has its
basis in a developed system of social exchange. This is what Althusser argued;
the commodity is determinate and is presupposed by the totality of social
relations that produce it. The dialectic cannot be the same thing as the
essence in Capital - though this does not yet mean that it does not constitute
the logic of capital. And yet we find justification for this point of view of
Lenin’s in Marx’s writing:
“In and for itself, the exchange of commodities implies no other
relations of dependence than those which result from its own nature“[166]
The commodity can be the
beginning in Marx’s sense only because it finds its truth in the process that
goes on behind it and produces it, the process which is more fundamental to
capitalism, as the theory goes; production for exchange. Marx takes as the
point of departure the, “simple, most underdeveloped shape’[167]
because it can divide into two planes, one of identity and one of difference.[168]
Althusser is right only in so far as he is arguing against theorists that
uphold a Hegelian identity between the dialectical processes of Marx and Hegel.
His contribution can be misleading however, because it obscures the lengths
that Marx went to in elaborate a simple totality out of the reflection
relations in the commodity form, in order to separate the apparent unity of
commodity producing society into different layers. It is the ontological status
of these divisions that are important. The first edition of Das Kapital Volume I had this as the
closing paragraph but it was omitted from later editions,
"The commodity is immediate unity of UV and EV thus of two opposed
entities. Thus it is an immediate contradiction. This contradiction must enter
upon a development just as soon as it is no longer considered as hitherto in
analytic manner (at one time from the viewpoint of UV and at another from the
viewpoint of EV) but it is really related to other commodities as a totality.
The real relating of commodities to one another, however, is their process of
exchange."
In the division within the
‘doublet’ of the commodity the analysis can open out on two levels – one is the
real differentiated actuality of commodity production and exchange. This level
is properly socially differentiated and is comprised of the totality of man’s
concrete activity as it relates to capital (omitting for a moment the question
of Marx’s neglect of the theorisation of reproductive labour). The second level
is arguably purely ideational, or, in the opinion of Uchida, a critical
idealism.
“The relationship
of equality is thus relationship of value, but the value relationship is above
all expression of the value or the value being of the commodity which expresses
its value”[169]
But it requires a different
(another) commodity (that counts of being equal essence) to express itself.
Here then is the important move, actual concrete difference is sublated and
retained in what is to become the explanation for a regime of the necessary
forms of value expressions.[170]
In another strong Hegelian
interpretation of Marx’s mature writings, Uchida’s attempt to draw out a
fundamental systematic complicity between Hegel’s shorter logic and Marx’s
category development in the Grundrisse, argues that in the second plane, Marx
‘intends critically to absorb Hegel’s idealism.’[171] Thus the idea becomes a kind
of stand in for what is really the ‘social logic of value –consciousness’ and
allows for the development of the theory of commodity exchange and the various
levels of value expression.[172] Later Uchida argues that
what both thinkers share, is a derivation of the complex out of a simple
generality which for Hegel means that the simple generality must be the
starting place for the notion because of the necessarily mediated difference
within the concrete. Uchida’s book is a strange contribution to this debate and
an extremely one-sided treatment but it does draw attention to this necessary
position within Hegel’s thought. And we reproduce here what he quotes from
Hegel: “The general is in and for itself the first moment of the notion because
it is the simple moment, and the particular is only subsequent to it because it
is the mediated moment: and conversely the simple is the more general, and the
concrete, as in itself differentiated and so mediated, is that which already
presupposes the transition from a first.”[173] The point however is, not so
much how much Marx drew on Hegel’s Logic to develop the categories, but
how much the development of categories in itself results in this hierarchy
between simple and concrete. Hegel argues that ‘the progress proper to the
Notion, from universal to particular, is the basis and the possibility of a
synthetic science, of a system and of systematic cognition.’[174]
Hegel continues to say that
the method must be proper to cognition itself, and thus cannot conceivably
start from the complex, as this is that which cannot be intuitively grasped.
Now it is very clear that the Grundrisse
and Das Kapital have different
starting points, and Marx’s original intention was to begin with the inner
totality of wage labour. Hegel’s logic fits with the abstract universal of
labour, but it does not fit with the rendering in Das Kapital where Marx does in fact start from the phenomenological
actuality of concrete determinateness.
