There are always two principles confronting each other: the abstract and the concrete, the universal and the singular, the dead and the living [das Tote und das Lebendige], the identical and the non-identical, exchange value and use value, capital and labour. The bad chiliasm associated with a âtheory of revolutionâ has shown itself in the simple aggregation of one side of these conceptual couplets as the untrue whole and the other side as the principle of hope, or put even more simply, as evil and good. Thus the significant content each of these concepts had in the Hegelian and Marxian dialectic at their specific place of mediation was necessarily lost, and it is here that the real crisis of the theory of revolution consists, that is, in its fragmentation [Auseinanderfallen] into, on the one hand, an apocalyptic conjuring of doom and into an indefatigable faith in the good on the other.
Kornelia Hafner, 19931
What is the legacy of Unoâs thought in the present discourse on value, capital, history and the social forms they present? This chapter will evaluate the problems elucidated with regard to Unoâs pure theory in the theoretical spectrum developed in such diverse areas of research as the âpostâ-Uno School of value theory in Japan (5.1.), the Anglophone Uno School (as in Thomas T. Sekineâs and Robert Albrittonâs work) (5.2.), and aspects of Uno-affiliated historiographies in the Anglophone world today probably best represented in recent works by Harry Harootunian and Gavin Walker (5.3.). Despite their different theoretical interests and incentives to utilise Unoâs theory for their respective views of value, money, form of production, history and the question of resistance to capital, they share a common theoretical basis that informs their respective interventions: the disavowal of value as the organising principle of modern capitalist social relations and, by the same token, the hypostatisation of the use value aspect of the commodity form as the motivator of capitalist exchange relations (in the post-Uno School of value theory) or even as site of resistance to capital (Walker). Whether the use value aspect is used affirmatively in the sense that it serves as the expression of exchange relations, against the social form of value, or affirmatively in the sense that it provides âapparatusesâ (Walker) that resist alleged âteleologically determined agendas of capitalismâ (Harootunian), both share an indebtedness to Unoâs theoretical framework we have previously problematised as use value fetishism. This chapter will scrutinise the âcareerâ of the use value fetishistic aspects in Unoâs theory in more recent international scholarship.
Even after the demise of the influential Uno School in the 1980s, Japanese economists have been continuously engaged in the categorial reconstruction of Marxâs Critique of Political Economy, especially the theory of value and money. Writing in the 1980sâ2000s, authors like Ebitsuka Akira, Mukai Kimitoshi, Masaki HachirÅ, Kataoka KÅji, Umezawa Naoki, and others, broadened the value theoretical views of Uno School orthodoxy to include the Neue Marx-Lektüre (the German ânew reading of Marxâ), French structuralism (in the economists C. Benetti and J. Cartelier), the regulation school (M. Aglietta), and other approaches. However, the integration of more internationally diverse scholarship notwithstanding, the recent value theoretical debates in Japan remain heavily influenced by Unoâs idiosyncratic reinterpretation of Marxâs Capital. In his reconstructive reading, stretching from his works on Value (Kachiron, 1947) to his better known Principles of Political Economy (Keizai Genron, 1950/1964), Uno, as we have seen, strongly criticises Marxâs âderivationâ of money from the analysis of the commodity and the labour theory of value.
Chapter 5.1. will review not only the remaining influence of Uno on the newer Japanese readings of Capital, but also confront a reading that poses what we believe is a false opposition of money and value in Marxâs critique of political economy. This view is perpetuated by Ebitsuka Akira and Mukai Kimitoshiâs appropriation of the âmonetary approachâ of Benetti/Cartelier on the one hand, and Hans-Georg Backhausâs and Michael Heinrichâs âmonetary theory of valueâ on the other, leading them to discard the labour theory of value in favour of a âmoney onlyâ-approach. While we will problematise the appropriation of Backhaus and Heinrich for this strategy, we will show that the dismissal of value theory leads to a reinterpretation of Marxâs critique of the capitalist relations of production as a Baileyan apologetics of the same â a position which we believe is both theoretically and practically precarious.
Chapter 5.2. will question the equilibrium approach to capitalist (re-)production already found in Uno and resuscitated in Sekineâs work. In it, Sekineâs critique of non-equilibrium approaches to capitalist economy, especially Duncan Foley et al.âs âNew Interpretationâ, will receive a fundamental counter-criticism, reinstalling the centrality of Marxâs labour theory of value as the core critical theorem and heuristic of capitalist relations and their bourgeois interpretation. In the same vein, Sekineâs view of the âlaw of valueâ as a law of general equilibrium will be shown to stem from an apologetic view of capitalist relations of production. A similar apologetic view of capital is repeated in Albrittonâs approach to Unoâs stages theory. Not only does Albritton adapt the view of the law of value as the sustenance of an âidealâ balancing between supply and demand, thereby introducing the idea that essentially capital produces use values to guarantee general social reproduction, eschewing the problem of moneyed demand (and therefore that of capitalismâs specificity), but he focuses on the problem between the logic and the history of capitalist development that he finds solved in Unoâs theory of stages (sandankairon). In it, the level of pure theory corresponds to the equilibrium force of the law of value and the realm of âideal use valuesâ, while the level of the concretely historical is reflected in key developmental stages of capitalism as there are the stages of mercantilism (merchant capital), liberalism (industrial capital) and the stage or era of imperialism (finance capital). However, as we will argue, Albrittonâs insistence on the methodological separation of stages theory on one side and the alleged âpurityâ of the principles of capitalist logic on the other do not constitute an organic whole, but remain external to one another, leaving the claim of a meaningful reconciliation of the logic and history of capital wanting (and, as we will see, tautological). More importantly however, Albritton, like Uno, fails to acknowledge the epistemological status of value, in that, as a real abstraction, it does not describe an âidealâ or âhypotheticâ assumption about the organisation of the capitalist mode of production, but its actual implementation and contradictory effects, including the problem of economic crisis absent from Albrittonâs (as well as Unoâs) theorisation. The methodological objection and resentment against demonstrating the intrinsically devastating effects of the law of value, or rather surplus value, in a real historical situation, which was Marxâs incentive for many of his illustrations in Capital, bears a significant symptom of the inherently apologetic character of Albrittonâs contribution.
In Chapter 5.3., we will take up the issue of real subsumption as a critical category within Marxâs fetish-critical method and the serious misinterpretation it receives in Harry Harootunianâs 2015 book Marx After Marx. In it, Harootunian argues that rather than real subsumption, it is the term of formal subsumption which more accurately describes the current âdifferent historical temporalitiesâ2 and âuneven developmentâ that areas beyond the âWestern worldâ have undergone. The concept of formal subsumption, for Harootunian, âoffers ⦠a way out of both the vulgate Marxian and modernizing bourgeois historical narratives constrained to fulfilling teleologically agendas of capitalism that have claimed the unfolding of a singular trajectory everywhereâ.3 This could allegedly be seen in the ââ¯âeffectivityâ of practices and institutions and the role played by uneven temporalities produced by incorporating and metabolising pasts in the presentâ, against âthe illusory claim of capitalismâs inevitable completion everywhereâ.4 Instead, Harootunian attempts to bring to the fore instances of âsingular contextsâ, which may âvery well have blunted the direct consequences of both expropriation and exploitation or masked their harshness and contributed to delaying the realization of real subsumptionâ.5 To counter what we think is the real subsumption of meaning rather than the meaning of real subsumption in this approach, a look at the specific uses and misuses of Marxâs terminology and theorisation of âreal and formal subsumptionâ is called for. We will present a radically different reading of real subsumption that focuses on real subsumption as a methodological heuristic indicating the âcompletedâ fetishisation of the capital relation. We will show that real subsumption 1) presents a critical category directed against the âfetishism of the political economistsâ, 2) forms not only the incentive, but the actual object of Marxâs analysis of the capitalist mode of production, and 3), by directly corresponding to the production of relative surplus value, it allows us to conceptually permeate the mechanism that effects the dominance and perseverance of capital on a global scale, the âovercomingâ of any obstacle, economic or political, that may impede the appropriation of unpaid surplus labour in our present historical time. Harootunianâs taxonomical subordination of real under âformalâ and âhybrid formsâ of subsumption, expressed in globally different cultural practices, not only misrecognises the specifically economic character of the relation between capital and labour and the ways its analysis contributes to a theory of class and wage dependency, but, with his resentment against the concept of real subsumption as a critical theory of the appropriation of unpaid and alien surplus labour, Harootunian unwittingly makes a case for the neoliberal view of âdifferent capitalsâ whose workings cannot be solely evaluated from the standpoint of (surplus) value extraction. As we will show, he thus invites a cynical view of the hardships of billions of people with âculturally differentâ backgrounds and âsingular contextsâ whose daily grind in a globalised world Harootunian surprisingly finds unworthy of mentioning.
Insofar as Harootunianâs perspective on the present world is informed by the view of a not-yet-subsumed âtemporalityâ or âspaceâ withdrawing from the âgripâ of value or capital, i.e. the aspect of use value against value, we find a similarity with Gavin Walkerâs 2016 book The Sublime Perversion of Capital and its highly original approach to Unoâs work. The leading question will not so much concern the tenability of Unoâs (and with it, Walkerâs) contention about the muri of the commodification of labour power, i.e. the assumption that labour power as a commodity cannot be directly produced by capital (for this, see our Chapter 2.2.), but rather the implications this view has for an alleged âparadoxâ between the âinnerâ valorisation logic of capital and historyâs âexteriorityâ that likewise serves as a buttress for capitalâs self-image as the logic of a âsmooth circleâ. In this area of conflict or Spannungsfeld, Walker posits his intervention via its emphasis on the âresistanceâ that the commodification of labour power, or rather, its â(im)possibilityâ, presents to capitalâs drive, located in the sphere of consumption. We will argue that neither is there a theoretical âparadoxâ between the logical âinteriorâ and the historical âexteriorâ, nor does the spectrum of use value provide a meaningful category of resistance to the capitalist mode of production. Drawing on Kornelia Hafnerâs seminal critique of âuse value fetishismâ, this chapter, and the present book, will conclude by highlighting the ideologically precarious character of the lopsided view of the capitalist contradiction, and counter it with the possibility of resistance the contradictory character of the concept of value itself.
5.1 Money vs. Value? The âMonetary Approachâ in the Post-Uno School of Value Theory6
The task of this chapter (5.1.) is to problematise aspects of the development of value theory in Japan after Uno. More specifically, it aims to review and critically evaluate the post-Uno Schoolâs appropriation of the âmonetary approachâ in Benetti-Cartelier and the âmonetary theory of valueâ of the Neue Marx-Lektüre. These appropriations culminate in the general contention of post-Uno School theorists that Marxâs labour theory of value, or âvalue theoryâ in their dictum, and the âmonetary approachâ7 have to be set apart as two distinct and oppositional theoretical paradigms, which ultimately âamounts to postulating money and discarding value theoryâ, as these authors conclude with Cartelier.8 They therefore hypostasise an opposition of money and value, pitching their monetary approach as an âalternative to the theory of valueâ.9 We will show that this approach owes to a truncated reading, if not outright misunderstanding, of Marxâs critical intervention against classical political economy, and therefore against the âinterpretersâ of the capitalist mode of production.10 The view of money as âhaving nothing to do with valueâ â i.e. with the substance of value in abstract labour as a category of production and its measure in âsocially necessary labour timeâ â is especially eminent in Ebitsuka Akira and Mukai Kimitoshiâs works which this chapter will review more closely. Ebitsuka and Mukai are arguably most radically opposed to Marxâs central theorem, which is why the focus on these authors is most promising in evaluating the development of Japanese value theory after Uno. Ebitsukaâs and Mukaiâs intervention lies in approximating the Benetti-Carterlier paradigm, while Mukaiâs more strongly focuses on that of the Neue Marx-Lektüre, especially Hans-Georg Backhaus and Michael Heinrich. Roughly, both Ebitsukaâs and Mukaiâs argument, despite their differences, relies on the assumption that Marxâs demonstration of the âgenesis of the money-formâ â âa task never even attempted by bourgeois economistsâ (Marx) â implies, on the one hand, a âsubstantialistâ, i.e. transhistorical and physiological understanding of the substance of value as abstract labour, and a âform-orientedâ analysis of money whose existence precedes market exchange. Money, in these theories, is autonomous and self-explanatory and need not be grounded in the âsubstantialistâ and âpre-monetaryâ labour theory of value. The latter must therefore be discarded. More strongly than Uno, and in parts in direct opposition to him,11 they conclude that value is constituted in exchange, and abstract labour is not a category of production, but of the market. Where these views agree with Uno, however, is in their conviction that money logically precedes commodity exchange, and therefore the analytical approach to the commodity: money is not to be derived from the commodity, but the commodity from money. Money therefore becomes the basis for social relations, which cannot be further deduced.
Against this view, this chapter will argue that these criticisms remain on the analytical level of what Marx called the âfetishism of the bourgeois relations of productionâ, in that it no further asks what money actually is. Marx instead demonstrates that it is the inverted and âdazzlingâ expression of the social form of labour that, as the predominant value-form â and therefore as fetish â obfuscates its constitutive content in the specific social form that labour takes under the conditions of its confrontation with capital. We will argue that the opposition between value and money is a false one, ignoring the specificity of money as the fetishised appearance of abstract wealth, which can only be meaningfully analysed on the basis of the social character of labour it is the âdirect incarnationâ of. Marxâs labour theory of value is not only not opposed to the theory of money, but the latter can only be meaningfully explained on the basis of the former. According to our understanding, Marxâs theory of value is therefore primarily a theory of the form-content (Formgehalt) and of the necessary constitution of the fetishistic forms of value (the commodity, money, capital, wage, profit, interest, rent, etc.), the latter of which form the categories of the bourgeois horizon. This chapterâs main focus of critique and concern therefore is the tendency towards a nominalist theory of money to be witnessed in the post-Uno School, relying on a model of money and exchange close to classical or âvulgarâ economist Samuel Bailey and the school of marginalism, which indeed parts with Marxâs crucial insights while claiming adherence to it in its attempts to bring forward a Marx uninhabited by what the post-Uno School sees as the ârelictsâ of the classical âlabour theory of valueâ.
The focus will be on refuting the Baileyan propositions of this newer functionalist and nominalist reading of money, arguing, first, that money as âmeans of circulationâ or âsymbolâ is not an explanans, but an explanandum. Second, Marxâs analysis of money already contains the further analysis of capital, which is Marxâs main concern. It will do so by evaluating Ebitsukaâs appropriation of Benetti-Cartelierâs monetary paradigm, its misconception of the notion of âprivate labourâ and the absence of the problem of class to show that the monetary approach adopted by Ebitsuka and Benetti/Cartelier alike falls short of the Marxâs Problembewusstsein of the inner nexus and predicament of capitalist sociation. Third, this essay will critically review Mukaiâs appropriation of Hans-Georg Backhaus and Michael Heinrichâs readings of Marx for Mukaiâs own agenda of âabandoningâ the labour theory of value. It will show that this attempt is not only misguided, but contains a wilful distortion of Backhausâs and Heinrichâs interventions.
Finally, we will contend that the strange ignorance of Marxâs larger Problemstellung, namely that the theory of value serves as the key heuristic analysis to the âriddleâ of money, capital, and other value-forms, in these recent approaches not only leads to a surrender to neoclassical views of value and money â views which the authors claim to refute. It also leads to an abandonment of any idea of modern society. Since, for them, capital and class do not exist, we must ultimately conclude that modern society does not exist either.12
5.1.1 The Benetti-Cartelier Paradigm: The Logical Prevalence of Money
In his 1984 essay âMoney and the Critique of Political Economy. The Problematic of the Critique of Political Economy according to Benetti-Cartelierâ,13 Ebitsuka presents Benetti-Cartelierâs âmonetaryâ approach as a helpful solution to the problems posed not only by classical and neoclassical economy, but also Sraffian âneo-Ricardianismâ and their disregard for money as constitutive for what they call âmarket societyâ. This rethinking of Marxâs theory of money, âcouched within an explicitly stated Marxist dispositionâ,14 can be considered as a radicalisation of Unoâs claim concerning the dispensability of the labour theory of value on the terrain of Marxist debate. Ebitsuka therefore sets the discussion of the Benetti-Cartelier paradigm roughly in the (at the time of Ebitsukaâs contribution) recent and well known âValue Controversyâ among Anglo Marxian value and money theorists15 of the late 1970s that culminated in Ian Steedmanâs and Paul Sweezyâs publication of the same name in 1981. The neo-Ricardians in the debate â predominantly Steedman16 â held the so-called âredundancyâ-thesis,17 namely that, with given physical quantities of inputs and their ratio, i.e. given wages and means of production, the labour theory of value â as Sraffa had already suggested in his seminal Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities in 1960 â becomes redundant. This becomes especially apparent in Marxâs âfaultyâ18 proof of the transformation of labour values into prices of production that regulate the general rate of profit: because the rate of profit (s/c+v) cannot be expressed in terms of labour values, but only by âalready transformedâ prices of production,19 Marx was wrong to hypostasise s/c+v, in which s, c and v âare âvaluedâ in terms of labour contentsâ, as the rate of profit. In the latter, the ratio of the surplus product to the capital advanced is âvaluedâ in terms of prices. s/c+v is therefore ânot the rate of profitâ, Steedman argues: â⦠the fact is that the profit rate and prices of production have to be treated simultaneously within the theoryâ. With given physical quantities of outputs and inputs, including labour-time, in each industry, and a given bundle of commodities constituting real wages (Ricardoâs original assumption), this approach can show three things: âFirst, those data suffice to determine, proximately, the rate of profit and the prices of production ⦠Second, the rate of profit does not, in fact, depend on all those data, but only on real wages and the direct and indirect conditions of production of those wage goods ⦠Third, no quantities of embodied labour play any necessary role in the determination of either the rate of profit or prices of productionâ:
â[E]mbodied-labourâ quantities are entirely redundant, even within a surplus-based theory ⦠The quantities of labour embodied in ⦠a commodity are determined precisely by the physical quantities we took as data. But those same data suffice to determine the rate of profit and prices of production: hence embodied-labour quantities are necessarily redundant.20
How does Ebitsuka â using the approach by Benetti/Cartelier â overcome the shared rejection of the labour theory of value with Steedman and the Sraffians, while simultaneously rejecting the Sraffiansâ non-monetary âsolutionâ to the transformation problem?
In the context of the âValue Controversyâ, Ebitsuka proposes that the âvalue systemâ (kachi taikei) and the âproduction price systemâ (seisan kakaku taikei) both stem from a system of âphysical resourcesâ (butsuryÅ taikei) that assumed a fixed production technology, and wages as âbundles of commoditiesâ. The first is an âevaluation system working under the assumption of homogenous labour with the postulate of an equal rate of surplus valueâ, while the second is âan evaluation system which postulates an equilibrium in the rate of profitâ.21 For him, the differentia specifica is not between the two systems, but between these two systems and another one, namely âthe theory of abstract labourâ:
The main contention in the âtheory of abstract labourâ (chÅ«shÅteki rÅdÅ ron) of market society being a theory of the mode of social formation ⦠is [the question how] in an âeconomy having undergone a dispersion that does not acknowledge any kind of social synthesis as a preconditionâ can the various private elements (shiteki sho yÅsÅ) [the products of private labour, ELL] be mutually related, and, as social elements forming a society, socially recognised for the organisation of society?22
Ebitsukaâs emphasis is on the aspect of social evaluation where both the value and the production price system fail: âIn both systems of evaluation, the social evaluation system is completely ignoredâ.23 It must therefore be substituted with a theory of abstract labour that accounts for the âmode of social formationâ in which its elements â commodities â are mutually related, so that they become recognised as aliquot parts of total social production: and its âlocusâ, so to speak, is in exchange. Ebitsuka hence declares âembodied labourâ-theories of value redundant, by claiming âabstract labourâ to be a category of the market. He thinks he operates within Marxâs field of vision: â[Marxâs concept of value] ⦠is not [a theory of] the âembodiment of labourâ, but related to abstract labour that establishes and mediates exchange relationsâ.24 To return to the initial question: what makes the labour theory of value, understood as a theory of the substance of value in âlabourâ, redundant is not a return to physical quantities of inputs and outputs, as the Sraffians believe, but the emphasis on exchange relations: abstract labour is a âpost factumâ that can only have any sort of legitimacy in the social mediation of commodities on the market. Consequently,
the problem that arises in the key concept of abstract labour is that, because it is a concept established post factum (jigoteki ni) by passing through (tsūjite) commodity exchange, guaranteeing the homogeneity of commodities before commodity exchange and rendering exchange relations possible, any kind of substance is unlikely.25
For Ebituska therefore, the reconstruction of the theory of the mode of social formation must be embedded in the âtheory of exchangeâ (kÅkan ron) to overcome the framework of neo-Ricardianism.
That, however, is not all. Drawing on the work of Benetti/Cartelier, especially Marchands, Salariat, et Capitalistes (1980), Ebitsuka seeks to reveal the ideological implications of the anthropological hypothesis of classical political economy. Let us briefly contextualise Benetti/Cartelierâs basic propositions.
Carlo Benetti and Jean Cartelierâs work is situated in the context of the book series Intervention en économie politique, published by François Maspero with Presses Universitaire de Grenoble since 1974. Since that time, in their numerous articles and essays, Benetti and Cartelier were actively promoting a âheterodox political economyâ, against the ânomenclatureâ of the classics and neoclassics alike. Assuming an Althusserian ideology-critical framework, in which not only schools, but also universities are viewed as âplaces of ideology-buildingâ,26 they aim at the evaluation of levels of domination in capitalist economics. The task of the critique of political economy for them is the critique of the ârationalisationâ of capitalist ideology, by which they intend to adapt Althusserâs ideology critique for what they call an âapprofondissementâ of Marxâs critique of the classics. Somehow assuming the character of a non-sequitur to this theoretical objective, their main intervention is the declaration of money as the central âeconomic objectâ, an object âoverlookedâ by classical political economy. They reject the logic of derivation of money from the commodity, as can be found not only in the classics, but also in Marx. In a recent article, recapitulating their original intervention from 30 years earlier, Benetti and Cartelier insist that
[Our] refusal of a presupposed commodity-space (the so-called hypothèse de nomenclature) and our suggestion to conceive of individuals as pure accounts are two complementary ways of emphasizing social objectivity â money â against a ânaturalâ one â use values ⦠We have presupposed money (far from the illusions of micro-foundation) to make it clear that economic theory is a component of our society â¦27
Money, according to Benetti/Cartelier, is the âa prioriâ mode of existence for the possibility of the particular social structure and organisation of the capitalist mode of production. Its existence therefore precedes the existence of the âcommodity formâ â much akin to Unoâs understanding.28 According to Benetti/Cartelier, the ânomenclatureâ of conventional political economy has ignored the specific social nexus provided by money. Instead, they resort to an âideological anthropologyâ (Althusser) of the âphysical worldâ in which âmanâ as the âdesiring subjectâ is the âsecretionâ of market society, a âsubjectâ which finds itself facing âobjectsâ (or âuse valuesâ) made for the satisfaction of his own needs and desires.29 Cartelier:
The contention of the nomenclature results in the hypothesis that the narrative of the totality of the various things that have been attributed to the âgoodâ or the âcommodityâ is possible before it has anything to do with society. In other words, the specific social form (exchange, production, etc.) is constructed on the basis of a âneutral substrateâ (un substrat neutre), which is the potential and natural âmonde physiqueâ.30
While Benetti/Cartelier distinguish a classical and a neoclassical form of this ânaturalistâ reduction, they reject both, demanding a theory of the economic basis that overcomes the âconceptual chainâ or derivation from the âgoodâ to âmoneyâ to the âcommodityâ. This theory must account for a) the social character of the economic nexus (against the naturalism in the classics and neoclassical theories), and b) a âspace of commensurabilityâ31 (espace de commensurabilité) where not âall objects acquire a monetary characterâ and âeach one is the equivalent against all othersâ as in barter,32 but where money is excluded as the specific agent causing homogeneity of all the commodities it mediates. For this aim, in Marchands, Salariat, et Capitalistes, they proceed from two hypotheses:
(H1) La société est donnée et le lien entre ses éléments est la séparation, dont lââ¯expression est lââ¯unité de compte commune.
(H2) Le mode dââ¯existence de la séparation est la rupture entre le privé et le social.33
The economic âcommon unit of calculationâ here is money. For Ebitsuka, these claims have far-reaching consequences for the theoretical status of money: â⦠H1 addresses the âseparationâ (bunri) =34 the social relations of a market society as the dispersed social relations (bunsanka shita shakai kankei), which presuppose the existence of money, i.e. the common unit of calculation. H2 addresses the specificity of a dispersed society in which private evaluation and social evaluation do not coincideâ.35 Only by being âprivateâ, as Ebitsuka summarises Benetti/Cartelierâs argument, can the various amounts of the common unit of calculation be socially recognised (reconnaissable). Only by the âsocial self expressionâ (shakaiteki jiko hyÅji /autodéclaration sociale) of the common unit of calculation, money, does the âprivateâ acquire a social meaning.36 Generally, in a market society, the quantity of âself-expressionâ and the quantity of social evaluation do not coincide. This is the âruptureâ between the private and the social. This rupture is reflected in the âtwo factors of the commodityâ, where use value acts as the individual factor, and value as the factor of homogenisation. Instead of the âhuman as desiring subjectâ, it is âmoney as a symbolâ37 of market society from which, in this world, meaning is given.
⦠in sum, they [Benetii and Cartelier] come to show that money â âthe commodityâ â âthe goodâ (zai) is a conceptual chain that is the opposite of political economy. This conceptual chain rejects the system of meaning (imi taikei) of âpolitical economyâ, provided by âman as desiring subjectâ that is an âideological anthropologyâ, and can be viewed as a structure theory of a system of meaning which is established when the theory of money as symbol is adopted.38
Ebitsuka sees the advantage of such an inverted analysis of money â measured against Marxâs â in the following:
In Benetti/Cartelier, the social relations precede the various âsubjectsâ, and can be grasped as making the mutual relations of the various members of this society as social âsubjectsâ possible in the first place. Here, money is just another name for social relation. Money assumes the position of the centre of market society. Against political economy, which, with its market ideology, cannot sufficiently grasp market society as money economy, Benetti/Cartelier have shown a way out.39
For Benetti/Cartelier, the âlogical prerequisiteâ of the universal equivalent âfor the [market] relation to existâ, i.e. the logical prevalence of money results from the alleged impossibility to âdeduceâ the money from the commodity form. Their argument oscillates between denying the possibility of an economy without money40 and attempting to refute Marxâs analysis of the value form, in which Marx showed the âorigin of this money from the simplest, almost imperceptible outline to the dazzling money-formâ,41 which would make the mystery of money disappear. These arguments belong to different levels of abstraction â while certainly Marx did not deny that a capitalist economy was impossible without money, he further asked what money actually is and by which of its faculties it was endowed with being the universal equivalent at all. This question is unfortunately beyond the scope of Benetii/Cartelierâs, Ebitsukaâs, and Unoâs, interest. Rather, they insist that âthe solution Marx proposed [of deriving the money from the commodity form] is incorrectâ.42 In our view, Fred Moseley has already successfully demonstrated where Benetti/Cartelierâs reading of value form analysis is misguided, and the critique therefore need not be repeated here.43 Instead, as seen above, for Benetti/Cartelier, money must be understood as âsymbol.â The problem of a âsymbolâ theory of money, however, does not disperse with the problem at hand: namely, by which of its faculty, money can become the universal equivalent at all â and what it is that money actually measures.44
5.1.2 The Strange Meaning of Private Labour and the Absence of Class
The approach of the âlogical prevalance of moneyâ over value remains strangely obscure as to its own cognitive gain over and above Marxâs analysis of the value form. More pertinently however, a certain question begging is involved in Ebitsukaâs and Benetti/Cartelierâs position â if not dominantly informing it. Precisely by conjuring away the problematic of the social form of labour by relegating abstract labour to the sphere of circulation and exchange, and not to production, they have cut the path to recapturing the social dimension of money they explicitly seek to establish, against the neoclassicals and the Sraffians. Hence, their emphasis on the âsocial dimensionâ of money is never redeemed. This is because, other than Benetti/Cartelier, and with them, Ebitsuka, believe, money is not an explanans, but an explanandum as a category of political economy. It becomes the social synthesis of private labours in a social context only by virtue of being the âdirect incarnation of all human labourâ,45 of directly representing all individual and concrete labours, while representing none of them specifically â hence being the direct expression of abstract labour. Not only is the problematic of how the products of individual labours can relate to one another as commodities at all beyond the scope of Benetti/Cartelierâs and Ebitsukaâs interest. Their âmonetary approachâ indeed also remains on the level of formalism, owing to their rejection of a meaningful basis on which the exchange relation can be grounded, namely abstract labour as the social âsubstanceâ of value. In a word, they are begging the question: if money is the condition of possibility of exchange, what is the condition of possibility of money? It cannot be exchange. It is indeed striking how the social dimension of money â namely what relations of production money is an expression of â is eclipsed from Ebitsukaâs and Benetti/Cartelierâs âdeflationaryâ views, despite their insistence on emphasising it, against the Sraffians. But Ebitsuka, Benetti/Cartelier â and Uno â forget that money does not make commodities commensurable: âQuite the contraryâ.46 It only appears to be able to do that precisely by being the palpable, material expression of a violent âhomogenisationâ that has already been performed in the homogenisation of social labour and its âquantificationâ as labour time, a process involving the totality of productive relations, predominantly that of class. Yet, money, being the fetishistic expression of value, âdoes not reveal what has been transformed into itâ:47 but a disparity between appearance and essence does not even occur to the âmonetary approachâ. It can therefore be characterised as a nominalist theory of money, akin to the paradigms of neoclassical â in Marxâs dictum, âvulgarâ â theory and its âfounding fatherâ, Samuel Bailey.48 This problematic is also not solved by the âprivateâ/âsocialâ-distinction or âruptureâ alone, especially when it shifts the emphasis away from the specific form of labour. Marx, in his analysis of the third particularity of the equivalent form of value,49 emphasises in what way the money fetish âexistsâ as the mediation of private labours in a social context: â⦠private labour takes the form of its opposite, namely labour in its directly social formâ.50 Benetti/Cartelier, in their strong reference to the term âprivateâ do not address this crucial social aspect of money. However, as pointed out by Marx in the third particularity of the equivalent form of value, the relation between social and private labour is constitutive for money. In order to understand this, however, one must possess an adequate grasp of the concept of âprivate labourâ â which Benetti/Cartelier lack. Especially Cartelier distorts the meaning of âprivate labourâ as a labour âaccording to the labourerâs own viewsâ to unrecognisability.51 That âprivate labourâ â understood as a kind of labour in which âindividuals have the choiceâ52 â should then be irreconcilable with the fact that labour-power becomes a commodity under generalised surplus value production (i.e. unfree labour), i.e. where the worker âdoes not have a choiceâ,53 demonstrates not only a fundamental misunderstanding of Marxâs theory, and gives Cartelierâs intention to reveal a âcontradictionâ in Marxâs theory of surplus value an almost embarrassing twist. But, as W.J. Urban correctly sees, it also betrays Cartelierâs âneoclassical economic biasâ, by making âchoiceâ the measure of freedom.54 At the same time, however, this misrecognition is symptomatic for the absence of class in the Benetti/Cartelier approach. This fatal absence accounts for Cartelierâs reading of âprivate labourâ as labour âaccording to the labourerâs own viewsâ, and not a mode of social production in which the sum total of the conditions of production belongs to the capitalist: private labour is capitalist labour. Private labour, more specifically, is based on the independence and the unawareness of the individual producers (i.e. capitalists), in that e.g. the specific quantity of a commodity to be produced is not subject to previous negotiation between all capitalists. The concept of private labour has therefore absolutely nothing to do with labour being âfreeâ and âindependentâ. Cartelierâs conclusion therefore, that the commodification of labour power (unfree labour) is incompatible with the commodity division of labour (private, free labour, labour as âchoiceâ) is bizarre, to say the least. Saying that âsome peopleâ (sic) are deprived of any means of production does not mean to say that they are âexcluded from commodity productionâ, as Cartelier insinuates.55 In fact, only when social relations between commodity owners, including class, are understood as a symmetrical, and not asymmetrical relation â in other words, when the âfreeâ market is declared as the âadequate formâ of social exchange and the conditions of production equally belong to all âindividualsâ, as Cartelier believes â does his crude hypothesis make any sense. However, a concept of class in which the contradiction between capital and labour is suspended, i.e. a notion of class in which the conditions of production do not belong to one class (i.e. the capitalist) against the other (i.e. the workers), is not a concept of class at all. And where there is no concept of class, i.e. a concept of unequal exchange, it is difficult to understand that money measures the expenditure of human labour in the abstract as the result of a valorisation process (the notion of valorisation implies that of necessary and surplus labour, and therefore that of class) in which it âbecomes the form of appearance of its own oppositeâ, the token of equality, freedom and wealth per se: a fetish. As early as in the Grundrisse, Marx clarified moneyâs fetishistic appeal to conventional political economy. It is political economyâs taking categories in isolation, i.e. abstraction, that accounts for their âoverlookingâ of the fundamental social mediation, that of class:
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. Thus, what all this wisdom comes down to is the attempt to stick fast to the simplest economic relations, which, conceived by themselves, are pure abstractions; but these relations are, in reality, mediated by the deepest antithesis, and represent only one side, in which the full expression of the anti-thesis [between labour and capital] is obscured.56
In order to constitute the semblance of equal exchange between capital and labour, money is therefore not an accidental, but a very necessary form of appearance of value and surplus value.
