Adventures of the Commodity, The: For a Critique of Value (Critical Theory and the Critique of Society) 9781350381193, 9781350381209, 9781350381216, 1350381195

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The Adventures of the Commodity

Critical Theory and the Critique of Society Series In a time marked by crises and the rise of right-wing authoritarian populism, Critical Theory and the Critique of Society intends to renew the critical theory of capitalist society exemplified by the Frankfurt School and critical Marxism’s critiques of social domination, authoritarianism, and social regression by expounding the development of such a notion of critical theory, from its founding thinkers, through its subterranean and parallel strands of development, to its contemporary formulations. Series editors: Werner Bonefield, University of York, UK and Chris O’Kane, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, USA Editorial Board: Bev Best, Sociology, Concordia University John Abromeit, History, SUNY, Buffalo State, USA Samir Gandesha, Humanities, Simon Fraser University Christian Lotz, Philosophy, Michigan State University Patrick Murray, Philosophy, Creighton University José Antonio Zamora Zaragoza, Philosophy, Spain Dirk Braunstein, Institute of Social Research, Frankfurt Matthias Rothe, German, University of Minnesota Marina Vishmidt, Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University Verena Erlenbusch, Philosophy, University of Memphis Elena Louisa Lange, Japanese Studies/Philology and Philosophy, University of Zurich Marcel Stoetzler, Sociology, University of Bangor Moishe Postone†, History, University of Chicago Matthias Nilges, Literature, St Xavier University

Available titles: Right-wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism, Mathias Nilges Adorno and Neoliberalism, Charles Andrew Prusik Towards a Critical Theory of Nature, Carl Cassegård Spectacular Logic in Hegel and Debord, Eric-John Russell

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The Adventures of the Commodity For a Critique of Value Anselm Jappe Translated by Peter Dunn

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2024 Copyright © Anselm Jappe, 2024 Anselm Jappe has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Ben Anslow All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3503-8119-3 ePDF: 978-1-3503-8120-9 eBook: 978-1-3503-8121-6 Series: Critical Theory and the Critique of Society Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.blo​omsb​ury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Preface Translator’s Acknowledgements Introduction 1 This stranger the commodity 2 Critique of labour 3 The crisis of market society 4 The history and metaphysics of the commodity 5 Fetishism and anthropology Conclusion: Some ‘false-friends’ Notes References Index

ix xiii 1 13 47 77 103 129 147 167 211 217

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Preface When this book first appeared in 2003 in French (éditions Denoël, Paris), it proposed a summary of the branch of social critique known as ‘The Critique of Value’, elaborated most notably from 1987 onwards by the German journal Krisis. It begins with a rereading of the work of Karl Marx which is quite different to those given by almost all historical Marxisms. At its core is a radical critique of value, of the commodity, of money and of labour. It is from this theoretical basis that the book goes on to analyse the current crisis of capitalist society, reviews its history and then establishes links to anthropology. A number of other forms of social critique are then subjected to sometimes fairly heavy scrutiny. This English edition now appears twenty years after the original French publication. In regards to its content I found very few things to change. This is not due to some special insight that I may have gained at the time of the book’s first publication, but rather it demonstrates, I hope, the solidity of the theoretical basis elaborated by value criticism, and most notably by its main author Robert Kurz. Nonetheless, theoretical reflection has continued apace ever since, and social reality has since undergone major upheavals. It was therefore necessary to develop and dig deeper into the ideas underpinning value criticism, and above all to use them to understand the contemporary world. I have attempted to do this in a number of articles and collections of essays, The Writing on the Wall: On the Decomposition of Capitalism and its Critics1 (Zero Books, Winchester, UK/Washington, DC, USA, 2017), and in La Société Autophage (The Self-Devouring Society) (éditions La Découverte, Paris, published at the same time as the present volume in English by Common Notes, New York, 2023). In the course of further research, I have shaken off the last remaining vestiges of a ‘progressive’ overview and henceforth no longer believe that the development of productive forces is necessarily above suspicion. I would therefore no longer criticize value, as I have done in this book, for being

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the ‘armour’ which ‘stifles’ productive possibilities. On the other hand, it has become clear to me that in pre-capitalist societies there was no ‘simple circulation’ of money without accumulation of capital, because there was neither money (in the modern sense of the term), nor ‘concrete’ labour. It was in his last work, Geld ohne Wert (Money without Value), published in Germany immediately following his death in 2012, that Robert Kurz placed the most stress on these points. In the wake of their split from the group around Krisis in 2004 and the foundation of the journal Exit!, Robert Kurz, Roswitha Scholz, Claus Peter Ortlieb and others went on to broaden criticism of the subject, Enlightenment reason and the ‘value-dissociation’, emphasizing that value is founded on a preliminary break with the sphere of ‘non-value’: a sphere mainly given over to women. Thus, the critique of patriarchy has come to play an essential role in the critique of commodity society. For my part, I incorporated this analysis into my book The Self-Devouring Society with particular emphasis on the psychoanalytic aspects of the description of commodity fetishism and the ‘automatic subject’. The journal Krisis continues to be published (but by now only online). Its main authors, Norbert Trenkle and Fritz Lohoff, also published in 2012 Die grosse Entwertung. Warum Spekulation und Staatsverschuldung nicht die Ursache der Krise sind (The Great Devalutaion. Why Speculation and Public Debt Are Not the Causes of the Crisis), Unrast, Münster; also translated into French as La grande dévalorisation. Pourquoi la spéculation et la dette de l’État ne sont pas les causes de la crise, Post-éditions, Paris, 2014. The authors present a point of view quite different from Kurz’s one, especially about the question of the ‘substance’ of capital. Robert Kurz’s death aged sixty-eight in 2012 as the result of a medical blunder brought his unremitting activity to an untimely end. The void that he left will be difficult to fill. Nevertheless, the ideas articulated by value criticism are finding increasingly wider reception throughout the world, a reception that is beginning to prompt re-formulations and further consolidation by new contributors to the field in several countries. Over the course of its thirty-five years of existence, value criticism has gone from decidedly fringe status to one which plays an important role in contemporary debate – or at least within the field of social critique. Such

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change is assuredly not a consequence of its incorporation into academic discourse, nor by grabbing the media’s attention. Value criticism continues to be treated by the official channels of the production and dissemination of knowledge with a distrust which does credit to a critique which proclaims to be radical. What has drawn attention to it rather is the evidence of the global crisis, and the evidence of the inadequacy of the dated analyses proposed by the Left. Since the financial and economic crisis of 2008, and sometimes even before it, it has become common to hear that capitalism is in bad shape, even on the point of collapse. If this crisis was still far from a large-scale collapse, it may well have appeared to be off the scale in the eyes of those who denied – on the left as much as the right – any possibility of a major crisis. On the other hand, according to crisis theory, it was scarcely anything more than just another foreshock. Every day it becomes increasingly difficult to deny or dismiss the conclusion that value criticism had already reached during a time when it was readily claimed that capitalism had ‘won out’. Prior to being borne out empirically, value criticism was able to draw this conclusion already at the beginning of the 1990s from the works of Marx, which proved at the same time that the kernel of his work remains the best guide for understanding what is happening to us today. If the worsening crisis of capitalism has proved radical theory right, it unfortunately has not increased the chances of social emancipation to the same degree. The rise in often barbarically inflected populisms, and especially of ‘transverse populism’ which unites elements of the right and of the ‘left’, and which lays all the faults of capitalism at the door of bankers and speculators, is up till now the most visible result of the despair engendered by the decline of capitalism and the scorched earth it leaves in its wake. Contemporary ‘anti-capitalism’, even when sincere, readily confuses capitalism as such with its most recent phase: neoliberalism, which has ruled since the end of the 1970s. Far from recognizing in the current upheavals the result of an exhaustion of value, the commodity, money and work, the vast majority of leftist movements – including those that consider themselves ‘radical’ – see only the need to return to a more ‘balanced’ capitalism, to Keynesianism, to a stronger role for the state and to a more stringent control of the banks and of finance. In general, the social movements of recent years have merely expressed the desire to return to a previous stage of capitalist

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development. Implicitly or explicitly, they have attributed the current power of transnational finance to a sort of conspiracy, rather than recognizing in credit and in the creation of astronomical sums of ‘fictitious capital’ the reckless acceleration of the commodity system, which became inevitable once the progress of technology practically ended the production of surplus value. What is desperately lacking, however, is a deliberation on the need to break with an entire civilization based on abstract labour. It is perhaps for this reason that The Adventures of the Commodity may still have something to contribute, despite being a theoretical work which offers no practical and immediate way out of the current quagmire. The simultaneous progress of economic, ecological and energetic crises is putting people everywhere in the shoes of the prisoner in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum. It is up to each one of us whether capitalism will be the last word of humanity, or whether a way out will finally open instead. Unlike in Poe’s tale, we cannot count on some miracle or other to help us. A special thanks to Peter Dunn, without whose translation this book might not have been published.

Translator’s Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to Anthony Hayes, Alastair Hemmens, Anselm Jappe, Amelia Searle, Ashok Collins and Jack Ennis-Butler for their help with this translation. Above all, I wish to thank John McHale for reading and offering important edits on the manuscript. –Peter Dunn

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Introduction Is the world a commodity? Some years ago, many people wanted to believe in the ‘end of history’ and in the definitive victory of the market economy and of liberal democracy. The dissolution of the soviet empire was considered proof of the absence of any alternative to Western capitalism. The opponents of capitalism were as convinced as its supporters. Since then, discussions have only been had around details concerning the management of what currently exists. Indeed, in official politics, all struggles between conflicting ideas have completely disappeared, and henceforth the idea that one could imagine a way of living and producing which is different from the one presently imposed is absent almost everywhere. This way of life seems to have become the only desire of people all over the world. And yet it is more difficult for reality to comply with such commands than for contemporary intellectuals to do so. In the years that followed its ‘definitive victory’, the market economy has shown more fragility than the previous half century before the collapse of the Soviet Union, as if the collapse of the Eastern European countries had only been the first act of a global crisis. Unemployment is rising everywhere and given this is caused by the microchip revolution, nothing will reverse this tendency or arrest the break-up of the social state. Together, they engender the marginalization of a growing part of the population, even in the richest countries, which are regressing after a century of social evolution. With respect to the rest of the world, small islands of well-being and of new-look1 democracy are emerging in an ocean of wars, misery and of abominable trafficking. Moreover, no unfair yet stable order of things do we have here: at any moment wealth itself is threatened with collapse. To

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the anyway serious-minded observer, the increasingly erratic movements of stock markets in conjunction with the ever more frequent ‘crashes’ of model countries such as South Korea, Indonesia or Argentina point to an imminent cataclysm. At the same time, the destruction of the environment is suspended above everyone’s heads, rich and poor, like the sword of Damocles. As it stands, each small improvement that is made on the one hand is accompanied by ten new aberrations on the other. There is no need to dwell on a state of affairs to which every informed television viewer has access. The ‘end of history’ did not last for very long. The prevailing disorder finds itself once again globally contested, and sometimes in places by quite unexpected people for unexpected reasons. One could cite the peasant struggles in the ‘Global South’, as well as those in India or in Brazil, the resistance movements in European countries against the dismantling of the social state and against the increasing precariousness of work. One could point to the rapid spread of the rejection of the incalculable effects of new biotechnologies, in countries as different as France and Thailand, as well as the formation of a new moral sensitivity regarding issues of child labour in poor countries and ‘Third World’ debt. As much as we are witnessing the appearance of demands for decent food, a growing distrust of the media and the creation of a network of occupied spaces devoted to dissent – such as the centri sociali2 in Italy – we are also observing a renewed interest in voluntary work and other activities which are not organized around profit. Even the shortlived electoral successes of ‘far Left’ political parties in France and elsewhere can be interpreted in such a way. Since Seattle,3 the demonstrations which are accompanying almost every summit of the rich countries and their economic institutions represent the emergence of these different protest movements throughout the entire world in a rather spectacular and mediatized way. Their common denominator for the moment is the struggle against ‘neoliberalism’. If these activists are still few in number, they have nevertheless ushered in vast changes in public opinion around one or another of these themes. It would therefore be greatly overstepping the mark to claim that the current state of the world is universally loved by those who have no other option but to be its contemporaries. It would be equally problematic to assume that this discontent always knows exactly what it wants. It is not the ‘revolution’ or the idea of a radically different society which drives these protesters. Neither is it

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a question of the demands of a well-defined social class. Apart from the vague universal opposition to ‘neoliberalism’, each movement has been confined to its own sector and has proposed piecemeal remedies, without concerning itself with the deeper causes of the phenomena it is ranged against. Nonetheless, the success of a book entitled The World Is Not for Sale4 appeared to bear witness to a less superficial concern. Those who repeat this slogan seem to take it above all to mean that culture, the human body, natural resources or professional competence are not to be simply bought or sold, and should in no way be defined in purely monetary terms. However well-intentioned such sentiments may be, they cannot replace an analysis of the society which creates the monsters that we intend to exorcise. Whipping up indignation because everything has become commodified is not a terribly novel approach and leads at best to an expulsion of traders from the Temple only for them to set up their stalls in the street outside. A purely moral critique that warns against seeing everything in terms of money and urges instead a look at the wider picture doesn’t go very far. It merely smacks of the futile solemn pleas that ethical committees often address to the nation. The theoretical disarray of these new dissenters reflects the collapse of the majority of social critique over the last twenty years. The absence of a widely applicable coherent critique, especially the explicit refusal of all ‘totalizing’ theories, forbids knowledge of causes and effects to anybody of a critical disposition. They risk therefore seeing their criticism degenerate, often against their best intentions, into the exact opposite of all socially emancipatory perspectives. In reality, we see opposition to American imperialism turn into vulgar nationalism, the critique of financial speculation take on an anti-Semitic hue, the struggle against neoliberal restructuring become simple corporatism and the critique of eurocentrism lead to the acceptance of the worst aspects of ‘other’ cultures, not to mention the dishonesty of people for whom struggling against globalization means struggling against immigration. Almost everyone seems to believe that nuisances ranging from genetically modified corn to unemployment can be eradicated without a thoroughgoing transformation of society itself. Nevertheless, a more in-depth explanation is clearly necessary. What, in point of fact, is a ‘commodity’? What does the fact that society is based on the commodity mean? It soon becomes apparent that a re-engagement

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with the works of Karl Marx is required in order to answer these kinds of questions. It is precisely in Marx’s writings on the commodity that we come across considerations that are nowhere else to be found: it emerges that the commodity is the ‘germ cell’5 of all modern society, but cannot be regarded as anything ‘natural’. We learn that its basic fetishist structure prevents society from making conscious decisions, that it necessarily drives individuals to work more and more, whilst at the same time making nearly everybody redundant, that it contains an internal dynamic that can only lead to a terminal crisis. We see also that this gives way to commodity fetishism which creates a topsy-turvy world, where everything is also its contrary. In fact, Marx’s whole ‘critique of political economy’ is an analysis of the commodity and of its consequences. Those who take the trouble to follow his sometimes difficult reasoning will be afforded a number of surprising insights into labour, money, the State, human community and the crisis of capitalism. We are therefore dealing with the critique of the basic categories of capitalist modernization, and not simply a critique of their distribution and of their application. Yet for more than a century, Marx’s thought has been used primarily as a theory of modernization for the purpose of further extending this modernity. With this theory as a guide, the workers’ unions and parties contributed to the integration of the working class into capitalist society, liberating the latter from many of its anachronisms and structural deficiencies. Furthermore, in the capitalist periphery, from Russia to Ethiopia, Marx’s thought served to justify the belated modernization attempted by these countries. The ‘traditional Marxists’ – be they Leninists, social democrats, academicians, revolutionaries, third-worldists or ‘ethical’ socialists – placed the notion of class conflict as the struggle for the redistribution of money, of the commodity and of value, at the centre of their reasoning without calling these categories any further into question. With hindsight, one can say that the entirety of ‘traditional Marxism’ and its practical applications has been simply another element in the development of commodity society. The global crisis of capitalism (globalization being merely the reckless capitalist acceleration following the microchip revolution that brought its basic contradiction to a head, i.e. the elimination of labour which constitutes the source of value and thus the source of the capitalist mode of production’s ultimate meaning) is also the crisis of traditional Marxism, of which it was an integral part, in

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the same way that the collapse of ‘real existing socialism’ was a stage in the decomposition of global capitalism. However, Marx also left us with some considerations of quite a different nature: the critique of the foundations of capitalist modernity themselves. For a long time, this critique was completely disregarded by Marx’s supporters and adversaries alike. Yet with the decline of capitalism, it is precisely the crisis of these foundations which has come to light. Subsequently, Marxian critique of the commodity, of abstract labour and of money ceases to be a sort of ‘philosophical premise’ and instead achieves fresh momentum as evidenced by events as they currently unfold. Two tendencies may thus be distinguished in the work of Marx, a twofold Marx so to speak: the ‘exoteric’ Marx familiar to everyone – the theoretician of modernization, the ‘dissident of liberalism’ (Kurz), a representative of the Enlightenment who wanted to perfect industrial working society under proletarian leadership. Then on the other hand, there is an ‘esoteric’ Marx whose often complex critique of basic categories seeks to go beyond capitalist civilization.6 It is thus necessary to historicize Marx’s theory, as well as traditional Marxism, rather than simply seeing them as erroneous. To say simply that the ‘esoteric’ Marx was right and the ‘exoteric’ Marx was wrong makes no sense. Rather, what is actually needed is to relate them to two separate historical stages – modernization and the supersession of modernization. Marx’s analysis is not confined to his own era, he also anticipated tendencies which were realized a century later. Yet it is precisely because he managed so well to recognize the salient features of capitalism in its early stages that Marx took this first stage for its maturity and further believed in the imminent end of capitalism itself. It is only the ‘esoteric Marx’ which can today constitute the basis for thought which is capable of grasping the issues currently at stake, and at the same time retracing their earliest origins. Without such thought, all early twentyfirst-century dissent may well view the current sea change as merely a rerun of previous stages of capitalist development. The danger of this happening may already be discerned in the common conviction that we should simply return to a previous stage of development, notably to the Keynesian welfare state and to national protectionism. Yet this pious desire ignores the whole of the capitalist dynamic. The triumph of neoliberalism cannot be explained away by means of some conspiracy theory to do with the evil henchmen of

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international capital whom the people could always thwart. Such an impulse to do good is accompanied by a lamentable toning down of the message despite the occasional employment of highly combative methods. Re-establishing the welfare state as a reaction to neoliberal barbarism, returning to industrial agriculture from twenty years ago as an alternative to the genetic modification of food, reducing pollution by a percentage point each year, limiting exploitation to those above sixteen years of age, abolishing torture and capital punishment. This fine programme pretends to avoid the worst and although it may prove viable in some concrete instances, it cannot in any way pass as an anti-capitalist or emancipatory critique. By merely plumping for capitalism with an ‘ecological’ or ‘human face’, what was exemplary in the rebelliousness begun in May 1968 is going to waste: the desire to criticize everything, starting with everyday life and the ‘ordinary madness’ of capitalist society which puts everyone in the absurd position of either sacrificing their lives to work, or frittering one’s life away earning a living7 or suffering through the lack of work. The horrors which are scandalizing these new protests, from poverty to oil slicks,8 are only the most visible consequences of the daily functioning of commodity society. These horrors will exist as long as the society which produces them exists because such horrors are a result of its very logic. The task then is to lay bare this logic, and only the ‘esoteric’ Marx, with his critique of the basic logic of modern society, can serve as the starting point for such research. Without his concept of ‘abstract labour’, for example, there is always the danger of getting caught between notions of ruinous financial speculation and honest labour, a dichotomy open to exploitation by populist currents ranging from the far right to traditional Marxists to those hankering for a return to Keynesianism. Without a resumption of the critique of these founding principles, the necessity of complete opposition to current society – the only realistic option – will easily become mired in either a subjective existentialism for culture to cash in on, or in the tweaking of old Marxist stereotypes (imperialism) leading only to an arid militantism and to sectarianism. The reclamation of the ‘esoteric’ Marxian critique of the commodity is thus the premise for all serious analysis, a prerequisite of all praxis. There is, however, no mention of it within public intellectual or so-called Marxist circles. Admittedly, the eclectic ideology which prevails to this day within dissenting

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circles contains numerous remnants of traditional Marxism, often transfigured and difficult to recognize, yet it is precisely this traditional Marxism which is blocking access to the wealth stored in the thought of Marx himself. To free oneself from more than a century of Marxist interpretation is a precondition for the Marxian reading of his work.9 To feel under no further obligation to accept or dismiss his thought in its entirety is another. It is equally necessary to dismiss the idea that only the most attractive parts should be retained and then jumbled together with bits of other theories and sciences. In a central, albeit highly succinct part of his later work, Marx outlines a critique of the basic categories of capitalist society: value, money, commodity, abstract labour and commodity fetishism. This critique of the central part of modernity is more relevant today than it was in Marx’s time, when this centre was only at an embryonic stage. In order to highlight this aspect of Marxian critique – the critique of value – there is no need to force meaning out of his texts via convoluted interpretations. Rather, a careful reading of them is all that is required, something that almost nobody has done over the last 100 years. At the same time, one must admit that today a good deal of Marx’s work has been superseded. For example, his highly effective description of the empirical aspects of the society of his time, as well as the whole ascendant phase of capitalism when it was still largely infused with pre-capitalist elements. Traditional Marxism could often insist on the truth of this part of his work, even without the need to distort the texts. The ‘exoteric’ Marx, who advocated the transformation of workers into fully fledged citizens, was not an invention of social democrats. Herein, it is therefore not a question of returning to some Marxist ‘orthodoxy’ in re-establishing the purity of the original doctrine, nor is it a question of revising Marxian theory with the goal of adapting it to the contemporary world. Firstly, we wish to reconstruct the Marxian critique of value in a fairly specific way, not because we believe that in establishing ‘what Marx really said’ we would prove ipso facto something about the reality that he analysed, but rather because an acquaintance with his critique must be the first condition for assessing its accuracy. It is moreover likely that our reconstruction will furnish even out-and-out Marxists with elements that had previously eluded them. Marx’s work is not a ‘sacred text’ and a quote from Marx does not constitute a proof. It should, however, be stressed that his work remains the most

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important social analysis of the last one hundred and fifty years. This we see as a given, whose validity we will try to demonstrate. Marx has been exorcized and declared dead numerous times, the last time being in 1989. Yet each time Marx has returned after a few years in a state of health which his erstwhile gravediggers would envy. This return may give grounds for regret since it would be far preferable to live in a world where Marx’s works had actually been superseded and where they would only constitute the memory of a world that no longer existed. Despite our best efforts, the presentation of the Marxian theory of value does not make easy reading. It contains numerous quotations and can sometimes give the impression of straying into a philological maze. This is, however, a wilderness that must be traversed because all successive developments will always return to the source, to these pages of Marx. Without a preliminary explanation of the basic categories of abstract labour, value, the commodity and money, subsequent reasoning would not make sense. Since this is not a postmodern book, we cannot read it in fragments or by inversing the order of chapters. This book follows a coherent development which goes from abstract to concrete and from simple to complex and so before judging it, a good grasp of its logic will indeed be required. Next, having established these basic categories, we shall attempt to draw conclusions from them, consequences which very often run counter to the whole of traditional Marxism and sometimes also to Marx’s theory itself with regard, say, to labour. To do this, we will draw on the works of the very few authors, starting from the 1920s, but above all from the last few decades, who have contributed to the development of the ‘critique of value’.10 We will limit ourselves initially to paraphrasing Marx’s text. Later on, those criticisms that can be levelled at the text together with the identification of possible internal contradictions in the text will be formulated in the course of the book. Similarly, where we summarize Marx we use certain concepts like ‘use value’ and ‘concrete labour’ in the same way that Marx uses them, even if we come later on to express reservations concerning the use of such concepts. Next, what we will have established as the valid core of the Marxian analysis will not be eclectically combined with other analyses to fill in supposed gaps in the theory. Rather, we will attempt to show that the laws of fetishistic society have also been the object of other research, most notably in anthropology.

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By using an approach different from that of Marx, authors such as Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss or Karl Polanyi have brought very important clarifications to areas which have eluded traditional Marxists: the critique of fetishism and the critique of the economy. Nevertheless, their understanding of basic forms is not at the same level as that of Marx. On the other hand, we will contrast the Marxian critique of value not only with traditional Marxism, but also with a number of contemporary theories which claim to articulate criticisms of the modern world whilst ignoring Marx’s categories. Above all, we hope to demonstrate that Marx’s theory is not a ‘purely economic’ theory which reduces social life to its material aspects without taking account of the complexity of modern society. Those who accuse Marx of ‘economism’, a rather frequent accusation even on the Left, reluctantly admit that his analysis on the functioning of capitalist production may be correct. Yet at the very same time they affirm that material production is only one aspect of social life in its entirety and that Marx had nothing important to say on the other aspects, a fudge beloved of authors such as Bourdieu and Habermas. We will on the contrary demonstrate that Marx developed a theory of fundamental categories which govern capitalist society in all its aspects. It is not a question of the well-known distinction between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ but of the fact that value is a ‘total social form’ – to use a term from anthropology – which itself gives rise to the different spheres of bourgeois society. Thus there is no need to ‘complete’ Marx’s economic ideas on ‘class’ with considerations on the themes of ‘race’, gender, democracy, language, the symbolic and so on that he supposedly overlooked. It should instead be emphasized that his critique of political economy, centred on the critique of the commodity and of its fetishism, describes the basic form of modern society which exists prior to any distinction between the economy, politics, society and culture. Marx is often criticized for reducing everything to economic life and neglecting the subject, the individual, the imagination or feelings. In point of fact, Marx provided a stark description of capitalist reality. It is commodity society which constitutes the biggest ‘reductionism’ ever seen. To escape from this reductionism, we must escape from capitalism, and not from its critique. It is value itself that must be superseded, not Marx’s theory of value. It is not our intention to propose a wholesale rereading of Marx. However, we hope to contribute to eliminating certain widespread misunderstandings

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which are partly responsible for putting some people off his work who might otherwise be expected to draw inspiration from it. The assertion that Marx’s materialist and economic theory is incapable of deciphering a world dominated by communication technology and the virtual world will be refuted in the course of what follows. The received idea that there exists a split between the ‘scientific’ Marx and the ‘revolutionary’ Marx will also need to be laid to rest. Some have extolled the scholarly Marx, zealously seeking to demonstrate that there is really no need to man the barricades, but that all are free to draw whatever conclusions they like from Marx’s research. Such people have attempted to adapt Marx’s theory to the supposed objective criteria of political economy and of the theory of bourgeois science. For its part, the ‘revolutionary’ tendency also believes that this schism exists, but does so in order to take aim at the presumed contradiction between scientific description and practical struggle. It is in fact the Marx of Capital who may nevertheless be termed the most radical. Whereas the Communist Manifesto and its radical cachet ends up making quite ‘reformist’ claims, both the critique of political economy by the mature Marx and the Critique of the Gotha Program demonstrate that all social change is in vain if it does not succeed in abolishing commodity exchange. One can therefore read this book on two levels: the main text outlines the essential points of the theory of the commodity and of its fetishism by summarizing Marx’s writings in relation to them and then by extending their logic to an analysis of the contemporary world. The book aims to be a free-standing essay and can be read without the notes. Apart from those of Marx himself, and direct references to authors other than Marx, there are few quotations. The chapter end notes seek therefore to broaden the points raised in the text, either by citing passages from Marx which are briefly paraphrased in the main text in order to demonstrate to traditional Marxists that we are not betraying the ‘canonical texts’, or by giving a voice to the authors who contributed to establishing the ‘critique of value’ using texts previously unpublished in English but deserving of mention; or by contrasting different opinions around a theme so to better establish our own, or via small digressions, expanding on points touched on in the main text. We hope that the notes will provide new material for readers who desire more in-depth theoretical study although their perusal is not vital for an understanding of the essential content of our text.

Introduction

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This book does not claim to present new discoveries. Value criticism has precursors in the 1920s such as Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, and I. Rubin’s Essay on the Theory of Value. Touched on in some of Theodor Adorno’s writings, it emerges fully around 1968 at which time in different countries (Germany, Italy and the United States) authors such as H. J. Krahl, H.-G. Backhaus, L. Colletti, R. Rosdolsky and F. Perlman were exploring the same subject. It reached further fruition during the second half of the 1980s, especially in the work of the German journal Krisis and its main author R. Kurz, as well as in the United States in the work of M. Postone and his rereading of Marx, all of whom, independently, often reached the exact same conclusions as each other. This fact evidently cannot be explained by some increased intelligence quotient among its theoreticians, but rather by the end of classical capitalism, which at the same time spells the end of traditional Marxism, opening the way to a renewal of social critique. Most of the theories in this book have therefore already been aired here and there over the last few decades by different authors especially in Germany, Italy, the United States and elsewhere. Were the present work to arouse some interest, it will be down to the fact that it attempts to offer an accessible summary for the general reader of research which has up till now only been available scattered across scholarly works and specialist journals. Each author dealing with value criticism has examined a particular aspect of it – almost always writing for a readership supposedly already acquainted with the Marxian theory of value. Some have set about dissecting a few pages of Marx in order to draw out all the possible consequences from it, others have analysed current economic upheavals, or twentieth-century history using value criticism as a ‘silent presupposition’ to which they devoted a few sentences by way of summary. No text currently exists which seeks to present value criticism in its entirety – starting with the simplest analysis of the relationship between two commodities, then progressing by degrees from the abstract to the concrete so as to arrive at the present-day situation and at its historical, literary and anthropological themes. Since 1993, one of the most important contributions to the critique of value in the anglophone world has come from Moishe Postone’s text Time, Labour and Social Domination. The goal of the present work, however, is to detail to an anglophone audience the German variant of the critique of value which is largely passed over in Postone’s book.

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The Adventures of the Commodity

Undoubtedly, it is much easier to write about multinational companies than it is to write about value, and it is much easier to take to the streets to protest against the World Trade Organization or against unemployment than it is to contest abstract labour. Demands for a different distribution of money or more employment do not require great intellectual effort. What is infinitely more difficult is the critique of oneself as a subject who works and earns money. Value criticism does not support the global vilification of multinationals or neoliberal economists while one’s own personal existence within the categories of money and work calmly carries on regardless. It may of course appear unreasonable to call these categories into question, but it has become absurd to criticize the capitalist system for not providing enough work or money. The time for easy solutions is over. This book does not shy away from the question of ‘What is to be done?’ although it also does not deny that it is a theoretical text and not a guide for action. The book will have achieved its purpose if it succeeds in conveying to the reader the passion that its author has for the apparently abstract subject of ‘value’. Such passion arises when one gets the impression of entering the room where the most important secrets of social life are kept, secrets upon which all the others depend.

1

This stranger the commodity The dual nature of the commodity What is a commodity? It might seem stupid to ask such a question as everyone seems to have an answer to it. We are told that a commodity is an object that is bought or sold and is exchanged for payment. How much one pays for a commodity depends on its value, which in turn is determined by supply and demand. We pay for a commodity with money because barter is possible only in primitive societies. If we ask ‘how much is 20 metres of fabric “worth” ’, the answer is ‘it is worth 100 dollars’. The commodity, money and value are things which are taken for granted, and yet they are found in almost all known forms of social life since prehistory. Indeed, to call them into question seems as senseless as contesting the force of gravity. Investigating them is possible solely in relation to capital, surplus value, investments and wages, prices, and class. That is, only when it is a question of determining the distribution of these universal categories that regulate exchange between people. This is precisely the arena in which different social and theoretical concepts are allowed to appear. Everybody, ranging from those who consider the contemporary economic system to be natural or the ‘best possible solution’ to those who contest the current distribution of commodities and money, shares these views. Those who follow Marx are no exception. Nevertheless, Marx had a different opinion. Capital begins with a detailed analysis of the commodity, value and money. Of course, it could be argued that in this first chapter Marx is only summarizing commonplaces already established by his bourgeois predecessors such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and that his own contribution really only begins with the ‘transformation of money into capital’. However, Marx

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The Adventures of the Commodity

himself explicitly emphasized that his analysis of the commodity was the most fundamental and revolutionary part of his research. It is precisely this part of his theory in which he claims to have made one of the great discoveries of human history, and to have solved a mystery that remained unresolved for millennia. ‘The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very simple and slight in content. Nevertheless, the human mind has sought in vain for 2,000 years to get to the bottom of it’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 90).1 In any case, neglecting the analysis Marx made at the beginning of his most important work has been a constant feature of every strand of traditional Marxism, whose collapse today should prompt us to reassess what it neglected. It could also be pointed out that in the thousands of pages that make up Marx’s ‘critique of political economy’, the analysis of the commodity and the value form occupy a relatively small part of the work. Marx nevertheless described the value form as the ‘germ cell’ of the whole of bourgeois society, and that the entirety of his critique is none other than an explanation, a deployment or a development of what is already contained in this apparently unremarkable analysis. Without such an analysis, Marx would not have written a critique of political economy, but rather, simply another doctrine of political economy. Finally, it could be objected that the Marxian analysis of value is unclear and obscured by its Hegelian terminology. It might be argued that its initial formulation was beset by difficulties, that it is available in various different versions and that, in over twenty-five years of work on it, Marx never managed to give it a definitive form.2 In reality, the part that took the most effort for Marx was the elaboration of the theory of value in his analysis of capital. In this regard, his texts present obscurities and contradictions that even the best philological interpretation was not able to completely resolve. This demonstrates precisely that Marx was faced with a completely new field, an aspect of social life, a ‘mystery’ (as he called it) so fundamental and so little explored that even a mind as subtle as his struggled to seize and understand it. Yet another reason to attempt to make these intuitions bear fruit, given that in a certain way this ‘mystery’ is easier to grasp today than it was in Marx’s time. In the finished version of the chapter on the commodity, in the second edition of Capital (1873), Marx analyses the structure of the commodity in the simplest possible way. Here, he examines the relationship between only a few commodities, apparently disregarding all the rest, their owners



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and the entire social and historical context. We almost get the impression of being confronted with a mathematical operation or a logical exposition. However, we are not dealing here with a description of some long gone, more embryonic or archaic stage of the commodity nor with a simple model or hypothesis that must be verified. Marx here is claiming to have identified the ‘germ cell’ of bourgeois (or capitalist or modern) society.3 This form does not exist in a pure state, in vitro, and it can be difficult to distinguish it from its concrete and empirical manifestations. And yet it forms the very fabric of all the acts that, repeated millions of times a day across the whole world, constitute the social life that we know. In the first sentence of Capital, Marx describes the commodity as the ‘elementary form’ of ‘the wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevail’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 125). The commodity has an ‘elementary’ form, not because it is considered as a neutral presupposition, but because it already contains within it the essential traits of the capitalist mode of production. This ‘germ cell’, as Marx himself called it, contains the basic contradictions which on first glance are difficult to recognize, but which are nevertheless found in all forms of economic and social life in modern society. Marx was well aware that his analysis of the value form was an almost incomprehensible innovation, in its form and its content, even for well-intentioned and astute readers. In the preface to the first edition of Capital he writes that ‘[t]‌he understanding of the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will therefore present the greatest difficulties … With the exception of the section on the form of value, therefore, this volume cannot stand accused on the score of difficulty’ (Marx, 1976b, p. 90). The commodity is not identical with ‘goods’ or an ‘exchanged object’. Rather it is a particular form occupying either a major or minor part of ‘goods’ in certain human societies. First of all, the commodity is an object that not only has a use value, but also an exchange value. Every object that satisfies any human need has a use value, which in of itself is not an economic category. However, in so far as an object is exchanged in determined quantities with other objects, it also possesses an exchange value. As exchange values, commodities can only be understood via quantitative determinations. If we exchange a shirt with 30 kilos of potatoes – in the sense that they have the same price – we treat commodities as different quantities of something identical that they

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The Adventures of the Commodity

must both have in common. In so far as they are use values, commodities are entirely incommensurable. The shirt and the potato in this sense have nothing in common, whereas the relations within which commodities are exchanged, their exchange values, are continually subject to variation. Yet at a given moment the same product is exchanged with different exchange values which amongst themselves are equal: a shirt can be exchanged with a gram of gold, or 10 kilos of wheat, or a pair of shoes and so on. Ultimately, it must be the case that these different exchange values contain something in common: their ‘value’. This common substance of commodities can be none other than the labour used to create them. Labour is the only thing in common between commodities which are otherwise incommensurable.4 Labour finds its measure in duration and therefore in quantity. The value of each commodity therefore depends on the quantity of labour that was necessary to produce it. In this respect, the nature of the use value occasioned by labour matters little. Whether one hour is spent sewing a dress, or one hour is spent making a bomb, it still remains one hour of labour. If two hours were necessary to make a bomb, its value has doubled in relation to the dress, without taking into account their use values.5 This quantitative difference is the only thing that can exist between values, and if different use values of commodities do not count towards determining their value, then the differing concrete labours that produced them cannot count either. Therefore the labour which composes value counts only as a pure amount of labour time spent, regardless of the specific form in which it has been spent. Marx called this form of labour which disregards all its concrete forms, ‘abstract labour’. The value of commodities is none other than the ‘crystallisations’ of this ‘congelation’ of ‘undifferentiated human labour’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 155). Value – as distinct from exchange value – is a determined quantity of abstract labour ‘contained’ in a commodity. The commodity is therefore the unity of use value (created by concrete labour) and of value (formed by abstract labour). We are not concerned here with the labour time actually employed by a concrete individual to create a particular commodity. Rather, value is determined by the average necessary labour time that it takes to produce a commodity in a given society, and at a certain point of development of its productive forces. If one hour suffices to sew a dress under average conditions,



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its value is one hour. And as such the tailor who spends one hour and a half will only be paid for one hour of labour. Marx calls this time ‘socially necessary labour time’. Therefore, every change in the productivity of labour affects the value of a commodity. If a new invention allows us to produce ten shirts in one hour instead of one, after this invention becomes universally employed each shirt will contain only six minutes of social labour even if those who have no access to it continue to employ one hour of labour to sew one shirt. Naturally, one does not have to work twice to produce one commodity – the first time as concrete labour producing a use value, and the second as abstract labour producing an exchange value. Rather it is the same labour that has a twofold character: it is, on the one hand, abstract labour and, on the other, concrete labour. As concrete labour, it is the infinite multitude of labours which produce various objects, in every society where the division of labour prevails. This labour is subject to qualitative differences: sometimes it may be weaving, other times driving a car or turning the soil. As abstract labour, all labour counts solely as ‘productive expenditure of human brains, nerves, and muscles, and in this sense are human labour’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 134). Labour as abstract labour knows only quantitative differences: sometimes it is a question of one hour of labour, other times of ten hours. More complex labour counts as a multiple of simple labour: one hour of labour by a skilled worker may be ‘worth’ ten hours of labour of a simpler nature. This reduction occurs automatically in economic life. There is therefore nothing material or concrete about abstract labour and the value that it creates, they are thus purely social. The linen that has been fabricated by the concrete labour of the textile worker is visible, and yet the abstract labour that it contains cannot be directly expressed. The value this worker creates does not have an empirical existence and exists exclusively in the heads of the people who live in societies where goods take on the commodity form.6 It is only value as the ‘common substance’ of commodities which allows them to be exchanged because they are commensurable. And yet this common substance – abstract labour time – is an abstraction which can only manifest itself and acquire a sensuous form in an indirect manner: via its relationship to other commodities. That 20 metres of fabric is ‘worth’ 20 metres of fabric is merely stating the obvious. Their value can nevertheless be expressed in relation to the value of another commodity. For example,

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The Adventures of the Commodity

20 metres of fabric is worth one coat. In this equation, the first commodity, which expresses its own value, plays an active role and is ‘presented as a relative value’. The second commodity in which the first expresses its value ‘functions as an equivalent’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 156). The commodity which is in the relative form of value cannot be at the same time an equivalent and vice versa. The commodity which expresses its own value cannot be the material for the expression of the other commodity. But in this ‘simple or accidental form of value’, where there are only two commodities, this relationship is still reversible. The equation expresses the fact that the two commodities have the same substance. The value-being of a commodity therefore finds its form in its natural form, that is, in the use value of another commodity. The value of fabric – which, as such, is an abstraction – takes on the form of the coat. Indistinct abstract labour which creates the value of the fabric is expressed in the concrete labour which created the coat. It is thus in its concrete form of use value that the coat expresses the value of the fabric, whereas for the fabric, the abstraction of value takes on the form of a coat. This is not a quality that comes naturally to the coat, ditto its ability to retain warmth, it possesses it only in its value relation with the fabric. As a value, the fabric has lost its own characteristics and is equal to the coat. Its value is expressed as something different to its own use value. The difference between value and exchange value must always be remembered: value, remaining abstract and imperceptible, is expressed in a perceptible exchange value, that is, in a commodity with which the first commodity is exchanged. In philosophical terms, one might be tempted to see in value the substance, and in exchange value the phenomenal form, even if, as we shall see, the identification of value with a ‘substance’ poses problems. Nonetheless, in reality there are more than just two commodities. Twenty metres of fabric could just as well be exchanged in determined quantities with all other commodities. So therefore we arrive at the total or developed value form: 20 metres of fabric = one coat, or = 10 pounds of tea, or = forty pounds of coffee, or = 2 ounces of gold, or = half a ton of iron and so on. Now, the fabric expresses its value in all other commodities, which makes it evident that ‘from the point of view of the value of the commodity, the particular form of use-value in which it appears is a matter of indifference’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 155). Therefore, it is just as simple to recognize that the labour represented in these



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various commodities is also equal, abstract and without regard to the concrete form in which it is objectified. Given that there are always new commodities appearing, the total or developed value form has difficulty functioning, as the chain of comparisons of value is always incomplete. What is more, each commodity has a form of relative value different to those of all the other commodities, as well as an equal amount of equivalent forms, of which none are complete and valid for all commodities. But, we could just as simply reverse the formula. If the fabric expresses its value in the tea, the coffee, the gold and so on, it must also follow that a coat, 10 pounds of tea, 40 pounds of coffee, 2 ounces of gold and so on must also be equivalent to 20 metres of fabric. We have therefore obtained the General Form of Value: ‘The commodities now express their values to us, (1) in a simple form, because in a single commodity; (2) in a unified form, because in the same commodity each time. Their form of value is simple and common to all, hence general’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 157). Each commodity now expresses its value in relation to the fabric, and it is in this way that the quantitative equality of all other commodities which can be exchanged with 20 metres of fabric is revealed. The fabric, having become a general equivalent, is immediately exchangeable with all other commodities: ‘The physical form of the fabric counts as the visible incarnation, the social chrysalis state, of all human labour’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 159). The general form of value presupposes that all commodities behave in the same way in that one commodity must be excluded from the relative value form so as to represent a general equivalent form, that is, the substance of their general and unitary value form. In theory, any commodity could play this role, but it is necessary that the exclusion is definitively fixed on one specific commodity. Historically, gold occupied this position. Hence, we can replace fabric with gold as the general equivalent to obtain the fourth form, the money form: and so, 20 metres of fabric, 1 coat, 10 pounds of tea, 40 pounds of coffee and so on are all worth say 2 ounces of gold. Unlike the unfolding of the transition from the simple form to the developed form and from the developed form to the general form, almost nothing distinguishes the money form from the general form. Immediate and universal exchangeability now takes the form of gold. And thus, if we were to replace ‘2 ounces of gold’ with its price form, 100 dollars, we obtain the original formula that everyone knows: 20 metres of fabric = 100 dollars.

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The Adventures of the Commodity

The money-form is thus a simple consequence of the development of the commodity form and finds its ultimate expression in the formula: 20 metres of fabric = 1 coat, or X commodities of A = Y commodities of B. It is in this sense that Marx claims to have solved the mystery of the money form that neither his bourgeois predecessors nor successors were ever able to understand. Analysing the commodity in such a way might seem tedious and unimportant. Nothing about it seems particularly open to challenge. In addition, the findings here seem in no way to bear upon capitalist society or provide grounds for its critique. Even Marxists have spotted nothing ‘explosive’ about these pages of Marx, which they perceive as a simple summary of the foundations that his theory shares with the classical political economy prevailing at the time. Yet, if Marx’s theory of value was merely the ‘doctrine of the labour theory of value’ of classical bourgeois political economy as exemplified in the work of David Ricardo, it is unclear why Marx would consider his own theory of value to be his most important discovery.7 This importance is revealed in the final part of the chapter on the commodity enigmatically entitled ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret’. It is here that Marx outlines some of the consequences of what he already established in the previous pages. In the first four pages written under this subtitle, Marx uses the following expressions: ‘secret’, ‘metaphysical subtleties’, ‘theological niceties’, ‘mysterious’, ‘grotesque, ‘absurd form’, ‘mystical character’, ‘enigmatic character’, ‘quiproquo’, ‘fantastic form’, ‘misty realm’, ‘enigma’, ‘hieroglyphic’ and ‘mysticism’ (Marx, 1976a, pp. 163–9). Evidently for Marx the commodity is no mundane matter. On the contrary, it is an object which defies common sense, something that Marx says ‘transcends sensuousness’8 (Marx, 1976a, p. 163), and in which human relations are presented as things, and things as endowed with a will of their own: ‘The mysterious character of the commodityform consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 165). In commodity production, ‘the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 175). To the producers, argues Marx, ‘their own movement within society has for them the form of a movement made by things, and these things, far from being under their control, in fact control them’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 167). Fetishism is itself



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already evident in the fact that social activity has an ‘objective appearance’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 176) in the commodity, in value and in money. In their acts of exchange they unknowingly produce the regulating element of socially necessary labour time, which is always imposed as if it were natural law. And it is the money form which hides the real relationships of commodities behind an appearance of things. The undisputed fact that a shirt is ‘worth’ 30 dollars is only a development of the simple value form according to which a shirt is ‘worth’ 3 kilos of tea because in this equation the tea represents abstract human labour. In other words, one of the primary points about the term ‘fetishism’ is that there is no direct relationship between the private labours of humans, instead they relate as an objectified form, in the appearance of a thing, as equal human labour expressed in a use value. Nonetheless, most people are unaware of this and so they attribute the movement of their products to the natural qualities of these products. Marx explicitly compares the fetishism of the commodity to religious fetishism where people worship human-made fetishes, material objects to which they attribute supernatural powers. Both traditional Marxists and nonMarxists have either ignored this Marxian theme or have simply dismissed it as ‘philosophical gibberish’. They have almost always interpreted fetishism as a mystification in the sense that the real existing structure of capitalist production necessarily produces false representations which hide its real characteristics. This mystification does of course exist and sometimes Marx does use the word fetishism in this sense (in particular at the end of the third volume of Capital). But the brief chapter on fetishism that we have just quoted, as well as other scattered remarks in his work, allow us to come to a completely different conclusion. For Marx, fetishism is not only an inverse representation of reality, but an inversion of reality itself.9 And in this sense the theory of fetishism is at the centre of Marx’s entire critique of the foundations of capitalism. Well beyond the explicit use of the word fetishism, the concept of fetishism as inversion can be found all the way through Marx’s critique of political economy and has its antecedents in the ‘philosophical’ works of his youth. The fetishistic character of capitalist society is not a secondary aspect of it, but rather it resides in the very ‘germ cell’ of this society. Fetishism, the fact that for humans their ‘relations of production’ take the form ‘of a material thing, escaping their control, independent of their conscious individual

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The Adventures of the Commodity

activity’ manifests itself first of all ‘by the fact that the products of men’s labour universally take on the form of commodities’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 187). Far from being a ‘superstructure’ belonging to the mental or symbolic sphere of social life, fetishism can be found in the very basis of capitalist society permeating every aspect of it. It is therefore legitimate to talk about an identity between Marx’s theory of value and his theory of fetishism. Far from being the ‘neutral presuppositions’ which we discussed in the beginning, value and the commodity are fetishist categories which lay the foundation of fetishist society. For Marx, the modern human being, whose activity takes on the form of the commodity or is represented in value, is equivalent to the ‘savage’ who worships a wooden idol – and, a kilo of potatoes bought at a supermarket is no more rational than a wooden totem. As we hope to demonstrate, the category of fetishism, itself borrowed from the history of religion, appears much more capable than the entire body of academic economic doctrines of explaining, for example, contemporary financial crises. It is therefore appropriate to return to the Marxian analysis of the commodity and to outline its fetishistic character as such.10

Real abstraction The twofold nature of the commodity is not particularly difficult to understand. Aristotle himself had already analysed it when he said: ‘For example a shoe is used for wear, and is used for exchange’11 (MECW, vol. 29, p. 269). Even the twofold nature of the labour ‘incorporated’ in a commodity had already been imperfectly recognized by classical political economy. A single commodity is relatively easy to understand, whereas it is only in the relationship between two commodities that ‘fetishism’ begins.12 According to Marx, what is essential is already contained in the simple value form: 20 metres of fabric = 1 coat. Marx continues by saying ‘The secret of the entire value-form must be hidden in this simple value-form. Hence its analysis offers the real difficulty’ (Marx, 1978, pp. 130–50, emphasis in original). It is to this analysis of the simple value form that Marx dedicates the most pages, and from which the total value form, the general form and the money form all quickly result as mere consequences. The equivalence of two commodities – apparently



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the most obvious thing in the world – already contains the entire mode of capitalist socialization. In the first edition of Capital, Marx says that the ‘first or simple form of relative value … is rather difficult to analyse, because it is simple’ (emphasis in original). Then, in a footnote at the bottom of the page, he adds, ‘this simple form is, as it were, the “cellular form”, or as Hegel would say “the being in itself of money” ’ (Marx, 1976b, p. 18, footnote missing in the English translation, emphasis in original). The commodity contains within itself a contradiction that comes to light in its relationship of exchange with another commodity. Its use value and its value – that is, its existence as a representation of a quantity of abstract labour – do not coexist peacefully but rather they are in a conflictual relationship. The internal opposition in each commodity achieves expression by forming two poles: it becomes an external opposition, a relationship between two commodities in which only one counts as a use value, and the other (the equivalent) only as an exchange value. Indeed, the simple value form is at once the simplest and the least developed form in which this opposition appears. This is why it is ‘difficult to understand’, but also why the secret to the whole of the capitalist mode of production can be found within it. The development of this form is at the same time the development of this internal opposition. In the value form, the abstract labour ‘contained’ in a commodity manifests itself in the body, in the use value of another commodity. However, the equalization of the products of labour with other commodities in which social labour is immediately expressed is by no means an innocent process or purely technical procedure. Rather it is an inversion, whose three most important manifestations Marx enumerates in the analysis of the simple value form. ‘Use value becomes the form of manifestation, the phenomenal form of its opposite, value’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 148). A perceptible thing, the body of a commodity represents something supernatural, suprasensible, something purely social, that is, value: ‘Concrete labour becomes the form of manifestation of its opposite, abstract human labour’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 150). To express this value, abstract labour – which did not create the fabric, but the value of the fabric – uses the concrete labour of the tailor who produces the coat. In this case, the labour of the tailor is the immediately exchangeable equivalent for all other commodities. Finally then, ‘private labour takes the form of its opposite, namely labour in its directly social form’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 151). At the moment