For in fact the commodity is not a simple universal but a composite
form, it may be simple in comparison to the more complex determinations of
capital, but it is itself a unity that needs to be divided to arrive at the
point of the real abstract universal which as we shall see, self-evidently in
the Grundrisse, but obscured in Das Kapital, is the category of abstract
labour.[175] The
difference between products of labour is fundamental (and analytically prior)
but only in so far as it is the basis of a greater identity between the
commodities in their sharing of a value element.
The relationship of one
commodity to another is its simplest ‘value expression.’ Again it requires
expression in a ‘commodity body’ that is elsewhere described as a ‘mirror of
its own value being’ different from itself’.[176]
There is a ‘polar opposition’ in the form of value given that the ‘same
commodity never possesses both forms at the same time in the same value
expression.’[177] Hence
although it has differentiation as the ground of possibility for identity, the
relational form becomes subsumed to the expression of exchange value itself.
This does not depend upon solely another singular commodity for its expression,
but upon the totality of commodities that by necessity must be mediated through
a general equivalent form. A mono-valent language of sameness is properly the
form of value requiring that one relate to the other; it is properly a
relational entity, depending upon a generality for its unity. From this point
on, from the subsequent development of abstract labour, Marx has integrated
concrete differentiated subjectivity into an analytics of a relation.[178]
The relation is intangible but substantial and ontological.
In the Grundrisse Marx is more explicit; exchange value is not simply the
product of labour, it is the basis of man’s social bond. Through division of a
simple and apparently self evident entity Marx, clearly looking from the
perspective of capital, divines ‘labour power in general” which is the ‘value
substance’. Viewed from the perspective of capital, this labour power as the
value substance has both a qualitative and a quantitative determinacy. Its
magnitude is qualitatively established in respect to the ‘proportion in which
the other commodity body is related to it.’ Marx lists a series of
peculiarities of the equivalent form, the second and most important of which
being ‘concrete labour becomes the appearance form of its opposite, abstractly
human labour’. There are few clearer examples than this expansion from the
simple relation to the total relation than the dialectic of externalisation and
separation out of the initial separation of commodity A from its natural form.
Clearly, in these two texts
on the form of value there is no question that the ontological derivation of
value is not a sequence of historical emergence. In fact quite the opposite is
the case and it is in explaining this that the non-historical Hegelian
interpretations of Marx’s analysis of capital are the most persuasive. The
possibility of treating capital as a system, and the possibilities of a bourgeois
science of political economy are the same. It is because capital ontologically
exists in a system based upon separations and only fleeting associations that
it contains within it its own force of idealisation, i.e. its existence in the
money form. The compulsory nature of this idealisation, i.e. the necessity of
an active symbolic mediation of exchange through money, appears to correspond
to a necessary synchronic orientation in thought, wherein through their
existence in the universal, particulars can be made commensurable. In the Grundrisse Marx is more explicit in
describing exchange value as an ideal entity. It is a socially existent
mediation of human activity in a non-human, ideally not even sensuous, form.
Its basis is in the indifference of dependent individuals forced to exercise
their social bond through a mediated form.[179]
Just
because the categories that Marx deconstructed and used were historically valid
thought forms does not necessarily mean that the analytical development follows
a historical sequence. So much is clear from strong Hegelian interpretations
like Arthur’s and Uchida’s that demonstrate this well. However despite the
strength of this refutation it does not imply that the derivation of the forms
of capital is in fact adequately reducible to forms of thought, nor the indeed
the ‘being’ of capital in a Hegelian sense. Even if it could be stipulated that
the development of the categories in Das
Kapital reflects their inner necessity; they are derived logically, but do
not exist as such; this would not give any proof of the inner collapse of
capital unless the categories could properly correspond to actual social
events.
What
complicates the analysis is the necessary shift from thinking through what is
implied by the concept of value, to thinking of the actual reality of commodity
exchange. Totality is a crucial device here because it is comfortable to think
of the correspondence between the real and the thought form through this
figure. The very grammar of totality is especially interesting in concealing as
much as it exposes the ontological placement of the object of the statements
that it uses. Without conceptual clarity concerning the ontological commitment
to understanding the totality of capital relations, something that Marx never
questions, it is impossible to get closer to seeing how from the analysis of
value the exploitative and repressive dimensions of capitalist accumulation can
be delineated. Without the anticipation of the totality as a knowledge
production that is adequate to the real totality one would merely arrive at
something like the subjectivism of Simmel and be forced to conclude that the
objectivity of value was only the result of the aggregation of individual
assessments of worth, or to in some other way reduce a question of ontology to
a question of epistemology or more simply to a form of perspective.