To summarise: in their attempt to reject both the ahistoricity of the (neo-)classical school and the non-monetary approach of Sraffian neo-Ricadianism, Benetti/Cartelier succumb to a functionalist reading of money as both analytically-conceptually and temporally prior to value and its forms, undermining Marxâs theory of money as the paradigmatic form of value which can only be grasped from the social form of value producing, i.e., abstract labour in the production process. The (false) reduction of Marxâs explicit problematisation of âformâ to the eminence of money â mistaking the object of critique (the forms that value takes, i.e. money) for affirmative categories â misrecognises that the forms that value takes are precisely the fetishised forms of value Marx sought a) to designate as the specific economic object (against the âeconomic unawarenessâ of political economy) and b) to reveal âwhat has been transformed intoâ them, their content in the specific form of capitalist labour. Benetti/Cartelierâs impetus to fortify the theoretical status of money in economic theory (lââ¯unité de compte commune, economic object) therefore ironically digresses into moneyâs theoretical subalternatisation, because in their theory, Marxâs main interest in the analysis of the value form â not that money is a commodity, but âhow, why, and by what means a commodity becomes moneyâ57 and therefore, how money is precisely excluded as a specific form of value from the âworld of commoditiesâ â remains obscure. It is equally obscure how Benetti/Cartelierâs âsolutionâ of âpostulating money and discarding value theoryâ can overcome the Sraffian paradigm. Ironically, Benetti/Cartelierâs and the Sraffiansâs approach are but the reverse side of the same pre-critical coin: while the Sraffians precisely lack an understanding of value as necessarily tied to money, the âmonetary approachâ lacks insight into the necessity of money to reflect a social relation of production. More devastatingly however, Benetti/Cartelierâs âsymbol theoryâ of money confirms the judgement that their theory does not move beyond the claims they intend to reject in neoclassical economics. As with Uno, therefore, Benetti/Cartelierâs nominalist reading of money and their strange disavowal of its social dimension can be traced back to the ignorance of the problem of fetishism. For Marx, the particularities of the equivalent value form, i.e. paradigmatically that of money â and not just the analysis of the value form in the confrontation of two commodities per se â are at the heart of the âsecretâ to the fetishisms of the bourgeois mode of production. Yet, this omission of the crucial outcome of Marxâs analytical approach to value form analysis seems to run like a golden thread through the proponents of the interpretation of value from Uno to the post-Uno School and its appropriation of other, more recent money theoretical approaches, as in Benetti/Cartelier. Recent critics of the Uno School in Japan have therefore pointed to the omission of the fetishism paradigm as the differentia specifica between Uno-oriented theory and that of other schools and theorists of Marxian value theory, e.g. Kuruma SamezÅ. A case in point is Sasaki RyÅ«ji, who in his 2011 book Marxâs Theory of Reification. The Thinking of the Material as the Critique of Capitalism, contends:
With regard to Uno KÅzÅ, because he does not intend an interpretation of Marx, but a âcorrectionâ of Capital towards a static theory of principles, it is self-understood that it is different from Marx in this sense. Without a doubt, he misconceives the core of the theory of reification (busshÅ, also: fetishism). As is well known, Uno argues that in the chapter on the commodity the labour theory of value cannot be proven, and one must wait until the emergence of capital to prove it for the first time. Hence, in the commodity chapter, not the relation between value, substance and value form, but only the form should be discussed. This is why the problem of reification where the social relations of persons appear as social relations of things (busshÅ) is cut off from the problem around production relations, which are the social expression of private labours. [Uno] merely shows the value form as an abstract unfolding of the contradiction between value and use value in the commodity ⦠Accordingly, with Unoâs framework, one cannot explain the reification of production relations founded on private labour.58
Can the integration of interpretations of the Neue Marx-Lektüre, especially Hans-Georg Backhaus and Michael Heinrich, in the Japanese post-Uno school provide us with a better grasp of the relation between value and money? For this, we shall turn briefly to Mukai Kimitoshi and his intellectual context.
5.1.3 Money as the Logical Limit to Value â The Neue Marx-Lektüre in the Post-Uno School
The characterisation of the works of Mukai Kimitoshi as the âpost-Uno Schoolâ is strictly speaking incorrect, since Mukai was a student of the well-known Marxist economist SatÅ KinzaburÅ (1927â89) who was one of Unoâs foremost critics. And yet, with regard to his embeddedness in the debates on value continuing after Unoâs death in 1977 and his enthusiastic accordance with Unoâs interpretation of the money form as prior to the commodity,59 the subsumption of Mukai to the post-Uno school can be justified. In Mukaiâs case, however, although he strongly references Benetti/Cartelier, the emphasis on the works of the Neue Marx-Lektüre, and especially Hans-Georg Backhaus and Michael Heinrich, is more evident. The signature intervention of the Neue Marx-Lektüre (NML) in the value theoretical debates of the late 1960sâ70s in Germany until today is twofold: the rejection of the premonetary theory of value (prämonetäre Werttheorie) and the logico-historical method. The latter is first prosposed by Engelsâs interpretation60 and perpetuated in the works of e.g. Wolfgang Fritz Haug in the German context.61 This twofold landmark intervention has especially been advocated by Backhaus and Heinrich in their writings. Backhaus first propagated this view in his seminal âMaterialien zur Rekonstruktion der Marxschen Werttheorieâ (Materials for the Reconstruction of Marxâs Theory of Value, 1974â8), while Heinrich strongly argued for it in his Die Wissenschaft vom Wert (The Science of Value, 1991).62 With different emphasis on its derivation, what can be said for both Backhaus and Heinrich is that Marxâs theory of value in Capital must be interpreted as a monetary theory of value, its method being strictly logical. But, as both Backhaus and Heinrich stress, Marx himself wasnât sufficiently conscious of his own âparadigm changeâ against the classics, which is why value form analysis in Section 3 of Chapter 1 of Capital Volume I can still be read as an âembodiedâ labour theory of value. Especially Heinrich claims that the substance of value, abstract labour, only has existence in exchange, in the âsocial relation between commodity to commodityâ.63 Because Marx was allegedly caught up between the framework of the classics (the âembodied labour theory of valueâ) on the one hand and breaking up their discourse, Heinrich hypostatises two distinct theories of value in Marx, a âpremonetaryâ and a âmonetaryâ one.64 Because, for Heinrich, the âembodiedâ labour theory of value â the âold discourseâ â must be rejected in favour of Marxâs breakthrough to a âmonetary theory of valueâ, it is in exchange that âvalueâ is constituted, and this therefore by necessity hinges on the existence of money. We will come back to a critical evaluation of these contentions in the last section. In the following, we will present Mukaiâs argument of why the money form must precede the commodity, and why the labour theory of value is to be discarded from the outset. As we will see, his argument is more consistent than that of Ebitsuka, and drawing on Marxâs original work, at first also more convincing. Like Ebitsuka, however, Mukai ironically leaves the problematic of money, and especially its capitalist dimension, unproblematised. Just because exchange necessitates the existence of a thing called âmoneyâ, we still have not understood what money actually is, by which of its characteristics it is actually able to hold the place of universal equivalent. To examine Mukaiâs argument, we shall first look at its contextualisation within the different value theoretical streams in 1960sâ70s Japan â which is oriented towards Backhausâs characterisation of the same streams in Germany â and then turn to Mukaiâs own âmonetary approachâ and the rejection of the historicist turn (âhistorizistiche Wendungâ) which can allegedly be detected in the different presentations of the value form from the first to the subsequent editions of Capital. Both of these positions are strongly informed by Backhausâs argument in Part III of the âMaterialienâ, in Chapter 6 of Heinrichâs Science of Value (âDie monetäre Werttheorieâ), and also reflected in the Benetti/Cartelier paradigm, which Mukai appropriates to harden the evidence for his case. We shall see that Mukai, despite his claim to have convincingly argued the superfluousness of the labour theory of value from Marxâs own âdefectsâ in the analysis of the value form, like the authors he adopts as buttresses for his view, fails to take notice of the centrality of the fetish paradigm in Marxâs theory of money, which leads to a truncated, misconceived and therefore non-critical view of the money form. Our contention is that the opposition of a âmonetaryâ theory of value to the labour theory of value is a false one, leading to precarious shortenings in the theoretical scope of the labour theory that is simultaneously the monetary theory of value.
5.1.4 Against the Labour Theory of Value
Mukaiâs unpublished article65 âThe New Readings of Capital in Japan since the 1960sâ (2014) is the latest in a series of articles since 1990 in which Mukai argues for the âdispensabilityâ of the labour theory of value for the analysis of capitalist relations.66 Here, Mukai Kimitoshi develops a short intellectual biography of âheterodoxâ (i.e. non-party line) Japanese value theoretical approaches, especially his own, contextualising it within his teacher SatÅ KinzaburÅâs work on the Grundrisse and Capital in the late 1960s. Mukaisâ claim that no reference to the concept of labour is needed for the development of the value form â an assignment he says, that is left to him after the death of his mentor SatÅ â is conducted in the fashion of a critical commentary on Marxâs value form analysis, focussing on its âdefectsâ.67 Before we follow Mukaiâs argument critically, the general overview of the âthree streams of Japanese Marxian economics in the 1960â70sâ is useful to situate Mukaiâs work. Mukai follows Hans-Georg Backhausâs characterisation of different readings of Capital in Germany from the end of the Second World War to, roughly, the late 1960s.68 We find here the streams of 1. the logico-historical approach of the âold orthodoxy (traditional Marxists)â and the âCivil societyâ school (K. Hirata), 2. the âlogical approachâ of Uno KÅzÅ and the ânew orthodoxyâ of SatÅ KinzaburÅ, and 3. the model-platonic approach of âAlgebraic Marxismâ (N. Okishio).69 Mukai, like Backhaus, sees himself in the tradition of the âlogicalâ approach. Though the latter expresses doubts as to the âstrictlyâ logical approach, and especially the ânew dogmatismâ in the theoretical circumference of the Frankfurt School,70 Mukai is more inclined to count himself among the representatives of the ânew orthodoxyâ, though not without a peculiar radicalisation of SatÅâs and even Unoâs argument that the labour theory of value were âprematureâ in the development of the value form: for Mukai, it is not only âprematurelyâ introduced in Capital, but entirely superfluous, as a theory of capitalist relations can be sufficiently expressed in money. As for the question of a historical or âlogicalâ methodological approach to the value forms of the commodity and money in the first chapter of Capital Volume I, Mukai adopted the âlogicalâ-systematic interpretation from his mentor SatÅ. While this non-evolutionary-historical theorisation is clear in the Grundrisse and the first edition of Capital, Mukai, following Backhaus, asks whether the âstrictly logicalâ approach had really been thoroughly pursued in the subsequent editions of Capital, or whether we must not concede a âhistoricist turnâ (Backhaus)71 in the editions following the first of 1867 and the conventional fourth edition. In other words: âWhat happened between the Grundrisse and Capital?â72 According to Mukai, and leaning on the NMLâs central thesis, the historicist turn was owed to certain defects in the âattempts of popularisationâ of the presentation of the analysis of the value form and the âgenesis of moneyâ, conducted in the subsequent editions of Capital. The two interpretations of value form analysis in Chapter 1, Section 3 of Capital, interpreted by both Mukai and the Neue Marx-Lektüre as precarious â on the one hand, a historicist reading of the analysis of value, and a âpremonetaryâ theory of value on the other hand â are however thoroughly âwovenâ into the material of Capital, so that it must be conceded that Marx himself wasnât entirely aware of the âqualitative differenceâ of his own value theory against that of his classical predecessors. Mukai here strongly relies on Heinrichâs evaluation:
As Heinrich says, we can find a paradigm change, but Marx was not conscious of it, and continued to believe that he remained in the paradigm of the labour theory of value. âOn the other hand, the discourse of the classics can still be found in central passages of his work ⦠[his] own categorial development remains ambivalent in some of the crucial passagesâ. (Heinrich 1991, p. 13).73
For Mukai, Marx did not always succeed in opening a new terrain against the classical âembodied labourâ, i.e. quantitative, theories of value that can be found in Ricardo etc.74 To prove his point, Mukai quotes the passage on the âphysiologicalâ aspects of abstract labour from the fourth edition, namely, that
all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power, in the physiological sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or abstract, human labour that it forms the value of commodities.75
Mukai concludes, with Heinrich and Backhaus:
Here we can see no difference between Marx and Ricardo, because âvalues are then reduced to mere labour quantities independent of money, as in Ricardoâ. (Heinrich 1988, p. 32) So it can be called a âpremonetary theory of valueâ (Backhaus 1978, p. 17) which belongs to the same paradigm as classical economists and neo-Ricardians of today.76
While for Mukai the ânew paradigmâ was invented by Marx as a âqualitative oneâ â â⦠the qualitative side of value relation expresses a new theoretical domain opened up by Marxâs analysis of the value-formâ77 â Marx at times slips back into a âsubstantialistâ quantitative view stuck in the Ricardian framework, and locates the constitution of value in production, not exchange, according to Mukai. In other words, Marx did not always clearly distinguish his own âpremonetaryâ from his âmonetaryâ theory of value. Yet, according to Mukai, at times, the âmonetary approachâ, and especially its rejection of the âpremonetaryâ one, is clearly detectable â while the reader is left in the dark as to which criteria this evaluation adheres to, as Mukai does not argue why certain texts, e.g. the 1861â3 Economic Manuscripts, should have a more consistent âmonetaryâ approach. For reasons of space, let us limit the presentation to what, for Mukai, is the most conclusive passages that show Marxâs standpoint of the overcoming of the âold discourseâ. Mukai quotes from the 1861â3 Economic Manuscripts on Ricardo: â⦠this qualitative aspect of the matter which is contained in the representation of exchange value as money, is not elaborated by Ricardo. This circumstance â the necessity of presenting labour contained in commodities as uniform social labour, i.e. as money â is overlooked by Ricardoâ.78 To prove his point, Mukai further quotes this decisive passage:
However, let us remember that commodities possess an objective character as values (Wertgegenständlichkeit) only insofar as they are all expressions of an identical social substance, human labour, that their objective character as values is therefore purely social. From this it follows self-evidently that it can only appear in the social relation between commodity and commodity.79
What Marx presents to the reader in these passages is the inherent link between the âhuman labourâ objectified in the commodities, and money, in which the latter must represent all of these different labours as one âuniform socialâ substance, as abstract labour. This is especially clear from the first quote Mukai provides. Contrary to Mukaiâs belief, however, Marxâs critique of Ricardo is not motivated by the confrontation of a âpremonetary theory of valueâ with a âmonetaryâ one, but by the desire to remind Ricardo of the quality of value, in that it must be represented in uniform (or abstract) social labour â expressed as money. Let us enhance the quote Mukai provides with some context to see what Marx really had in mind with his critique of Ricardo:
Ricardoâs mistake is that he is concerned only with the magnitude of value. Consequently his attention is concentrated on the relative quantities of labour which the different commodities represent, or which the commodities as values embody. But the labour embodied in them must be represented as social labour, as alienated individual labour ⦠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 â the necessity of presenting labour contained in commodities as uniform social labour, i.e. as money â is overlooked by Ricardo.80
Marx explicitly refers to money as âuniform social labourâ (âuniform social labour, i.e. moneyâ), as the presentation of the labour contained in the commodities, which is necessary in order to obtain a uniform objective existence. However, Ricardoâs mind is fully absorbed by, first, the analysis of the magnitude of value, and second, the search for an âinvariable measureâ of value. But Marx had shown that the sole emphasis on the magnitudes of relative labour quantities in the first misses the specific condition of possibility by which magnitudes of value can even be compared to one another â uniform social labour, expressed in money.81 The labour theory of value, for Marx, is nothing but the theory of money, and the analysis of money essentially comes down to the labour theory of value. The latter grounds both the quantitative and the qualitative aspect of value, as the indicator of capitalist exchange relations, and the basis on which different labours can be meaningfully exchanged with one another. This is also the context in which Marx emphasises the necessity of money â as demonstrated in the third particularity of the equivalent form â to invertedly represent the product of individual private labour (and not self-determined labour, as Carterlier wrongfully suggests) as directly social labour. In his critique of Baileyâs nominalist theory of money â money as the âdirect expressionâ of the ratio in which different use values exchange for one another â Marx notes:
⦠the labour which constitutes the substance of value is not only uniform, simple, average labour; it is the labour of a private individual represented in a definite product. However, the product as value must be the embodiment of social labour and, as such, be directly convertible from one use value into any other ⦠Thus the labour of individuals has to be directly represented as its opposite, social labour; this transformed labour is, as its immediate opposite, abstract, general labour, which is therefore represented in a general equivalent. ⦠This necessity to express individual labour as general labour is equivalent to the necessity of expressing a commodity as money.82
Mukai however counterfactually insists on the irrelevance of the recourse to abstract human labour for the phenomenology of money â even after quoting these indeed relevant passages! To sustain his argument, he contrasts the concept of âabstract human labourâ in the âphysiologicalâ determination of value with the concept of âabstract, general labourâ in the above quote to claim that the former was a category of production, i.e. still attached to the old âembodied labourâ-discourse of the classics, while the latter was a category of the ânew domainâ, a category of exchange:
âAbstract general labourâ here mentioned as an opposite of private labour is quite different from the above-mentioned âabstract human labourâ. It was newly created by Marx in order to clarify the secret of money, which makes the different products of private labors in the market commensurable and reduce them to the same unit. âThe equality of laborâ means this commensurability, which does not exist before exchange, but emerges only in exchange, correctly speaking, in the relation of the commodity to money. As such an âabstract laborâ is âpurely socialâ, it cannot be acquired by imagining real human labor in production, e.g. the factory, and therefore its quantity cannot be measured by the duration of labor, but only by money.83
However at no point does Marx say that value is constituted in exchange. To the contrary: it is precisely the position Marx polemicised against. To maintain the opposite means to wittingly ignore Marxâs critique of the classics. It is therefore difficult not to view Mukaiâs reading as a conscious misjudgement (or ignorance) of Marx extensive discussion of 1.) Ricardoâs negligence of the substantial dimension of value in the social form of abstract-general human labour represented by money, as shown above (âabstract-generalâ and âabstract human labourâ are not two different concepts in Marx) and 2.) Baileyâs ignorance of the simple fact that, if money âmeasuresâ different heterogenous use values, a common denominator of these different use values becomes a logical prerequisite for the comparison (tertium-problem), and this common denominator cannot be money itself.
⦠for commodities to express their exchange value independently in money, in a third commodity, the exclusive commodity, the values of commodities must already be presupposed.84 Now the point is merely to compare them quantitatively. A homogeneity which makes them the same â makes them values â which as values makes them qualitatively equal, is already presupposed in order that their value and their differences in value can be represented in this way. For example, if all commodities express their value in gold, then this expression in gold, their gold price, their equation with gold, is an equation on the basis of which it is possible to elucidate and compute their value relation to one another, for they are now expressed as different quantities of gold and in this way the commodities are represented in their prices, as comparable magnitudes of the same common denominator.
But in order to be represented in this way, the commodities must already be identical as values.85
According to Bailey, it is not the determination of the product as value which leads to the establishment of money and which expresses itself in money, but it is the existence of money which leads to the fiction of the concept of value.86
To claim that the common denominator is money itself, as Bailey, Uno, Ebitsuka, Benetti/Cartelier, and Mukai do, is to identify substance and form, essence and appearance â in sum, it means to identify what generates a phenomenon, no matter how its appearance inverts the underlying constitution, with the phenomenon itself. This becomes prevalent in the discussion of Baileyâs identification of value with its external measure, money. Marx here neatly summarises what it means to determine the value of a commodity by, first, the quantity of labour inherent in it, and second, by the âvalue of labourâ that produces it (a conflation originally produced by Smith, but prevalent also in Bailey):
In the first case one investigates the genesis and immanent nature of value itself. In the second, the development of the commodity into money or the form which exchange value acquires in the process of the exchange of commodities. In the first, we are concerned with value, independent of this representation, or rather antecedent to this representation. Bailey has this in common with the other fools: to determine the value of commodities means to find their monetary expression, AN EXTERNAL MEASURE OF THEIR VALUES.87
It is precisely this conflation for which Marx called Bailey not only a âfoolâ, but also a âFetischdienerâ (âfetish-worshipperâ).88 It must however be asked whether this characterisation does not also apply to Marxâs modern Marxist critics. As though to further substantiate this, Mukai concludes:
It is true that the qualitative and the quantitative sides of Marxâs value theory are incompatible with each other under developed capitalism. But we need not make them compatible in a particular model, as Rubin did. In order to understand the qualitative side completely, we should only abandon the quantitative one, the labor theory of value.89
Accordingly, Mukai, like his peers, ignores the task of value form analysis, in that it is the analysis of the necessity of the emergence of the money form as universal equivalent from the defects of the expanded value form, measured in different use values. Mukai does not understand this:
Where does value as âsomething purely socialâ (etwas rein Gesellschaftliches) appear? Marx would say, âit can appear only in the relation of commodity to commodityâ.90 So he begins his analysis of the value-form with the âsimple form of valueâ: x commodity A = y commodity B. But why not x commodity A = y money? In reality, we can find a direct relation of commodity to commodity without money nowhere in todayâs developed commodity circulation ⦠In this sense, Marxâs analysis of the value-form beginning with x commodity A = y commodity B should be called a âpre-monetaryâ one.91
Like Uno, Mukai mistakes the analysis of the value form for an analysis of commodity exchange (or âcirculationâ).92 However, exchange is not the object of the analysis (in fact it only becomes thematic in Chapter 2, âThe Exchange Processâ). The object of the analysis is the precondition of exchange, i.e. the money form: how a commodity obtains general exchangeability against all the other commodities of the âwhole worldâ of commodities. The question is not whether 20 yards of linen actually do exchange for 1 coat, but what conditions a commodity must fulfil in order to serve as the universal equivalent. In other words, it is the analysis of the preconditions of exchange. However, Mukaiâs rejection of the alleged âpremonetaryâ character of value form analysis has a deeper, two-fold motivation: if Marxâs âderivationâ of money from the commodity in the analysis of the value form were illegitimate, following the Benetti/Cartelier paradigm, then money cannot be a commodity:
Marx took over not only the labor theory of value, but also a theory of money from classical economists â the commodity theory of money. In his analysis of the value-form, therefore, it is presupposed without a doubt that money is a commodity which has its own value and use-value, and that a commodity becomes money as the result of exchanges. But as Backhaus says, âThe concept of a premonetary commodity (sic) should be recognised as something impossible to thinkâ.93
In his critique of readings that hypostatise a money commodity in Marx, Heinrich has shown that Marx at no point assumes that money must necessarily be a commodity.94 Mukaiâs reading falls short by believing that the derivation of money from the commodity form is the same as assuming that money must necessarily âbeâ a commodity. These however are two separate things, and their conflation provides a truncated, if not outright wrong, reading of Marxâs analysis.
5.1.5 With Backhaus and Heinrich against Marx? The âHistoricist Turnâ and the Labour Theory of Value as Remnants of the âOld Discourseâ
The argument of Marxâs alleged inability to break with the âold discourseâ is further supported by Mukaiâs claim that Marx âintroducedâ historical elements in the derivation of the value form, in that the emergence of money was âdeducedâ from barter. Backhausâs problematisation of the âpopularisation of the presentation of the value formâ gives Mukai a buttress for his view. To prove that the historicist turn was already introduced in the first edition of Capital, Mukai quotes from the appendix:
Let us consider exchange between linen-producer A and coat-producer B. Before they come to terms, A says: 20 yards of linen are worth 2 coats (20 yards of linen = 2 coats), but B responds: 1 coat is worth 22 yards of linen (1 coat = 22 yards of linen). Finally, after they have haggled for a long time they agree: A says: 20 yards of linen are worth 1 coat, and B says: 1 coat is worth 20 yards of linen.95
Mukai follows:
This is the first step to the âhistorization of the logicalâ (Historisierung des Logischen, Backhaus)96 in the second edition. With the popularization of the description as a turning point, his analysis of the value-form has been reduced to a âstory tellingâ about âhistorical occurrencesâ (âFabeleien über Historischesâ, Backhaus)97 â the genesis of money from barter. Although he had quite a new answer from his analysis of the value-form, [Marx] reverted to the old answer â the labor theory of value and the commodity theory of money.98
However, the question remains what the diagnosis of the âhistorisation of the logicalâ in the âpopularisedâ version of value form analysis is actually supposed to prove. Commentators like Mukai and Backhaus â though his intervention is more complex and metatheoretical, as we will see â seem not to be aware that by admitting that Marxâs âhistorically groundedâ reformulation of value-form analysis is owed not to a content-related reconsideration, but a reconsideration of form (in order to make his analysis, e.g., more âreader-friendlyâ, i.e. to âpopulariseâ it), they have implicitly admitted that Marxâs original methodological vantage point was indeed a systematic and logical one. It addresses the analysis of the nexus between value and money in specifically capitalist societies.99 The logical-historical interpretation, as Backhaus correctly sees, is therefore actually owed to a misunderstanding, even if it presents a misunderstanding whose scope Marx himself obviously was not aware of.
More pertinent however is Mukaiâs appropriation of Backhausâs intervention for his own ends, the delegitimisation of the labour theory of value. While Backhaus is often inconsistent (or rather indecisive, as we will see) towards Marxâs own âmonetary theory of valueâ, he stresses that the specific cognitive gain of Marxâs intervention â and the new problem-horizon it provides, as opposed to that of the classics â consists in having precisely demonstrated the necessity of the money-value nexus. The labour theory of value therefore does not present an opposition, but the necessary explanatory framework for the theory of money. The appropriation of Backhausâs intervention for Mukaiâs ends â notwithstanding Backhausâs own ambiguities â is therefore utterly problematic. In the following, we will briefly characterise Backhausâs intervention and stress what, for Backhaus, the specific cognitive interest in Marxâs theory is.