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that it enters into exchange, private labour becomes the same labour as that undertaken by all the others participating in the exchange. The commodity is therefore the unity of two determinations of the same thing which are not just different, but exclude each other: use value is the opposite of value; concrete labour is the opposite of abstract labour; private labour the opposite of social labour. The commodity thereby contains a perpetual and dynamic conflict in that it must find forms which allow its contradictions to exist without destroying it. With respect to the value form, the commodity tries to express in a perceivable way the ‘value’ of another commodity. This means that its concrete form – its use value – its perceivable body incarnates the suprasensible quality of another commodity. Yet people attribute certain other ‘values’ to commodities, which are considered to be natural qualities of it.13 Moreover, they do not attribute these qualities consciously. It is while their backs are turned that the inversion takes place, where concrete and perceivable objects count only as incarnations of abstract and suprasensible value. In the inversion that already characterizes a single commodity, the concrete becomes a simple carrier of the abstract. It has a social existence only in so far as it serves the abstract so as to give itself a sensuous expression.14 It follows that if the commodity is the ‘germ cell’ of the whole of capitalism, then the contradiction between the abstract and the concrete that it contains exists at every level of analysis, and in a certain way constitutes the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist social formation. If the commodity is a fetishized category it is because the labour which constitutes its value is abstract labour: ‘As the foregoing analysis has already demonstrated, this fetishism of the world of commodities arises from the peculiar social character of the labour which produces them’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 165). But, it could be argued, why must this abstraction be negative? Without the capacity for generalization and for disregarding diversity, thought could not be reasonably said to exist. There is nothing wrong with placing dogs, cats, hares and horses in the same category, that of the animal, even if the ‘animal’ as such does not exist. In a similar vein, it is impossible for people to exchange their products without mentally reducing their various concrete labours to the fact that labour has been expended in a purely technical sense. Indeed, it is in this sense that the concept of abstract labour was first put to use by classical political economy. Having superseded theories which



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recognized value creation only in certain forms of labour (such as mercantilism which attributed it exclusively to the labour used for extraction of precious metals, or the physiocratic doctrine of agricultural labour) classical political economy recognized that labour tout court was the source of value. But in so doing, it followed an analytic process whereby every characteristic is gradually removed from an object so as to reduce it to its simplest element, just as in the same way we can reduce human diversity to a determined chemical structure common as much to Kalahari ‘Bushmen’ as to the emperor of Japan. This being the case, it would nevertheless be impossible to explain the cultural, historical and social differences between the Kalahari Bushmen and the emperor of Japan solely by their common chemical structures. On similar, purely logical grounds, we could conclude that all commodities are the product of some form of labour. Marx summarizes this journey from the complex to the simple in the first two sections of his analysis of the commodity in chapter one of Capital. Nevertheless, it would be a frequent, albeit serious error to assume that Marx shared this point of view and that his concept of ‘abstract labour’ is the same as the one that Smith and Ricardo arrived at with their reductio ad unum. In reality, the labour thus obtained is independent of all social determinations and exists in all societies. In this sense it is a purely physiological question – the expenditure of physical or mental labour. In his analysis of the value form in the third section of the first chapter of Capital, Marx takes the opposite approach. This much more difficult approach, in which Marx is strictly Hegelian, completely abandons the method of political economy. He seeks to uncover the non-historical, logical genesis of the categories found in empirical reality, rather than accepting them as givens. For Marx it is necessary to explain why and how the basic abstract forms become visible surface phenomena. In this way he reveals that they belong to a certain social formation rather than seeing them as natural and universally present givens, as does bourgeois political economy. The abstract labour analysed by Marx is not an indisputable assumption without specific consequences, such as the fact that one must breathe in order to live. On the contrary, abstract labour in the Marxian sense only exists within capitalism and is its primary characteristic. Marx calls this the ‘secret’ or the ‘pivot’: ‘I was the first’ says Marx ‘to point out and examine critically this twofold nature of the labour contained in commodities. As this point is crucial

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to an understanding of political economy, it requires further elucidation’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 132). The concept of abstract labour that Marx establishes is not the above-mentioned act of mental generalization, but rather it is a social reality, an abstraction that becomes reality. We have seen that if all commodities must be mutually exchangeable, the labour contained in them must equally be immediately exchangeable. This can only be the case if it is equal for all commodities, and if it is always the same labour. The labour contained in one commodity must be equal to the labour contained in all the others. In so far as labour is represented in value, each individual labour amounts to is ‘expenditure of human labour power’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 137). But insofar as they are all equivalent, their concrete content is erased. This is not a purely mental exercise since their value is represented in a material form, in exchange value, which in more advanced conditions takes the form of a determined quantity of money. Money represents something abstract – value – and it represents value in so far as it is abstract. A particular sum of money can represent any use value or any concrete labour. Wherever the circulation of goods is mediated by money, abstraction becomes very real. It therefore makes sense to talk about ‘real abstraction’.15 The abstraction from all sensuous qualities, from all use values, is not some mental reductionism, as when it is a matter of disregarding different types of animals in order to focus on ‘the animal’ which does not actually exist as such. The best expression of the essence of this ‘real abstraction’ is found in a passage of the first edition of Capital, which unfortunately Marx did not include in the following editions: It is as if alongside and external to lions, tigers, rabbits, and all other actual animals, which form when grouped together the various kinds, species, subspecies, families etc. of the animal kingdom, there existed also in addition the animal, the individual incarnation of the entire animal kingdom. Such a particular which contains within itself all really present species of the same entity is a universal (like animal, god, etc.). (Marx, 1976b, p. 27, emphasis in original)

The mystification contained in the commodity abstraction is quite real and constitutes the true nature of this mode of production: A social relation of production appears as something existing apart from individual human beings, and the distinctive relations into which they enter



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in the course of production in society appear as the specific properties of a thing – it is this perverted appearance, this prosaically real, and by no means imaginary, mystification that is characteristic of all social forms of labour positing exchange-value. This perverted appearance manifests itself merely in a more striking manner in money than it does in commodities. (MECW, vol. 29, p. 289, emphasis added)

Money does not represent the multitude of use values, but is the visible form of a social abstraction, the visible form of value. In commodity society, everything has a twofold existence as a concrete reality and as a quantity of abstract labour. It is this second mode of existence which is expressed in money and deserves therefore to be called the primary real abstraction. A thing ‘is’ a shirt or a night at the cinema and ‘is’ simultaneously 100 euros or 30 dollars. This quality of money cannot be compared to anything else. It is beyond the traditional dichotomy of being and thought for which an object exists either solely in the mind and is therefore imaginary (this being the usual meaning of the term abstraction) or, on the contrary, as something very real, material and empirical.16 It is a form of reality best analysed using the Hegelian dialectic, and to which we will again have occasion to advert. Whilst concrete labour is always realized in something material or immaterial, in a commodity or in a service, abstract labour cannot be directly expressed because it only produces a social form.17 It thus has to express itself in an indirect manner in exchange value, which in practice is money. In social exchanges, the protagonists are unaware of the fact that the values of things are merely the representatives of units of labour. Exchange value hides the fact that it is the quantity of labour incorporated that determines the value of commodities, and not their natural qualities. Talk of ‘concealment’ in this regard is therefore quite legitimate. Yet Marx poses an even more radical question: why does labour, productive activity, take the form of value? With regard to real activity, value is already a form of abstraction. It is not only the representation of value in the value form – exchange value –which is fetishized, but more importantly it is also the representation of living labour in value. If all value dissolves into labour it would then seem logical to conclude, in accordance with bourgeois political economy, that all labour is represented in value. These two terms then become equivalent, and therefore the only remaining question is to know how much value a commodity contains and

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not under what form labour became value. Marx criticizes classical political economy for having arrived at this conclusion and for focusing on the quantitative side of value: Political economy has indeed analysed value and its magnitude, however incompletely, and has uncovered the content concealed within these forms. But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product. (Marx, 1976a, p. 174)18

Indeed, Marxists themselves have paid very little attention to this question. They took it for granted that labour becomes value and focused their critique on the inaccurate representation of labour in money. It should nevertheless be acknowledged that Marx himself did not always rigorously separate the passage of labour into value, nor the passage of value into exchange value. The difference between the ‘exoteric’ and the ‘esoteric’ Marx exists even within his analysis of value and is visible in his lack of clarity on how value is determined.19 To refute the idea of value-creating labour as a naturally occurring fact common to every society, it is also necessary to criticize the idea that labour is ‘contained’ in value, that it ‘is’ value, and that it ‘creates’ value. Indeed Marx himself often uses these expressions, typically found in Smith and Ricardo, for whom labour creates value just ‘as the baker makes bread’. Elsewhere, Marx says rather that labour is ‘represented’ in value, which is quite different. Yet he does not pay enough attention to the need to stand apart from the ‘naturalist’ conceptions of his predecessors. Up till now, we have echoed this hesitancy in our paraphrasing of Marx since it is a feature of what he has to say. In the course of the following, we will take account of the differences between ‘contained’ and ‘represented’ value, a subject to which we will return. One misunderstanding in particular which has grown up over recent years must be eliminated. This has it that the abstract labour and concrete labour instanced by Marx are two different types of labour. According to Marx, these categories have nothing to do with the contents of labour, nor with the organization of labour. Even less are they two different stages in the labour process. Labour is not first of all concrete for it then to become abstract. Abstract labour in Marx’s sense has nothing to do with the division of labour, in which labour is fragmented into meaningless units, or with its dematerialization – an



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idea prompted by the fact that in recent times ‘abstract labour’ has been linked to the growing importance of immaterial labour. Abstract labour is neither assembly line labour nor computer programming. Consequently, it would be incorrect to say that abstract labour is increasingly ‘replacing’ concrete labour, or that labour is becoming ‘more and more abstract’. This interpretation of abstract labour played an important role in the first work which returned to the Marxian concept of abstract labour: History and Class Consciousness by Georg Lukács (1923). The importance that Lukács places on the ‘abstraction’ that the division of labour produces derives from the fact that in this work he places much greater stress on the division of labour than even Marx himself did in his later works. For example, Marx wrote: ‘Though it is correct to say that private exchange presupposes division of labour, it is wrong to maintain that division of labour presupposes private exchange’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 299). The division of labour would therefore be a far broader category than that of private exchange – the basis of capitalism – and does not necessarily lead to it. According to the Marxian theory of the twofold nature of commodities, in the production of commodities, all labour is at once abstract and concrete: ‘It follows from the preceding not that there are two differing kinds of labour lurking in the commodity, but rather that the same labour is specified in differing and even contradictory manner – in accordance with whether it is related to the use-value of the commodity as labour’s product or related to the commodity-value as its merely objective expression’ (Marx, 1976b, p. 16, emphasis in original).20 Thus, even labour in agriculture or elderly care has, in capitalist conditions, an abstract side to it, just as working with computers or in a laboratory contains a concrete side. All labour that creates commodities is always and necessarily abstract and concrete. These two types of labour are utterly incommensurable, and they even belong on completely different ontological levels. It is therefore impossible to swap abstract labour with concrete labour or vice versa. As we have mentioned above, there is of course a type of labour that we could perhaps somewhat paradoxically call ‘empirically abstract’ labour.21 The existence of this type of labour is actually a result of the predominance of abstract labour in its formal sense, but is nevertheless not at all identical to it. It remains the case that abstract labour in its formal sense becomes the dominant social form only when the propensity of the labours being exchanged, that is,

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their non-specificity and the possibility of moving from one form of labour to another has permeated every aspect of society. When Marx wrote his reflexions on abstract labour it was this non-specific form of labour that he had in mind: ‘Such a state of affairs is at its most developed in the most modern form of existence of bourgeois society – in the United States. Here, then, for the first time, the point of departure of modern economics, namely the abstraction of the category “labour”, “labour as such”, labour pure and simple, becomes true in practice’ (Marx, 1973, pp. 104–5). Yet at the same time he emphasizes that abstract labour, as a simple expenditure of labour power, is not a natural given, but rather the result of an historical evolution: ‘This example of labour shows strikingly how even the most abstract categories, despite their validity – precisely because of their abstractness – for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations’ (Marx, 1973, p. 105). Yet as we have already shown, at the time Marx had not yet distinguished between ‘unskilled’ labour and ‘abstract labour’ as formal determinations.

Value against the human community It is much easier to understand the specifics of commodity production if we compare it to the modes of production which preceded it. To do this, however, it is imperative to refrain for the moment from all value judgements. This is in no way to suggest that capitalist societies were somehow superior to pre-capitalist ones or vice versa. Rather it is about removing all natural ‘appearances’ from value and abstract labour by recalling that until very recently most people globally lived almost entirely without money, commodities or abstract labour. Whether they lived well or poorly is of little importance here. Labour has always taken place in society and has almost everywhere existed as a division of labour. It is not this division per se that creates abstract labour. Each individual labour makes up the total labour of any given society. The fact that it has a social character and that it forms a part of a universality of labour does not yet make it abstract. There is absolutely no need for the social character of labour to take on a separate existence alongside its concrete and



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private character (indeed, neither was this the case in pre-capitalist societies). In societies which preceded commodity, production labour was social precisely in its natural form, as a particularity: ‘The natural form of labour, its particularity – and not, as in a society based on commodity production, its universality – is here its immediate social form’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 170).22 In the patriarchal peasant family, ‘the different kinds of labour which create these products – such as tilling the fields, tending the cattle, spinning, weaving and making clothes – are already in their natural form social functions’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 171). In each mode of production, Marx argues that society must in some way make use of the different concrete labour of individuals (which, as such, are completely incommensurable) as parts of the total social labour. It must do this with as much regard to the distribution of this labour in the different branches of production, as to measuring the different contributions of individual producers (at least in non-communist societies). But wherever modern commodity production does not yet predominate, it is precisely as concrete labour that different individual labours are social, either as a consequence of the ‘natural’ division of labour in patriarchal, feudal or slave-based modes of production; or as a function of a future society which consciously regulates its production. In the Middle Ages, ‘it was the distinct labour of the individual in its original form, the particular features of his labour and not its universal aspect that formed the social ties at that time’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 275). The same goes for inside a factory where different workshops do not exchange values among themselves, but rather each product and each particular job is immediately part of the general distribution of labour. In this case, it is through its use value that each product relates to all the other use values. Every member of a factory contributes, through their labour, to the realization of a total product which is then distributed amongst them by various methods.23 Each individual activity is essential (or at least considered as such) for the success of the whole: it is the role of each individual within collective production, and not the quantity of labour expended, which establishes the right of each participant to a share of the entire production. If, for example, in an automobile factory the bumper bar workshop sends 100 bumpers to the assembly workshop, whilst simultaneously requesting 2 tonnes of aluminium from the warehouse, there is no calculation to determine whether these quantities of objects have the same ‘value’. Indeed, these

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workshops do not pay for the materials they receive. However, in the factory, the entirety of production is governed by the production of value. Perhaps a more worthwhile comparison is traditional agriculture: the different labours of the peasant who cuts grass, the serf who helps them, and the grandmother whose task it is to stop chickens from entering the house do not vie with each other in order to determine their relative share of the total labour. Their labour is not private, but from the outset makes up a part of a social labour. Indeed, there is no risk of their private labours failing to become social because their activities could not possibly turn out to be non-exchangeable in the given context. The necessity of their labours, and the necessity of it in a certain quantity (e.g. the fact that three men devote themselves for three days to mowing) is here posited in advance, and so nobody need offer their labour or its product to another who could accept of refuse it. In every situation not governed by commodity exchange, labour is distributed prior to its realization according to qualitative criteria which obey the needs of the producers and the necessities of production. Of course, such a distribution might also take place in an unconscious and fetishistic way when it is determined, for example, by tradition, or regulated by authorities in thrall to unfair or absurd principles. Yet in this case, neither abstract labour, money, value, anonymous markets nor competition are factors.24 In every society, the social character of private labour consists in the fact that it counts only as a part of the total labour, and as such is exchangeable with all other labour. Yet there are two possibilities: firstly, this labour may possess a social character precisely as a particular labour, as a concrete and determined element of the division of labour prevailing in a certain society.25 Secondly, and on the contrary, it may possess a social character as a constituent part of the overall mass of social labour in a given society. In the first case, labour is a part of a concrete universality, as its exchangeability is direct and resides within it.26 In other words, it is inseparable from the concrete form of labour. In the second case, labour is part of an abstract universality, its exchangeability is indirect and lies outside labour. In other words, it is separated from the concrete form of labour. In commodity society, labour is exchangeable and thus social only to the extent that it is abstract. The commodity cannot be exchanged prior to its potential transformation into money because money is the only commodity which can be directly exchanged with any other commodity. Therefore, no



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commodity possesses within itself the capacity to be exchanged.27 This capacity exists for it in the form of an exterior object (the equivalent, money) into which it must seek to transform itself. In commodity society the capacity of individual products to be exchanged is not found in their concrete or useful characteristics, but must exist beside them and their utility, separated from them: this ‘shows strikingly by its effects that production is not really subjected to social control, as social production, and that the social form of wealth exists alongside wealth itself as a thing’ and this becomes apparent because ‘it is only with this [capitalist] system that the most striking and grotesque form of this absurd contradiction and paradox arises’ (Marx, 1981, p. 668, emphasis in original). It is only in the production of commodities that the social aspect of production – that is, the capacity of particular labours, and their products, to be valorized as part of total labour and total production – resides precisely in these commodities’ lack of quality, in their existence as pure quantity. Therefore, in one respect, abstract labour should not be identified with the reduction of all complex labour to a simple average labour – which of course continually takes place, but which actually constitutes a separate feature. In commodity production, it is in fact the non-social, zero-quality form of labour (i.e. the mere duration of its expenditure) that becomes the social form: ‘The general value form, in which all the products of labour are presented as mere congealed quantities of undifferentiated human labour, shows by its very structure that it is the social expression of the world of commodities. It is in this way that it is made plain that within this world the general human character of labour forms its specific social character’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 160). The particularity of commodity production resides in the fact that we find within it a non-specific, non-historical property transformed into a specific and historical form of sociality. Within this mode of production, the mere duration of time becomes the sole criteria for the evaluation and comparison of different activities. It is only here that all activity, unequal by nature, becomes equal. We disregard their qualities by reducing them to an equality with a third thing. Confined formerly to ‘niche’ activity, commodity production only becomes dominant when on a social level individual producers produce through being separated from each other: ‘If the use-values were not qualitatively different, hence not the products of qualitatively different forms of useful labour, they

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would be absolutely incapable of confronting each other as commodities’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 132). Private production and the external exchangeability which is realized in money are mutually inclusive. That is to say, as long as production is assured by private owners of commodities, money will continue to exist. This is because the labour of the individual, in order to be social labour, must abandon its original character – that which defines and distinguishes it from other labour. Money is the agent that obliterates these specific qualities, something that Marx pointed out in opposition to the widespread Proudhonism of his own day, and the controversy surrounding it is no less relevant in our own day and age. Indeed, current criticisms of capitalism are so numerous – above all those that focus their attention on monetary and financial interests – that without knowing it, they owe much more to Proudhon than to Marx. Of course, production is ‘private’ only on a ‘formal’ level, in other words on the level of the social form: it does not abide by any agreement between producers. Each producer produces for their own account hoping that their product will achieve subsequent social importance when sold on the market. Materially, on the other hand, production cannot really be private, because all production presupposes some form of the division of labour and the cooperation which is derived from it. Socialization on a material level is a very different thing to socialization on a formal level, which concerns social ties: ‘Objects of utility become commodities only because they are products of the labour of private individuals who work independently of each other’ (emphasis in original). However, the labours of individual producers depend materially on each other as elements ‘of the total labour, as a branch of the social division of labour, which originally sprang up spontaneously’ (Marx, 1976a, pp. 165–6, emphasis in original). On a material level, all modes of production are socialized, and it is only the degree of this socialization which varies between them.28 On a social level, however, the modes of production which are socialized are those in which labour, in its concrete form, has an immediate part in the social division of labour, in order to satisfy need. According to Marx, this takes place in pre-capitalist societies (even though commodity exchange might take place between different communities) but not under capitalism. Within commodity production, the individual producer, or the unity of a particular area of production, are much more socialized on a material level than in previous modes of production. And yet production



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here is for the purpose of an anonymous sphere of exchange, and it is only a posteriori and independent of all conscious human activity that this sphere gives labour its social character. As we already know, a commodity that has not been sold reverts to an extra-social condition, i.e., a condition in which the sphere of exchange does not bestow its social character upon labour. Under capitalism, material interconnection already exists before any exchange takes place, it cannot begin its duties, so to speak, and would ‘wither away’, if strictly social or formal socialization is not added externally: ‘This material social interconnection of private labours carried out independently of each other is, however, mediated and, therefore, only realized through the exchange of the products of this labour’ (Marx, 1978, p. 140, emphasis in original). It is precisely the use of machinery on a very large scale which defines capitalism as a society with a very high level of socialization, and yet it is all the more absurd that on the level of social interconnection this society is much less socialized than those that preceded it.29 We could go so far as to say that in the course of capitalist development, material socialization and ‘societal’ socialization are inversely proportional, which constitutes one of the major contradictions of this mode of production.30 In the production of commodities, the natural form of the individual product of labour serves only as a ‘vessel’ of exchange value. To participate in exchange, and so in the world of commodities, the product of labour must divide itself in two. As we have already mentioned, this is not a universal phenomenon, for, as is the case in societies which are not based on commodity production, the individual product of labour already possesses a social character in and of itself, and thus has no need to acquire it by becoming equal to something external. What, for Marx, represents – at the most abstract level – the main characteristic of the production of commodities, and the society upon which it is based, is the fact that labour – the fundamental human activity through which people are members of society – possesses a social character as something external to itself, and which must be seized through exchange. What is more, in this society, the success of this exchange is never assured. Value as a general form of the product is only possible and necessary where possible exchangeability must be realized post festum, and does not derive directly from social relations. This is why value (even in its most innocent form, i.e. ‘20 metres of fabric has the value of 1 coat’) is already the cause

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and the consequence of a social formation in which people do not consciously regulate production. When Marx writes, ‘[t]‌he objectification of the general, social character of labour (and hence of the labour time contained in exchange value) is precisely what makes the product of labour time into exchange value’ (Marx, 1973, p. 168), he makes it abundantly clear that the transformation of the product into exchange value, as well as the apparently more neutral fact that labour, in the form of labour-time, is represented in value, do not constitute an original postulate, but are themselves the consequence of a certain form of socialization: one which is based on the labour of separate private producers. The objectification of labour time is a consequence of the objectification of the social character labour, of its quality as a social bond. The exchange of their products – in the broadest sense of the division of labour and the circulation of its products – is what binds people together and defines their sociality. Where exchange is not mediated by conscious social activity but by the self-movement of value, it is necessary to talk about an alienation of this social tie.31 Value itself, in its visible form as money, becomes a social form of organization, and its laws become those of social mediation. This is clearly contrary to all conscious control: ‘Money is itself the community and can tolerate none other standing above it’ (Marx, 1973, p. 223). Indeed, its distribution destroys communities who, for their part, seek to banish it. If money itself becomes a community (Marx uses the term Gemeinwesen meaning literally ‘common essence’), it is not an organic community or a concrete universality, but an external and abstract universality which erases the concrete qualities of its members: Money thereby directly and simultaneously becomes the real community [Gemeinwesen], since it is the general substance of survival for all, and at the same time the social product of all. But as we have seen, in money the community [Gemeinwesen] is at the same time a mere abstraction, a mere external, accidental thing for the individual, and at the same time merely a means for his satisfaction as an isolated individual. (Marx, 1973, pp. 225–6)32

This ‘external and accidental thing’ has no relationship with the individual qualities of its owner, but is simply an object to be bought or sold.33 Therefore we can add that ‘the individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket’ (Marx, 1973, p. 157), that is, as money.34 Money itself is not the origin of the alienation of social relations, but is the expression



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of already alienated social relations: money ‘can have a social property only because individuals have alienated their own social relationship from themselves so that it takes the form of a thing’ (Marx, 1973, p. 160). Individuals therefore must try to abolish this alienation, ‘on its own terrain’, through the development of ‘means of communication’ (Marx, 1973, p. 161) – a particularly prophetic observation. It is above all in the first draft of the Contribution, and in a poetically bleak and often very Hegelian language, that Marx underlines that money has replaced all other social ties: ‘Both relate to each other as abstract social persons, merely representing exchange value as such before each other. Money has now become the sole nexus rerum [“natural link”] between them, money sans phrases’35 (MECW, vol. 29, p. 451). This means that social ties no longer consist of personal relationships (as it was the case in slavery or in feudalism), but become something that everyone can acquire or lose. Marx underlines several times that for individuals ‘money appears in effect as their community existing as a physical object outside them’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 437) or as a ‘materialisation of their own social connections’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 467, translation modified). We notice here that this ‘reification’ is not some intellectual slight or a false way of seeing the world, but rather a very real phenomenon throughout the whole of society. Because independent individuals are ‘not subsumed under any naturally evolved community and, on the other, are not consciously communal individuals subsuming the community under themselves, this community must also exist as an independent, external, casual thing’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 468). With regard to value and to money, it is not only labour, but the entirety of human sociality which is opposed to them as something that they have no control over and which threatens them: ‘In bourgeois society, the worker e.g. stands there purely without objectivity, subjectively; but the thing which stands opposite him has now become the true community [Gemeinwesen], which he tries to make a meal of, and which makes a meal of him’ (Marx, 1973, p. 496).36 Money as a social form of wealth is incompatible with all self-regulating communities. Humanity delegated its collective power to a metallic object and then tried to reappropriate its lost social substance. We notice once again here that the theory of value goes well beyond the ‘economic’ sphere and comprises a theory of society in its totality. We cannot understand value if we have not recognized

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in it the alienation of social power. This is evidently much more than traditional Marxists and their bourgeois adversaries have been able to comprehend.

Wealth in the time of commodity society Just as material socialization is distinct from formal socialization, so material wealth and abstract wealth, the production of use value and the production of value are distinct from one another.37 It is a question here of two completely different levels of reality.38 In commodity production, it is solely and exclusively the expenditure of labour-power which counts, regardless of the use value in which this labour realizes itself. The goal is not to produce use values or even the greatest possible quantity of them, but rather to produce the greatest amount of value – in other words, transform the greatest possible quantity of living labour into dead labour. These two ‘productions’ do not coincide and can even proceed in completely opposite directions, as Marx explains: If some factor were to cause the productivity of all types of labour to fall in equal degree, thus requiring the same proportion of additional labour for the production of all commodities, then the value of all commodities would rise, the actual expression of their exchange-value remaining unchanged, and the real wealth of society would decrease, since the production of the same quantity of use-values would require a larger amount of labour-time. (MECW, vol. 29, p. 282, emphasis in original)

Real production is simply an annex ‘an unavoidable middle term, a necessary evil for the purpose of money-making’ (Marx, 1992, p. 121).39 Value therefore is nothing more than a social form of organization.40 The production of value does not enrich society, but rather it is the creation of a social link that is not created during production itself but exists beside it as an externalized form.41 Any mention of ‘overproduction’ should prompt the question: overproduction of value, or of wealth? ‘It is not that too much wealth is produced. But from time to time, too much wealth is produced in its capitalist, antagonistic forms’ (Marx, 1981, p. 346), even though it cannot strictly speaking be termed ‘wealth’ since the ‘auto-valorisation of capital, the creation of surplus value’ has a ‘highly impoverished and abstract content’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 990).



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What is this content? Money is the only goal of production, yet money is not the concrete universality of the use values produced. It is, rather, the abstract universality of value produced, of the abstract labour expended. Where wealth consists of money, it consists of abstract labour itself, and so in the greatest possible expenditure of abstract labour. And yet abstract labour, as has been demonstrated, is simply a form of social organization. The labour that creates value – or more precisely, labour conceived as a creator of value – does not produce any content. It creates neither products nor services but only pure form. It creates something which is very difficult to understand, which Marx calls the ‘objectivity of value’ (Wertgegenständlichkeit) (Marx, 1976a, p. 166).42 He speaks of value in these terms in the first edition of Capital: In order to retain linen as a merely corporeal expression of human labour one has to abstract from all that which makes it to be really a thing. Any objectivity of human labour which is itself abstract (i.e., without any additional quality and content) is necessarily an abstract objectivity – a thing of thought. In that fashion, a web of flax turns into a chimera … The linen’s value is the merely objective reflection of the labour so expended, but it is not reflected in the body of the linen. It reveals itself (i.e., acquires a sensual expression) by its value-relationship to the coat. (Marx, 1976b, pp. 19–20, emphasis in original)

Marx calls this ‘objectivity of value’ a ‘phantom-like objectivity’, the products of labour are ‘merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 128). This objectivity establishes an ontological level which is different to that of the concrete existence of the commodity and which not solely mental: Human labour-power in its fluid state, or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value. It becomes value in its coagulated state, in objective form. The value of the linen as a congealed mass of human labour can be expressed only as an ‘objectivity’ [Gegenständlichkeit], a thing which is materially different from the linen itself and yet common to the linen and all other commodities. (Marx, 1976a, p. 142)

In other words, the capacity to be immediately exchanged. As we have seen, value is not the labour of the individual producer ‘contained’ in a commodity, but rather it is a manner of expressing the expended labour of

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the whole of society. For the individual producer, the value of their commodity is not the result of their individual labour, but presents itself as being externally determined. This value can stand in opposition to the producer as a hostile force to the point of starving him to death. The average ‘socially necessary’ labour time which constitutes value becomes a very real abstraction for the individual: The introduction of power-looms into England, for example, probably reduced by one half the labour required to convert a given quantity of yarn into woven fabric. In order to do this, the English hand-loom weaver in fact needed the same amount of labour-time as before; but the product of his individual hour of labour now only represented half an hour of social labour, and consequently fell to one half its former value. (Marx, 1976a, p. 129)

In other words, the labour of the singular individual is only taken into account as a part of the total social labour: the living and concrete creators of the products of labour count only as expressions of the total labour.43 Value cannot be ‘touched’ or empirically measured in any given case, for the value of a commodity is not determined by the labour actually and concretely expended by an individual. The value of his product, and therefore what he receives in exchange, is determined as a part of the global mass of social labour. This part is regulated by the average amount of socially necessary labour time and thus depends on the stage of productivity and on the time that the whole of society must spend to satisfy different social needs. If the producers dedicate too much time to a particular branch of production, the value of the products in this area falls. Additionally, value is subjected to continual change, for it is only the market that stipulates whether the quantity of labour employed was sufficient, or whether it was too great. This can happen if the producer has not yet reached the current standards of production (which today are global), or, because on a social level an excessive quantity of labour was used in this domain, meaning that too many products were produced in relation to their demand. These are two factors whose impact is difficult to predict for producers. Nevertheless, this does not mean that exchange or the market determines the value of a commodity – in capitalist conditions of production, value, as we shall see more precisely, is predetermined in production, even if it is realized in circulation.



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Commodity society is the first society where social ties become abstracted, separated from the rest and where this abstraction qua abstraction becomes a reality. The concrete aspect of things is subordinated to this abstraction, which is why the abstraction develops destructive consequences. Abstract labour reduces everything to a single common unit, a simple or complex expenditure of the faculty of labour that all humans have in common in the sense that labour becomes social only once it is emptied of all social determinations. If the social aspect of an object or the expenditure of labour is not to be found in its utility, but exclusively in its capacity to transform itself into money, decisions in society are made for neither individual nor collective utility. The content of concrete labour – that is, the presuppositions, social consequences, effects on producers and consumers and impact on the environment of this labour – no longer form a part of its social character. What is social is solely the automatic and uncontrollable process of the transformation of labour into money. Taking on a purely private dimension, the subordination of the utility of products to their exchangeability – their single social dimension – can only lead to catastrophic results. The dialectic between use value and value – concrete labour and abstract labour – implies that value and its substance, abstract labour, are destructive forces. Form is completely indifferent to content, because the latter does not exist for the former. The content of individual labour disappears because the latter becomes alienated in general labour where its particularity is ‘entirely obliterated’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 304). As a consequence, value is interested only in its own quantity and uninterested in the use values that buttress it as commodity substance: from wheat to contaminated blood, from books to video games. Sociality is divested of all concrete content, and the social relationship is reduced to the exchange of quantities: ‘Their [commodities’] social relationship consists exclusively in counting with respect to one another as expressions of this social substance of theirs which differs only quantitatively, but which is qualitatively equal and hence replaceable and interchangeable with one another’ (Marx, 1976b, p. 28, emphasis in original). It is for very precise reasons, and not by some moralistic or existential recrimination or other, that social life itself can be said to become abstract. This type of abstraction is not just a way of thinking that can be cured by replacing wrong ideas with right ones. Neither will it simply do to change the circumstances which lead to these

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wrong ideas, as Marx and Engels proclaimed at the beginning of one of their early works, The German Ideology. Rather, it is the very real subordination of concrete content to abstract form which the concept of ‘real abstraction’ calls into question. Only the force of long habit leads everybody to think it perfectly legitimate to say nowadays that air pollution is ‘worth less’ than the financial losses to the car industry from traffic reduction. Well before any moral judgement, the lunacy here lies in the fact that two completely different things – the health of individuals and the interest of industry – are being measured by the same quantitative yardstick and a more abstract one at that in the shape of money. It is then clear that such apparently ‘abstract’ considerations on abstract labour can directly touch upon the heart of today’s problems. All concrete labour is realized in a certain result. To realize this result is its goal, and it is achieved once the goal has been obtained. Concrete labour is therefore the means to an end, which is itself determined by a particular need. All societies based on concrete labour use the mass of labour at their disposal to achieve the ends that a particular society sets for itself, even if sometimes they might appear crazy to us (as in the case of the construction of the pyramids), and despite the majority of producers often working to meet the needs of a minority. What counts is the result: labour is a kind of necessary evil that must be reduced to the most indispensable minimum. Money can also exist in societies based on concrete labour – but its function is subordinated to the latter. It serves only to mediate the exchange of commodities. Yet, as we have already mentioned, in pre-capitalist societies only a minority of products take on the commodity form, which are in general those which are exchanged between different communities. Most goods circulate within the bounds of subsistence economies – feudalism, direct appropriation within slavery, bartering between neighbours and so on – and never take on the commodity form. Marx summarizes this form of circulation in the formula: CommodityMoney-Commodity (C-M-C). The producer possesses a commodity which they have no need for and which they transform into money through a sale, so as to then use this money to buy another commodity which they do need, and which constitutes the goal of the operation. It is not important whether the commodity they acquire in the end has no more ‘value’ than that with which they started, as the original goal was to exchange a commodity that was not



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needed with one that was. To some extent, money is playing here the role of a technical medium for a developed form of barter. But this stage which Marx calls ‘simple circulation’ is only the first step. It does not have a stable existence, even if it already presupposes the existence of separated private producers. In its initial formal determination, money is the measure of value or of price. In other words, it serves to express value. Yet this can simply take place in the mind, before any sale, as it does not need a material presence. Following logically, in its secondary determination, money is a means of circulation, a real mediation between two interlocking acts of buying and selling. As such, money can be replaced with another symbol, such as paper money. Both of these forms are related to the simple circulation C-M-C, in which they constitute the mediation that disappears once both commodities have changed places. All this changes when money enters into its third formal determination: money as money. This determination emerges with hoarding, when, after the initial transformation C-M, a commodity seller no longer reinvests the money that they gained, but rather simply puts it aside. Thus, the sale of commodities is only a means to accumulate money. This form of money cannot be either imaginary or symbolic since it must represent a real labour value. Historically this role has always been played by precious metals whose circulation is not limited to a particular country, nor does it depend on the nominal value that the authorities of a particular country seek to attribute to money. The circulation of precious metals is global and money proper is already capital ‘in itself ’ albeit in a latent state. Simple circulation does not itself contain the principle of its own selfpreservation. As Marx states, as long as simple circulation is limited to the formula of: Commodity-Money-Commodity, it must time and again ‘wither away’. Value is only preserved with growth. At the end of the process of simple circulation, value (as money) is exchanged with a commodity (as use value) and disappears with the consumption of this use value. The value no longer exists, and so, in order to start the process again, a new value must be created. In simple circulation, value is not preserved: it disappears. An initial way to preserve value is through hoarding money with its roots in the Ancient World. But by regressing to the state of hidden treasure, of metal alone, money also disappears from circulation. To remain in circulation, value must develop a form which at the end of this process of circulation is larger than it was in the

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beginning. In developed commodity society, the initial formula is therefore reversed to form a new one: Money-Commodity-Money (M-C-M). The owner of a sum of money spends it so as to acquire a commodity, which he can transform again into money. It is not important whether the owner resells the object at a higher price than that for which it was bought (commercial capital), or whether the transformation was performed through the purchase and exploitation of labour-power (industrial capital). What counts is that this money-to-money operation would mean nothing to the participants if the sum of money obtained in the end was not greater than the initial sum. In fact, whilst there was a qualitative difference between the two commodities of the formula C-M-C (e.g. a bootmaker gives up a pair of shoes so as to buy some bread) money remains the same, and there can only be a quantitative difference between the two sums. Yet this quantitative difference must exist as nobody would buy something so as to resell it at the same price. The formula M-C-M therefore only really exists in the following form: Money-Commodity-More Money (M-C-M’). It would not be too far off the mark to say that the reversal of the formula C-M-C into M-C-M’ contains within itself the entire essence of capitalism. The transformation of abstract labour into money is the only goal of commodity production, and all production of use values is nothing but a means, a necessary evil in the pursuit of a single aim: to obtain at the end of the operation a greater sum of money than at the start. Here, the satisfaction of need is no longer the goal of production but a secondary, unavoidable aspect. The reversal between the concrete and the abstract that we originally observed in an abstract manner in the relationship between two commodities manifests itself now as a fundamental law of the whole of our society. In this society the concrete serves only to fuel materialized abstraction: money. In fully developed commodity, that is, capitalist society, money – and therefore the labour that makes up its substance – is an end in itself. It should now be clearer why fetishism is not a phenomenon belonging solely to the sphere of consciousness, and that it is far more than a mystification. The means by which society achieves its qualitative goals are transformed into an independent power, and society itself is reduced to a means that has become end in itself. The only thing that matters is the production of money via labour. Indeed, Marx himself was not the only one to recognize this fundamental



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trait. Even one of the fathers of modern bourgeois political economy, John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), uncritically referenced the tautological and self-referential nature of abstract labour when commenting that, from the point of view of the national economy, digging holes so as to fill them in again is a perfectly sensible activity. This instability and incapacity even to reproduce itself at the same level as before appears at the very core of commodity society. This society obeys the impulse of growth at any cost, to transform a sum of money into a sum always greater, which necessarily triggers another identical process. Such a process contains no natural or social limit capable of defining an end to it. Marx does not consider the commodity, value, money and the more developed aspects of capitalist society to be ‘unfair’, nor does he merely point out that they function badly. Marx flatly calls them ‘mad’. Everything that we have described so far about the tautological character of this mode of production should drive home the fact that we are not dealing here with some rhetorical formulation. This ‘madness’ has solid consequences: ‘Where determinations relate to one another independently, positively, as in the case of the commodity which becomes an object of consumption, it ceases to be a moment of the economic process; where negatively, as in the case of money, it becomes madness; madness, however, as a moment of economics and as a determinant of the practical life of peoples’ (Marx, 1973, p. 269).44 Historically, the dissemination of money has often appeared to people as madness: The consciousness of men, especially in social orders declining because of a deeper development of exchange-value relations, rebels against the power which a physical matter, a thing, acquires with respect to men, against the domination of the accursed metal which appears as sheer insanity. It is in money, and in its most abstract and hence most senseless, incomprehensible form, the form in which all mediation is sublated, that this transformation of social interrelations into a solid, overwhelming, individual-subsuming social relationship first appears. And this appearance is all the harder in that it springs from the premise of free, untrammelled, atomistic private persons linked with each other in production only by reciprocal wants. (MECW, vol. 29, p. 487)

Whilst many Marxists have actually seemed captivated by the capitalist mode of production, Marx never tired of referring to capitalism as a highly irrational system destined to be a passing phase in human history.

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2

Critique of labour Historical categories and logical categories If commodity circulation must be something other than an occasional exchange of rare or excess goods, if it is to take control of the whole of productive life, then it must grow from one cycle to the next. In other words, there must be creation of profit. Historically, profit was first made by selling commodities at prices higher than their purchase price, that is, through the means of commercial transactions, especially in maritime and long-distance trade. High interest usury is also another very old form of profit. In both cases, it is a kind of swindle at someone else’s expense, and if all economic subjects acted towards each other in such a way, then globally no profit would remain. The transformation of an initial sum of money into a larger sum through the means of the commodity can only become a society’s basic principle when the commodity in question is of a very special nature. In other words, the commodity in question must be the commodity that creates value itself. Value is created by labour, and thus, what creates value is one’s labour power. The possessor of money buys neither the worker (as was the case in slavery) nor labour itself, but rather the labouring capacity of another. The value of this capacity is determined in the same manner as any other value – according to its costs of production. In this case, these are things that, on average, are necessary to produce and reproduce this labouring capacity, that is, all that is needed to live in a certain society and eventually to feed a family. Seen from this angle, the worker is not being swindled. Under normal conditions he receives the equivalent of his commodity, that is, his labouring capacity whose use he relinquishes. However, having purchased the means of production and labour power, the possessor of money may use them as he desires, as is the

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case with all purchased commodities. Thus he is able make the possessor of labour power work for longer than is necessary to reproduce the value of the commodity he has purchased. In other words, the worker must work part of his time for free for the capitalist who bought his labour power. It is here that we find the origin of surplus value, which in turn is what gives rise to profit. Living labour, that is, labour at the very moment it is expended, is the only source of value and of surplus value. Indeed, dead labour, that is, the result of past labour, such as means of production (machines and materials) which is made available to the worker by the capitalist, does not create value but only transmits its own value to the final product. This is why Marx calls the capital invested to buy labour power variable capital – which increases through this process – and the capital invested to buy the means of production fixed capital. It is not necessary to continue in the vein here of the ‘exoteric’ Marx that everyone thinks they know, were it merely because even philosophy textbooks explain the theory of exploitation, classes and their struggles.1 Nonetheless, the reader will have noticed that we arrived at this result in quite a different way to the traditional Marxist canon. Indeed it was arrived at through the method of Marx himself, where visible phenomena, the actions of social protagonists, classes and their everyday conflicts, are not the starting point of his analysis. They are not the ultimate elements to which social and economic life can be reduced; on the contrary, they are derived forms, consequences of something that stands ‘behind’ the logic of value. As surprising as this result might seem at first glance, nothing more can be expected of a fetishistic society, based on the inversion of concrete and abstract, person and means, subject and object. Included in the concept of surplus value is the existence of capital and of wage labour, and thus of a capitalist class as well as a class of wage-labourers, in other words ‘the concept of capital contains the capitalist’ (Marx, 1973, p. 512). Indeed, in the first three chapters of Capital, Marx never mentions class; his starting point rather is the equality of the participants within exchange and not their inequality.2 The elementary forms of capitalism have their origin at a deeper level than that of the existence of sociological classes, although these elementary forms do not represent an earlier stage which had once actually existed. They can be detected only by means of an analysis which recognizes them as elementary parts of more developed forms. From a logical point of view, it is value that leads to the creation of classes3 – it gets under people’s



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skin so to speak, making them docile executors of its logic. The production of commodities cannot take place without the production of surplus value, and thus without the creation of the functional categories of ‘capital’ and ‘wagelabour’ (which are not the same as ‘capitalists’ and ‘waged workers’): ‘What is overlooked, finally, is that already the simple forms of exchange value and of money latently contain the opposition between labour and capital etc.’ (Marx, 1973, p. 248). These passages should not at all be viewed as a summary of a real historical event, nor as a series of models or back-up theories. They are a dialectical sequence of forms where the aporias and contradictions of each form give rise to the higher form that follows them. A ‘simple exchange of commodities’ cannot be imagined without money, because from the outset the commodity presupposes money and vice versa. Without a universal commodity – that is, money – commodities become incompatible with each other and even cease to be commodities. Marx’s procedure, beginning with the simplest elements, and not with the New York Stock Exchange or with the sociology of work, is so far removed from the prevailing contemporary social sciences that an explanation is required. What relationship exists in Marx between logical and historical categories? It can be seen immediately why Capital or the Grundrisse do not constitute a history of capitalism, as Marx himself points out: ‘In order to develop the laws of bourgeois economy, therefore, it is not necessary to write the real history of the relations of production’ (Marx, 1973, p. 460, emphasis in original). For Marx the historical succession of categories does not explain their origin. Whereas commercial and usury capital – thus capital acting in circulation – historically precede industrial capital (i.e. productive capital) and although the latter emerged from the former, in developed capitalism the exact opposite happens: circulating capital exists only as a derived form of industrial capital and absorbs part of the surplus value created by it. Historically, capital first developed in the sphere of circulation, to then seize production only afterwards; yet in capitalism, capital emerges exclusively within production. Capital that seems to emerge in circulation (commercial profit, monetary interest) is only a deduction from the profit realized in production. This fact alone should demonstrate that the relationship between logical genesis and historical succession in Marx is of a very special nature. At the logical level, Marx developed his analysis of the whole of capitalism from the commodity

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form, that is, its ‘germ’ or ‘nucleus’: ‘This dialectical process of its becoming is only the ideal expression of the real movement through which capital comes into being. The later relations are to be regarded as developments coming out of this germ’ (Marx, 1973, p. 310). At the same time, however, this ‘germ cell’ only exists historically once capitalist production has already developed. On the one hand, it is based on the relationship between wage labour and capital, and on the other, its legal conditions, such as the formal right of everyone to private ownership of the products of their labour. This right does not exist in conditions where productive labour is performed by slaves or serfs. It is only in relation to wage-labour that we can say that ‘its product, as objectified labour, has an entirely independent existence as value opposite it’ (Marx, 1973, p. 515). The ‘historical’ genesis of these categories does not correspond to their ‘logical’4 genesis. In analysing these basic categories, Marx tacitly presupposes the historical existence of these relationships, which he then logically deduces from these categories: At this point, however, we have nothing to do with the historical transition of circulation into capital. The simple circulation is, rather, an abstract sphere of the bourgeois process of production as a whole, which through its own determinations shows itself to be a moment, a mere form of appearance of some deeper process lying behind it, even resulting from it and producing it – industrial capital. (MECW, vol. 29, p. 482)

When Marx starts with the supposed simplest element, the commodity, he already presupposes the existence of the entire social structure that the commodity has as its germ cell. Capital seems to presuppose the commodity, and the commodity seems, in turn, to presuppose capital.5 Abstract labour is, in historical terms, less of a presupposition than a consequence of the capitalist development of productive forces. Marx stresses that the analysis of the relations that the categories of developed capitalist society entail cannot be based on their chronology: It would therefore be infeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development. (Marx, 1973, p. 107)



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It is a question here of a twofold movement, on the one hand, ‘the path of abstract thought, rising from the simple to the complex, would correspond to the real historical process’ and, on the other hand, as Marx says in regard to money: ‘Although the simpler category may have existed historically before the more concrete, it can achieve its full (intensive and extensive) development precisely in a combined form of society, while the more concrete category was more fully developed in a less developed form of society’ (Marx, 1973, p. 103).6 The primitive commodity gave birth to capital, but only capitalism has transformed the entirety of society into commodity society. Nonetheless, ‘logical interpretation’ cannot be viewed as a metaphysics of history. It only seeks to explain what is ‘latently’ contained in the concept of the commodity and therefore what must derive from it once the necessary conditions are met. Marx put it this way: The historical broadening and deepening of the phenomenon of exchange develops the opposition between use-value and value which is latent in the nature of the commodity. The need to give an external expression to this opposition for the purposes of commercial intercourse produces the drive towards an independent form of value, which finds neither rest nor peace until an independent form has been achieved by the differentiation of commodities into commodities and money. (Marx, 1976a, p. 181)

Marx devotes only a few, yet extremely important pages to the emergence and history of the capitalist mode of production. What he analyses is above all the structure of the capitalist mode of production where it has fully developed. The succession of categories in the analysis of the structure does not correspond to historical reality. Furthermore, these are often pure concepts, to which no tangible reality could ever correspond. For example, the developed value form or money as a measure of prices is introduced only as stages in the evolution of Marx’s concepts. There are categories (such as exchange without money) that Marx only seems to introduce in the analysis to demonstrate their structural antinomy, their impossibility and thus the necessity to go beyond them to create a new form. Moreover, Marx always emphasizes that these categories only function within bourgeois production and not as autonomous pre-capitalist realities. In one respect, the procedure followed by Marx and which we also follow obeys a general methodological rule: the dialectical (non-empirical) method starts with the simplest elements, which are not immediately obvious, but

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which have been ‘distilled’ by a process of reflection. It thus demonstrates the genesis of its research objects by determining their ‘concept’. In another respect, and in keeping with the requirement for unity of method and content, Marx at the same time describes the specific traits of commodity society, where abstract categories form the prius, the first moment of social life, while humans and their conscious actions are simply its executors.