As
such the whole debate has been forced to centre on the appropriateness of the
starting point and the enigmatic first chapters of Das Kapital. The impossibility of using the commodity as the proper
speculative point of departure has led many of the more astute commentators to
dwell on this appearance of the
commodity as the surface form of the total process of capital and to treat the
reference to wealth appearing as such is to the manner it first comes known to
the ordinary perceptions of agents within capitalist relation. Some theorists
like Banaji argue that the simple commodity, or the commodity as such is only
the superficial and immediate aspect of the speculative development. Quoting
Marx, Banaji states that capital must be the starting and finishing point of
investigation, “but as the starting point, capital must be taken in its ‘immediate being’ or as it appears
immediately on the surface of society.”[180]
Others insist more on the ‘cell form’ of the commodity as if it is the
elementary component part of a larger structure. What is fundamental to
recognise is the importance of a immanent deconstructive critique here; the
establishment of a simple totality that in deepening its gaze through its
divisions simultaneously embellishes its scope.[181]
This
is only possible if the commodity contains within itself determinations that
can be drawn out of it, most notably its substance, abstract labour power. It
requires that the commodity be seen as the result of something else, and is in
fact concrete and composite. If it is however, far from being an indeterminate
point of departure, as Banaji and so many others has noted it implies that it
‘comprises a relation within itself’ and as concrete it is internally
differentiated.[182]
This evidence makes very difficult any easy substitution of the movement of
capital and the movement of the idea in Hegel’s system of logic. As the latter
makes clear in the Science of Logic,
the ‘beginning can not be made with anything concrete, anything containing a
relation within itself’. This is because the concrete is clearly the result of
a process that has occurred prior to it, and as has already been demonstrated
it is the essential and distinguishing purpose of Hegelian philosophy to posit
the absolute as its own result.[183]
But although Marx privileges
a specific starting point, one sanctioned by the a realm of appearance and
hence appropriated by political economy, there could be many others, indeed,
the world does not present itself as an immense wealth of commodities, it presents
itself also as driven by greed, also as a divided society, also as an
aggregation of independent parts and so on.
So Banaji proceeds, the
commodity is something analysable, this allows us to reconfigure it as
immediacy, a moment of capital, what Hegel would call “a mediated immediacy.”[184]
Yet this mediated immediacy, Hegel makes clear, is a posited existence - it is
a further stage from pure abstract simplicity. In Hegel the process of becoming
is auto-genetic; it can be a positive germ of development because the idea is
estranged from reality. In contrast, the premise of capital as a social system
is the forced estrangement of the
producer from the object produced. The production of commodities for money
determines the form of interaction that people have within society. In order to
understand this, Marx bifurcates the social activity that goes into producing
commodities by bifurcating the labour that goes into them. This separation is
so clear-cut it can be represented in a tabular form (see Figure 1).
Marx does not perform the
bifurcation of the commodity and the division in labour in order to hold both
in their distinction on an equal footing. At each stage of the analysis, Marx
rejects the concrete and complex actual form of the commodity and labour and
reduces it to its simplified general social form under capitalism. The whole
left side of the table is rejected at each step of the way although its brief
presence serves to elaborate the social form of that side of the analysis that
Marx regards as appropriate to study capital. Concerned only with value and not
any one particular commodity the analysis proceeds only by subsuming the
differential into an equation wherein a universal can be found. The common is
strained out of the multiple. The multiplicity is the form of existence and the
necessity of the generalised universals, as for example for quantitative
exchange to be possible, different qualities must exist, but the differentiated
is always in service of the non- differentiated.