Already in his relatively early text âOn the Dialectics of the Value Formâ (âZur Dialektik der Wertformâ, 1970), Backhaus, according to his overall methodological standard of presenting a meta-theoretical evaluation of the reception of Marxâs theory of value, holds that
[n]umerous authors ignore the claim of the labour theory of value to derive money as money and thus to inaugurate a specific theory of money. It is then no longer astonishing that these interpreters only present the theory of value, but exclude or correct the theory of money and therefore become unable to make the difference between the classical and the marxist (sic) labour theory of value plausible. They misconceive that the basic concepts of value theory are only understood when they on their part make the understanding of the money-theoretical basic concepts possible. Value theory is adequately interpreted when the commodity is grasped in such a way that it posits itself in the process of an âimmanent moving-beyond-itselfâ (im Prozess eines âimmanenten Ãber-sich-Hinausgehensâ) as money. This inner nexus between value and money forbids acceptance of the Marxian theory of value that simultaneously disavows the theory of money posited with it.100
The âinner nexus between value and moneyâ is where, for Backhaus, Marxâs advancement, indeed his break with the classical âlabour theory of valueâ, must be situated â and not, as some representatives of the post-Uno school (or Benetti/Cartelier, for that matter) would have it, in the disavowal of the theory of value in favour of a âmonetary approachâ. The opposition of the two is a false one. The money-value nexus can only be disrupted at the risk of jeopardising Marxâs specific intervention, and the misrecognition of the new problem-horizon that his predecessors were not even aware existed: namely, the specific social form of labour whose characteristic is to take on specific forms of value, predominantly money. This question, tantamount to the question of how fetishism is possible under the specifically capitalist mode of production, is what guides Marxâs exegesis â and his critique.101 In Backhausâs 1978 text, Part III of the âMaterialsâ (âMaterialien zur Rekonstruktion der Marxschen Werttheorieâ), the crucial theoretical distinction between Marx and the âclassicalâ, i.e. premonetary labour theory of value, but also to neoclassical, âsubjectivistâ theories of value, is further delineated. Interestingly, Backhaus sees striking parallels between the objectivist labour theory of value, and both its âlogico-historicalâ and its âmodel-platonicâ variants, on the one hand, and subjectivist theories of utility (subjektive Nutzenlehre) on the other. He presents them as two sides of the same coin: âThey tacitly and unreflectedly posit the logical permissibility of a procedure which abstracts from the âmoney veilâ in order to be able to interpret the result of this abstraction as a model of a fictitious, or as the structure of a historical, natural economy (Naturalwirtschaft), and ultimately as the âessenceâ of modern monetary economy hidden beneath the âmoney veilââ¯â.102 In other words, both the objectivist and the subjectivist premonetary theories of value disregard (and therefore misconceive of) the constitutive function of money for the functioning of capitalist social relations: they are therefore paradigmatically theories of value without fetish. Instead, according to Backhaus,
Marx was ⦠concerned primarily with the evolution of the thesis that the nexus between value and money must be comprehended as the nexus between the âimmanentâ and âappearingâ (erscheinend) measure of value, [as the nexus] between the substance and form âofâ value. Value therefore cannot be thought as a premonetary substance existing for itself, which is externally related to a third thing called money. Value does not exist beyond and independently of its âadequateâ form of appearance ⦠the organic nexus of value and price has its theoretical expression in the fact that value theory must be âsublatedâ in a specific theory of money.103
Interestingly, Backhaus (unwittingly) rejects the claim made by Benetti/Cartelier and also Mukai that Marx was unable to show the necessity of money from the âdevelopmentâ of the commodity form. According to Backhaus, in the analysis of the value form, Marx precisely sets it as his task to demonstrate that âthe construction of an exchange process of premonetary commodities must fail by necessityâ.104 These are the âDefects of the total or expanded form of valueâ (Form II), in which the âseries of representations never comes to an endâ, and which is therefore âa motley mosaic of disparate and unconnected expressions of valueâ.105 Benetti/Cartelier, apart from misrecognising value form analysis as the explanandum of money, and not as an analysis of âbarterâ, also underestimate its critical function: namely, to show that the failure of the hypothesis that commodities can relate to one another without an equivalent, is fully intended. Also fully intended, therefore, is the presentation of moneyâs genesis in which the âdazzlingâ money form âleav[es] no trace [of the process by which money emerges] behindâ.106 Taking no notice of Marxâs explicit references to the âdefectâ of Form II, Benetti/Cartelier, Ebitsuka and Mukai take the âderivationâ of money from the commodity for a positivistic model in which the latter is a direct âresultâ of the former. The âmonetaristsâ declare Marxâs theory of value bankrupt, fully unaware of Marxâs intent and method of showing the necessity of money from the incompleteness of Forms I and II.107
In sum, for Backhaus, Marxâs theory of value is constituted of four different tasks:
-
the rationale (Begründung) and unfolding of value as the basis of the determination of exchange relations (quantitative theory of value),
-
a critique of premonetary theories of value,
-
the rationale of a specific theory of money,
-
a critique of money theories corresponding to premonetary theories of value, which proceed from the aporia of the separation between the organically interrelated categories of value and money.108
Especially the last of these must be regarded as Marxâs specific cognitive interest, in refuting any ânominalistâ, as well as ârealistâ theory of money, taking their vantage point from either symbol theories or functionalism (âmoney as facilitator of exchangeâ). However, as announced before, Backhaus is indeed ambivalent in his own theorisation, so that it must be asked if his endeavour to establish a âbinding consensusâ in the history of the reception of Marxâs theory of value is not rendered rather more difficult by his own indecision. Here is also the place to recapitulate the appropriation of Backhausâs and Heinrichâs interpretation for the purposes of rejecting labour theories of value. First, though, we will stay with Backhaus, before moving on to a striking problematic in Heinrich.
5.1.6 The Conflation of Value and the Value Form, or: The âOriginal Sinâ of Conventional Political Economy
The claim that Marxâs labour theory of value was a âresidueâ of the discourse of the classics, is an argument to be found in almost all newer discussions of Marxâs value theory.109 We, however, think that this contention cannot be upheld. It builds on the assumption that the classics had a âlabour theory of valueâ at all, which we have refuted in Chapter 1. Only Marx, we argue, in fact had a consistent, social, and consistently social labour theory of value at all. To therefore claim that Marxâs labour theory of value as a theory of the quality and the quantity of value is a âClassical residue in Marxâs value theoryâ (Itoh), âderived from Classical political economyâ (Reuten), even a theorem that Marx ârefusedâ (Harvey), has no theoretical basis. Yet, even if the claim of the âold discourseâ prevailing in Marx can be successfully refuted â are the claims of the NML thoroughly consistent with regard to the âorganically interrelated categories of value and moneyâ? To give an example: in the same text (the Materials III), Backhaus meanders between different conceptualisations of the âprevalenceâ of money. Having just shown that the nexus between value and money, and therefore the derivation of money from the commodity, must be thought of as a critique of premonetary theories of value, he verges on digressing into the nominalism he has just admonished â even though these considerations are formulated very hypothetically:
If it can be proven that Marxâs path of the âdevelopmentâ of the money form of the commodity cannot be followed, then the category of money will have to be accepted as the logical prius of economic theory, as the basic concept irreducible by the means of economic analysis. It may be hypostasised that value theoretical consequences follow from it. The objectivist theory of value would lose its object if the objectivity of intersubjectively valid units of money can be provided.110
But Backhaus has already formulated the insight that money is not an explanans: that, in his own words, the category of money is precisely not an âirreducible basic conceptâ, but itself in need of an explanation â hence Marxâs task to answer the âriddleâ of money. What is more, Backhaus in this passage seems to confuse what an âobjectivistâ theory of value could provide with what money itself (âintersubjectively valid units of moneyâ) could provide. However, a theory of B and B are not the same thing: even if these âintersubjectively valid units of moneyâ exist objectively, they still require an explanation. This being given, the theory of value would not lose its object, because money would still be an explanandum. Backhaus seems to admit the epistemological dimension of this problematic when he says: âUltimately, the point is whether an âempirical principleâ is demanded to give an argument for the intersubjective validity of economic unitiesâ.111 One can therefore evade the impression of ambiguities in Backhausâs theory of money, verging on the neoclassical identification of value with its external measure (money), only with difficulty.
Marx has time and again stressed that value, and with it, abstract labour, is never constituted in exchange. To the contrary, the idea of a mere Formwechsel (change of form) from the commodity to money, or an interchange of their specific locus in the exchange process being generative of value, is precisely the target of Marxâs critique.112 Yet, even prominent Marxist theorists deeply engaged in reconstructing Marxâs theory of value, do not always sufficiently delineate their distance to âexchangeâ or âcirculationâ theories of value. We contend that the assumption that value is constituted in exchange relies on a conflation of value and the value form, a conflation of Wert and Wertgegenständlichkeit. This conflation is unfortunately also to be found in Heinrich. In The Science of Value, Heinrich quotes from the fetish chapter: âIt is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire a socially uniform objectivity as values (Wertgegenständlichkeit), which is distinct from their sensuously varied objectivity as articles of utilityâ.113 He comments: âIn this sense, abstract labour [i.e. the substance of value] is a specific social determination of labour that is only brought about in exchange (erst durch den Tausch zustande kommt)â.114 But Marx does not speak of value (Wert) in the quote Heinrich provides â instead, he speaks of value objectivity (Wertgegenständlichkeit): the form in which value becomes objective (gegenständlich), that is, as the value form of money. And it is a matter of fact that âonly by being exchangedâ the different labours can appear as uniform labour in money.115 Wertgegenständlichkeit therefore has to be understood as the form of value, not value itself (Wert). This distinction is crucial. Its neglect informs what we might call the âoriginal sinâ of conventional political economy. If the systematic fetish-character of money and the further, even more âmysteriousâ forms of value (capital, profit, rent, interest, etc.) are to be correctly understood and targeted in the nexus in which they constitute the categories of political economy, it is essential to distinguish value and its forms. And it is only the latter (the value form), as a necessary form of appearance of the former (value) that has its locus in exchange. But it is precisely because the âsphere of exchange is the only sphere known to the bourgeois economistâ, that their relation to value, i.e. the social form of labour in its confrontation with capital, is obfuscated. In consequence, to the naked, i.e. conventional economistâs, eye, it is unclear what value has âgot to doâ with money. If accordingly, the constitutive conceptual difference of value and the value form is collapsed, it is easy to conclude that value, and not the value form of money, is constituted in exchange. Marx, in his economy-critical work, especially in the 1861â3 Economic Manuscripts through Capital, has shown precisely this identification of the two to account for the fetishistic horizon, the âoriginal sinâ of bourgeois political economy. As we have shown, his critique of Bailey, but also of Ricardo, is pertinent here.
That said, however, neither Backhausâs nor Heinrichâs interventions are attempts to discard (or âabandonâ, as Mukai suggests) the theory of value. It is quite the opposite: an understanding of how deeply the theory of money penetrates the theory of value â and vice versa. Consequently, their appropriation by Mukai, as well as other Japanese theorists working in value theory since the 1990s towards a position that rejects Marxâs core critical theorem, is indeed rather difficult to defend. While it is true that the labour theory of value is the vantage point for any meaningful analysis of the fetishistic forms of value in the capitalist mode of production, this does not mean it must be separated from the theory of money. To the contrary, it is precisely because the labour theory of value is the methodological and analytic heuristic â the âtoolâ â to unravel the forms that value takes, paradigmatically money, that it presents the theory of money. This is how the âmonetary theory of valueâ must be understood â and this has nothing to do with âembodiedâ theories of labour.
It is, however, difficult to diffuse the suspicion that, by the appropriation of the NML to delegitimise the labour theory of value â attempts which we can also find in the Benetti/Cartelier paradigm and which they ironically share with their neo-Ricardian âadversariesâ â a new framework can be found in an attempt to delegitimise Marxâs critique of the capitalist mode of production. That without Marxâs critique, the most holistic and concise analysis of the capitalist mode of production that we have even today, we would be thrown into a kind of âstone age of cognitionâ as to the mode of socialisation in which we now live, is hopefully shown to be obvious. Yet, authors working in the post-Uno school seem to concentrate their energies on precisely this kind of deconstruction, whatever their motives. It may, however, just be that with their emphasis on the category of the âmarketâ as economic object, the âmonetary approachâ with its nominalist, Baileyan identification of value/price and money, and the declaration of the predominance of âcirculationâ over âproductionâ, these theories have long succumbed to the fetishisms of the bourgeois relations of production they, or so we at least like to believe, must have questioned at some point.
5.2 The âDialectic of Capitalâ as the Apologetic of Capital in the Anglophone Uno School
As we have seen in Chapters 3 and 4, the analysis of Unoâs reconstruction of Marxâs Critique of Political Economy as the critique of capitalist relations of production provided the following results:
-
the reference to the framework of methodological individualism implied in the reinterpretation of value form analysis as structurally depending on the personal âwantsâ of commodity owners,
-
the basic concept of capital derived from merchant capital, i.e. âbuying cheap and selling dearâ (arbitrage),
-
an understanding of âsocial reproductionâ unhinged from the exploitation of alien and unpaid labour,
-
the reinterpretation of the âlaw of valueâ as the law of general equilibrium of supply and demand,
-
the dismissal of a concept of crisis in favour of a concept of business cycles consolidating that equilibrium,
-
the dismissal of labour values in favour of market-regulated price as a) the âsolutionâ to the problem of the transformation of labour values into prices of production and b) the âreal enactmentâ of the law of value in which values and prices of production coincide.
In sum, these results can be diagnosed as the hypostatisation of use value as the primary locus of capitalist economic mediation, which implies Unoâs theoretical proximity to the paradigms of classical, and consequently (albeit more problematically) neoclassical economy, in its acceptance of a âharmoniousâ interplay of factors of production and consumption, in which the aim of capitalist production is the satisfaction of âneedsâ. As we have previously shown, Unoâs theory of value and money is basically informed by the methodological framework of marginalism and shares its core features â methodological individualism; functionalism (âmoney is what money doesâ); the understanding of capital as not primarily defined in its contradictory relation to labour, but in being a âcommodity economyâ; and the vantage point of surplus value production not primarily in the exploitation of living labour, but other factors, such as arbitrage. Marxâs predominant Problemstellung, namely the capitalist production process itself, whose objects, the categories of conventional political economy, assume their fetish-character by disavowing the problem of abstract living labour and its unequal exchange with capital, remains a theoretical sideline in Uno. Most of all, however, the prevalence of the idea of general equilibrium as the âenactmentâ of the law of value, balanced social reproduction, and the structural impossibility of crisis within the framework of âpure theoryâ, are detrimental to Marxâs critique of the prevailing social mode of production.
The general aim of this chapter (5.2.) is to present and problematise the relatively recent reception of Unoâs work by the Anglophone Uno School which, for reasons of their sheer prolificness, we identify rather reductively with the works of Thomas T. Sekine and his best-known follower, Robert Albritton.116 By evaluating which of Unoâs theorems have been emphasised in this line of reception, we in turn investigate its specific interest in Marxian theory and how it served to produce an independent theorisation of Marxâs legacy. We can here identify a central problem which has already confronted us in the analysis of Unoâs intervention: the capital relation, i.e. the confrontation of capital and labour, is not understood as the object and target of critique, but as a âlogicalâ and transparent entity, devoid of any problematic as to the inversion of capitalâs own self-presentation in the rationalisations in bourgeois economy and its real basis in the social form of labour, i.e. the problem of fetishism. In this perspective, indeed, â[c]apital ⦠cannot lie to us or deceive usâ.117 Therefore, despite its claims of presenting, in the case of Sekine, a âCritique of Bourgeois Economicsâ,118 this intervention must much rather be characterised as capitalâs apologetic, as will be shown in this chapter. For a large part, this is owed to the invocation of the term âlaw of valueâ as a central analytical category in this line of reception. Following Uno, the âlaw of valueâ in Sekineâs perspective indicates balanced and evenly distributed production and the general equilibrium of supply and demand as the core feature of capitalist reproduction,119 not the sustenance of capital through increasingly crisis-ridden forms of exploitation and appropriation of living labour as its basic condition. It therefore betrays a euphemistic and apologetic outlook on the concept of capital as the âgod of our own âeconomic motivesââ¯â in the style of Feuerbachian anthropomorphism, in combination with an asocial, idealist, and arguably ârational choiceâ-inspired âutility maximisingâ conception of the individual:
According to Feuerbach, God did not create us in his image, rather it is we who create him in our image ⦠If ⦠these wonderful attributes of ours, or human essences, as Feuerbach calls them, are made infinite and absolute, and extrapolated as attributes of an entity beyond us, we have created God ⦠Similarly, I would say that we, finite human beings, are all to some extent greedy and acquisitive, avoid waste and pursue efficiency (sic), wish to accumulate material wealth, etc.; in short, we maximise gains and minimise losses. But we never do so infinitely. Let these âeconomic motivesâ be made infinite and absolute, and be extrapolated in an entity beyond ourselves (sic). Then we have created âcapitalâ. In other words, capital is the god of our own âeconomic motivesâ.120
Consequently, the de-problematisation of capital as a social relation in the Anglophone Uno-School leads to an unconscious conflation of what is called the âdialectic of capitalâ with the idea of pre-established harmony, reflected in the (mis-)use of âlaw of valueâ as âbalancedâ conditions of reproduction â and hence the rejection of the inherent crisis-ridden character of capital, the rejection of Marxâs analysis of surplus value as the direct exploitation of living labour as the point of reference, and, ultimately, the problem of âlabourâ remaining external to its analysis. Capitalâs fundamental dependence on forms of appropriation of living labour without an equivalent remains unaddressed in Sekineâs approach.
We do not only ascribe this insufficient awareness of the Problemstellung with regard to the law of valorisation (rather than the euphemistically named âlaw of valueâ) to a lack of awareness of the contradiction between dead labour (capital) and living labour as the source of (surplus) value. We also detect a radical divergence of the pragmatic and the semantic aspects of Sekineâs and Albrittonâs contentions, or, in common parlance, a divergence between the assertion and the reality of their claims. First, we will evaluate Sekineâs position, followed by an evaluation of Albrittonâs central works and claims.
5.2.1 Sekineâs Idealisation of Capital
Like that of Itoh Makoto around the same period, the work of Sekine, who studied with Uno and came to accept a position at York University in the late 1970s, helped to introduce Unoâs theory to a non-Japanese audience for the first time. His English publications, such as âUno-Riron: A Japanese Contribution to Marxian Political Economyâ (1975) and âAn Uno School Seminar on âThe Theory of Valueââ¯â (1984â5)â arguably contributed to the reshaping of questions of basic Marxian methodology and value theory to include a wider, non-European or US scholarly reception. His translation of Unoâs Principles in 1980 arguably gave Unoâs theory and attempt to reconstruct Marxâs Capital the greatest impact. Unlike Uno, however, Sekine sees his specific contribution in having established a correlation between the methodological architecture of the tri-partite structure of Hegelâs Logic and Marxâs Capital that â[o]nly the Unoist approachâ121 has adequately articulated. In Sekineâs view, therefore, in the Principles, âUno treats the theory of a purely capitalist society in the three doctrines of circulation, production and distribution in just the same way as Hegel expounds his Logic in the three doctrines of being, essence, and the notionâ,122 which can be considered a more rigorous systematisation of Marxâs structure. Central to this understanding is that Unoâs doctrine of distribution (bunpairon) âshows how the capitalist mode of production develops and regulates its own market so as to produce all use-values that are socially needed in a manner that is most satisfactory to the self-adopted claim of capitalâ,123 thereby short-circuiting the alleged pre-established harmony of capitalist reproduction with a certain understanding of the Hegelian âAbsoluteâ.124
Before we come to understand the idealistic hypostasis of Sekineâs concept of capital, we must note that Sekineâs work, unlike that of Itoh and despite its alleged Hegelian habitus, addresses a non-academic audience. This is evident in terms of both style and content: the introductory and schematic character of explanations,125 the use of simple (if not overly simplifying) examples and language,126 the lack of reference to original sources, the often anecdotal style in which certain claims are upheld,127 and, last but not least, the missing engagement with other schools of thought, especially in the Hegelian Marxist vein, whose arguments might or might not reflect or situate Sekineâs own work. It is striking that Sekine at no point seems to find it necessary to engage with the efforts of the Neue Marx-Lektüre, Postone, or even the Althusserian problematisation of Hegelian Marxism in discussing his own idiosyncratic parallelisation of Hegelâs and Marxâs system, despite the common rejection of the logical-historical method and the delineation from traditional Marxism.128 His engagement with related positions is limited to a critical response to Chris Arthurâs original critical engagement with the Uno Schoolâs conception of money and exchange.129 Pointing out the non-academic character of Sekineâs writings should however not make the reader prone to take less seriously his high claims to interpreting the âdialectic of capitalâ as a self-sustaining and enhancing system in the vein of Hegelâs âabsolute spiritâ. If anything, it should make the reader more sensitive to it. For we detect a considerable gap in Sekineâs (and, as we will see, Albrittonâs) fairly high claims of the âDialectic, or Logic that Coincides with Economicsâ and the very validity of this claim in a Marxian framework. In fact, we contend that Sekineâs idiosyncratic interpretation of the concept of capital raises no suspicions of having been developed in a Marxian framework at all â including, pertinently, capital as a form of value emerging from the conditions of unequal exchange between itself and labour on the basis of the appearance of equivalent exchange, i.e. as a specifically conditioned and contradictory social relation, presupposing class society as the specific relation of production. The rejection of the very core of Marxâs analysis, i.e. the rejection of what is arguably the defining feature of Marxâs intervention against classical political economy, further consolidates this lack of engagement with Marxâs problem-setting. The height of this misconception can be found in Sekineâs almost alienating assertion that âthe more we study economics, the more âcapitalistâ we tend to become. Only Karl Marx knew this danger from the beginning, and thus undertook to criticise that âopium-likeâ science of political economyâ.130
For Sekine, as briefly summarised above, capital is nothing âoutside of usâ, but, analogous to Feuerbachâs anthropomorphism of God, the extension and extrapolation of our own economic interests and motives: âTo understand the logic of capital, we only have to ask ourselves what we, as economic man, would do in this or that situationâ.131 The âfundamental core of economic theoryâ, for Sekine, is therefore âthe definition of capitalism by capital itselfâ,132 or method copying, as he calls it elsewhere. This includes the detection of capitalâs own laws, i.e. that of general equilibrium, not by the âexperimental, trial-and-error methodâ of the natural sciences, but âby introspectionâ. As though this reference to the realm of religion were not sufficiently unsettling, Sekine further mobilises hyper-idealistic motives as the âmethodâ by which to gain access to capitalâs functioning. Let us see how.
An important aspect in Sekineâs, as in Unoâs, concept of capital as a totality, is its relation to âuse-value spaceâ, in such a way that use value can never be totally subsumed to the totalising demands of capital. We have already problematised Unoâs idea of the âconstraint of use valueâ in Chapters 2 to 4 in relation to Unoâs principal failure to sufficiently conceptualise the threefold inversion taking place in the equivalent form of value, i.e. money, as well as in Unoâs Ricardian understanding of premonetary social reproduction in which capitalist society basically hinges on the fulfilment of demand in terms of use value, not in terms of value, that is, moneyed demand. For Sekine, capital must however âpresuppose an ideal use-value spaceâ.133 This has little to do with understanding the necessity of monetary mediation, but rather with capitalâs self-idealisation, the insight into which allegedly allows us to understand the âmethodâ of capitalâs dialectic, or logic.
A use-value space is ideal when no part of it resists or exceeds subsumption under the logic of capital. Only by presupposing such an ideal use-value space, can we let capital synthesize pure capitalism, the theoretical definition of capitalism. The way in which this kind of economic theory is synthesized is, in fact, quite simple. In this ideal use-value space, we need only specify a particular situation or context, before asking capital, âNow what do you want to do?â We always get the right answer from capital, and economic theory is no more than an ordered totality of such answers.134
As though this assertion were not already deeply set in the framework of a Fichtean identitarian idealism (which Hegel has fiercely objected to), Sekine expands the idealistic hyperbole to the individual, culminating in Novalis-style romantic metaphysics:
But how do we know that capitalâs answer is always true? Because the truth is already in ourselves. Recall that capital originated in us before it transcended us. Since capital is our âeconomic motivesâ made infinite, we are in fact asking the question of ourselves and answering it. There is nothing inside ourselves that we do not know.135
We shudder to think what Marx, whose wit and scathing criticism far surpasses our own, would have made of these claims. Certainly we must halt to ask what bearing this combination of naive romanticism and dogmatism has on the critique of political economy. Yet, for Sekine â[o]nly when we see the whole body of economic theory as the definition of capitalism by capital itself, i.e., as the logic of capital the unfolding of which constitutes capitalism, do we understand how the structural (or equilibrium) aspect of it and the dynamic (or cyclical) aspect of it can be brought together into a unified system. This we call the dialectic of capitalâ.136 Equilibrium instead of the necessary rupture between (over-)production and moneyed demand, and cyclical operations of the market instead of the inherent tendency to the increasingly exacerbating crisis, as problematised in Unoâs approach in Chapter 4, accordingly become the hallmark of this line of interpretation, for which Sekine explicitly claims Unoâs legacy: âIt is the signal accomplishment of KÅzÅ Uno (1897â1977) to have understood Marxâs Capital as essentially a book of the dialectic of capitalâ.137 The difficulty here arises in reconciling such a reading with what Marx actually proposed, due to the lack of e.g. references to the source that Sekine claims as authoritative to his interpretation â i.e., Capital and Marxâs other critical-economic writings. Similarly underdeveloped are critical engagements with texts that might further substantiate Sekineâs idiosyncratic perspective.
The non-fulfilment of even the most minimal scientific standards notwithstanding, Sekineâs view of the law of value as the âlawâ of general equilibrium becomes the defining feature of his economic theory, i.e. the âdialectic of capitalâ. In it, the production of surplus value is not denied, but it is understood to complement the law of equilibrium, and not to contradict or considerably unsettle it. The price-value divergence must hence be âcorrectedâ in such a way that, ultimately, prices regulate balanced production and demand through their fluctuations on the market, in which labour values no longer exert any influence on real price formation. By discarding the problematic of surplus value and profit as the unpaid labour time of total social production, unpaid labour appears as paid labour in Sekineâs approach, without any means to discern how this very transformation could have taken place. However, as shown in Chapter 4.3., in the context of the theory of profit, Marxâs intention is no longer to explain the origin of surplus value, but the appearance of capital as self-valorising, or, in Heinrichâs words, âhow the origin of profit becomes invisibleâ,138 i.e. how the appropriation of unpaid labour can appear as paid labour in total social production. This cognitive interest is beyond Sekine, for whom the labour theory of value is no longer the determining framework by which the discrepancy of value and price, but also that of paid and unpaid labour, can be accounted for as soon as labour values assume the form of production price. Sekineâs intention much rather is to explain the âlaw of valueâ as the law of equilibrium price formation on the market, where value âis that which expresses itself as a price in the sphere of circulation and that which consists of abstract (in the sense of âsocially-necessaryâ) labour in the sphere of production.â However, this explanation is tautological: according to Sekine, labour values automatically become prices of production by the workings of the âlaw of valueâ, which is however at no point derived from a set of assumptions not already presupposing what is supposed to be explained. The tautological character of Sekineâs approach is further exacerbated by his decision to explain the substance of value by âthe real cost that society bears in producing it in terms of the expenditure of productive labourâ.139 In this view, the substance of value is the âreal costâ of its own production, value is explained by its âcostâ, and cost by âvalueâ. The vague notion of âsociety bearing costsâ completely evades the class character constitutive for this kind of production. The extraction and appropriation of alien unpaid labour is anathematic to Sekineâs theory.
In this context, Sekine criticises the ânon-equilibriumâ approach of Marxist economists who insist that value and prices (prices of production) do not converge, but that the sum total of unpaid labour time is directly proportional to the total sum of profits. They therefore do not abandon Marxâs axioms formulated in Chapter 9 of Capital Volume III and can simultaneously account for capitalâs false appearance as âself-valorisingâ. In the following, we will set Sekineâs equilibrium approach in contrast to one of the ânon-equilibriumâ approaches he criticises, developed by Duncan Foley, Gérard Duménil, and Alain Lipietz in the early 1980s.140 Here, the concept of the âvalue of moneyâ, or in later terminology MELT, upholds the labour theory of value as the sine qua non frame of reference for showing that, in the problematic surrounding the âtransformation problemâ, âthe proportionality of profit and unpaid labor time in the face of any deviations of prices from labour valuesâ, are âretainedâ.141 This theory in our view has at least three advantages over Sekineâs, in that it is a) monetary (defining capitalist production as specifically capitalist, i.e., not mediated by use values), b) defining, explaining and solving the value-price deviation without abandoning the necessity of this deviation, and c) retaining class struggle as historically specific to the capitalist mode of production. The explicit reference to the labour theory of value as the defining framework undertaken in Foleyâs approach is not only missing from Sekine, but emphatically rejected, in that he dissolves the ânon-equilibriumâ inherent to the value-price deviation and the deviation between supply and moneyed demand into the pre-established harmony of âbalanced productionâ and an understanding of the law of value as reflected in optimal or equilibrium price. Here, the meaning of âsocially necessary labour timeâ is no longer tied to the âoptimal allocation of unpaid labourâ through intersectoral competition of firms (and, to a lesser extent, demand) and its effect on price formation, but euphemistically referred to as the optimal allocation of resources for balanced production in which supply and demand are regulated by the market, and in which crises can and do not occur. This problematic shall be addressed in the following.
5.2.2 General Equilibrium and the Linearity of Capital
According to Sekine,
[o]ne of the commonest claims that Marxists make is that economics should stress the instability and not the equilibrium of the capitalist economy because the latter is a âcontradictoryâ system doomed to automatic breakdown. According to such a claim, âequilibriumâ is nothing more than a false vision of capitalism, complacently entertained by the bourgeoisie, and should have no place in Marxist economic analysis.142
The reason why Marxist theorists reject the equilibrium approach is not, as Sekine thinks, the belief in capitalismâs âautomatic breakdownâ, or, as he states further down the page, the belief in âNostradamus-styleâ prophecies about the âfuture of human civilisationâ, but equilibriumâs blindness to capitalâs incessant accumulation of abstract wealth in the form of profit on the one pole and, by this very process, the simultaneous creation of conditions for labourâs increasing redundancy, in the form of superfluous industrial reserve army and its subforms (the precariat, the surplus population), on the other. This fundamental contradiction, which is much more likely to characterise the law of value as the law of crisis than of âgeneral equilibriumâ, is a dynamic inherent to the very mode of production whose ultimate raison dââ¯Ãªtre is never use value, but value, embodied in money or abstract wealth. Money here marks the very cleft between capitalâs necessity of self-valorisation and the laws of its realisation. As long as the specificity of a particular mode of production does not consist in producing commodities that meet demand, but only commodities that meet moneyed demand, this contradiction will be constitutive for its mode of operation.
Conceptually, capital therefore operates on the logic of its own contradiction, a contradiction that is exacerbated by historical progress. We have shown the operations of this dynamic in Chapter 4 and contrasted it with Unoâs thesis of the law of value as the law of general equilibrium. Sekineâs strange disavowal of this logic of capital and the invocation of capitalâs logic as âbeing for the bestâ of capital does not even acknowledge that this âdialecticâ (which is in fact closer to the Fichtean concept of identity) does not even apply to capitalâs own terms of operation. The development of the forces of production and its increasing contradiction with the relations of production is factual, both logically and empirically. For instance, the increasing hyper-inflation of businesses developing computerised applications for saving labour costs for major companies since the 2010s (ABB, Rockwell Automation, Allen-Bradley, Cognex Corporation, etc.) has spawned an economy-onto-itself, which is no less safe from crisis tendencies than the âreal economyâ it helps to âoptimiseâ. Capital does activate its powers to âtear down all barriersâ to accumulation, but precisely by doing this and inventing ever so intricate business models to enhance this process, it reaches its inner limits: all of these ever so innovative models, being of the logic of capital, stand or fall with the valorisation of labour. This is a tendency that is both very real as well as grounded in the deeper, very contradictory logic of capitalâs secular tendency to crisis.