The automatic subject Yet it is not only Marx’s method that has been little understood, and which is almost always found in an inverted form in Marxist textbooks. It is above all the entire content of Marxian development summarized by us in the foregoing which is opposed to traditional Marxism. According to the latter in all its variants, the fundamental contradiction of capitalism is the one between capital and wage labour, between dead labour and living labour. For Marx’s categorical criticism, on the contrary, this opposition is only one derivative of the true fundamental contradiction between value and concrete social life. Thus, confronting the theory of the ‘esoteric’ Marx with the kind of Marxism that has accompanied the march of capitalism for more than a century will be an effective way to better understand the particularities of the critique of value. Moreover, this confrontation is necessary because certain features of the traditional interpretation of Marx still prevail today as the only possible reading, even for those who are in no way ‘traditional Marxists’. The logical development that begins with the internal contradiction of the commodity – and then deduces all its consequences – considers social classes, especially the two classes par excellence, that of the capitalists and that of the workers, not as the creators of capitalist society, but as its creatures. Not actors but acted upon. Money and commodities cannot ‘themselves go to the market and perform exchanges in their own right’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 178), and it is this fact that logically gives rise to classes. This is not surprising in fetishistic society, whose subjects have alienated their power to their own creations. But traditional Marxism has always reversed this relationship, preferring empiricist ‘common sense’ to Marx’s dialectic. According to orthodox Marxist doctrine, the ‘true’ essence of capitalism hides ‘behind’ value, that is, the exploitation



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of one class by another.7 For Marx himself, classes exist only as executors of the logic of the components of capital – fixed and variable capital. They are not the original motors as ‘the capitalist functions only as capital personified, capital as a person, just as the worker only functions as the personification of labour … The rule of the capitalist over the worker is therefore the rule of things over man, of dead labour over living, of the product over the producer’ (Marx, 1976a, pp. 989–90, emphasis in original), a process which shows that ‘the capitalist is just as enslaved by the relationships of capitalism as is his opposite pole, the worker, albeit in a quite different manner’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 990). The capitalist appears as the ‘personification’ of the social character of labour, of the ‘workshop as a whole’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 1053). Here again we find the category of fetishism as a real inversion, as Marx explicitly states: ‘Here once again we have the inversion of the relation, the expression of which we have already characterised as fetishism in considering the nature of money. The capitalist himself only holds power as the personification of capital’ (MECW, vol. 34, p. 122, emphasis in original). Marx describes the participants in the process of production as ‘characters’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 711), as ‘personifications of economic categories’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 92). The capitalist is ‘fanatically intent on the valorisation of value’, merely a ‘cog’ in the ‘social mechanism’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 739). These are the ‘managers’ and ‘foremen’ who ‘command during the labour process in the name of capital’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 450). Consequently, the capitalist does not act the way he does because he is ‘evil’. It is quite remarkable that in Marx’s analyses, as in Hegel’s, there is no recourse to psychology, nor therefore to moralism. Although so many of Marx’s pages rail against the bourgeoisie and its misdeeds, he never attributes the structural workings of capitalism to the ‘thirst for profit’ or the ‘greed’ of a social group. Nor does he attribute the spread of capitalist production or changes in its evolution to a conscious strategy or a ‘conspiracy’ of the ‘powerful’. Of course, the owners of capital are not innocent victims; they are more than willing to play their part. However they are incapable of controlling a process driven by the internal contradictions of a society whose ‘germ cell’ is the commodity. Marx always rejected the theory of subjective ‘deception’, somewhat reminiscent of eighteenth-century theories explaining religion as a mere ‘imposture’ organized by priests. He does not describe capitalism as a set of personal relationships of domination, where the dominators, so as to

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better deceive the exploited and the dominated, hide behind an appearance of ‘objective’ circumstances such as value, by making their subjective manoeuvres look like the results of a natural process. For this to happen, a person, or at least a certain group of people, would have to be the real subject of commodity society, and thus the categories of this form of socialization would be their creations. If this was the case, it could at the very most be said that these categories reappear upside down in the minds of its subjects. On the contrary, the Marxian theory of inversion asserts that the real subject is the commodity and that humans are merely the executor of its logic. Their own sociality, their subjectivity appears to people as subject to the automatic self-movement of a thing.8 Marx expresses this fact in the formula that value is an ‘automatic subject’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 255) or as he says in the Grundrisse ‘value enters as subject’ (Marx, 1973, p. 311). This is one of Marx’s most important assertions, as well as one of the most ignored and most surprising to common sense. Normally, the term ‘subject’ implies self-consciousness, the capacity to make one’s own choices, or spontaneity – which is the very opposite of ‘automatic’. The subject is that which moves objects around itself; in the usual sense of the term, this can only be the human being, individually or collectively. Recent fashionable theories have denied any possible existence of a subject, by considering it as an ‘epistemological error’. The theory of fetishism, on the contrary, acknowledges the actual existence of a subject, but stresses that so far subjects are not individuals, but their objectified9 relationships. Naturally, individuals are, in the final analysis, the creators of value, but, as Marx summarized, ‘They do this without being aware of it’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 167). In fact this is a reworking of an utterance by Jesus on the Cross: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’ (Lk. 23.34). Value is not an expression of other more essential relationships hidden behind it, but is itself the essential relationship in capitalism.10 Of course, things do not actually rule in the manner which fetishized appearances demand. But they rule to the extent that social relations have become objectified11 in these appearances. Fetishism is precisely a universality which is not the sum of particularities; it is the undesired result created by particular (actually existing) conscious actions of subjects. In this sense, the concept of fetishism is already central to Hegel, whereas Marx, on the other hand, applies it to social reality:



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As much, then, as the whole of this movement appears as a social process, and as much as the individual moments of this movement arise from the conscious will and particular purposes of individuals, so much does the totality of the process appear as an objective interrelation, which arises spontaneously from nature; arising, it is true, from the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another, but neither located in their consciousness, nor subsumed under them as a whole. Their own collisions with one another produce an alien social power standing above them, produce their mutual interaction as a process and power independent of them. (Marx, 1973, pp. 196–7, emphasis in original)

Hence, the value form is necessarily the basis of an unconscious society which has no control over itself and follows automatic processes that is has unknowingly created: ‘Individuals are subsumed under social production; social production exists outside them as their fate’ (Marx, 1973, p. 158). These automatic processes are not an excuse, an appearance behind which the ruling classes hide their subjective actions and manipulations. Despite being a ‘demystifying’ and ‘de-fetishizing’ gesture, the positing of such connivance is simply a form of consolation or comfort because it leads to the assumption that society runs itself and that only its leaders have been badly chosen. On the contrary, the theory of ‘objective fetishism’ acknowledges that as long as value, commodities and money exist, society is effectively governed by the selfmovement of things that it has itself created.12 On the other hand, traditional Marxism has followed a completely different path, especially as an official ideology of the various currents of the labour movement. It made the conflict between labour and capital, between living labour and dead labour (i.e. objectified labour) the alpha and omega of its explanation of the world. This fixation – not on the real abstraction that is ‘labour’ itself, but on one of its empirical and derived forms, namely as wage labour in its opposition to capital – has united all the currents of Marxism and now seems to remain as the lowest common denominator among surviving Marxists. Nevertheless, the conflict between labour and capital, as important as it has been historically, is a conflict which takes place within capitalism itself. Wage labour and capital are only two aggregate states of the same substance: abstract labour reified in value. They are two successive moments in the valorization process, two forms of value. Traditional Marxism with

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its very narrow concept of capitalism overlooks the fact that it is value that constitutes classes, their conflicts over distribution and what they have in common. Classes are not wholly antagonistic, but are forms helping the automatic subject to fashion itself. Wage labour and capital exist only in mutual opposition. Therefore, they can only disappear together. According to Marx, capital is not a ‘thing’, but a ‘social relation’. This means that both workers and owners are part of capital. Yet Marxists fall back on the bourgeois definition of capital as the means of production as a whole; they conceive the ‘relationship’ as one between classes, of which only one class ‘owns’ capital, and not as the tautological relationship of abstract labour with itself, which consequently produces social subjects. If the capitalist class and the working class are consequences of the organization of social labour in the categories of capital and wage labour, and not its creators, the same thing cannot be said about social relationships in pre-capitalist societies. These were often straightforward relationships of domination13 and not the result of functional fetishistic categories belonging to a separate sphere of material production. Stirring up stereotypical controversy, Marxists themselves did what they were so fond of criticizing their opponents for: a focus on circulation and obliviousness to production. In reality and in accordance with bourgeois political economy, they considered the capitalist mode of production as eternal and pre-social, because they identified it with the forces of production in the technical sense. Marxists knew that Marx’s essential category was production, to which the sphere of circulation is subordinate. Indeed, Marx criticized Smith, Ricardo and all the ‘messieurs les économistes’ for regarding the mode of production as a natural and trans-historical given and for viewing the mode of distribution alone as historically determined.14 In the third volume of Capital, he argues that the confusion between production and circulation was the result of ‘the confusion and identification of the process of social production with the simple labour-process’ (Marx, 1981, p. 631) – that is, with nothing more than the metabolism of nature. Elsewhere, Marx refers to Charles Fourier, whose great contribution is ‘to have expressed the suspension not of distribution, but of the mode of production itself, in a higher form [Aufhebung], as the ultimate object’ (Marx, 1973, p. 712).15 But by ‘relationship of production’ Marxists did not mean the transformation of



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labour into value as a fundamental relationship within capitalism, but the relationship between capital and labour. The latter relationship, as a category of value distribution, actually belongs to circulation. If value, commodities and money represent eternal factors of all production, then what characterizes capitalism is only the private ownership of the means of production and the existence of the market. According to this interpretation, the seemingly equal exchange of values in circulation hides the unequal exchange between labour and capital in production. This is where exploitation takes place, while the surface level is dominated by the illusions created by circulation and as such all its participants appear to be mere owners of commodities, equal and free, and who only exchange equivalents. The sale of labour power as a commodity falsely appears to be a sale like any other. From this perspective, it is only the market that transforms products into commodities and thus the abolition of the market would suffice to supersede commodity production. But production and labour are not purely technical, eternal givens that need only be freed from the hold that value exerts on them. Under capitalist conditions, the production of value is ensured by the abstract side of labour, namely by activities that are already equalized as quantities of abstract time. The production of each commodity presupposes the system of abstract labour; the product is therefore a commodity, with a value, before entering into circulation. If the commodity remains unsold, its value has not been realized – but the fact that a sale can fall through does not stop the value-being of the commodity from emerging in production and that it is not a quality that circulation adds a posteriori to products emanating from a straightforward technical process. Seen from this perspective, according to traditional Marxists, value masks surplus value, and this is where ‘fetishism’ is to be found. But the criticism of surplus value only makes sense as a critique of value. What results is the impossibility of abolishing surplus value production without abolishing value production. This also explains why Marxists of all tendencies have so seldom arrived at this theoretical conclusion. They were almost always convinced that, somewhere in the world, the abolition of surplus value production had already taken place, but of course without being able to deny that value production still existed in the country in question.

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The attempt by traditional Marxists to attribute both fetishism and value to the sphere of circulation corresponds to their belief that fetishism is a misrepresentation and not an inversion of reality and that value conceals class struggle and property relations. This widespread interpretation overlooks the banal circumstance that class struggle or social conflict in general are easily observable on an empirical level and in no way hidden ‘behind’ phenomena. On the contrary, value, as a non-empirical phenomenon, can be discovered only through patient analysis. If the relationship between people manifests itself as the relationship between things, this does not mean that in reality, personal relationships of domination are hiding behind the appearance of an objective logic of things. Such a verdict takes no account of the specific features of capitalism, viewing it as a linear continuation of former relationships of exploitation. These relations were all characterized by the fact that one class stole the other’s surplus product. Seen in this way, the main difference between capitalist society and previous ones is this: in capitalism, exploitation is ‘concealed’ by a supposedly equal exchange, whereas previously it was practised openly. As such, modern surplus value appears to be only the continuation of feudal tributes or slave-labour and not a category that necessarily arises from the category of value. Such an assimilation of the different historical forms of exploitation can indeed be found in the Communist Manifesto (1848), where the class struggle between bourgeois and proletarians is presented as a continuation of the struggle between ‘Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed’ (MECW, vol. 6, p. 509). Nevertheless, this assimilation is no longer found in Marx’s mature work, which is an analysis of developed capitalism and not a philosophy of history. Here, capitalism is not considered as some parasitic appropriation of what direct producers create in a pre-social sphere. Pre-capitalist modes of production were indeed straightforward relationships of appropriation, where dominant classes preyed on a production process which was almost completely out of their control and which developed very slowly. This process truly was a metabolism with nature which largely obeyed technical rules – which is not at all the case in capitalism. But the relationship between value and surplus value is not the same as the relationship between agricultural labour and a tithe, because the worker does not produce value in the way the peasant produces wheat.



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What the epigones have made of Marx’s theory Marxists overlook the difference between abstract labour and concrete labour, between production as a satisfaction of needs and production as an accumulation of dead labour in the form of value. For them, labour, even under capitalist conditions, is always useful labour whose content they never question. Any form of labour therefore, is a supreme good, and the worker is glorified as the ‘creator of all values’ – without distinguishing between the production of use values and the production of value for capital, and regardless of the nature of the use values. Seen this way, the technical production process is conceived as natural, even socialist, because it is already socialized at the material level. This conception can be found in the last writings of Engels, and it prevailed during the Second International (1889–1914). Thus, the unspoken ideal was the return to a kind of simple commodity production without surplus value or capital; it was often thought – after the manner of Engels – that this kind of production had actually existed before capitalism. Dear to so-called Marxists, such a notion was in actual fact Proudhonian through and through. Although they attacked ‘petty-bourgeois’ Proudhonism, the Marxists of the labour movement committed the same error: criticizing the existence of money as an end in itself, without wanting to question its social base, that is, labour as an end in itself. They were scandalized by the tautological accumulation of money without caring about the tautological accumulation of labour. For them, labour was the concrete, positive opposite of the abstraction represented by money. There ensued the project for a society based entirely on ‘honest labour’, in which there would be no appropriation of surplus value. Depending on the circumstances, this project could take the form of a network of cooperatives, where workers produce in the absence of an employer, or of a ‘workers’ State’, where surplus value is administered by a body supposed to represent all workers: the party-State. Such ideas resulted from the transformation of Marx’s negative analysis of capitalist society into a blueprint for the construction of socialism. Without money, however, commodity exchange cannot take place because it is only through the designation of a universal commodity, that is, money, that other commodities become truly equal as commodities. If we take away the ‘privilege’ of money (Proudhon), turning it into just another commodity, the whole system dissolves. Of course,

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there can be material production without money, but no commodity exchange without money. Proudhonism, present even within traditional Marxism, is the combined attempt to maintain capitalist production in a purely technical form and change only distribution and circulation. On a theoretical level, this was a consequence of the fact that Marxists had lumped the Marxian critique of value together with Ricardo’s labour theory of value. In the previous chapter we spoke of the ‘two levels’ of fetishized representation: labour is represented in value and value is represented in exchange value, that is, in money. This may seem like a very theoretical, almost philological problem. We see now that dealing exclusively with the passage of value to money, and considering the passage from labour to value as normal, corresponds to the idea that labour, as represented in value, is ‘good’ and should be directly represented as such and not in money. Accordingly, the concept of value loses all critical purchase and it becomes possible to replace it with the so-called ‘law of value’,16 which is meant to regulate the distribution of the quantities of labour in the different branches of production. It was inevitable then that the main criticism levelled at capitalism by traditional Marxists was no longer about subordinating the material content of production to value. On the contrary, their critique was that capitalism hindered the ‘natural’ functioning of the law of value. Thus they lambasted ‘market anarchy’ under capitalism that distorts ‘true’ value, conceived as a neutral instance of regulation, whereas according to them socialism is characterized not by the abolition of the law of value, but by ‘consciously applying’ it through planning. This was not an implicit consequence, but was publicly vaunted, for example, in the Soviet Union, as a component of the real difference between socialism and capitalism. Hence, the continued existence of the commodity and of money under this form of ‘socialism’ came to be naturally justified. It is clear that Marxists, even those wholly versed in Marx’s work, have paid little attention to their master’s theory of value. They opined that Marx’s real theoretical innovation only began with his analysis of surplus value. For them, surplus value is not the necessary mode of existence of value, but an outgrowth that is added to value, deemed by them to be timeless. The question of whether, for example, it is ‘labour’ or abstract labour that makes up the substance of value was in their eyes only a scholastic nuance. They regarded value as a purely economic category and developed separate categories for politics,



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ideology and so on, thus reproducing the bourgeois division into separated spheres and special disciplines, interlinked externally by categories such as ‘reciprocal action’ and ‘primacy of the economy’. Some even argued that to be a Marxist there was no need to adhere to the labour theory of value. The first to state it explicitly was Eduard Bernstein in 1899, one of the leaders of German Social Democracy (see Bernstein, 1993). Indeed, for many other Marxists the labour theory of value was an unscientific, ‘metaphysical’ remnant of Marx’s Hegelian origins. It was not thought to be on a par with modern science and was merely an obstacle to the application of Marxist theory to the economic problems of contemporary times. The best thing would therefore be to sacrifice it as an unnecessary burden, so as to save the other parts of Marx’s theory. If other Marxists did not reach such conclusions, it is simply because they did not see any problem with value as such. Fetishism, abstract labour, value, the commodity and money as critical categories – that is, not simply arising from empirical reality – played almost no role in the discussions within the Second International. The few times that it did crop up saw the subject dropped,17 and even the best theorist at the time, Rosa Luxemburg, devoted next to zero attention to it. Of course, what lies at the origin of this attitude is not a misinterpretation of the Marxian analysis of the commodity, but powerful historical motifs that influenced the way Marx was read. The workers’ movement did not go astray from its goal, on the contrary, it accomplished its real task: that of ensuring the integration of workers into bourgeois society. In truth, the workers wanted this integration, which the bourgeoisie refused whilst society was still largely dominated by pre-capitalist and often paternalistic social relations. This was demonstrated by the absence of voting rights for workers, who remained outside society as subjects endowed, even formally, with minor rights. What the workers’ movement successfully spearheaded was the struggle for workers’ recognition, the ‘fourth estate’, as just another owner of commodities. In capitalist society, the sale of labour power is just another transaction. For a long time, however, workers were not granted what all other owners of goods were allowed to do: to try and sell their goods as expensively as possible, in this case by means of strikes and trade unions. But this was a hiccup in a system still in the throes of development. We have in fact seen that low wages and workers’ exclusion from political rights are not necessarily part of capitalism,

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and that on the contrary the latter functions much better by dealing with wage labourers’ interests in the same way that it deals with other interests clothed in the money form. The workers’ movement arose out of the fact that value, as a relation of production, spread much faster than legal, political or cultural forms based on value and which are predicated on the abstract equality of all citizens of the same State. It could therefore demand capitalist ideals (freedom, equality) against capitalist reality. The class struggle has been the form of movement immanent to capitalism, the form in which developed its universally accepted basis: value. The struggle has increasingly integrated workers into capitalism and wage-labour, instead of releasing them from it. It has transformed all subjects into ‘free citizens’, into participants of universal competition as a general and common form of social life. Essentially, workers’ political organizations only ever pursued goals that were immanent to the capitalist mode of production. But because of the resistance the ‘real existing’ bourgeoisie put up to democratization, the workers’ movement was forced to embrace Marx’s radical theory. It did so by transforming it, only to finally abandon it after achieving its goals. The interests of its affiliates, which it defended, had already taken on the value form: it was simply a question of guaranteeing everyone a slightly larger amount of money. For the workers’ movement, the whole of society, the universal interest, existed only in the abstract form of the State and the party. In the same way that it raised the conflict between the two categories of value – capital and wage labour – to the level of an antagonism superseding the capitalist system, the workers’ movement transformed the contrast between the other two inseparable poles of the society of value into an absolute opposition: the commodity as abstract particularity and the State as abstract universality. The workers’ movement has always been the representative of one of the poles of capitalist society: the proletariat. In the long run, the interests of the proletariat have in no way turned out to be incompatible with the development of capitalism. There is, especially today, an objective similarity between the interests of capitalists and those of the workers in the same factory, in the same city, same country. On the other hand, the conflict between labour and capital is only one of the many conflicts that run through a society based entirely on competition. But instead of abolishing competition, the labour movement



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sought to make one participant win. In the end the movement lost its role when the workers obtained equal rights, and it has almost disappeared with the continuous decrease in the number of wage workers. What is left of it today is corporatism, lobbying for groups of wage workers who ask for nothing more than to survive in the world of competition. In this quest, they often find themselves on the same side as their employers. When unions accept ‘painful’ restructurings to maintain the ‘competitiveness’ of ‘their’ company and to save ‘jobs’, they are not ‘betraying’ their mission, but clarifying the identity between capital and wage-labour which is already set in place by value. Only traditional Marxists see in this negative end of class struggle the end of all social antagonism and the victory of capitalism. The virtual disappearance of the industrial proletariat has put both capitalism and traditional Marxism in an awkward position, and now it is their common framework that is wavering. The real crisis of capitalism is already underway, but latter-day Marxists cannot recognize it because the disappearance of the proletariat means the end of their world model. By lately extolling the Protestant work ethos, the workers’ movement and its Marxist theorists have essentially focused on the opposition between labour and non-labour, as if the main cause of exploitation was that capitalists themselves do not personally work. This was in no way a criticism of labour, but rather a criticism made from the point of view of labour, a criticism of non-workers: ‘No room here for the shirk’, proclaimed the final verse of the Internationale. The fact that the worker creates ‘value’ justifies his claim to lead the society of the future, entirely based on labour and made up exclusively of proletarians (as if there could be proletarians without capitalists, and as if the workers’ lot was so wonderful that it deserved to be extended to everyone). If need be, it will be the representatives of the proletariat who will make proletarians work: indeed the two main souls of the labour movement are suitably represented by the well-known figures of Stakhanov and Friedrich Ebert (1871–1925), the latter the first social-democratic president of Germany, who said that ‘socialism above all means working a lot’. This tradition continues to this day; just a few years ago, the election posters of the German social democrats contained only one promise: ‘Work, work, work’. The reductive nature of this criticism can be seen in the fact that it treats capitalists as if they were happily consuming the surplus product for their own

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pleasure. The critique consequently lumps them together with the dominant classes of the past. The reality is that capitalists are nothing but serfs of the tautological self-valorization of capital who reinvest their profits in the everincreasing cycle of production. Marxists, for their part, have internalized this end in itself to such a degree that they seek only the best means to achieve this self-valorization. They blame the owners of capital for not devoting enough time to this purpose, and for filling their bellies to the detriment of the fetish of accumulation, adored by Marxists and their opponents alike. This is comparable to criticisms often levelled at priests: they think too much about themselves, instead of sacrificing themselves in the service of the fetish-god. But in general, capitalists themselves, compared to the ruling classes of the past, have a quite wretched time of it. In The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), the young Engels had already pointed out the miserliness of English capitalists towards themselves; indeed today’s stressed-out managers would look like a bunch of poor plebeians to any feudal lord. The squires of yore symbolically represented the whole of life’s enjoyment – first and foremost the enjoyment of not having to work – even if this life was reserved for an elite. Capitalists, especially those linked to the New Economy,18 represent only an intensified form of general misery and universal overwork. A proper small businessman of today even prides himself on working harder than an English proletarian in Dickensian England. For Marx, proletarian labour, as living labour, is only possible in capitalism, where it constitutes the ‘other side’ of capital. A supersession of capitalism would then entail the abolition of proletarian labour, not its triumph. Indeed, Marx even called the wage worker a ‘mask’ when he stated that ‘the capitalist and the wage-labourer are as such merely embodiments, personifications of capital and wage-labour’ (Marx, 1981, p. 629). But Marxists did not see in proletarian labour the essence of capitalism and a violence against individuals, a violence from which individuals should free themselves. On the contrary, for Marxists, proletarian labour is identical to the eternal metabolism with nature. It is subordinated to capital only in an external way, and the purpose of abolishing capitalist domination is to at last allow workers to work as they wish and free of constraint. Here, the Marxism of the labour movement even bears a certain objective resemblance to the anti-capitalist rhetoric that characterized fascism and which, more or less disguised, continues to exist to



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this day: the extolling of labour, accompanied by the accusation levelled at a stratum of non-workers in the sphere of circulation and situated preferably in the financial world, that they rob workers of the fruits of their labour. We will show later why this argument, common to both Lenin and Keynes, as well as among anti-Semites and within the French ATTAC19 organization, represents the antithesis of any serious social criticism. Traditional Marxism was an integral part of the society of labour. It did not question the alleged need to accumulate ever more labour and create ever more value. Its only concern was to ensure a different distribution of the fruits of this labour. It even blamed capitalism for being incapable of sufficiently developing productive forces. Thus the conflict between the labour movement and the capitalist class was just a ‘family quarrel’ inside the workhouse20 that is capitalist society. Things could hardly have happened otherwise during the foundational phase of the capitalist society of labour. The labour movement was not only an immanent correction of the imbalances of capitalism. In many respects, it was even the driving force, the avant-garde of capitalist development; indeed it often embodied the pure logic of capital against the thousands of obstacles opposed to its realization. By ‘detourning’ Lenin, we could say that the labour movement was the commodity’s ‘useful idiot’. It was the workers’ movement that demanded modernization, as much in the name of productivity as in the ‘comfort’ of the ‘popular masses’. It was this movement which advocated the relocation of workers from the old neighbourhoods to the low-rent housing projects21 and requested ever more rationalization, standardization, air conditioning. It was the first to mock any respect for the environment as ‘petty bourgeois’ as well as demand a car, a television, a washing machine and an annual flight for all and sundry. Free from bourgeois sentimentalism and nostalgia, the labour movement identified itself completely with industrial civilization and the reduction of life to equipped survival. In the workers’ movement and its representatives, sheer hatred of everything left over from pre-capitalist forms of life could be found, as much in agriculture as in medicine, in architecture as in education. The exception was when it was a matter of already constituted social powers, such as the family or the church, with which the workers’ movement quickly forged compromises. In countries where the labour movement could deploy freely, its identification with the civilization of labour took the form of the myth of

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the ‘new man’ or the ‘new world’ that was supposed to make any return to the past impossible and establish a world entirely adapted to the demands of accumulation, a world even baptized ‘socialist’. With success proving elusive, it at least set about orgies of destruction in order to realize the dream, seared into the heart of the commodity, of a world where no trace of the possibility of a different one remained. From this point of view, the Chinese ‘Cultural Revolution’ was the most concentrated summary of capitalist history, just as Pol Pot’s Cambodia embodied the society of labour in its purest form. Indeed, the crimes that apologists of capitalism most like to cite in order to discredit any idea of an alternative to capitalist society in actual fact reveal its deepest tendencies. On the other hand, it is surprising how superficial the critique was of ‘official’ Marxism made by Marxist dissidents of every hue, as well as by anarchists. Almost always, the accusation was that they had ‘betrayed’ the defence of wage labour against capital. Although there were rare exceptions – such as the best aspects of Situationist agitation – the opponents of traditional Marxism almost never reminded it that it had in no way departed from the capitalist terrain of money, the State, commodities and value. The sympathy that some of these currents may attract today should not obscure the fact that, rather than engaging in radical critique, they had instead compounded a weakness of their opponents. The result of the gigantic growth of the means of production is ever more work, not less. Even after the introduction of the forty-hour working week, we work more in modern societies than slaves or serfs of the past, for whom daylight, the seasons and so on were a limit to exploitation – not to mention ‘primitive’ societies, a subject to which we shall return later. Thanks to the development of productive forces, the individual today has a much larger mass of consumer goods at his disposal. But in order to obtain them, he must devote an ever-increasing portion of his life to labour – and when the number of hours does not increase, the intensity does.22 This fact did indeed prompt a critique of labour from the nineteenth century onwards whose history is not within the scope of the present work. This critique arose neither within the workers’ movement, nor in its radical fringe or from philosophical thought or science. Rather it emerged in the artistic avant-gardes who were nevertheless oblivious to the social form of modern labour. It was within the Situationist International that this encounter



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between artistic tradition and Marxist-inspired social criticism took place for the first time. Theodor W. Adorno and other authors from the Frankfurt School, including Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, are among the few philosophers to have criticized the cult of labour. Within their work we find important intuitions into value and fetishism. They are nonetheless mixed in with debris from the most traditional Marxism – even though on certain points these authors have made some effective criticisms of it. Their references to Marx’s critique of political economy and to fetishism were valuable at a time when no one else was talking about them. Nevertheless, they are often wide of the mark. Their critique of the ‘exchange’ that crushes individuals remains very vague and does not start from a true understanding of the twofold nature of the commodity. Despite this, it is from these references that some of their students around 1968 developed the rudiments of value criticism. It is through another analysis that the ‘Critical Theory’ of the Frankfurt School exerted great influence. Towards the end of the 1930s, it came to the conclusion that classical capitalism, founded on the market and free competition, had been replaced by ‘monopolies’ and the authoritarian State, which had crushed bourgeois liberties arising from circulation. At the time of Nazism, Stalinism and the New Deal, this theory had evidence on its side. Until the 1970s, almost the whole of the left was convinced that the ‘political sphere’ had taken over the ‘economic sphere’. All internal historical dynamics as well as all the contradictions of capitalism seemed to have come to an end. Thus, one could no longer imagine a real crisis of the system, other than as a purely proactive intervention of an external subjectivity. This conviction was also found in many of the theories of the 1950s and 1960s that had nothing to do with the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, for example, in the theoretical output of the French journal Socialism or Barbarism. Critical Theory considered value only as an economic category, and not as a category of the totality that also includes the subject. For Adorno, the subject is rather ‘conquered’ by value from the outside. He drew quite pessimistic conclusions from this: that value excluded any possibility of resistance, and so all praxis was useless. Yet, his work lacks an analysis of the specific features of capitalism that distinguishes it from other forms of society, that is, it favours a timeless notion of ‘domination’. Therefore Adorno unwittingly slips towards

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a metaphysics of history: the category of exchange becomes trans-historical and refers to human socialization as such. Its origins were to be sought in a distant prehistory. Adorno’s analysis of modern society does not start from the determined form that social production takes in capitalism, but rather places at its centre the appropriation of nature by humanity and the supposed intrinsic ambiguity of any domination over nature and self-preservation. It is from this initial ‘instrumental’ relationship with nature that Adorno derives all further developments. In this way, capitalist society appears as inevitable – as the consequence of structural principles that govern all human history. The exchange of commodities is for him only a particular form and a logical continuation of previous exchange relationships, starting from religious sacrifice and the archaic practice of exchanging gifts. Thus the fact escapes him that abstract labour is a pure form of mediation, something completely social which has nothing to do with nature and matter. Thus, Adorno deduces the tautological character of production and its necessary tendency towards growth from the structure of technology, rather from the contradictions of the commodity.

Labour is a capitalist category Our entire argument compels us to question not only ‘abstract labour’, but also labour in general. This might seem contrary to common sense, as how could one possibly live without working? It is only by identifying ‘labour’ with the metabolism with nature, however, that can it be presented as a trans-historical, eternal category. Yet this is merely a tautology. From such a general principle, one can deduce little more than the fact that man must eat to live. ‘Labour’ is itself a historical phenomenon. Strictly speaking, labour exists only where there is abstract labour and value. Yet in relation to labour, and not only at the logical level, the terms ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ refer to one another and cannot exist independently of each other. It is therefore extremely important to emphasize that our critique touches on the concept of ‘labour’ in general and not simply ‘abstract labour’. We cannot just place abstract and concrete labour in opposition with each other, and much less so can we consider them ‘good’ and ‘bad’. The concept of concrete labour is itself an abstraction,



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because it separates, in space and time, a certain form of activity from the entire field of human activities, whether it be consumption, play and fun, ritual, the participation in communal affairs and so on. Pre-capitalist man would never have had the idea of placing the making of a loaf of bread, the performance of a piece of music, the direction of a military campaign, a mathematical calculation, the preparation of a meal and so on on the same level as human ‘labour’. Labour is not ontological, but exists only where money exists as the usual form of social mediation. But if the capitalist definition of labour disregards all concrete content, this does not mean that every activity in the capitalist mode of production is considered ‘labour’: only labour which produces value can be translated into money. Domestic labour, for example, is not ‘labour’ in the capitalist sense. Labour as a separate activity from all other spheres of activity is already a form of abstract labour; abstract labour in the strict sense is therefore a second-degree abstraction: ‘If abstract labour is the abstraction of an abstraction, concrete labour is merely the paradox of the concrete aspect of an abstraction – namely the formal abstraction of “labour”. It is only “concrete” in the very narrow and restricted sense that the different commodities require materially different production processes’ (Trenkle, 2014, p. 9). However, the idea of having to ‘free’ labour from its shackles has logically entailed the consideration of ‘concrete’ labour as the ‘positive pole’ desecrated by abstract labour in capitalist society. Yet concrete labour exists in this society only as a carrier, as the basis of abstract labour, and not as its opposite. The concept of ‘concrete labour’ is also a fiction; what exists is really only a multitude of concrete activities. The same schema is true with respect to use value, when it is linked to value as a magnetic pole to the other. It cannot stand on its own feet and is therefore not the ‘good’ or ‘natural’ side of the commodity, which could be contrasted with the ‘bad’, abstract, artificial and external side.23 These two sides are linked to each other in the same way that, for example, capital and wage labour are linked, and thus they can only ever disappear together. The fact of having a ‘use value’ only expresses the abstract capacity to satisfy some need or other. According to Marx, use value becomes an ‘abstract chaos’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 499) as soon as it leaves the separate sphere of the economy. The true opposite of value is not use value, but the concrete totality of all objects.24

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What then was Marx’s position in regard to labour? Despite the ambiguities that to a certain extent still remain in his work regarding this question, Marxists (and anti-Marxists) were mistaken when they attributed to Marx a monism of labour that posits labour as the basis of any past, present and future human society – a basis which must simply be ridden of its parasites. The famous ‘part played by labour in the transition from ape to man’ is an invention of Engels, and Marx, in general, does not adhere to an uncritical ‘ontology of labour’. Nevertheless, the criticism of labour as the principle of social organization is not easy to extract from Marx’s work because he himself – in the least theoretical parts of his work – sometimes indulges in a certain cult of labour and homo faber, an idea he shared with his own day and age. However, the general logic of his theory and some of its developments demonstrate that Marx proposed a critique of living labour as the basis of production, rather than seeing in it an ontological principle that must be freed up and brought into the light of day. In his mature works, Marx does not take ‘labour’ as his starting point. ‘To develop the concept of capital, says Marx ‘it is necessary to begin not with labour but with value, and, precisely, with exchange value in an already developed movement of circulation’ (Marx, 1973, p. 259).25 If despite this, he put labour at the centre of his analyses, it is because he’s talking specifically about capitalist society. The central role assigned to labour is thus part of Marx’s critical method, instead of constituting a meta-historical statement about the essence of human life. It is true that even the ‘esoteric’ Marx never arrived at a systematic questioning of ‘labour’. He identified the ‘natural necessity’ of ‘exchanges with nature’ with that of ‘labour’, and thus it is only beyond this necessity that ‘the realm of freedom actually begins’ (Marx, 1981 p. 593).26 ‘Labour then, as the creator of use-values, as useful labour, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself ’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 133). Here, Marx is the heir to the bourgeois tradition that abhors ‘laziness’ and demands that the individual use all his energies to transform the world. He blames Adam Smith for considering labour exclusively as strain and sacrifice and he emphasized that this is true only under capitalist conditions (Marx, 1973, pp. 610–11). But in the same passage of the Grundrisse, he also cites musical composition as an example of a free activity which requires ‘at the same time



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precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion’ (Marx, 1973, p. 611). In some of Marx’s early writings, however, there is a critique of labour in general, as a separate sphere of activity. In a commentary on a book by the German economist F. List, Marx wrote in 1845: ‘It is one of the greatest misapprehensions to speak of free, human, social labour, of labour without private property. “Labour” by its very nature is unfree, unhuman, unsocial activity, determined by private property and creating private property. Hence the abolition of private property will become a reality only when it is conceived as the abolition of “labour” ’ (MECW, vol. 4, p. 278, emphasis in original). In the same year, he and Engels wrote in The German Ideology that ‘proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individuals, have to abolish the hitherto prevailing condition of their existence (which has, moreover, been that of all society up to then), namely, labour’ (MECW, vol. 5, p. 80). Indeed, ‘in all previous revolutions the mode of activity always remained unchanged and it was only a question of a different distribution of this activity, a new distribution of labour to other persons, whilst the communist revolution is directed against the hitherto existing mode of activity, does away with labour, and abolishes the rule of all classes with the classes themselves’ (MECW, vol. 5, p. 52, emphasis in original). This is why Marx and Engels refused to accept the rallying cry freedom of labour27: ‘Labour is free in all civilised countries; it is not a matter of freeing labour but of abolishing it’ (MECW, vol. 4, p. 205, emphasis in original). This is one of the rare passages where Marx directly criticizes the very existence of labour as a separate sphere, that is, the ‘substance’ of labour. Elsewhere, he limits himself to asserting that it is only the form of labour, that is, abstract labour – that is historical whereas its substance is ontological. This idea of Marx is not wholly confined to his early works. Thirty years later, he reminded the German Social Democrats that it was not a question of the ‘emancipation of labour’, but of the emancipation of the workers (MECW, vol. 24, p. 83). Freeing oneself from labour means freeing oneself from living labour and leaving as much as possible of the metabolism with nature to accumulated dead labour, thus to machines. In the third volume of Capital, Marx says that the capitalist necessity to diminish variable capital is but a ‘distorted form of the fact that the relatively greater use of congealed labour, as compared with living labour, signifies an increase in the productivity of

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social labour and a greater social wealth’ (Marx, 1981, p. 510). But it is above all a long passage of the Grundrisse28 which shows that Marx in no way aims for the triumph of living labour over dead labour, and that he wants, on the contrary, to allow producers to free themselves from living labour. The latter is to be replaced by dead labour, the accumulated product of the forces of the whole of humanity: But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour, time, and the amount of labour employed, than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is in turn completely disproportionate to the direct labour time spent on their production, but instead depends on the general state of science and the progress of technology … Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself … He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. (Marx, 1973, pp. 704–5)

Next, Marx emphasizes with particular force the historically limited character of value29 when he states as follows: Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth … it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value. (Marx, 1973, p. 706)

Here Marx not only pleads for the greatest possible reduction of labour time, but above all for the abolition of labour time as a measure of wealth ‘for real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty’ (Marx, 1973, p. 708, emphasis in original). From this angle,



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communism becomes possible precisely because of the reduced importance of the immediate producer, while dead labour – that is, productive forces of all kinds, the true result of human evolution – becomes the site of possible emancipation. This passage from the Grundrisse has been quoted frequently in recent years and rightly so. It predicts that capitalism tends towards a situation where wealth no longer consists in the amount of labour time spent and where there is no longer any labour value. Thus, it confirms everything we have said so far, and we could have even organized this book in the form of a commentary on this passage. Yet the authors who have referred to it recently have often done so to affirm something quite different: that we have already gone beyond societies based on value. The truth is, these pages contain a succinct explanation of the crisis caused by the split between material production and value production. It is the crucial role of science in capitalist production that has made it impossible for each to be paid ‘according to their labour’ that even Marx wanted to keep for the ‘first stage’ of socialism. These scientific forces are forces that belong to the whole of humanity, not to the individual who by chance happens to push the button. Yet this is only true on a material level. In terms of social organization, production remains under the control of value, and thus the reproduction of each and every one passes through the expenditure of individual labour power. The capitalist principle ‘he who does not work, does not eat’ has become completely archaic once living labour contributes to production only in a secondary manner. And yet, this principle has not disappeared, and the reduction of value-creating labour, which could be very good news, for most people becomes bad news – they can no longer eat. Even if there is no longer any need to work, they are not allowed to live if they do not work. Thus, Marx’s considerations here are not announcing the imperceptible transformation of capitalism into another form of production, but rather explain the possibility of a new crisis. Labour and the possibility of quantifying it presupposes that either an individual is working or he is not at any given moment. It is not possible to measure a mix of productive and unproductive activities in terms of value. Such a mix was not uncommon, however, in pre-capitalist societies, and the disappearance of village shops where the owner spent the day between home and shop according to the ebb and flow of custom is a comparatively recent

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phenomenon. Only the standard acceptation of wage labour fully corresponds to abstract labour. Post-Fordist labour again becomes part and parcel of the entire life of economic subjects, although its purpose now is to transform the entirety of life into labour. This is above all the case in the ‘creative’ or ‘communication’ industries where labour is able to harness for itself those personal qualities naturally acquired outside working hours. Everybody is kept in a constant state of ‘lifelong learning’ at the risk of falling victim to the next round of ‘downsizing’; gone are the days when the worker could forget about work once outside the workplace. This supersession of the division of life into spheres, only one of which is considered to be value-producing labour, has nothing emancipatory about it given that it still identifies with value while at the same time helping to throw the latter into crisis. Labour is therefore a specifically modern way of organizing activities as a separate sphere. This sphere has become autonomous and superior to the others. It is only in capitalist society that labour becomes its own organizing principle, because it is only here that production, its expansion and its derived demands become the raison d’être of society. In previous societies the goal of production was intended to create material and concrete wealth, but this in turn was done in the service of the reproduction of a given social order. As Moishe Postone puts it, the importance of labour for Marx is ‘historically specific rather than trans-historical. In Marx’s mature critique, the notion that labour constitutes the social world and is the source of all wealth does not refer to society in general, but to capitalist, or modern, society alone’ (Postone, 1993, p. 4). Therefore what radically distinguishes capitalism from all other forms of society is the fact that ‘labour and its products mediate themselves in capitalism … What makes labour general in capitalism is not simply the truism that it is the common denominator of all various specific sorts of labour; rather, it is the social function of labour which makes it general’ (Postone, 1993, pp. 150–1, emphasis in original). In societies where wealth is defined in concrete terms, it is not distributed by itself, but is the simple object of the human relationships that decide its distribution. ‘Material wealth … taken by itself, however, it neither constitutes relations among people nor determines its own distribution. The existence of material wealth as the dominant form of social wealth implies, therefore, the existence of overt forms of social relations that mediate it’ (Postone, 1993, p. 154). It is only where wealth consists of



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an amount of expended labour time that it in turn begins to regulate social relations in turn. In other societies, concrete activities are embedded in an openly social matrix: ‘Labour as such does not constitute society per se; labour in capitalism, however, does constitute that society’ (Postone, 1993, p. 157, emphasis in original). We have seen that for Marx value is the alienating objectification of labour as a social bond. Due to the ambiguity of the Marxian position on labour – that Postone underestimates – we must now clarify the ‘esoteric’ core of this position. If in pre-capitalist (and post-capitalist) societies, social ties do not exist alongside activities, but rather within them, this does not mean that labour becomes its own organizing principle. Rather, it means that social relationships – whether freely chosen or relationships of domination – organize productive activities in such a way that they form part of a whole. Modern labour, on the contrary, effectively self-organizes despite the isolation of private producers and it does so indirectly, in the externalized form of value and its self-movement.30 According to traditional Marxism, labour is the backbone of all societies, and in modern society this fact simply appears in broad daylight, whereas previously it was hidden. This assertion is based on the confusion between ‘labour’ in the sense of the metabolism with nature and ‘labour’ as the principle of social organization. In all pre-capitalist societies, the activities that mediate the exchange with nature were integrated as direct social relationships that managed and distributed the products of this activity. In feudalism, for example, it was the lord who regulated productive activity so as to satisfy need according to the social hierarchy. It is only in capitalism that labour as such has become the synthesizing principle of society. It is only here that the tautological transformation of living labour into dead labour becomes the principle organizer of all activities, so that they only exist in view of this transformation. In classical antiquity, the synthesizing principle was to a certain degree, politics, and it was precisely the mediation of the exchange with nature, which made women and slaves contemptible, excluding them from society. In the ancient polis, socialization was not mediated through labour, and it was even done in direct opposition to it. Thus politics was effectively a sphere of decision-making which existed above the ‘economy’. It did not have the function of allowing the individual ‘bourgeois’ to create their own fortune.

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On the contrary, it asked individuals to leave these unworthy concerns behind them. This is also the reason why a ‘return to politics’ modelled on antiquity is impossible in commodity society (see Lohoff, 1992, pp. 58–8). It would be inaccurate to say that in modern society the synthesizing principle is material production as such; indeed, when production is not ‘profitable’ in terms of the valorization of accumulated dead labour (‘value’), it is abandoned. However, the accumulation of value does not function without a continuous increase in the production of goods for use. This is why capitalism is the only society that has proclaimed material productivity as the supreme good. From this derives the well-known ‘materialist’ character of modern society, which, taken as an isolated factor, is the favourite target of all purely moralistic critiques of it. In reality, it is only indirectly, through the self-valorization of value, that the demands of material production in capitalist society take precedence over all other social, aesthetic, religious and moral considerations, whereas in other societies, on the contrary, material productivity could be sacrificed to these kinds of concerns.

3

The crisis of market society Value in crisis A mode of production organized to supply the needs and whims of the dominant classes, such as feudalism, can have many flaws, but it can never be destructive and self-destructive in the manner of society guided by the ‘automatic subject’. A system that is not tautological, but goal-oriented, always finds its limits and point of equilibrium. It can be said that all societies that have existed until now have been blind. There has not been a single one that has consciously managed its own productive forces without being mediated through fetishism. Yet in relation to capitalist society, they almost all completely lacked dynamism. What makes modern society so dangerous is that it is subject to a very strong dynamic that it has absolutely no control over, for it is entirely embedded in its fetish medium. This absence of limits only enters the world with the help of money, that is to say when money becomes the goal of production. The sole purpose of money, as the incarnation of value, is its self-expansion1: ‘Fixed as wealth, as the general form of wealth, as value which counts as value, [money] is therefore the constant drive to go beyond its quantitative limit: an endless process’ (Marx, 1973, p. 270). This is not an additional quality that comes to it from the outside, but is its basic structure.2 Indeed, Marx deduces the excessiveness which characterizes capital from the concept of capital itself. This means that capital and its excesses will only come to an end together. We have already seen that value is preserved only with its growth in circulation. In the Short Outline (1858), Marx also deduces this excessiveness from ‘the contradiction between the general characteristics of value and its material existence in a particular commodity’ (MECW, vol. 40, p. 301). Money in its third formal

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determination – money as money, representing only a greater or lesser amount of the general wealth – becomes a visible contradiction: as general wealth, it is the quintessence of all use values, and it has the ability to buy everything. But at the same time, in this form it is always a determined and limited quantum of money and therefore a limited representative of general wealth. This contradiction between the qualitatively unlimited and the quantitatively limited character of money is the cause of a quantitatively infinite progress where through its permanent growth money seeks to approach wealth in general. This happens as soon as money, no longer linked to concrete needs, becomes the goal of production: ‘Whereas specific requirement in the specific use value in which the exchange value is incarnated is the prerequisite for exchange value in the guise of any other commodity, there is no such limitation for gold and silver as abstract wealth’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 458). This tautological character, the dynamic aspect of capitalism and the forced incorporation of all societies into ‘history’ are simply different aspects of the same thing.3 Society based on commodity production with its externalized and abstract universality is necessarily limitless, destructive and self-destructive.4 This outcome is already embedded in its concept, as Marx always emphasized: However, as representative of the general form of wealth – money – capital is the endless and limitless drive to go beyond its limiting barrier. Every boundary is and has to be a barrier for it. Else it would cease to be capital – money as self-reproductive. If ever it perceived a certain boundary not as a barrier, but became comfortable within it as a boundary, it would itself have declined from exchange value to use value, from the general form of wealth to a specific, substantial mode of the same. (Marx, 1973, p. 334)

Capital that does not seek to grow is reduced to the state of hoarded treasure: an inert accumulation existing outside of circulation. For Marx, even the final abolition of capital will be an effect of its limitlessness, whereby capital transforms itself into its own greatest limit, working towards its own abolition.5 Crisis theory is one of the most original parts of Marx’s work, and he criticized bourgeois political economy for becoming completely ‘vulgar’ when dealing with this theory (MECW, vol. 32, p. 130) His own theory of crisis is rather fragmentary and not without contradictions. Yet it can be said that his entire analysis of capitalism is essentially a ‘theory of crisis’, leading to the ‘apocalyptic’ ending with which he



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had planned to crown his critique of political economy (see his drafts for The Contribution). Above all in the third volume of Capital, he provided a lengthy analysis of cyclical crises as a normal feature of the functioning of capitalism, whose prosperity is never stable. He also developed the theory of the ‘final crisis’, which he considered inevitable because of the insurmountable internal limits of capitalism. Above all he did this in the Grundrisse, insisting right till the end of his life that the dynamics of capitalism will push it towards a final crisis of collapse (e.g., in the draft of his letter to V. Zasulich, MECW, vol. 24, pp. 346–70). For Marx, the essential connection between capitalism and the state of crisis is not only the result of quantitative incoherence among the various factors of the capitalist economy (an incoherence whose importance was exaggerated by the theory of underconsumption, which flourished in the Keynesian era). Capitalism’s tendency towards crisis is already contained in the structure of the commodity with its fundamental separation between production and consumption,6 between the particular and the universal. Each new step in the analysis demonstrates this potential for crisis: The most abstract form of crisis (and therefore the formal possibility of crisis) is thus the metamorphosis of the commodity itself; the contradiction of exchange value and use value, and furthermore of money and commodity, comprised within the unity of the commodity, exists in metamorphosis only as an involved movement. The factors which turn this possibility of crisis into [an actual] crisis are not contained in this form itself; it only implies that the framework for a crisis exists. And in a consideration of the bourgeois economy, that is the important thing. The world trade crises must be regarded as the real concentration and forcible adjustment of all the contradictions of bourgeois economy. The individual factors, which are condensed in these crises, must therefore emerge and must be described in each sphere of the bourgeois economy and the further we advance in our examination of the latter, the more aspects of this conflict must be traced on the one hand, and on the other hand it must be shown that its more abstract forms are recurring and are contained in the more concrete forms. It can therefore be said that the crisis in its first form is the metamorphosis of the commodity itself, the falling asunder of purchase and sale. (MECW, vol. 32, p. 140)7

This lengthy quotation is useful because it contains matter enough to posit a unity between Marx’s value theory and his crisis theory. Crisis is not a temporary interruption that disturbs the ‘normal’ functioning of capitalism.

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Rather it is the very truth of this system. The fact that capitalism is ‘madness’ is not only included in its ‘concept’, in the ‘elementary form’ of capitalism, but also in the fact that it can only evolve through continual friction, so as to finally collapse under the weight of its own logic, or better still, its non-logic. Fundamentally, all the crises of capitalism are caused by the absence of community, of social unity. In a way, this community is violently reconstituted in crisis: ‘Crisis is nothing but the forcible assertion of the unity of phases of the production process which have become independent of each other’ (MECW, vol. 32, p. 140, emphasis in original). In the above quoted excerpts on the end of labour from the Grundrisse, Marx predicts the collapse of value production precisely because of the deployment of the logic of value. He advocates the abolition of labour as the basis of social wealth: The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great wellspring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. (Marx, 1973, pp. 705–6, emphasis in original)8

Contrary to what is often believed, traditional Marxists have neglected Marxian crisis theory. When they have dealt with it, it was generally in purely quantitative terms and through separating the different elements of crisis from each other. Even the few rare theorists of crisis that have existed – such as R. Luxemburg, H. Grossmann and P. Mattick9 – generally related it to the reproduction schemes contained in the second volume of Capital, as well as to overproduction and to underconsumption. They predicted the collapse of capitalism but without deducing it from the structure of the commodity. For them, the real problem with capitalism was the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Marx had indeed given a lot of importance to this fall which is a consequence of the most visible contradiction of capitalism: capital must always absorb living labour as the only source of surplus value. At the same



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time, competition inevitably pushes capitalists to replace living labour by the use of fixed capital, that is, with machines, which increase the productivity of the employed labour power. In the long run, the capital invested consists of an ever-increasing percentage of fixed capital and an ever-smaller percentage of variable capital spent on wages. Marx calls this phenomenon the ‘rise in the organic composition of the capital’. But it also means that profit decreases, even if the degree of exploitation increases. Marx himself listed a series of factors that slow down this tendency, such as falling prices for fixed capital. He points out, however, that in the long run that the fall of the rate of profit will become more and more pronounced, because its primary cause cannot be eliminated. It is not clear whether Marx himself saw this phenomenon as an absolute internal limit that allows us to predict with certainty that one day, capitalism ‘will no longer work’. In fact, he never really addressed the problem because he expected, like the Marxists in his wake, that long before it met its internal limit and collapses in on itself (a process which, according to Rosa Luxemburg, may last more or less until the ‘the sun dies’), capitalism would disappear for another reason: with the proletariat, capitalism creates its own enemy, its ‘gravedigger’. According to this expectation, every cyclical crisis increases the consciousness of the proletariat and decreases its patience. This crisis is therefore merely an intensification of the class struggle, and at the same time its result. This explanation of crisis by proletarian struggle reached its climax in the ‘far Left’ with its subjective pro-activism as opposed to the static ‘objectivism’ of Marxist orthodoxy. For the ‘subjectivists’, the very fact of studying the laws that govern the functioning of capitalist society is tantamount to approving them, as well as putting oneself at their service. For them, every moment is the right time to strike a hammer blow, all that is needed is enough will do it. Indeed their criticism of other Marxists was purely on moral grounds: such people were traitors who did not want to throw the masses under their command into battle. In truth, Marxists of every hue were united, and still are, by their tacit ignorance of the internal, logical limits of capitalism. They reject the idea that capitalism can lead to an absolute crisis. For them, such a crisis would be a crisis of the very forms themselves – commodity, State and money – that they wish to harness in order to run them ‘democratically’ or ‘for the benefit of the proletariat’. If they hate ‘collapse theory’, it is because it also foresees the end of the proletariat and of labour itself.