Figure
1: Twin bifurcations in the commodity and labour*
|
Simple Commodity (Appearance form of wealth)
Divides into: |
|
|
Use value Quality Natural/ physical Complex Heterogeneous Concrete Specific Form |
Exchange value Quantity Social Simple Homogeneous Abstract General/ total Essence |
|
Type of Labour |
|
|
Useful labour Qualitative *Natural/ Physical/ Actual Complex Concrete Heterogeneous Specific Form |
Social labour Quantitative Social/ force/ total
potential Simple Abstract Homogeneous General/ total Essence |
|
Means of Production |
Relations of production |
*NB Several commentators on Das Kapital have devised similar
schemas. Macherey’s presents something similar, on the basis of division
between ground and surface.[185]
Cleaver presents the division in the commodity form.[186]
The
logic of the progression to general equivalence
“The labour of
individuals in the same branch of work, and the various kinds of work, are
different from one another not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. What
does a solely quantitative difference between things presuppose? The identity
of their qualities. Hence, the quantitative measure of labours presupposes the
equivalence, the identity of their quality.”[187]
“It is only the
expression of equivalence between different sorts of commodities which brings
to view the specific character of value creating labour, by actually reducing
the different kinds of labour embedded in the different kinds of commodity to
their common quality of being human labour in general.”[188]
Use value is almost
immediately rendered a redundant, trans-historical category in Das Kapital; ‘powder is powder’, and use
value is an ‘excuse’ for producing exchange value.[189]
Value, an immaterial relation depends on the materiality of things in use-values,
but it is of complete indifference to value which ‘particular object serves
this purpose.’[190]
When it functions in developing the idea of the universal equivalent, in simple
exchange relations, the value of one commodity is related to the use value of
another. But once there is a general equivalent that can be changed for any
particular commodity, use-value no longer has any place in the exposition.
However it opens up the two- fold character of labour, exchange value enables
abstract labour to be identified. But like use-value, concrete labours are
pushed aside once the identity between types of labour in abstract labour is
made. It is a step in the deconstruction of the commodity that for Marx opens
up a dimension of social substance seen in materiality, or substantiality. Just
like the Ricardian thinker Thomas De Quincey, Marx believes that consideration
of use value falls outside of the domain of political economy.[191]
The use-value of labour is
not its social use and does not lie in the types of commodity it produces; its
only relevant use-value is that from the perspective of capitalist private
appropriation. That is its power of valorisation and of producing surplus value
within its exchange value. Marx’s violent abstraction pushes him to claim that
even the capitalist himself is little concerned with the actual type of
concrete labour; the capitalist is only interested in its value capacity and is
morally divorced from any consideration of the utility, ethical worth of his
commodity nor in Marx’s words, the ‘crappy shit’ that he produces, nor from an
identification with the virtues of the product i.e. having to believe in it in such a manner as
today’s corporations invest into the brand identity of products in the plethora
of ways described by Naomi Klein and others.[192]
The derivation of abstract
labour as something implied entirely by the exchange of commodities themselves
and not by the actuality of actual concrete practices of work is critical to
the whole system. Without such a development there can be no theory of money
nor of the exploitation of labour, which occurs only within the semblance of
equivalence. As an abstract universal, derived from the developing one side in
the duality of the commodity form, labour is both the real substance of the production
of wealth and the abstract force on which the possibility of an advanced
monetary economy is based.
In the third section of
Chapter 1 of Das Kapital, money is
posited as the ‘necessary form of appearance of abstract labour”. Furthermore,
all of the chapter on money in the Grundrisse is about the necessary mediation
of labour time in the form of money e.g. “Labour time always exists only in the
form of particular commodities (as an object): being a general object, it can
exist only symbolically, and hence only as a particular commodity which plays
the role of money.” But this is only because “labour time itself exists as such
only subjectively, only in the form of activity. In so far as it is
exchangeable (itself a commodity) as such, it is defined and differentiated not
only quantitatively but also qualitatively, and is by no means general,
self-equivalent labour time.[193]
The general exchangeability of labour must require that labour take on “ an
objective form, a form different from itself, in order to attain this general
exchangeability.”[194]
For the system of exploitation of labour to exist, requires an intermediary
form to allow for the inequality within equality to take shape. As Hegel says,
‘all symbols call up significations’, but Marx is contesting money’s
signification as simple means of exchange and trying to demonstrate that it is