For Sekine however, the ideal model of the âdialectic of capitalâ which by no means is âonly a theoretical fictionâ143 fundamentally rests on the precondition of 1) an ideal use value space (in which use values are âcontrolled or âneutralisedâ; that is to say, rendered in thought more amenable to the logic of capitalâ144 than they âactuallyâ are), and 2) the limitless availability of labour-power. These being given, capital can operate according to its own logic of inherent equilibrium, allocate productive âresourcesâ and ultimately produce all commodities in accordance with their âsocially necessary labour timeâ, or value, which then simply coincides with their production price:
The law of value, after all, can never be adequately accounted for except in the light of a general equilibrium of the capitalist economy, in which resources are presumed optimally allocated (sic) to all branches of production. In the dialectic of capital, a state of general equilibrium exists when no commodity is either overproduced or underproduced relative to the existing pattern of social demand, i.e., when all commodities are capitalistically produced in their socially necessary (i.e. equilibrium) quantities. In such a state, capital allocates the productive resources available to society âoptimallyâ to all branches of production, in which a uniform rate of profit prevails. In such a state all commodities will be exchanged one for another at their respective production-prices, while embodying no more or less than the socially necessary labour for their production as value.145
If one were to think that the discrepancy to Marxâs critical cognitive interest in capitalâs logical convulsions could not be stronger at this point, capitalism, for Sekine, is sufficiently defined by equilibrium production. In fact, for Sekine, if empirically a state of equilibrium cannot be accounted for, then âthe economy, which fails to embody the definition of capitalism (sic), cannot be a capitalist oneâ.146 At the same time, it is true that capital accumulation must undergo âcyclesâ, i.e. a âspecial macro-mechanismâ that ensures âthe continued existence of capitalismâ.147 This, for him, is the âlaw of relative surplus populationâ that, by the expulsion of workers superfluous relative to the demands of capital, ensures the sustenance of capitalâs functioning (i.e. further accumulation) through the depressive phase of the business cycle, as we have seen in Uno in 4.4. It is crucial to Sekine that the interchange of cycles in the âwideningâ or âprosperityâ phase (absorption of labourers) and âdeepeningâ or âdepressionâ phase (expulsion of labourers) relative to the demands of capital makes capital steadfast against real crises of valorisation. The relation between social change and crisis for Sekine is therefore entirely arbitrary: âA crisis can lead to a revolution for contingent reasons but not as a necessary consequence of the operation of the logic of capitalâ.148 It is as though the whole conceptual problematic of the production of relative surplus value is beyond the scope of Sekineâs interest. Sekineâs is precisely not a dialectical, but a linear conceptualisation of capital.
This becomes even clearer in Sekineâs concept of surplus value, which ultimately discards Marxâs theoretical framework and resorts to the conception of âprofit as arbitrageâ (or âprofit upon alienationâ) of the classics that Marx so fiercely objected to. In the context of the critique of the neoclassical economic notion of âutility maximisationâ or âsubstitutionâ, which Sekine contrasts with his concept of general equilibrium as the âenactmentâ of the law of value, he claims:
The general equilibrium in the capitalist market (sic) results from the mercantile behaviour of âbuying cheap and selling dearâ any commodity, i.e. from the indifferent act of âarbitrageâ on the part of the capitalist, and not from the consumerâs act of substituting one use-value for another. A merchant, which the capitalist most certainly is, shifts any commodity from where the demand for it is low to where the demand for it is high by the capitalist act of arbitrage, so that the available commodities in the market are reshuffled and shifted to where they are most needed by society. If production is also involved, capital sees to it that the most needed and wanted commodities are produced first, allocating societyâs productive resources optimally to all industries. In other words, a general equilibrium of the capitalist market is achieved by the mercantile act of arbitrage.149
Counterfactual to Marxâs analysis of the origin of profit which, as explained earlier, lies in the difference of k (cost price) and C (commodity value), not in the difference between C and sales price, Sekine reiterates Proudhonâs (as well as Torrensâs and partly Steuartâs) argument that the cost price of the commodity constitutes its value, and that by virtue of its sale alone, surplus value (and finally profit) emerges. In short, for Sekine (as well as Marxâs predecessors), profit appears as the excess of the sales price of the commodity above its value. With arbitrage as the explanatory framework for surplus value (and profit), something is generated out of nothing. Because cost price is identified with the value of a commodity, surplus value must stem from exchange. However, the value of a commodity, as soon as it is produced as a product of capital, already contains profit in the form of C = k + p. Production price then marks the aliquot part of that share in the total sum of produced values that is in proportion to the capital invested: k + kpâ. Here is what Marx says about conceptualisations like that of Sekine which falls victim to the fetishism of profit as being constituted in exchange â which was already dealt with extensively in Chapter 5 of Capital Volume I, the locus classicus of the refutation of theories of âvalue by exchangeâ:
Thus if commodity value is formed without any other element besides the capitalistâs advance of value, there is no way of seeing how any more value is to come out of production than went into it, unless something is to come out of nothing.150
Robert Torrens, one of first proponents of âproductive factorsâ theory,
manages to evade this creation from nothing only by shifting it from the sphere of commodity production to the sphere of commodity circulation. Profit cannot derive from production, says Torrens, for if it did it would already be included in the costs of production and would not be an excess over and above these costs ⦠The sum of values of the products exchanged is evidently not affected by the exchange of the products whose value sum this is.151
Therefore, neither Torrens, nor the âsocialistâ Proudhon, can explain the origin of profit:
The unthinking notion that the cost price of a commodity is its real price and that surplus-value springs from selling the commodity above its value, i.e. that commodities are sold at their values when their sale price is equal to their cost price â i.e. equal to the price of the means of production consumed in them, plus wages â has been trumpeted forth by Proudhon with his customary pseudo-scientific quackery as a newly discovered secret of socialism.152
Sekineâs inability to understand, not to mention explain the âreal contradictionsâ153 of developed categories of political economy, such as profit, within his framework of the reconciliation of a theory of arbitrage with the law of value as general equilibrium, is therefore only mildly surprising.
What Sekine really takes issues with, however, is the ânon-equilibirumâ approach of the single system interpretation (A. Kliman, A. Freeman, G. Carchedi) and the New Interpretation, especially the proponents of the âvalue of moneyâ or MELT approach, D. Foley et al., as mentioned earlier. As Sekine correctly sees, these authors reject Bortkiewiczâs âdual systemsâ approach (of two different equilibriums, one measured in value, one in price), continue to regard Marxâs labour theory of value as absolutely indispensable, and âvigorously defend Marx by claiming that his reasoning, based on what they call the âsingle (value-price) systemâ approach was flawless without the transformation of input values into pricesâ. The signature claim of these authors (also including F. Moseley and others, who differ much in the details â which Sekine ignores) is, according to Sekine, to take the constant and variable capital advanced by industries and firms as given and as already expressed in price, not value. It determines the output values and prices on the basis of whether each sector or firm receives the surplus value it has actually produced or only on the basis of the share of the aggregate social surplus value proportional to the total capital which it has advanced. Hence, they do not abandon Marxâs two axioms of the equality of the sum of values to the sum of prices and that of the equality of the total sum of surplus values to the total sum of profits. Generally, Sekine agrees with this âdefinitional stage-settingâ. Viewing the âmicro-dynamicâ of competition, Sekine argues, equilibrium is rather the exception than the rule: in intrasectoral competition, the equalisation of profit rates does not take place, so that equilibrium in this case must be âlimited to the sub-phase of âaverage activityâ of business cyclesâ.154 Intersectoral competition does only take place when the labour market (the availability of labour power) is in equilibrium and must be regulated by intrasectoral competition which by itself does not (except in âaverage activityâ) equalise the profit rates. Interestingly, Sekineâs departure from the ânon-equilibrium approachâ155 is motivated by a methodological differentiation:
Since capitalism is most of the time out of equilibrium and does not always necessarily point towards it, why should one attach such a disproportionate emphasis to the idealist state of equilibrium? There seems to be a consensus in the negative on this point among the authors of the book. The dialectic of capital, however, is not am empiricist theory. Consequently, it takes a different view on this issue â¦156
However, the âNew Approachâ or New Interpretation (NI), which we will look at more closely presently, is not an empiricist theory either, but precisely criticises the approach of establishing the correlation between embodied labour coefficients and production and market prices empirically, i.e. âRicardoâs positionâ, Foley associates with the work of A. Shaikh, P. Cockshott and A. Cottrell.157 Rather, regarding method, the NI âproposes a definitional ordering of the key abstractions of the labor theory of valueâ.158 The NI therefore abstracts entirely from the question of quantity-correlation and focuses on the theoretical significance of the labour theory of value for explaining the value-price divergence.
For Sekine however, what is at stake is the âstatus of the theory of value in non-equilibriumâ.159 For if, e.g., the value of a commodity âor its production-priceâ is 5 hours of labour per unit, the market however only acknowledges 4.2 hours of labour, âthis contradicts the law of value; for 8 hours of surplus labour, actually performed, in the production of every unit of this commodity systematically fails to become surplus valueâ.160 The only solution, as Sekine proposes, is to introduce a technical change, so that the commodity unit can be produced in 4.2 hours or less. But what else than precisely the âlaw of valueâ has Sekine just described here? The fact that under conditions of (intrasectoral) competition, e.g. 0.8 hours of labour could be redundantly expended, so that capital needs to readjust the productive conditions for its most profitable valorisation, is not a âcontradictionâ of the âlaw of valueâ, but its exact expression. If we view the law of value from Marxâs standpoint, namely capitalâs incessant drive to optimise the exploitation and appropriation of unpaid labour for capitalâs maximum valorisation, the constant readjustment of productive conditions is but one of its defining features. Naturally, no individual capital can afford to let labour time go to waste through unfulfilled valorisation on the market. Two things must be noted in this regard: Sekineâs misconception of the notion of âsocially necessary labour timeâ and the static interpretation of the âlaw of valueâ.
First, it is the law of capitalâs maximum proportion of the aliquot share in the total aggregate surplus value produced, conditioned to the largest part by competition, that defines the âsocially necessary labour timeâ that in turn defines the magnitude of value of a commodity. The meaning of the term âsocially necessaryâ, contrary to what Sekine believes, is completely unhinged from the âoptimal allocation of productive labour for the provision of the use-values that society needs and wantsâ,161 as the appropriate amount of labour time necessary to satisfy social demand. The meaning of âsocially necessaryâ is quite different: it is solely defined within the logic of capitalâs most profitable and optimal share in surplus value.162 Needless to say, this must evade an approach that sees the aim of capitalist production in use value, not in value.
Second, Sekine only seems to acknowledge a static condition, with given inputs and no technical change. Any assumption acknowledging the dynamic of capital, i.e. capitalâs readjustment of productive techniques, etc., seems to fall out of the scope of this idiosyncratic and rigid definition of the law of value, for Sekine.
Yet, Sekine has a more fundamental concern, namely to disqualify the interpretation delivered by the New Approach or NI, and to disavow the usefulness of the labour theory of value for the explanation of the emergence of a general rate of profit and prices of production: âIt has not been clear what they (D. Foley and G. Duménil) and their followers wish to accomplish by means of the newly interpreted labour theory of value, since none of them have so far shown a significant result of its application (i.e. a significant thesis which cannot be advanced without depending on it), going beyond a trivial proof of Marxâs infallibilityâ.163 Sekine, in other words, has two objections to the NI: the alleged tautology of their line of argument, and the question of its use. In the following, we will, for reasons of space, give only a brief overview of Duncan Foleyâs conceptualisation of the term âvalue of moneyâ or the monetary expression of labour time, to show that Sekineâs allegations are unfounded. Specific attention is given to the retention of Marxâs axioms of the aggregate sum of surplus value being equal to the sum of profit, i.e. the correspondence of unpaid labour to profits.
5.2.3 Duncan Foleyâs Concept of âValue of Moneyâ and MELT as the modus operandi of the Labour Theory of Value
As said previously, Foley refers to the labour theory of value when he shows that, with the concept of the value of money (or the MELT which is the more practical mathematical inversion serving the same function), âthe proportionality of profit and unpaid labor time in the face of any deviations of prices from labour valuesâ, are âretainedâ.164 This is indeed the main desideratum of showing the coherence of Marxâs value theory, if not economic analysis in toto. Foleyâs approach is therefore at least a valid contribution to the problem surrounding the âtransformation problemâ. We will show that it is also a minimalistic and desirable approach, in which the emphasis on a specific set of axioms (or rather, definitions) is methodologically put to use to solve the problem addressing the total operation of the real economy. The minimalistic redefinitions concern the value-price distinction, for which the labour theory of value can still be held accountable. It is therefore in its general outline close to the view of the labour theory of value held here, in that it can be regarded as the âTuring bombeâ or decoding machine to the fetishisms of the conventional categories of political economy (for Foley, the labour theory of value âplays a role in political economy analogous to the role played by Newtonâs Laws in mechanicsâ).165 The question in this quantitative approach is of the operability of the labour theory of value as a theoretical approach, not whether certain determinations of magnitudes can be confirmed.
The novelty (hence ânewâ approach or interpretation) of Foley et al. is the redefinition of the value of labour power. The value of labour power, Foley contends, is not in general equal to the labour value of workersâ consumption. This is almost intuitively confirmed, because workers do not receive the âvalueâ of their labour power (a bundle of commodities measured in labour values produced during a certain part of the working day), but a money wage (i.e. the price of the labour power commodity), which are not necessarily the same. This holds also for any other commodity aside from labour power: âAny particular commodity can be seen as embodying a certain fraction of the total abstract labor expended in producing commodities; it also exchanges for a certain amount of money (its price), which represents a possibly different fraction of the aggregate abstract social labour expendedâ.166 The value of labour power is the mathematical product of the money wage multiplied by what he calls the âvalue of moneyâ, a mathematical term of conversion which is defined as, in the special case of equivalence of labour values to prices, the ratio of the labour value of the commodity to its price. This definition, which is in line with Marxâs own conceptual determinations, allows us to âconsistently ⦠translate back and forth between labor time and money valueâ.167 The presuppositions of this definition are rooted in Marxâs determination of the convertibility of value and labour time. In Foleyâs words:
⦠the labour theory of value [is] the claim that the money value of the whole mass of net production of commodities expresses the expenditure of the total social labor in a commodity-producing economy â¦168
This way of thinking of the labor theory of value requires us to think of a strict relation in a commodity-producing economy between the monetary unit (whether that unit is linked to a general equivalent money commodity or not) and abstract labor time. A unit of money, in this approach, can be thought of as a claim to a certain amount of the abstract social labor expended in the economy.169
The expenditure of labor creates value, which is expressed in the price of the commodity. A quantity of money under these assumptions is the expression of a certain amount of labor time (for example, 1 hour of labor equals 10 dollars).170
These presuppositions within Marxâs own conceptual framework allow Foley to give a set of definitions that conceptualises the âvalue of moneyâ as the coefficient of the labor value of the commodity to its price.171 âIts dimensions are hours of labor per dollarâ. This also holds for the case in which prices are not uniformly proportional to labour values, and can thus be generalised: viewed in the total economy with aggregate products, the value of money expresses the ratio between the aggregate direct labour and the aggregate money value added to production (the price of the commodity minus the non-wage costs, i.e. means of production etc.), or the ratio of the aggregate direct labour to the net product (= added value). The monetary expression of labour (time), MEL or MELT, is the reverse: the ratio of the net domestic product at current prices to living productive labour (e.g. per annum).172 Both the value of money and MELT are integrated to determine the value of labour power which is the modus operandi of the labour theory of value even in cases where prices diverge from labour values. The following presents an overview of the definition of the value of money in the case of (I) coincidence of labour values and prices, (II) divergence of labour values and prices, and the new formula for the value of labour power using (III) the definition of the value of money (= aggregate direct labour / aggregate value added) and (IV) the definition of MELT (= net domestic product at current prices / living productive labour).
-
value of money = labour value of the commodity (hours of labour time expressed in a unit of money) / price
-
value of money = aggregate direct labour / aggregate value added
-
value of labour power = money wage à agg. direct labour / agg. value added
-
value of labour power = money wage / MEL(T)
The significance of this approach is the deviation from the âclassicâ interpretation of the value of labour power in that the money wage multiplied by the value of money implies âthat the value of labour power is equal in magnitude to the wage share in aggregate value addedâ.173 In other words, the value of labour power is already transformed in terms of price expressing its exact value, i.e. the âfraction of the working day that is paid labourâ.174 With the introduction of the new determination of the âvalue of labour powerâ by the conversion unit of the âvalue of moneyâ or MELT, a minimalistic approach to understanding the value-price divergence, Foley retains âat a global level the relation between money and embodied labour which is central to the idea that money is a form of value and that the substance of value is abstract social labourâ.175 This approach is therefore strictly monetary, in line with Marxâs analysis.
Second, it builds a logical correspondence between surplus value or profit and unpaid labour time.
Since the value of money is the ratio of aggregate direct labor time to aggregate value added,
if we multiply it by the average level of money wages, we get the wage bill divided by value added, or the share of wages in aggregate value added, on the assumption that one hour of labor power sold yields one hour of actual labor time. An immediate corollary of these stipulations is that the aggregate profit in the system of capitalist production as a whole multiplied by the value of money is exactly equal to the unpaid labor time, in the sense of the time worked for which workers receive no equivalent in the wage. With these interpretations, the most central of Marxâs claims about the âtransformationâ of values into prices of production, that profit arises from unpaid labor time, is sustained â¦176
Third, and probably most importantly, Foley emphasises a specific sense of capitalist exploitation and class struggle which the struggle over the distribution of profit otherwise obscures. While class struggle, under capitalist relations of production, seems to be âa struggle over what part of the net product will go to workers and will constitute the social surplusâ, this should not at all be viewed as the impetus, for its logical end would only be the disappearance of the surplus product altogether, and a standstill to social development. He therefore pleads for a different approach to the significance of class struggle, namely that âwe keep clearly in mind the specific form the surplus takes in capitalist society, a surplus value appropriated by a particular classâ whose consequence is not the elimination (or different distribution) of the surplus product, but âto transform the social relations that make the social surplus take the form of surplus valueâ.177 This is indeed a âmore historical conception of class struggle than the notion of a purely distributional conflictâ,178 fulfilling the condition of Marxâs discernment of the central problem of capitalist relations of production, namely that the form that social labour necessarily assumes are the fetish-characteristic forms of value.
None of the three features of the NI and other approaches in the ânon-equilibriumâ or âsingle systemâ spectrum, namely that it is monetary, that it retains the equivalence of unpaid labour and profit, and that it specifies the meaning of historical class struggle on the basis of the meaning of value â positions that we have shown are crucial to Marxâs economic analysis â is addressed in Sekineâs âdialecticalâ approach. Contrary to what Sekine believes, they are also neither tautological, nor useless. To the contrary: with a precise grasp of the significance and explanatory power of the labour theory of value, the âriddlesâ of the âtransformation problemâ can be solved.179 At no point is there a question begging involved, unlike Sekineâs own view of social cost explaining value and value explaining social costs. But this would precisely require an understanding grounded in the problematic direct relation between living and value-adding labour in the production process and value (and its monetary forms) that is denied in the Sekine approach, as well as in that of his mentor, Uno KÅzÅ. Instead, Uno views the forms of value, such as the commodity, money and capital, as if they were detached from production, and instead locates them in exchange, treated as the primary form of the social metabolism which then (when?) âabsorbsâ the production process. This is tantamount to misconceiving the direct interrelation of labour and value that gives rise to this particular historical social nexus without which capitalist relations of production cannot be adequately addressed. Indeed,
[o]ne of the virtues of the New Interpretation is that it firmly links the value of the net product at market prices to the expenditure of living labour and profit to unpaid labour time. It is true that the New Interpretation identifies the phenomenal forms of price to the categories of the labour theory of value, but it is hard to see why this turns the relation on its head. The New Interpretation locates the course of new value in the expenditure of living labour in production, not in market exchange, the relation Marx insists on.180
Sekineâs objections to the tautological character of the NI and its âuselessnessâ for explaining a very specific set of assumptions involving equilibrium production cannot be maintained.
But on what grounds does Sekine think the identitarian, i.e. non-contradictory âdialectic of capitalâ, helps to grasp the nature of capital better than the framework Marx develops throughout Capital? It seems that the âself-sustenanceâ of capital is given a greater emphasis than the contradiction within capitalâs logic of self-valorisation. Yet, this self-sustenance is neither logically, nor empirically verified. For this reason, it seems, Sekine draws on the sterility of equilibrium models close to the Walrasâ law (which he explicitly refers to).181 Methodologically, the incantation of an ominous âdialecticâ or âlogicâ of capital which is never explicitly spelled out forms a crude opposition to the actual presentation of the proof of equilibrium which is suddenly and without mediation (hence poorly Hegelian) deferred to formulas of output levels, means of production and labour times in linear schemas.182 Sekineâs approach therefore lacks a coherent method that redeems its own claims. Instead, the separation between assertion and reality, or the semantic and the pragmatic, is indeed unbridgeable and makes for a logically poor and conceptually dissatisfactory interpretation that shares with the Marxian template it claims to engage with nothing but the invocation of Marxâs name. There may however exist a more general problem than merely the reconciliation of Sekineâs general equilibrium view of the pre-established harmony of social production and demand for use values with the Marxian framework. We hold that the more general problem of the unfolding of Sekineâs proposition seems to be the unawareness with which he uses concepts such as âvalueâ and âcapitalâ, âfetishismâ, âpriceâ and âmoneyâ. Not once does Sekine provide a systematic definition of these concepts, not once does he mobilise their semantic dimension in their nexus, i.e., relation to one another, and not once do we hear in what way they are significant for Marxâs critique (or not). They remain utterly external to the analysis. Their sematic dimension and pragmatic use are unrelated. For a self-proclaimed âHegelianâ approach to the concept of capital, this is quite a striking deficit.
Now let us see how another allegedly Hegelian legacy is further put to use in understanding Unoâs interpretation of Marxâs analysis in the work of Robert Albritton.
5.2.4 Use Value as Central Category in Stage Theory: Robert Albrittonâs Contribution
A strange externality of the analytical framework invoked and the object of investigation â the capitalist mode of production â also informs Robert Albrittonâs work. This is all the more baffling, since Albritton insists on the coherence and inner structural logic of the method he applies and its object. Like Uno and Sekine, in understanding the capitalist relations of production as primarily use value-mediated, âself-sufficientâ, and âself-regulatingâ, Albrittonâs analysis is also inflicted with the apologetic character of the interpretation of capital that we have found in both Uno and Sekine.
In the following, we will show how 1) Albrittonâs theory, in accordance with what we have seen in Sekine and also in Uno, assumes the form of an apologetic towards capital which is thoroughly disinterested in the fundamentally contradictory character of the law of value and its implementation, and 2) Albrittonâs conceptualisation of method and object assumes a truistic, if not outright tautological character, that fails to deliver precisely the inner nexus it claims to provide. Both aspects, as we will show, are related.
More profoundly than Sekine and Uno himself, Albrittonâs research focuses on the concrete implementation of the âlevels-of-analysisâ approach (sandankairon) which, as we have seen in Chapter 2, Uno has sketched in the Methodology and, in broader terms, in the Principles, the latter of which Albritton orients himself toward. To recapitulate, in sandankairon, which Uno conceptualises as the âcorrect methodâ of political economy, a first level of analysis, pure theory or the theory of principles (genriron) âestablishes the foundation of political economyâ183 by making a âpure capitalist societyâ its object of analysis. More specifically, for Albritton, it addresses a hypothetical society in which all use values are ideally subsumed by value and the capital-labour relation. It is therefore an âidealâ capitalist society from which all empirical and historical âimpuritiesâ are eliminated, both on the level of presentation and analysis. From this follows, for Albritton, that this level of abstraction has no real historical equivalent (we have seen that Unoâs view is more ambiguous). The second level, dankairon, addresses the stages of capitalist development in their rough succession of economic models and forms of capital as they appear in history: mercantilism based on merchant capital, liberalism based on industrial capital, and imperialism based on finance capital. The third and final level, genjÅ bunseki, addresses the âanalysis of actual phenomenaâ in Unoâs dictum, or âthe historical analysisâ of capitalism in concrete terms (no longer tied to rough economic schemas) in Albrittonâs view.
It must be noted that Albritton is only familiar with Unoâs Principles in translation, so that his interpretation and understanding of sandankairon is mainly informed by this work and Sekine, who was Albrittonâs close associate at the University of York since the 1970s. In the following, we shall concentrate on Albrittonâs voluminous monograph A Japanese Reconstruction of Marxist Theory (1986) that gives the most inclusive outline of his Sekine-informed interpretation of what he calls âStage Theoryâ.
The main contention is that pure theory, while it is the most holistic and general analysis of the law of value and the workings of capital in a âpureâ capitalist society, cannot account for the âhistorical impuritiesâ that capitalism in its real historical development has shown to possess: âThe distance between the inner logic of capitalism and its historical development is great. To apply the law of value directly to history would therefore produce an economistic and reductionist historyâ.184 Yet, we never hear why this is the case. After all, Marxâs project in Capital was to show how the law of value prevails precisely in a historically real economy â see his elaborations in âThe Working Dayâ. The methodological objection and resentment against demonstrating the intrinsically devastating effects of the law of value, or rather surplus value, in a real historical situation, which was Marxâs incentive for many of his illustrations in Capital, bears a significant symptom of the inherently apologetic character of Albrittonâs contribution, as we will see.
For Albritton, the âgapâ between theory and history âmust be addressed by developing mediationsâ.185 Stage theory, according to him, is successful in doing so. The object of the second level of analysis, dankairon, is no longer the most abstract capital vs. worker-relation in which âideal use valuesâ are produced â i.e. use values which ideally constitute the wage basket needed for the reproduction of the working class: âA use-value such as a shirt fits these requirements perfectly and hence may be considered an âidealâ use valueâ.186 In the concrete analysis of historical stages of capitalism, which is the topic of stage theory, on the other hand, not all use values produced are âso capitalistically manageableâ.187 His example here is grapes and other agricultural produce whose successful production depends on a number of varying factors, such as the fertility of the soil, the weather, etc., and which require a shorter (though Albritton does not use that term) turnover time. Why grapes should not present an âideal use valueâ, however, is never explained. In times when mass fertilisation and turnover times are integral factors of the standardisation and automatisation of agricultural production, grapes are as easily produced as T-shirts.188 It is also difficult to comprehend why âgrapesâ should not belong in the workersâ âwage basketâ.
The problematic of deciding which use values are produced as âidealâ (corresponding to pure theory) and which are âless capitalistically manageableâ (corresponding to stage theory and the historical analysis of capitalism), however, permeates the discussion of the legitimisation of levels-of-analysis-approach in Albritton. For him, âif the motion of value has difficulty subsuming agriculture at a historical level, it also has difficulty subsuming other types of use-value productionâ.189 His examples are fine art, spaceships, battleships and thermonuclear weapons. Indeed, these use values (with the exception, under very exceptional conditions, of fine art) usually do not constitute the workerâs wage basket. But what does that prove? Are thermonuclear weapons âless capitalistically manageableâ in the sense that grapes are âless capitalistically manageableâ? Hardly. But we are left in the dark as to what exactly the criterion of difference between grapes, battleships, and a Van Gogh painting is in their common denominator of being âcapitalistically less manageableâ. How exactly in these instances use value production is not subsumed by value is never addressed. It would require the demonstration that battleships are not sold for money, and therefore not part of the valorisation nexus of capital (which should however prove to be difficult), a requirement not met by Albritton.
Nevertheless, Albritton insists that stage theory comes in where pure theory fails in conceptualising the real character of use value production, which is not exhausted in âidealâ or âcapitalistically manageable use valuesâ alone. The argument of the âpassive use value-restraintâ has also been substantial for Uno, as shown in Chapter 4. As much as it is decisive for recapitulating capitalâs alleged âpartial grasp on historical realityâ190 (capital can never subsume all and every use value), it is lacking persuasive power. The examples of thermonuclear weapons, grapes and spaceships not adhering to the âlaw of valueâ are absurd. Why art must be exempted from the value-nexus, however, is very persuasively argued in Dave Beechâs work.191 But Albritton fails to make this case explicit, because he nowhere defines an exhaustive criterion for his much-invoked âlaw of valueâ: it is not âthe use-values which constitute the wage basketâ, but in that value is measured in socially necessary abstract labour time that defines the law of value and which allows us to meaningfully speak about the production of value in the first place192 (from which follow the equalisation of profit rates and the distribution of surplus value, etc.). It would indeed have to be shown that grapes and weapons are not produced as the products of capital, involving the employment of productive capital, c + v, the equalisation of profit rates (i.e. their production measured in socially necessary labour time), and the realisation of surplus value in the circulation process with their transformation into money, in order to prove that, here, use value âoverwhelms valueâ.193 To say that products of capital are not produced capitalistically, is not only logically contradictory. It is absurd.
Yet, it is precisely capitalâs alleged âfailureâ to subsume the production of all use values that motivates Albritton to come up with a description of the role of capital in the future world historical development:
Capitalism is a historically limited mode of production because the law of value can only subsume a limited range of use-value production ⦠That the motion of value has only limited success in taming use-values explains the limited grasp that capitalism has on history (i.e. historical capitalism never becomes pure). That value can successfully manage only a limited range of use-values explains the limited duration of capitalâs passage on this planet (i.e. capitalism only holds sway over a limited period of history).194
Indeed, of all the conventional reasons usually provided for why capitalism is going to die a natural death (see the debate on the LTRPF we referred to in Chapter 4.4.), saying that it fails âin taming use-valueâ, is probably the most counterfactual one. As though to emphasise that point however, Albritton insists that the time for class struggles is over:
Starting with the stage of imperialism, there is no longer a historical tendency towards two homogeneous and polarized classes (of course there may be conjunctural tendencies towards polarization). Class struggle is increasingly overlaid with national struggles and struggles of particular strata and fractions within classes or even intermediate strata between classes. In fact the strong state required by the imperialist stage with its welfare state policies is the beginning of the modern service sector with its intermediate strata that have fuelled so much controversy within Marxist discourse on class.195
Because class struggles have become obsolete in the face of national struggles and the establishment of the âwelfare stateâ â we shall point out that this assessment is not a critique, but Albrittonâs neutral observation âprovingâ the obsolescence of class struggle â we can basically only wait and see how capital, unable to âmanage all use-valuesâ it has itself produced, simply withers away. Moreover, in this text from 1986, Albritton has good faith in the establishment of the socialist project via the âtransition away from capitalismâ introduced by âthe first successful socialist revolution in 1917â:
Referring to the period from 1917 to the present as a transitional phase does not mean that exploitation or the production for profit cease, but only that the structural dynamics of economic life can less and less be understood by the law of value ⦠It is necessary to understand both that the law of value has failed and why it has done so in order to understand the stratified economies that have developed. It is necessary to see that this is a transitional stage in which increasingly the world is becoming socialist, albeit at first with often rather primitive forms of socialism.196
Albrittonâs assessment of the âfailureâ of the law of value has only been disproven a few years after these lines were written. The world has never been as capitalist to date as the world only a few years after Albrittonâs statement, and in its history it has never been as âcapitalistâ as it is now.197 For Albritton in general, however, âthe law of value increasingly does not apply and that therefore the world must be understood primarily in terms of socioeconomic forces and power relations and not in terms of value theoryâ.198 The implication of this kind of postmodern jargon is a pervasive reluctance to grapple with the contradiction that the law of value presents insofar as it is fully realised: it is precisely because the production of relative surplus value is fully operative that capital reaches its contradictory and crisis-ridden limits. In other words, it is not use value as âexternalâ or a âpassive constraintâ to value that capital fails â and Albritton never specifies the exact character of capitalâs âhistorical limitâ â but capitalâs thorough absorption of the âuse-value spaceâ that expresses itself precisely in the contradiction between the conditions of the production of surplus value and the conditions of its realisation, which is the significant, encompassing contradiction of the capitalist mode of production grounded in the âlaw of valueâ.199 Because the capitalist mode of production is not, and never was, âaimed at (producing) use valuesâ, as Marx says in the Grundrisse, but subsumed the rationale of production under the auspices of value and surplus value (the latter which is bizarrely out of the scope of Albrittonâs theorisation of capitalâs âlimitsâ), that it cannot contain itself. As we have seen in Chapter 4, the result is an increasing exacerbation of crisis â and not just a business cycle of âalternating widening and deepening phases of accumulationâ,200 as Albritton states in accordance with Uno. It is the systemic devaluation and substitution of the source of value and surplus value, the value-producing use value of labour power, that leads to an equally systemic devaluation of the mass of surplus value produced, which in turn makes it impossible for capital to realise increasingly higher profits, and fulfil its only raison dââ¯Ãªtre, namely optimised profitability. It is precisely the historical trajectory of the so-called âdigital revolutionâ which so blatantly demonstrates not capitalâs âversatilityâ and âagilityâ in dealing with the obstacles of valorisation, but to the contrary, capitalâs inability and ineptitude in realising the foundation it is built on: the âlimitless approximation to abstract wealthâ in the realisation of increasingly higher amounts of moneyed surplus value.201 Capitalâs âotherâ, to remain in the postmodern jargon, is not use value: it is the mode of its own operation. It is inherently contradictory.