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The hope that capitalism would disappear because of the appearance of an ever more numerous, more miserable, more concentrated, more conscious and more organized proletariat, has evaporated even before the end to capitalism itself. In this situation, it is the other part of Marx’s theory of crisis which becomes relevant, the part with which he logically anticipated the final crisis. He was wrong only in considering the crises of his time as the final crises, which in reality were merely growing pains and certainly not the most serious. It took another century to reach the point where the selfcontradiction inherent in capitalism began hindering its operation and where the machine malfunctioned. What emerges today is a much deeper crisis than those caused in the past by momentary quantitative disproportions. The contradiction between material content and the value form leads to the destruction of the former. It becomes particularly visible in the ecological crisis and then presents itself as ‘productivism’, as the tautological production of goods for use, which, however, is merely the consequence of the tautological transformation of abstract labour into money. Production as an end in itself does not signify the greatest possible production of use values, as if it were some kind of greed for something concrete – indeed this is the deceptive way in which environmentalists often present the problem. We are not dealing here with an irrepressible impulse to surround ourselves with material wealth or transform the world. Neither is the gigantic waste of the natural basis of life that characterizes capitalism today the consequence of the necessity to feed a vastly expanded world population, such as many neo-Malthusians would have us believe. Nor is it even a question of ‘excessive’ desires. It is the result of the tautological logic of the system of the commodity. In fact six billion human beings could even live much better than today by producing and working a lot less than they do now. The production of value and surplus value, the sole aim of the subjects of the commodity, may also involve a decrease in the production of use values, even the most important ones. We see this in the increasing frequency of the de-industrialization of entire countries, where production is reduced to only those sectors whose products are exportable, even if the only thing exported is peanuts. ‘Production for the sake of production’ means the greatest possible accumulation of dead labour. The gains of productivity, that is, the increase in the production of use values, in no way changes the value produced in



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each unit of time. One hour of labour is always one hour of labour, and if within that hour we produce sixty chairs instead of one, it means that each chair now only contains one sixtieth of an hour. In other words, the chair is now only ‘worth’ one minute. The increase in the productive forces driven by competition in no way increases the value of each unit of time and this fact forms an impassable limit to the creation of surplus value, whose growth today is becoming increasingly difficult. To produce the same amount of value, an ever-expanding production of use values is necessary, and therefore also an increased consumption of natural resources. Thus, if the owner of capital does not want to be eliminated by competition, he must produce sixty chairs, hoping to meet a paying demand. He may even try to create demand without taking into account the real relationship between needs and resources in society. The fall in the rate of profit of a particular commodity involves the need to continuously increase the production of commodities so as to prevent the fall of the overall mass of profit. It is precisely because gains in productivity only indirectly increase surplus value that this productivity must always increase.10 The entire concrete world is then gradually consumed in order to maintain the value form.11 In the value system, increased productivity of labour is also a calamity because it is the root cause of the ecological crisis. Such a result is a manifestation of the opposition between abstract form and concrete content that runs throughout the entire history of capitalism. Value as described by Marx is characterized by the fact that it does not develop in a vacuum, but must always struggle against the resistance of the concrete. Abstract form seeks to make itself independent of concrete content and of its laws. But the concrete content always and ever rejoins the abstract form because form without content cannot exist. Marx’s thought is precisely characterized by the importance given to nature broadly speaking when, for example, he highlights the role of use value, neglected by classical economists, or when he emphasizes that labour forms not only valorization process, but also production process.12 Almost the entirety of bourgeois thought also reflects the logic of value in that it assumes the existence of an autonomous form that can continue to develop forever without ever encountering resistance from content or substance. Bourgeois economists always reason in quantitative terms and believe that value can be increased at will, without having to bother about objective limits, such as the limited capacity of society’s consumption,

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the laws that flow from the use value of fixed capital, the limited character of natural resources or the availability of labour power. While the latter are more or less natural, there are many more limits that, being social, take on a quasi-natural aspect because of their fetish character: such as the falling rate of profit or overproduction. Form, in so far as it is something derived from thought, is quantitatively unlimited, while content always has boundaries. The belief that reality can be endlessly manipulated eventually descends into crisis revealing the existence of an inescapable reality, of a substance governed by its own laws. All relativistic theories, from positivism to postmodernism, have always challenged this fact. Forgetfulness of natural foundations is precisely what distinguishes modern bourgeois thought from Marx’s theory. This is the reason why Marxian critique of political economy, far from being incapable, as is sometimes claimed, of explaining the ecological crisis or of taking it into account, offers the only structural explanation for it that is not framed by appeals to moral values. On the other hand, this increased productivity of labour – which as such could naturally be a good thing for all humanity – more directly produces the collapse of value-based society.13 Paradoxically, it is because of its greatest strength, the unleashing of productive forces, that capitalism is reaching its limit: the individual expenditure of labour power is less and less the main factor of production. Today the applied sciences, as well as knowledge and skills disseminated at the social level, are directly becoming the main productive force. The need to calculate the amount of labour each person performs, and therefore the value each creates, is transformed then into an ‘armour’ that stifles productive possibilities, as individual labour is no longer measurable. Labour expenditure can no longer constitute the social form of wealth, nor be the condition for the individual to participate in its rewards. Science as a productive force has abolished the identification between ‘labour’ and the ‘metabolism with nature’, because it has created a productive process in which the ‘producer’ often finds himself sidelined by the means of production, limiting himself to controlling and directing them. These new productive forces are the work of society as a whole; once a new product (say, a new piece of software) has been invented, its ‘value’ can no longer be found in the product (or only in homeopathic doses). Determining the labour expended by each individual producer then becomes as impossible as it is useless. In



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this situation, the ‘exchange’ of units of labour loses its raison d’être, as Marx predicted would be the case in communism (MECW, vol. 24, p. 75). Indeed, exchange is only necessary in circumstances where producers are separated from each other and where only things are socialized. But today the separation of producers no longer has a material or technical basis and derives exclusively from the abstract value form. The effective functioning of production therefore increasingly enters into conflict with the logic of value. This is precisely what Marx had prophesized in the Grundrisse as one of the possible outcomes of value-based society. Unfortunately, we can see that this is not a case of a peaceful and gradual exit from capitalist society, an exit that would simply need to be translated to the political level – as some ideas that bear on these pages of Marx claim, or as proclaimed even by those who, bereft of theory, present new developments such as ‘free software’ as the supersession of capitalism. The value form continues to exist, not because the ruling classes have decided so, but because it is a fetish form not perceived as such by subjects. Far from disappearing, the value form, although ‘objectively’ superseded, increasingly enters into collision with the material content it helps to create. This is seen above all in the fact that society – for which labour is the essence and its only driving force – abolishes labour and therefore makes the production of value and therefore of surplus value almost impossible. We have said that the fall in the rate of profit has accompanied the whole evolution of capitalism, but for a long time, it was compensated, and even overcompensated, by the increase in the mass of profit. For example, if we assume that in ten years, thanks to the use of new technologies, the share of variable capital (i.e. wages) contained in a commodity might decrease from 20 per cent to 10 per cent, resulting in a decrease in the rate of profit of 10 per cent to 5 per cent (assuming the rate of surplus value, i.e., the degree of exploitation remains stable at 50 per cent). Nevertheless, if at the same time we produce three times as many commodities, then the mass of profit has increased by 50 per cent and can therefore support an expanded production cycle. This possibility was foreseen by Marx and has indeed been playing out for more than a century. However, it is obvious that this development must one day reach the point of no return, where the mass of profit of global capital will begin to diminish until it reaches an absolute limit.

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Indeed, it is not enough for capital to absorb labour. It must do so at a sufficient level of profitability, and this level is constantly established by competition and its use of fixed capital. If with one million dollars invested in the latest generation of machines, we can make a single worker – who will even be paid ten thousand euros a month – produce ten thousand pairs of shoes, then it is not profitable for the capitalist who cannot heavily invest in fixed capital to employ labour. Even ten workers paid a thousand dollars a month would produce, with old-fashioned tools, only a thousand pairs of shoes. In other words, so that the consumption of the labour force is profitable, enormous investments are needed, which is expressed in the highly visible fact that jobs always ‘cost’ more.14

Productive and unproductive labour Besides, not all labour in capitalism is productive labour. Naturally, we are not talking here about the actual utility of labour, because this aspect is missing from the logic of valorization. Rather, it is a question of whether labour produces surplus value. Marx paid some attention to this question, whereas in general Marxists have neglected it and even less so have they recognized its links to the crises of capitalism. They have thus abandoned this terrain to bourgeois economists, who would now have everyone believe that every job loss in traditional sectors (heavy industry, agriculture, etc.) is more than compensated for by new jobs and the fantastic earning opportunities that are opening up, and will open up even more in the near future in services, computing and so on, oblivious to the fact that this labour, whether ‘useful’ or ‘not’, is not usually ‘productive labour’ in the capitalist sense. For Marx, the only labour that is productive – in the capitalist sense – is that which creates surplus value that can be reinvested. All other labour does nothing other than consume the income of those who pay them. If I go to the tailor to have a coat specifically made for myself, this is not a productive expenditure, that is, the tailor’s labour is not productive in the capitalist sense. If, however, I use the same money as a wage for factory garment workers whose clothes I sell, then this is a question of productive labour. Proof of this lies in the fact that in the first expenditure, if I repeat it enough, I’m left penniless, while in the



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second expenditure, after many repetitions I should become very rich because of the surplus value extorted from the workers.15 Naturally, capitalism cannot completely renounce ‘unproductive’ labour. But since only productive labour constitutes its ‘essence’, it must seek to limit unproductive labour and transform it as much as possible into productive labour. For example, teachers are not ‘productive’ labourers, yet according to Marx, if they work in a private school creating surplus value for their employer, then they do become productive for capital (Marx, 1976a, p. 1044). Marx’s distinction between productive labour and unproductive labour has come under heavy attack and is often accused of recognizing only material or even industrial labour as the source of surplus value to the exclusion of services and all immaterial labour that are supposed to constitute the bulk of labour today. This is simply false, as Marx never conceptually identified the question of the productive or unproductive character of labour with its material or immaterial content – even if the preponderance of material labour in his time suggested a quasi-empirical identity with it. Nonetheless, the issue of productive labour can be more clearly defined today. The case for productive labour cannot be proved on the basis of some isolated instance of it, as this depends on its position in the complete reproduction process. Only at the level of global capital can we see the productive or unproductive nature of labour: as such, people within a company who are assigned to cleaning or accounting, for example, are unproductive workers. They are simply a necessary evil for the business. Their organization in specialized companies outsourcing to other companies – who thus no longer employ regular workers for these tasks – creates surplus value for the owners of these service businesses. This is the secret of what we call ‘the growth of the service sector’. But these profits for individual capitalist ventures cancel each other out at the level of overall capital, where these activities always represent a deduction from the capital gain realized by productive capital. Unfortunately, this fact is not sufficiently developed in Marx’s argument, and his example of the private school is likely to mislead the reader. For labour to be productive, its products must return to the process of capital accumulation, and the consumption of these products must support the expanded reproduction of capital, either by being consumed by productive labourers or by becoming goods to be invested in a cycle which effectively produces surplus value.

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The difference between productive and unproductive labour, understood in this way, does not fit in with the distinction between material goods and services, nor between State expenditure and private investment, although it remains true that almost all government spending represents unproductive consumption (armaments, public administration, education, health, etc.). Therefore nowadays there is also a part of industrial production which is unproductive (see Kurz, 1995, pp. 29–37). It is not only the visible reduction of labour in the contemporary world that causes the crisis of valorization, but even more so the invisible decrease of productive labour. Only a very small part of the activities that take place in the world today create the surplus value which still fuels capitalism.16 The decrease in productive labour is also caused by the constant increase in what Marx calls ‘faux frais’ (incidental expenses).17 In order to function, the productive sectors need many activities before, after and incidental to the real productive process. But these sectors are unproductive and often cannot obey the logic of value. In part, this labour is located within the business, such as the aforementioned cleaning or accounting activities. Nonetheless, it is the State that bears most of these ‘faux frais’. With taxes and other revenues, the State finances everything that is too expensive, even for the largest companies (the construction of railroads in certain countries is the best-known historical example) or which cannot be organized according to the usual criteria for profit, whilst at once remaining indispensable to it. Modern production, for example, needs skilled workers, and thus an education system extended to the whole of society, which a purely private education system cannot guarantee. Internal and external ‘security’, transport, sanitation, administration and many other things are needed so that productive labour can take place. In exchange, productive labour must give up part of its profit to the State. Each capital entity is naturally satisfied to find well-functioning infrastructure, the use of which is often free of charge. But for global capital, these ‘faux frais’ must be kept to a minimum, because otherwise they may well threaten the profitability of production. Since the early days of capitalism, these incidental expenses have tended to rise steadily. What causes this is the continuous increase in fixed capital, especially because of the increasing scientific nature of production, the effect of infrastructure on competition (capital that does not have the availability



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of highways to move its products, but only country roads, is going to lose out in global competition), the needs for public order, the arms race and also capital’s demand to find ever more skilled workers, or at least workers au fait with the values of capitalism. The attempt to organize these activities, in the typically neoliberal form of capitalist enterprises, does not change the situation at the level of global capital, but may well destabilize the whole social framework in which the production of value takes place. The progressive asphyxiation of value production due to the increase in incidental costs and unproductive labour, as well as the resulting decrease in the mass of profit, are, logically speaking, an unavoidable consequence of the basic contradictions of the commodity. Historical reality has confirmed this logical deduction. First, because classical capitalism – which was characterized by the gold standard, the unlimited convertibility of gold currencies, balanced public expenditures and free competition without State intervention – ended with the First World War. Since then, capitalism has been perpetually running amok and continues to function only by suspending its own laws. The period from 1920, and especially after 1945, until around 1975 is today rightly called ‘Fordism’. From the American automobile industry and the innovations introduced by Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor (assembly line, ‘scientific management’ of the labour force, etc.), a new socio-economic system spread, first of all to the United States and then to other western countries after the Second World War. Fordism went hand in hand with Keynesian methods of political economy, and the results of this were the mass production of semi-durable low-priced goods, high wages, full employment, political democracy, massive State investment in infrastructure and social services, monetary stability and the diffusion of consumer goods in all areas of life. However, the Fordist ‘virtuous circle’ did not have a strong foundation. It was State investment, usually paid by credit, which allowed the rapid growth of unproductive sectors – for example, with the construction of motorways, without which ‘global car ownership’18 would not have been possible. This growth allowed an increase in the productive sectors, sufficient in absolute terms to compensate for the relative decrease in profit in each particular product. By filling the world to the brim with commodities, Fordism has managed to postpone the structural crisis of capitalism by several decades: a crisis which had already manifested itself in the 1920s and which exploded with the great crisis of 1929.

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Around 1970–5, the Fordist-Keynesian cycle was exhausted, because it became impossible to continue to finance ‘secondary costs’. The signs of this were the abandonment of the gold standard for the dollar in 1971, as well as the return of inflation in Western countries. This crisis was infinitely exacerbated by the microchip revolution. This revolution established no new model of accumulation because from the very beginning it rendered huge amounts of labour unnecessary and therefore ‘unprofitable’. Unlike Fordism, it does this at such a pace that no extension of the market is capable of compensating for the reduction in the share of labour contained in each commodity. Computer technology thus definitively sunders the link between productivity and the expenditure of abstract labour embodied in value. It sets in motion the ‘vicious cycle’ that we’ve been witnessing for last forty years. And so to survive in a situation where it saws off the very branch on which it sits – labour – the capitalist system must more than ever before seek ruses in order to make circulation and production momentarily coincide by practically suspending the law of value. It should be remembered that it is not the production of goods for use that is in crisis, but if we were to strictly follow the logic of value, we would have to abandon almost all present production due to ‘lack of profitability’. To avoid getting to that stage, the ‘automatic subject’ forges ever more recklessly ahead.

Fictitious capital This rout is accomplished via fictitious capital, that is, by empowering stock markets and speculation. Thus, capital extends its life beyond its real limits by consuming its future in advance, that is, by living on credit. Credit, too, is ‘contained’ in its embryonic state in the elementary structure of the commodity: monetary mediation separates sales from purchases, because it allows the deferral of payment. Labour and money are different stages of the same valorization process, but they could just as well not coincide as money can multiply faster than dead labour. This creates the illusion that money has the mystical power to increase all by itself, without the mediation of a productive process in which labour has been consumed. Monetary interest, where apparently we move directly from money to a greater quantity of money



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(M-M’ in the terms used at the beginning of Chapter 1), appears to common sense as the true form of profit – although in reality it is only a deduction made from the profit obtained in production. In truth, only money from a successful process of the valorization of value, operated by labour, is ‘good’ money. Money representing unproductive labour and money that is based solely on trust – in the main form of credit – ends up devalorizing itself. The necessity of credit derives from the continuous increase of fixed capital that goes beyond the capacities of individual companies. It is therefore a result of the increased productivity of labour. It then becomes essential to commit in the present the expected gains of the future. Until these gains actually arrive later to pay for the interest and to pay off the debt, debt is not a big problem. Unlike the capitalists of the nineteenth century, the Fordist expansionist companies were no longer able to finance themselves without recourse to credit. In addition, because of the explosion of ‘unproductive’ and incidental costs, a growing part of the credit supply was used only to fuel unproductive consumption. On the other hand, States – which until the First World War presented balance sheets that were more or less even – started going into debt to build up the necessary infrastructure for national economies. While Keynes thought that State intervention should serve only to ‘kick’ accumulation into gear so that it took off again under its own steam, these interventions soon turned out to be a sine qua non for the functioning of the economy, as well as a constantly growing burden on public finances. Once the mechanism that compensated for the decrease in productivity of value through the expansion of production was exhausted, credit financing changed in nature. After the quantity of credit in circulation had far exceeded the amount of existing gold, the abolition of the convertibility of the US dollar into gold (1971) dismantled the last existing safeguard. Since then, money has been based exclusively on trust, and there is no limit to its multiplication. Yet money is nothing more than the representation of abstract labour expended in sufficiently profitable valorization processes. Naturally, the State can print paper money without taking the amount of productive labour into account, especially since the latter is impossible to measure directly. Economic actors can create money in the form of shares, bonds, loans and so on. But the amount of excess money inevitably loses its value in inflation or deflation. The drastic reduction of productive labour on a global scale also makes money

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lose its substance, rendering it ‘invalid’. If one were to calculate all the money circulating in the world in all its forms (shares, bonds, debts, etc.), then divided it by the number of people in the world, we would probably arrive at a global inflation of several hundred percent. If this hyperinflation has not manifested itself yet, it is because money remains largely ‘parked’ in financial structures in the form of shares, ‘virtual’ money, special drawing rights and so on. The miraculous multiplication of money aroused panic in the early 1970s, but the sums involved at that time were only a small fraction of the ‘fictitious capital’ that was to circulate a few decades later. The concept of ‘fictitious capital’ was developed by Marx in the third volume of Capital to refer to capital based exclusively on speculation and on the expectation of future gains. As such, as soon as someone demands the ready payment of debts, the ‘bubble’ must burst followed by a chain of bankruptcies. But in Marx’s time, this was still an epiphenomenon which accompanied real economic crises. Financial crashes had a cleansing function that did not affect the actual productive processes. Until the end of the Fordist cycle, financial speculation more or less kept pace with the rhythm and dimensions of real accumulation. This largely changed when real accumulation stopped, in spite of all credit. Henceforth, credit is therefore used to simulate non-existent accumulation and to artificially prolong the life of an already dead mode of production.19 It is only a very small amount of this liquidity in circulation which is directly issued by States; most are shares, bonds, loans, real estate, ‘virtual currency’ and so on – which renders this process completely uncontrollable. In a grotesque reversal, which even Marx could not foresee, real production has become an adjunct to fictitious capital. The dizzying movements recorded from 1987 onwards on the stock markets no longer have anything to do with the cyclical oscillations in what remains of the real economy. Fictitious capital has even become the actual engine of growth. The gains made with purely speculative financial operations have become an indispensable element in the finances of companies, governments and private individuals: whether it be the American ‘economic miracle’ financed with the largest debt in history, or the many American families who obtain bank loans solely on the basis of the shares they own and their hoped-for increases, or even ‘viable’ companies whose sheets are in balance only thanks to financial income. In this context, notorious Third-World debt is only a small part of total fictitious capital.



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Therefore, it is no longer only State revenue that is spent in advance, but also that of society as a whole. It is not possible here to go into the ins and outs of international finance and to describe international circuits of deficit (the most important being the one between the United States and East Asian countries). The collapse of the financial structure will occur only after a certain incubation period and the consequences will be all the more catastrophic because it will then become apparent that real accumulation ended long before this collapse occurred. The ever more delirious surges of the stock markets go hand in hand with the apparent tranquillity of international economic institutions, which, without batting an eyelid, lend tens of billions of dollars to bankrupt countries – sums of money which only a few years earlier had shaken international finance to its very core, as in the case of the 1995 Mexican crisis. Nevertheless, the insane movements of money are not the cause, but the consequence of the turmoil in the real economy. The real economy would be no better off if ‘excess’ speculation was abolished, as preached by concerned observers such as the banker George Soros or the newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique. The reality is that the economy will not work at all once we remove the crutch of speculation. Indeed, after the speculative bubble bursts, we will see that for a certain period of time it hid the fact that the accumulation of value had already reached its historical limit. Naturally, this should not mean the end of the production of goods for use, provided that it can be separated from value production. The ‘devalorization of value’ is not just an economic crisis but also signifies a total crisis: the collapse of an entire ‘civilization’. Commodity production is no longer simply one sector within the framework of social life, but occupies an increasingly larger part of it, as much geographically and within society, as well as extensively and intensively. Its end will be all the more catastrophic for the entire planet. A collapse of capitalism around 1900 would have been much more limited in its consequences. Today, having sequestered all resources, commodity society forbids humanity to use them for non-commodity purposes. People can no longer initiate and develop their own means, because the fetish of ‘profitability’ will not allow it. At the same time, the ‘automatic subject’ can no longer incorporate the large quantities of available labour power: all productive forces must go through the eye of the valorization needle, an eye growing ever more narrow.

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Thus, value leads to its own abolition precisely because of its success. The definitive victory of capitalism over pre-capitalist remnants is also its final defeat. The fact that fully developed capitalism coincides with its concept does not signal an end to all crisis but quite the reverse: the beginning of the real crisis. Indeed, the transformation of labour into value can only take place if it is surrounded by a large number of other activities that cannot meet the criteria of profitability and value transformation, or where the expenditure of labour can no longer be determined. The incidental costs of production are only one part of it and a part that is still found within the ‘economic’ field. Much more extensive, although incalculable, are all the activities essential for social reproduction that take place outside the ‘economic’ sphere. We can talk about a ‘dark side’ of valorization, a huge grey area without which ‘production’ as it is currently understood would not exist. The most important part of these activities that are not considered as ‘labour’, and which are unpaid, is done by women: ‘Value is the male’, is the title of an essay by Roswitha Scholz (Krisis, vol. 12, 1992).20 Despite its abstract character, value is not ‘gender neutral’ because it is based on a ‘dissociation’: everything liable to create value is ‘masculine’. The activities that can in no way take the form of abstract labour, and especially the creation of a protected space where the worker can rest, are structurally ‘feminine’ and are unremunerated. This is one of the reasons why for a long time capitalist society denied women the status of ‘subject’ (e.g., the right to vote). In commodity society only those who expend abstract labour time are considered to be subjects in their own right. Other activities – which do not achieve the ‘dignity’ of being consumed directly by the valorization machine, however exhausting or necessary they may be – remain branded as inferior. It is thus a consequence of the logic of value if a woman caring for her elderly father-in-law does not ‘work’, while her husband who manufactures bombs or key chains does. Of course, in the last few decades, many women have become ‘subjects’ in commodity terms, even sometimes achieving executive status. But in order to do so, they had to become ‘male-oriented’: indeed, the ‘schism’ produced by value also implies that the capitalist subject develops only those qualities necessary for success in the world of labour, qualities structurally considered as ‘masculine’ such as self-discipline, reason, logic, being hard on oneself and others. The ‘feminine’ part of the capitalist subject is entirely delegated to women, who must use it to



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‘furnish’ rest and recuperation wherewithal. The fact that today these obviously cultural qualities can be detached from their biological bearers only reinforces the structural mechanism: in the world of labour, whoever, whether man or woman, behaves according to traditionally ‘feminine’ criteria like compassion will not get very far. Proposals to change this situation by paying for domestic ‘labour’ or for childcare go nowhere. Apart from their illusory nature in an era of the necessary shrinkage of the State – and not simply because of bad political choices – these proposals would amount to extending the logic of value and abstract labour to new sectors, instead of acknowledging its collapse. Value collapses just at the moment when it seeks to transform all human activity, every breath and every thought into abstract labour to counteract the exhaustion of labour itself. But most of these activities, including childcare, affectivity (which is also part of the ‘reproduction of the labour force’), and domestic activities, by their very nature, cannot enter the armour of value. One could imagine breaking the logic that grants the status of subject only to those who provide ‘abstract labour’, but it is impossible to globally transform everyone into such a subject at a time when the shrinking of value strips more and more people of this status – the unemployed, for example, or those in receipt of public funds have already lost some of their ‘dignity’ in the face of value. At the end of its historical trajectory, the main harm that capitalism does to people is no longer exploitation, but expulsion. Thus, the final stage of capitalism is not characterized by the existence of an ever larger, ever more revolutionary proletariat, due to the fact that the reduction of variable capital makes wage labour, and thus the classical proletariat lose their importance. This stage is characterized, on the contrary, by the small number of people still worth exploiting. An objection to value criticism could be made on the grounds that, if surplus value is merely a derived category, this should raise the possibility of value production without surplus value. In reality this would, however, be impossible. Even if the rate and the mass of profit carry on falling, they must continue to exist in some way because otherwise the production of value as such would lose its raison d’être and would revert to the production of goods for use. But does the necessary existence of an exploited class of workers not follow on from this? Strictly speaking yes, in the sense that there must indeed be someone who produces more value than they receive. However, this does

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not necessarily have to correspond to the traditional idea of exploited masses of workers (whereas Marxism settled on only one possible historical and empirical form of the existence of the logical category of the ‘labourer’). Globally today, a small number of often very well-paid productive workers, in jobs with extremely high fixed capital costs, produce for their employers a much greater amount of surplus value than a great mass low-wage workers can produce. The reason is that the products of this small number of workers, because of the mechanisms that govern competition on the global market, appropriate an oversized share of global value creation. The necessity to create surplus value continues to exist structurally in capitalism, but today it is expressed less in ‘exploitation’ (especially if this ‘exploitation’ is identified with ‘poverty’, because a European worker, regardless of how much overtime they do, is rich on a global scale) than in the fact that an increasing share of humanity is being expelled from the production process, and therefore from all possibilities of reproduction and survival. The absorption of living labour is still the ‘fuel’ of the capitalist mode of production; thus, wherever it actually functions, it at least guarantees the survival of those it exploits. Today, however, entire peoples are no longer ‘useful’ to the logic of valorization. Not a growing army of proletarians, but an increasingly superfluous humanity marks the final stage of capitalism, to which the continual need to produce surplus value has led it. Capitalism was able to triumph over its supposed adversaries but it cannot defeat its own logic. It is the result of the contradiction between the capabilities developed by humankind and their really existing alienated form.21

Politics is not a solution Even though many still refuse to understand the inexorable logic that leads to such a bleak state of the world, the belief is spreading that the capitalist economy has presented humanity with enormous problems. The first response is almost always that ‘we have to return to politics to make rules for the market. We must restore the Democracy which is threatened by the power of multinationals and stock markets’. But are politics and democracy really the opposite of an autonomous economy? Are they really able to return it to its ‘fair limits’?



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‘Politics’ and ‘economics’ are spheres of the social totality, complementary subsystems. Just as pre-capitalist societies did not have an ‘economy’ in the modern sense, neither did they have ‘politics’ as we understand it. From the moment that value imposes itself as the form of the social totality, it implies the emergence of differentiated subsystems. Value, with its impersonal impulse towards tautological growth, is not a purely ‘economic’ category which could be contrasted with the ‘political’ sphere of free will, discussion and common decision-making. This idea, which has long been one of the pillars of the entire Left, would like to ‘democratize’ political life with the goal of imposing rules on the economy. But in the fetishistic society of the commodity, politics is a secondary subsystem. This subsystem results from the fact that the exchange of commodities does not involve direct social relations, and thus as a consequence what is needed, we are told, is a sphere for direct social relations and for the realization of universal interests. Without a political body, the subjects of the market would immediately engage in a general war of all against all – and of course no one would want to take on the responsibility of guaranteeing the infrastructure.22 People, in their capacity as representatives of commodities, cannot meet each other in their individuality and thus cannot possibly form a community. The logic of value is based on private producers who have no social ties to each other, and this is why it must produce a separate body that deals with the general aspects of society. The modern State is thus created by commodity logic. It is the other side of the commodity; the two are linked together like two inseparable poles. Their relationship has changed several times throughout history of capitalism, but it is a big mistake to be dragged by the current neoliberal polemic against the State (which, moreover, is contradicted by neoliberals’ practice wherever they are at the helm) into believing that capital has a fundamental aversion to the State. Nevertheless, the Marxism of the labour movement and almost the entire Left have always counted on the State, sometimes to the point of delirium, in considering it the opposite of capitalism. The contemporary critique of neoliberal capitalism often evokes a ‘return of the State’, unilaterally identified with the welfare State of the Keynesian era. In truth, it was capitalism itself that massively made use of the State and politics during its foundational phase between the fifteenth and the late eighteenth centuries, and which continued to do so wherever capitalist categories had yet to be introduced – such as the underdeveloped Eastern bloc

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and Southern Hemisphere countries during the twentieth century. Ultimately, capitalism has always and everywhere resorted to the State in situations of distress. It is only at those times that the market seems to be standing on its own two feet that capital wants to reduce the incidental expenses that a strong State incurs. The Left is gravely mistaken when it attributes sovereign powers of intervention to the State. Firstly, this is because politics is increasingly becoming pure economic policy. Just as in some pre-capitalist societies everything was motivated by religion, today all political discussion revolves around the fetish of the economy. Since the end of the Second World War, the difference between the right and the left consists essentially in their divergent recipes for economic policy. Politics, far from being outside or superior to the economic sphere, moves completely within it. This is not due solely to the ill will of political actors, but arises from a structural reason, which is that politics has no autonomous means of intervention. It still has to use money, and every decision it takes must be ‘financed’. When the State seeks to create its own money by printing paper money, that money immediately devalues itself. State power only works in so far as it manages to extract money from successful valorization processes. When these processes start to slow down, the economy increasingly limits and stifles the field of action of politics. It thus becomes clear that in the society of value, politics depends on the economy. With the disappearance of its financial resources, the State is reduced to an increasingly repressive management of poverty. In the end, even soldiers desert if they are not paid, and the armed forces become the private property of the barbarized remains of State institutions – something which has already happened in many Third-World countries, as well as in the former Yugoslavia. We have indicated the major elements of the crisis of socialization based on the value form – today, the society of labour is running out of work and must declare to entire peoples that they are no longer of any use. The national State as a regulatory mechanism is in the process of disappearing. The ecological crisis means that, in order to continue value creation, the whole world is thrown into in the cauldron of valorization. The traditional relationship between the sexes is questioned because feminine labour as the ‘dark side’ of valorization cannot be integrated into the logic of value. These problems remain beyond the reach of politics, which itself is starting to run on empty. It degenerates for good into



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a publicity spectacle which conceals the governments of national unity who manage the continuing emergency in all Western countries. The problem is not that politics is not ‘democratic’ enough. Democracy itself is capital’s ‘other’ side, not its opposite. The concept of democracy in a strict sense presupposes that society is composed of subjects endowed with free will. In order to have such freedom of decision, subjects would have to be outside the commodity form and be able to dispose of value as well as their object. But in a fetishistic society, no such autonomous and conscious subject can exist. Value is not just a mode of production; it is also a form of consciousness. Not only in the sense that every mode of production produces at the same time corresponding forms of consciousness but also that value, like other historical forms of fetishism, is something more: it is an a priori form in the Kantian sense.23 Subjects are oblivious to this framework because it presents itself as ‘natural’ and not as historically determined. In other words, all that the subjects of value can think, imagine, desire or do is already expressed in the categories of the commodity, money, State power and the law.24 Free will is not free in regard to its own form, that is, vis-à-vis the commodity form and the money form, nor to their laws. In a fetishistic constitution, no subject’s will can be set against ‘objective’ reality. Just as the laws of value are out of the reach of the free will of individuals, they are equally inaccessible to political will. In this situation, ‘democratization is nothing more than complete submission to the subjectless logic of money’ (Kurz, 1994, p. 86). In democracy, it is never the basic fetishistic categories themselves that constitute the object of the ‘democratic discussion’. They are already taken for granted in all decisions, which can therefore only bear upon the best way to serve the fetish. In commodity society, democracy is not ‘manipulated’, ‘formal’, ‘fake’, or ‘bourgeois’. It is the most suitable form for capitalist society, in which individuals have completely internalized the necessity to work and earn money. Wherever it is still essential to beat submission to capital into people, capitalism is still in a somewhat imperfect form. It would be wide of the mark indeed simply to go on and on – as the Left does – highlighting the fact that economic groups, the media, churches and so on manipulate voters and transform democracy into something very different to what is contained in written constitutions – although obviously such manipulations do exist. Democracy is complete when everything is subject to negotiation – except for the constraints arising from

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labour and money. The subjects whose indisputable foundation of existence is the transformation of labour into money will always decide in favour of what the laws of the commodity impose in the form of ‘technological or market imperatives’, even if they are ‘completely free’ to choose. ‘Unmasking’ the ‘true interests’ behind these ‘imperatives’ is one of the Left’s favourite sports. Yet what should be up for discussion is the fetishistic system that produces these imperatives which really do exist at the heart of this system.25 ‘Left-wing’ illusions about democracy became particularly bold when they presented themselves as demands for ‘workers’ self-management’, and thus as an extension of ‘democracy’ in the productive process. However, if what needs to be self-managed is a business that must make a monetary profit, the only thing that self-managers can collectively do is merely what all subjects of the market do: they must make their unit of production survive in competition. The failure of all attempts at self-management, even those organized on a large scale such as in Yugoslavia, is not only attributable to the sabotage carried out by bureaucrats (even if this did also happen). In the absence of a directly socialized mode of production, separated units of production, whether they like it or not, are obliged to follow the fetishistic laws of profitability. In fully developed commodity society, individuals – who can no longer imagine a life outside of labour and the commodity – use their own initiative to further this system by any means necessary without having to be manipulated by it. Indeed, we can see that there are increasingly more subjects of the market within whom the logical categories of the ownership of the means of production and wage labour are assembled. It has been in the context of the enormous increase in the number of ‘self-employed’ workers – who in some countries already outnumber wage earners – that the figure of the self-exploiter is now widespread. Among the conventional employees who remain, many are effectively defending their ‘interests’ by working themselves to death in order to maintain the ‘competitiveness’ of the company where they have their ‘place’. ‘Workers’ self-management’ has finally lighted upon a cruel parody in the idea of a ‘shareholder democracy’, ‘that is, a universe of wage earners who, being paid in the form of shares, would collectively become “owners of their companies,” thereby bringing about the perfect association between capital and labour’ (Bourdieu, 2003, pp. 86–7). One can indeed imagine, at least logically, a capitalist society where ownership of the means of production



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would be distributed among all subjects, instead of being concentrated in only a few hands. The foundation of capitalist society is the relationship of private appropriation, not the number of owners. A ‘shareholder democracy’ will never exist, although the mere idea that such a thing ever could demonstrate that the conflict between labour and capital is not at the heart of capitalist society. All of these considerations lead to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a subject ontologically opposed ‘in itself ’ to a capitalism simply holding external sway over it. Were such a subject to exist, all it would have to do is become aware of its situation in order to also become ‘for itself ’ an anticapitalist subject, so that its deployment coincides with the ruin of capitalism. But in capitalism, there can only be one subject, which is the ‘automatic subject’ that must be abolished rather than developed. For traditional Marxism, however, as we have seen, the automatic subject, that is, value, is a derivative of class, which it considers to be the real subject. In traditional Marxism’s view, capitalism is the result of the will of the capitalist, and capitalism’s abolition will be the consequence of the will of the proletariat. In History and Class Consciousness, Lukács combined the Marxist glorification of the proletariat with the Hegelian conception of the subject. He wrote that ‘the proletariat appears as the identical subject-object of history’ (Lukács, 1968, p. 199) and as ‘the real subject of this process – although it is a chained and initially unconscious subject’ (Lukács, 1968, p. 199, emphasis in original). According to History and Class Consciousness, as soon as proletarians recognize themselves as commodities they can become aware of the fetish character of all commodities and therefore understand the ‘real’ relationships hidden behind the commodity form. Today, for most Marxists, it is no longer an article of faith to regard the proletariat (in the sense of factory workers) as the subject that will engineer a way out of capitalism. Yet very often, from the 1960s onwards, the revolutionary subject’s vacant throne has simply been filled with a few other historical pretenders without in any way changing the structure of the narrative. That there is under capitalism a subject which is only superficially part of capitalist relations and which, in its current form, is ‘in itself ’ already beyond capitalist logic is an underlying and persistent assumption. It would make more sense, however, to acknowledge that the interests of wage workers are essentially

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no different from other competitive interests within commodity society. The defence of their interests may be more justified than that of other interests because the workers or other social categories in question are more numerous, more exploited, poorer than other commodity subjects or are victims of a major injustice. But there is nothing in this defence that is necessarily ‘emancipatory’. It simply turns the spotlight on one category of goods vendors (in this case, their labour power) as opposed to all the other vendors. In fetishistic society, there cannot be a ‘class of consciousness’ which, as a creation of the functional categories of the commodity, is on an historical mission to do away with class society. The dynamic of market society is not the effect of the subjectivity of the exploiters up against the subjectivity of the exploited. The fact of the matter is that in commodity society the emergence of genuine social subjectivity is impossible. It is also, in the final analysis, the limit against which it will shatter. The automatic subject cannot manage to govern the dynamics that it has unleashed, and so it destroys the forms of subjectivity that previously existed.

4

The history and metaphysics of the commodity Metaphysics and ‘real contradictions’ If Marx favours the conceptual exposition of the logic of the commodity over a summary of its historical and empirical evolution, it is not for ‘methodological’ reasons (which for Marx do not exist separate from their content). Rather, it is because one of the distinguishing features of fetishistic capitalist society is that it has a ‘conceptual’ nature. Abstraction, embodied in money, does not derive from the concrete, but dominates it. The form becomes independent of the content and tries to completely rid itself of it. Marx’s conceptual analysis has hardly been understood and has frequently come under attack, yet it is the most adequate description of this dominance of form over content. Developing the whole of capitalism from the structure of the commodity, as well as from the necessity for private labour to represent itself as social labour, is not a ‘philosophical’ procedure which could be replaced by others that are perhaps more ‘efficient’. Rather, it reproduces the true structure of developed commodity society. Grasping the essential concepts of commodity society makes it possible to understand its mechanism without examining all its empirical details: The exact development of the concept of capital is necessary, since it is the fundamental concept of modern economics, just as capital itself, whose abstract, reflected image is its concept, the foundation of bourgeois society. The sharp formulation of the basic presuppositions of the relation must bring out all the contradictions of bourgeois production, as well as the boundary where it drives beyond itself. (Marx, 1973, p. 331)

As is the case in the Hegelian concept of being, the simple concept of the commodity and therefore of capital as well, already contain all successive

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developments within itself. Thus, they are not added from the outside: ‘The simple concept of capital has to contain its civilizing tendencies etc. in themselves; they must not, as in the economics books until now, appear merely as external consequences. Likewise the contradictions which are later released, demonstrated as already latent within it’ (Marx, 1973, p. 414, emphasis in original). On the other hand, ‘it is damned difficult for Messrs the economists to make the theoretical transition from the self-preservation of value in capital to its multiplication; and this in its fundamental character, not only as an accident or result’ (Marx, 1973, pp. 270–1). Whoever grasps the concept of capital also grasps its resulting evolution as its ‘later developments are already contained in the general concept of capital’ (Marx, 1973, p. 402). ‘Conceptually, competition is nothing other than the inner nature of capital’ (Marx, 1973, p. 414), because ‘the tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself ’ (Marx, 1973, p. 408). Once the basic categories are given, the entire evolution of capitalism, including its disappearance, is already programmed through the contradictions that follow these categories. The original contradiction between concrete labour and abstract labour, between use value and value, involves the emergence of new forms, which in turn prove to be contradictory, thus giving rise to other new forms and so on in an endless movement. The concept only develops through continual contradictions, of which Marx said: ‘We are the last to deny that capital contains contradictions. Our purpose, rather, is to develop them fully’ (Marx, 1973, p. 351, emphasis in original). For Marx, some things are contradictory in themselves, and as such their conceptual nature enters into contradiction with the material substratum in which this nature is embodied.1 The quantity of value, a quantity always determined and therefore limited, is in contradiction with its qualitative totality. ‘If gold and silver are general wealth, then, as certain quantities, they represent it only to a certain degree, i.e., inadequately’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 530).2 We have already seen that this contradiction is at the origin of capital’s impulse for continuous growth. Marx returns several times to the ‘contradiction’ that exists between the conceptual nature of value (and thus money) and its always imperfect realization. This contradiction is far from being only the consequence of the observer’s point of view: ‘The quantitative delimitation of exchange-value conflicts with its qualitative universality’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 365). Empirical



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reality in its entirety is inadequate when it comes to expressing the concept of value. As Marx says in the Short Outline: ‘The contradiction between the general characteristics of value and its material existence in a particular commodity, etc. – these general characteristics being the same as those later appearing in money – gives rise to the category of money’ (MECW, vol. 40, p. 301). This is why the contradictions which result from it are not static, but develop: ‘Money in its final, completed character now appears in all directions as a contradiction, a contradiction which dissolves itself, drives towards its own dissolution’ (Marx, 1973, p. 233) – after which Marx then goes on to list these contradictions. Nonetheless, Marx’s use of the Hegelian notions of ‘concept’ and ‘contradiction’ are not self-evident. It has aroused strong objections from his opponents and lukewarm defences from Marxists. One of Marx’s earliest critics, the economist L. von Bortkiewicz, had already written in 1906 that ‘we find in Marx the perverse desire to project logical contradictions onto the objects themselves, in the manner of Hegel’ (quoted in Rosdolsky, 1977, p. 119). Marx does not only highlight the contradictions he finds in the theories of political economy, but he also emphasizes the profoundly contradictory nature of capitalist society itself. Some interpreters have found this approach to be incompatible with materialist thought. A representation can be contradictory, but therefore, it can be replaced with a correct representation. But can a certain reality be contradictory? Marx clearly says yes: It goes without saying that the paradox of reality is also reflected in paradoxes of speech which are at variance with common sense and with what vulgarians mean and believe they are talking of. The contradictions which arise from the fact that on the basis of commodity production the labour of the individual presents itself as general social labour, and the relations of people as relations between things and as things – these contradictions are innate in the subject-matter, not in its verbal expressions. (MECW, vol. 32, p. 324)

In some key passages, the Marxian critique of political economy uses dialectical Hegelian logic – and not simply ‘ornamentally’ – with its simultaneous predication of qualities that are mutually exclusive but which refer to the same object. Whereas some triumphantly see in it proof of the ‘non-scientific’ character of Marx’s theory, others think they can free it from

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this ‘ballast’ in an attempt to save the ‘correct’ description it offers of empirical reality. Marx points out that capitalism is a fundamentally contradictory society, but unlike Hegel, he does not pretend that all reality is contradictory. His theory is the analysis of a determined social formation, that is, capitalism, with its specific features, and not an application of the general principles of a cosmology, an ontology or a philosophy of history to ‘special case’ capitalism.3 Marx himself warned of the danger of falling into a purely speculative argumentation, but called it an ‘appearance’. In a bracketed annotation to the Grundrisse, he writes that ‘it will be necessary later, before this question is dropped, to correct the idealist manner of the presentation, which makes it seem as if it were merely a matter of conceptual determinations and of the dialectic of these concepts. Above all in the case of the phrase: product (or activity) becomes commodity; commodity, exchange value; exchange value, money’ (Marx, 1973, p. 151). In the introduction to the Grundrisse, Marx evokes the ‘dialectic of the concepts productive force (means of production) and relation of production, a dialectic whose boundaries are to be determined, and which does not suspend the real difference’ (Marx, 1973, p. 109, emphasis in original). It is without doubt that some of Marx’s developments can appear to have an ‘idealistic’ or ‘metaphysical’ character. However, this is a consequence of the nature of the subject of his research: as a description of capitalism, it is Marx’s ‘metaphysical’ and conceptual description which is correct. It is from this point then that the full meaning of a Marxian statement is revealed which is truly amazing to everyday consciousness. It appeared in the first but not in the second edition of Capital: ‘What was decisively important, however, was to discover the inner, necessary connection between value-form, valuesubstance, and value-amount; i.e., expressed conceptually, to prove that the value form arises out of the value-concept’ (Marx, 1976b, p. 89, emphasis in original). In the appendix to the first edition we read: ‘Only through this general character does the value-form correspond to the concept of value (entspricht dem Wertbegriff ). The value-form had to be a form in which commodities appear for one another as a mere jelly of undifferentiated, homogenous human labour, i.e., as expressions in the form of things of the same labour-substance’ (Marx, 1978, pp. 146–7, emphasis in original). In his Modifications of the second edition, he writes that the ‘form of objectivity is included in the concept



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of value’ (Marx, 1987, p. 32, emphasis in original). What is singular in society based on commodity production is precisely the fact that it has a ‘metaphysical’ structure.4 Again the first edition of Capital further emphasizes this: Simple human labour (expenditure of human labour-power) is capable of receiving each and every determination, it is true, but is undetermined just in and for itself. It can only realize and objectify itself as soon as human labour-power is expended in a determined form, as determined and specified labour; because it is only determined and specified labour which can be confronted by some natural entity – an external material in which labour objectifies itself. It is only the ‘concept’ in Hegel’s sense that manages to objectify itself without external material’. (emphasis in original)

In connection with this, Marx quotes in a note a passage from Hegel’s Encyclopaedia: ‘The concept, which is only subjective at first, marches ahead in accordance with its own proper activity to objectify itself, without needing any external material or stuff for the purpose’ (Marx, 1976b, p. 20). Thus Marx suggests that abstract labour corresponds to the Hegelian concept. In abstract labour, the concept and the abstraction become real. Form effectively triumphs over content, over substance. Here the whole of reality is subject to something purely formal, completely devoid of content, such as abstract labour in its form of value. Capitalism is realized metaphysics, the true realism of concepts dreamed of by the scholastics.5 In Marx’s thought, many of the central concepts of the history of European philosophy reappear, especially that of substance and the eternal discussion between realists and nominalists,6 although here they undergo a completely unexpected transformation. It is not just a question of reinterpreting them in a ‘materialist’ way, but rather of demonstrating that these categories, precisely as idealistic categories, constitute an appropriate description of modern society.7 The young Marx criticized Hegel for transfiguring empirical reality by means of unjustified hypostases of logical concepts: Is it surprising that everything, in the final abstraction – for we have here an abstraction, and not an analysis – presents itself as a logical category? … If all that exists, all that lives on land, and under water, can be reduced by abstraction to a logical category – if the whole real world can be drowned thus in a world of abstractions, in the world of logical categories – who need be astonished at it? (MECW, vol. 6, p. 163)

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What Marx criticizes here is idealistic abstraction as ‘the reduction of all concrete things to a logical concept and the hypostasis of the latter in reality’ (as quoted by Krahl, 1971, p. 31). Later, while writing the Grundrisse and having ‘by chance’ re-read Hegel’s Logic, Marx did not resume this criticism of logical hypostases as ‘ideologies’, mere figments of the imagination. The critique of fetishism found in his mature work is more of a critique of real hypostases and of the effective reification of something completely abstract, that is, value. From here on in, Hegel’s logic constitutes in Marx’s eyes the unintentionally correct representation of a reality that is false. It seems to him to be the philosophical awareness – still purely philosophical – of the definitive victory of the commodity form within social reality. Thus, deducing the actual reality of capitalism from its ‘concept’ is not ‘idealism’, but a process that corresponds to the nature of the object of analysis. In his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx notes: ‘Comprehending does not consist, as Hegel imagines, in recognising the features of the logical concept everywhere, but in grasping the specific logic of the specific subject’ (MECW, vol. 3, p. 91, emphasis in original). The objectivity of value is neither purely mental nor physically present: this ‘figment’ can only be grasped with a very particular instrument, namely dialectical logic. In socialization through the commodity form, reality takes on forms that the human senses can no longer grasp and which are totally absurd from the point of view of ‘common sense’. Hegel makes this paradoxical world a constant of human and natural being. This was his mistake, and he even considered this ‘dialectical’ reality as a superior form of reality upon which he built an entire system. Yet this in no way alters the accuracy of his starting point. Even if it is true that in Hegel a mystical tendency was present from the beginning, this merely demonstrates that his mysticism of the concept is better placed to understand the real mysticism of a society where ‘4 = 5’8 than the reasoning of those seeking to attribute a rational character to this society that it does not have, and who want, like classical political economy, to rescue it from the ‘contradictions of immediate experience’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 421). It is not a question of reinterpreting Hegel’s9 metaphysical and anti-materialist process in a materialistic sense, but rather to see in it the description of the logic of value. The Hegelian negation of the finite which has its reality only in the infinite has a real basis: in socialization through value, the finite reality of



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use values finds its worth only as an objectification of the infinite formal ideal nature of value. Value ‘destroys’ reality much better than any sceptical epoché ever did.10 The dialectical description of the contradictions of capitalist socialization is not to put it bluntly the ‘false’ description of a ‘real’ situation, but rather it is the ‘real’ description of a ‘false’ situation, a ‘false reality’.11 The concept of ‘false reality’ naturally refers to Hegelian philosophy with its distinction between ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ and its identification of the ‘truth’ of a thing with its concept. Marx analyses capitalist reality to the extent that it corresponds to its own ‘concept’: ‘In a general analysis of the present kind, it is assumed throughout that actual [economic] conditions correspond to their concept’ (Marx, 1981, p. 225). He thus considers this reality in its pure forms, even if these are difficult to recognize as such and instead assume other phenomenal forms.12 At most, it is at the end of their development that these forms can correspond to their concept. For example, money corresponds to its concept only once it becomes universal money: ‘Just as in theory gold and silver as money are universal commodities, so world money is the appropriate form of existence of the universal commodity’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 383).