a necessary form of mediation of a system of subordination, describing it as
”the pimp between man and the object of his desire”. This is a far cry from its
pure and ideal signification of equality that will be seen as the effect that
this particular symbol generally has on Simmel. For this reason, many readings
of Das Kapital and the Grundrisse have concluded that rather
than being a neutral means of exchange and possible basis for a more equal
society, money is itself a ‘weapon in the hands of the Bourgeoisie.’[195]
What troubled Marx about how,
“Hegel conceives wealth…only in its thought form,’[196]
led him later to employ a Hegelian mediation in the explanation of the concrete
appearance forms of alienated labouring money. “The truth is that the exchange
value relation – of commodities as mutually equal and equivalent
objectifications of labour time – compromises contradictions which find their
objective expression in a money which is distinct from labour time.”[197]
It is this very necessity of
an actual societal mediation wherein labour becomes general through the
externalisation in the means of exchange that the speculative development is so
attractive, with the caveat that the idealisation is made possible by the
historical totalisation of the wage-labour relation. The particular form of
capitalist command that characterised the historically most developed
capitalist formations that Marx studied through the homogenisation and
reduction, both formally and substantially, of labour to labour power, namely
the factory form, licensed the idealisation of elements of the system into a
measurable universe wherein an intrinsic contradiction could be exposed. Thus
the more total the system, the more it could apparently correspond to the
special treatment of the method of the dialectic; that is the study of a system
which is its own cause. So what Hegel perceived philosophically as ‘the
innermost ‘drive’, ‘the need’ of spirit to detach itself from what is abstract
by absolving itself into the concreteness of absolute subjectivity and so
freeing itself for itself” [198]
is reposed here as a reclamation of all relations between the reflections in a
mirror-like thought totality presented in a dialectically articulated artistic
whole.
In the first volume of Das Kapital, Marx is interested in
deducing the general formula for
capital and how it valorises and for this reason, use-value simply doesn't come
into the equation. He wants an abstract universal that works on the basis of
identity but has its conditions of possibility in difference. What Hegel
criticised in Spinoza for not properly reducing the infinite attributes of the
absolute to thought and extension and their inner contradiction, has a curious
repetition here in value theory. Spinoza tries to remain on the horizontal
plane where the absolute is God or nature, a purely immanent plane of the being
of one substance. Marx, like Hegel, seeks to bundle this up into a hierarchical
scheme where, through the progression of the categories, the inner nature of
capital can be uncovered in itself
without the giving the impression that their expression has been aided by
external reflection. Whilst there may well be positivist elements in Marx’s
outlook and in his method, in the elaboration of the theory of capital, he
seeks to build an artistic whole that posits its own determinations. But the
same difficulty remains, real commodity exchange does not arise out of its
logical order - meaning that its historical preconditions cannot be advanced in
the architectonic, and, where introduced, always appear external to it. Where
Marx asks us to analytically accept the imposition of the necessary social form
of labour in commodity production in its form as a homogenisation - though he
morally protests against it and tries to show its fundamental weaknesses - many
thinkers have seen this as kind of complicity with the social forces that have
enacted that reduction, and thus accuse him of ordering his thoughts in the way
that capitalists order their social relations. Yet into this very complicity,
from another perspective, where concepts can be conceived of as adequate but
distinct from their objects might be one place where the ‘royal road to
science’ might arrive.
Marx’s pedagogic structure
attempts to be an act of guidance that leads thought from the abstract to the
concrete. It can only do so by totalising relations, that is to say theorising
a process of colonisation at its apex and completion. It is an act of
representation but one sutured to its object, and in this case the object is
the force of capital’s command over labour. There is a violence of abstraction
because a step is taken away from the concrete, mediated differentiated world.
But the step away is a determinate step, and ostensibly a necessary one because
it is grounded in the abstract universal of exchange. Hence abstraction, as a
logical separation, is quite specifically mandated by the nature of its object,
it is not a method for all objects of thought, but one valid because of the
nature of the social form.
The important point here is
that a relation can be treated in this totalised manner when it is objectified
in relation. Its apprehension in thought, as a conceptual totality, relies upon
the type of identity in its relations. The similarities here with Hegel are
important. But the particular form of presentation, the appropriation from
Hegel of the ‘rational kernel’ for representation has the effect of giving the
appearance of idealism to Marx’s work.