The fact that Albritton nowhere thematises the striking contradiction between the conditions of the production of surplus value (competition-induced cost saving techniques, âinvesting in little valueâ) and the conditions of their realisation (maximum share in profits, âexpecting huge gains in valueâ), is a misrecognition not only of the often-invoked topos of the âdialectic of capitalâ â which would at least indicate that the contradictory character of capital were recognised â but barely conceals the disinterestedness of the Uno School in critically engaging with their object, the capitalist mode of production. Instead, we hear that capitalism cannot lack âinternal integrityâ. In his critical discussion of classic theories of imperialism, Albritton objects to Rosa Luxemburgâs idea that capital bears an intrinsically âparasiticâ character. Instead, for Albritton,
[if] capitalism is basically parasitic, as Luxemburg claims, then it cannot be rigorously theorized as a mode of production that has internal integrity.202
Because capital rests on a fundamentally contradictory mode of production that completely evades the analysis of the Uno School, they fail to see that, indeed, capital has no âinternal integrityâ. However, not only is there a baffling denial of the principally contradictory and destructive character of capitalâs mode of operation, but by invoking an ethical category â âintegrityâ â Albritton also suggests that capital were, indeed, a viable and ethically defensible economic model â or at least, he at no point gives the impression that it is not. This is further accentuated in his view, against Arghiri Emmanuel,203 that
[in] a purely capitalist society all exchange is equal exchange. To the extent that a society is capitalist, systematic unequal exchange cannot take place.204
Probably even more than Uno and Sekine, whose equilibrium approach to reproduction is all-pervasive, Albritton makes the case for the neoclassical assumption of âequal exchangeâ which informs his apologetic interpretation of the capitalist mode of production. This wilful blindness against the very definition of what allows someone to speak of a mode of production as being capitalist at all â namely through the unequal exchange of capital and labour which is fetishised (but only fetishised!) as that of âequal exchangeâ â is quite astonishing.
This apologetic is also reflected in the conceptualisation of stage theory as an âexternalization of pure theoryâ that disengages from the actual implementation and operation of the law of value in real history and thereby absolutises its workings and effects on humans existing in capitalist actuality.
5.2.5 Stage Theory as Tautology and the Apologetic of Capital
The transition from the logically contradictory diagnosis of capital as unable to manage all capitalistically produced use values, to the concrete implementation of stage theory, is even more incomprehensible and inflicted with logical inconsistencies. One of them is the non sequitur-exposition of stage theory that does not follow from the premises Albritton has previously unfolded. The other is the tautological characterisation of the objectives of stage theory. We shall turn to these now, in this order.
For Albritton, the stages of capitalist development correspond to particular modes of the accumulation of capital: while âin pure capitalism, society is governed by a self-regulating marketâ â the foremost apologetic topos of the Uno School â in history, on the other hand,
capital always develops within and between territorial states, and the development of capital and of the nation-state are up to a point mutually supporting. Also capital develops very unevenly when viewed spatially on a global scale. So in constructing stage theory we look for the form or forms of use-value production that most characterize the stage ⦠Thus at the level of stage theory, we look for the dominant form of capitalist accumulation, we look for its geographical location and we look for the types of ideology and state policy that support it.205
These forms of accumulation in the historical development of capitalism correspond to merchant capital with the state policy of mercantilism, to industrial capital with the state policy of laissez faire, free market-liberalism, and to finance-capital with the state policy of imperialism, ultimately adding the âtransition away from capitalismâ with socialist planned production as the last stage. To these economic models correspond different kinds of dominating use value production: âWool production is the type of use-value production that is most characteristic of the activities of merchant-capital in so far as it directly lays the foundations for the development of capitalismâ.206 In the liberal stage, âwhich is closest to pure theory ⦠the sort of light manufacturing represented by cotton manufacturing is closest to the ideal use-values assumed by pure theoryâ.207 In imperialism, âthe most characteristic type of use-value production ⦠became iron and steelâ.208
The explanatory power of the determination of forms of capital accumulation on the basis of the production of particular dominating forms of use value is evident.209 As is well known, in his analysis of primitive or original accumulation, Marx demonstrates the emergence of the capital relation on the basis of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century wool production in the English countryside. In other words, this is not where Albrittonâs argument lacks a rational explanatory basis. But the question is how it is related to the aforementioned thesis that capital is increasingly unable to manage and âtameâ the realm of use values. If anything, Albritton here precisely gives a coherent argument for the opposite view, namely that in each and every stage of capitalist accumulation, use value is subsumed by capital as one of its forms of structuring production for the maximum share in profits. This is why particular use values such as wool have become dominant in the stage of mercantilism, cotton in the stage of liberalism, steel and iron in the stage of imperialism: because they respectively allowed capital to extract unpaid surplus labour from the production process in the most developed, dynamic, and effective way. In each case, production was organised in a way that best conformed to the development of the forces of production. It is therefore a mystery how the thesis should hold that capitalism âloses its gripâ on use value production, and use values present an âobstacleâ to valorisation. To the contrary, Albritton precisely demonstrates the valorisation postulate of capital by highlighting the dominant forms of particular use value production facilitating capitalâs firmer grip on the production and valorisation process. It is the process of the development of the forces of production in which capital increasingly operates independently of the given structures and use values and itself dynamically transforms the process to adhere to its own conditions of existence, the valorisation postulate â in other words, the process of real subsumption in the production of relative surplus value. The specific use values are therefore by no means gaining an increasing independence from the reign of capital. To the contrary: they are capitalâs means in securing its global procession. The argument does not follow from the aforementioned thesis on the status of pure theory: it is a non-sequitur.
At the same time, the usefulness of stage theory in explaining how history becomes âdetachedâ from theory becomes even more unpersuasive.
To be sure, if the âthree levels of analysisâ-approach should hold any explanatory power at all and be distinguishable from a positivistic model or âschemaâ whose criteria remain external and arbitrary (which Albritton clearly aims at), their inner relation of the three must be self-reflexively elucidated. This is why Albritton calls for âintermediary stepsâ. Unlike Uno, who wrongly believes the model is self-explanatory in delivering the inner nexus, Albrittonâs attempt starts from the dubious premise that âpure theoryâ is only an abstract model that has no bearings on âreal historyâ at all:
Knowledge of the inner logic of capital achieved at the level of pure theory helps to interpret the historical material in constructing a stage theory, but stage theory is in no sense a deduction from pure theory. Rather, stage theory represents an externalization of pure theory, such that the use-value obstacles become more concrete and historical as do the motions of value in overcoming these obstacles.210
Stage theory is a distinct level of analysis arrived at neither by a deduction from pure theory nor by an abstraction from history. The concepts of stage theory are essentially abstract âmaterial-typesâ arrived at by using pure theory and history to help determine the main structures and processes of the dominant mode of capital accumulation in that historical stage. Stage theory is essentially static since it aims to grasp the dominant type of capital accumulation and not actual historical change and development.211
That the two levels somehow must be âmediatedâ (âconcepts of stage theory are arrived at by using pure theoryâ), but remain âexternalâ to each other, certainly presents the biggest obstacle to their explanatory potential. The meaning of âexternalisationâ of stage theory as a benchmark of the differentiation against âpure theoryâ is nowhere explained; yet it would be precisely the definition of criteria that allow for pure theoryâs implementation on the level of stages, and those cases in which this is impossible, and as well as a coherent argument for the criteria of this difference, that would give significance to the pure theory-stage theory nexus â and their difference. At no point however do we hear about meaningful criteria of either their nexus or their difference. That the realm of use value should historically evade the grip of pure theory has been shown to owe to a faulty and self-contradictory assumption. The usefulness of pure theory, however, stands and falls with the demonstration of its actual applicability to the capitalist mode of production. Because Albritton cannot establish the necessary relation between pure theory and its explanatory power, pure theory stands at a hypothetical model with no bearings or effect for the theorisation of the capital relation.
That, however, is not all. In close relation to this problem, there is a further obstacle that directly concerns the apologetic character of Albrittonâs, as well as the wider Uno Schoolâs, approach. How do we arrive at history/the real/the actual implementation of history if we cannot show that the law of value is real? Like in Uno, we can witness a lack of insight into the epistemological status of value in Albritton. Uno and his school defer the analysis of âpure capitalismâ to âpure theoryâ, where the law of value prevails and has a âfull gripâ on the mode of production and reproduction.212 This âfull gripâ however is mitigated by actual historical production where âuse values are not so capitalistically manageableâ. However, like Uno, Albritton does not fully grasp the idea of real abstraction, the fact that value is both an objective as well as an immaterial structuring phenomenon; it is both merely âsocialâ, as well as a ârealâ category. It is not a mere âillusionâ, a âconstruction in thoughtâ, a âtacit premiseâ, or an âabstractionâ without objective validity.213 One must here remember Marxâs well-known statement from Volume II of Capital: âThose who consider the autonomization [Verselbständigung] of value as a mere abstraction forget that the movement of industrial capital is this abstraction in actionâ.214
Marxâs incentive, as written in the famous letter to Kugelmann, is to demonstrate âhow the law of value prevailsâ in societies where the mode of production is organised capitalistically. This is why the illustration of the real living conditions of the working class cannot be abstracted from in the presentation of valueâs domination: it is one and the same context that delivers critical information as to the effects of the real implementation of the law of value. Setting apart âpure theoryâ, where supply always corresponds to demand, workers can seamlessly reproduce, and capital produces a great many use values âneeded by societyâ â a theory that, in fact, has little to do with the capitalist mode of production â from a theory of stages and the âhistorical analysisâ, neither of which thematise the devastating effects of capital accumulation on humans and nature, is therefore probably the single most capital-apologetic assumption we find in academic Marxism as a whole. It is detached from the object of Marxâs critique.
Moreover, as we have seen, because value prevails as the structuring underlying mode or essence in which social reproduction is organised, it appears in fetishistic forms of e.g., use value-mediated or âself-regulatingâ market mechanisms which can be traced back all the way to the âthree particularitiesâ of the âequivalent form of valueâ, which has been so fatally ignored by Uno. That the fetishistic dimension of valueâs appearance should be taken as a fact by the Uno School â that the appearance should be taken as essence â is the key problem of this particular line in the reception of Marx. It is however a problem that Marx has already detected in the elaborations of vulgar economy, predominantly Bailey and Say, which we have referred to as the âoriginal sinâ of political economy.
In sum, grasping the critical function of Marxâs method is tantamount to understanding that the âtheory of pure capitalismâ is unnecessary, because the law of value always-already operates within the framework of impurity, namely the fetishistic appearances it delivers. It is also unfeasible, because the inner coherence of the whole structure, the sandankairon, cannot be maintained unless we presuppose the standpoint of totality from which the âinstancesâ or the âlevelsâ of analysis can be meaningfully abstracted from. What is lacking is a coherent superordinate conceptual heuristic which explains the formation of stages which they are instances of. Sandankairon does not provide a coherent angle which would explain the formation of stages and inform the history of the âconcrete phenomenaâ: in other words, it leaves method and object external to each other. In Marx, we argue, the demonstration of âhow the law of value prevailsâ precisely relates the âlawâ to its actual operation, the labour theory of value functioning as the precise nexus between method and object. In Albrittonâs version of stage theory, the three levels remain external to each other, as well as to a common grounding nexus that would offer a coherent conceptual bond. As it stands, stages theory can only remain on the terrain of logical inconsistencies with regard to itself, as a truistic and tautological assurance that âthe distance between the inner logic of capitalism and its historical development is greatâ. The truistic character of its assertions â that âpure capitalist society is global, but in history capital always develops within and between territorial statesâ215 do not deliver any conceptual insight from which a meaningful critique can be arrived at, and which is the biggest obstacle to a meaningful conceptualisation of capital, even in a concrete global, and historical context.
5.3 The Meaning of Real Subsumption or the Real Subsumption of Meaning: Aspects of Anglophone Uno School Historiographies
The relation between theory and history that forms the incentive for Albrittonâs interpretation of stage theory also forms the specific interest of historiographic approaches in the Uno School, exemplified in the following in aspects of Harry Harootunianâs and Gavin Walkerâs works.
Unlike Albritton, their impetus is motivated by both overcoming the tautological argument of pure theory concerning a âpurely capitalist societyâ, and stage theory concerning the âhistorical formationsâ of capitalism. At first at least it seems as though Harootunian and Walker in their respective works are more interested in fundamentally relating these seemingly disparate theoretical objects. However, their success also depends on a thorough conceptualisation of that relation as one mediated by capital itself. Operating with the truistic concept of âuneven developmentâ (or âdifferent trajectoriesâ in Harootunianâs dictum) in global capitalist societies, the capital relation and the laws which govern them, however, as in the Anglophone Uno School approach, remain external to their analysis. This is especially clear in Harootunianâs both theoretically and empirically counterfactual and theoretically (and politically) questionable preference for the concept of formal subsumption over real subsumption as an explanandum for the global rise of capital.
What is to be gained for the understanding and, more importantly, for the critique of the capital relation if we acknowledge so-called uneven development and the âdifferent trajectoriesâ that e.g. Western Europe and Japan have taken in the generation of their respective histories? The main intervention of Harry Harootunianâs Marx after Marx consists in delegitimising âWestern Marxismâsâ216 alleged claim to the âcompletion of the commodity relationâ which âtrumpet(s)â the âtriumph of capitalismâ, expressed in the conceptual framework of âreal subsumptionâ. The book instead argues for a recognition of âthe very unevenness lived by all societies, both the putatively advanced and the backward, as a condition of fulfilling capitalâs law of accumulationâ,217 expressed in Marxâs concept of âformal subsumptionâ. The simple heuristic of disavowing Marxâs concept of real subsumption and substituting it with that of formal subsumption in order to avoid Western Marxismâs alleged one-sidedness and its âabandonment of a meticulous historical materialism founded on a close investigation of specific and often singular contextsâ218 forms Harootunianâs overall argument. Formal subsumption, used as analytical category to understand the (geographically) different trajectories that subsumption of labour has taken, serves, among other things, to âwiden(s) the angle of vision to include the world beyond Western Europeâ.219 The appeal of the concept of formal subsumption consists in âa way out of both the vulgate Marxian and modernising bourgeois historical narratives constrained to fulfilling teleologically determined agendas of capitalism that have the unfolding of a singular trajectory everywhereâ.220 It is not clear which âvulgate Marxianâ historical narratives Harootunian refers to, since he provides no references. As Harootunian claims, Marxists like those in the Frankfurt School tradition and their intellectual heirs (Hans-Georg Backhaus, among others) can be said to be guilty of a more serious offense, namely, in âtheir patient desire for the accomplishment of real subsumptionâ to not acknowledge the âgreat unevennessâ existing in different geographical areas in the course of time and the expansion of capitalism, as there are instances of the past âmingling with the presentâ, the âresidual traces that embodied untimely temporalities announcing their unevenness and differenceâ.221
The major irritation to the reader is to be found in Harootunianâs judgment that the full capital relation, comprised in the analytical concept of real subsumption, has not prevailed as the social form that dominates economic life on a global scale. In other words, the capital relation described by the term of real subsumption, in reality and globally, has not been completed. Hence, the concept of âreal subsumptionâ only points to a theoretical model that bears no significance for the real historical diversity to be found in the âdifferent historical temporalitiesâ and the âsynchronous nonsynchronismsâ (Ernst Bloch) Harootunian finds represented in the concept of formal subsumption: âMarx has posited the achievement of real subsumption as a model, perhaps as a proto-ideal type that envisions the possible realization and completion of the commodity relation in an as yet unreached future, in a last instance that never comesâ.222 As we have seen, quite the opposite is true â De te fabula narratur! â if we look at the evidence in Marx. What is more bizarre, however, is Harootunianâs underlying assumption that real subsumption may have some justification as a hypothetical model, but cannot be used as a template to analyse the present â not even the âpast in the presentâ. As though the obvious empirical evidence indicating the actual completion of the commodity form on a global scale were a far-fetched, even absurd, illusion, Harootunian expatiates: âWhether Marx actually believed capital would ultimately realize the completion of the commodity relation ⦠is hard to say. What seems certain is that he needed such a concept in order to present capitalism as a completed totalityâ.223 Indeed, for Harootunian, the âclaim of capitalismâs inevitable completion everywhereâ is âillusoryâ. Allegedly, it is formal, not real subsumption that more accurately theorises âthe constant interaction of coexisting times and practices in a ceaseless process that might lead to the final realization of capital but probably not everywhereâ.224 The remnants of the past in the present â outdated modes of production existing alongside new technologies, but also religious and cultural practices etc. â in Harootunianâs view hamper the âWestern Europeanâ export of the capital relation to distant parts of the earth where the âoldâ prevails and, as Harootunian suggests in an astonishing argumentative move, the process of expropriation and exploitation may not have exerted such a âharshâ impact on the particular social edifice found in regions of uneven development (pace colonialism!):
In a sense, it is possible to argue that the undisturbed accompaniment of older modes of work and tools, along with customs and religious beliefs that were seen as vital to or indistinguishable from work, may very well have blunted the direct consequences of both expropriation and exploitation or masked their harshness and contributed to delaying the realization of real subsumption. A good deal of agricultural practices in Japan carried associations of work and ShintÅ beliefs well into the Meiji period and probably beyond ⦠And we know that even in post-War Japan, firms and companies recruited Zen Buddhism to inculcate a sense of âspiritualâ discipline into employees designed to reinforce their work performance.225
To support his view that the violent process of primitive accumulation Marx describes so vividly in the Grundrisse and in Capital did not exert its savage powers so cruelly in late developers like Japan, or had been avoided completely, Harootunian leans on Unoâs reflections in the work Outlines to the Agrarian Question (NÅgyÅ mondai jÅron, 1965), published shortly after the Methodology. Here, Uno discusses the import of the capitalist production mode and its particular effects on agrarian production and the social edifice of rural Japan after the Meiji restoration. Uno was interested in theorising âlate developmentâ as being especially significant in agrarian production that still made up 65 percent of the national net product in 1900.226 But the agrarian sector did not undergo a process of âenclosuresâ and the expropriation of the small scale farmers (that made up more than half of the Japanese populace), so that the farming sector did not only come out of the capitalisation process relatively unscathed, but constituted a means of promotion for capitalismâs self-implementation: âAgriculture that remained within the sphere of production of direct consumer items such as grains lingered in its prior form and was only gradually invaded by capital as it assisted the process of reproduction of capitalismâ.227 The village therefore âremained committed to âsmall-scale agricultural productionâ in contrast to the appearance of large-scale industrial enterprises in the cities and provided the recruiting ground for male (?) and child labor when urban industrialization required itâ.228 Hence, for Harootunian, primitive accumulation had been âbypassedâ in Japan, which initiated a development of unevenness and verified that, although older relations of production were no longer directly involved, the ââ¯âinfluencesâ of the remnant still constituted a primary factor in the development of productive powerâ.229 In other words, acknowledging the Japanese development, exempted from âreal subsumptionâ, could give clues as to how capital âintentionallyâ left the prior medieval village intact, âdelaying the alienation of large numbers of peasants from their means of subsistenceâ.230 Yet, against Harootunianâs verdict, one should not lose sight of the empirical and historical: the development of rapid modernisation and the release of land from the feudal han-system that went hand in hand with the dissolution of the bushi as a class, lifted the prohibition of the purchase and sale of agricultural land, so that, to the contrary, âthe erosion of the medieval agrarian villageâ indeed took place and, like in England and greater parts of Europe before, generated a whole new class of âfreeâ wage workers. Harootunianâs verdict that primitive accumulation has been âbypassedâ in Japan is counterfactual.231
In the case of Japan, the new proletariat was incorporated into the two emerging new industries that would mark Japanâs economic success on the globalised world market at the dawn of the imperialist age: silk and cotton manufacturing industries (women and children) and the mining and heavy metal industries (men). However, Uno was less interested in the details of the âformal subsumptionâ process in the uneven development of Japanese capitalism as an object of economic analysis, as Harootunian believes, than in the âpreservation and continuation of the form of older precapitalist practices and ways of thinking that had taken command over timeâ beyond the economic sphere, including âareas of social and cultural life dominated by the involuntary interaction of conscious life and the force of other, unconscious habits and modes of behaviourâ.232 While we find the culturalist assumptions bordering on (self-)orientalising schemes of explanation in this assessment problematic, it is less Unoâs than Harootunianâs own specific disposition that is to be detected here.
More rewarding than the probable culturalist consequences one may draw from Harootunianâs interpretation is a look at the specific uses and misuses of Marxâs terminology and theorisation of âreal and formal subsumptionâ. As a matter of fact, theorising late development does not preclude specific usages of Marxâs terminology, quite to the contrary: a fruitful application of Marxâs theory could imply a âcreativeâ way to deal with his categories when it is productive of cognitive gain. The creative usage of Marxâs conceptualisations however should be asked to meet the requirement of at least attempting to grasp Marxâs specific intervention. It could further be enhanced by meeting Marxâs own method at eye level. This however implies the identification of the object of critique, namely socialisation under the directive of the full operation of the capitalist mode of production. However, as I will show, Harootunian neither meets this requirement, nor seems to be particularly interested in recapitulating Marxâs specific Problemstellung. What we find in Harootunianâs theoretical approach is that the meaning of real subsumption instead turns into the real subsumption of meaning, irrespective of whether we have Marxâs conceptual framework or the target of Marxâs critique in mind. We contend that Harootunianâs project of âdeprovincialising Marxâ against the postcolonial attempt to delegitimise or âprovincialiseâ Marx becomes itself an unwitting attempt at Marxâs âprovincialisationâ, in that it not only counterfactually mobilises formal against real subsumption â in direct opposition to Marx â but makes the reference to Marxâs central theoretical question about the operation of not only how capital produces, but how it produces itself â the very definition of what the heuristic of real subsumption that Marx devotes the analysis of Capital to clarifying â redundant. Because if the central question surrounding Marxâs project is expurgated from the research programme, then another question suggests itself immediately: why draw on Marx at all? The apparent non-applicability and insignificance of Marxâs intervention for Harootunianâs ends (of which he seems little aware) seems a far greater concession to Marxâs âprovincialisationâ than the postcolonial project which at least recognises the theoretical fertility of Marxâs intervention. As we will see, the eschewal of Marxâs principal interest in the conceptual interrelation of real subsumption, value and the development of the forces of production on a systematic global scale, is due to a use value-fetishistic hyperbole that Harootunian, like other authors discussed in this chapter, mobilises against the value form. As I will show, this strategy also betrays Harootunianâs neoliberal agenda, which downplays actual human suffering effected by the global implementation of the law of value.
Again, as shown throughout this volume, the realm of use value, which Harootunian mobilises as the space âmitigatingâ the sphere of the valorisation, is beside the point for capitalist production. And if it is true that an imagined âuse-value spaceâ allegedly hampers the âcompletion of the commodity relationâ which âtrumpet(s) the triumph of capitalismâ, as Harootunian thinks, then it does so only in order to present another barrier for the realisation of surplus value, which must be overcome. This is what the analysis of the production of relative surplus value, corresponding to the real subsumption of labour under capital, signifies. With the breakdown of the barriers to the appropriation of unpaid labour, also the legal and extra-economic barriers increasingly vanish. As Marx neatly illustrates in this passage from the âResults of the Immediate Process of Productionâ,
⦠on the one hand, [capital] creates means by which to overcome obstacles that spring from the nature of production itself, and on the other hand, with the development of the mode of production peculiar to itself, it eliminates all the legal and extra-economic impediments to its freedom of movement in the different spheres of production. Above all, it overturns all the legal and traditional barriers that would prevent it from buying this or that kind of labour-power as it sees fit, or from appropriating this or that kind of labour.233
What characterises capital is its indifference towards the particular âforms of the labour process it acquiresâ,234 once real subsumption is enacted. The talk of âsingular contextsâ (understood in terms of national/regional unevenness) barely conceals the commentatorâs desideratum of âpreservingâ intact and innocent spaces, âuntouchedâ by the capital relation, preserved in the notional sphere of formal subsumption, concrete labour and use value.235 Against this unabashed ideological, moralistically motivated rejection of real subsumption, we will present a radically different reading of real subsumption that focuses on real subsumption as a methodological heuristic indicating the âcompletedâ fetishisation of the capital relation. We will show that real subsumption 1) presents a critical category directed against the âfetishism of the political economistsâ, 2) forms not only the incentive, but the actual object of Marxâs analysis of the capitalist mode of production, and 3), by directly corresponding to the production of relative surplus value, allows us to conceptually confront the mechanism that effects the dominance and perseverance of capital on a global scale, the âovercomingâ of any obstacle, economic or political, that may impede the appropriation of unpaid surplus labour. As against formal subsumption, real subsumption then indicates a methodological tool for deciphering the context of fetishism and the increasing mystification of the capital relation, which the present work highlights as the crucial aspect in Marxâs Critique of Political Economy. Contrary to what Harootunian believes, it is formal, not real subsumption that serves as no more than a preliminary âhypothetical modelâ, lacking the form determination of capitalist reproduction that only real subsumption â indicating the self-reproductive subsumption of wage labour under capital implied by the production of relative suplus value â can offer.
5.3.1 The Meaning of Real Subsumption I: Against the âCapital Fetishâ of Conventional Political Economy
Formal and real subsumption, as the two heuristic-interpretative diagnoses corresponding to the production of absolute, and, respectively, the production of relative surplus value and their inner relation,236 are clearly defined in their loci classici in Capital (parts 3â5) and the âResults of the Immediate Process of Productionâ, a chapter initially included as Chapter Six, but then discarded from the third draft of Capital, the 1863â5 Manuscript.237 However, the âResultsâ offer a rich, if very dense, summary of what Marx thought was crucial about both the immediate effect of the capitalist mode of production â that âcapitalist productionâ is first and foremost âthe production of surplus valueâ, as one section title asserts â as well as what the bourgeois âinterpretersâ in their ahistoric, generalising, and hence, fetishistic approach to capital missed about capitalâs specific social form. The significance of the analysis of the general features of capital is on a par with the critique of its fetishism in the political economists. With the concepts of formal and real subsumption in the context of this debate, the âResultsâ are therefore a useful source for analysing the impetus Marx intended with these heuristic concepts. Here, we can immediately discern that the conceptual distinction between formal and real subsumption is decisive for grasping different levels of abstraction concerning the object in question (i.e., the capitalist mode of production). This impetus remained completely beyond the scope of classical and vulgar political economy. The importance of different levels of abstraction is evident from Marxâs explication that formal subsumption âis the general form of every capitalist process of productionâ, while it can be found as a âparticular form alongside the specifically capitalist mode of productionâ.238 While the specifically capitalist mode of production requires the formal and general characteristics of the formal subsumption of labour under capital, the reverse does not hold (i.e. formal subsumption exists, or rather, existed in the absence of the specifically capitalist mode of production). In the view of historical succession which Marx points at throughout the chapter, formal subsumption corresponds to âan earlier state of independenceâ239 of the direct producers (self-sustaining peasants, farmers who only pay a rent on their direct produce, rural or domestic secondary industry, independent handicraft), with labour being subsumed under the directive that it produce surplus-value, but without yet a direct transformation of the labour process by technological innovation of the means of production, and hence, changes of scale, for the production of surplus value. We can therefore state that formal subsumption remains at the level of a general and formal, merely social relation, whereas real subsumption also indicates the incessantly dynamic transformation of the material conditions of production which in turn more radically transforms the social relationship between capital and labour.
To understand how formal and real subsumption point to different levels of the fetishisation of capital and the capital relation, we should first look at their common features. The connecting thematic nexus between formal and real subsumption is the unity of the labour and valorisation process that is specific to the capitalist mode of production. The capital fetish, the perception of capital of being directly âfruit-bearingâ, is a direct result of the valorisation process itself, which Marx so rigorously describes in the âResultsâ as the effect of viewing the form determinations of capitalâs use value (the means of production, i.e., raw materials, auxiliary materials, means of labour, tools, etc.) in abstraction from the historically specific social form they serve: namely, to be means for the production of surplus value. Capital thus appears as a ânecessary feature of the human labour process as suchâ.240 This applies to both formal as well as real subsumption. Formal subsumption however cannot account for the same degree of mystification as real subsumption, because it is necessarily limited to the production of absolute surplus value, and with it, the lengthening of the working day and the proportional rise in the value of labour power, as well as the proportional rise in the value of the commodity. In other words, the relation between labour and value is still cogent; less labour employed in the final product implies less value, more labour employed will result in a higher value of the commodity. The source of value is not yet thoroughly mystified.