The real history of commodity society: Antiquity The further back one goes, the more difficult it is to distinguish the conceptual core in the phenomenal form. For example, it is not easy to recognize in the embryonic forms of capital and wage-labour that existed in the fifteenth century, or in antiquity, the pure forms that were to develop much later. This is the sense of Marx’s remark that ‘human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape’ (Marx, 1973, p. 105).13 This statement does not imply a universal teleology, but only means that the basic conceptual structure of capitalism must produce certain results, as soon as the necessary empirical historical evidence has been added. The birth of capitalism is therefore not ‘inevitable’ in a deterministic sense. But once it exists, its inner dynamic is increasingly subject to a linear trend, much more so than in previous societies. The ‘primitive accumulation of capital’, and thus the separation of the immediate producers with their means of production, was only able to produce capitalism

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once the corresponding ‘conceptual’ structure was already present, into which this process inserted itself. As such, this is not a question here of an a posteriori auxiliary hypothesis serving to explain the effective historical evolution for the already extant commodity form and money form. Thus money in its third determination (money as money) demands its self-expansion and it was simply waiting for what would translate its potentiality into action. The evolution of value is included in its concept,14 but not the fact of knowing where, when and if it must meet the conditions that make it a reality. Many of the events that were decisive in the emergence of capitalism, for example, the invention of machines that increase productivity, or the expropriation of entire sections of the population, had already taken place at other times in history. But they did not have the same consequences because they took place in a setting that was not yet in its capitalist form. In these societies, saving labour time through the use of machinery seemed a pointless alleviation of the fatigue of slaves – as in the ancient world – or a threat to social cohesion, as in feudal society. What was missing was the idea of accumulation through the growth of productive forces; it generally lacked any idea of progress or linear accumulation. Where self-reproduction is the goal of individuals, classes and societies, the cyclical conception of life and society predominates, and as such its abandonment is closely linked to the dissemination of value, whose sole aim is its own self-expansion. In other words, it was only in Europe, from the late Middle Ages onwards, that capitalism began to ‘coincide with its concept’. This concept already existed long before – not as a Platonic archetype, but as a value, one which was much older than capital. Pre-capitalist value was not self-reflexive and simply constituted a mediation between use values. Thus it could not constitute a relationship of social reproduction. Value only becomes capital once it becomes a self-reflexive and tautological relationship in such a way that the inherent contradiction in all commodity production becomes a dynamic contradiction ‘in process’. For many centuries, the commodity remained a ‘niche’ phenomenon, limited to circulation or an occasional exchange of products almost always obtained by direct appropriation (slavery, serfdom). It is only where ‘free’ wage-labour confronts capital that the commodity penetrates production, and then the whole of society, to such an extent that value transforms itself from an analytical category into a truly historical one. Large-scale commodity production without capital has never



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existed, and it is only where capital and wage-labour predominate that the commodity achieves its most developed cell form. Despite this, value and the commodity are not mere ‘presuppositions’, if by ‘presupposition’ of capitalist production we mean the fact that there is a product, or, more specifically, that there is a surplus product, or that there is a social group that appropriates this surplus. Presuppositions of this kind are the necessary but not sufficient conditions for the capitalist production of surplus value, as the latter does not inevitably follow from the former. Value, on the contrary, inevitably leads to surplus value, as soon as the necessary historical conditions are met. What were these necessary conditions? It is time to make a few extremely brief remarks on the real history of commodity society. The establishment of capitalism is not the fruit of divine providence, nor is it part of an alleged dialectic of the entirety of history that somehow led, with iron necessity, from ‘primitive communism’ via different class societies to the return of communism. Capitalism should rather be seen as a kind of historical incident, an absolute exception to the general run of human societies. In no case was it ever deliberately introduced by populations eager for ‘progress’. It is impossible to date the birth of the commodity, for specialized production destined for exchange already existed in certain prehistoric societies. Extensive trade flourished in the first great civilizations (Middle East, Egypt, China), and forms of money – metals, livestock or shells – were used as mediators between commodities. In cities one could also find artisans producing directly for ‘export’. But all this was just a more sophisticated form of barter within an essentially agricultural society based on slave labour and organized by a despotic state. Commodity prices did not depend on the value of labour, but on their rarity and the difficulty of transporting them. Such a situation cannot therefore be described in terms of markets and competition. A big change came with the appearance of the first coined currency. Such a fundamental event can be fairly precisely dated and located: it took place around 630 BC in the Greek cities of Ionia in Asia Minor. With coined currency there arises the possibility of moving on to what Marx calls the ‘third determination’ of money. This is achieved when the separation of buying and selling allows for the accumulation of money, as well as making this accumulation the real aim and whole purpose of commercial operations. In this form, money gave a great boost to commodity exchange. It became

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a characteristic element of urban Mediterranean culture that was to last about a millennium. Some cities such as Athens managed to make a living mainly from trade and crafts, importing agricultural products from faraway countries that they could no longer produce in sufficient quantities in their own limited territories. Yet this phenomenon should not be exaggerated. Commercial transactions and the people who lived from them were islands in a society that continued to rely on local self-sufficiency and subsistence economies. The volume of trade remained low. Surplus value was produced only at the level of circulation, that is, in commerce and usury, and as such no revolution in the mode of production took place throughout antiquity. With rare exceptions, slaves were not employed in mass production. Thus it was circulation which transformed products from non-commodity-based modes of production (small independent producers or slavery) into commodities and it had no impact on the sphere of production. Here it was a question of commodity exchange and not of commodity production. Capital existed in a latent state, since money, having reached its third determination, was ‘ready’ to be employed as capital – yet capital still lacked ‘free’ labour power that was ready to be employed with a wage. Thus it remained in the state of commercial and usury capital, and the accumulation of money was essentially used up in hoarding. Moreover, we see that it was not technological innovation that triggered a surge in ‘economic’ development. Inventions like the steam engine and the clock had already appeared in antiquity, but without giving rise to real practical applications. Money aroused the greatest mistrust when it first appeared in Greece. For the first time, the unlimited nature of money was being felt because it conferred an inordinate amount of power to those who managed to accumulate it. Indeed this was the birth of the ‘bourgeois’ subject, who exists not as a member of a community that sustains him, but as a ‘character mask’ of value and which in the name of accumulation treats the community, its members and the entire metabolism with nature as an external and abstract ‘object’ to be used for the purpose of valorization. Indebted peasants were falling into poverty, and the old patriarchal communities were imploding. Money was thus seen as a demonic force capable of destroying human existence, long-standing customs and religion – in short, as madness. An echo of this can be found in the famous lines from Sophocles’ play Antigone: ‘Of all vile things current on earth, none



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is so vile as money/for money opens wide the city-gates to ravishers/ it drives the citizens to exile/it perverts the honest mind to shamefulness/it teaches men to practise all forms of wickedness and impiety’ (Edith, 1962, trans. H. D. F. Kitto). A piece of metal had become more powerful than men and their traditions. The first well-known case of this appearance of the ‘invisible hand’ appeared in Attica at the beginning of the sixth century BC. The cultivation of olive trees was spreading – having become more profitable than that of wheat – thus endangering the existence of small farmers. Henceforth, the metabolism with nature obviously depended on its formal transformation into value. However, this decision was not made by a community institution. It was presented as the result of the preponderance of money, earned from the export of oil, over autarkic production that generated much less ‘value’. As we know, the ensuing serious social unrest led Athens to a ‘class compromise’, introduced by Solon, which allowed the city to progress on the path of value and become a perfect example of a pre-Renaissance society based on the commodity (within the limits that we have described, and – signally – in a city of only about 50,000 inhabitants). But even Athenian society was not based on the atomized individual, bound to other citizens solely by money. It was still a form of community, where, as Rousseau says, the relationship between individuals and the community was similar to the relationship between fingers and the hand. In Sparta, on the contrary, it was decided to defend the community by limiting money to its function as a means of circulation – which was accepted – so as to prevent its transformation into a goal in itself. Individuals were forbidden to possess gold and so Spartans used iron bars as a means of circulation and because of their low value, large quantities were needed to represent even modest sums, which made it difficult to accumulate. If the economic development of value during antiquity remained limited, the corresponding forms of consciousness, on the other hand, experienced a great leap forward, resulting in formulations that are still valid today, above all in philosophy. For example, concepts such as form, substance, accident, matter, concept, universal and particular are related to the development and dissemination of the commodity form. Thus, there seems to be a link between the beginnings of European philosophical thought, which elaborated the first universal ideas, and the appearance of money. These two phenomena took place at the same time and in the same place: in Ionia at the end of the seventh

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century BC. This period was also characterized by a great expansion of trade, the appearance of ‘tyranny’ as a political form distinct from the old aristocratic domination, the spread of writing, as well as other elements of ‘rationalization’ such as the introduction of standardized weights and measures.15 Money represented the same abstraction in relation to social activity as the concept in relation to thought. The very conception of an individual subject that remains identical to itself in the face of a changing external world, upon which the subject can act, developed alongside the existence of value. Here, the individual experiences a non-empirical substance that remains identical by passing through various manifestations or ‘incarnations’. In money, this abstraction becomes ‘real’ in everyday life.16 For the first time in history, the dissolution of ancient communities by money gave rise to the ‘individual’ who perceives himself as different from the community and whose actions are not totally dictated by tradition. The ‘individualism’ of Athens and the ‘collectivism’ of Sparta thus corresponded to the different roles money played at the time. Finally, with the circulation of commodities, where participants must formally recognize each other as free and equal, we also find the emergence of egalitarian law and democracy. ‘Pure science’, already highly developed among the Greeks, is a form that ‘disregards’ all content, in exactly the same way as value does. For example, Egyptian geometry remained, even at a high level, an application of empirical rules to the concrete case – a kind of land surveying. Greek mathematics, on the contrary, formulated abstract and universal rules: it formulated Pythagoras’ theorem which the Egyptians used without ever having theorized it.17 Greek philosophical thought, while promoting the elaboration of universal and abstract categories, at the same time formulated the resistance against the ‘upside-down world’ that these categories expressed. Plato, on the one hand, elaborated the concept, which is the ‘general equivalent’ in the realm of thought. On the other hand, he conjured up the utopia of an archaic community where, as in Sparta, money was only to be used to circulate commodities – which were nevertheless envisaged in his ideal city – without ever becoming an end in itself. Aristotle, for his part, indicated with great precision the difference between ‘natural’ wealth, intended to satisfy ‘domestic’ needs, and ‘chrematistics’, the unlimited and irrational acquisition of money (Aristotle, 2012, pp. 8–9).



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These historical comparisons show – with regard to categories such as personal identity, the subject opposed to the objective world and the quality/ quantity pairing – that it is not necessary to accept them as ontological or anthropological givens after the manner of Kant, nor to explain their genesis as a simple fact of experience, after the manner of Hume. Rather, it should be recognized that these categories are related to a specific society, within which they have an effective objective validity. This historically simultaneous appearance of abstract value in the fields of material reproduction, thought, mentality, politics and so on is reason enough to refute any ontologized distinction between an economic ‘base’ and a derived cultural ‘superstructure’.

The real history of commodity society: Modern times As we know, the development of the commodity and money suffered a decline at the end of antiquity which was to last about a thousand years and cause a return to local subsistence economies that functioned almost completely without money. Nevertheless, it was during this period, and especially from the thirteenth century onwards, that the foundations were laid for a unique event in the history of mankind; the birth of capitalism. It was first of all in monasteries that little by little some of this system’s indispensable assumptions were created. In monastic life, labour was a Christian duty to be carried out voluntarily as atonement for sins and mortification of the flesh. It was no longer, as in pre-Christian morality, a necessary evil to achieve a certain goal, which if possible one would delegate to others. For the first time, labour was given a moral significance – typically as suffering! In the monasteries, labour was accompanied by a regular organization of time. This was part of the larger phenomenon of the introduction of ‘abstract time’, visible also in the invention and dissemination of clocks. According to Moishe Postone, ‘concrete time’ is distinct from ‘abstract time’. Concrete time is a ‘dependent variable’ that exists in relation to concrete events, and it may have qualitative determinations such as good time and bad time, sacred time and profane time.18 Abstract time is an ‘independent variable’, meaning a setting in which events take place and which knows only quantitative determinations. Only in Western Europe from the fourteenth century onwards did abstract time develop. Henceforth, nothing

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had its own time anymore, because everything was the time of capital. Labour had just been separated in space and in time from all other activities. This first occurred in the regions where massive recourse was made to wage-labour, especially in Flanders and in Northern Italy in the fourteenth century. Here innovations such as workplace lighting to allow work outside of daylight were introduced – one of the first anticipations of the upheavals wrought by abstract labour in all lifestyles. Yet despite all this, it is likely that the commodity and money would never have progressed in small steps towards capitalism. It took the real big bang of modernity for this to happen – the introduction of firearms. It was not a productive but a destructive force that gave birth to capitalism, as noted by Robert Kurz (1999a, p. 16). After the spread of firearms, the feudal vassal or the bourgeois of the city could no longer wage war with their own weapons. Henceforth, the nascent territorial states now competed with each other to acquire firearms, especially cannons, as well as in the construction of increasingly sophisticated fortresses. Both had to be paid in money as well as professional soldiers – the mercenaries – into whose hands the conduct of war had quickly passed. Soldiers,19 as the name already suggests, were even the first example of ‘professionals’ who lived entirely for and from their pay and who were indifferent to the content of their work. In other words, they were not fighting for their sovereign or for their city, but for their wage. Soon the old feudal contributions and tithes were no longer sufficient for states, and so they levied more and more taxes in money, the sum of which, unlike in-kind contributions, had no natural limit. Peasants and craftsmen had to get used to producing directly for a monetary return, and therefore for anonymous markets. Coined currency thus began, much more than in antiquity, to penetrate deeper into society, dissolving local agriculture – not, of course, by a choice of the producers, but by the insatiable thirst for money prompted in states by the military competition from which they could not escape. Soon, the monetary economy was no longer limited to imposing heavy financial burdens on the traditional economy. The first capitalist entrepreneurs, but above all states themselves, began to organize manufacturing and plantations in the colonies. These were the first places that produced for anonymous world markets. In the beginning, these companies almost exclusively operated with forced labour, because it was impossible to find enough ‘free’ workers



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willing to let themselves be paid. Thus, it was from inside insane asylums and prisons that modern labour was born in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whereas a concrete goal, however bad it is, cancels itself out when it is achieved, here for the first time appeared the continuous and unlimited transformation of money into more money. It was not only military spending that multiplied, but also the entire share of the social product levied by the state, which increased enormously at the beginning of modernization. For the great mass of the population, this meant nothing but misery. Various studies have shown that the real wealth of a craftsman, measured by the amount of grain at his disposal, peaked in the fifteenth century. Living conditions deteriorated rapidly with the spread of the capitalist mode of production, falling to their lowest point in the seventeenth century. Thus workers had to work up to a hundred times more than two centuries previously to obtain the same amount of grain. Consequently, it took more than 400 years of capitalism to return to a medieval standard of living by the end of the nineteenth century (see, e.g., Braudel, 1992). As evidenced in Capital Part Eight: So-Called Primitive Accumulation, as well as in numerous other studies, the horrors and violence that accompanied the emergence of capitalist modernity and its presupposition – the existence of a class of ‘free’ workers – are well-known. These workers were former small producers who had been driven off their land and deprived of their former rights to hunt, fish and gather timber, forcing them to sell the only thing they had left, their labour power. Here, it is important to quickly highlight three important aspects. Firstly, it is clear that capitalism was not the result of a peaceful growth of markets, accepted by everyone because it brought about general well-being. State violence has always been a constituent element in the creation of the conditions necessary for the action of the ‘invisible hand’. Secondly, commodity society’s second launch went hand in hand, like the first in antiquity, with a revolution in the forms of consciousness. The birth of modern science and the quantitative conception of nature in the seventeenth century are closely linked to the incursion of abstract value into material exchanges and abstract time in social life, without being able to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between these phenomena. They were in fact articulations of the same ‘total social form’ in a nascent state. The same quantity without quality imposed by money was also imposed in Galileo’s conception

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of nature: just as the logic of value reduces every object to a quantity of value, Galileo dissolved all natural quality in spatial extension alone. With Newton’s physics, only the force of gravitation was supposed to rule the universe, just as the world was beginning to unite under the government of one force: value. Finally, it should be noted that from the Renaissance onwards, almost all thought unconditionally sung the praises of labour and the transformation of the world through work, as well as the necessary virtues corresponding to this purpose. The long period between the appearance of the capitalist form at the end of the Middle Ages and the take-off of industrial capitalism at the end of the eighteenth century saw not only the expropriation of direct producers, but also a gigantic effort to discipline ‘human material’ and make it internalize the demands of labour, by triumphing over resistance of all kinds. While literature has left some evidence of this resistance, thinkers and philosophers have preached in chorus the moral duty of man’s adaptation to the ‘beautiful machine’ as the English ‘utilitarian’ philosopher Jeremy Bentham called it (1748–1832). Hobbes, Rousseau (who wrote: ‘Every idle citizen is a rascal’) and Kant were, despite all their differences, the thinkers of a new type of submission: no longer to a lord in flesh and blood, nor to a God, but to the new fetish, the impersonal mechanism, in its aspects of ‘reason’, ‘general will’, ‘progress’ and ‘state’. Enlightenment reason was also a transfiguration of the irrationality of valorization, and if Marxism has remained a ‘dissident of liberalism’, it is above all because of its glorification of labour. As far as the history of industrial capitalism is concerned, we need just to touch upon a few points that are often neglected. Emerging first in England, industrial capitalism in its purest form quickly led to a real destruction of society (see K. Polanyi’s studies cited in the next chapter). It descended into crisis as soon as it was freed from the last legal obstacles to the unlimited exploitation of people and resources. As such, after 1830, it had to accept restrictions including the first factory legislation as well as limitations on the working day. The dystopia of a total market economy that is completely autonomous from society demonstrated after centuries of preparation by Hobbes, Mandeville, Locke, Kant and Smith, and its codification in classical liberalism, that it was completely unfeasible and that it led to the consequence proclaimed by hardline liberals like Thomas Malthus (1766–1834): let the poor starve to death, as more will always be born. At its first attempt at full realization, commodity



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society engendered unprecedented misery and degradation. The result was the threat of civil war and exhaustion of its own economic dynamics. Since then, capitalism has developed only by continually suspending its own logic and by controlling the economy by means of the state. We have already said that capitalism’s mad scramble, always looking for ways to block the fall of the mass of value, led to Fordist democracy after the crisis of the interwar period, from the 1929 crash to the Second World War. In turn, Fordism entered definitively into crisis with the microchip revolution. In the nineteenth century, following England, the first great countries to build industrial capitalism were France and the United States and then Germany. However, another fact soon became clear: the market economy was not – as the official version still has it today – the appropriate ‘model’ that simply needs to be applied in every country so as to reap its rewards. On the contrary, every national market economy is, from the outset, part of a global economy strongly determined by competition. England long retained its advantage as the first nation to flood world markets with its commodities. Subsequently, other national economies had to reckon with a level of productivity established by the already industrialized nations. It was therefore necessary for them to invest in infrastructure and fixed capital, even before they could start producing, so as to compete with the most developed countries. In other words, these countries had a gap to close, which was all the greater having entered competition late. Thus Japan and Italy were the last countries to make it to the group at the ‘top’. In the twentieth century, it became impossible to establish the capitalist mode of production in a country without its economy being immediately shaken by the influx of cheap goods from already industrialized countries. In this situation, the only possibility of taking part in ‘modernity’ – and not in a completely subordinate way – was through forced self-sufficiency: a space protected from all external competition was to allow the development of a local capitalism. Indeed this was what happened in Russia, China and many countries on the capitalist periphery.20 The ‘construction of socialism’ in Russia was neither an attempt – ultimately destined to failure – to build an emancipated society (as claimed by its proponents), nor the insane ambition to realize an ideological utopia (as its bourgeois critics wanted to believe), nor even a revolution ‘betrayed’ by the new parasitic bureaucracy (as its ‘leftist’ critics proclaimed). It was above all a ‘catch-up modernization’ in a backward

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country. Not only were the commodity, money, value and abstract labour not abolished there, but the goal was to develop them to Western levels by suspending the free market. The commodity economy was not superseded, but was to be led by ‘politics’. A kind of ‘primitive accumulation’ was repeated in Russia, involving the forced transformation of tens of millions of peasants into factory workers and the spread of a mentality adapted to abstract labour. The resources of society were channelled into the construction of infrastructure and heavy industry to a degree that a private economy could never have achieved. Foreign trade was reduced to a minimum – to the point of autarky – which allowed this huge country to develop an industry that would have disappeared instantly if it had had to withstand global competition. In the beginning, the successes were indeed remarkable, and within a short time the Soviet Union had become the world’s second largest industrial power. ‘Western democracies’ were horrified by the methods by which this had been achieved. In truth, they should have seen it merely as a summary of the horrors of their own past. Backward Russia had repeated in just a few years that which had taken centuries in the West. Indeed, as we have just remarked, the installation of the ‘free’ market economy in the West had also been achieved with state terrorism, forced labour, militarism, the destruction of traditions, the reduction of peasants to the state of famine and the suppression of individual freedoms. The so-called ‘free’ West should have recognized in the Eastern countries a reflection of its own origins – even if neither side wanted to admit this fact. The initial successes of the USSR encouraged many other countries to try to follow the same path to integrate into a position of strength in the world economy. This was initially the case with China, while many Third World countries tried to combine the state approach with varying yet substantial doses of the market. The more the development of the world market advanced, the more the country in question lagged behind according to capitalist criteria, and the more its methods became violent or even delusional. Socialist ideology was nothing but a paradoxical justification for introducing capitalist categories more quickly into countries where they were still largely absent. Instead of ‘emancipating’ the proletariat, the proletariat had first to be created ex nihilo. But in the history of Western capitalism, phases marked by strong state intervention have always alternated with phases in which the ‘pure’ market predominated. In the East, this alternation did not take place, and after having



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succeeded in establishing basic industries, state capitalism begun to run idle and to lag behind the economic and technological developments in the West again. Yet the existence of a large protected market (COMECON) allowed the survival of many industries that would have had no chance of success on world markets. This made it possible to maintain a sufficient standard of living to maintain a minimum consensus – and nothing more. ‘Real existing socialism’ was never an ‘alternative’ to commodity society, but a dead branch of it, a footnote in its history. Indeed, it could not overcome its fundamental contradiction and so it sought to consciously regulate the self-movement of value and money, which by nature is blind. Thus, it was a society based on the commodity and on value that had at the same time abolished the competition that in a commodity society adapts production to social needs. This was, in the final analysis, the cause of all the failures of the Soviet economy. What resulted was production without regard to quality or needs, a great difficulty to get resources to where they were needed, poor work performance and so on. Finally, the ‘microchip revolution’ and ‘financialization’ in the West from the 1970s onwards made the gulf between East and West insurmountable. The Soviet economy was by no means able to keep up with these innovations and soon felt the consequences in terms of military competition with the United States. We all know the rest of the story. But contrary to what the victors thought, the downfall of Eastern-bloc countries did not mean the definitive victory of Western capitalism. On the contrary, it constitutes a new stage in the global crisis of commodity society. Another link in the chain has broken. A global economy based on competition necessarily produces winners and losers, and the distance between them quickly becomes impassable when every new technological invention goes to the advantage of those who allow its introduction. During the period of Fordist prosperity, the growth of world markets gave even ‘developing’ countries the opportunity to find a few niches for their products and to believe that ‘catch-up’ modernization was possible. The crisis that began in the 1960s dissipated these illusions. One after another, many countries fell behind. Moreover, countries that had relied on the private market generally did not fare any better. The problem was not the system they chose, nor could everything be explained by the effects of colonialism or unfair exchanges. In a global economy based on value and competition, there will always be a majority of losers. After

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dashing Third World hopes, cannibalized competition swept over Easternbloc countries like wildfire. The hope that their populations would reach prosperity by copying the West was quickly disappointed. They discovered that Western capitalism itself was taking on water from all sides and had neither the strength nor the will to invest massively in their countries, nor to welcome their commodities or their labour power.

Critique of progress, the economy and the subject Nevertheless, this triumphant march of value during the second half of the second millennium did not take place without encountering resistance from populations whose intolerable living conditions were continually worsening. While the participants of the workers’ movement who were born in the first half of the nineteenth century had already accepted their existence as factory workers, whose conditions they only wanted to improve, previous revolts were mainly directed against the attempt itself to transform the popular masses into ‘workers’. Their participants advocated the idea of a ‘good life’, which for them meant maintaining their present living conditions, or at least those of the recent past which they knew to be much better than what awaited them in the factories. These included the peasant revolts that followed the Middle Ages, the ‘Luddite’ movement in England, known for its destruction of machinery in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and the ‘Carlist’ movement in the Spanish countryside in the middle of the same century, as well as numerous revolts in non-European countries up to the present day (e.g. the Canudos in Brazil).21 Their ideology was often muddled, such as when the Carlists defended certain dynastic claims and even the Inquisition. But the almost unanimous condemnation that these revolts prompted in both bourgeois and Marxist historiography, and even in the reactionary critique of progress, shows the extent to which these different interpretations are all part of the same progressive liberalism that could do nothing other than reject everything opposed to the spread of the fetishes of labour and productivity. In reality, there were good reasons for these revolts, for example, the Carlist peasants opposed the laws of the liberal bourgeoisie, laws which allowed the latter to buy the land that until then each village had owned collectively. The strange



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alliances that these movements sometimes formed to their own cost with the church or other reactionary forces are better understood if we consider that the victories of the liberal bourgeoisie, to which the Left has always felt to be a successor, were concerned with problems that were of no importance in the eyes of the masses: freedom of the press, national unity and freedom of worship. On the other hand, these victories led to a strong acceleration of the forced integration of the masses into the society of labour. One need only think of the fact that one of the first acts of the French Revolution was the abolition of several public holidays, which was then followed by the banning of ‘workers’ coalitions’. The ‘freedom’ that the new bourgeoisies so ardently defended was first and foremost the unlimited freedom to buy and sell. The abolition of the many legal restrictions, of feudal origin, on the sale of land, on the employment of workers and so on, had catastrophic effects, especially in the countryside. Traditional Marxism has always proclaimed itself the heir of the liberal bourgeoisie, unconditionally approving the destruction of the old society by this bourgeoisie. It simply criticized it for abandoning this path whose pursuit was now the responsibility of the proletariat. What exactly was Marx’s position in this regard? It is undeniable that, while he was aware of the horrors of capitalist progress, he believed in the ‘civilizing mission of capital’. A ‘romantic’ critique of progress cannot therefore claim to have its roots in his work.22 But it must first be observed that there is no necessary relationship between his critique of value and his appreciation of the historical role of capital, where much Hegelian teleology lies. The logical and historical analysis of value demonstrates why ancient communities disappeared; it does not follow that this disappearance should be welcomed or that belief in some ‘cunning of reason’ should be an article of faith guaranteeing that this disappearance is merely an inevitable but transitory moment in the march towards a better society. We are once again dealing with the difference between the ‘esoteric’ Marx with his ‘negative’ critique of commodity socialization and the ‘exoteric’ Marx, the successor of liberalism. But even in his explicit assertions, Marx does not always show himself to be very convinced by progressive mythology. There are almost no Marxian remarks on pre-modern revolts such as that of the Luddites, whose existence was quickly lost to living memory.23 But in one of his last writings, he takes

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a clear stance against the assertion – which later passed as ‘Marxist’ – that all countries must undergo full capitalist development before they can access communism. In his letter of 1881 to the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich, and in the drafts of this letter, Marx makes some very interesting observations on the traditional Russian village, still extant at that time, and on its collective land ownership practices: ‘The special study that I have made of it … has convinced me that this commune is the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia’ (MECW, vol. 24, p. 371). He states that the Russian rural commune ‘can become a direct point of departure for the economic system towards which modern society tends … it can gain possession of the fruits with which capitalist production has enriched mankind, without passing through the capitalist regime’ (MECW, vol. 24, p. 354), and that ‘everyone would recognise in it the element of regeneration of Russian society and an element of superiority over the countries still enslaved by the capitalist regime’ (MECW, vol. 24, p. 349), especially since this community finds capitalism ‘in a crisis which will only end in its elimination, in the return of modern societies to the “archaic” type of communal property … So we must not let ourselves to be alarmed at the word “archaic” ’ (MECW, vol. 24, p. 350). In his brief historical typology of the different forms of archaic community, Marx points out that they can go beyond blood kinship as a basis (MECW, vol. 24, p. 350) and that they can offer, at least in their more differentiated forms, ‘a development of individuality’ (MECW, vol. 24, p. 351). This individuality does not necessarily imply that private property outweighs the collective element, even if this risk does exist (MECW, vol. 24, pp. 351–2). At the end of his life, Marx was convinced that Russia was one of the first candidates for revolution, although he had quite different ideas about the function of that revolution from those who were to later make it. ‘To save the Russian commune’ said Marx, ‘a Russian revolution is needed’ (MECW, vol. 24, p. 357).

Critique of the economy in general Marx’s ‘critique of political economy’ is not only a critique of bourgeois economic doctrines, but is also a critique of the existence of the ‘economy’ itself. Nowhere in Marx does the word ‘economy’ have a positive meaning,



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nor does he ever refer to his theory as an ‘economic doctrine’ or anything of the like.24 At first sight, this seems to contradict the fact that Marxian theory is supposed to be based precisely on this category. Representatives of ‘historical materialism’ have constantly repeated that material being determines consciousness and that the ‘economy’ is the ‘basis’ of all other aspects of social life. They proclaimed that the subordination of men to their own products was a courageous truth that must be highlighted against the bourgeois idealist transfiguration of reality. But the inversion between the means and the end is characteristic of capitalist society, where content is subordinated to form. It makes no sense to transform this negative fact – which represents a state of alienation because sociality is unconscious of itself – into a positive one. Marx analyses capitalism through labour and the economy, but in doing so he does not talk about human society in general. He points out, of course, that even pre-capitalist societies had first and foremost to ensure their vital needs, and that the way in which they did so determined their other social forms (Marx, 1976a, p. 175). But Marx does not want to say that the organization of the satisfaction of needs in a separate sphere (the ‘economy’, with its own rules that it imposes on all other social spheres) is an ontological and always valid fact. Leaving aside the evidence that humans must first eat, clothe themselves and so on, the pre-eminence of the ‘economy’, even in the broadest sense, is anything but obvious in pre-capitalist societies. In many circumstances, other criteria take precedence over ‘economic’ criteria: examples include the traditional holiday, squandering by the nobility and the frequent occasions in history when a society has given up introducing labour-saving technical inventions. Thus ‘historical materialism’ – whose codification is not the work of Marx – is appropriate only as an analysis of capitalism: in capitalism, material production is not only the basis of society, but also its autonomous organizing principle, its principle of social synthesis. Indeed from the point of view of value criticism, the whole distinction between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, the pivot of historical materialism, proves to be of little use, especially with regard to non-capitalist realities. Traditional Marxism has often tried to soften the rigidity of this distinction with the concept of ‘reciprocal action’ between the economic base and the cultural, legal and religious superstructure. However, reciprocal action presupposes the existence of separate factors which must be brought together a posteriori and

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externally. Thus, it seems much more promising to explore ‘total form’ and to explain the simultaneous emergence, in a given context, of subject and object, base and superstructure, being and thought, material and immaterial praxis. It is necessary to question the social praxis that has been divided into these poles. The further back in history we go, the less sense it makes to distinguish between ‘material’ and ‘ideal’ factors. Potlatch, for example (to which we will return), was simultaneously a form of product circulation, a modality for the creation and confirmation of the social hierarchy, a religious ritual, a game and so on. The separation between ‘utility’ and other factors was unknown, and it was impossible to identify it as a separate sphere of the ‘economy’. The ‘economy’ based on ‘value’ is the modern form of fetishism. Every society is based on the appropriation of nature, but this is not yet an ‘economy’ as such. This appropriation always goes through a process of presupposed and unconscious symbolic codification, which may be religion in one case and value in another. In modern society, value is both the form of thought and action, without it being possible to deduce one from the other. Rather than about class struggle, history thus turns out to be a history of fetishes. The class struggle, as a dynamic structure, can only exist in capitalism, since the social antagonisms of previous societies were largely static. It is only value that creates the dynamic in social antagonisms, transforming them into class struggles. Inbreeding, totemism, land ownership and value can be considered as stages in the process in which the human detaches itself from nature, becoming a relatively conscious subject with regard to first nature, but not yet with regard to second nature, which is his own self-created social connection.25 The basic foundations of all of these societies are constituted unconsciously. When they talk about these societies, structuralist theory and system theory would be partly right if they did not consider the absence of a human subject as a timeless constant. The subject exists, but at present it is not humankind who is the subject, but rather it is its product. The human subject is not a fiction, but up to now it has never existed in a complete form either. Perhaps this form is currently in the making. There is no need to resort to conspiracy theories to explain how the ruling classes have for millennia been able to impose a system of exploitation on the majority of people. It is fetishistic relations that have thus far created the relations of production and with them the corresponding forms of consciousness. We have repeatedly



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rejected the assertion that ‘behind’ the fetishistic relationships of things are ‘true’ human relationships. It could be objected that the Marxian critique of fetishism pinpoints as false the appearance of a self-movement of (economic) things. What then do we mean by the critique of the usual interpretation of fetishism? Of course, it is obvious that, in the final analysis, human beings are the creators of their products. ‘Behind’ the commodity as a fetishized form of objectivity is, at the material level, the human being – however, not the human as a conscious subject who controls its own sociality, but the fetishistic human. The creator of fetishism is a human being who is subject only to nature, but not to its own sociality. This is why the theory of fetishism must be understood as a theory of the historical emergence of the subject and the object in forms that are alienated from the very beginning. Transcending fetishism cannot therefore mean restoring predicates to a subject that already exists in itself and whose essence has been alienated. Rather, it means creating the conscious, non-fetish subject and appropriating all that has been produced in fetish form. The modern fetishism which consists in the existence of the commodity and of value can be overcome, but as long as they continue to exist, humans will effectively remain dominated by their own products. One can then imagine a materialistic and critical research programme that analyses history as a history of fetishism, where ‘material’ and ‘ideal’ (or ‘symbolic’) factors are always intertwined. In fact Marx is basically doing something similar when he conceives of his critique of the value-fetish as a direct continuation of the critique of religion. He repeatedly emphasizes the similarities between their structures, which are always based on ‘inversion’. He does so in his aforementioned early notes on Mill as well as in a passage of Capital where he says that ‘for a society of commodity producers … Christianity with its religious cult of man in the abstract, more particularly in its bourgeois development, i.e., in Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religion’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 172). In another passage, he writes: ‘It cannot be otherwise in a mode of production in which the worker exists to satisfy the need of the existing values for valorisation, as opposed to the inverse situation, in which objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development. Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 772).

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Fetishism and anthropology Value as projection Marx already made use of the concept of fetishism in one of his earliest works. In the article ‘Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood’, published in the Rheinische Zeitung in October 1842, he stigmatized the fanatical zeal with which Prussian legislators wanted to prohibit the poor from gathering wood as well as hunting hares in forests. He ends with these words: The savages of Cuba regarded gold as a fetish of the Spaniards. They celebrated a feast in its honour, sang in a circle around it and then threw it into the sea. If the Cuban savages had been present at the sitting of the Rhine Province Assembly, would they not have regarded wood as the Rhinelanders’ fetish? But a subsequent sitting would have taught them that the worship of animals is connected with this fetishism, and they would have thrown the hares into the sea in order to save the human being. (MECW, vol. 1, pp. 262–3, emphasis in original)

Of course, Marx is merely using irony here, but it should be noted nonetheless that the ethnological concept of fetishism as well as its application to the life of modern society was present in Marx’s work from the very beginning. It should also be mentioned that the young Hegel, in his early manuscripts, proposed to liberate religion from the ‘fetishistic worship’ (Hegel, 1984, pp. 30–58). Naturally, Hegel was referring here to something quite different to Marx. Nevertheless, the young Hegel as much as the young Marx wanted to return to humanity its forces which had been projected and alienated and this starting point existed for them long before they elaborated their theories on fetishism or alienation. We have established that fetishism is a form of ‘inversion’. If value ‘inverts’ social activity, then it is, so to speak, a ‘projection’ of that activity. In other

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words it is attributed to the objects themselves. Marx describes value, as we have seen, as ‘something simply posited’ (MECW, vol. 31, p. 30) and as a ‘chimera’1 (Marx, 1976b, p. 20). To private producers, the social universality of their own labour appears as an ‘in itself ’ of the products, an objectified quality that belongs to them. In truth, the form of objectivity exists only ‘for’ the producers, not ‘in itself ’. As Marx himself says: ‘The relationships of the private workers to the totality of social labour objectify themselves over against them and exist, consequently, for them in the forms of objects’ (Marx, 1976b, p. 37). ‘For them’, says Marx, and not ‘in itself ’, as R. Kurz (1987, p. 99) notes. ‘Human labour-power in its fluid state, or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value. It becomes value in its coagulated state, in objective form’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 142). Similar formulas come up several times in Marx’s work. The almost always forgotten fact that this is a paradox does not escape him. How is it possible for a process or an activity to ‘coagulate’? Once the productive process – the ‘labour’ – has been expended, it no longer exists. To say that the carpenter’s labour is ‘in’ the table is in truth pure fiction, a social convention. No chemical analysis of the table can find in it the ‘labour’ that created it. After its production, if the table is still being considered as an expression of something that has ceased to exist, this is simply because it is a human projection. The ‘law of value’ is considered a fetish because it signifies that the whole of society bestows an imaginary quality upon objects. As such, believing that commodities ‘contain’ labour is a fiction accepted by all members of commodity society. In no way is this alleged ‘law’ a natural basis that fetishism conceals, as traditional Marxism would have it, but is itself a fetish, a modern totemism. The objectivity of value is also to be considered as a ‘projection’ in the anthropological sense. In a certain way, the concept of the fetishism of commodities enters into the anthropological concept of fetishism or ‘totemism’. The ‘totem’ of modern society is value, and the social power that is projected onto this totem is labour, as a fundamental human activity in commodity-producing society. ‘Primitive’ societies often believe in the existence of a phenomenon called ‘mana’ after the name of one of its first forms which was observed in Melanesia. Mana is an immaterial, supernatural and impersonal force, a kind of invisible ‘fluid’ or ‘aura’. It is concentrated in certain people and things and can be transmitted to other objects. If mana is treated improperly, it can provoke negative consequences, and thus mana is



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linked to ‘taboo’. What is striking are not only the similarities – highlighted by Marx himself – between value and religion, where man is always dominated by his own products, but also the parallels between value and mana, between capital and the totem. Consequently, this is yet another confirmation of the Marxian assertion that capitalism is still part of human ‘prehistory’. The concept of ‘projection’, understood as the unconscious projection of an individual or collective ‘power’ on an autonomous external element, on which man then believes he is dependent, makes it possible to establish a relationship between the fetishism instanced by anthropology, commodity fetishism and the concept of fetishism used in psychoanalytic theory. It is thus possible to affirm that the theories of Marx, Durkheim and Freud present objective similarities.2 The first ethnographic descriptions of fetishism, totemism and mana date from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But it was only from the late nineteenth century onwards that nascent cultural anthropology sought to use these categories to provide a general explanation of religious and symbolic thought. The most accomplished attempt in this direction is to be found in Emile Durkheim, especially in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912).3 Durkheim analyses the totemism of Indigenous Australians, as they were considered to exist at the lowest level of human cultural evolution. Thus, according to Durkheim, their religion represents a kind of original cell form of all religious experience, a cell that can be compared with the religion of ‘evolved’ peoples in order to arrive at general conclusions about human culture and its constants. In this perspective, religion appears neither as a ‘truth’ nor as mere illusion. All religions, superior and ‘primitive’, as well as magic, form the vast field of the ‘sacred’. But these different forms of the ‘divine’, which still have their roots in mana, are simply projections of the power of the community over an external object. In the idea of God, society divinizes itself as well as its own forces; society, in its absolute transcendence in relation to the individual, is for its members what a god is for its worshippers. The sacred therefore has a social origin: ‘Thus one positive conclusion arises from this critical examination. Since, in themselves, neither man nor nature is inherently sacred, both acquire sacredness elsewhere. Beyond the human individual and the natural world, then, there must be some other reality in relation to which this species of delirium that every religion is, in some sense, takes on meaning and objective

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significance’ (Durkheim, 1995, p. 85). Each manifestation of the sacred is only the expression of a ‘force’: At the origin and basis of religious thought, we find not definite and distinct objects or beings that in themselves possess sacredness but indefinite powers and anonymous forces. They are more or less numerous in different societies (sometimes, indeed, they are only one force), and their impersonality is exactly comparable to that of the physical forces whose manifestations are studied by the sciences of nature. Turning to particular sacred things, those are but individualized forms of this basic principle … This is so because that force can attach to words spoken and gestures made, as well as to material substances. (Durkheim, 1995, p. 202)

Among Indigenous Australian tribes, objects are always, so to speak, ‘sensible-suprasensible’. Each individual participates by way of the nature their totemic animal and ‘thus, each individual has a dual nature: Two beings coexist in him, a man and an animal’ (Durkheim, 1995, p. 134). Animals also possess the same double nature which ‘is particularly evident among the Haida. According to Swanton, every animal has two aspects. From one point of view, it is an ordinary creature that can be hunted and eaten, but at the same time, it is a supernatural being with the outward form of an animal, and to which man is subject’ (Durkheim, 1995, p. 145). Indeed, it is the projection that prevails over the empirical reality of the object: ‘All kinds of figures representing the totem are surrounded with a markedly greater respect than the being itself, whose form the figures imitate … the images of the totemic being are more sacred than the totemic being itself ’ (Durkheim, 1995, pp. 132–3, emphasis in original). But what does man project onto objects, giving them a supernatural status? Here Durkheim touches on the essential question: [The totem] expresses and symbolizes two different kinds of things. From one point of view, it is the outward and visible form of what I have called the totemic principle or god; from another, it is also the symbol of a particular society that is called the clan. It is the flag of the clan, the sign by which each clan is distinguished from the others, the visible mark of its distinctiveness, and a mark that is borne by everything that in any way belongs to the clan: men, animals, and things. Thus if the totem is the symbol of both the god and the society, is this not because the god and the society are one and



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the same? How could the emblem of the group have taken the form of that quasi-divinity if the group and the divinity were two distinct realities? Thus the god of the clan, the totemic principle, can be none other than the clan itself, but the clan transfigured and imagined in the physical form of the plant or animal that serves as totem. (Durkheim, 1995, p. 208)

This process of projection is obviously not conscious, and it is the totem, not society, that is considered powerful: The totem is the flag of the clan, so it is natural that the impressions the clan arouses in individual consciousness – impressions of dependence and of heightened energy – should become more closely attached to the idea of the totem than to that of the clan. The clan is too complex a reality for such un- formed minds to be able to bring its concrete unity into clear focus … Because religious force is none other than the collective and anonymous force of the clan and because that force can only be conceived of in the form of the totem, the totemic emblem is, so to speak, the visible body of the god. (Durkheim, 1995, pp. 222–3)

This description given by Durkheim could be reproduced in Hegelian terms: the totem is ‘in itself ’ an object of nature, but ‘for’ the clan it is the expression of its own social connection. Given the clan cannot represent ‘for’ itself this connection that is itself, it must be expressed through something perceptible (see Kurz, 1987, p. 98). In spite of all the criticism that the concept of totemism has subsequently received, Durkheim’s theory illustrates the fundamental link between the mechanism of projection and the sacred. The problem is that Durkheim limits his observations to the religious sphere, even though this is extended to magic and the sacred in general. For him, as well as for all future anthropology, projection is always linked to the dimension of the sacred, which necessarily derives from the supernatural and from some form of the divine (see Magli, 1980, p. 138). Consequently, any manifestation of ‘force’ (or ‘power’) is considered to belong to the sacred: ‘Since there is nothing known that is not classified within a clan and under a totem, there is also nothing that does not receive a reflection of that religiousness, to some degree’ (Durkheim, 1995, p. 154). But instead of extending the concept of the sacred to the whole of life, it would be more useful to understand that the projection of an alienated force also occurs in many phenomena outside of any sacred dimension, and that it

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also characterizes our culture – for example, in the case of value as a projection of past labour on the objects produced. In bourgeois society, the indeterminate ‘force’, which is believed to be everywhere, takes the form of ‘labour’, so that everything is presented as a major or minor quantity of labour. In agrarian societies, to give an example of another form of this ‘force’, it appears rather as being related to the idea of fertility. These considerations on the genesis of fetishism in general should also shed some light on the genesis of commodity fetishism. It could be objected that they prove something else instead: that each society has its own form of fetishism, and that these different forms merely fulfil a function that must always be fulfilled in human existence. But even if it were true that until now all societies have been based on some form of fetishism, this would not prove that it should be so in the future and that it is an ontological structure that is part of a so-called ‘human nature’. The fetishistic societies that have existed until now have still been part of ‘human prehistory’, whereas today what is necessary is the transition to a conscious history. One could reply that all eras, at least from the Enlightenment onwards, considered themselves to represent a decisive stage in the history of humanity, or even the culmination of time. It is therefore not clear why our time should actually lead to the most important stage in human history, that is, overcoming the unconscious and fetishistic constitution of society in general. Indeed, we cannot prove through reason that the passage to such a stage is imminent. But at least two factors suggest that fully developed capitalism really is different from all the other societies that succeeded one another after the ‘Neolithic revolution’. Unlike previous fetishisms, commodity fetishism is currently leading humanity towards a situation where the demands of survival themselves will force this humanity to rid itself of fetishism and find less wasteful forms of social mediation. None of the previous forms of fetishism had threatened the very existence of the human species. At the same time, commodity society is the first society to recognize the existence of fetish forms as such. This progress of consciousness is a precondition – without precedent – to perhaps one day emerge from fetishism. Indeed, the exit from the social unconscious cannot itself take place unconsciously. No ‘law of history’, no philosophical teleology and no succession of thesis, antithesis and synthesis can guarantee that the fetishism of the commodity will really be the last and that a human life free of distorting objectification of



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its own power will be possible. Yet it is generally agreed that during the two centuries of the existence of industrial capitalism and especially in the last few decades, the growth of human powers as well as changes in nature and society have been greater than all those that have occurred in the millennia since the Neolithic revolution. We have reached completely new thresholds, including the possibility of the destruction of the entire planet. There would thus be no reason to rule out a priori that the most dramatic changes in material and social living conditions that humanity has ever seen will not be followed by an equally radical change in the forms of social mediation. Moreover, the category of fetishism should not be confused with the much broader category of social mediation or the medium of social synthesis. Mediation is not equivalent to fetishism, just as objectification is not equivalent to alienation. The critique of fetishism is not a criticism of mediation as such in the name of an imaginary immediacy, but a criticism of fallacious mediations. Here, two opposing errors must be avoided. Historical materialism sees in archaic social structures labour value, the economy and surplus value in various guises and present in all societies. It relocates reciprocity, the gift, ritual exchanges, generosity or sacrifice, into the economy and into the law of value. The structuralist interpretation, on the other hand, sees value and the economy as variations of an eternal ‘structure’ anchored in the human unconscious. What unites these two approaches is their inability to understand the radical divide between pre-modern societies and capitalist society, for what is true about one type of society is not necessarily true about another. Marxists reduce pre-modern societies to modern categories, whereas structuralists consider modern society as a special case of ontological structures best exemplified in pre-modern societies. Nevertheless mana should neither be seen as a ‘reflection’ of value – which did not yet exist in ‘primitive’ societies – nor should modern value be seen as a mere manifestation of an eternal sacredness: rather, they are both to be dissolved into the broader category of fetishist socialization.

The gift instead of value It is not only with the analysis of fetishism in the ethnological sense that cultural anthropology can contribute to the understanding of commodity society. There

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is a line in anthropology that runs from Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi to Louis Dumont and Marshall Sahlins, even though they do not form a ‘school’ as such. These authors are in no way Marxist, but they have shown that the exchange of equivalents is not the only possible form of socialization and that the total subordination of society to the demands of productive labour, as well as the precondition for this subordination, namely the detachment of ‘economy’ and ‘labour’ from the global field of life, is a relatively recent phenomenon, limited to capitalist society alone. These theorists see in ‘historical materialism’ an approach opposed to their method. In regard to the ontologization of labour, the economy, or the so-called ‘finite nature of resources’, traditional Marxists are not very different from mainstream (‘formalistic’) bourgeois anthropologists. It is therefore not surprising that the authors in question here explicitly distance themselves from Marx, whom they identify with his exegetes.4 Yet the results of their research sometimes harmonize very well with the ‘critique of value’ as well as with the ‘esoteric Marx’. Among all the consequences of the Marxian theory of value that we have developed so far, there is one that lends itself particularly well to be confirmed by anthropological and historical research while at the same time being far removed from traditional Marxism. This is the assertion that the existence of an autonomous economy and the predominance of productive labour are major characteristics of capitalism and are not found in other societies or only in a partial form. In the first decades of the twentieth century, anthropologists began to focus on two forms of exchange that are completely different from the exchange of equivalents, but which occupy a central place in certain ‘primitive’ societies. Firstly, the Melanesian Kula is a ceremonial exchange, consisting of solemn expeditions moving according to a fixed order from one island to another in an annular archipelago. At each stopover, the participants exchange many objects with the local inhabitants in the midst of many rituals in the form of a ‘battle of generosity’. But at the end of their trip, the participants have won nothing. Secondly, in the Potlatch of the Indians of the northwest coast of Canada, tribal chiefs gave gifts to each other with the intention of demonstrating their superiority. The one who receives a gift is obliged to respond with a greater gift, if he does not want to accept his defeat. Thus a continual challenge based on apparent generosity is set in motion and can go as far as the voluntary destruction of one’s own wealth.