Each of the moments of the
explanation forms a totality but because its content exists in a state of
opposition and the unity must come through the cancellation of one of its
terms. Here dynamism is certainly created by juxtaposing contradictory
conceptions. But it takes more than the concept to determine what ontological
status these relations have within reality. Could the dynamism of the
analytical progression belong only to the movement within the conceptual
totality, in what sense can these relations of relative complexity be said to
exist in reality? Even though Marx attempts to show that the categories of
political economy are valid forms of consciousness derived from the presence of
these material structures, does not the very idea of presenting it in
systematic and scientific form necessitate a structuring through an external
mode of thought? Macherey argues that it is having adopted the Hegelian form of
the development of the content, i.e. by making it self- positing, that the plan
of organisation of the work, the creation of an analytical totality, should
fail to realise its plan of organisation. That is if it does not have a
scientific coherence but an ideological coherence taken from Hegel.[199]
On the other hand, by adopting these abstractions Marx claims to have seen
through the mystery of the commodity form and presented these categories in a
manner that correctly pertains to their nature.
Simply holding a realist
ontological commitment to the existence of social entities outside of our
reflections upon them does not necessarily provide us with the right formula
for the appreciation within reflection of their ‘inner nature.’ A rigorous
distinction between the ideological and the scientific cannot be upheld. In
adopting the ‘social point of view’, although it may be the most important,
must by necessity be only one perspective upon a system. By disregarding the
phenomenological form or rather only presenting it in order to subdue it to the
more adequate and substantial scientific presentation, Marx progresses to
increasingly more adequate representations of the totality of the ‘inner
relations of capital.’ One way around this problem of developing the concept of
capital is by drawing on the Spinozian distinction between extension and thought.
These are two equally valid attributes of the existence of the same substance.[200]
In Ilyenkov’s words, in Spinoza’s system,
“…Thought
and extension are not two special substances as Descartes taught, but only two
attributes of one and the same organ; not two special objects, capable of
existing separately and quite independently of each other, but only two
different and even opposite aspects under which one and the same thing appears, two different modes of existence,
two forms of the manifestation of some third thing.”[201]
If the multiple and diverse concrete types of labour and its products are disregarded in the analysis this is not to deny them an ontological statement. On the other hand by developing the thought form of an idealised and totalised object, the system can be presented under its own infinite cause, which in Spinozian terms is the only possible way to treat substance. If the daily, physical and embodied actions of agents in capitalist society form are finite and perishable modes of what capitalist production in itself involves, then the scientific presentation treats the system in its inward self-causing eternity. Although most recourse to Spinoza in the explanation of Marx’s method takes the form of ‘thought-experiments’ and it is clearly against the prevailing evidence to draw Althusser’s conclusion that Spinoza is Marx’s only true philosophical ancestor, it is nevertheless extremely helpful to perceive the difference between the concrete corporeal totality and the ideational totality in this way. In fact this very distinction found in Spinoza has a precedent in Marx’s own comments on the matter:
‘Even with philosophers who gave their work a systematic form, e.g. Spinoza, the real inner structure of their system is quite distinct from the form in which they consciously presented it.’[202]
If capital can be looked at
as one substance which can be presented through a science peculiar to it, this
invalidates the wider appropriation of the method used in Das Kapital to a science of social objects per se. The
peculiar nature of capital identified by the Hegelian reading, which claims
capital forms a distinct object because of the idealisation in the appearance
form of social labour, has in some studies such as Simmel’s been turned around
to such an extent that the money form can be used to shed light on philosophy
concepts. The critical distinction between these two systems is that by showing
capital in its simple, expanded and total forms Marx aims to demystify the
supposed neutrality and commensurability of the exchange of labour power for
money whereas in the sociology of Simmel this ideal form is taken to be a
realisation of a system of equality. However, Marx’s system has been subject to
attack for reducing the consideration of labour purely in respect to what can
be drawn out from it as scientific matter: its quality of being temporally and
quantitatively measurable. Curiously this criticism has been most strongly
articulated by Negri, a post-modern thinker who draws strongly on Spinoza’s ontology.
The exact role that labour time has as the measure of value and the notion of
money as the necessarily objective practical expression of contradictions
within commodity production has in Marx’s work will follow the treatment of
Simmel’s Philosophy of Money.