In real subsumption, however, the relation between labour and value is fully obscured. With the production of relative surplus value, the development of the forces of production and the devalorisation of labour power, the proportion of labour in the final product â and the commodity is the immediate product of the process of capitalist production â becomes smaller: work is increasingly substituted for âtechnologyâ241 and machines (âcapitalâ in the bourgeois dictum), profits ascribed to the âfruit-bearingâ power of the means of production, the âproductive powerâ of capital. In the capital fetish, the obfuscation of the relation between labour and value is completed. A propos the âproductive powers of capitalâ, Marx notes:
It does not appear as the productive power of labour, or even of that part of it that is identical with capital.242 And least of all does it appear as the productive power either of the individual worker or of the workers joined together in the process of production. The mystification implicit in the relations of capital as a whole is greatly intensified here, far beyond the point it had reached or could have reached in the merely formal subsumption of labour under capital.243
Accordingly, formal and real subsumption correspond to different levels of mystification of the value forms. Marx identifies formal subsumption by âthe takeover by capital of a mode of labour developed before the emergence of capitalist relationsâ, an âavailable, established labour processâ, a âtraditional established labour processâ in which only âgradual consequencesâ of that form of subsumption of labour under capital can appear:244 âThe work may become more intensive, its duration may be extended, it may become more continuous under the eye of the interested capitalist, but in themselves these changes do not affect the character of the actual labour processâ.245 This is quite contrary to âthe specifically capitalist mode of productionâ246Â â the production of relative surplus value: â[The] latter not only transforms the situations of the various agents of production, it also revolutionizes their actual mode of labour and the real nature of the labour process as a wholeâ.247
What is interesting here is that Marx directly identifies the âspecifically capitalist mode of productionâ with the production of relative surplus value248 and explicitly distinguishes it from the production of absolute surplus value of formal subsumption. In other words, we may add, formal subsumption may be a prerequisite for capitalist relations of production to arise249 (and the fertile ground for the mystification of capital); however, it is not itself specifically capitalist. Something else aside the mere subjugation of the labour process under the directives of capital must happen in order for the real, for the specifically capitalist mode of production to develop. What we can witness here is a classic case of the Hegelian âtransformation of quantity into qualityâ, in that Marx largely gives reasons attributable to measure, quantity and scale, i.e. the expansion of the scale of production, i.e. large scale industry, the establishment of the factory, etc. â in other words, a certain degree of the development of the forces of production â so as to account for the emergence of real subsumption of labour under capital, just as quantitative relations were a precondition for the emergence of the formal subsumption against older modes of labour:
The distinction between labour formally subsumed under capital and previous modes of labour becomes more apparent, the greater the increase in the volume of capital employed by the individual capitalist, i.e. the greater the increase in the number of workers employed by him at any one time. Only with a certain minimum capital does the capitalist cease to be a worker himself and [begin] to concern himself entirely with directing work and organizing sales. And the real subsumption of labour under capital, i.e. capitalist production proper, begins only when capital sums of a certain magnitude have directly taken over control of production, either because the merchant turns into an industrial capitalist, or because larger industrial capitalists have established themselves on the basis of formal subsumption.250
The choice of the plural â industrial capitalists â is not accidental. As we have discussed at length in Chapter 4.3., it is only with competition that the concept of the magnitude of value of socially necessary labour time receives its full meaning, as well as its immediate appearance in the form of price (and the notion of the existence of a single industrial capitalist makes little sense). We have also seen that the âsocial valueâ of the commodity no longer corresponds to its âindividual valueâ, because of the systematic and fetishistic distortion induced by competitive suppliers in intrasectoral competition and technological innovation. It is here that relative surplus value establishes itself as the primary mode of the extraction of unpaid labour. Here, the price form allows the individual capitalist who first establishes cost-saving technological changes (i.e., before other suppliers within the same branch of production do so) to sell his commodities at a price above its social value. For Marx, â[with] the production of relative surplus value the entire real form of production is altered and a specifically capitalist form of production comes into being (at the technological level, too)â.251
However, with the emergence of economies of scale, general wage dependency comes into play. When the commodity form becomes the universal and exclusive form of social reproduction, pushing back older forms of self-subsistence, the wage form simultaneously arises as the universal and exclusive possibility of workersâ reproduction. This is how the Umschlagen von Quantität in Qualität is concretely enacted in the emergence of specifically capitalist relations of production.
Consequently, it is the concept of real subsumption, not that of formal subsumption, that formed the essential interest and motivation behind Marxâs attempt to analyse not only the way that capital produces, but to describe how the capital relation (re)produces itself by dynamically transforming the process of technological and therefore also social production.
This is also more specifically the thematic of the âProcess of Accumulation of Capitalâ, Part 7 of Capital, and especially the chapter on âThe Political Economistsâ Erroneous Conception of Reproduction on an Increasing Scaleâ, which profoundly draws out the blind spots of classical political economy and its failure to explain not only the origin of surplus, but how the surplus reinstantiates the subsumption of labour under capital by the very process of capitalist production itself. Real subsumption and the reproduction of the capital relation completely fall out of the framework of classical political economy.252 In that sense, the analysis of the capital fetish and the concept of real subsumption serve the common goal of the critique of classical (and vulgar) political economy, which Harootunian, like Uno, do not recognise as the first and foremost function of Marxâs critical project.
The analogy of formal and real subsumption with simple and extended reproduction, respectively, is striking. The production of absolute surplus value can only ever be a limited form of production, due to the ânatural limitâ of the working day. In the presentation of reproduction in Part 7 of Capital Volume I, as well as the Reproduction Schemes in Volume II, Marx, for didactic reasons, begins with simple reproduction. Simple reproduction however is only a formal and general hypothetic model. It does not describe the actual capitalist reproduction process, which cannot be anything other than reproduction on an extended scale, reproduction yielding surplus value for the capitalist class. Indeed, â[there] is no âsimpleâ capitalist reproduction. Without self-expansion capital is not capital, its circulatory movement is, echoing Hegelâs description of dialectical development, âa spiral, an expanding curve, not a simple circleââ¯â.253 Claudio Napoleoni confirms the analogy between the formal, general model of simple reproduction with formal subsumption, and the actual reproduction on an extended scale with real subsumption:
Before the emergence of the capital relation, the goal of production was not surplus value; production therefore took place within confined limits. Now that the goal of production has clearly become surplus value and it has no other determination than that of quantity, and the capitalist has no other goal than augmenting this quantity, the labour process is, so to speak, constrained by formal subsumption. While it remains the same, it underlies the attempt to expand its scale, so that it can actually serve the specific goal of capitalist production, which consists in the unlimited increase in surplus value. It is precisely this constraint of the labour process which causes the transition from formal to real subsumption, because at a certain point it becomes impossible to expand its scale if it remains in the previous form.254
In other words, formal subsumption corresponds to a âgeneralâ mode of the subsumption of labour under capital. Here, however, the object, a process of production, in which the value of labour power is constant, does not correspond to its concept or âideaâ, the maximal extraction of unpaid surplus labour. This is a definite constraint to the aim and purpose of the capitalist mode of production. Only with real subsumption and the production of relative surplus value does the object correspond to its concept, in that only with the devaluation of the value of labour power, and the potential extraction of infinite quantities of surplus value, do we have the final ârealisation of the idealâ of capitalâs self-valorisation. And this, as shown in Chapter 4.4., immediately becomes the reason for capitalâs crisis tendency, the inherent contradiction in the law of value.
5.3.2 The Meaning of Real Subsumption II: The Capital Relation as Marxâs Specific Object of Investigation
Hence it is formal, not real subsumption that serves as a âhypothetic modelâ for analysing the actual conditions of capitalist reproduction, as a historical precursor, but more significantly, as a rough approximation that still lacks the specific form determinations of capitalist reproduction. The single most important form determination of the real capitalist mode of production is, however, the subsumption of labour under capital that is reproductive of itself, i.e. not hinging on anything else but the process of production. This is provided in the form determination of the wage. Wage dependency marks the differentia specifica between the preliminary heuristic of formal against real (âactually implementedâ) subsumption: â⦠the production of relative surplus-value completely revolutionizes the technical processes of labour and the groupings into which society is dividedâ.255 In formal subsumption, with the âearlier state of independenceâ of the individual producers and reproduction on an even scale, the dependence on the wage was peripheral. In real subsumption, the wage relation becomes central. In fact, it becomes the single form determination that fully expresses the transition of the objective conditions of production (means of production) away from the direct producers towards the capitalist class â and with it, also the subjective conditions of reproduction (means of subsistence). Through the sole dominance of the wage form, the production of relative surplus value establishes itself as the confrontation between capital and labour which is the object of Marxâs investigation (and not, e.g. the âhoarding of riches in the hands of the fewâ). Based on the production of relative surplus-value, âand simultaneously with it, the corresponding relations of production between the various agents of production and above all, between the capitalist and the wage labourer, come into being for the first timeâ.256 In his analysis of the production of relative surplus value, Marx was finally able to determine the specific object of critique, namely the systematic contradiction between the classes, between capital and wage labour, or the capital relation:
Capitalist production therefore reproduces in the course of its own process the separation between labour-power and the conditions of labour. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the conditions under which the worker is exploited ⦠It is no longer a mere accident that capitalist and worker confront each other in the market as buyer and seller ⦠The capitalist process of production, therefore, seen as a total, connected process, i.e. a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one hand the capitalist, on the other hand the wage labourer.257
Hence the two different forms of the production of surplus value correspond to two different forms of the subsumption of labour under capital, and not to, say, two different forms of the âaccumulation of wealthâ. Because the production of relative surplus value reproduces the capital relation itself, it indicates the real, the total and absolute subordination of labour under capital, a relation, in which the âobject (Sache)â corresponds to its âconcept (Begriff)â, and the form determination of the capital relation is complete. This is the object of Marxâs investigation.
Let us briefly recapitulate, with Marx, how exactly the production of relative surplus value effects the reproduction of the capital relation. The âcurtailmentâ258 of necessary and, with it, the extension of surplus labour, on which the production of relative surplus value rests, obviously entails a wage decrease for the workers. Without a certain âstandard of livingâ, however, the reproduction of labour power proves to be difficult. Capital itself therefore must change the conditions of production under which it can valorise itself. Production is transformed under the auspices of velocity, efficiency, quantity of output â in short, cost-saving administrative techniques and technologies.259 With the lowering of production costs, especially in variable capital, and the intensified and/or extended use of constant capital, a bigger mass of commodities can be produced in a shorter period of time. At the same time, and by the same process, the value of the commodities necessary for worker consumption260 decreases. Insofar as the production of relative surplus value decreases the value of labour power (the money wage), it also decreases the value of the commodities that can be bought with it. The socially necessary labour time they contain becomes smaller. By this dynamic, the subsistence of the working class has become directly subordinate to the logic of capital. This is what is meant by the form determination of wage: in its phenomenal form of abstract and general human labour â money â it may be exchanged for any use value available on the market, but it cannot present anything else than use values available on the market, again feeding into capitalâs valorisation process. But if the value of the newly produced commodities is lower, valorisation can only keep up with its own imperative if a greater mass of commodities is being produced in a shorter period of time â and, again, bought by the workers with their wage. With it, working hours and days become longer, surplus labour and output increases. The circle repeats itself. This process is inherent to the âconstant revolutionising of productionâ.
Bigger, not better, but faster, and more: it is this dynamic transformation of the conditions of production which spurs the development of the forces of production.261 The means of choice for the capitalist class to lower the value of labour power is the substitution of living for dead labour, i.e. the substitution of labour for technical auxiliaries, advanced computerisation in the production process, robotics, assistant systems, etc., today known as âdigitalisationâ. Because the general division of private labour and the competition between capitals, however, still dominate this mode of production â never mind the stage of the development of the forces of production â every single capital employed is viewed solely with regard to cost saving procedures â while every single capitalist endeavours to achieve the most effective and potent valorisation of his capital. By no means the single capitalist consciously decides to shorten necessary labour and lower the value of labour power, but âhe contributes towards increasing the general rate of surplus value only insofar as he ultimately contributes to this result. The general and necessary tendencies of capital must be distinguished from its forms of appearanceâ.262 As we have seen, it is precisely the capital fetish, i.e., the notion that the substitution of living for dead labour enhances a more efficient valorisation, which is a form of appearance, a fetish dominating capitalâs self-perception and its prospective survival strategies, regardless of its increasing inherent contradiction manifested in the crisis of valorisation. Yet, capitalâs infinite âhunger for surplus labourâ, the shortening of necessary labour, the substitution of living for dead labour, and the development of the forces of production is directly tied to the emergence and consolidation of the capitalist mode of production as a class-based social relation. Competition spurs âthe individual capitalist ⦠to seize the initiativeâ263 by shortening necessary and extending surplus labour through the employment of technological innovation; this in turn lowers the value of labour power, and finally the circle towards the consolidation of the class relation is closed, because wage dependency is no longer an accidental social relation between capital and labour, but its exclusive and solitary form.
However, just as obviously, this development is not a new one. Wage dependency is as old as the system of capitalist production itself. Looking at the history of real subsumption, we can go back almost 300 years to find the same logic of automatisation that we find today. In mid-eighteenth-century France, engineer and inventor Jacques de Vaucansonâs (1709â82) programme-controlled spinning machines helped accelerate the production process and increased the output level.264 Yet, for the capitalist class, the âflexibilityâ of automated machines was a desideratum in the early days of mass production, as it is one today:
[The development of automatons with higher flexibility] goes back as far as the cylinders and wooden punch cards, which were used for machine control systems in the 18th century. In the 1740s, the French clockmaker and inventor Jacques Vaucanson developed the first programme-controlled machine. He received an order by Louis XV to modernise the French textile industry. Frustrated by the resistance of the weaversâ guild of Lyon,265 he developed a weaving loom in which the textile pattern was no longer crafted by humans, but by punch cards. Just like the pins on the cylinder of a music box generate a melody, the punches in the wooden plates guide the spinning needles and the threadâs different colours, to craft a cloth whose pattern corresponded to that of the punch cards ⦠the weaving loom could now be operated without induction by the handicraftsmen, which had hitherto determined the sequence of the multi-coloured threads. Vaucanson ⦠made their labour knowledge âmachine-readableâ.266
In other words, even in its earliest mercantilist days, capitalist production could not survive without a constant revolutionising of the mode of production, the introduction of the newest techniques and technologies. Louis XVâs incentive was the growing competition on the world market for sales, and in that sense there is little to suggest a qualitative difference in motivation between his enhanced production method of the early eighteenth century and Chinaâs mega-factories of today. In other words, capitalism without competition is a contradictio in adiecto. Yet, in its general framework, formal subsumption abstracts from market competition, and in doing so, it abstracts from general wage dependency generated by the development of the productive forces. As a general, abstract concept, it leaves the specific form determination of the subsumption of labour under capital unconsidered.
It is clear from the greater bulk of passages in the âResultsâ that Marx invites a reading in which formal and real subsumption correspond to different historical stages.267 Yet, when we consider the wider context of the discussion, it is clearly embedded in a more theoretical and conceptual concern, the âmystificationâ process of capital generated by its confrontation with labour. Hence, Marxâs discussion of formal and real subsumption fundamentally concerns the increasingly persistent dominance of the capital fetish. Already with the emergence of formal subsumption,
[the] mystification inherent in the capital-relation emerges ⦠The value-sustaining power of labour appears as the self-supporting power of capital; the value-creating power of labour as the self-valorizing power of capital and, in general, in accordance with its concept, living labour appears to be put to work by objectified labour.268
How the social creates the real mystification whose outcome is a technologically defined mode of production is the real concern of Marxâs discussion of subsumption. When, in the heuristic of real subsumption, the technological comes to dominate the social, things become persons, persons become things, and the wage relation establishes itself as the sine qua non of reproduction, the capital fetish is complete. With this framework, we must conclude that Harootunian errs not only on the level of grasping the function of formal and real subsumption as critical concepts, but he errs in believing that the framework of formal subsumption meaningfully contributes to understanding the real and actual workings of capitalist sociation on a global scale. We will shortly elucidate this misunderstanding by pointing not only to the theoretical, but the political perniciousness of Harootunianâs intervention following from his theoretical apotheosis of formal against real subsumption.
5.3.3 The Use Value-Fetishistic Hyperbole of Formal Subsumption
The critical function of Marxâs main work, Capital, as previously stated, is already clear from the very first conceptual abstraction presented to us in the value form of the commodity, this most complex, and by no means âsimplestâ category that Marx utilises to deconstruct the fetishistic sphere of âsimple exchangeâ, as seen in Chapter 1. For already in the commodity, the contradiction between value and use value implies a subsumption, as Sáenz de Sicilia notices:
Capitalist social relations ⦠involve the instauration of the commodity as the elementary form of social wealth, a form whose value aspect stands over and above the qualitative particularity of its use-value aspect and subsumes it as a result of its subjection to commercial circulation.269
The value aspect of the commodity, subsuming and subordinating use value, has become the structuring force of capitalist production. The actual production of relative surplus value, to which real subsumption and its techniques of âconstantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of societyâ270 correspond, and of which the âdigital revolutionâ, massive global technological reconstruction, economies of scale, automatisation, the increasing substitution of living labour for digitalised automatons and robots, etc. are direct expressions, blatantly defies production of absolute surplus value and, with it, formal subsumption. Formal subsumption, as we have seen, essentially assumes a constant organic composition of capital, i.e. reproduction on an even scale.271 Formal subsumption is incompatible with specifically capitalist relations of production. Today, it exists nowhere but in the mind of the theorist.
Indeed, a thorough critique of Marxâs category of real subsumption of labour under capital would have to be formulated as a general critique of Marxâs analysis of the capital relation and the theory of social form on which it is based. Such a critique would have to show that
the capitalist mode of production does not insist on a systematic subsumption of living labour under the imperatives of the valorisation process of capital, encroaching on the labour process, [it would have to show] that the class-form relation of the domination of capital is not constantly being reproduced by the dynamic of capital growth, and that in its historical progress, capital did not transform the previous labour modes and labour forces according to forms necessitated by its need for expansion. This would be tantamount to presenting evidence that the capital form of value were not the organising and synthetisising principle of modern bourgeois society.272
One may rightfully ask what motivates Harootunianâs intervention to taxonomically subordinate the concept of real under that of formal subsumption. We must return here to the problematic of the fetishism of use value that informs most Uno-affiliated research. Here is precisely the second objection to Harootunianâs project for the ârecognitionâ of uneven development, because, strictly speaking and on the basis of the conceptual framework elaborated by Marx, Harootunian contends that capitalism proper does not exist as a global social system. For a writer working in the historical present, Harootunianâs insistence on the âillusionâ that real subsumption should count as a social reality is at best ignorant and, at worst, cynical â not only if we face the reality of the hardship of billions of people who live under the conditions of capitalism in its specifically globalised mode (which Harootunian strangely never refers to). This denial of actually existing capitalism also coincides with the neoliberal agenda Harootunian unwittingly pursues. To be sure, if Harootunianâs claim is that next to the âcapitalist everydayâ, there exist âotherâ, âhybridâ forms, which survived as âremnants of the pastâ, this amounts to a truism. Harootunianâs claim, however, is a stronger one: namely that the âhybrid formsâ â Zen Buddhism in corporate activities, customs and religious beliefs â weaken the experience of exploitation and the everyday grind in dependent wage labour. This claim reads as if it had been taken from the catechism of corporate propaganda (âwork-life-balanceâ), considering, for example, that Zen Buddhism in Japanese corporations has not been able to mitigate the problem of karÅshi (and how, indeed, could it?).273 The karÅshi phenomenon however is a direct and real effect of real subsumptionâs production of relative surplus value in that capitalâs appropriation of unpaid surplus labour has become potentially infinite, driving employees to âwork-onto-deathâ and having to expect informal sanctions when they do not. Harootunianâs confidence in the mitigating factors of âdiverse cultural practicesâ and âreligious beliefsâ, categories of use value, cynically ignores this actual and real implementation of the law of value in the fabric of economic life. To claim that âsingular contextsâ, âuneven temporalitiesâ etc. weaken âthe experience of exploitationâ does not change the fact that this amounts to support for the euphemistic image neoliberalism likes to present of the real capitalism which it ideologically and politically orchestrates. This is especially clear where Harootunian attempts a critique of Marxâs analysis of real subsumption, not only misrecognising the specific object of critique it establishes, but confronting it with a conceptual catalogue allegedly indicating a âdifferentâ agenda â the âarchaic in the presentâ, âunevennessâ, âuntimelinessâ (yet the view that capital had a specific âagendaâ remains Harootunianâs alone) â thus inviting the view of use value as a possible field of political resistance to capital by virtue of its alleged âexternalityâ:
⦠Marx may have ⦠understated the political consequences of recognizing and mobilizing these spectral reminders of temporal unevenness, untimeliness, and arrythmia in producing discordance, consequences such as disturbing the homogenous linearity projected by the nation-state busy promoting the claims of another kind of contemporaneity. For these âready-madesâ, taken over and utilized in a different way, released from the role they once played in modes of production that generated them, were not completely emptied of their historicality but still indexed the intimation of a time external to and dissimilar from capitalism, a world where use-value and the non-differentiation of subject and object still supposedly prevailed, bringing with it possibilities for different forms of political economy.274
However, categories of use value, mobilised as âarrythmiaâ or âareas of lifeâ that are not âfully subsumedâ by the capital relation (âexternalâ to them) do not hamper the hard interests of valorisation. âCultural practicesâ do not âweakenâ the âexperience of exploitationâ. Moreover, as a critical category, exploitation is not an âexperienceâ. This is precisely why it could become the secret to the self-representations of alleged equivalent exchange. Harootunianâs empirical hypostases miss Marxâs crucial analytical and critical intervention against capitalâs self-definition. They cannot be empirically redeemed as they miss the overall specificity of Marxâs method in relation to that of bourgeois political economyâs empiricism.
Because of the fact that, by the process of really subsuming labour as a use value-producing activity, capital renders value the ultimate and only goal of the production process, the ongoing valorisation process is veritably indifferent275 to the âuse-value spaceâ of cultural practices. It is indifferent to the fact that Pakistani day labourers in Dubaiâs shipbuilding industry read the Koran, or that Bangladeshi textile labourers perform Hindu rites, or that Chinese toy factory slave workers, when asked, name âBuddhismâ as their religion of choice â as long as these practices do not hamper capitalâs drive towards surplus value. Consequently, Harootunian cynically ignores the conditions under which workers in regions having undergone âuneven developmentâ live and suffer, with no perspective for the future being one of the milder self-assessments. âHybrid forms of subsumptionâ is the theoristâs euphemism for a reality in which workers provide the âhuman materialâ absorbed for capitalâs valorisation process. At the same time, and counter-intuitively, considering the strong emphasis Harootunian puts on âuneven developmentâ, his approach also ignores the effects of globalisation. It is difficult to ignore real subsumption in the face of the reality of child labourers in Africaâs Congo digging rare earths like cobalt and cassiterite as raw materials for the production of smart phones in China â not to mention the anxiously anticipated effects of an even stronger globalised capitalism, manifested in political and economic tools such as Transatlantic trade treaties like the TTIP which mainly rely on real subsumption to perfect the exploitation process. In view of his objective of âgaining access to the historically concreteâ,276 Harootunianâs assessment that the commodity form has not been completed everywhere becomes grotesque. His criticism of theorists who âfail to see what clearly is around and before them, everywhere: the persisting traces of historical-temporal forms from the past, the shadowed silhouette of âliving labourâ, and the ever present signals they emit of continuing unevennessâ,277 expresses not the slightest discernible theoretical or practical interest in changing the conditions of the real capitalist predicament. To the contrary: this romanticising view of the âshadowed silhouette of âliving laborââ¯â betrays his apologetic view to the capitalâs subsumption mode.278 It delivers no conceptual instrument to confront the actual conditions of our historical present. Like the Anglophone Uno Schoolâs approach to the analysis of the capitalist relations of production, Harrootunian assumes an apologetic stance toward the present. In this framework, capitalism is no longer a problem â in fact, a social relation of production that must be overcome if humankind were to be free â but an object of discourse to be viewed more empathically, with more nuance, more âdiverselyâ. This is in line with the propaganda of neoliberalism, in which the concept of âdifferent capitalismsâ â another word for âsingular contextsâ of capital â serves to extenuate resistance and critical action against a clearly identified target of critique.
In sum, Harootunianâs theoretical hypostatisation of an alleged realm âoutsideâ of capitalâs global dominance assumes a fetishistic attitude to the conceptual circumference of use value which it attempts to mobilise against value as âthe organising and synthetisising principle of modern bourgeois societyâ (R. Schmiede), choosing to imitate the neoliberal impetus of highlighting the âmitigating effectsâ of use value-mediated cultural practices and/or âremnantsâ of âdifferent temporalitiesâ, thereby downplaying and ignoring human suffering induced by the law of value.
Like the projects of Uno, of the value theorists of the post-Uno School, and of Sekine and Albritton, respectively, Harootunian presents a travesty of Marxâs Critique of Political Economy. While the concessions to neoliberal tropes and the apologetic stance they take may be due to academic necessities â and today, the university is the neoliberal institution per se â their work presents a serious obstacle to an emancipatory struggle, which also always takes place in the realm of theory.
5.3.4 The Fetishism of Use Value as the âSite of Resistanceâ
In his The Sublime Perversion of Capital. Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan, Gavin Walker posits a question directly relevant to our own inquiry, namely whether Uno, decisively rejecting any consequences for a theory of revolution from the analysis of Capital âwas not ⦠also giving up on Marxâs revolutionary project?â279 For Walker, this question must be answered in the negative, while we have seen in the previous that it is the inadequacy of the categories by which Uno attempts to grasp the phenomenon of capital in contrast to Marx that already renders the object of critique Uno addresses obscure. In accordance with our analysis, it is little surprising then that Uno disrupts pure theory from the question of revolution: capital, understood as a principally âself-regulatingâ heaven, an equilibrium form of production which sees to the satisfaction of social needs does not exactly urge one to call for an overcoming of such a production form. In Walkerâs interpretation, however, Uno offers a âsuspension that ruptures the apparently smooth cycleâ of capital, found in the concept of the â(im)possibility of the commodification of labour powerâ or the âmuriâ of capital which serves as capitalâs site of resistance. The tenet of the following critique will be to show, however, that a conceptual âapparatusâ mobilised against a particular predicament which is itself misconceived cannot help but be itself a faultily constructed theoretical, and hence also political, claim.
In his work, Walker follows a unique, if not to say idiosyncratic approach: rather than viewing Unoâs pure theory as a conceptualisation of the âgeneral norms of economic lifeâ, as Uno contends in the Introduction to the 1964 edition of the Principles, Walker sees pure theory as capitalâs âfantasyâ: âUno intervenes in theory to show that capitalism can be systematized as a pure circuit: he calls this internal dream or fantasy of capital âthe world of principleâ, or pure capitalismâ ⦠Strictly speaking, this âworld of principleâ does not exist as suchâ.280 As we have seen, Unoâs âpurificationâ, restructuring and condensation of the analysis in Capital, completely evading the topos of the Critique of Political Economy, is what is striking about Unoâs work, as it is responsible for the shortcomings we have analysed. Walkerâs approach is not only different: he sees the striking feature not so much in the âpurificationâ of the theory of capital, but in the new positing of questions seemingly unrelated, but directly related to the âgeneral analysisâ of capital: the national and the agrarian question. Like in Harootunian therefore, the agrarian question assumes a pivotal role in Walkerâs interpretation of pure theory. Let us see how Walker contextualises the agrarian question in relation to the question of the inter-relation of history and logic and the âparadoxicalâ solution he offers in his interpretation of the âmuriâ or the â(im)posssibility of the commodification of labour powerâ.
In his essay âThe World of Principle, or Pure Capitalism: Exteriority and Suspension in Uno KÅzÅâ (2012), Walker, like Harootunian, draws on Unoâs Agrarian Question to indicate that the âtransitionâ from feudalism to capitalism in the nation-state of Japan did not occur âsmoothlyâ. To the contrary, what was perceived as âfeudal remnantsâ were not âremnantsâ at all â they formed auxiliary means and even vital presuppositions to the implementation of the capitalist mode of production in Japan: âThe debate on Japanese capitalism, and therefore on the nature and location of the agrarian question in theory, leads Uno to a seemingly paradoxical conclusion: that the so-called âfeudal remnantsâ were not in fact âremnantsâ of feudalism in the strong sense, that is, obstacles or blocks on capitalâs local deployment, but rather precisely the opposite â¦â281
Unlike Harootunian, however, Walker has a specific philosophical interest connected with Unoâs text that goes far beyond its being a mere intervention in the debate on the evaluation of Japanese capitalism. In Walkerâs view, Unoâs historical understanding of capitalism is here interrelated with its logical âunfoldingâ as presented in the theory of principles. The historical herein provides a key to situate the logic, and even exerts âa certain theoretical pressure on the logical form of capitalâs functioning: the role of the mechanisms or apparatuses that would allow for the development of this paradoxical relation [of the historical and logical âimpossibilityâ of capital] in which what should be an obstacle instead functions to buttress, to nurture, to support, to aidâ.282
However, this âparadoxâ becomes thematic in Unoâs theorisation of the agrarian question only in relation to the historically inexplicable âeventâ (Badiou) of the commodification of labour power â an event neither explicable by history, nor by logic, but only as something forgotten within the apparatus of explication delivered by the means of capitalist logic itself, and hence a ânihilâ (muri) of reason. Walker: âThis is exactly how Uno will repeatedly disclose to us capitalâs essential dementia, a dementia that should arrest or obstruct its function, and yet through the formation and maintenance of these apparatuses, capital will be able to overcome its own demented logic without resolving the ânihil of reasonâ that characterizes its inner driveâ.283 What could this possibly mean?
According to Walker, while the three-level method (or âschematic of three levels of analysisâ, as Walker prefers to call it) â designating the theory of pure capitalism, the stage-theoretical analysis of capitalist development and the âconjunctural analysis of the immediate situationâ (genjÅ bunseki) â âseems at first to exclude the historical from the âworld of principleâ, in fact Unoâs work presupposes that this logical âworldâ is not a pure circle but a torus, a structure that constantly folds onto itselfâ.284 Capital may present itself as a âperfectâ, indeed, a âsmoothâ circle, but Walker contends that the geometric figure of a torus would much better symbolise the âhiddenâ, indeed, the âforgottenâ agenda of capitalist valorisation. In his explication, Walker puts special emphasis on the conceptual oppositions of inside/outside (of capitalâs logic, respectively, history) and presence/absence to concede that Uno has worked on these oppositions so as to show the fundamentally âirrationalâ or the âabsence of reasonâ in attempts that explain the capitalist accumulation process as a perfect circle. Capitalâs self-instantiation, like the famous âcourse of loveâ Marx quotes from Shakespeare in the chapter on value-form analysis, ânever does run smoothâ. Not only does capital for its self-functioning rely on a social relation outside of its immediate grasp â the reproduction of labour power that takes place in the sphere of consumption â, it also constantly suppresses its historical condition of possibility, the absence of the original commodification of labour power, in order to make its presence visible, according to Walker. Hence, with his three levels of abstraction, Uno, according to Walker, has figured out a way, or rather, a âweaponâ, to show how the existence of capitalism can be grasped as a social system that is in and out of itself, logically and historically, incomprehensible:
The analysis of âpure capitalismâ shows us that while we can determine the specifically logical drive of capitalâs interior motion, the logical interior itself is always paradoxically dependent on and coextensive with the historical exterior for its conditions of interiority. This paradox is expressed as the (im)possibility, the ânihil of reasonâ, or muri of the commodification of labor power, the Ur-Akt or arché of capitalâs logic ⦠when Uno argues, for example, that logically the circuit of commodities and money is interrupted by the consumption process and not by the production process, he is pointing out the paradox that the historicity of social relations is always-already suspending the pure and smooth circulation process.