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In his Essay on the Gift (1924), Marcel Mauss draws parallels between the Kula, the Potlatch and many similar, but more fragmentary facts that he found in archaic Roman law, among the ancient Celts, Germans and the Chinese. He claims to have thus determined the principle which was at the basis of a very long phase of human evolution: These phenomena allow us to think that this principle of the exchange-gift must have been that of societies that have gone beyond the phase of ‘total services’ (from clan to clan, and from family to family) but have not yet reached that of purely individual contract, of the market where money circulates, of sale proper, and above all of the notion of price reckoned in coinage weighed and stamped with its value. (Mauss, 1990, p. 59, emphasis in original)

Mauss also stresses that the principle of the obligatory and reciprocal gift continues to operate within modern society, despite appearances. Although Mauss is convinced that in every society there is a market, even without money, and that ‘the notion of value functions’ even in societies based on the gift (Mauss, 1990, p. 266). Although he bases this on a non-historical notion of money, he nonetheless has the great merit of proving that economic calculation and the exchange of equivalents are nothing less than ‘natural’. In gift societies, the maintenance of social relationships, which often coincides with the establishment of hierarchies, is more important than material exchanges. The latter are a simple means to an end: gifts do not have a commercial purpose, but must produce a ‘sense of friendship’ between individuals and especially between groups. In gift societies, local groups are often self-sufficient and if they come into contact with neighbouring groups it is not for purely material reasons. Trade can take place, even in an exchange of gifts, for example, in the context of the Kula. But they remain absolutely distinct from it, because the gift is based on a true cult of generosity and disinterestedness, which brings it very close to the spirit of nobility that has for so long permeated even the most ‘developed’ cultures. The exchange of gifts is not another form of ‘economy’, but is a ‘total social fact’. Mauss defines this concept as follows: ‘In these “total” social phenomena, as we propose calling them, all kinds of institutions are given expression at one and the same time – religious, juridical, and moral, which relate to both politics and the family; likewise economic ones, which suppose special forms

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of production and consumption, or rather, of performing total services and of distribution. This is not to take into account the aesthetic phenomena to which these facts lead, and the contours of the phenomena that these institutions manifest’ (Mauss, 1990, pp. 3–4). The spheres that in modern societies appear to be separate – economics, law, religion, science, arts and politics – are all mixed together in gift societies. It even ignores the distinction, for us so crucial, between people and things – even if this does not mean that in these societies everything is indistinct, because there are other forms of classification and distinction. As Mauss says: ‘It is clear that in Maori law, the legal tie, a tie occurring through things, is one between souls, because the thing itself possesses a soul, is of the soul. Hence it follows that to make a gift of something to someone is to make a present of some part of oneself ’ (Mauss, 1990, p. 16). Things tend to return to their place of origin as there is a force in them that makes them have a soul just like people. Things and living beings share the same substance: ‘Everything passes to and fro as if there were a constant exchange of a spiritual matter, including things and men, between clans and individuals, distributed between social ranks, the sexes, and the generations’ (Mauss, 1990, p. 18). The ‘total social fact’ is therefore characteristic of ‘archaic’ societies. On the other hand, Mauss’ concept of the ‘total social fact’ can very well be applied to value in its modern form: it is not a purely economic fact, but a form that covers different contents. It is value itself that produces the various spheres of life. Thus it is in this sense that we have already made use of the concept of ‘total social fact’ in our analysis of society based on value. In Stone Age Economics (1972), Marshall Sahlins presents an important critique of ‘formalistic’ economic anthropology. For the latter, primitive societies are busy relentlessly procuring the bare necessities of life so as not to starve to death. The technical means of these societies are considered to be so weak that they live in perpetual scarcity, which prevents them from reaching higher levels of culture. Sahlins explicitly notes that ‘it deserves mention that contemporary European-Marxist theory is often in accord with bourgeois economics on the poverty of the primitive’ (Sahlins, 1972, p. 4). For Sahlins, this image is a projection of bourgeois categories onto a completely different reality. According to him, scarcity is, on the contrary, typical of modern society: ‘The market-industrial system institutes scarcity, in a manner completely unparalleled and to a degree nowhere else approximated … the



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insufficiency of material means becomes the explicit, calculable starting point of all economic activity’ (Sahlins, 1972, p. 4).5 It is not enough to consider the technical level of primitive societies, because it must be related to their aspirations: ‘Having equipped the hunter with bourgeois impulses and Palaeolithic tools, we judge his situation hopeless in advance’ (Sahlins, 1972, p. 4). By exhibiting extensive ethnographic material, Sahlins dismantles the myth of original misery, which from Hobbes onwards has always served to justify the constraints of bourgeois society. Many observers have testified to the abundance that prevailed in most ‘primitive’ societies prior to colonial violence. By analysing more specific contemporary hunter-gatherer societies (such as Indigenous Australians or the Pygmies in Africa), Sahlins points out that access to natural resources is typically direct – ‘free for anyone to take’ – even as possession of the necessary tools is general and knowledge of the required skills common. The division of labour is likewise simple, and predominantly gendered. Add in the liberal customs of sharing, for which hunters are properly famous and all the people can usually participate in the going prosperity, such as it is. (Sahlins, 1972, pp. 10–11)

Indeed, ‘of the hunter it is truly said that his wealth is a burden’ (Sahlins, 1972, p. 11), because he must always remain mobile. Thus Sahlins arrives at the following conclusion: ‘A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society’ (Sahlins, 1972, p. 14). This is due to the fact that the hunting and gathering activity of one person easily provides for the subsistence of four or five others. At the same time, it is a ‘society of abundance’ because all the needs of its members are met. Many food resources even remain unused, and often the territory could maintain a much higher population. The ‘work week’ is usually 15 to 20 hours, and many people do not work at all. Thus, it is not that hunters would not be able to match the economic level of their neighbours who practice agriculture, or that they do not have the time to do so. Rather it is that they do not want ‘progress’ because it would be too tiring and they already have everything they need.

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When we talk about simple agricultural societies, such as could be found in Melanesia or in certain regions of Africa, we have to talk about systematic underproduction. Far from seeking to maximize its production, each productive unit – the family or the village – stops production as soon as it has obtained what it needs. These societies are not governed by inescapable economic laws. On the contrary, they limit their production and voluntarily remain below their possibilities. Food is often excluded from any exchange, especially within the same tribe. Few years of life are spent working, and it is mostly older people who work. ‘Indeed, in the community of domestic producing groups, the greater the relative working capacity of the household the less its members work’ (Sahlins, 1972, p. 87). The possibilities of the most effective minorities then remain unexplored, just as, on the other hand ‘there is no class of landless paupers in primitive society’ (Sahlins, 1972, p. 93). The only people who work more than necessary are those with political ambitions. Nevertheless, it is not wealth as such that gives political power here, but the fact of excelling in the most valued social virtue: generosity. Thus one acquires social status not by accumulating wealth, but by getting rid of it. ‘Any accumulation of wealth-among such and such people’, says Sahlins, ‘is followed hard upon by its disbursement. The objective of gathering wealth, indeed, is often that of giving it away’ (Sahlins, 1972, p. 213). In order to maintain its place in the exchange cycle, if necessary the economic benefits themselves are sacrificed. Here, social relationships prevail over material utility. Indeed, Sahlins seeks to determine the actual function of the obligation, described by Mauss, to give, receive and give back in an accumulated way: the exchange of gifts would thus be a way of avoiding internecine war, a primitive ‘social contract’. Whoever receives a gift is in a state of inferiority until they respond with another gift, something comparable to making a vow. The exchange is therefore never balanced, nor should it ever be as someone must always remain in debt in order for the relationship to continue. Material exchanges are not the ‘raison d’être’ of the social bond, but on the contrary, they must be the foundation of it, even without any ‘economic’ utility: ‘The material flow underwrites or initiates social relations. Thus do primitive peoples transcend the Hobbesian chaos … So peacemaking is not a sporadic intersocietal event, it is a continuous process going on within society itself ’ (Sahlins, 1972, pp. 185– 6). In other words, in primitive societies, men do not exchange with the main



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intention of ‘increasing their well-being’, but to establish hierarchies within the group and avoid war with other groups. According to Sahlins, the great merit of Mauss – which in this respect he likens to Marx, and in particular to his theory of value – is that he asks why people exchange their goods, instead of merely presupposing a certain natural human tendency to exchange, as bourgeois political economy has always done. In the primitive world, there is no such thing as an ‘economy’: ‘Even to speak of “the economy” of a primitive society is an exercise in unreality. Structurally, “the economy” does not exist’ (Sahlins, 1972, p. 76). On the other hand, material exchanges can enter into any relationship. ‘No social relation, institution, or set of institutions is of itself “economic”. Any institution, say a family or a lineage order, if it has material consequence for provisioning society can be placed in an economic context and considered part of the economic process’ (Sahlins, 1972, p. 185). There is, however, one important fact that Sahlins only touches on, which is that not only do people ‘work’ much less in primitive societies than in more ‘evolved’ societies, but the very distinction between work and other activities does not even take place. Why, for example, is hunting in a society of hunters considered as a ‘job’, and not as the most exciting and desired moment in the life of that society? Sahlins himself writes, quoting ethnologist L. Sharp: ‘And what are we to construe of those Australian Aborigines – the Yir Yiront-who do not discriminate between “work” and “play” ’? (Sahlins, 1972, p. 64). He points out that among Fijians, there is just one word that indicates work and ritual (Sahlins, 1972, p. 63). The notion of ‘free time’, which Sahlins commonly uses, is therefore meaningless.

Never look a stolen horse Other sources testify that the very idea that a product belongs to the one who created it is in essence already a fetishistic projection. But such a conviction pits the temporarily quantifiable human capacity for patience and fatigue resistance against other qualities such as intelligence or courage. For example, in banditry traditional among nomadic populations, one’s whole personality is on the line, while any man who knuckles down like a slave to work can accumulate money and buy whatever he likes. This opposition is well described in Tolstoy’s early

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work, The Cossacks (1863). In the book, the Russian officer Olenin gradually got to know the world of the Cossacks, who, in turn, are strongly influenced by the way of life of their Caucasian neighbours, the Chechens. These are the bearers of an archaic culture of shepherds and robbers, whose circulation of products is largely based on Potlatch.6 An old Cossack, Uncle Eroshka, explains to a young Cossack, who complains that he has no money to buy a horse, what he has to do to be a real ‘dzhigit’, a war hero: ‘Ha! In my day we never bothered paying for horses’, the old man said. ‘When Uncle Eroshka was your age, he had rustled whole herds of horses from the Nogai … If you want to be a real Cossack, you must be a brave warrior and not a muzhik. Even a muzhik can get his hands on a horse – he pays the money and the horse is his’ (Tolstoy, 2010, pp. 92–3). A fine horse is not a commodity, but the expression of the individuality of the one who stole it, and the bravest will have the finest horse. If, on the other hand, it is purchased, it is only the quantitative expression of the time during which one agreed to be a slave or an animal.7 The reluctance to work does not only characterize societies far removed from ours. Prior to the emergence of developed capitalism, labour was seen everywhere as a necessary evil in order to produce wealth and was despised and hated as physically exhausting. The Bible already described labour as a curse imposed on men. The word ‘labour’ in our modern sense is nowhere to be found in societies where the expenditure of labour power is not considered as the social form of wealth. The etymology proves it. In the beginning, ‘labour’ did not mean ‘useful activity’, but ‘forced labour, obtained with violence’. The French word ‘travailler’ derives from the late Latin ‘tripaliare’: ‘to torture with the tripalium’ (Le Petit Robert, 2009), a three-staked torture instrument used to punish serfs in revolt. The Latin word ‘labor’ first meant ‘heavy load (carried with great difficulty)’ and then ‘pain, suffering, fatigue’ (Ernout, 1985, p. 334). The German word ‘Arbeit’ etymologically refers to the orphaned child who is forced to perform heavy physical labour and for a long time it meant ‘shameful and exhausting activity, punishment’ (Duden, 1963, p. 31). The historian of antiquity M. Finley writes in The Ancient Economy: ‘Neither in Greek nor in Latin was there a word with which to express the general notion of “labour” or the concept of labour “as a general social function”. The nature and conditions of labour in antiquity precluded the emergence of such general ideas, as of the idea of a working class’ (Finley, 1973, p. 81). Another historian of antiquity,



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J. P. Vernant, states: ‘So, in ancient Greece the idea is not one great human function, work, encompassing all the trades, but rather a plurality of different functions, each constituting a particular type of action with its own particular product … The social bond is established above and beyond trades on the only level where there can be mutual harmony between citizens’ (Vernant, 2006, p. 294). Finley even devoted the first chapter of The Ancient Economy to refuting its title: [Such a] title cannot be translated into Greek or Latin. Neither can the basic terms, such as labour, production, capital, investment … they lacked the conceptual elements which together constitute what we call ‘the economy’. Of course they farmed, traded, manufactured, mined, taxed, coined, deposited and loaned money, made profits or failed in their enterprises … What they did not do, however, was to combine these particular activities conceptually into a unit. (Finley, 1973, p. 21)

To which he adds: ‘The word “market” is used abstractly, of course, and I cannot refrain from pointing out that in that sense it is untranslatable into Greek or Latin … It would then not be possible to discover or formulate laws of economic behaviour, without which a concept of “the economy” is unlikely to develop, [and] economic analysis impossible’ (Finley, 1973, p. 22). It is not only in relation to ‘primitive’ societies, but also in relation to a not too distant past that capitalism represents a total break with catastrophic consequences. This thesis was defended with particular vigour by Karl Polanyi in his book The Great Transformation (1944). For the author, the idea of a selfregulating market put forward by economic liberalism since the beginning of the nineteenth century with religious fervour is a true ‘negative utopia’. Yet the object of Polanyi’s criticism is not the market as such, but rather the liberal conviction that a society based entirely on a self-regulating market whose sole criteria for action are economic motivations could even exist at all. His condemnation of liberal capitalism is not based on the harm done to a particular class, but on the intrinsically self-destructive mechanism of such a society. Polanyi criticizes both Marxists and liberals for their conviction that the destiny of society depends on class interests and that these interests are essentially economic in nature.8 According to him the fact that ‘nineteenthcentury society was organized on the assumption that such a motivation could be made universal was a peculiarity of the age’ (Polanyi, 2001, p. 160), because

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‘such a system is an institutional structure which, as we all too easily forget, has been present at no time except our own, and even then it was only partially present’ (Polanyi, 2001, p. 40). Polanyi’s polemic against the automatism of the market and the picture he paints of the nineteenth century are all the more remarkable in that his concept of the commodity is very different from that of Marx and that he considers any labour theory of value (which he attributes to Marx himself) to be a mistake. Any object produced to be sold on the market is, according to Polanyi, a commodity and so its existence is therefore ‘natural’. It is only with the transformation of labour, land and money into commodities that the problems begin. For Polanyi, these are not ‘natural’ commodities because they are not produced for the purpose of sale (Polanyi, 2001, p. 107). The attempt to completely subjugate the very foundations of life to the self-regulating market took place with the final liberalization of the labour, land and financial markets in England around 1820. For the first time in history, individual profit was raised ‘to the level of a justification of action and behaviour in everyday life’ (Polanyi, 2001, p. 31). Society now only existed for the economy and the control of the economic system by the market is of overwhelming consequence to the whole organization of society: it means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system … society must be shaped in such a manner as to allow that system to function according to its own laws. (Polanyi, 2001, p. 60)

The introduction of the self-regulating market would soon have led to the complete destruction of society and capitalist production itself, if European societies had not taken self-protection measures over the course of the nineteenth century, especially with regard to labour legislation and the introduction of public services. According to Polanyi, the subordination of society to the economy was not inevitable as ‘the gearing of markets into a self-regulating system of tremendous power was not the result of any inherent tendency of markets toward excrescence, but rather the effect of highly artificial stimulants administered to the body social in order to meet a situation which was created by the no less artificial phenomenon of the machine’ (Polanyi, 2001, p. 60). To achieve this goal, ‘the institutional separation of society into an economic



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and a political sphere’ was necessary (Polanyi, 2001, p. 74). This fact was just as unprecedented because ‘nineteenth-century society, in which economic activity was isolated and imputed to a distinctive economic motive, was a singular departure’ (Polanyi, 2001, p. 74). The economic sphere was thus supposed to provide the criteria for good and evil. Indeed this is evident in Malthus’ above-mentioned incentive, consisting of letting the poor starve to death because it would be a fair and ‘natural’ punishment for those who do not sufficiently comply with the ‘natural’ laws of economics, especially with regard to wage-labour.9 Such a statement would have been unthinkable in any previous society and indeed in ‘almost every and any type of social organization up to about the beginning of sixteenth-century’ the individual ‘was not threatened by starvation unless the community as a whole was in a like predicament’. For individuals to be forced to subsist by selling their labour power, ‘their traditional institutions must be destroyed, and prevented from reforming’ (Polanyi, 2001, pp. 171–2). Thus, the introduction of capitalism in England was a veritable social cataclysm, which must be compared to the uprooting that struck the populations of sub-Saharan Africa during the colonial era. But more than just a consequence of economic exploitation, ‘the catastrophe of the native community is a direct result of the rapid and violent disruption of the basic institutions of the victim’ (Polanyi, 2001, p. 167), especially with regard to the organization of land and labour. ‘To separate labour from other activities of life and to subject it to the laws of the market was to annihilate all organic forms of existence and to replace them by a different type of organization, an atomistic and individualistic one’ (Polanyi, 2001, p. 171). To demonstrate the exceptional nature of the self-regulating market, Polanyi also cites works of ethnology. He draws the conclusion that ‘gain and profit made on exchange never before played an important part in human economy’ (Polanyi, 2001, p. 45), given that the ‘the premium set on generosity is so great when measured in terms of social prestige as to make any other behaviour than that of utter self-forgetfulness simply not pay’ (Polanyi, 2001, p. 49). In the societies described by ethnologists such as B. Malinowski, all the behaviours that we consider ‘economic’ are missing, including profit-seeking, finding ways to make the least effort possible, working for remuneration – on the contrary, the motivation to work in such societies is based on ‘reciprocity,

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competition, enjoyment of work, and social approbation’ (Polanyi, 2001, p. 277). Above all there is an ‘absence of any separate and distinct institution based on economic motives’ (Polanyi, 2001, p. 49), because economic systems, as a rule, are embedded in social relations; distribution of material goods is ensured by noneconomic motives … Reciprocity and redistribution are principles of economic behaviour which apply not only to small primitive communities, but also to large and wealthy empires … but the distributive function increases with the growing political power of a few families and the rise of despots. (Polanyi, 2001, pp. 279–80)10

According to Polanyi, reciprocity, redistribution and the market are three forms of exchange and social integration which do not constitute a historical development, but which have coexisted in different proportions over the course of history. Thus, commodity society is the first society to make use of only one of these forms.

Conclusion: Some ‘false-friends’ Critique of neoliberalism or critique of capitalism? There is no need here to take stock of the horrors produced by commodity society in its current neoliberal phase. They are well known. The much-praised ‘invisible hand’ has begun to wildly strike from every direction. As such, we are all in the process of becoming ‘unprofitable’. Now, crises no longer derive from the imperfections of the commodity-producing system, but rather from its complete development. There is no more room for opposition and immanent solutions to the system. It is not out of a certain commitment to radicalism or ‘utopia’, but out of realism that radically anti-capitalist issues must now be considered. It will be easier to kill the beast once and for all than to believe that the problems posed by the market can still find solutions in the realm of the commodity economy itself. For more than 150 years, the labour and democratic movements accepted the existence of the beast by tying it down with a thousand chains and enclosing it within a thousand fences. The first crisis of valorization and first serious challenge was clearly enough to make the beast forget the fact that it had been tamed and to break its chains. Capitalism that has been rendered ‘social’, ‘democratic’, ‘human’ and even ‘ecological’ by a secular effort can from one day to the next become capitalism tout court: a blind fetish system, ready to swallow up everything to ensure its survival. But what ways are there out of commodity society? After the exhaustion of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the flat calm of the 1980s, the 1990s saw a gradual rise of new movements that challenge the existing world order. The struggle against the perverse effects of neoliberal ‘globalization’ is the common denominator of these movements. Our presentation of the critique

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of value therefore ends with a brief analysis of the most widespread ideas in the anti-globalist or alter-globalist movement. Among the reactions to the ‘global woes’ produced by contemporary capitalism, the one that has prevailed so far is the criticism of neoliberal policies in explicit or implicit favour of their replacement by a return to Keynesian recipes and a major role for the state. This argument does not challenge the commodity as such, but only its control over all aspects of life. The aim is to ‘re-insert’ the economy into society through courageous reforms by broad coalitions of well-intentioned people. Typical expressions of this movement, represented at the global level by the Porto Alegre counter-summits, are the French organization ATTAC which was created to place a tax on financial transactions, the newspaper Le Monde diplomatique, the writings of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and the symbolic actions of José Bové, leader of the Confédération Paysanne.1 Bové refers to the situation as follows: ‘There are two different views of society. One where the market, with its own rules, runs everything, and where all human activity (health, education, culture, and so on) takes place with capital as the bottom line; the other where people and their political institutions – not to mention issues such as the environment and culture – are at the forefront of society’s concerns’ (Bové and Dufour, 2001, p. 142). Does the radical criticism of the commodity and the market developed by value critique find its practical realization in a movement based on such principles, on one whose founding text is called The World Is Not for Sale? In the first place, it should be emphasized that this movement proposes to fight against the ‘scourge of neoliberalism’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. vii) and not against capitalism in general, much less against commodities, money, value and the state. It is true that its representatives announce that they want to go beyond the description of symptoms and superficial analysis. According to Bourdieu, ‘it is clearly necessary to get to the real economic and social determinants’ (Bourdieu et al., 1993, p. 629) so as to ‘help the victims of neoliberal policies to discover the differential effects of one and the same cause in apparently radically diverse events and experiences’ (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 22). However, what is missing is precisely a critique pointing to the common root of the various problems, whereas here neoliberalism is the only target of this reductive critique. It wants politics and the state to liberate capitalism from its ‘excesses’ – first and foremost, from the power of financial speculation – so



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as to re-establish a true welfare state. The logic of the commodity is never even mentioned. This kind of challenge is only intended to prevent education, health, culture, science, art, agriculture and other specific areas from becoming commodified (assuming, of course, that they are not already). One may naturally wonder whether such a return to Keynesian Fordism would really be desirable. In the face of the chain of misfortunes produced by neoliberalism, it may seem understandable to foster nostalgia for ‘social capitalism’. Thus, Bourdieu often insists on the modern-day problems (social and ethnic segregation, etc.) caused by the neoliberal housing policy that began in the 1970s (Bourdieu et al., 1993, p. 134). Yet, were the low-rent housing projects of the 1960s really a shining example, and did de Gaulle really begin to build a true state of social justice? In any case, it is more useful to demonstrate that turning back the clock is impossible. It needs to be impressed upon those who in their desperation would welcome capitalism with a human face that the times for this option are decidedly over. This illusion can only be perpetuated by denying that neoliberal globalization is the inevitable outcome of capitalist logic and at the same time a sign of its extreme weakness. Neoliberal globalization is often seen rather as the result of a kind of long-standing conspiracy. According to this theory, globalization enables the holders of economic and especially financial power to undo all the conquests made during a century of struggles for ‘democratization’ and ‘social rights’. Authors such as Bourdieu fail to see the profound ambiguity of these ‘conquests’, which, even though they were wrenched from the bourgeois classes kicking and screaming, were nevertheless useful and even indispensable to the development of capitalism. If Bourdieu happens to write: ‘In short, because the dominant in this game are dominated by the rules of the game they dominate (the rule of profit), this field functions as a kind of infernal machine without a subject, which imposes its will on both states and firms’ (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 28), it is nevertheless a one-off assertion. Bourdieu argues that capitalist development is not caused by its internal contradictions, competition and the automatic subject. In his view, each improvement in the conditions of the ‘dominated’ is due to political and social action, conceived as the opposite of capitalism, and not as an integral part of it. It all comes down to the balance of power and the good or bad will of the protagonists.2 ‘Economic globalization is not a mechanical effect of the laws of technology

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or the economy but the product of a policy implemented by a set of agents and institutions’ (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 84), and thus ever-active, neoliberal think tanks are responsible for it marking a process of involution, a true ‘conservative revolution’: ‘One thus begins to suspect that insecurity is the product not of an economic inevitability, identified with the much-heralded “globalisation”, but of political will’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 92, emphasis in original). Nonetheless, the introduction of capitalism was not inevitable, and we are not forced to accept its existence as destiny. On the other hand, we cannot expect capitalism to differ from its nature or expect it to remain, even in times of crisis, ‘considerate’ capitalism ‘with a human face’. ‘Political will’ has done nothing but execute the laws that govern the last phase of capitalism, when it has already reached the end of its natural life and desperately seeks to maintain an appearance of value production. Neoliberal globalization is not a ‘backwards step’, against which the gains of social democracy must be defended. Rather, it is the stage that logically follows on from the welfare state. Neoliberals are not mistaken in considering themselves the representatives of ‘progress’ and ‘reforms’ for they are a very good expression of what ‘progress’ and ‘reform’ are all about in capitalist society. The ‘economy’ appears here not as the total form of modern social life, but as a separate sector, against whose imperialism one can mobilize art, science and so on, which supposedly belong to another world. But it is above all the Keynesian-era regulatory state apparatus that this school of thought wants to revive. Bourdieu’s writings bear witness to this at every turn. For him, ‘the state is an ambiguous reality. It is not adequate to say that it is an instrumental in the hands of the ruling class. The state is certainly not completely neutral, completely independent of the dominant forces of society, but the older it is and the greater the social advances it has incorporated, the more autonomous it is’ (Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 33–4). This obviously confers a special dignity on the French state, despite all the proclamations in favour of a ‘new internationalism’ or a ‘European social state’, conceived as a step towards a world state. For Bourdieu, the state is something with which the dominated oppose capital, ‘the state, in every country, is to some extent the trace in reality of social conquests’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 33). Its existence is therefore unacceptable to capital: ‘Neoliberals do not want either national states, which they see as simple obstacles to the free functioning of the economy, or, a fortiori, the supranational state’



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(Bourdieu, 1998, p. 62). According to him, it is then necessary to defend the state, betrayed precisely by the ‘great nobility of the state’: ‘At the present time, the critical effort of intellectuals, trade unions of associations should be applied as a matter of priority against the withering away of the state … I think that the dominated groups in society have an interest in defending the state’ (Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 40–1). Bourdieu complains that today the state no longer demands ‘commitment’ or ‘enthusiasm’ from citizens (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 5) and he blames the French socialists for having ‘completed the demolition of belief in the state’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 6). He wants to ‘discover real politics’ even in the most traditional terms, ‘without yielding to antiinstitutional mood and myth’ (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 14). He even desires the return of the honest charismatic leader and he regrets the fact that parties no longer produce ‘inspired personalities’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 5), and that ‘like the tribunes of ancient Rome, politicians capable of understanding and expressing their constituents’ expectations and demands are becoming increasingly rare’ (Bourdieu et al., 1993, p. 627). In the subordination of politics to the economy, he does not recognize the result of the above-mentioned fact that the state structurally lacks an autonomous means of intervention; he sees this only as the result of an ideological blindness. Consequently, he is outraged to see ‘all those high representatives of the state who abase the dignity of their position by bowing before the bosses of multinationals’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 102), and he often assures the reader that the room for manoeuvre of leaders is much less reduced than one would have us believe. Naturally, Bourdieu has reservations about the state as it is today. However, he should be reminded of the short-sightedness of writing that ‘this new social movement will have to rely on the state while changing the state’ (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 42), as the problem lies not only in the concrete contents of the state, but in the state-form itself. When Bourdieu thinks he can make out the negative particularity of neoliberal globalization in the fact that ‘unlike the unification that took place in centuries past at the national state level in Europe, presentday unification at the global level is carried out without the state’ (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 95) – he neglects what for centuries has been the state’s role: waging war on people to get them to ‘integrate into the market’. Simply recalling that the state remains, from infrastructure to repression, the indispensable guarantor of capitalist valorization is proof enough of this. Moreover, statist reformism is not

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even ‘realistic’ given that the contradictory attempt to plan and regulate by the state what in its very foundations is blind and unconscious – the commodity economy – has already capsized state socialism in Eastern-bloc countries. If a national government really took radical steps against big investors, it would be dragged down by the immediate withdrawal of international capital and a collapse of stock markets and investments – which is not necessarily a disaster if a multifaceted approach to resource management is preferred. It would, however, be a disaster in the context of the commodity economy, one that these reformists never call into question. When these neo-Keynesians speak of ‘crisis’, they are only thinking of ‘speculative bubbles’. The idea of a structural crisis of the capitalist system doesn’t even occur to them, and very often they identify globalization with a phase of increased capitalist prosperity. In their view, strengthening the role of the state and fighting financial power and the logic of short-term profit will bring back full employment. They neither intend to criticize labour as such, nor understand the reasons for its actual disappearance. In their view, the continual decline in employed labour power is the result of a deliberate choice, dictated by short-sighted greed; it would therefore be possible to reverse this trend through political decision-making. In reality, new technologies have considerably reduced the labour necessary for production, thus putting a limit on the Fordist growth which could fuel Keynesian politics. The fact that production continues to increase despite increasing unemployment shows that it is not true that ‘without work we will no longer produce’, unless the word ‘work’ is being misused here as a byword for any activity. Rather than pointlessly trying to return to the past and to artificially recreate fictitious jobs in ‘training workshops’ or ‘state employment programmes’, it would be better to free the individual from the need to sell their labour power in order to live. This is even more urgent when this labour force is increasingly proving to be an unsellable commodity and when those who fail to sell themselves are invited to have only themselves to blame for want of new ‘workplace skills’ and to consider themselves as supernumerary parasites. Even if a return to ‘full employment’ were possible, it would be desirable only in the eyes of those who retain a moral appreciation of work. Opposing the ‘solid’ and ‘honest’ realities of the state and the nation, of labour and ‘productive investment’ to those of financial capital and stock



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market speculation, risks becoming a rather dangerous game, regardless of the intentions of its promoters. Indeed it is more useful for mobilizing resentment than for creating a movement for social emancipation. The latter, however moderate it may be in its aims and methods, can in no way limit itself to choosing one pole of the market abstraction (the state, labour) over the other (money, finance). But instead of underlining the contradiction between social emancipation and capitalism, it is fashionable to confront ‘democracy’ with ‘rampant finance’. Nevertheless, the polemic against speculation is wholly compatible with the praise for ‘healthy capitalism’, while ‘financial excesses’ rank as some kind of disease. It should be recalled that in 1995 French President Jacques Chirac called financial speculation ‘the AIDS of our economies’, and that his successor François Hollande declared in 2012 that finance was his ‘true adversary’. Naturally, such arguments confuse the cause and effect of the crisis. As already noted, it is not the weight of parasitic finance that burdens an otherwise healthy capitalist economy, but rather it is the now exhausted economy of value that continues to survive provisionally thanks to speculation. A false anti-capitalism, uncritical of labour and its transformation into value, has existed almost from the moment capitalism first emerged. It sees in labour and value only the positive, ‘concrete’ side of capitalist relations. This false anti-capitalism wants instead to eliminate ‘greedy capital’, the supposedly bad, ‘abstract’ side of capital. This side was soon assigned to a particular social group, which just as quickly turned out to be ‘the Jews’. The central role that this demagogy played in Nazism has made it difficult to employ it openly today. But it continues to spread sometimes in the most unexpected situations.3 This form of anti-capitalism is not a ‘half-truth’; rather, it helps to redirect social discontent towards secondary or false objectives, which do not endanger the capitalist mode of production. The sacrifice of a few speculators and a few corrupt politicians may be indispensable in order to save the essential. The ATTAC movement, as well as organizations committed to Third-World debt cancellation, World Bank reform and similar goals have in a way taken the place left vacant after European Social Democratic parties completely switched over to the neoliberal camp.4 Despite the occasional anti-capitalist rhetoric, it is not difficult to see that this movement’s viewpoint is totally reformist. Its only, wholly unachievable promise is that everything will continue as before and that we will be spared the worst. This movement remains imprisoned in

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the world of traditional politics, whose real vocation would be to give ‘citizens’ and ‘civil society’ a voice. It addresses itself non-stop to ‘elected officials’, thus legitimizing the democratic façade of commodity society. This is also the case for the fiercest opponents of the WTO, such as the Confédération Paysanne, who claim that the WTO is ‘a political organization set up by the affiliated governments and countries. It is a legitimate world organization (sic), but it has very quickly turned into an exclusive tool of commerce’ because states are ‘confined to the role of guarantor’ (Bové and Dufour, 2001, p. 153). These critics believe that ‘representatives of countries’ including the United Nations – around whom illusions galore swirl as though an assembly of states was better than individual states, or as if the Sicilian Mafia Commission was preferable to individual mafiosi – can bring back a ‘return to the primacy of politics over capitalist economics’ (Bové and Dufour, 2001, p. 157). They are not even referring to some imaginary politics, but to the one that actually exists and is one of the pillars of the system they claim to be fighting. This attempt to make politics ‘credible’ again does not only consist in endless harking back to the ideals of bourgeois society, so as to contrast them with its reality. There is something worse. Like historical social democracy, the spokespersons of this movement are in the political running to take part in the management of what currently exists – which in practice will mean take office in order to oversee an ongoing state of emergency and manage repression. They are putting themselves forward on the ballot paper as a more dependable substitute elite than the neoliberal gangsters: ‘We must restore meaning to politics and to do this prepare projects for the future capable of giving meaning to an economic and social world that has undergone enormous transformations in recent years’ (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 27). Indeed, they claim to know better than current governments the real needs of the economy: ‘In the logic on enlightened self-interest, a strictly economic policy is not necessarily economical – in terms of the insecurity of persons and property, the consequent policing cost, etc.’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 40). They promise greater opportunities for profit if their proposals are taken up: ‘The idea of a single-cell acceptance of globalization should be abandoned in order to understand what globalization has to gain in reality: namely, flourishing local territories’ (ATTAC, 2001, p. 11). They do not even intend to challenge multinationals as such, but would be happy if ‘the large firms move away from a predatory attitude towards local



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resources … to one that is a co-creator of these same resources’ (ATTAC, 2001, p. 32). This reformism definitively becomes the enemy of all social emancipation when it openly declares its willingness to restore work, something badly mistreated by the neoliberal economists who know nothing ‘about the real social and economic world’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 101).5 Bourdieu hopes to save the society of labour currently threatened by neoliberal madness: ‘In order for the economic system to function, the workers have to bring into it their own conditions of production and reproduction, but also what is needed for the economic system itself to function, starting with their belief in the company, in work, in the necessity work, and so on’ (Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 86–7). What is needed, in other words, are workers who passionately love work, the company and the state and who crave them democratically through their own initiative: the entire centuries-old development of commodity society has aimed precisely at creating this figure, already so well established by Stalin’s Russia. Thus work is naturally proclaimed as the most basic ‘right’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 30). Yet in practice we know that the right to work becomes the duty to work, whether paid or unpaid, as was the case in the countries of ‘real existing socialism’. In order to achieve this solution, it can be no wonder that in one of its programmes ATTAC demands the establishment of a ‘community police force’ and a ‘police civic education force’ (ATTAC, 2001, p. 104). This is and always will be the last word of reformist democrats.

More blessed to give than to sell? Another more theoretically sophisticated attempt to go beyond the framework of commodity society is directly related to the above-mentioned studies of Mauss, Polanyi and Sahlins. In France, this movement is expressed in initiatives such as the Mouvement antiutilitariste dans les sciences sociales6 (MAUSS) and, on a more political level, in the writings of André Gorz. These authors highlight the fact that the gift, moneyless exchange, mutual aid and cooperation even today play a much more important role in social life than is commonly believed.7 They propose to remedy the shortcomings of commodity society by a wide-ranging acknowledgement of these non-commodity practices and by

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their increased use, from a ‘dual society’ point of view, wherever a commodity sector and a non-commodity sector coexist. Of course, it is true that the gift – as an exchange based on ‘personal and deferred reciprocity’ – is the expression of a completely different logic from commodity logic. In commodity terms, ‘the social link is instrumental in relation to what circulates; the social link is a means of circulating things by exchanging or redistributing them. In the gift on the contrary, we tend to observe the opposite relationship: what circulates is at the service of the link, or at least is conditioned by the link’ (Godbout, 1992, p. 220). These authors understand that the market is incompatible with the existence of direct social ties. Similarly, they clearly see that it is impossible for all social activities to take place in the form of commodity exchanges. Consequently, commodity society can only function on condition that a considerable part of the activities that take place within it do so in the form of the ‘gift’, a subject touched upon earlier in the present work with particular reference to the reproductive activities assigned to women. Nonetheless, these authors do not see the simultaneous existence of the gift and the commodity as a contradiction that necessarily leads to crisis because of the omnivorous nature of value.8 Value must transform everything into a commodity, but collapses as it succeeds in doing so. For neo-Maussians, the gift should simply play a subsidiary role to the market and the state, institutions which they do not think to question: To those who fear community regression, anti-utilitarianism responds with an explicit and undeniable recognition of the liberating role historically played by the market and the state … The person wishing today to be involved in reciprocal exchange relations, but without losing the advantages of full individual participation in the market and the state, is without a shadow of a doubt the modern citizen freed from community ties. (Salsano, 1994, p. 19)

Indeed, these authors must admit that from now on the concept of the gift is also used by neoclassical economists – who discovered, for example, the importance of the voluntary sector – as well as by ‘management theories’ that are beginning to appreciate the ‘value of connections’. Faced, however, with moves to cash in on their proposals, gift theorists remain disarmed because they have already decided that there is no polarity between the gift and the commodity and that to conceive the gift as a total alternative to the



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commodity would amount to deplorable ‘romanticism’ (Berthoud, 1991, p. 75). According to the degrowth theorist Serge Latouche,9 who is close to this school in many respects (La Planète des naufragés,10 La Découverte, Paris, 1991), in Southern Hemisphere countries, the ‘informal economy’ – where reciprocal relationships are a fundamental element – not only guarantees the survival of entire populations alongside the market, but can even be the basis for remarkable commercial success. André Gorz also believes that the way out of the crisis that society is currently going through requires both less market and less state. This would lead to exchanges that are not governed by money or any administrative apparatus, but by networks of mutual aid, voluntary cooperation and selforganized solidarity. This is what Gorz calls the reinforcement of ‘civil society’ (cited in Salsano, 1994, p. 18, trans. Peter Dunn). Gorz’s tirade against labour is not without merit, even if he claims that the heteronomous nature of labour is due to the technical requirements of complex production. Thus, it would be impossible to overcome this heteronomy. In his view, heteronomous labour should be kept to a minimum which will, however, always remain subject to the requirements of abstract ‘profitability’ – and place at its side a sphere based on the free and unencumbered cooperation of the value-form. This sphere should be economically supported by the state. Still, in Gorz’s work, there are more references to Marx than in any of the other authors under review in the present work. He knows that a reduced amount of labour means at the same time a reduced amount of value but fails to see that this necessarily implies a reduced quantity of money. An increased production of goods for use does not correspond to an increase in value, but rather today, it corresponds to its decrease, and there is thus very little to be distributed in monetary terms. To believe that there are huge amounts of money to be ‘redistributed’, the sums of money that have been fictitiously created by speculation must be taken at face value. The state – even if it wanted to – can only economically support the non-labour sector to the extent that there are still successful valorization processes that produce ‘valuable’ money. This is only possible when the national economy in question – which must create the ‘imposable base’ that allows the state to finance its interventions – resists ever fiercer competition on world markets. In other words, all the proposals made in the richest countries for a monetary redistribution in favour of ‘unprofitable’ sectors – thus the

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feeding of ‘useless mouths’ – always tacitly presuppose that these economies are maintaining their winning position at the expense of the rest of the world.11 In the end, this ‘no-profit’ perspective is not very different from that of the neo-Keynesians. It says ‘yes’ to the commodity, on the condition, however, that it remains within limits and promises not to swallow up the entire society – which amounts to nothing more than wishful thinking. Even here, there is a risk that these well-intentioned theories may ultimately serve to manage the new poverty caused by the reduction of labour power. The marginalized are invited to organize their own survival themselves through mutual aid and by directly exchanging services – but always at a very low material level because naturally, resources will remain earmarked for trade routes, even though only a tiny minority of people will be able to use them. Furthermore, nothing would change if the proposal espoused by the various movers and shakers of the new protest movements to establish a ‘universal basic income’ or ‘social wage’ was actually adopted and paid to every citizen regardless of how much they work. It is no coincidence that the social wage was proposed many years ago precisely by Milton Friedman, one of the founders of neoliberalism. In his view, granting a survival aid to each needy person should make it possible to dispense with all other public aid, such as unemployment benefits. Formerly, for liberal theorists such as Quesnay (Dumont, 1977, p. 54), the care of the poor was one of the few duties to which the state was bound, and if the social wage really was introduced, it would have to be in this form. In a situation of generalized precariousness, where temporary contracts, part-time work, training courses and so on, alternate with unemployment and informal work, such minimal aid would not be emancipatory, but would only further generalize these practices. In reality, what is necessary is to combat the very idea of labour itself, even where it still exists, instead of proposing solutions to ensure the survival of the new poor before they seek access to resources.

The final masquerade of traditional Marxism In circles that still profess to be in direct conflict with capital and that do not openly sympathize with the state, a set of tenets is doing the rounds typified in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s book Empire (2001), as well as Negri’s other



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recent writings and reviews such as Multitude. The authors of Empire start from the fact that ‘the central role previously occupied by the labour power of mass factory workers in the production of surplus value is today increasingly filled by intellectual, immaterial, and communicative labour power’ (Hardt and Negri, 2001, p. 47). The analysis of the social and immediately communicative dimension of the new forms of living labour leads these authors to look for new figures of subjectivity, in relation to exploitation as well as revolutionary potential: ‘After a new theory of value, then, a new theory of subjectivity must be formulated that operates primarily through knowledge, communication, and language’ (Hardt and Negri, 2001, p. 47). The authors go on to argue that the growth of ‘immaterial labour’ has disrupted the traditional parameters of value production. They conclude that Marxian value theory is outdated, as it is no longer possible to distinguish between productive, reproductive and unproductive labour. In reality, it is this blurring of distinction that makes their theory as weak as many other variants of traditional Marxism. It is true that it is often no longer possible to distinguish between labour time and ‘free’ time, and that it is no longer possible to measure labour time. But this only shows that value is a straitjacket for new productive realities and does not imply that these realities are already beyond the grasp of value, nor, as Negri fancies, that ‘all activities have become places of production as soon as there is no longer a “place of production” ’ (Negri, 2001b, p. 83) which for Negri would finally throw the issue of productive labour out the window. This rationale tacitly presupposes that new forms of labour create surplus-value solely by virtue of the fact that ‘exploitation’ takes place. It ignores the fact that capital does not simply aim at exploiting as many people as possible, but as many people as possible according to the existing level of profitability – which are not at all the same thing. Hardt and Negri use these assertions to give a new lease of life to the concept of the proletariat and to affirm that now almost everyone is a proletarian. While they consider the distinctions between productive forces and relations of production, production and reproduction, constant capital and variable capital, base and superstructure, to be outdated, they are careful not to say the same thing about living and dead labour. Indeed, the modernist pretensions of their whole theory are simply a revival of the Italian Workerism of the 1970s. The latter, for its part, was an extremely subjectivist re-run of the positions

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of the Second International, viz. that living labour creates all ‘value’ – an argument that makes no distinction between values and use values – but has it that labour is governed and operated by capital as an external, parasitic force. The ‘multitude’ that Hardt and Negri describe, as a set of different singularities of the ‘people’ – which is constituted only in relation to the sovereign – is, on their own admission, simply another name for the proletariat, which they identify with all those who are exploited and dominated. In Empire there is no real critique of labour; what the authors define as such is merely the extolling of resistance to capitalist labour conditions. The transformation of labour into value is not the object of criticism; on the contrary, it is seen as an ontological, neutral and even positive fact. Thus, Negri and Hardt confuse the concept of abstract labour with that of ‘immaterial labour’: ‘Through the computerization of production, then, labour tends toward the position of abstract labour’ (Negri, 2001b, p. 310). That is, they do not distinguish between abstract labour and concrete labour and they attribute value creation to concrete labour: ‘Labour appears simply as the power to act … we can thus define the virtual power of labour as a power of self-valorisation that exceeds itself ’ (Negri, 2001b, p. 376, emphasis in original). According to them, cooperation is immanent to immaterial labour and is not added to it from the outside, unlike traditional factory labour. The multitude therefore already possesses all the forces of cooperation, but are held prisoner by capital, which for its part creates nothing and must even curtail these forces. Immaterial labour can thus valorize itself and no longer needs variable capital: ‘Brains and bodies still need others to produce value, but the others they need are not necessarily provided by capital and its capacities to orchestrate production … immaterial labour thus seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism’ (Negri, 2001b, p. 294). The computer would thus be the instrument that realizes the time-honoured dream of traditional Marxists of a labour that creates value without the intervention of capital. In fact, Negri speaks of the ‘PC [not the Communist Party, but the Personal Computer]12 as an autonomous capacity for labour, as a tool integrated into the brain, without the need for a boss who provides it on loan in exchange for labour’ (Negri, 2001a, p. 17, trans. Peter Dunn).13 Anyone who is enthusiastic about this ‘self-valorization’ has therefore already accepted value, labour and money and just wants to change property



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relations. For Negri and Hardt, labour and capital are not two poles of the same relationship of private appropriation, but ontologically represent fullness and emptiness, life and vampirism (Hardt and Negri, 2001, p. 80). In reality, labour and capital are indissolubly linked together, and one cannot exist without the other. Consequently, the crisis of one is also the crisis of the other. Therefore not only is the capitalist dream of being able to continue accumulation without even resorting to more labour in vain, but also the Workerist hope that labour can emancipate itself from capital and continue to exist as ‘labour’. For Negri and Hardt, therefore, the limit of capitalism lies in the subjectivity of the exploited and not in the internal contradictions of capitalism. On the contrary, for them ‘capitalism is miraculously healthy, its accumulation more robust than ever’ (Hardt and Negri, 2001, p. 288). On the subject of crisis, they muddle the issue by saying that crisis is always omnipresent, because ‘crisis is for capital a normal condition that indicates not its end but its tendency and mode of operation’(Hardt and Negri, 2001, p. 240). Capitalist development is therefore nothing but a parasitic and repressive repurposing of what the proletariat spontaneously creates in its desire for freedom (whose provenance is never explained). According to Negri and Hardt, it is this proletarianmultitude who make history, because its struggles will force capital to evolve by accepting political reforms and technological restructuring. Negri and Hardt, like Bourdieu, therefore deny that capital is driven forward by its internal dynamics and by competition. They see in its new forms only a reaction to the subjectivity of the exploited. According to these authors, this subjectivity is obviously in no way affected by the commodity form. As a result, the post-1968 protest movements contributed to the spread of intellectual, affective and immaterial labour by valorizing ‘mobility, flexibility, knowledge, communication, cooperation, [and] the affective’ (Hardt and Negri, 2001, p. 293). According to Negri and Hardt, it was not capital that prompted these new values, not even in a dialectical relationship. ‘Capital’s problem was rather to dominate a new composition that had already been produced autonomously and defined within a new relationship to nature and labour, a relationship of autonomous production’ (Hardt and Negri, 2001, p. 294). According to these two authors, ‘Empire’ should not be fought by a return to earlier forms, but by realizing the potential for liberation it contains within itself. In their view, Empire – as a form of transnational domination – represents

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historical progress and was created by the multitudes themselves. Indeed, it is merely a perverted form of what the multitude creates: ‘The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges’ (Hardt and Negri, 2001, p. 15). All that remains then is to incorporate into Empire government those proletarians who already make up the Empire: ‘The circuits of productive cooperation have made labour power as a whole capable of constituting itself in government’ (Hardt and Negri, 2001, p. 368). A century prior to this declaration, Marxists of the Second International regarded monopolies and joint stock companies as the direct precursors of social property, in such a way that all the proletariat had to do was run them. Empire is aimed at a very specific audience in sociological terms: it suggests to the new middle classes – earning their living in the ‘creative’ sectors (IT, advertising, cultural industry) – that they are the new subject of the transformation of society. Communism will be achieved by an army of computer micro-entrepreneurs. It is remarkable how in Negri and Hardt the ‘multitude’ and its creations meet with blanket approval – only the appropriation of these creations by capital is judged to be deplorable. Thus, the authors speak of ‘the accumulation of expressive and productive capacities that the processes of globalization have determined in the consciousness of every individual and social group’ (Hardt and Negri, 2001, p. 231). They never question the content of this creativity, thus endorsing technology, science and the productive forces as they developed from the Renaissance onwards. But what exactly have the ‘mass intelligence’ and ‘endemic creativity’ that so enthrals Negri and Hardt so gloriously created over the last few decades thanks to the ‘concentration of productive labour on the plastic and fluid terrain of the new communicative, biological, and mechanical technologies’ (Hardt and Negri, 2001, p. 236)? Among the wonders that come immediately to mind are computer and gene technology, ever more dreadful weapons and ramshackle skyscrapers, cyberpunk aesthetics, trash literature, new technologies of control and cable television. Even assuming that these inventions demonstrate a very high degree of technical competence (albeit for a small minority), the fact remains that this potential for ‘creativity’ went unopposed into this very kind of creation and no other. The subjects of this marvellous multitude have



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completely internalized the criteria of commodity society, and their creations bear witness to this. Indeed, today almost all material and immaterial products consist of a pile of junk that should be done away with rather than trying to wrench it from capital by shouting ‘that’s ours!’.14

Leaving market society behind One ceterum censeo remains to any horizon of social emancipation: the times are over when one extant category of people could be set against the ‘domination’ and ‘exploitation’ exercised by another group. The critique of commodity fetishism calls for the supersession of all fetishistic forms, thus also the fetishistic form of the subject who cannot imagine that ‘selling and selling oneself will one day come to an end’ (Kurz, 1996, p. 19). On a personal level too, a break with all the values imposed by commodity society is required, viz. the demands made by money, the valorization of labour, the joys promised by the commodity and the cult of success and efficiency. In the new waves of protest, there are still too many people who do not see anything wrong in ‘designer clothes’ or other consumer pipe dreams, although for peace of mind they go for clothing not sourced from sweatshops exploiting child labour and, out of a concern for their own health and well-being, made from natural fibres. Value criticism is not an ideology aimed at justifying the rise of a new social class or, even worse, a new ruling elite. In some ways, it instead espouses theories that diagnose the crisis affecting all forms of a particular civilization. Contrary to what will be said by its opponents, who accuse it of ‘determinism’, ‘objectivism’ or ‘fatalism’, value criticism does not proclaim iron laws that would strip the individual of any possibility of intervention. It is in the course of historical change from one fetish form to another that the hold of fetish forms weakens. At the same time, the decline of commodity society weakens the deterministic conditioning that it is capable of exerting, and thus it is only the decomposition of the system itself that remains determined in advance. The fact that society is governed by deterministic laws is a historically limited fact for ‘a theory of determinism must delimit the logical and historical scope of validity within which one can effectively speak of deterministic processes’ (Lohoff, 1996, p. 65). It is therefore a question of freeing oneself from the

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tyranny of historical laws, as opposed to executing them. Here we can see the profound meaning of Marx’s assertion that all of capitalist history still belongs to ‘prehistory’ subjected to blind forces. There is no necessary succession between slave society, feudalism, capitalism and communism. The teleology of history which is part of Marxist scholasticism, after many detours, will eventually come to an end. What Marx demonstrates is that, once value has become the predominant form of socialization, it must follow an inevitable course that will end with its selfdissolution. Yet there is no necessity for capitalism to have appeared, nor for it to give way to socialism. It was above all for the first generations of Marxists that the crisis of capitalism and the coming of socialism were closely linked and almost identical. For them, capitalism would disappear precisely because popular masses wanted to turn it into socialism. Value criticism, for which crisis means the self-destruction of capitalism, is much less optimistic in this respect, for the end of capitalism does not imply any guaranteed passage to a better society. On the contrary, the fall into barbarism is what is already happening in many instances and this is what may well be the end result on a global scale. It is not only the great totalitarian state that threatens us, but also the spread of anomie throughout society. Commodity society will break down into islands of (very relative) well-being, surrounded by barbed wire on one side and on the other will be the rest of the world collapsing by varying degrees into gang or factional wars over the few remaining things that still contain ‘value’. The disintegration of Yugoslavia was a warning to the other backward countries that had believed they could participate in the banquet of commodity society.15 The last word of the commodity economy is to declare that humanity has become useless for valorization, and thus commodity totalitarianism has proved to be even stronger than the totalitarianism of the state. Nonetheless, the implosion of capitalism leaves a vacuum that could also allow the emergence of another form of social life. With regard to the progress of barbarism, we can today affirm something like a ‘point of view of humanity’ which is beyond class – but recalling that certain parts of humanity are much more interested than others in maintaining the logic of value. There has never been a period in history where the conscious will of humanity has had such an importance as it will have during the long agony of commodity society. This agony need not be foretold, for it is already unfolding before us. The opponents of



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the existing order no longer need to find strategies for disturbing public peace or breaking up consensus. Turbulence comes of its own accord, without the need for a declared enemy of capitalism to provoke it. The question is to understand what direction such turbulence will take. The time has passed when any protest, any challenge seemed to be automatically framed with a view to social emancipation. Many attacks against the ‘new world order’, especially outside Western countries, no longer fit into the classical programmes of both the left and the right and ultimately serve those who aim at anything other than a liberated humanity. It is more urgent than ever to find alternatives to today’s society. It is indeed necessary to ‘re-insert’ the economy into society, as Polanyi intended, not as an integration of an extant commodity economy into a supposedly larger society, but as a supersession of the division between production and consumption and as the abolition of the ‘economy’, ‘labour’, the state and the market. Such a change will not happen overnight, and here the old distinction between reform and revolution no longer makes much sense. Even simple defensive struggles, or modest and immediate demands, are only likely to succeed with a view to transcending the entire system itself. One thing above all is clear: no critique of capitalism is now possible without a critique of labour and such a critique is not simply a ‘luxury’ for rich countries. It is, on the contrary, even more relevant where work has already disappeared or where it had never even arrived, that is, wherever the society of labour informs people that it no longer needs them and that their disappearance would be good for the global economy. When being exploited by capital has become a privilege reserved for a minority, the old class struggle around labour has lost all meaning. The critique and practical abolition of ‘labour’ is a precondition for beginning to be truly active, for making use of resources and to escape from the forced inactivity to which the society of labour condemns an ever-increasing part of humanity. Capitalism has been an expropriation of resources, now it is necessary to organize their reappropriation. To find an alternative to commodity society, it is not necessary to go very far or to elaborate any ‘utopias’. It is at the source of Western society, precisely where the commodity began its historical triumph, that we also find its opposite. It is therefore well worth reassessing Aristotles’ idea of the ‘good life’ as the real purpose of society, for such an idea is diametrically opposite to the service of the fetish-god of money.