Subjectivist conceptions of value
One aspect of Simmel’s
thinking in the Philosophy of Money clarifies
an important aspect of why the exposition of economic categories can take a
speculative level for Marx. It is useful to contrast Marx and Simmel as there
is much that both share in the analysis of value and money. For instance both
insist upon the fundamental relativity of economic value and both decry any
attempt to derive objective value from the inner nature of the commodity object
– that is to say qua use-value - itself,
“No matter how closely the inner nature of an object is investigated,
it will not reveal economic value which lies exclusively in the reciprocal
relationship arising between several objects on the basis of their nature.” [203]
This mirrors Marx’s infamous
critique of commodity fetishism where it is mistakenly held in common
consciousness that it is the property of individual commodities, their demand
and supply that governs their worth. There are however some fundamental differences
that make Simmel a strange heir to the title of having completed the most
important sociological work on money since Marx’s Das Kapital. What is different about Simmel’s conception is that he
approaches money first as a general problem not specific to capitalist forms of
accumulation and a related issue is that he does not address it from the point
of view of production. What this amounts to is that Simmel does not develop a
labour theory of value. For this reason what he holds in common with Marx is
all the more interesting.
Simmel follows a similar line
of argument from the relational to the measurable. Just as Marx argues, for
Simmel, for two different objects to be measured there must be at some level an
identity in one of their qualities.[204]
Now whereas Marx develops from here the idea that, as products of labour, these
values are measurable by the labour time expended on their production, Simmel
in fact argues something that would appear tautological to Marx; that in fact
what commodities have in common is that they are all exchangeable for money.
Simmel theorises the general equivalent as itself the common denominator of the
relationship of commodity exchange (his question is actually whether money has
a value). What Simmel’s theory amounts to is claiming a kind of neutrality and
an enormous utility for money (it can be exchanged for the totality of goods,
but any particular good can only be exchanged for money) whilst retaining the
notion that it has a symbolic function which registers not only the objective
totality of the relations between commodity values but also the subjective
assessments of their worth.
Simmel describes the
development of money as aspiring towards a purely ideal realm, that comparable
to Plato’s philosophical idea, and he talks of it as if it were a formula of
all being. However it is important to note that as an ideal, it is never
attained.[205] He even
goes so far as to suggest that it is reality that is not adequate to the
concept of money.[206].
He further argues that money cannot become a pure symbol, as it must, due to
value of the money material,[207]
retain its own relative worth as standard.[208]
Like Simmel, Marx sees the
conditions of possibility for money in distantiation.[209]
Termed ‘alienation’, the separation of subject and object, of producer and
product is a necessary social form for money to appear as a mediating form of
relations between people. However, it could be argued that every relation, and
not just those between people, involves some kind of separation, division or distinction.
What possible purpose could
there be in defining value as the totality of the relations of commodity
exchange? Simmel is right to say all measure is relative to something. If Marx
is right in saying that single physical objects do not have value, but rather
it is the totality of all abstract labour that comprises the value of labour
power, then why is this so integral to the analysis?[210]
Value is not a neutral
relation of one commodity to another, or the total amount of exchange values to
the abstract labour that produces them. For Simmel, value is a psychological,
subjective estimation of worth.[211]
This is clearly a functional reality of capitalist society, in that it allows
for estimation of sale prices and prediction of returns. For Simmel value is a
socially valid category for a perspective on reality, indeed, money for Simmel
is a special social form because therein one can develop a form of the totality
that is completely adequate to itself.
“For money represents pure interaction in its purest form; it makes
comprehensible the most abstract concept; it is an individual thing whose
essential significance is to reach beyond individualities.”
What is special about money
for Simmel then, is that out of subjective considerations of worth, of demand
and sacrifice that accompany all exchange, an objective realm of value emerges
based upon the coincidence and settling out of all of the individual
considerations.
“The decisive fact in the objectivity of economic value, which makes
economics a special area of investigation, is that its validity transcends the
individual subject….exchange presupposes an objective measurement of subjective
valuations…in the sense that both phenomena arise from the same act”[212]
If Simmel’s formal sociology
is characterised by an emphasis on the individual forms rather than the total
social form,[213] then his
concept of money can be read as coming the closest to bringing out the
significance of the totality of individual actions to the point of an objective
social reality where individuality is both surpassed and retained.[214]
Indeed if Simmel’s method, for all its quirks, has been criticised for
employing too abstract and general analytics, it would appear that money and
its concept presented an object suitable to his approach, a view in fact
partially confirmed by Simmel when he wrote that The Philosophy of Money was a work he considered truly his own.[215]
Value and command
The implication of Simmel’s
subjectivist conception of value is that it has no veritable material being. It
is a form of perspective in consciousness and does not exist outside of the
mind. Does Marx’s concept of value differ from this? Marx is clear that value
does not contain an, ‘atom of matter’, yet he regards it as real social form.