But where is the âparadoxâ? To say that the consumption process constitutes an âinterruptionâ to the logical process of circulation is not paradoxical. The âhistoricalâ in this case may be external to the âlogicalâ process of valorisation, but it is by no means âparadoxicalâ. To claim that a logical operation hinges on factors it cannot provide itself may therefore question the status of its logicity, but is itself neither self-referential,285 contradictory, a vicious circle, nor âparadoxical.â That logic and history may be constitutive for each other in order to constitute a whole or to legitimise their own specific status only confirms the status of their respective exteriority. Yet they are in no âparadoxicalâ positon. A paradox only appears in the logical procedure of a self-contradiction in a = ¬ a, but the dependence of the logical on the historical does not indicate such a contradiction. A paradox requires that one category contradicts itself, not another one. These concepts simply designate two different categories. In other words, the relation of the logical and the historical does not seem to be elucidated by the conceptual apparatus Unoâs theory provides. Like in Albrittonâs stage theoretical elaborations, both remain external to one another and require separate theorisations. It is also implausible why the âinterruptionâ in the consumption process of labour power should be categorised as a âhistoricalâ event. One might as well, and with greater plausibility, argue that the consumption process of labour power belongs to the very logic of capitalist reproduction, as Marx does, when he insists that â[it] is not the worker who buys the means of production and subsistence, but the means of subsistence that buy the worker to incorporate him into the means of productionâ.286 We will return to this point soon.
Unoâs thesis that Japanâs feudal remnants served not as an obstacle, but as a support for the newly emerging capitalist system here finds another âparadoxicalâ expression. According to Walker, for Uno the new economic order was already at work âwithinâ capitalist social relations, as âa violence of the interior of capitalist social relationsâ,287 namely in the role of the proletariat:
The rural village structure, which had formed the social basis of the ancien régime, was thus seemingly dismantled through violence, yet at the same time, this was also in fact an expression of the planned balancing and harmonization [sic] of capitalist production. The pastures, expanded to accommodate the goal of wool exports, offered raw materials to the domestic wool industry, and the peasantry, expelled from the land in precisely the same process, became the laboring proletariat, the force that spurred on the capitalist industrialization of the wool and other medieval industries, which were at that point still being managed and administered on the level of simple handicrafts. Thus the emerging proletariat was itself used as a powerful force of pressure in order to forcibly subordinate the existing artisans to capital.288
Again, what Walker here identifies as a âbasic paradoxâ289 is not a paradox at all.
The proletariat emerged from the dissolution of the rural village structure that constituted the âsocial basis of the ancien régimeâ when production was still organised by peasants and artisans in domestic production in semi-dependent relationships, i.e. individual producers manufacturing goods in domestic, often family labour, under the supervision of overseers. With industrialisation, this kind of labour organisation was no longer possible: on its basis, peasants were expelled from the land, the enclosure system established, and the proletariat as the âfree worker in the double senseâ, i.e., the wage system emerged. This process indeed did not happen âsmoothlyâ, and it may well have been necessary to use parts of the emerging proletariat to force (wage?) pressure on the remaining artisans. However, this is not a âparadoxâ, but the specific form of development that the emergence of the proletariat had assumed in early sixteenth-century England. If anything, the new capitalist classesâ use of the proletariat to âforcibly subordinateâ the artisans to capital, is a logical, not paradoxical strategy. It helps them to subordinate production to production on a greater scale, and therefore favours the conditions for the production of greater amounts of surplus value. For the capitalists, this is quite a logical tactic. In other words, just because a specific historical transition does not occur âsmoothlyâ, does not imply its being âparadoxicalâ. In Walkerâs â not so much Unoâs â theorisation of original accumulation, we can detect a conceptual overreach of what it means for a certain historical development/logic to be âparadoxicalâ.
The real point for Walker, however, is that capital utilises means and âapparatusesâ that make its historical conditions of production appear as part of capitalâs logic, internal to it: â⦠capital not only encloses the outside while relying on it but, more specifically, forces the outside to invert or reverse itself into the inside; it âfoldsâ the historical exterior âinside outâ so that it can function as the putatively logical interiorâ.290 But hasnât Walker just attempted to show that capital in its historical unfolding relies on something always-already internal to capital, namely, the âproletariat as pressureâ, to mark this as the specific âbasic paradoxâ of capitalâs emergence? Is capitalâs emergence the result of a force from the âoutsideâ (âhistoryâ), disguised as âitsâ inside â or the result of something âalways-already insideâ (the proletariat, used as pressure)? This is never clear in Walkerâs conceptualisation, and we are left in the dark as to what the âparadox of inside and outside that obtains in the volatile amalgam of logic and history in the form of capital in generalâ is actually supposed to indicate, or what cognitive gain it is supposed to provide.291
To be sure, to elucidate the âgaps of the supposedly perfect circle of capitalâs self-movementâ292 is what motivates Walkerâs intervention and his interpretation of Unoâs muri of the commodification of labour power. Walker views Unoâs three level-method as a âweaponâ or âdevice that is forcefully inserted or shoved into the situation that bears the name âcapitalâ. By ramming this weapon into capitalâs smooth self-definition, Uno attempts to see how capital behaves when it is forced to disclose its essence, by being purified or determined in accordance with a schema that disables capitalâs own techniques of insinuationâ.293 Herein, finally, consists the secret to Walkerâs theoretical riddle, the âparadoxâ of the apparatus that makes capitalâs dependence on factors external to itself seem as though it belonged to the internal logic of capital itself: it is the âelementary form of resistanceâ294 that results from the muri of the commodification of labour power. With the âhistorically contingentâ process of original or primitive accumulation, the commodification of labour power presents itself as this weapon of resistance, something defying incorporation into capitalâs logic, even if capital would have us think differently.
⦠the proletariat discovers that it has ânothing to lose but its chainsâ only through the experience of being divorced form the land in the process of primitive accumulation and forcibly reconstituted as the owner of a single thing: labor power that can be commodified. Through the insertion of this labor-power commodity, the foundational input for capitalâs operation, the elementary form of resistance insinuates itself within the interior (capitalâs logic), and capital, in confronting the fact that it cannot itself produce this labor-power commodity, is forced to plug up its own gaps with the material of this resistance. Thus the proletarian outside discovers for itself the openings for the project of communism only, paradoxically, by being exposed to the weaknesses and limitations of capital from the inside: it is not a pure absence, but an âindiscernibleâ element that structures the exchange between interior and exterior.295
Again, there is no such thing as an âindependent existence of living labourâ under capitalist relations of production. The muri of the commodification of labour power cannot be upheld as the site of âruptureâ or âbreakâ (much less âresistanceâ) to the law of value, because it is itself constitutive of this very law. Walker himself neatly illustrates this fact in his discussion of the term Umschlag, which Marx used to indicate the transition of the law of equivalent exchange (between the labour power commodity and its exchange value) into the law of appropriation (of the unpaid surplus value produced beyond the exchange value of labour power):
This âinversionâ or âreversalâ [Umschlag] arises from the fact that the use value of labour capacity, as value, is itself the value-creating element; the substance of value, and the value-increasing substance ⦠[The worker] is absorbed and incarnated into the body of capital [wird er absorbiert vom und inkarniert in das Kapital] as a cause [Ursache], as activity [Tätigkeit]. Thus the exchange turns into its opposite, and the laws of private property ⦠turn into the workerâs propertylessness and the dispossession of his labour [Eigentumslosigkeit des Arbeiters und EntäuÃerung seiner Arbeit], [i.e.], the fact that he relates to it as alien property and vice versa.296
Because the use value of the commodity of labour power consists of living labour, i.e. of the positing of exchange value, there is indeed an âinversionâ (Umschlag), as Walker notices, from use value to value, but also from value (the monetary expression of the value of labour power) to use value. But it is precisely the quantitative difference between the value and the use value of the labour power commodity, or the necessary and the surplus labour it performs, that constitutes the conditio sine qua non of the capitalist production process. In other words, this inversion or Umschlag from the law of equivalent exchange to the law of appropriation in which the law of appropriation appears as the law of equivalent exchange does not indicate any kind of âgapâ or âruptureâ within the âsmooth circle of capitalâ: it is the condition of possibility of capitalist social relations, and with it, the fetishistic gaze of its bourgeois interpreters. Marx was able to solve the riddle of the classical political economists by explaining the source of surplus value on the basis of the law of equivalent exchange. However, he also explained that the use value of the labour power capacity quantitatively (measured in socially necessary labour time) exceeds its value is the âluckâ of the money owner,297 not a fraud. History does not impede the âsmooth circleâ, if anything, it forces it. In fact, as soon as the commodity form has really subsumed living labour under its own rationale, resistance cannot come from an imagined, âas-of-yet-still-not-commodifiedâ space of use value. It is precisely the process of production as the site of the valorisation process in which the subsumption of use value under value is enacted. Hence the consumption process of labour power is the production process of capital. There is no way that the use value of labour power or in fact any other use value designates âfreedomâ or âindependenceâ (as in the phrase âthe independence of living labourâ) from the interests of the social relation in which it is embedded. What would such an independence look like? Where should that place be? Capital has not âpreserved spacesâ in terms of use value for the theorist to claim as his little patch of land or âweaponâ to insert into its âsupposedly perfect circleâ. Any heuristic of resistance or even revolution has to accept that such a view succumbs to ideology. As we have seen in Chapter 2.2., living labour is a use value for capital only insofar as it is the mediating activity of valorisation. Both the objective (means of production) and subjective conditions of labour (means of subsistence) confront the worker as capital.298 The means of subsistence he buys are really subsumed into the logic of capitalâs valorisation process, âto incorporate him into the means of productionâ. Resistance cannot come from the use value dimension of an alleged âfree realmâ in which the worker can enact a supposedly not-yet-commodified âwillâ or âindividualityâ.
But if the aspect of use value is not the site of resistance to capital, then what is?
To answer, let us first summarise the problem of the hypostatisation of use value as site of resistance we have found in both Walker and in Harootunian, to conclude our investigation with the contradiction (and not merely âparadoxâ) of the capital relation itself.
The real stakes of the problem both in Harootunianâs and Walkerâs approaches consist in their reliance on the assumption that capital has not perfected (âreally subsumedâ) virtually all human social relations under its own logic (a logic of Sachzwänge, âpractical constraintsâ or ânecessitiesâ), because we can detect a failure, a rupture, a âgapâ, to capitalâs drive to self-valorisation in notions of âformal subsumptionâ (Harootunian) or âthe nihil of reason/the muri or the (im)possibility of labour powerâ (Walker). As we have seen, both theorisations are haunted by the spectre of resistance that the concept of use value seemingly provides. Particularly Walker deduces this claim from the fact that the labour power commodity has to reproduce itself in the sphere of consumption in which capitalâs circuit is allegedly interrupted. Here, the commodification of labour power and its reproduction as a commodity becomes a âforceâ against capital, or a muri, an âimpossibilityâ in Unoâs view, for the perfect totality of the production and reproduction process. Harootunianâs discourse is informed by the same presumption. Despite his insistence on the importance of the site of production, his discourse being informed by Luxemburgâs criticisms from the viewpoint of (under)consumption, he also retreats to the positive effect he concedes to use value against the completed value form of real subsumption. This can also be seen in his romantic affiliation with the concept of âthe freedom of living labourâ that he sees not as generating the exchange relation, but as the âradical otherâ of the âunfreedomâ generated by abstract labour. His critique of value form theory that allegedly âfail[s] to see what clearly is around and before [it], everywhere: the persisting traces of historical-temporal forms from the past, the shadowed silhouette of âliving labourâ, and the ever present signals they emit of continuing unevennessâ299 summons an empirical access to the âimmediacyâ of life that fails to meet the Marxian critique at eye level, even at its most empirical. In this interpretation, living labour produces not for value (and is appropriated without an equivalent through exchange), but for use value that resists real subsumption into âevenâ and singular trajectories, confirmed by a nostalgic view of the present that defies the reality of the hardship of billions of people in our historical time.
Moreover, both theorists more or less declare the sphere of circulation (or âconsumptionâ) and the effects of use value as the site where capital collides with its own limits and the sphere of production subaltern to their discourse: â⦠when Uno argues, for example, that logically the circuit of commodities and money is interrupted by the consumption process and not by the production process, he is pointing out the paradox that the historicity of social relations is always-already suspending the pure and smooth circulation processâ.300 Second, this very understanding of the commodity and money forms â abstracted from their own conditions of possibility in the way in which production is organised in capitalist societies â owes to a reading of Marxâs central concepts that completely sidesteps the problem of the fetish in relation to value. Here we might even draw a wider circle to incorporate not only the direct heirs of the Uno School, but also the post-Uno School of value theory in our critique. As we have seen in Chapter 5.1., Ebitsuka and Mukai, by systematically rejecting the importance of the substance of value in abstract labour, do not overcome the theoretical circumference of the Baileyan nominalist view of value and money. It is, however, precisely the rejection of the essential and grounding social relation â value as both a qualitative and quantitative determination â that renders their explanation of exchange relations confined to the aspect of use value. This is in line with their neoclassical argument of specific âwantsâ of commodity owners as the motivator for exchange relations whose Baileyan implications we have already analysed in Uno.
Again, the âparadoxâ, âgapâ, or âoutsideâ is not determined by the use value aspect of capitalist sociation. If anything, it is determined by the logic of production itself. This, we hold, is the real Verrücktheit  â âderangednessâ or âdisplacementâ, in Walkerâs idiom â that constitutes the irrationality of capitalism: the production of (surplus) value for the sake of surplus value under conditions in which people suffer âfrom the deadâ. It is this logic according to which the production process of capital undermines and negates the âoriginal sources (Springquellen) of its own wealthâ,301 the exploitation of Man and nature, regardless of needs, that qualifies as âmadâ (verrückt). By no means can use value, signifying the aspect of consumption or âspecific wantsâ or âneedsâ of commodity owners, sidestep, evade, interrupt, or deliver any means of resistance against the principles of capitalâs self-valorisation which is itself inherently contradictory (and not just merely âparadoxicalâ). In the following, let us elucidate the concept of use value fetishism and its lopsided view of the capital relation to articulate a radically different locus of resistance to capital which lies in the concept of capital, the law of value, itself.
In her epochal essay âUse Value Fetishismâ (âGebrauchswertfetischismusâ) (1993), Kornelia Hafner contends that use value as a category of âresistance and revoltâ, as can also be found in the works of Helmut Reinicke302 or Wolfgang Pohrt,303 is often owed to a conflation of use value with the category of the non-identical, as theorised by Adorno.304 The incommensurability of the non-identical to the âconceptâ (Begriff) then functions as the theoretical model for the same alleged incommensurability to be found in the relation between use value and value, âuse valueâ being identified with the non-identical or the âthingâ (Sache), âvalueâ with the concept (Begriff). This equivocation however is lopsided and has its basis in the misrecognition of the Hegelian dialectic as a âphilosophy of identityâ. Moreover, in this strategy, the interpretation of the non-identical as âmoment of resistanceâ becomes the direct model for the hypostatisation of the sphere of use value as âresistingâ real subsumption. However,
the fact that the thing [Sache] is not absorbed in the concept [daà die Sache im Begriff nicht aufgeht], even if it is made into the object of thought, may for some be an ever new stimulus for a more pronounced formation of thought while for others, who mistrust [thought] as a stealthy agent of capital, this fact is a soothing reassurance that its reach does not extend everywhere.
Yet, by no means is it an indication for the resistance [Widerständigkeit] of use value in the sense of potential opposition [Gegenwehr], or even revolutionary activity ⦠Even if scientific knowledge [Erkenntnis] has in the meantime actually been more or less subordinated to the valorisation interests of capital, the non-identical of an object does not constitute its use value dimension. On the contrary: only as known is the object available for use [erschliesst er sich dem Gebrauch].305
Similarly to Reinicke, who attempts to âreveal the history of the subversion of the use value-side of the commodityâ,306 the authors discussed here attempt to mobilise a sphere âbeyondâ value, âunsettlingâ the âsupposedly perfect circle of capitalâs self-movementâ to identify it in the âotherâ of valorisation, in the âshadowed silhouette of living labourâ (Harootunian), or the consumption sphere (Uno/Walker), in short, in the use value-dimension of the commodity form, fetishising it as the site of âresistanceâ. Indeed, as we have seen in the discussion of crisis in Chapter 4.4., use value does mark a boundary to capital, but only insofar as it presents a âbarrierâ [Schranke] in the Hegelian sense, i.e. only as it makes its appearance as something always-already vanquished by capital itself, inducing it to re-instantiate the production process on an extended scale (incorporating new technologies, new labour processes and techniques, creating new areas of demand), until it again confronts new barriers provided by the sphere of use value, repeating the process of an ever more effective, intensified and extended procedure for the extraction and appropriation of alien unpaid surplus labour on a larger scale. In other words, use value is indeed an active ingredient of the valorisation process in production, as we have seen, not only on the side of the worker and the âproductive consumptionâ of labour power, but also on the side of capital: âCapital has consumed its material with labour, and its labour with material; it has consumed itself as use valueâ.307 But that does not mean that use value can in any way function as an independent variable within the production and valorisation process â and even less so in the process of circulation or consumption:
Its [capitalâs] consumption as use value therefore in this case falls within circulation itself, or rather it itself posits the beginning of circulation or its end, as one prefers. The consumption of the use value itself here falls within the economic process, because the use value here is itself determined by exchange value. In no moment of the production process does capital cease to be capital or value to be value, and, as such, exchange value.308
Is resistance, then, impossible? We argue that it is impossible if we rely on the ârevolutionary potentialâ of the aspect of use value, torn from its interrelation with the totality of the capital relation, fetishised as the âincommensurableâ and hypostasised as capitalâs alleged âotherâ, thereby regressing to the illusions of bourgeois classical and vulgar political economy, which share the use value-mediating impetus of social reproduction with many modern Marxist intellectuals.
âSince Marxâ, Hafner argues in this context, âit is actually well known that if one surrenders to this temptation [of de-contextualisation], one always only evokes those fetishised forms whose penetration is the actual prerequisite for any political agency [politische Handlungsfähigkeit], which wants to be more than just blind [blindwütige] reactionâ.309 âActual realityâ cannot be grasped in the mode of immediacy. The dilemma of the attempts to conceive of capitalism at eye level consists, as Hafner says, âin evoking mediation and simultaneously severing itâ.310
What directly follows is that mediation must remain the object as well as the method of critique. Marxâs (labour) theory of value, the tool of that very mediation, presents not only a deciphering method or the âTuring Bombeâ to conventional political economy and its modern repercussions at the level of âpureâ theory. It is the critical force behind which revolutionary action can and must, indeed, be generated. Precisely because capital is indifferent to the private circumstances by which labourers take care of reproducing their labour power311 and indifferent towards the specific relics of the past or âformal subsumptionâ that still find their way into the contemporaneous organisation of cultural life â in sum, precisely because capital is indifferent to use value â the hypostatisation of this very realm of use value as site of resistance remains at the level of capitalâs own âself-imageâ, as a historical law of nature, whose aim is the satisfaction of social needs. It remains ideological. However, capital is not indifferent to the modes in which it can or cannot extract surplus labour, modes which it shapes in its own image. It is here that resistance must occur. This is the main lesson to be drawn from reading Capital. Capital and Marxâs other economy-critical writings therefore do not âsuggestâ revolutionary action. They comprise the theory of revolution:
It becomes clear that, when Marx hoped for the revolutionising of society, he did not think of natural-sensual qualities and needs, but of the explosive force of social relations themselves, the collapse of a mode of production based on exchange value due to its own contradictions.312
Indeed:
Capital is destructive towards, and constantly revolutionises, all this, tearing down all barriers which impede the development of the productive forces. The extension of the range of needs, the differentiation of production, and the exploitation and exchange of all natural and spiritual powers.
But from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier which it has ideally already overcome, it does not at all follow that capital has really overcome it; and since every such limit contradicts the determination of capital, its production is subject to contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited. Moreover, the universality for which capital ceaselessly strives, comes up against barriers in capitalâs own nature, barriers which at a certain stage of its development will allow it to be recognised as being itself the greatest barrier in the way of this tendency, and will therefore drive towards its transcendence through itself.313
Uno KÅzÅâs rejection of Capital as a revolutionary theory â or rather, as the work that paradigmatically establishes the link between epistemology and social theory â along with his reluctance to posit the problem of the fetishism as the central problem of the capitalist âself-imageâ, instead relying on an alleged âmuriâ of capital in the sphere of use value mediation, in short, his theory of value without fetish, thereby makes itself accomplice to the very logic it attempts to undermine.
But it is precisely this gap which is illusory: capital does not produce for the satisfaction of needs, it produces for profit. As long as the circle consists in this theoretically simple, yet, for some theorists, evasive fact, along with the global and deadly success of real subsumption that exposes its horrible grimace to us, we still have not even come close to disrupting it. The true challenge still waits for us.
Hafner 1993, p. 84. Many thanks to Eric-John Russell for his help with the translation.
Harootunian 2015, p. 20.
Harootunian 2015, p. 19.
Harootunian 2015, p. 19.
Harootunian 2015, p. 62.
An abridged version of this chapter can be found in Lange 2019c.
Cartelier 1991, p. 257.
Cartelier 1991, p. 260.
Cartelier 1991, p. 257.
In 1989, R. Bellofiore already made the cause for a âMonetary Labour Theory of Valueâ. The present essay rather diverges from Bellofioreâs results, while sharing its general impetus. See Bellofiore 1989.
See Ebitsuka 1982, where he argues that Unoâs âproofâ of the labour theory of value in the context of the production process of capital was still too tied up with a âsubstantialistâ view of value. Instead, the labour theory of value was to be conceptualised as a theory of equilibrium, i.e. a theory of exchange, in which supply and social demand are directly proportional.
In his critique of Cartelier, William J. Urban does not beat around the bush: â⦠we suspect that Cartelier disavows his true bourgeois agenda: believing to be acting on behalf of Marxâs cause despite his exclusive utilization of the non-dialectical logic of ordinary economic theory, he dismisses Marxâs arguments for deficient reasons in order to clear the way for an alternative model that is not neededâ. Urban 2010, p. 2.
Ebitsuka 1984.
Urban 2010, p. 2.
With the exception of Itoh, all the contributors were faculty members of British or US higher education institutions.
Steedmanâs view is elaborated in his Marx after Sraffa (1977), the discussion of which is beyond the scope of this chapter.
See Steedman 1981, p. 15; Heinrich 1999, pp. 275â6.
Steedman 1981, p. 13.
Steedman correctly sees that Marx did not think labour values and ârelative pricesâ (production prices) were âequalâ, but that âthe rate of profit and normal prices, under capitalist conditions, can be explained in terms of labour quantitiesâ. Steedman 1981, p. 14. Original emphasis. The question of course remains how the expression âin terms ofâ can be more precisely defined.
Steedman 1981, p. 15. For a critique of this âsolutionâ to the transformation problem, see Moseley 2016, pp. 230â43; Heinrich 1999, pp. 272â84.
Ebitsuka 1984, p. 684.
Ebitsuka 1984, p. 685. Ebitsuka here relies on Michel de Vroeyâs assumption that abstract labour is socially validated through exchange: âLabour is first performed as private labour, initiated by an independent decision. It is transformed into social labour through, and only through, the sale of its product. When social labour is formed in this context, it is called abstract labour, the adjective referring to the operation of homogenization or abstraction achieved by exchange on the marketâ. de Vroey 1981, p. 176. The problem of the monocausal linearity of this approach aside â is privately performed labour and its elements, the means of production and labour power, not already bought on the market? If yes, the production process, which is initiated with these elements, must be equally social â de Vroey, as well as the other proponents of the âexchange theoryâ of abstract labour, are begging the question: they forget that the condition of possibility of exchange cannot be exchange itself. They donât explain on the basis of which of its faculties different use values can be exchanged â and therefore relate to each other as commodities â at all.
Ebitsuka 1984, p. 684.
Ebitsuka 1984, p. 684.
Ebitsuka 1984, p. 685.
See Ebitsuka 1984, p. 681.
Benetti/Cartelier 2013, pp. 19â20. Thanks to Michael Gaul for bringing this article to my attention.
Benetti/Cartelierâs theory has been accused of various âreductionismsâ and misreadings, including a âconceptual limitation to a form of âmonetary purismââ¯â, where âthis limitation makes it incapable of attributing any theoretical status either to the labour force or to the wage-labour nexusâ. See, e.g. Sobel and Postel 2014. See also Stavros Mavroudeasâs critique, who however claims Benetti/Cartelier belonged to the âRubin schoolâ. Mavrouedas 2017. See also William J. Urbanâs discussion of Cartelier 1991, to which we pointed earlier.
See Ebitsuka 1984, p. 687.
Cartelier 1976, p. 94. Quoted in Ebitsuka 1984, p. 686.
Ebitsuka 1984, p. 688, quoting de Vroey 1981, p. 178. Somewhat counterfactually to his previous proposition that exchange is the locus of social coherence, de Vroey now assumes value to be defined as âa space of commensurability without which no relation of equivalence could be established. Prior to any measurement, an abstraction must be constructedâ. Emphasis added. De Vroey 1981, p. 178.
Benetti/Cartelier 1980, p. 90. Quoted in Ebitsuka 1984, p. 688.
Benetti/Cartelier 1980, p. 12. Quoted in Ebitsuka 1984, p. 690.
Ebitsuka uses an equals sign between social relations of market society and âseparationâ, the latter of which he attributes to Aglietta 1976, pp. ivâv.
Ebitsuka 1984, p. 690.
As for the problem of private labour, see next page, and the referenced footnote.
Ebitsuka 1984, p. 692.
Ebitsuka 1984, p. 692.
Ebitsuka 1984, p. 692.
âIf an economy without money is assumed as a starting point, it is logically impossible to get a monetary economy as an outcomeâ. Benetti/Cartelier 1998, p. 158.
Marx 1976, p. 139.
âThe monetary form of value cannot be obtained by inversion of form II of value. In an economy composed of n commodities, form II does not contain (n-1) expressions of relative values (or particular equivalents) as Marx states. It contains n(n-1) expressions. It follows that the result of inversion of form II is nothing but form II itselfâ. Benetti/Cartelier 1998, p. 162. See also Benetti 1985, pp. 96â7 and Benetti 1990.
For a critique of Benettiâs interpretation of Marxâs development of the value form and the âNecessity of Moneyâ, see Moseley 1998b (
As Engster has pointed out, â[a]ll symbol and sign theories of money misrecognise the productive meaning that [the act of] measuring has for the valorisation (Verwertung) of labour and capital, because no sign and no symbol theory of money can adequately grasp capitalism as a valorisation process measuring and realising itself in moneyâ. Engster 2014, p. 488.
Marx 1976, p. 187.
Marx 1976, p. 188: âIt is not money that renders the commodities commensurable. Quite the contrary. Because all commodities, as values, are objectified human labour, and therefore in themselves commensurable, their values can be communally measured in one and the same specific commodity, and this commodity can be converted into the common measure of their values, that is into money. Money as a measure of value is the necessary form of appearance of the measure of value which is immanent in commodites, namely labour-timeâ.
Marx 1976, p. 229.
We will come back to the Baileyist implications of the post-Uno Schoolâs and Ebitsukaâs money theory further down.
The first and second particularities of the equivalent form, i.e. money, consist in taking the form of appearance of their opposite, i.e. value (not use value), and abstract labour (not concrete labour). See Marx 1976, pp. 148, 150â1. These three particularities are logically simultaneous. In the first edition of Capital, the fetish-character of the commodity formed a fourth particularity.
Marx 1976, p. 151.
âThe labour processes are private ones, that is, oriented according to the labourerâs own views. Essentially, individuals have the choice, and this generates the market as the adequate form for the confrontation of the products of labour. Labour processes have to be private and independent in order to be considered part of the commodity division of labour. To assume that some people are deprived of any means of production amounts to saying they are excluded from commodity production. Labour performed by wage workers is neither private nor independent. The choice of commodities produced and the way of producing them are determined by capitalistsâ. Cartelier 1991, p. 263.
Cartelier 1991, p. 263.
Cartelier 1991, p. 263.
Urban 2010, p. 12.
Cartelier 1991, p. 263.
Marx 1973, p. 248. The context in which the quote appears is the critique of Proudhon, who is attacked as a deeply âbourgeoisâ thinker in believing that exchange represents a âsystem of universal freedomâ, which has only been âperverted by money, capital, etcâ. Marx 1973, p. 248.
Marx 1976, p. 186.
Sasaki 2011, pp. 125â6. The Kuruma âschoolâ emphasises the third particularity â private labours appearing as directly socially mediated labour â as the defining specificity of the capitalist mode of production, as against theories that emphasise the historical specificity of abstract labour. See also Sasaki 2012, pp. 48â50. In this reading, however, it is also important not to forget the other two particularities. All of them however have their origin in the specific kind of labour that is productive of value as a social totality. Abstract labour is the shorthand for it. Also see Sasaki and SaitÅ 2013.
See Mukai 1995, p. 98.
Engelsâs review of the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), his postface to the third edition of Capital Volume I, and his preface to the third volume of Capital are pertinent in this regard. In his review of the Contribution, Engels claims that âthe logical method of approachâ, understood as âsimplifiedâ method (see Elbe 2008, p. 19), was âindeed 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, and its further progress will be simply the reflection, in abstract and theoretically consistent form, of the course of history, a corrected reflection, but corrected in accordance with laws provided by the actual course of history, since each moment can be examined at the stage of development where it reaches its full maturity, its classical formâ. Engels 1980, p. 475.
See the âMethodenstreitâ between Haug, Heinrich, and Backhaus taking place in the German Marxist journal (edited by Wolfgang Fritz Haug) Das Argument in 2003. The best overview and commentary on the Methodenstreit is to be found in Wolf 2008b.
For an extensive discussion of both positions, see Dieter Wolfâs work. Especially Wolf 2008b.
Marx 1976, pp. 138â9.
Heinrich 1988, p. 30 and Heinrich 1991 [1999], p. 13. Quoted in Mukai 2014, p. 5.
We have explicit personal permission from Mukai Kimitoshi to discuss his work in a publication.
See Mukai 1990, Mukai 1992, and the two-series article on the âPhenomenology of Moneyâ (Mukai 1995 and Mukai 1996). See also Mukai 2010.
Mukai 2014, p. 3.
According to Backhaus, within the âsecondary literatureâ on Capital, three different ârelatively homogenousâ streams can be detected: 1. the âlogico-historicalâ stream, as represented by the âold orthodoxyâ (Engels, Marxism-Leninism) (see Footnote 58), 2. the âlogicalâ interpretation, as represented by the ânew orthodoxyâ arisen around the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. In it, the rejection of âreflection theoryâ (Widerspiegelungstheorie), Engelsâs dialectic of nature, and the basis-superstructure paradigm are commonplace. 3. the âmodel-platonicâ interpretation, held by modern (Marxian) economists solely interested in quantitative problems and terms (the transformation problem, etc.). Backhaus 2011, p. 136.