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Notes Preface 1 Translator’s note: ‘Crédit à mort’ (éditions Lignes, Paris, 2011).

Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9

Translator’s note (TN hereafter): English original. TN: ‘Social centres’ Italian original. TN: in reference to the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle. TN: José Bové and Francois Dufour. The World Is Not For Sale: Farmers against Junk Food. London: Verso, [2000] 2001. TN: German: Keimzelle. It was Marx himself who applied the terms ‘esoteric’ and ‘exoteric’ to Adam Smith (MECW, vol. 31, p. 391) – the question was to know whether Smith was able to get to the essence of the global process or whether he placed himself in the shoes of the individual capitalist). Even before this, Heinrich Heine and the young Hegelians had applied these terms to Hegel, and others later to Plato. TN: ‘perdre sa vie à la gagner’. TN: ‘marée noire’ – lit. ‘black tides’ – term referring originally to the shipwreck and subsequent oil spill of the Torrey Canyon petrol tanker in 1967. This should be substantially complemented by what now goes by the name of ‘Critical Marxism’. Its representatives limited themselves in general to the eminently worthwhile critique or refutation of the ‘orthodox’ or Stalinist interpretations of Marx’s work (e.g. in the books of Maximilien Rubel (Marx critique du marxisme, Payot, Paris, 1974) and Kostas Papaioannou (Marx et les marxistes, J’ai lu, Paris, 1965, republished by Flammarion, Paris 1972, 1984; L’Idéologie froide, Essai sur le dépérissement du marxisme, éditions Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Paris, 1967). They were particularly interested in the political aspects of Marx’s theory and its critique of ideology, at the same time as their understanding of his critique of political economy matched the orthodox Marxist one in every detail convinced that its pivot was the concept of class, private property and living labour. Sometimes the most radical theorists took this even further with notions

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such as ‘class struggle’, criticizing the orthodox Marxists for having watered down these ideas. As soon as they rejected such notions (such as the ‘ontology of labour’ which they thought they detected in Marx’s work), commentators such as Cornelius Castoriadis or Claude Lefort also rejected the Marxian critique of political economy. They did this without any attempt to criticize Marx through the prism of Marx, and without even imagining that the key for surpassing ‘Marxist’ concepts could be found in Marx himself. Others wished to retain Marx’s ‘economics’ in its traditional interpretation, whilst combining it with the results of other disciplines such as linguistics, anthropology or empirical sociology. In this context there exists an equally strong tendency to reassess Marx’s theory in the light of bourgeois concepts of democracy. The upshot of these eclectic approaches was in general the outright abandoning of Marxian categories themselves. What all these theories have in common is that they never refer to the Marxian critique of value and of the commodity – and even less do they attribute a central role to them. However, often the words ‘fetishism’ or ‘alienation’ may have been used in the past, these phenomena were never applied to the structure of the commodity. 10 Above all, the theory of fetishism developed in this book owes much to the German journals Krisis and Exit!, and it often adopts their point of view. This is an approach that we ourselves have helped to develop, one that is fleshed out more in the pages that follow than via specific quotations.

1  This stranger the commodity 1 In a letter to Engels dated 22 June 1867, having just finished the first volume of Capital, Marx wrote: The economists have hitherto overlooked the very simple fact that the equation 20 yards of fabric= 1 coat is but the primitive form of 20 yards of fabric = £2, and thus that the simplest form of a commodity, in which its value is not yet expressed in its relation to all other commodities but only as something differentiated from its own natural form, embodies the whole secret of the money form and thereby, in nuce [in embryo], of all bourgeois forms of the product of labour. (Marx to Engels in Manchester [1867], MECW, vol. 42, p. 384, emphasis in original) In relation to an article on A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that Engels was planning to write, Marx wrote to him on the 22nd of July 1859: ‘Should you write something, don’t forget, 1. that it extirpates Proudhonism root and branch, 2. that the specifically social, by no means absolute, character of bourgeois

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production is analysed straight away in its simplest form, that of the commodity’ (MECW, vol. 40, p. 473). In a letter to Engels on the 8th of January 1868, Marx lists ‘the three fundamentally new elements’ of Capital: The economists, without exception, have missed the simple fact that, if the commodity has the double character of use value and exchange value, then the labour represented in the commodity must also have a double character; thus the bare analysis of labour sans phrase, as in Smith, Ricardo, etc., is bound to come up against the inexplicable everywhere. This is, in fact, the whole secret of the critical conception. (MECW, vol. 42, p. 514) Marx often returned to the importance of his theory on the double nature of labour and on the novelty that it represents. Speaking again about Capital, which he has just completed, Marx wrote to Engels on the 24th of August 1867: ‘The best points in my book are: 1. (this is fundamental to all understanding of the facts) the two-fold character of labour according to whether it is expressed in use-value or exchange-value, which is brought out in the very First Chapter’ (MECW, vol. 42, p. 407). 2 We recall very briefly here the formation of Marx’s theory of value and of the commodity. The following works offer clarifications on these subjects: Roman Rosdolsky. The Making of Marx’s ‘Capital’, translated by Pete Burgess. London: Pluto Press, [1968] 1977; Ernest Mandel. The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx, 1843 to Capital , English translation by Brian Pearce, [1967] 1971; Hans-Georg Backhaus. ‘On the Dialectics of the Value-Form’, Thesis Eleven, vol. 1, no. 1 (1980): 94–8; Fred E. Schrader. Restauration und Revolution: Die Vorarbeiten zum ‘Kapital’ von Karl Marx in seinen Studienheften 1850–1858, 1980; Vitali Vygodski [1970]. The Story of a Great Discovery; How Karl Marx Wrote ‘Capital’, English translation by Christopher Salt, 1974 marxists.org version, 2009; Vitali Vygodski [1970]. Wie ‘Das Kapital’ entstand, German translation from Russian by G. Wermusch, Verlag Die Wirtschaft, Berlin, 1976; Walter Tuchscheerer. Bevor ‘Das Kapital’ entstand. Die Entstehung der ökonomischen Theorie von Karl Marx, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1968 [1]‌. (new edition, Pahl-Rugenstein, Köln 1968); Enrique Dussel. La producción teórica de Marx. Un comentario a los Grundrisse, Mexico: Siglo veintiuno editores, 1985; Enrique Dussel [1985]. Towards a Hidden Marx, A Commentary on the Manuscripts of 1861–63, Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, English translation by Yolando Angulo, 2001; Enrique Dussel. El Marx definitivo (1863–1882). Un comentario a la tercera y cuarta redaccioón de ‘El Capital’, Mexico: Siglo veintiuno editores, 1990.   After the defeat of the 1848–9 revolution and his subsequent transfer to London in 1849, Marx resumed his studies of political economy that he had already

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begun in 1844. He was envisaging a project that he believed could be completed ‘in 5 weeks’ (MECW, vol. 38, p. 325). Yet it was only during the summer of 1857, that in expectation of an imminent revolution following a great economic crisis, that Marx began work on the manuscript known as the Grundrisse. Beginning with developments on production ‘in general’ (the famous introduction) there follows a new foray into the analysis of money, containing an early draft on the theory of value. The last page of the manuscript again breaks new ground and is entitled ‘1.Value’. Before the completion of the Grundrisse, a letter to Engels dated 2 April 1858 provided a summary (termed ‘Short Outline’) of some of his results, above all in relation to value. Having found a publisher at the end of 1858, Marx begins drafting a first version of The Critique of Political Economy (which the publishers named Urtext). This draft appeared to begin with his analysis of value, but only a part of the second chapter on money and the beginning of the third chapter on capital have survived. The Critique of Political Economy was published in Berlin in 1859 with two chapters on the commodity and on money. Initially Marx’s intention was to publish a series of booklets. In the first half of the 1860s he wrote the early drafts of the three volumes of Capital, The Theories of Surplus-Value (published in 1905–10), as well other manuscripts on the subject of surplus value, such as Results of the Immediate Process of Production published in 1933. In 1867 he had the first volume of Capital printed, whose first chapter contained a reworked summary of the A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Because his friends L. Kugelmann and Engels voiced concerns that the theory of value would prove difficult to understand, Marx added at the last minute an ‘appendix’ which contained a ‘popularized’ version of the analysis of the value form. For the second edition of Capital (1873), Marx again undertook a careful revision of the first chapter, dividing the first section into three chapters. Five versions of the theory of value therefore exist, to which may be added the French translation of Capital (1872–5), revised by Marx himself on the basis of the second German edition. It is above all the first chapter of the French version that contains certain distinctive characteristics, which according to Marx ‘possess a scientific value independent of the original’ (Postface to the French edition, Marx, 1976a, p. 105). Finally, in his observations on the Manual of Political Economy by the German economist Adolph Wagner (written around 1880), Marx provides some of his final reflections on his own theory of value. There have been very few philological studies on the Marxian theory of value, or even cursory attention paid to its texts. In these texts are a number of sentences which were totally ignored until the 1960s, despite their striking nature. Nor were they deemed at all worthy of detailed discussion. It is equally striking that even after its German-language publication in Moscow in 1939, hardly any attention was paid to the Grundrisse until around 1965, followed only later by translations into other

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languages (French 1968, Italian 1969, English 1973). Similarly, practically nobody took the first German edition of Capital into consideration which could only be consulted with extreme difficulty as very few copies had survived, and which had never been reprinted. Thus to read about value theory solely on the basis of its exposition in the second edition of Capital was itself to underestimate its Hegelian underpinnings and the problems that value theory posed. 3 ‘For bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour, or the valueform of the commodity, is the economic cell-form’ wrote Marx in the preface to the first German edition of Capital, accurately foreseeing that ‘to the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 90, emphasis added). 4 Marx is not particularly bothered about demonstrating the correctness of the ‘labour theory of value’, elaborated by ‘classical’ bourgeois political economy, especially that of Smith and Ricardo which he seems to use as a starting point. In his time this elaboration was rarely challenged. Yet later, official economic science would maintain that the value of a commodity is far better determined by its ‘marginal utility’. With its supposed refutation of the labour theory of value, academic economic science even believed it had refuted the entirety of Marx’s theory, and its presuppositions. In reality, academic economic science quickly abandoned all theoretical preoccupations (even those of an apologetic nature) in favour of simple mathematical models, ceasing all interest in any determination of value. More importantly, as we will see, Marx in his own critique of value goes beyond all the ‘naturalistic’ labour theories of value which occupied his predecessors. If Marx had not gone beyond these critiques neglected by traditional Marxists, then the criticisms made against Marx – for example, in the debate on the ‘transformation of values into price’ – would be partially justified. Otherwise, Marx did not ‘prove’ his understanding of value in a preliminary manner. Rather it is the totality of the internal coherence of his theory and its capacity to explain empirical phenomena which in turn prove the accuracy of his conception of value, which forms the basis of this theory. On the 11th of July 1868, Marx wrote to his friend Ludwig Kugelmann about a review of the first volume of Capital in the journal Centralblatt. With regard to the author of the review who criticized Marx for not ‘proving’ his theory of value, Marx wrote: The unfortunate fellow does not see that, even if there were no chapter on ‘value’ at all in my book, the analysis I give of the real relations would contain the proof and demonstration of the real value relation. The chatter about the need to prove the concept of value arises only from complete ignorance both of the subject under discussion and of the method of science. (MECW, vol. 43, p. 68)

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5 To avoid all misunderstanding, it is necessary to consider that for Marx, ‘value’ and ‘price’ are not identical. Value has no empirical existence, nor is it measurable in any particular instance because real existing social relations are infinitely more complex than the elementary examples which we have given. Therefore, the value of each commodity depends almost always on the value of every other commodity which has contributed to their production. Supply and demand, as well as other factors also enter into the composition of price, which is itself different to value. Yet price always gravitates around value, which in the long run is the determining factor. The superficial reality formed by price ‘conceals’ the fundamental reality constituted by value, without invalidating it the slightest. Modern bourgeois economic science concerns itself exclusively with prices, and thus with a simple phenomenal form, for whom the category of value is a useless philosophical speculation on a hypothetic ‘thing-in-itself ’. 6 ‘Empirically we are able to grasp concrete and useful labour, exchange-value and money. Yet in the middle there is a gap which we cannot grasp empirically in which Marx identifies the “unseizable” categories of abstract labour and value’ (Kurz, 1987, p. 80, trans. P. D.). Krisis is a theoretical journal published since 1986 in Nuremburg, Germany, initially under the title Marxistische Kritik. Its primary contributors have been Robert Kurz, Roswitha Scholz, Peter Klein, Norbert Trenkle and Ernst Lohoff, who have also published a number of books, essays, articles and brochures, some of which are cited in the present work. Krisis regularly organizes seminars, conferences and meetings. Unlike other representatives of value criticism, Krisis steps outside the academic and scholarly arena, so as to move from theory to contemporary and historical analyses while sparking plenty of controversy along the way. Its scope ranges widely from the subtlest interpretations of Marxian theory to commentaries on the current movements of the stock exchange published by the daily media. None of its main authors have university or other such institutional affiliations. Their theories emerged on the fringes of Marxist discussion groups in the 1980s which gradually came to involve a wider audience. Indeed in Germany and Brazil, print runs of their publications, particularly those by Robert Kurz, are unusually large for this type of literature. With Krisis, value criticism has taken leave of traditional Marxism as well as of bourgeois academic theory and has gone beyond its initial phase of a kind of esoteric science. Works on value criticism available in English include Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson and Nicholas Brown. Marxism and the Critique of Value. Chicago: MCM, 2014 (a collection of several essays); Robert Kurz. No Revolution Anywhere. London: Chronos Publications, 2012, pp. 30–8; Robert Kurz, The Substance of Capital, translated by Robin Halpin. London: Chronos Publications, 2016; Krisis. Contributions to the Critique of Commodity Society. The Boomerang Series. 8. London: Chronos Publications,

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8 9

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pp. 20–5; Robert Kurz. Marx 2000. The Boomerang Series. 9. London: Chronos Publications, 2002; Alastair Hemmens. The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought, from Charles Fourier to Guy Debord. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Anselm Jappe. ‘Sohn-Rethel and the Origin of “Real Abstraction”: A Critique of Production or a Critique of Circulation’. Historical Materialism, vol. 21, no. 1, 2013; Anselm Jappe. ‘Towards a History of the Critique of Value’. Translated by Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro and Alastair Hemmens. Capitalism Nature Socialism, vol. 25, no. 2, 2014; Anselm Jappe. ‘Kurz. A Journey into Capitalism’s Heart of Darkness’. Translated by Alastair Hemmens. Historical Materialism, vol. 22, nos. 3–4, 2014; Anselm Jappe. ‘We Gotta Get Outta This Place’. Interview with Anselm Jappe by Alastair Hemmens. Brooklyn Rail, September 2015; Anselm Jappe. The Writing on the Wall. On the Decomposition of Capitalism and Its Critics, translated by Alastair Hemmens. London: Zero Books, 2017; Anselm Jappe. ‘Fetishism’, in The SAGE Handbook of Marxism, ed. Beverly Skeggs et al., vol. I. London: Sage, 2021, pp. 559–75; a number of articles, as well as the Manifesto against Labour, can be found on exit-online.de and other websites. In 2004 after the split in the Krisis group, Kurz and Scholz founded and directed the journal Exit!, which has reached its nineteenth issue as of 2022. By ‘classical political economy’ Marx means the theoretical developments which began in France, and above all in England at the end of the seventeenth century, and which culminated in the works of Adam Smith (1723–90) and David Ricardo (1772–1823). Marx recognized a certain scientific value in ‘classical political economy’ but considered that it had become sordidly apologetic and ‘vulgar’ in the wake of Ricardo. However, the theoretical debt that Marx owes to ‘classical’ theory is much more modest than certain Marxists and anti-Marxists (such as J. Schumpeter) fancy. TN: In Capital, the expression ‘sensuous things which are at the same time suprasensible or social’ is also employed (Marx, 1976a, p. 165). ‘To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material [dinglich] relations between persons and social relations between things’ (Marx, 1976a, pp. 165–6, emphasis in original). There is no doubt that for Marx, the commodity as such constitutes a fetishist category: ‘In the capitalist process, every element, even the simplest, the commodity for example, is already an inversion and causes relations between people to appear as attributes of things and as relations of people to the social attributes of things’ (MECW, vol. 32, p. 507). In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, we read that ‘the contradiction of commodity and money is the abstract and general form of all contradictions inherent in the bourgeois

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Notes mode of labour’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 332). In the Results of the Immediate Process of Production, Marx already sees ‘the basis for the fetishism of the political economists’ in the fact that the product appears in-itself and for-itself, such that ‘the product embedded in this mode of production is equated with the commodity by those who have to deal with it’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 983). Finally in the third volume of Capital, Marx sums up his thought: We have already shown in connection with the most simple categories of the capitalist mode of production and commodity production in general, in connection with commodities and money, the mystifying character that transforms the social relations for which the material elements of wealth serve as bearers in the course of production into properties of these things themselves (commodities), still more explicitly transforming the relation of production itself into a thing (money). (Marx, 1981, p. 921)

Furthermore in the third volume he points out that the two above characters of the product as commodity and the commodity as capitalistically produced commodity give rise to the entire determination of value and the regulation of the total production by value … What is also implied already in the commodity, and still more so in the commodity as the product of capital, is the reification of the social determinations of production and the subjectification of the material bases of production which characterize the entire capitalist mode of production. (Marx, 1981, p. 974) 11 TN: ‘In the case of shoes, for example, one can wear them or one can trade them’ (Aristotle, 2012, p. 52). 12 ‘It is relatively easy to distinguish the value of the commodity from its use-value, or the labour which forms the use-value from that same labour insofar as it is merely reckoned as the expenditure of human labour power in the commodityvalue. If one considers commodity or labour in the one form, then one fails to consider it in the other and vice versa. These abstract opposites fall apart on their own, and hence are easy to keep separate. It is different with the value-form which exists only in the relationship of commodity to commodity’ (Marx, 1976b, p. 21, emphasis in original). 13 ‘It is not less a definite social relation of producers, in which they measure the magnitude of their labours by the duration of expenditure of human labourpower. But within our practical interrelations these social characters of their own labours appear to them as social properties pertaining to them by nature, as objective determinations (gegenständliche Bestimmungen) of the products

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of labour themselves, the equality of human labours as a value-property of the products of labour, the measure of the labour by the socially necessary labourtime as the magnitude of value of the products of labour, and finally the social relations of the producers through their labours appear as a value-relation or social relation of these things, the products of labour. Precisely because of this the products of labour appear to them as commodities, sensible-supersensible (sinnlich übersinnliche) or social things’ (Marx, 1978, p. 142, emphasis in original). 14 In a passage of the ‘appendix’ to the first edition of Capital, Marx probably gives the best description of this inversion: Within the value-relation and the value expression included in it, the abstractly general counts not as a property of the concrete, sensibly real; but on the contrary the sensibly-concrete counts as the mere form of appearance or definite form of realisation of the abstractly general. The labour of tailoring, which, for example, hides in the equivalent ‘coat’, does not possess, within the value-expression of the linen, the general property of also being human labour. On the contrary. Being human labour counts as its essence (Wesen), being the labour of tailoring counts only as the form of appearance (Erscheinungsform) or definite form of realisation of this its essence. This quid pro quo is unavoidable because the labour represented in the product of labour only goes to create value insofar as it is undifferentiated human labour, so that the labour objectified in the value of the product is in no way distinguished from the labour objectified in the value of a different product. This inversion (Verkehrung) by which the sensibly-concrete counts only as the form of appearance of the abstractly general and not, on the contrary, the abstractly general as property of the concrete, characterizes the expression of value. At the same time, it makes understanding it difficult. (Marx, 1978, pp. 139–40, emphasis in original) 15 This expression does not occur in Marx’s work, although its content is clearly expressed in formulations such as this from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: ‘This reduction appears to be an abstraction, but it is an abstraction which is made every day in the social process of production. The conversion of all commodities into labour-time is no greater an abstraction, and is no less real, than the resolution of all organic bodies into air’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 272), or in another formulation where the ‘labour of different persons is equated and treated as universal labour’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 275). All that is required for ‘a particular commodity as a universal equivalent [to be] transformed from a pure abstraction into a social result of the exchange

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process’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 287, emphasis in original), is that ‘every commodity considered as exchange value [becomes] a measure of value of all other commodities’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 287). ‘But the act of equating tailoring with weaving reduces the former in fact to what is really equal in the two kinds of labour, to the characteristic they have in common of being human labour … 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 varieties of labour embodied in the different kinds of commodities to their common quality of human labour in general. (Marx, 1976a, p. 142, emphasis in original). The same observations crop up in the course of successive stages of Marxian analysis. In the second volume of Capital we read: ‘Those who consider the autonomization of value as a mere abstraction forget that the movement of industrial capital is this abstraction in action’ (Marx, 1992, p. 169). In the Results of the Direct Production Process in relation to the difference between concrete labour and ‘undifferentiated, socially necessary general labour’, Marx says that ‘within the process of production this distinction confronts us actively. It is no longer we who make it, instead it is created in the process of production itself ’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 993, emphasis in original). Mental abstraction merely sums up empirical facts which are accepted as indisputable givens. On the contrary, the concept of real abstraction and conceptual development casts doubt on empirical reality and seeks to explain its origin by demonstrating that this reality could also be different. 16 Given the large amount of modern interest in language and the fact that Marx devoted so little consideration to it, here is an interesting comparison that Marx makes between money and language in the Grundrisse: ‘To compare money with language is not less erroneous. Language does not transform ideas, so that the peculiarity of ideas is dissolved and their social character runs alongside them as a separate entity, like prices alongside commodities. Ideas do not exist separately from language’ (Marx, 1973, pp. 162–3). 1 7 It is true that Marx spoke almost exclusively of the production of material objects which predominated in his day and age. Yet commodity logic in no way changes if abstract labour is realized in an immaterial result or a ‘service’. Indeed Marx writes bluntly that in this relationship there is no difference between placing one’s money in a sausage factory or in a teaching factory (Marx, 1976a, p. 644). It is therefore absurd to claim that Marx’s theory is now superseded because today immaterial production predominates (services, information, communication, etc.). Nevertheless we shall return to this question later in our discussion of productive labour. 18 In other words, political economy never took the qualitative side of the problem into account:

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This transformation of the labour of private individuals contained in the commodities into uniform social labour, consequently into labour which can be expressed in all use-values and can be exchanged for them, this qualitative aspect of the matter which is contained in the representation of exchange-value as money, is not elaborated by Ricardo. This circumstance – the necessity of presenting the labour contained in commodities as uniform social labour, i.e., as money – is overlooked by Ricardo. (MECW, vol. 32, p. 318, emphasis in original) 19 The understanding of the concept of abstract labour is made more difficult by that fact that Marx himself only gradually and never completely separated it from the concept of average or socially necessary labour, as well as the concept of simple labour as opposed to complex labour. Little by little Marx became aware of some of the most important aspects of this discovery, such as the fundamental difference between abstract labour and average labour, between ‘labour sans phrases’, and abstract labour as the substance of value, and above all, between value and exchange value. Marxist literature has generally neglected these differences.   In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx identifies two different abstractions: on the one hand a more and more mechanized process of production which disregards the skills of different labourers – specifically the replacement of skilled labour by unskilled labour – and on the other hand ‘abstract labour’ as a social form. At the beginning of chapter one of the first edition of Capital, Marx does not yet refer to abstract labour, but only to ‘labour’ as the substance of value by measuring value-creating labour against unskilled average labour (Marx, 1976b, p. 9). Marx only introduces the concept of ‘abstract labour’ in his analysis of the simple value form (Marx, 1976b, p. 20). It is only in the second volume of Capital that Marx clearly distinguishes between average and abstract labour as formal determinations, beginning immediately with abstract labour as the substance of value. In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx does not yet make a clear distinction between value and exchange value. Even in Value, Price and Profit, a lecture series held in 1865, Marx says: ‘In speaking of value I speak always of exchangeable value’ (MECW, vol. 20, p. 119). As always Marx tended to foster misunderstandings when trying to ‘popularize’ a particular idea. In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx had written: ‘Regarded as exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 272, emphasis in original). In Capital, he cites the following sentence from his own book with no indication that anything had been altered: ‘As values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed labour time’ (Marx,

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1976a, p. 130). In the first edition we read: ‘A thing can be a use-value without being an exchange-value’ (Marx, 1976b, p. 11, emphasis in original) and in the second edition: ‘A thing can be a use-value, without being a value’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 131). Whilst the second sentence of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy affirms that ‘[e]‌very commodity, however, has a twofold aspect – use-value and exchange-value’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 269, emphasis in original), the title of the first sub-chapter of Capital is named ‘The two factors of the commodity: use-value and value (substance of value, magnitude of value)’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 125). A footnote in the first edition indicates that ‘when in future we use the term “value” without any other determinations, we refer always to exchangevalue’ (Marx, 1976b – footnote not translated in the English edition where it should be at p. 9), while in the second edition Marx says, ‘[h]ere, as occasionally also on previous pages, we use the expression “value”, for quantitatively determined values, i.e., for the magnitude of value’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 145). In the Theories on Surplus Value, written after the completion of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, but before Capital, Marx discovers that the lack of distinction between value and exchange value is precisely one of Ricardo’s errors: The criticism we can make of Ricardo in this regard is simply to have not rigorously separated the different moments in the development of the concept of value. Ricardo does not consider the exchange-value of the commodity, as it is represented, as it appears in the process of commodity exchange as distinct from the existence of the commodity as a value and as different from the commodities existence as a thing, a product, a usevalue. (Marx, 1976b, trans. mod., emphasis in original) In the notes on Adolph Wagner, Marx points implicitly to the inadequacy of his own previous distinction: ‘Thus I do not divide value into use-value and exchange-value as opposites into which the abstraction “value” splits up, but the concrete social form of the product of labour, the “commodity,” is on the one hand, use-value and on the other, “value,” not exchange value, since the mere form of appearance is not its own content’ (MECW, vol. 24, p. 545, emphasis in original). Marx therefore seems to give a negative response to the questions he posed twenty-three years earlier in the Grundrisse: ‘Is not value to be conceived as the unity of use value and exchange value? In and for itself, is value as such the general form, in opposition to use value and exchange value as particular forms of it?’ (Marx, 1973, p. 267). 20 This sentence is not found in the second German edition. However, in the French version which Marx corrected, and which almost always followed the text of the second German edition, Marx retained this sentence from the first German edition by re-inserting it next to the reworked one for the second German

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edition (Marx, 1989, p. 29) since he obviously regretted its removal. I. I. Rubin paraphrases the latter proposition well: ‘Value is not the product of labour but is a material, fetish expression of the working activity of people’ (Rubin, 1928, p. 192). Isaac Illich Rubin (1885–1937) in the 1920s was a renowned professor of fledgling soviet political economy. His main work, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, appeared in Moscow in 1924 in the context of academic debate. This work was required reading for students, although once its author was arrested in 1930 for his ‘Menshevism’ and sent to Siberia; his works were also withdrawn from circulation. In 1937, Rubin became a victim of Stalinist Terror. (The little biographical information that we have on Rubin comes from Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origin and Consequences of Stalinism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, pp. 180–4, as well as from Naum Jasny, Soviet Economics of the Twenties (Names to Be Remembered), Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1972). Rubin’s study on the theory of value was not only one of the first works on the subject, but remains till today one of the best. This is all the more surprising since Rubin – who was well acquainted with the discussions that took place during the Second International – had obviously never come across ‘Western’ Hegelian Marxism of the 1920s. His book remained completely unknown in the West (only Rosdolsky mentions it) until 1969 when an American translation was published. This translation was the basis for translations into other European languages (German 1973, Spanish 1974, Italian 1976, French 1978). To our knowledge only two of Rubin’s other books are translated into Western languages: Isaak Illich Rubin, and S. A. Bessonov, Dialektik der Kategorien, German translation by Eva Mayer and Peter Gerlinghoff, Berlin: VSA, 1975; Isaak Illich Rubin, A History of Economic Thought [1929], English translation by D. Filtzer, London: Pluto Press, 1979, 1989. Two articles by Rubin ‘Zwei Schriften über die Marxsche Werttheorie’ and ‘Stolzmann als Marxkritiker’ were published in 1928 in the first volume of Marx-EngelsArchiv in Frankfurt (reprinted Erlangen, 1971). After 1970, almost every author concerned with Marx’s theory of value borrowed essential elements from Rubin’s arguments and are often more indebted to him than they appear. For our part, we often follow Rubin in our interpretation of the first chapter of Capital. Evidently, Rubin’s approach can only displease traditional Marxists. In the prefaces and postfaces of his two works published in German, the publishers complained about the absence of class ‘antagonisms’. Even P. Mattick, one of the most critically minded traditional Marxists, mistakes Rubin’s analysis of value for a ‘theory of equilibrium’ in ‘simple commodity production’ which takes no account of the existence of social classes, or fosters an understanding of crisis (Mattick, 1974, pp. 259–61). In his essay The Substance of Capital first published in Exit! Issues 1&2 (2004/2005) and in English translation by Chronos publications, 2016,

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Kurz underlines the differences between his own conception of abstract labour and that of Rubin’s. ‘Abstract labour is merely the “emptying” (German: Entleerung) of the “immediate producer’s” labour, that is, the separation of “intellectual potential” from the productive process itself until it is reduced to a contentless repetitive labour emptied of all scientific power in the process of metabolism with nature and thus to an “abstract” labour incorporating indifference and frustration. In reality, this apparently ‘critical’ analysis of abstract labour is based upon a major conceptual confusion: unconsciously it remains on the plane of “concrete labour” which, as such, implies “abstract labour” on a completely different level … Capitalist division of labour and its technical and material development are not the cause and the essence, but rather the result and the phenomenal form of this tautological principle of the form of social “labour”. This phenomenal form on the technical and material plane I call the empirical becoming-abstract of concrete labour, as distinct from the formal principle of abstract labour itself ’ (Kurz, 1991, pp. 27–8, emphasis in original). See the same sentence in the French Edition of Capital written by Marx himself: ‘The natural form of labour, its particularity – and not, as in a society based on commodity production, its universality, – is here its immediate social form’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 170). These examples, as with all examples that are used to explain the logic of value, have a limited scope and are useful only in so far as they facilitate understanding. ‘Where labour is communal, the relations of men in their social production do not manifest themselves as “values” of “things” … In the first part of my book [A Contribution …], I mentioned that it is characteristic of labour based on private exchange that the social character of labour “manifests” itself in a perverted form – as the “property” of things; that a social relation appears as a relation between things (between products, values in use, commodities)’ (MECW, vol. 32, p. 317). Naturally, this ‘society’ has no fixed borders. Society can be, in the framework of traditional subsistence economies, the village within which almost all exchange takes place. And it can equally be, above all today, the entire world, where each labour finds itself in immediate competition with the labour executed on the other side of the world. At most, each labour has several societies for its reference, although all this is without importance for the level of analysis in the present study. To understand the Marxian concept of abstract labour it is necessary to reference the Hegelian concepts of abstract universality and concrete universality. Marx uses them, for example, in the ‘introduction’ to the Grundrisse, where he develops his own method more than anywhere else. Marx opposes their

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reduction to ‘ever more simple concepts’ in the passage towards a ‘rich totality’, concluding that ‘[t]‌he concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse’ (Marx, 1973, pp. 100–1). Concrete universality is the summary of the concrete as concrete, a unity which does not violate the diversity of beings that it brings together. Abstract universality, on the contrary, erases the concrete and creates a form of universality in which there is no longer any trace of the concrete: it is not, therefore, the simple sum of concrete elements, but possesses an autonomous existence beside them. The abstract universality of social labour signifies that the social universality of labour (its social character) is in fact separated from the concrete wealth of a particular useful labour. A concrete universality of labour would contain the wealth of the individual and thus universality in as much as the particularity of labour would be social. In commodity production, total labour does not appear as a concrete universality, as a sum of individual labours, but rather as an abstract universality which reduces all particular labours to purely quantitative expressions of abstract universality, that is, to sums of money. Where different labours immediately refer to one another as useful labour, there is no longer any need for abstract universality. On the contrary, money represents ‘the incarnation of abstract universality, and does not at all “contain” the concrete totality of the system of useful labours, but rather it “erases” them’ (Kurz, 1987, p. 70; this essay showcases the problem very well). The act of making quantity autonomous creates an abstract universality, since once quantity is linked to the concrete determination of the content, its universality is equally concrete. If the act of measuring the duration of labour does not erase its social content, then there is no abstract labour. However, as we shall see later, it would be more accurate to say that the concept of ‘labour’ itself loses meaning outside of the modern sphere of abstract labour and its measurability. ‘A single commodity, the linen, therefore has the form of direct exchangeability with all other commodities, in other words it has a directly social form because, and in so far as, no other commodity is in this situation’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 161). ‘Each person’s labour is a social labour precisely because it is distinct from the labour of the members of society of which it is a material part. Labour in its concrete form is immediately social’ (Rubin and Bessonov, 1975, p. 12). ‘Machinery … operates only by means of associated labour, or labour in common’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 508). ‘One could even say: the more “private” different labours become the less they are “independent from each other” in a material and concrete sense’ (Kurz, 1991, p. 41).

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31 It is the triumph of mediation over whatever is mediated, a theme already found in Marx’s early reflections. In his reading notes on James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy (1844), Marx writes: It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself. Objects separated from this mediator have lost their value. Hence the objects only have value insofar as they represent the mediator, whereas originally it seemed that the mediator had value only insofar as it represented them. (MECW, vol. 3, p. 212, emphasis in original) Marx then goes on to compare the mediating function of Christ with that of money (MECW, vol. 3, p. 212), More than twenty years later, he writes in Capital: ‘Already it is evident here how in all spheres of social life the lion’s share falls to the middleman … in religion, God is pushed into the background by the “Mediator,” and the latter again is shoved back by the priests, the inevitable middlemen between the good shepherd and his sheep’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 907). In the Grundrisse, we also find a remark on exchange value as autonomous mediation on the one hand, and Christ and the ‘priests’ on the other (Marx, 1973, p. 332). 32 ‘For Marx, exchange – and the private labour conditioning it – are incompatible with the community. They do not exist in the primitive community. They will disappear in the community of the future. Their disappearance will also bring about the disappearance of “exchange value” ’ (Dognin, 1977, p. 15). 33 Marx already expressed this aspect in the chapter of his 1844 Manuscripts entitled ‘The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society’. 34 Colletti summarizes it thus: ‘Where labour is effectively communal, individual labours are considered as immediate parts and articulations of complex social labour … Where labour is not communal and the labour of individuals is “private”, the relationship becomes autonomous. Value, “immaterial objectivity”, is hypostatized “social unity” ’ (Colletti, 1973, pp. 271–5, trans. mod., emphasis in original). At the time a professor of philosophy at the University of Rome, Lucio Colletti (1924–2001) was one of the first authors post-1968 to have rediscovered the themes of abstract labour and fetishism. He brought his work in this area to the attention of a wider readership, coming eventually to influence the 1960s’ Italian far Left. Bizarrely, this influence then began, however, to take on an antiHegelian and neo-Kantian hue and Colletti’s subsequent ideological trajectory saw him become a senator under Silvio Berlusconi. 35 TN: ‘without more ado’ (MECW, vol. 42, p. 514). 36 TN: see also MECW, vol. 28, p. 420: ‘In bourgeois society, e.g., the worker stands there purely subjectively, without object; but the thing which confronts him has

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now become the true community, which he tries to make a meal of and which makes a meal of him’ (emphasis in original). 37 According to Marx, ‘gold and silver are the material of abstract wealth’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 367). 38 ‘As the general form of wealth, the whole world of real riches stands opposite it [money]. It is their pure abstraction – hence, fixated as such, a mere conceit. Where wealth as such seems to appear in an entirely material, tangible form, its existence is only in my head, it is a pure fantasy … If I want to cling to it, it evaporates in my hand to become a mere phantom of real wealth’ (Marx, 1973, pp. 233–4). 39 Marx adds this remark which is more relevant today than ever: ‘All nations characterized by the capitalist mode of production are periodically seized by fits of giddiness in which they try to accomplish the money-making without the mediation of the production process’ (Marx, 1992, p. 121). 40 According to Marx, Ricardo did not understand that ‘wealth itself, in its exchange-value form, appears as a merely formal mediation of its material composition’ (Marx, 1973, p. 331). 41 Or it does this only in an indirect manner through the growth of productive forces. We will turn our attention later to the supposedly ‘civilizing mission’ of capital. 42 TN: Translation modified. The Ben Fowkes translation of Capital Vol. 1 [1976] translates ‘Wertgegenständlichkeit’ as ‘socially uniform objectivity as values’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 166). 43 ‘The exchange value of a thing is nothing other than the quantitatively specific expression of its capacity for serving as medium of exchange’ (Marx, 1973, p. 199). 44 The Urtext (the original draft of Capital) has the same sentence but after ‘it becomes insanity’ Marx writes: ‘insanity stemming from the economic process itself ’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 493). We have translated Verrücktheit here as ‘insanity’ rather than ‘absurdity’.

2  Critique of labour 1 Of course, in moving on to the analysis of capital and wage-labour, Marx in no way abandons the critical categories that he developed in his analysis of the commodity. Traditional Marxism has systematically ignored these categories and relates the concept of fetishism, something it considers mysterious, exclusively to the ‘inverted representation’ which makes capital itself appear as the creator of

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value. Marx does indeed speak of this ‘inverted representation’, but by describing it as a consequence of the ‘truly inverted relationship’ between subject and object that already starts with the simple commodity. In Capital, he speaks of the inversion of subject and object that takes place already in the process of production. In the latter, we have seen, the subjective productive forces of labour appear as productive forces of capital. On the one hand, the value, or the past labour, which dominates living labour, is incarnated in the capitalist. On the other hand, the labourer appears as bare material labour-power, as a commodity. Even in the simple relations of production this inverted relationship necessarily produces certain correspondingly inverted conceptions, a transposed consciousness which is further developed by the metamorphoses and modifications of the actual circulation process. (Marx, 1981, p. 30) 2 Already in 1924, Rubin wrote that the Marxian theory of value does not completely neglect class, but that it approaches it starting from the equality of the participants in the exchange: ‘The theory of value, which takes as its starting point the equality of exchanged commodities, is indispensable for the explanation of capitalist society with its inequality’ (Rubin, 1990, p. 94). The inequality of classes is an inevitable consequence of the ‘egalitarian’ structure of the commodity and thus this structure is not a simple ideology that hides the real inequality of classes. 3 ‘From at least the Grundrisse on, Marx no longer makes class struggle a key to reading all societies and no longer bases the notion of social production on the simple production and reproduction of life (drinking, eating, housing), but on the production and reproduction of individuals and their social relationships (which obviously involves both material and symbolic aspects). It is moreover the case that Engels … tends to substitute the primary relationship between the forms of capital and of value with the derived relationships between capitalists and workers, which leaves out fundamentals aspects of the Marxian analysis’ (Vincent, 1991, p. 28). With regard to Capital Vol. 3, in the same essay, Vincent says: ‘Nowhere does Marx consider classes to be active subjects … or as collective actors consciously intervening in social relations’ (Vincent, 1991, p. 36). Jean-Marie Vincent (1934–2004), for many years a professor at Paris-Vincennes, was one of the first to introduce the Frankfurt School into France. His Abstract Labour: A Critique (1991) is probably the book closest in approach to value criticism even if in certain respects it still remains within the framework of traditional Marxism. 4 To put it in more precise terms: they may coincide, but they still need to be distinguished at the conceptual level. Marx himself often points this out, for example, in the Short Outline: ‘the transition of landed property to wage labour is not only dialectical but historical’ (MECW, vol. 40, p. 298) and ‘the principle

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of self-reproduction is not intrinsic to simple money circulation, which therefore implies something extrinsic to itself. Implicit in money – as the elaboration of its definitions shows – is the postulate capital, i.e. value entering into and maintaining itself in circulation, of which it is at the same time the prerequisite. This transition [is] also historical’ (MECW, vol. 40, p. 303, emphasis in original). 5 ‘Capital cannot come in to being except on the foundation of the circulation of commodities (including money) i.e., where trade has already grown to a certain degree … On the other hand however, once the commodity has become the general form of the product, then everything that is produced must assume that form; sale and purchase embrace not just excess produce, but its very substance, and the various conditions of production themselves appear as commodities that leave circulation and enter production only on the foundations of capitalist production’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 949, emphasis in original). 6 Despite this, in his review of The Contribution, published in 1859 in Das Volk, a journal of German emigrants in England (MECW, vol. 16, p. 465), Engels stated that Marx’s description of the transition from commodities to money, and then to capital, was the summary of a real historical process. Although this review was an occasional piece, written without Engels studying the subject in depth, and despite the fact that Engels himself subsequently arrived at a deeper understanding of this problem (as Backhaus demonstrated, 1997, p. 290), ‘orthodox’ Marxists have nonetheless canonized this account. According to the review, this ‘logical method of approach’, the ‘only suitable one’, is ‘indeed nothing but the historical method, only stripped of the historical form and of interfering contingencies. The point where this history begins must also be the starting point of the train of thought’ (MECW, vol. 16, p. 475). Any other consideration seemed to move away from ‘historical materialism’ and towards metaphysics. In truth, all the essential determinations in Capital are already found in the Grundrisse, where they are presented as the results of a logical deduction. The historical analyses contained in Capital are often only later additions: during the development of the critique of political economy, Marx increasingly filled his logical framework with empirical material. ‘Orthodox’ interpreters see this growing ‘historicization’ as a commendable supersession of the Grundrisse’s construction, a work plagued by ‘idealism’ and ‘Hegelianism’. Only in the 1960s did this interpretation begin to be seriously challenged. On the one hand, it was called into question by Althusser: ‘The order in which these concepts are articulated in the analysis is the order of Marx’s scientific proof: it has no direct, one-to-one relationship with the order in which any particular category may have appeared in history’ (Althusser, 2016, p. 43). On the other hand, as of 1968, the students of the Frankfurt School in Germany – such as Hans-Georg Backhaus who published an important essay Zur Dialektik der Wertform in 1969 and went on to author various studies on the

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value form published as Dialektik der Wertform in 1997 and Helmut Reichelt, the author of Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriffs bei Karl Marx (1970), who later became a professor in Bremen – developed a ‘logical’ interpretation that claims to reconstruct the ‘authentic’, ‘unpopularized’ form of Marxian value theory. They recall the fact that Marx (and a limited number of other authors such as Georg Simmel) did not simply ask why money exists, but also what money is. Without having determined what it is, it cannot even be decided whether a certain historical phenomenon represents money, a substitute for money or a preliminary form of money: it is only logical development that can explain the essence and nature of money. 7 ‘In Marx’s analysis, social domination in capitalism does not, on its most fundamental level, consist in the domination of people by other people, but in the domination of people by abstract social structures, that people themselves constitute’ (Postone, 1993, p. 30). The work of Moishe Postone (1942–2018), who taught at the University of Chicago, is rooted in Critical Theory and the discussions that it prompted around 1970. Postone goes much further than this however. His work is one of the most important attempts over the last few decades to reconstruct Marx’s theory. Postone begins his book by drawing a distinction between ‘the fundamental core of capitalism and its nineteenthcentury forms’ (Postone, 1993, p. 3), which is why he does not ‘analyse capitalism primarily in terms of private ownership of the means of production, or in terms of the market’ (Postone, 1993, p. 3). In place of ‘a critique of capitalism from the standpoint of labour’, he sought to propose ‘a critique of labour in capitalism’ (Postone, 1993, p. 5, emphasis in original) as Marx’s ‘mature critical theory is a critique of labour in capitalism, not a critique of capitalism from the standpoint of labour’ (Postone, 1993, p. 22). Postone’s criticism (which identifies a little too much with that of Marx himself) does not rely on the ‘gap between the ideals and the reality of modern capitalist society, but in the contradictory nature of the form of social mediation that constitutes that society’ (Postone, 1993, p. 67). Indeed, he sees the main contradiction of capitalism lying in a growing tension ‘between the socially general knowledge and skills whose accumulation is induced by the labour-mediated form of social relations, on the one hand, and this form of mediate itself, on the other’ (Postone, 1993, p. 304). 8 It is perhaps here, more than anywhere else, that we see the continuity between Marx’s early writings and his later critique of the economy. The concept of ‘alienation of species-being’ (Gattungswesen) in the 1844 Manuscripts, still conceived in the sense of Feuerbach’s anthropology, directly prepared the future analysis of the alienation of the community (Gemeinwesen) and the social bond.

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9 ‘As subjects they are the subjects of Capital. Whether they are wage-labourers or capitalists is of no importance: they are the supports of processes that go beyond them’ (Vincent, 1991, p. 18). 10 ‘These impersonal and abstract social forms [the commodity and capital, which Postone calls ‘the quasi-objective forms of social mediation constituted by labour in Capitalism’] do not simply veil what traditionally has been deemed the ‘real’ social relations of capitalism, that is, class relations; they are the real relations of capitalist society, structuring its dynamic trajectory and its form of production’ (Postone, 1993, p. 6, emphasis in original). 11 ‘In this quite alienated form of profit and in the same measure as the form of profit hides its inner core, capital more and more acquires a material form, is transformed more and more from a relationship into a thing, but a thing which embodies, which has absorbed, the social relationship, a thing which has acquired a fictitious life and independent existence in relation to itself, a naturalsupernatural entity; in this form of capital and profit it appears superficially as a ready-made pre-condition. It is the form of its reality, or rather its real form of existence’ (MECW, vol. 32, p. 484, emphasis in original). In value, something that exists only in thought form governs material life by being itself the expression of social relationships. In value, the social connection is as much the cause as the result of the mode of social production: Marx writes that ‘these objective dependency relations also appear, in antithesis to those of personal dependence … in such a way that individuals are now ruled by abstractions, whereas earlier they depended on one another. The abstraction, or idea, however, is nothing more than the theoretical expression of those material relations which are their lord and master’ (Marx, 1973, p. 164, emphasis in original). 12 Postone writes: ‘Marx, then, explicitly characterizes capital as the self-moving substance which is Subject. In so doing, Marx suggests that a historical Subject in the Hegelian sense does indeed exist in capitalism, yet he does not identify it with any social grouping, such as the proletariat, or with humanity. Rather, Marx analyses it in terms of the structure of social relations constituted by forms of objectifying practice and grasped by the category of capital (and, hence, value) … Marx’s Subject, like Hegel’s, then, is abstract and cannot be identified with any social actors’ (Postone, 1997, pp. 75–7): that is, it consists of reified relationships. In no way does Marx want his Subject to be more ‘concrete’ than Hegel’s Subject. 13 In the capitalist process of production: ‘This authority reaching its bearers, however, only as the personification of the conditions of labour in contrast to labour, and not as political or theocratic rulers as under earlier modes of production’ (Marx, 1981, p. 630). 14 ‘A more advanced, more critical mind, however, admits the historically developed character of distribution relations,[in a note here Marx cites John Stuart Mill]

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but nevertheless clings all the more tenaciously to the unchanging character of production relations themselves, arising from human nature and thus independent of all historical development’ (Marx, 1981, p. 628). Postone comments on this passage as follows: ‘If the process of production and the fundamental social relations of capitalism are interrelated, however, then the mode of producing cannot be equated with the forces of production, which eventually come into contradiction with the capitalist relations of production. Instead, the mode of producing itself should be seen as intrinsically related to capitalism’ (Postone, 1993, p. 23). The ‘law of value’ was furthermore considered a theory of justice which founds the right of the worker, as a producer of value, to receive the entirety of the value they produce. This ethical or normative interpretation was also put forward by bourgeois philosophers, such as the Hegelians Benedetto Croce and Jean Hyppolite, in their attempts to approach Marxism. ‘After Marx’s death, the discipline of critical economy became, for the most part, a variant of political economy itself, whose main concern was to formulate the laws of evolution of capitalism. This has manifested itself first in an acritical acceptance of a ‘naturalist’ theory of value which owes more to Ricardo than to Marx … But if we look a bit closer, Marx’s disciples are not that far removed from the Ricardian perspective when they look on labour as a kind of primary, suprahistorical element of social organisation. They do not consider abstract labour as a substance-subject produced by social relations and representations, but as a substance common to all products of human productive activity, regardless of differences among societies’ (Vincent, 1991, pp. 94–5). TN: English in original. TN: ATTAC; Association pour la Taxation des Transactions Financières et pour l’Action Citoyenne (Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and for Citizens’ Action). TN: English in original. TN: ‘HLM’ ‘Habitation à Loyer Modéré’ (‘Moderate rent housing’). The first factory to introduce the eight-hour day, even before the First World War, was Henry Ford’s automobile company in Detroit. But this was not out of philanthropy: the ‘scientific management of the work force’ invented by the engineer F. Taylor allowed such an increase in the hourly output of labour that Ford workers were working more in eight hours than other workers in twelve hours. They were all the more exhausted for it (see Kurz, 1999b, pp. 364–85). Indeed, Marx never proposed it in the form found in some of the interpretations of recent decades. Regardless, it must be stressed that our considerations here go beyond Marxian texts – whilst also seeking to be a continuation of their logic. In an essay entitled Use-Value Fetishism, K. Hafner writes:

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Thus one arrives at the following paradox: in all human societies we can talk about use and utility, but it is only where the notion of the specific virtue of a thing has been completely erased, and where it the mark of the universal capacity to be exchanged and valorised has been conferred, that we can speak of use-value in the strict sense of the term … It is also significant that the notion of pure utility, as it is presented in utilitarian doctrines, does not develop before commodity production has been socially imposed to a certain degree, nor before the disappearance of the last remnant of Aristotelianism, in the sense of the idea of a particular determination inherent in the specific thing in question. (Hafner, 1993, p. 64) 25 Originally, Marx started his analysis not from the commodity, but from value (MECW, vol. 40, p. 301). But as of The Contribution, he replaces value with the commodity as the starting point. The reason was not only the requirement to ‘popularize’ it, for later he was to argue strongly against value as the starting point of his analysis. In the Remarks on Wagner he writes: ‘It is from the valueconcept that use-value and exchange-value are supposed to be derived first of all by Mr. Wagner, not as with me from a concretum, the commodity’ (MECW, vol. 24, p. 538, emphasis in original). In an annotation in the margin of a book by the Russian economist Kaufmann, read in 1877, Marx says: ‘The mistake generally is to proceed from value as the highest category instead of from the concrete, the commodity … Yes, but not the single man, and not as abstract being … The error – to proceed from man as a thinker, and not as an actor’ (reproduced in Karl Marx Album [1953], quoted in Rosdolsky, 1977, p. 114). But it would be a mistake to see in these observations a fundamental theoretical shift. Rather, they correspond to the need to rail against academic method – in the shape here of Wagner – which starts from a simple analysis of the concept. Whereas Marx states that his method ‘which does not proceed from man but from a given economic period of society, has nothing in common with the Germanprofessorial association-of-concepts method’ (MECW, vol. 24, p. 547, emphasis in original). The truth is, in Marx himself, not a great difference between beginning with value, as he conceives it, and beginning with the ‘concrete’ commodity can be discerned. Above all, labour was never his starting point. 26 Nevertheless, a few pages before this statement, quoted countless times, Marx criticizes Ricardo’s non-historical concept of labour. This introduces a ‘mere ghost’: Labour, which is no more than an abstraction and taken by itself does not exist at all, or, if we take … the productive activity of human beings in general, by which they promote the interchange with Nature, divested not

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Notes only of every social form and well defined character, but even in its bare natural existence, independent of society, removed from all societies, and as an expression and confirmation of life which the still non-social man in general has in common with the one who is in any way social. (Marx, 1981, p. 591)

2 7 TN: MECW, vol. 5, p. 205. 28 Rosdolsky calls them notions ‘which, despite the fact that they were written more than a hundred years ago, still generate a feeling of awe and excitement, containing as they do some of the boldest visions attained by the human imagination’ (Rosdolsky, 1977, p. 425). Roman Rosdolsky was born in 1898 in Lvov. From 1927 to 1931, he collaborated on the first edition of the complete works of Marx and Engels. After spending the Second World War in German concentration camps, he emigrated to the United States, where he died in 1967 in Detroit. The main work which he focused on for twenty years was published in 1968 in Germany with the title The Making of Marx’s Capital. In spite of or because of its very philological character, it has had a great and lasting impact. It shows that the most important and most neglected problem in the Grundrisse is its relationship with Hegelian logic. Although Rosdolsky was aware of returning to a long-buried tradition: ‘It is clear that the four decades which have passed since the publication of Lukács’ pioneering study History and Class Consciousness [1923] have brought no change’ (Rosdolsky, 1977, p. 11). Those who, after 1968, rediscovered the problem of value and of Marx’s method recognized the precursory role that Rosdolsky played in these events. 29 The Italian economist Claudio Napoleoni claimed in 1970 that this is ‘the only passage where Marx directly relates the thesis of the inevitable end of capitalism to theory of value’ (Napoleoni, 1970, p. 206) even though this passage is not in actual fact the only one, contrary to what Napoleoni asserts. 30 Marx wrote in The Contribution: ‘The exchange of commodities is the process in which the social metabolism, in other words the exchange of particular products of private individuals, simultaneously gives rise to definite social relations of production, into which individuals enter in the course of this metabolism’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 292) – thus exchange creates relations of production, whereas in pre-capitalist societies it was the other way around. Rubin was one of the first to develop this theme: in market society ‘the circulation of things – to the extent that they acquire the specific social properties of value and money – does not only express production relations among men, but it creates them’ (Rubin, 1990, p. 11). This is well explained by a comparison with the different workshops in a factory that do not ‘exchange’ their products: here, ‘the object moves in the production process from some people to others on the basis of

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production relations which exist among them, but the movement does not create production relations among them’ (Rubin, 1990, p. 14). Similarly, ‘in feudal society production relations among people are established on the basis of the distribution of things among them and for things, but not through things’ (Rubin, 1990, p. 29, emphasis in original). On the contrary, in capitalism, ‘the material process of production, on one hand, and the system of production relations among individual, private economic units, on the other, are not adjusted to each other in advance’ (Rubin, 1990, p. 17, emphasis in original). Thus ‘the agents of production are combined through the factors of production; production bonds among people are established through the movement of things’ (Rubin, 1990, p. 19, emphasis in original).