Marx does not want to imbue value with any physiological properties, any less
than the abstract labour that goes into its production.[216]
The question remains; what is the ontology of value?
It appears that value is
purely a neutral perspective of measurement of the quantities in which articles
are exchanged for one another. Neither Marx nor Simmel believe that it is in
and of itself the property of the things that are exchanged that gives them
value. Both agree that the tendency is towards the subordination of use-value
to exchange value. Both in fact believe that money is the form of the social
bond, which the worker carries in his pocket, so that the mediation of social
intercourse through money attains a political character and refers to a regime
of rights and proprietorship.
However, Marx and Simmel
differ on what they think value is an expression of. For Marx it is labour-time,
but Simmel passes over this moment almost completely. For Simmel, both value
and money are representations of a social consideration of worth; a subjective
and psychological evaluation. On the contrary, Marx’s notion of value does not
have this status of a neutral category of evaluation. Value might not have any
tangible being; it might well be a category of political economy, but most of
all it has the positive and necessary status of social force. Although it
cannot be known or conceived outside of the creation of the mind, it has a real
social existence outside of the philosophical and ideational approximations to
it. Hence Marx’s ontology of value is a thoroughly realist approach.
This force of the relation of
values could be described in terms of value as command. Just as it is possible to say that 10 coats are
exchangeable for say 5 pairs of shoes or a certain quantity of money, it is
also possible to say that this quantity of coats commands (Simmel uses the term
‘demands’) a certain quantity of shoes, just as a quantity of money (capital)
commands more or less labour power (where exchange of commodities is
generalised to the commodity form of labour power).[217]
The benefit of seeing it in this way is that one can isolate, in the manner
Marx sought to, the inner properties of the object exchanged from the general
set of relations that comprise the economy of the totality of commodities
produced and which is quintessentially a social and general category based upon
the general productivity of labour
power and its value in exchange, rather than the productivity of any particular
concrete labour.
So the question of the
ontology of value leads us to a consideration of the value of labour power in
general. The value of labour power can only generally relate to its commodity
producing capacity as the existence of many capitals militates against any
single control over or determination of what the cost of reproducing the
labourer (variable capital) must be. Given the diffusion of the division of
labour this must be a general social determination. Value might appear to exist
only in consciousness, but in Marx’s view at least, value expresses the power
of exchangeability, which is ostensibly an objective relation between labour,
capital and commodity. Yet what is complicated about value is that as a social
form, the more it becomes totalised, the less it is related to any particular
determinate process of production. The more total the more value becomes an
ontological category wherein human activity, in its generality, is represented.
In another yet different
subjectivist concept of value, Knafo shows that for many Marxists capital
replaces Geist as the materialist
version of Hegelian dialectical development.[218]
He argues rightly that this assumes that the dialectic can be stripped of its
content and turned into a method of formal logic. However Knafo makes this
criticism in order to recuperate the dialectic in ontological terms as the very
being of subjectivity itself. The dialectic is taken out of its scientific
meter and placed back into its classical role of a developmental notion of
subjectivity based in experience and consciousness: “The use of the dialectic is
justified because it represents the way by which we rationalise the world.”[219]
Knafo argues, quite plausibly that this aspect of dialectics in capital is
overlooked because in the book “social rationality is grasped through its
manifestations, and not through the intentions of subjects.”[220]
Knafo wants to break with the debilitation of seeing causal necessity within
objective relations, because it cannot account for the subject, or for the
historical dimensions of viewing capitalism as a process of class struggle.
Yet, the way he does so is to consider objective forms as only limitations upon
consciousness upon the shaping of our experience.[221]
“Social value
might appear to be something autonomous, existing and acting on its own and
apart from the will of any particular agent. But a market is still simply the
reflection of the acts of all of its participants, not something that acts by
itself. We only experience it as an external force imposing upon us the
conditions through which we interact with others.”[222]
To his credit Knafo has identified the problem in the ontological status of the law of value, and correctly tried to locate its site as internal to the constitutive activity of subjects. Hence he rightly rejects the idea that the structure is self-