3  The crisis of market society 1 ‘We may say that as early as 1803 Hegel had envisaged the process of production for production’s sake of which Ricardo spoke and which Marx described as the expansion of value that animates the entire system of capitalist production’ (Hyppolite, 1973, p. 80). 2 ‘The growth of capital must be developed as an essential element of the concept of capital, it must not appear as a contingent element’ or be introduced surreptitiously (Reichelt, 1974, p. 213). 3 Reichelt states that in the Grundrisse, Marx knows only two structures, namely: The relationships where wealth assumes a form distinct from itself, and those where it does not. No matter how diverse the different societies may be from each other, if they are based on the appropriation of wealth in its particular form, they have no history. History only exists in an upsidedown world where the metabolism with nature itself is reduced to the means for the permanent pursuit of abstract wealth; where the immanent logic of this process grasps the metabolism by structuring it. (Reichelt, 1974, p. 263) This is how history invades non-historical structures and dissolves them. For Marx, Indian culture, for example, has no history. 4 Krahl quotes the following statement by Hegel taken from The History of Philosophy: ‘To bring abstractions into reality means to destroy realities’ (Krahl, 1971, p. 31). 5 For example:

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Notes The universality towards which it irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognized as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own suspension … On the other side, Ricardo and his entire school never understood the really modern crises, in which this contradiction of capital discharges itself in great thunderstorms which increasingly threaten it as the foundation of society and of production itself. (Marx, 1973, pp. 410–11, emphasis in original)

6 The commodity separates consumption from production. The unity between consumption and production does not mean that each person, or each cell of production (a large multipurpose traditional farm, etc.), consumes what it produces, in a totally self-sufficient system. Rather, this unity signifies that production is oriented towards needs that are known in advance, as was the case, for example, with medieval corporations that established the quantity and the quality of production. This unity no longer exists when production is directed towards anonymous markets, where only the ‘invisible hand’ decides whether the producer will find a consumer. Obviously, the society that replaces market society will restore this unity in the form of preliminary decisions on the use of resources. 7 Already in the Short Outline, Marx writes to Engels: ‘At this point I shall not go further into the development of this section and would only add that the lack of congruence of C—M and M—C is the most abstract and superficial form in which the possibility of crises is expressed’ (MECW, vol. 40, p. 302). Although he explains himself better in the Grundrisse: The simple fact that the commodity exists doubly, in one aspect as a specific product whose natural form of existence ideally contains (latently contains) its exchange value, and in the other aspect as manifest exchange value (money), in which all connection with the natural form of the product is stripped away again – this double, differentiated existence must develop into a difference, and the difference into antithesis and contradiction. The same contradiction between the particular nature of the commodity as product and its general nature as exchange value, which created the necessity of positing it doubly, as this particular commodity on one side and as money on the other – this contradiction between the commodity’s particular natural qualities and its general social qualities contains from the beginning the possibility that these two separated forms in which the commodity exists are not convertible into one another. (Marx, 1973, p. 147)

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8 We obviously consider the opinions of authors such as Karl Korsch to be misconceived. In his Marxism and Philosophy (1923) and Karl Marx (1938), Korsch makes a distinction, for example, between Marx – the subjective ‘revolutionary’ – and Marx – the objective ‘researcher’. Authors like these also seek to contrast Marx’s early writings – considered immediately revolutionary, especially the Communist Manifesto – with the supposed resignation of his later works that allegedly veer towards reformism. Viewed from today’s vantage point, it is in actual fact the critique of political economy in his mature work which is the most ‘revolutionary’ because it does not place much hope for change in the subjective frustrations of an excluded proletarian class which is defined in sociological terms, and which no longer exists in the form described by Marx. The critique of political economy relies rather on the internal contradictions of capitalist society and on its inability to surmount them. Nowadays, disciples of theory à la Korsch are the epitome of resignation. 9 See Rosa Luxemburg. The Accumulation of Capital [1913]. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951; Henryk Grossmann: Marx, Classical Political Economy and the Problem of Dynamics [1941], Capital and Class Summer 1977 (2): 32–55; Autumn 1977 (3): 67–99; Paul Mattick Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory [1974]. London: Routledge, 1981. 10 Postone points out that this fact is at the origin of the ‘dynamic’ character by which capitalism distinguishes itself from all previous societies: ‘This treadmill effect implies, even on the abstract logical level of the problem of the magnitude of value – in other words, before the category of surplus value and the wage labour-capital relation have been introduced – a society that is directionally dynamic, as expressed by the drive for ever-increasing levels of productivity’ (Postone, 1993, p. 290). The increase in material productivity per hour does not change the fact that an hour’s work always produces the same value. Capitalist production ‘comes to a standstill’ because its unbridled and cumulative dynamism in terms of material wealth does not increase its wealth in the abstract. 11 Marx gave the most striking description of this aspect in The Results of the Immediate Process of Production: On the other hand, there is the negative side, its contradictory character: production in contradiction, and indifference, to the producer. The real producer as a mere means of production, material wealth as an end in itself. And so the growth of this material wealth is brought about in contradiction to and at the expense of the individual human being … Its aim is that the individual product should contain as much unpaid labour as possible, and this is achieved only by producing for the sake of production. (Marx, 1976a, pp. 1037–8, emphasis in original)

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12 It is important to note that Marx analyses the dialectic of the concrete and the abstract, of use value and value, and not simply the abstraction and value. He states: ‘For me use-value plays an important part quite different from its part in economics hitherto’ (MECW, vol. 24, p. 546). For Marx, ‘use value does not lie dead as a simple presupposition’ (Marx, 1973, p. 320), just like Ricardo who ‘simply disregards it’ and who “is concerned with use value only exoterically” ’ (Marx, 1973, p. 647). He criticized bourgeois economists for dealing only with purely quantitative relationships. To give just one example of the importance of use value in Marx: in its form as a social capacity for consumption, use value is a limit to the expansion of value, so that ‘the indifference of value as such towards use value is thereby brought into just as false a position [Position] as are, on the other side, the substance of value and its measure as objectified labour in general’ (Marx, 1973, p. 407). But in spite of these clarifications, Marx has been often accused of neglecting use value as well. There is a good summary of the Marxian position on this subject in Rosdolsky (1976, pp. 112–40). 13 What follows till the end of this chapter is particularly indebted to the writings of the journal Krisis and Robert Kurz. 14 It will be objected that in the Third World, especially in Asia, there is colossal exploitation of a low-cost labour force that forms the basis of these countries’ ‘export miracles’. However, these are short-term phenomena, limited to sectors such as textiles, and which in last few years have already reached their limits. Of course, the capitalists in those countries are well and truly capable of repeating all the horrors of the first industrialization in Europe, but they are not in a position to create large-scale industries capable of competing in global markets, if only because they will never be able to afford to build the necessary infrastructure. 15 Adam Smith affirms that ‘the sovereign, for example, with all the officers both of justice and war who serve under him, the whole army and navy, are unproductive labourers … In the same class must be ranked … churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds; players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, operadancers, etc.’ (MECW, vol. 31, p. 16). The polemic against ‘non-productive’ sections of society was part of the industrial bourgeoisie’s attack on the former ruling classes of the Enlightenment, even though ‘productive’ in the sense of ‘use value’ and capitalist value was often confused. 16 This is one of the bones of contention between value criticism and the débris of Marxism. To talk about a gigantic creation of surplus value in the slums of Southern Hemisphere countries, or in Romanian shoe factories, merely betrays total ignorance of the critique of political economy. Paradoxically, many extant Marxists are particularly keen to deny the overall decline in value (whereas bourgeois economists have long since lost interest in this subject, which is tantamount to proving that Marx was absolutely right on the theoretical level).

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According to value criticism, in capitalist society the simple product is already a commodity from very beginning, instead of becoming one only after it has entered exchange and circulation. Nevertheless, this assertion is disputed by many authors, who can fall back on the uncertainty of Marx himself on this subject, whose hesitations are evident in his writings, sometimes from one line to the next. The fact is that this problem cannot be solved without taking into account the fundamental difference between pre-capitalist societies and capitalist society. In the former, the product acquires or may acquire the value form in circulation. In the capitalist mode of production, on the contrary, the product is already manufactured as a commodity with a determined magnitude of value. However, this magnitude needs exchange to realize itself. If value emerges in production, it is the result of abstract labour, which by nature is quantitatively limited and which in reality decreases due to the increase of fixed capital. If, on the other hand, value was to emerge in circulation, it would be the result of commercial transactions, and its quantity would depend only on the success of these operations. It would therefore have no immanent tendency towards depletion. This is why traditional Marxists, who deny the crisis of the capitalist system, stubbornly locate the origin of value in exchange. TN: lit. false costs/expenses. TN: There is a pun here with the French ‘automobilisation totale’: lit. ‘total auto-mobilisation’. This ‘fictitious’ phase of capitalism is the real basis for the 1980s’ and 1990s’ vogue for notions such as ‘simulation’, ‘virtual’, ‘hyper-real’ and so on. See from the same author: Das Geschlecht des Kapitalismus. Feministische Theorie und die postmoderne Metamorphose des Patriarchats (The Gender of Capitalism: Feminist Theory and the Postmodern Metamorphosis of Patriarchy). Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 2000. One thing should be obvious: were we to invite those who talk only about surplus value and exploitation to first consider value and abstract labour, this would by no means be some stylistic intellectual exercise averse to sullying itself with workaday reality. On the contrary, it would be about facing up to realities that are undoubtedly even sadder. Infrastructure cannot completely depend on supply and demand. The massive power cuts in California in 2001, and in Brazil, gave some idea of what can happen when attempts are made to privatize infrastructure services. It should be possible to draw on Marxian categories in order to try and answer the question posed by Kant: how are the object and the subject formed? How do a priori forms emerge in which all content is presented? Reframed thus, Kant’s reflections could serve to renew Marx’s ideas, but in a way that has nothing in common with early twentieth-century Kantian ‘ethical’ Marxism or with

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the current vogue for Kant’s political theory among some bewildered (ex-) Marxists (such as in a book by André Tosel with the rather improbable title of ‘Revolutionary Kant’, PUF, Paris, 1988). The theme of fetishism exists in a latent way in Kant, when he analyses the hypostasis of concepts – even though he could only see in this a simple error of thought. Value is an a priori form, in the Kantian sense, because all objectivity manifests itself through it. It is a grid to which the individual is oblivious, but which is preliminary to all perception and which constitutes the perception of objects. Kant’s a priori is a non-historical ontologization and individualization of value, which in modern society is the true a priori, albeit a social, unnatural one. The following question therefore arises: what is the structure of consciousness common to all classes in capitalism, a structure whose particular forms of class consciousness are only variations? Indeed, such an analysis should not only lead to a materialistic interpretation of the contents of social consciousness – by now an overcrowded field up to and including Karl Kautsky’s famous explanation that Spinoza’s philosophy arose out of Dutch wool trade interests – but also to an interpretation of its forms. Adorno was one of the first to begin the debate on the ‘constitution of categories’, although he offered only a glimpse. In general, his last works were characterized by a resumption of the Kantian problem. He was preceded in this by Alfred SohnRethel (see below), who influenced him, and followed by his student Hans-Jürgen Krahl. The latter thus conceives the relationship that exists between Kant, Hegel and Marx as follows: the identity of the self – which Kant locates in the depths of the human soul, as an a priori formal relation to a possible world of objects – is dissolved by Hegel in the concrete and social relationship between subject and object, and by Marx in the relations of production (Krahl, 1971, p. 400). Concrete labour provides the material for perception, while ‘the activity that value posits provides the apperceptive, non-transcendental framework for an ideologized world of categories: that is, it constitutes science and concepts (Krahl, 1971, p. 404). The analysis of the categories of socialization as preliminary forms to all other questions leads to a theory of social mediation that could help to supersede traditional objectivist and subjectivist theories, instead of trying, as is often the case, to make a superficial synthesis of them. Krahl was one of Adorno’s most brilliant students and at the same time one of the leaders of the German student revolt in 1968. During his brief life (in early 1970 he died aged twenty-seven in a car accident), he produced a large number of writings that constituted a radicalization of Critical Theory. They were published after his death under the title Konstitution und Klassenkampf (Social Constitution and Class Struggle). This book not only had a certain influence on the New Left in Germany, but in Italy as well. It is especially noteworthy that already by 1967, when almost no one was discussing this topic, Krahl gave a talk in Adorno’s seminar on the

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The Logical Essence of the Marxian Analysis of the Commodity (Krahl, 1971, pp. 31–81). 24 Still, it must be observed that the logic of value – as we have previously noted – does not occupy all space in life, and it never will. Even in those individuals most socialized by the commodity there always remains a part which is not formed by the latter, even if it attempts to assert its control through the ‘colonization’ of daily life and psychic structures. Nevertheless, those thoughts and desires not formed by the commodity do not constitute a non-alienated sector that can simply be mobilized against commodity logic. Indeed, they are often subordinated to and dependent on this dominant logic. 2 5 Similarly, the far Left has greatly exaggerated the importance of the ‘leaders’ betrayal’ that occurred in the Russian Revolution, in other revolutions that have ushered in ultra-authoritarian regimes and within almost every protest movement. Without in any way detracting from the correctness of the moral judgement passed on the gravediggers of revolutions, it should be noted that they did nothing more than follow the automatic subject that the ‘betrayed’ themselves had not superseded. The sometimes obsessive emphasis the radical Left placed on questions of organization, on the criticism of parties and unions, on the definition of bureaucracy as a new parasitic and exploitative class, although accurate in terms of its descriptiveness, harks back more as an explanation to Robert Michels, Vilfredo Pareto or Max Weber, if not directly to Nietzsche than to Marx himself. According to this explanation, society’s development is down to the will of its actors and to their ‘will to power’. The ‘sociology’ which considers collective sociological subjects as the demiurges of social life can be seen to end only in a pessimistic anthropology where evil always triumphs.

4  The history and metaphysics of the commodity 1 Krahl thus comments on the process in which value ‘surreptitiously acquires’ a reality in use value: in value, ‘the abstraction of the thing in itself seems, as such, to acquire a spatio-temporal existence’. This refutes Kant’s assertion – explained with the famous example of the Hundred Thalers – according to which being is not a predicate, but only the position of a thing (Krahl, 1971, p. 52). 2 In the same manuscript, Marx says, speaking of money: By concept it is the essence of all the use values; but its quantitative limits, as the limits of what is always merely a definite magnitude of value, a definite sum of gold and silver, is in contradiction with its quality. That is why rooted in its nature is a constant drive to go beyond its own limits …

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For value, firmly established as value, its expansion, therefore, coincides with its self-preservation, and it preserves itself only by constantly driving beyond its quantitative limits, which contradicts its inner universality. So enrichment is an end-in-itself. (MECW, vol. 29, p. 516) 3 For ‘dialectical materialism’, on the contrary, the dialectic is the fundamental law of being, and even of natural being. Although ‘diamat’ was codified in the Soviet Union, it must be said that this curious mixture of Hegelian idealism in form with a vulgar materialism in content can already be found in Engels’ late works. It was undoubtedly one of Marx’s weaknesses to have not objected to the interpretations his friend put forward while he was still alive (especially in his Anti-Dühring). Yet nowhere in his work does Marx present the social dialectic as the result of an allegedly natural dialectical law, even if for explanatory purposes he had a tendency to make comparisons between social life and the world of nature. 4 ‘It is only with the capitalist relationship that there is an automatic self-movement of value, which in this way becomes a causa sui, a metaphysical subject’ (Krahl, 1971, p. 82). 5 ‘Hegel’s idealism, which asserts that men obey a concept that holds power, is far more appropriate to this upside-down world than any nominalist theory that only wants to accept the universal as something purely conceptual and subjective’ (Reichelt, 1974, p. 80). Krahl puts it very well in this respect: The thing in itself, which Hegel denounced as a pointless ens rationis, seems to obtain an effective existence in the ontic self-representation of value, and yet it is nothing more than a ‘non-appearance’, which however, in generalised commodity production, dominates to such an extent that it threatens to lower the reality of the world of sensitive appearance to what it has always been according to the Platonic ontological and metaphysical tradition that discredited it: the mè on. (Krahl, 1971, pp. 51–2, emphasis in original) In another essay, Krahl writes: In Hegel, men are the puppets of a superior consciousness. But according to Marx, conscience is the predicate and property of living men … The existence of a metaphysical consciousness superior to men is an appearance, but a real appearance: i.e. capital. Capital is the existing phenomenology of the mind, it is real metaphysics. It is an appearance because it has no real discernable structure of things, and yet it dominates men. (Krahl, 1971, p. 375) 6 The category of real abstraction goes beyond the distinction between nominalism and realism: in a fetishistic society, universalia are much more than mental

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summaries. On the contrary, they dominate and crush the particular and the individual. As a description of this society, realism is right, and not nominalism, whose fundamental credo has been so well summarized not by a philosopher, but by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, when she said: ‘There is no such thing as society’. ‘Marx’s historical explanation of the Subject as capital, and not as a class, attempts to ground Hegel’s dialectic socially and thereby to provide its critique … Marx implicitly argues that Hegel did grasp the abstract, contradictory social forms of capitalism but not in their historical specificity … This critical analysis is very different from the sort of materialism that would simply invert these idealist categories anthropologically … Marx implicitly attempts to show that the “rational core” of Hegel’s dialectic is precisely its idealist character: it is an expression of a mode of social domination constituted by structures of social relations which, because they are alienated, acquire a quasi-independent existence I individuals, and which, because of their peculiar dualistic nature, are dialectical in character’ (Postone, 1993, p. 81, emphasis in original). Marx uses this most direct formula several times to designate the irrationality of capitalism: ‘The vulgar economist prefers the formula capital-interest, with its occult quality of a value that is to be unequal to itself, to the formula capital-profit, as here we already get somewhat nearer to the actual capital-relation. Then again, disturbed by the feeling that 4 is not 5 and hence 100 shillings cannot possibly be 110 shillings’, he seeks refuge in this still major absurdity: to put together two completely incommensurable things, a use value and a social relationship conceived as a thing (Marx, 1981, p. 911). Already in the Grundrisse he wrote that money prices ‘mask’ the ‘contradiction’ that four hours of work = three hours of work, because of fact that value and price do not coincide (Marx, 1973, p. 250). The church has never completely succeeded in explaining to men why one should be equal to three, and so it has always had to adhere to the credo: quia absurdum est (I believe because it is absurd). Value, on the other hand, has no trouble spreading around the world its own ‘good news’ from the same content. Like Korsch, for example, who said that in Marx’s work ‘the Hegelian “contradiction” was replaced by the struggle of the social classes; the dialectical “negation” by the proletariat, and the dialectical “synthesis” by the proletarian revolution and the transition to a higher stage of society’ (Korsch, 2016, p. 132). This should make it possible to judge the importance of Hegel’s early writings in a much deeper way than Lukács (especially in The Young Hegel. Cambridge: MIT Press, [1948] 1976) who wanted to demonstrate that Hegel was not a ‘mystic’ but a great patriot of progress. If Hegel’s philosophy is the most profound representation of modern society, it is more so in its general form than in its

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specific content, as interesting as these pages of his youth on the division of labour, money and bourgeois society may be. 11 For Marx, the irrationality of the thing and the irrationality of the expression correspond. He speaks of irrational forms in which certain economic relationships appear and are grasped in practice do not bother the practical bearers of these relationships in their everyday dealings; since they are accustomed to operating within these forms, it does not strike them as anything worth thinking about … What Hegel says about certain mathematical formulae applies here too, namely that what the common human understanding finds irrational is in fact rational, and what it finds rational is irrational. (Marx, 1981, pp. 872–3) Given that in capitalism there is an ‘irrationality of the very thing’, a rational ‘expression’ would only falsify it. This is why the seemingly rational expressions of bourgeois political economy merely conceal the irrational: ‘Land – rent and capital – interest are irrational expressions in so far as rent is defined as the price of land and interest as the price of capital. … This irrationality of expression (the irrationality of the thing itself arises from the fact that, as regards interest, capital as the prerequisite appears divorced from its own process, in which it becomes capital and consequently self-valorising value … this irrationality of expression is so much felt by the VULGARIAN that he falsifies both expressions in order to make them appear rational’ (MECW, vol. 32, pp. 519–20, emphasis in original). In his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx notes that ‘a “view” cannot be concrete when its subject-matter is abstract’ (MECW, vol. 3 p. 79, emphasis in original). Thus, we can see in this statement a kind of early intuition of real abstraction. 12 ‘Here it becomes quite obvious that the structural affinity with Hegelian philosophy arrives at its central principle: in the presupposition that real relationships “correspond to their concept” (Marx, 1981, p. 242) hides the Hegelian concept of truth which breaks with the traditional conception of truth as a one-sided relationship of representation. ‘In the philosophical sense, truth, to put it in abstract terms, means that a content corresponds to itself ’ says Hegel in The Philosophical System. Alongside the question of whether the concept corresponds to the thing, is this other question, also justified, of whether the thing corresponds to its concept, if the thing is a real thing’ (Reichelt, 1974, pp. 76–7). 13 Even here, Marx’s comparison with natural science is inadequate to explain something that can only have social validity.

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14 In fetishistic development, each step is the automatic consequence of the contradictions from the previous step: ‘As soon as gold and silver (or any other commodity) have developed themselves as measure of value and means of circulation (as the latter, whether in bodily form or as symbol), they become money without the society’s aid or desire. Their power appears as a kind of fate’ (MECW, vol. 29, p. 508). 15 It goes back to Alfred Sohn-Rethel (but see also R. W. Müller, Geld und Geist, Frankfort: Campus, [1977]; G. Thomson, The First Philosophers: Studies in Ancient Greek Society [1955], London: Lawrence & Wishart, as well as the chapter on Ulysses in M. Horkheimer, and T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment [1947]), New York: Herder and Herder, 1972. It was Sohn-Rethel who indicated the role played by money in the ‘Axial Age’ in which the Greek or European ‘mind’ first emerged. Born in Paris in 1899 to German parents, in the twenties and thirties he was in contact with Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer and had a particular influence on Adorno (see T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics [1966], and their correspondence in T. W. Adorno, and A. Sohn-Rethel, Briefwechsel, München: Verlag Text + Kritik [1991]). Living in England from 1936 onwards, he only started to be acknowledged late in life after the books he had written much earlier were published in West Germany in 1970 (notably Intellectual and Manual Labour [1978]; Warenform und Denkform [1971] and Das Geld, die bare Münze des Apriori [1976]). From 1973 he taught in Bremen, where he died in 1990. His main theoretical concern was to locate the origin of the Kantian synthesis in social labour and thus the transcendental subject in the value form so as to explain the historical genesis of the allegedly ontological categories with which Western epistemology operates. He sought to deduce from this an entire materialist theory of knowledge, based on the separation between manual and intellectual labour. His theory generated much discussion and debate, especially in the 1970s in Germany and Italy. SohnRethel had the merit of introducing the concept of ‘real abstraction’ into debate. However, he claims it originates in the sphere of exchange, thus in circulation, for he considers production as a non-social and trans-historical metabolism with nature. He conceives labour only as an exchange with nature, not as an activity determined by the value form. Consequently, he rejects the concept of ‘abstract labour’. According to this perspective, labour as such is a natural given and cannot be affected by the commodity form, because labour is considered as always being concrete labour. Alienation only occurs when labour is exploited. Where commodity production prevails, the social synthesis is based on the process of circulation, not on labour. Thus Sohn-Rethel attributes substance, magnitude and form of value to different factors: ‘This separate deduction of the value form in relation to exchange abstraction, real abstraction, and of the

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magnitude of value in relation to the labour subsumed within it is fundamental and must absolutely be maintained’ (Sohn-Rethel, 1990, p. 31). Sohn-Rethel asserts that he, unlike Marx, follows the origin of abstraction to its ‘root’: the act of exchange is abstract because it excludes or postpones the act of use to a later date. By understanding abstraction as the temporal distance between the act of usage and the act of exchange, he conceives it in psychological terms: as a postponement of satisfaction to later date. Yet what Sohn-Rethel does not see is that the abstraction in the act of exchange merely accomplishes the abstraction created in production, where labour is concrete as a material process, but not for the producers as social beings. It is the capitalist mode of production that has made circulation a total form, not the other way around. In the end, Sohn-Rethel remains within the framework of traditional Marxism: class relations falsify production, which is conceived as neutral and pre-social, and if only the social synthesis took place directly in production, and not through exchange, it would be a classless synthesis. ‘But nature does not provide identical objects like money as money; therefore provides not a single element in the context of experience that could produce the possibility of abstraction. This abstraction must be present in society itself as a real category, as a possible experience of something real, so that we can grasp it as an idea … The social interconnection of life, increasingly mediated by value … changes, as a universal subject, even human relationships – which are continually socialized as bourgeois individuals – with the natural environment, by transforming them into an abstract relationship between the subject and object of knowledge’ (Müller, 1981, p. 136, trans. Peter Dunn, emphasis in original). Can it be said, then, that the development of conceptual thought is only possible where there is an actually existing universal at the social level (i.e. money)? If this were so, thought would remain concrete thought as long as the commodity form does not exist. Distinctions already elaborated by J. Le Goff, for example, in ‘Merchant’s Time and Church’s Time in the Middle Ages’ [1960], reproduced in J. Le Goff, ‘Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages’ [1980]. TN: French ‘soldat’ meaning ‘soldier’ and is derived from the Italian ‘soldato’: somebody who receives a ‘soldo’, a payment. Again we refer to Robert Kurz’s book: Der Kollaps der Modernisierung. Frankfurt: Eichborn, [1991]. It was only with the collapse of both Marxist and bourgeois progressivism that these movements have received more objective attention. As a starting point one will always benefit from the work of Edward P. Thompson, based on the concept of moral economy: The Making of the English Working Class, 1963, as well as the works Eric Hobsbawm. Primitive Rebels. New York: Norton Library, 1959; Eric

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Hobsbawm. Bandits, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969; Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969. 22 In the following quotation, he expressed his ‘dialectical’ approach to this issue well: ‘In earlier stages of development the single individual seems to be developed more fully, because he has not yet worked out his relationships in their fullness, or erected them as independent social powers and relations opposite himself. It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end’ (Marx, 1973, p. 162). Marx believed that ‘this antagonistic stage cannot be avoided, any more than it is possible for man to avoid the stage in which his spiritual energies are given a religious definition as powers independent of himself. What we are confronted by here is the alienation of man from his own labour’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 990). But if this passage is necessary, it is because commodity fetishism is historically the first fetishism that leads to the supersession of all fetishisms, by producing an awareness. Marx says of the bearer of labour power: ‘The recognition of the products as its own, and the judgement that its separation from the conditions of its realization is improper – forcibly imposed – is an enormous awareness, itself the product of the mode of production resting on capital, and as much the knell to its doom’ (Marx, 1973, p. 463), so that this mode of production cannot last longer than ancient slavery. 2 3 As Engels himself says in a letter of 1887 to John Lincoln Mahon (in MECW, vol. 48, p. 82). For Marx, the Luddites were not a movement against becoming workers, but a first very primitive stage of the workers’ movement. In regard to the ‘the large-scale destruction of machinery which occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century, largely as a result of the employment of the power-loom’, he simply says that ‘it took both time and experience before the workers learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilizes those instruments’ (Marx, 1976a, pp. 554–5). Even more negative was the judgement of the young Engels, who foreshadowed the future Marxist historiography when he speaks about the ‘first opposition of the workers to industrial progress which attempted to restore the old patriarchal situation and whose most energetic manifestations of life did not go beyond the smashing of machines. Just as reactionary as these workers were the bourgeois and aristocratic chiefs of the Ten Hours party’ (Frederick Engels, ‘The English Ten Hours’ Bill [1850]’; MECW, vol. 10, pp. 291–2). The Communist Manifesto also refers to

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those who ‘smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages’ (MECW, vol. 6, p. 116). 24 This has not stopped many Marxists from re-establishing the positive use of the word ‘economy’. Drawing up a Marxist Economic Theory (E. Mandel), calling a section of the French edition of Marx’s works ‘Economy’ (M. Rubel), or proceeding like K. Korsch who divides his book Karl Marx into parts entitled ‘Bourgeois Society’, ‘Political Economy’ and ‘History’ in no way help to address the issue either. History and Class Consciousness represents a partial exception to this: ‘But the “economy” no longer has the function that every economy has had hitherto: for it is to be the servant of a consciously directed society; it is to lose its self-contained autonomy (which was what made it an economy, properly speaking); as an economy it is to be annulled’ (Lukács, 1968, p. 251). Unfortunately, this remarkable idea remained an isolated intuition for Lukács himself. History and Class Consciousness highlighted the historical character of the economic category: By contrast, in pre-capitalist societies legal institutions intervene substantively in the interplay of economic forces. In fact there are no purely economic categories to appear or to be given legal form … Economic and legal categories are objectively and substantively so interwoven as to be inseparable … In Hegel’s parlance the economy has not even objectively reached the stage of being-for-itself … Thus class consciousness has quite a different relation to history in pre-capitalist and capitalist periods. In the former case the classes could only be deduced from the immediately given historical reality by the methods of historical materialism. (Lukács, 1968, pp. 56–8, emphasis in original) 25 For Marx, the paradoxical aspect of capitalism lies precisely in the fact that, in spite of all its technical domination of nature, it always presents itself to mankind in the form of ‘overwhelming natural laws, governing them irrespective of their will’ (Marx, 1981, p. 925), and which ‘assume ever more the form of a natural law independent of the producers and become ever more uncontrollable’ (Marx, 1981, p. 173).

5  Fetishism and anthropology 1 TN: ‘Chimera’ was removed from the Ben Fowkes’ translation of Capital, Vol. 1 (1976).

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2 H.-J. Krahl described commodity fetishism as an expression of a ‘pathology of bourgeois society’. He quotes Freud’s assertion that any pathology contains a projection. For Krahl: The problem of fetishism and reification is a consequence of the Kantian critique of reason. Its rational and emancipatory interest is to restore the autonomy of the transcendental subject by demonstrating that what the subject attributes to things in themselves, in reality is simply something that belongs to the subject itself. This interest is translated in a materialistic way in the critique of autonomous and fossilized relations of production, of the objective spirit of a global social subject of labour, which, as a primary natural quality seems inherent in the products themselves. Basic Marxian analysis shows that the pathology of bourgeois society – the global social mechanism of a collective projection – is founded in the organizational heart of the capitalist production process. (Krahl, 1971, p. 49) 3 As a description, Durkheim’s sociology was far superior to other bourgeois ideologies of his time. According to his well-known fundamental principle, society is not the sum of the individuals that make it up. Rather, it is an autonomous being with its own reality that determines individuals. Thus, Durkheim recognizes fetishism, but only to ontologize it and thus justify it. His interpretation of religion and of the sacred in general, as a projection of human power, resembles, at first glance, the one proposed by Ludwig Feuerbach. However, for Durkheim the autonomy of collective power does not constitute an ‘alienation’ to be overcome, but is connatural to any possible form of society: ‘Fundamentally, then, there are no religions that are false. All are true after their own fashion: All fulfil given conditions of human existence, though in different ways’ (Durkheim, 1995, p. 2). There is much truth in Durkheim’s disillusioned view of modern society, acknowledging that it presents itself to individuals as an external coercion and not as the result of the play of free and conscious subjectivities. For Durkheim, society ‘requires us to make ourselves its servants, forgetful of our own interests. And it subjects us to all sorts of restraints, privations, and sacrifices without which social life would be impossible’ (Durkheim, 1995, p. 209) – even if Durkheim denies his own ontologization of the coercive character of any society, when he writes that ‘primitive societies are not Leviathans that overwhelm man with the enormity of their power and subject him to harsh discipline’ (Durkheim, 1995, p. 226). The ‘collective consciousness’, which is independent of the will of its members, is a sui generis reality which has its own will and is governed by its own laws, often unknown to its members. Thus, Durkheim’s analysis presents analogies with the

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contemporaneous discovery of the unconscious by psychoanalysis. But what distinguishes Durkheim’s thought from the Marxian theory of fetishism, and in a way also from Freud’s thinking, is that he approves of the fetishistic constitution of society. For him, the fact that man’s forces are detached from his control is not the perverse result of a historical process governed by contradictions, but is the direct and inevitable consequence of the relationship between society and nature. Thus, society, this form of ‘secondary nature’ appears just as immutable and as ‘given’ as primary nature. For Durkheim, as with Hobbes, the only alternative is between existing society, with all its evils, and chaos. For Durkheim, society as an institution is the highest good, and so it is easy to observe that rather than demystifying religion, he mystified society. Pierre Clastres, in his preface to the French edition of Sahlins’ book, triumphantly asserts that this book proves the incompatibility between ethnology and Marxism. This is true in relation to ‘Marxism’, it is not at all true in relation to those Marxian concepts on which the critique of value is based. Indeed, it is the privatization of resources that creates scarcity: the access to resources of a privileged few necessarily means there are others who cannot access them. In the Légendes sur les nartes (The Nart Sagas) that G. Dumézil collected from the mountain populations of the Caucasus (Gallimard, Paris, 1965), we find a world that seems to be diametrically opposed to modern socialization by value. Nevertheless, we do not necessarily want to recommend this form of appropriation as an alternative to capitalism, nor do we want to claim that these populations lived better than others. It is only a question here of proving that the modern right to dispose of what one has earned with one’s labour is a historical fact, and not a ‘natural’ one. As a result, he arrives at a rather disillusioned judgement of the labour movement, which, in his view, has contributed to the generalization of marketrelated forms of life, and not to fighting them or proposing alternatives. This incitement by Malthus was not an ‘excess’, but the logical outcome of the subordination of life to the accumulation of money. It is therefore quite natural that this consequence should always remain in the air: one only has to look at how in 2001 the most renowned neoliberal economists quietly declared that it was impossible to save a country such as Argentina, advocating a future for it worse than that of Russia, and with no possibility of escape. We can also think of the sacrifices that have been imposed on Greece since 2010 for the sole purpose of making it pay the interest on its debts. This shows how wrong it is to compare ‘democracy’ with ‘totalitarianism’ for liberal Democrats such as Malthus, Bentham or Friedman did not cause fewer victims than those who decapitated kings and tsars.

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10 In From Mandeville to Marx (1977), Louis Dumont describes the non-economic conception of ‘wealth’ that prevailed in traditional societies: In most societies, and especially in … ‘traditional societies,’ the relations between men are more important, more highly valued, than the relations between men and .things. This primacy is reversed in the modern type of society, in which relations between men are subordinated to relations between men and things. This is a point Marx has stressed in his own manner, as will be recalled later on. Closely combined with this reversal of primacy, we find in modern society a new conception of wealth … [in traditional societies] rights in land are enmeshed in the social organization in such a manner that superior rights accompany power over men. Such rights or ‘wealth,’ appearing essentially as a matter of relations between men, are intrinsically superior to movable wealth, which is disparaged, as is natural in such a system for a mere relation between men and things. Again, I find that [this is another point that] Marx perceived clearly. (Dumont, 1977, p. 5) Unfortunately, Dumont shows in the rest of his book that he did not understand much of Marx, whom he confuses with Ricardo.

Conclusion: Some ‘false-friends’ 1 TN: Farmers’ Confederation, a French agricultural union. 2 It is not surprising, then, that for him Marxism is ‘the most economic of traditions’ and that he treats Marxism and neoliberalism as instances of the same ‘economic fatalism’, based on the ‘fetishization of the productive forces’ (quoted in Callinicos, 2001, p. 73, trans. Peter Dunn). He says: ‘It is perhaps no accident that so many people of my generation have moved from a Marxist fatalism, to a Neoliberal fatalism: in both cases, economism forbids responsibility and mobilization by cancelling out politics and imposing a whole set of unquestioned ends – maximum growth, competitiveness, productivity’(Bourdieu, 1998, p. 50). Naturally, he is right in regard to a certain traditional Marxism, but he renounces a priori any use of Marx’s criticism of political economy. Indeed, such a use would remind him that in commodity society, economic tyranny is inscribed in the structures of the social, instead of being the result of an external imposition. 3 See Moishe Postone, Antisemitism and National Socialism. London: Chronos Publications, [1986] 2000. In it, Postone analyses the figure of the Jew as an imaginary embodiment of abstract value and Auschwitz as a ‘factory’ for the

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destruction of value. But if we are to denounce the latent anti-Semitism of many theories that claim to be anti-capitalist, it is also necessary to oppose those who denounce any criticism of capitalism as anti-Semitic. The critique of value leads precisely to a critique of the structural mechanisms of capitalism that does not attribute its misdeeds to the actions of particular human groups. A very popular idea in this context is ‘fair trade’, defined as ‘receiving the correct price for their produce’ (Bové and Dufour, 2001, p. 158). But within the logic of value – which is already tacitly presupposed in this rationale – trade between rich and poor countries is not ‘unfair’. It is precisely their equitable nature, that is, the fact that the rules are the same for all economic protagonists – that overwhelms poor countries. Indeed, on the world market, countries do not receive the mass of value that corresponds to the labour actually employed, but the mass that corresponds to their productivity. It is precisely those countries and companies that use the least amount of labour – because their productivity is higher than that of the rest of the world – that can capture a higher proportion of the overall value in competition. Once one has accepted the abstract production of wealth, it is absurd to demand a ‘fairer’ distribution of this abstract wealth: only concrete wealth can be distributed according to law, that is, according to principles that society consciously establishes. Value, as we have said, must necessarily become surplus-value, otherwise all value production would also cease. Indeed, these ungrateful economists do not understand that they are ‘the reserves of social capital which protect a whole block of the present social order from falling into anomie’ (Bourdieu, 1998 p. 103), and elsewhere Bourdieu talks about ‘values of unspectacular devotion to the collective interest which once characterised the civil servant or the activist’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 4). TN: Anti-utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences. Although attempts to quantify this may raise a smile, as in the case of a study (cited in Salsano, 1994, p. 15) which states that the sphere of the gift, including ‘rounds of drinks’ in bars, is equivalent to three-quarters of the French gross national product. See my essay ‘The Dark Side of Value and The Gift’, now in The Writing on the Wall: On the Decomposition of Capitalism and its Critics (Zero Books, 2017, trans. Alastair Hemmens). On the subject of degrowth, see my essay ‘Degrowthers, One More Effort If You Want To Be Revolutionaries’, in The Writing on the Wall, 2017. TN: ‘The Planet of the Shipwrecked’. In the last years of his life, André Gorz revised his positions and came very close to value criticism. See my essay ‘André Gorz et la critique de la valeur’, in Sortir du capitalisme. Le scénario Gorz (sous la direction d’Alain Caillé et de Christophe Fourel), Le Bord de l’eau, Bordeaux, 2013.

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1 2 TN: ‘Le Parti Communiste’. 13 Here it is particularly obvious that Negri wants to convince new minientrepreneurs that their self-exploitation is genuine freedom – just as neoliberal propaganda does. 14 For a more in-depth critique, see Anselm Jappe, and Robert Kurz: Les Habits neufs de l’Empire. Remarques sur Negri, Hardt et Rufin (The Empire’s New Clothes – Remarks on Negri, Hardt and Rufin). Paris: Lignes/Éditions Léo Scheer, 2003. 15 See Ernst Lohoff, Der Dritte Weg in den Bürgerkrieg. Jugoslawien und das Ende der nachholenden Modernisierung (The Third Way to Civil War. Yugolsavia and the End of Catch-up Modernisation). Bad Honnef: Horlemann-Edition Krisis, 1996.

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216

Index Adorno, Theodor W. 11, 67, 68, 196 n.23, 201 n.15 Althusser, Louis 185 n.6 Aristotle 22, 114, 174 n.11 Backhaus, Hans-Georg 11, 169 n.2, 185 n.6 Benjamin, Walter 201 n.15 Bentham, Jeremy 118, 206 n.9 Bernstein, Eduard 61 Berthoud, Gérard 157 Bessonov, Sergei Alexeyevich 179 n.20, 181 n.28 Bortkiewicz, Ladislaus von 105 Bourdieu, Pierre 9, 100, 148, 149, 150, 151, 154, 155, 161, 207 n.2, 208 n.5 Bové, José 148, 154, 167 n.4, 208 n.4 Braudel, Fernand 117 Callinicos, Alexis 207 n.2 Castoriadis, Cornelius 168 n.9 Clastres, Pierre 206 n.4 Chirac, Jacques 153 Colletti, Lucio 11, 182 n.34 Croce, Benedetto 188 n.16 Dufour, François 148, 154, 167 n.4, 208 n.4 Dumézil, Georges 206 n.4 Dumont, Louis 136, 158, 207 n.10 Durkheim, Émile 9, 131, 132, 133, 205– 206 n.3 Dussel, Enrique 169 n.2 Ebert, Friedrich 63 Engels, Friedrich 42, 59, 64, 70, 71, 168– 169 n.1, 170 n.2, 184 n.3, 185 n.6, 190 n. 28, 192 n.7, 198 n.3, 203 n.23 Feuerbach, Ludwig 205 n.3 Finley, Moses 142, 143 Ford, Henry 89, 188 n.22 Fourier, Charles 56

Freud, Sigmund 131, 205 n.2, 206 n.3 Friedman, Milton 158, 206 n.9 Galilei, Galileo 117, 118 Gaulle, Charles de 149 Godbout, Jacques 156 Gorz, André 155, 157, 208 n. 11 Grossmann, Henryk 80, 193 n.9 Habermas, Jürgen 9 Hafner, Kornelia 188–189 n .4 Hardt, Michael 158, 159, 160, 161, 162 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 54, 105, 107, 108, 129, 167 n.6, 187 n. 12, 191 n.1, 191 n.4, 196 n.23, 198 n.5, 199 n.7, 199 n. 10, 200 n. 11, 200 n. 12, 204 n.24 Heine, Heinrich 167 n.6 Hemmens, Alastair 173 n. 6 Hobbes, Thomas 118, 139, 206 n.3 Hobsbawm, Eric 202–203 n.21 Hollande, François 153 Horkheimer, Max 67, 201 n. 15 Hume, David 115 Hyppolite, Jean 188 n.16, 191 n.1 Jasny, Naum 179 n. 20 Kant, Immanuel 115, 118, 195–196 n.23, 197 n.1 Kautsky, Karl 196 n. 23 Keynes, John Maynard 65 Klein, Peter 172 n.6 Korsch, Karl 193 n.8, 199 n.9, 204 n.24 Krahl, Hans-Jürgen 11, 108, 191 n.4, 196–197 n.23, 197 n.1, 198 n.4, 198 n.5, 205 n.2 Kugelmann, Ludwig 170 n.2 Kurz, Robert ix, x, 5, 11, 88, 99, 116, 130, 133, 163, 172–173 n.6, 180 n.20, 181 n.26, 181 n.30, 188 n.22, 194 n. 13, 202 n.20, 209 n.14

218 Latouche, Serge 157 Lefort, Claude 168 n.9 Le Goff, Jacques 202 n.18 Lenin, Vladimir 65 List, Friedrich 71 Locke, John 118 Lohoff, Fritz X, 76, 163, 172 n.6, 209 n. 15 Lukács, Georg 11, 29, 101, 190 n.28, 199 n.10, 204 n.24 Luxemburg, Rosa 61, 80, 81, 193 n.9 Magli, Ida 133 Mahon, John Lincoln 203 n.23 Malinowski, Bronislaw 145 Malthus, Thomas 118, 206 n.9 Mandel, Ernest 169 n.2, 204 n.24 Mandeville, Bernard 118 Marcuse, Herbert 67 Marx, Karl xi, 4–62 passim, 64, 67, 69–88 passim, 92, 103–9, 123–5, 127, 129–31, 136, 144, 157, 164, 167–207 passim Mattick, Paul 80, 179 n.20, 193 n.9 Mauss, Marcel 9, 136–8, 140, 141, 155 Medvedev, Roy 179 n.20 Michels, Robert 197 n.25 Mill, James 127, 182 n.31, 187 n.14 Müller, Rudolf Walter 201 n.15, 202 n.16 Napoleoni, Claudio 190 n.29 Negri, Antonio 158–62, 209 n.13 Newton, Isaac 118 Nietzsche, Friedrich 197 n.25 Ortlieb, Claus Peter x Papaioannou, Kostas 167 n.9 Pareto, Vilfredo 197 n.25 Perlman, Fredy 11 Plato 167 n.6 Poe, Edgar Allan xii Polanyi, Karl 9, 119, 136, 143–6, 155 Pol, Pot 66 Postone, Moishe 11, 74, 115, 186 n.7, 187 n.10, 187 n.12, 188 n. 15, 193 n.10, 199 n.7, 207 n.3 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 34, 56 Pythagoras 114 Quesnay, François 158

Index Reichelt, Helmut 186 n.6, 191 n.2, 191 n.3, 198 n.5, 200 n.12 Ricardo, David 13, 25, 28, 56, 169 n.1, 171 n.4, 173 n.7, 177 n.18, 178 n.19, 183 n.40, 188 n.17, 189 n.26, 191 n.1, 192 n.5, 194 n.12, 207 n.10 Rosdolsky, Roman 11, 105, 169 n.2, 179 n.20, 189 n.25, 190 n.28, 194 n.12 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 118 Rubel, Maximilian 167 n.9, 204 n.24 Rubin, Issac I. 11, 179–180 n.20, 181 n.28, 184 n.2, 190–191 n.30 Rude, George 203 n.21 Sahlins, Marshall 136, 138–41, 155, 206 n.4 Salsano, Alfredo 156, 157, 208 n.7 Scholz, Roswitha x, 94, 172–173 n.6 Schrader, Fred 169 n.2 Schumpeter, Joseph 173 n.7 Simmel, Georg 186 n.6 Smith, Adam 13, 25, 28, 56, 70, 118, 169 n.1, 171 n.4, 173 n.7 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred 173 n.6, 196 n.23, 201–202 n.15 Sophocles 112 Soros, George 93 Spinoza, Baruch 196 n.23 Stakhanov, Aleksei Grigorievich 63 Taylor, Frederick 89, 188 n.22 Thatcher, Margaret 199 n.6 Thompson, Edward 202 n.21 Thomson, George 201 n.15 Tolstoy, Leo 141, 142 Tosel, André 196 n.23 Trenkle, Norbert x, 69, 172 n.6 Tuchscheerer, Walter 169 n.2 Vernant, Jean-Paul 143 Vincent, Jean-Marie 184 n.3, 187 n.9, 188 n.17 Vygodski, Vitali 169 n.2 Wagner, Adolph 170 n.2, 178 n.19, 189 n.25 Weber, Max 197 n.25 Zassulich, Vera 79, 124