Though not a Marxist, Morishima Michio may be counted among the latter type as well.
Backhaus 2010 (1978), p. 138.
Backhaus 2011, p. 154: âThe historicist turn in [Marxâs] later works would remain thoroughly mysterious (rätselhaft) if it couldnât also be shown that Marx attempted to relate the âlogicallyâ developed categorial analysis to a âlogical-historicalâ development of the sameâ.
Mukai 2014, p. 3.
Mukai 2014, p. 5. The Heinrich quote is provided in German, translation my own. Heinrich 1999, p. 13.
See Mukai 2014, pp. 3â4.
Marx 1976, p. 137.
Mukai 2014, p. 4. The quotes by Heinrich and Backhaus are given in German.
Mukai 2014, p. 4.
Marx 1989, p. 318; orig. MEGA2II/3.4., 1318 (Marx 1979). Original emphasis. Quoted in Mukai 2014, p. 4, without the emphasis.
Marx 1976, pp. 138â9; orig. MEW 23, p. 62 (Marx 2008), quoted in Mukai 2014, p. 4.
Marx 1989, p. 318. Original emphasis.
The second misses that there is no need for an âinvariable measureâ of value: the abstract labour that is the substance of value is variable, because the working day is variable. His unsuccessful search for an âinvariable measureâ of value is precisely the context which prevented Ricardo from detecting the unequal exchange between capital and labour in the variable proportions of necessary and surplus labour in an equally variable working day. In other words: abstract or uniform social labour as the substance of value is an absolute, not a relative determination, but it is equally variable, not invariable. While Ricardoâs critic Bailey correctly refutes the necessity of an âinvariableâ measure of value, he is of course completely unaware of the reason for the necessity of a variable measure.
Marx 1989 pp. 322â3; Marx 1979, p. 1322. Quoted in Mukai 2014, p. 4.
Mukai 2014, p. 4.
Emphasis added.
Emphasis added. Marx 1989, p. 321.
Marx 1989, p. 332. Original emphasis.
Marx 1989, p. 341. Original emphasis. Note how Marx stresses that value were âantecedentâ to its representation in money.
Marx 1989, p. 317.
Mukai 2014, p. 4.
The question is indeed whether Marx would say this. In fact however, he has nowhere said it. Mukai succumbs to the identification of value and value objectivity (Wertgegenständlichkeit).
Mukai 2014, p. 6.
For the problem of Unoâs reading of value form analysis as a theory of exchange, see Lange 2014.
Mukai 2014, p. 6. See Backhaus 2010, p. 150.
See e.g. Heinrich 1999, p. 233: âWhat [Marx] demonstrates is not the necessity of another commodity to serve as the value expression, but that this value expression is incomplete and defected, if it clings to a single, accidental commodity. By the value expression of one commodity in another commodity, Marx demonstrates which requirements a value form must fulfil in order to adequately express value. That the bearer of this value form itself be a commodity, is not shown, but presumed from the beginning. Therefore, value form analysis provides the form determinations of the universal equivalent, but it does not provide an argument whether the universal equivalent must be a commodity or notâ.
See
See Backhaus 2011, p. 155.
See Backhaus 2011, p. 155.
Mukai 2014, p. 9. All quotes from Backhaus are in German.
Backhausâs doubts towards a âpurely logicalâ reading are 1. the failure of the reception to produce an âintersubjectively binding detailed definiton of the basic conceptsâ, which all interpreters could agree on, and 2. the failure of the âlogical readingâ to explain such a gross misconception as that of Engelsâs theory of âsimple commodity productionâ. See Backhaus 2011, pp. 157â8. The question is whether these different interpretations can be ascribed to the âlogicalâ reading, or not rather the opposite, its misreading. Backhausâs claim to a good theory is that it must deliver an âintersubjectively bindingâ interpretation (Backhaus 2011, p. 191), an interpretation on which âconsensus is to be obtainedâ (ibid.), containing a ânon-falsifiableâ theoretical core (Backhaus 2011, p. 192). The question is whether, in the intellectual history of men and women, such a theory has ever existed â or indeed, whether it will. That Marxâs, and Marxâs theory alone, should comply with such a claim, is probably slightly unfair.
Backhaus 2011, p. 45. Emphasis added.
It is all the more regrettable that an author like Backhaus, who identifies his work as being ultimately guided by âthe problem of fetishismâ (Backhaus 2011, p. 34), never applies this claim to the actual theory he puts forward.
Backhaus 2011, p. 147.
Backhaus 2011, p. 150.
Backhaus 2011, p. 150.
Marx 1976, p. 156.
Marx 1976, p. 187.
That this deeply Hegelian motive in Marxâs analysis of the value form has gone missing in the interpretations of the post-Uno School and Benetti/Cartelier, should not be too surprising now. Cartelier however sees the deliberate ignorance of âan alleged deeper levelâ (Cartelier 1991, p. 260) as the specific advantage, not disadvantage, of his approach.
See Backhaus 2011, p. 151.
Apart from the authors mentioned here, see ItŠ1976, p. 312; Reuten 1993, p. 89; Arthur 2006, p. 10; Harvey 2018, p. 1. Interestingly (or rather tellingly), these authors do not provide any original source for their claims.
Backhaus 2011, p. 181.
Backhaus 2011, p. 183.
The locus classicus of course being the chapter of the âContradiction in the General Formula [M-C-Mâ]â: âCirculation, or the exchange of commodities, creates no valueâ. Marx 1976, p. 266. Marxist theorists often forget that M-C-Mâ is the object of Marxâs critique, and not a âneutralâ formula. The standpoint of the âneutralâ or âformalâ form is the standpoint of conventional political economy. For this argument, see also Brentel 1989, pp. 244â5: âThe ideological semblance of simple circulation precisely results from the fact that their economic determinations appear to the immediately acting subjects, as well as their theoretical interpretors, as exlusively formal determinations ⦠in the mediating forms C-M-C and M-C-M, simple circulation merely presents the âformal processâ (Grundrisse, 919) of mediating or realising both determinations of the commodity as use value and exchange value in so far as these â polarly distributed to the extremes of the exchange process â interchange with one another as money and the commodity ⦠money as economic form therefore seems to have no further content-related (inhaltlich) determination or rationale than the mediating movement of simple circulation itselfâ.
Marx 1976, p. 166, quoted in Heinrich 1999, p. 208.
Heinrich 1999, p. 209.
Throughout the following section âValue Objectivityâ (âWertgegenständlichkeitâ) (Heinrich 1999, pp. 214â15), Heinrich identifies value and value objectivity. While Heinrichâs endeavour is in proving that value â a specific social relation â is constituted in exchange, he exclusively refers to value objectivity: âValue objectivity ⦠is assumed by the commodity only under specific social relations (commodity production) and is therefore a social property that however appears as an objective property, which constitutes the fetish character of the commodity. It is however essential that this social property only exists in the social relation between commodities, i.e. in exchangeâ. Heinrich 1999, pp. 215â16. This is true as far as value objectivity, i.e. the value form, is concerned. But, in line with Marxâs overall argument reconstructed above, it is wrong as far as value is concerned. It seems odd that Heinrich conflates the question of valueâs necessary appearance (as Vergegenständlichung) with the cause of the same, i.e. the specificity of the social form of labour under capitalist productive relations â despite his attempt to emphasise the latter. His argument about the specificity of abstract labour in the capitalist mode of production therefore only goes halfway. (That value objectivity is constituted in exchange is uncontentious to our interpretation.)
Other members include John R. Bell, John Simoulidis, Richard Westra. We have referred to their works in Chapters 3 and 4. See References for the major publications by Sekine and Albritton.
Sekine 2013 (1999), p. 188.
This is the title of Sekineâs collection of essays from 1980â2013 (Sekine 2013).
âThe law of value ⦠can never be adequately accounted for except in light of a general equilibrium of the capitalist economy, in which resources are presumed optimally allocated (sic) to all branches of production.â Sekine 2013 (1999), p. 191.
Sekine 2013 (1994), p. 7.
Sekine 2013 (1994), p. 2.
In the appendix to Uno 1980, pp. 147â8.
Ibid., p. 148.
In this context, see also: âHere the dialectic of âcapitalâ replaces the dialectic of the Absolute; with Marx âcapitalâ plays the same role as Hegelâs Absolute â¦â Sekine 1986, p. 39, quoted in Versieren 2018, p. 220.
A schoolbook-style explanation of the difference between ânaturalâ and âsocial sciencesâ forms the introduction to at least three of Sekineâs essays (see Sekine 2013, pp. 4â6; Sekine 2013, pp. 13â16; Sekine 2013, pp. 35â41). In these, we hear that â[f]or instance, we may be able to predict, with a fair degree of accuracy, that an earthquake of a certain magnitude is about to occur in a given region ⦠We cannot, however, stop the earthquake itself from occurring ⦠In summary, we can never know nature from inside out. We can only observe it from the outside to learn the regularity of its motion in various specific contexts, and conjecture what it might do next. Since we cannot get to the Ding-an-sich ⦠of nature, we had better conform to its motion wisely and subtly, without becoming too arrogant ⦠This wisdom, however, does not apply, as soon as we put âsocietyâ in place of ânatureâ in the above argument. Society is that which we ourselves make up. We are its creator, and we are (or ought to be) fully privy to its inner logicâ. Sekine 2013 (1994), pp. 4â5. Original orthography. Note also that with this transhistorical view of society, the specificity of capitalist societies, in which âthe process of production has mastery over manâ (Marx 1976, p. 175) akin to a force of nature, as well the âsocio-natural propertiesâ (Marx 1976, p. 165) of commodities which account for their fetishism, remains unaddressed.
âDialectic, however, never claims that A and Äâ are simultaneously true. It merely says that if Mr. Jones is a husband, that does not prevent him from being a son, a father, an uncle, a brother, a cousin, etc. of someone other than his wifeâ. Sekine 2013 (1980), p. 47.
âIn the course of my training as an economist I have learned that true economic theory should take the form of the dialectic of capital, whose structure is a mirror image of Hegelâs logic. My reason for writing this essay is to explain to you what all that means. With this preamble-caveat, I wish to begin with a personal episode relating me with Hegel â¦â Sekine 2013 (2003), p. 12.
Versierenâs claim that Sekine, in his latest contributions, âalso underlines his differences in conceptualizing totality with Adorno, Neue Marx-Lektüre and New Dialectic â three Hegelianized interpretations of Marxâs Capitalâ can â with the exception of Sekineâs response to Chris Arthur â not be confirmed.
See Arthur 2006 and Sekineâs response in the same journal (Capital and Class) in 2009. See Sekine 2013 (2009), pp. 163â84.
Sekine 2013 (1994), p. 6. Italics in the original. This use of decontextualised and arbitrary quotes, without providing the original source, is another feature of Sekineâs populist scientific approach.
Sekine 2013 (1994), p. 7.
Sekine 2013 (1994), p. 7.
Sekine 2013 (2003), p. 19.
Sekine 2013 (2003), p. 20.
Sekine 2013 (2003), p. 20.
Sekine 2013 (1994), p. 8. Emphasis in the original.
Sekine 2013 (1994) p. 8.
Heinrich 1999, p. 283.
Sekine 2013 (1999), p. 195.
For reasons of space, we must limit our commentary to Foleyâs work.
Foley 1982, p. 37.
Sekine 2013 (1999), p. 191.
Sekine 2013 (1999), p. 192.
Sekine 2013 (1999), p. 191.
Sekine 2013 (1999), p. 192.
Sekine 2013 (1999), p. 192.
Sekine 2013 (1999), p. 192.
Sekine 2013 (1999). p. 194.
Sekine 2013 (1999), p. 197.
Marx 1981, p. 128.
Marx 1981, p. 129.
Marx 1981, p. 130.
Himmelweit and Mohun state that the significance and status of Marxâs value theory âare such that its apparent inconsistencies can be recreated as the expression of the real contradictions of capitalist societyâ. Himmelweit and Mohun 1981, p. 231. âHence Marxâs transformation procedure is not, as it would be for Ricardo, an attempt to correct an unfortunate disjuncture between an embodied-labour theory of value and the requirements that the equalization of the rate of profit makes of prices. Rather, that disjuncture is recognized as the necessarily contradictory link between value, as the explanation of capitalist production relations, and its expression as exchange-value in prices. Hence it is not surprising that, when competition is accounted for, the one-to-one relationship of values to exchange-value disappearsâ. Himmelweit and Mohun 1981, p. 264. This interpretation is close to our view of the transformation problem as a problem of fetishism developed in Chapter 4.3. It must however be more clearly stressed that Marxâs theory of value, while it explains the contradictions of capitalist production relations, is not itself contradictory. This is akin to Hegelâs dialectic which at no point violates the laws of logic, but makes violations of the laws of logic its object. The confusion of the two has led some authors to believe that Hegel was âillogicalâ.
Sekine 2013 (1999), p. 209. Sekine argues that in the phase of depression (the âdeepeningâ phase), it is intrasectoral rather than intersectoral competition that âinduces the adoption of new techniques. Thus, when the labour market is out of equilibrium in the depression phase of the business cycle, the market for commodities has not yet acquired firmly given technical parameters to operate byâ. Ibid.
We use this umbrella term out of convenience for the different approaches associated with the rejection of the dual system approach (the New Interpretation, the (T)SSI, Moseleyâs macro-monetary approach), despite their internal differences, in opposition to the âgeneral equilibriumâ approach.
Sekine 2013 (1999), p. 209.
See Foley 1997, p. 17.
Foley 1997, p. 19.
Sekine 2013 (1999), p. 209.
Sekine 2013 (1999), p. 212.
Sekine 2013 (1999), p. 196.
We would think that an approach that relies on the âdefinition of capitalism by capital itselfâ would at least acknowledge a basic feature of its operation such as this.
Sekine 2013 (1999), p. 212.
Foley 1982, p. 37.
Foley 1997, p. 23.
Foley 1982, p. 37. Emphasis added.
Foley 1982, p. 39.
Foley 1982, p. 37.
Foley 1982, p. 37.
Foley 1982, p. 39.
âIf we want to hold to the idea that labor produces value, and that money is a form of value, the question of how much abstract simple labor a unit of money represents still makes senseâ. Foley 1982, p. 41.
âWe argued that the core content of Marxâs labor theory of value was that the expenditure of living labor in production adds money value to the inputs of production ⦠Thus we concluded that the appropriate definition of the monetary expression of labor was the ratio of the net domestic product at current prices to the living productive labor expended in an economy over a period of timeâ. Foley 1997, p. 18. Needless to say, the equality of value and price is redefined by limiting it to the newly produced or added value component of value and price of production. There is however no reason to assume this is not within Marxâs framework.
Foley 1982, p. 42.
Moseley 2016, p. 256.
Foley 1982, p. 41.
Foley 1982, p. 42.
Foley 1982, p. 43.
Foley 1982, p. 43.
Needless to say, the NI is also criticised by eminent Marxist economists. Of these, probably the criticisms by F. Moseley (Moseley 2016, pp. 253â64), M. Heinrich (Heinrich 1999, pp. 276â7), and A. Rodriguez-Herrera (Rodriguez-Herrera 1996) are the most to the point. See also Makoto Itohâs critique (Itoh 2005). While Moseley agrees with the general contentions of the macro-monetary approach of the NI, he thinks the NI âonly goes halfwayâ (Moseley 2016, p. 253) in transforming the inputs of the value of labour-power, but forgetting constant capital, thereby 1) remaining in the framework of the neo-Ricardian input-output matrix of physical quantities, and 2) failing to establish âthe logical connectionâ to a theory of individual price and the level of the rate of profit (the macro-micro connection). In his view, NI is therefore limited to stating the equivalence between total surplus value and unpaid labour which Moseley, however, agrees is the âmain conclusion of Marxâs theoryâ (Moseley 2016, p. 255). Heinrich however doubts that the NI is monetary at all. The âvalue of moneyâ, he states, is merely a âfactor of conversionâ for the redistribution of the surplus (Heinrich 1999, p. 277). The notion of the âredistributionâ of surplus value in the âtransformationâ process is also criticised in Himmelweit and Mohun: âSurplus-value is not redistributed between capitals so as to equalize the rate of profit, because there is no state from which this redistribution occursâ. Himmelweit and Mohun 1981, p. 240. None of these however argue from a âgeneral equilibriumâ theory of value standpoint.
Foley 1997, p. 22.
Sekine 2013 (1999), pp. 191, 197, 200. Interestingly, Foley indirectly criticises Sekineâs approach by targeting John Roemerâs criticism of the identification of social labour time with money. Foley: âRoemerâs failure to find much resonance in the New Interpretation may also be connected with his commitment to the Walrasian model of market equilibrium as a vehicle for the analysis of commodity relations. The Walrasian approach is in striking contrast to Marxâs in its inability to integrate money, which is precisely the point on which the New Interpretation definitions restâ. Foley 1997, p. 24.
Sekine 2013 (1999), pp. 200â2.
Albritton 1986, p. 73.
Albritton 1986, p. 73.
Albritton 1986, p. 73.
Albritton 1986, p. 74.
Albritton 1986, p. 74.
On the standardisation and automatisation of agricultural production, see Becker 2017, pp. 195â201. This is a process that has been actively implemented in the West (but not only) since the agricultural industrialisation or the âGreen Revolutionâ in the 1960s, and could have been known to Albritton. Becker also points out that as early as the nineteenth century, especially in slavery-based cotton farming in the US South, standardisation methods were employed: âSlavery formed the vantage point for the global valorisation chains of the textile industry. Between 1800 and 1860, the harvest per slave quadrupled after some new species [of cotton] were cultivated which were easier to pickâ. Becker 2017, p. 197. This also shows that the implementation of capitalist relations is unlikely without a simultaneous implementation of technological means to increase productivity.
Albritton 1986, p. 75.
Albritton 1986, p. 76.
Beech 2015.
âIf the labour-time of the worker is to create value in production to its duration, it must be socially necessary labour-time.â Marx 1976, p. 987.
Albritton 1986, p. 76.
Albritton 1986, pp. 76â7.
Albritton 1986, p. 75.
Albritton 1986, p. 86.
It is of no small irony that one of the incentives of stage theory both for Uno and Albritton was Marxâs inability to correctly assess the future of capitalist development in its increasing âimpurityâ. Even in the follow-up work A Japanese Approach to Stages of Capitalist Development, published in the year of the end of the Soviet Union and a year after the fall of the Soviet bloc (1991), Albritton was little inclined to modify his theory of the increasing use value dominance over value. Counterfactually, he merely supplements yet another stage, that of âconsumerismâ, as though precisely âconsumerismâ â were it not inflicted with the one-sidedness of the use value perspective alone â would show that the reign of value had taken full control of society. See Albritton 1991. pp. 225â¯ff.
Albritton 1986, p. 79. Had Albritton not attempted a critique of postmodernism in an article critically directed against Baudrillard â see Albritton 1995 â (âTheorizing the Realm of Consumption in Marxian Political Economyâ, in: A Japanese Approach to Political Economy, ed. Sekine and Albritton), one could have almost suspected him a promoter of the very same ideology.
In Capital Volume II, Marx points to two contradictions: first, the contradiction between the importance of âworkers as buyers of commoditiesâ and the restriction of workers as sellers of their commodity, labour power â the source of value-creation â to their âminimum priceâ. Second, the contradiction between the conditions of the production of surplus value and the conditions of its realisation. Marx 1978, p. 391.
Albritton 1986, p. 91.
Stock market shares of the digital economy are therefore the most volatile, in comparison to the Dow Jones, Nasdaq and Dax.
Albritton 1986, p. 103.
See Arghiri Emmanuel 1972.
Albritton 1986, p. 108.
Albritton 1986, p. 79.
Albritton 1986, p. 81.
Albritton 1986, p. 83.
Albritton 1986, p. 84.
âThe economies of scale associated with large fixed capital investments in steel production required the long-term mobilisation of large amounts of capital and credit. The development of the limited-liability joint-stock company accompanied by the development of the banking system facilitated the rapid centralisation of capital in the late nineteenth century. Large banks became very interested in the operations of heavy industry since the banks committed large amounts of credit to the fixed capital investments of heavy industry. The resulting merging of industrial-capital and banking-capital is referred to as âfinance-capitalââ¯â. Albritton 1986, p. 84.
Albritton 1986, pp. 79â80.
Albritton 1986, p. 78.
The problems in Unoâs understanding of the law of value have been analysed in Chapters 2, 3 and 4.
As unfortunately some proponents of the Neue Marx-Lektüre, e.g. Helmut Reichelt, also seem to believe. For a critique, see Elbe 2018, and my commentary in Lange 2021 (forthcoming).
Marx 1978, p. 185. Emphasis added. The original reads: âdiese Abstraktion in actuâ. Marx 1963, p. 109.
Albritton (1986), p. 79.
With the term âWestern Marxismâ â introduced by Merleau-Ponty and subsequently used by the Soviets to separate party line Marxism-Leninism from the âphilosophicalâ Hegelian Marxist discourse initiated by Lukács â Harootunian refers to Marxist theory primarily concerned with ideology and âcultural criticismâ contextualised within the problematic of the value and the commodity form, hence âFrankfurt Marxismâ with their special emphasis on âcirculationâ. According to Harootunian, they âfollow a homogeneous interpretative strategy, founded on the presupposition of a unity based on geographical contiguity that had long given up on the anticipated âwithering of the stateâ or indeed the prospect of an imminent worldwide social revolution for critical cultural analysis of capitalismâs domination of the social formationâ. Harootunian 2015, p. 4. There are reasonable doubts regarding this contention, which we hope to address in future publications. Harootunianâs contention, however, that âWestern Marxismâ (i.e. the Frankfurt School and their intellectual heirs) strived for a âprogressive distancing from the economic for the culturalâ (p. 5) is highly questionable, as studies in the Frankfurt Schoolâs reception of Marx and the Critique of Political Economy have shown (see Behrens 2005, Braunstein 2011).
Harootunian 2015, pp. 4â5.
Harootunian 2015, p. 5.
Harootunian 2015, p. 9.
Harootunian 2015, p. 19.
Harootunian 2015, pp. 17â18.
Harootunian 2015, p. 8.
Ibid.
Harootunian 2015, p. 18. Emphasis added.
Harootunian 2015, p. 62.
See Furihata 1987, p. 76. Furihata points out that the silk and the cotton manufacturing industries made up the majority. More than half of Japanâs populace consisted of small-scale farmers, most of these in turn produced rice and silk worms. The raw silk extracted from this process had been nearly completely exported to the United States, so that the export revenues could in turn be used to import raw cotton. â⦠the processing of raw cotton and the export of manufactured cotton goods formed the most important activity of capitalist enterprisesâ in Japanâs Meiji period. Furihata 1987, p. 77.
Uno 1974 [1947], p. 41. Quoted in Harootunian 2015, p. 190.
Harootunian 2015.p. 190.
Harootunian 2015, p. 187.
Harootunian 2015, p. 186.
For reasons of space, we consider it sufficient to point to the vast literature on the capitalisation of Japanese agriculture and the introduction of the factory system in the Meiji period. See SaitŠ1986; Toby 1991; Brandt 1993; Francks 2005; Marcon 2014; Smith 1986. I thank Raji C. Steineck for his help with evaluating the literature.
Harootunian 2015, p. 192.
Marx 1976, p. 1013.
Ibid.
Steineck correctly points to the theoretical consequences of such a view: â[Harootunian] believes that there exists, in capitalism, spheres of purely concrete labour, in which pre-capitalist formations of the metabolism of human beings with their environment remain intact. In other words, he succumbs to an essentialism of the concrete that is also the hallmark of the fetishism of use value â meaning the identification of the production of use values as the ultimate goal of capitalist production and the concomitant glorification of concrete labour and its products over and against abstract labour and money. This is no minor mistake, because it is precisely the elevation of use value that consistently supports reactionary anti-capitalismâ. Steineck 2017, p. 1344.
Marx more specifically distinguishes between four types of subsumption: formal, real, hybrid, and ideal. For a detailed discussion of the latter two, see Murray 2004, pp. 263â66. For reasons of space, they cannot and need not be presented for the purpose of the present chapter.
For the locus of the âResultsâ in the structure of Capital, see Antonowa 1982. For the wider context of the âResultsâ in Marxâs work, see Napoleoni 1974, pp. 108â18.
Marx 1976, p. 1019.
Marx 1976, p. 1028.
Marx 1976, p. 981. Marx counters the claim of the existence of capital as the âeternal law of nature of human productionâ with an impressively polemical comparison: âI could prove with equal facility that the Greeks and Romans celebrated communion because they drank wine and ate bread, and that the Turks sprinkle themselves daily with holy water like Catholics because they wash themselves dailyâ, Marx 1976, p. 999.
In contradistinction to âTechnikâ, Bellofiore, drawing on Guido Frison, notes that âTechnologie defines the potential relationships between labour power and its means, so it is strictly related to innovation ⦠it is one of the many examples of the fetish character of capital (in this case, the immediate process of production) leading to fetishism: the social powers created by capital, which are effective, are attributed to things as such (here, the means of production), and not to a specific social relationâ. Bellofiore 2018, p. 373.
By the labour that is âidentical with capitalâ, Marx presumably means dead labour.
Marx 1976, p. 1024.
Marx 1976, p. 1021. Original emphasis.
Marx 1976, p. 1021.
Marx 1976, p. 1021. Original emphasis.
Marx 1976, p. 1021. Original emphasis.
In his critique of Derek Sayer, Murray emphasises this: âSayer does not recognize that Marxâs phrase âspecifically capitalist productionâ is equivalent to production that has undergone real subsumptionâ. Murray 2004 (ed. Bellofiore/Taylor), p. 251.
The âmore completelyâ the objective and subjective conditions of labour confront the worker as capital â we will soon thematise this crucial aspect in greater detail â the âmore effectively the formal subsumption of labour under capital is accomplished, and this is turn is the premiss and the precondition of its real subsumptionâ. Marx 1976, p. 1026. Original emphasis.
Marx 1976, p. 1027. Original emphasis.
Marx 1976, p. 1024.
See e.g. âThe Political Economistsâ Erroneous conception of Reproduction on an Increasing Scaleâ (Marx 1976, p. 734), mainly targeting Ricardo and Smithâs schemes, which are scrutinised again and more meticulously in Volume II.
Sáenz de Sicilia 2016, p. 224. The author refers to the Grundrisse. See Marx 1973, p. 266.
Napoleoni 1974, p. 117.
Marx 1976, p. 645.
Marx 1976, p. 1024.
Marx 1976, p. 724. Emphasis added.
Marx 1976, p. 432.
These are the subject of every Business Administration Bachelor or Master degree programme worldwide.
Needless to say, not only consumer goods, but means of production as well âlose in valueâ.
Murray strangely puts the cart before the horse: â⦠the whole strategy of relative surplus-value is to increase productivity in order to drive down the value of labour powerâ. Murray 2004, p. 262.
Marx 1976, p. 433.
Marx 1976, p. 1023.
The prototype wasnât used widely, but Joseph-Marie Jacquardâs optimised and elaborated loom, based on Vaucansonâs original machine, was employed in textile production in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the beginning of industrialisation, after a longer period of unsuccessful resistance by Franceâs textile guilds. Allegedly, Jacquard came upon a destroyed specimen of Vaucansonâs machine which was kept at Napoléon Bonaparteâs âConservatoire des arts et métiersâ in 1804. He used the parts for his own invention, which first systematically applied the punch card system and became the cornerstone for automation in the production process.
In 1744, the weavers of Lyon did not expel Vaucanson because of his invention, but because, on the crownâs authority, he attempted to employ a more liberal trade and investment system. See Becker 2017, p. 213.
Becker 2017, pp. 43â4. Own translation.
See also Postoneâs discussion on the emergence of abstract time in medieval society, especially the cloth manufactures in Flanders: âBecause workers were paid by the day, conflict became focused on the length and definition of the work day. It seems that it was the workers who, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, demanded initially that the work day be lengthened in order to increase their wages, which had declined in real value as a result of the crisis [the economic crisis of textile industry in the late thirteenth century]. Very quickly however, the merchants seized upon the issue of the length of the work day and tried to turn it to their advantage by regulating it more closelyâ. Postone 1993, p. 210. Postone draws on Jacques Le Goff, âLabor Time in the âCrisisâ of the Fourteenth Centuryâ, in Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, Chicago and London, 1980.
Marx 1976, p. 1021.
Sáenz de Sicilia 2016, p. 138. Unfortunately, in the latter part of the book, the author revokes his previous insights to claim that âMarx ⦠brackets the independent existence of living labour, reducing its reproduction to the functions it fulfils for the reproduction of capital ⦠But the âcertain limitsâ ⦠are crucial in opening the system to an independent qualitative dimension beyond capitalâs unilateral control and direct interest, because whilst the capitalist must cede a wage to the worker in order to ensure his or her reproduction, they do not directly oversee that reproductionâ. Ibid., p. 231. This is an illustrative example for the confusion between the historically specific capitalist form determination of wage (and its monetary expression) with a historically unspecific necessity for general human reproduction. Sáenz de Sicilia overlooks that capitalist forms of consumption are confined by the form determination of the wage, so that one must ask to what extent we may speak of an âindependent existence of living labourâ under capitalist relations of production. Sáenz de Siciliaâs argument seems to point in a direction similar to âfeministâ Social Reproduction Theory and its problems that we have addressed previously.
As Marx and Engels famously declare in the Manifesto. Marx and Engels 1976 [1845â8], p. 487.
â[Capital] finds in existence the actual production process â the particular mode of production, and at the beginning it only subsumes it formally, without making any changes in its specific technological characterâ. Marx and Engels 1988 [1861â3], p. 92.
Schmiede 1988, p. 21. Own translation. Original emphasis.
One case of karÅshi, proving the phenomenon no longer receives the media attention it once had, has become public with the death of NHK reporter Miwa Sado in 2013, who worked 159 hours overtime in a month. Companies have acknowledged that 93 cases of suicide among their employees could be directly related to their workload in overtime hours, which in all these cases were over 100 hours. In 2015, Abe has promised to cut overtime workloads of more than 100 hours per month and punish companies who made their employers work more. For a critical discussion of Abeâs work reforms, see
Harootunian 2015, p. 55.
âOf course, the particularity of labour must correspond to the particular substance of which a given capital consists; but since capital as such is indifferent to every particularity of its substance, and exists not only as the totality of the same as the abstraction from all its particularities, the labour which confronts it likewise subjectively has the same totality and abstraction in itselfâ. Marx 1973, p. 296. Original emphasis.
Harootunian 2015, p. 38.
Harootunian 2015, p. 68.
As can also be detected in his pledge of allegiance to an underconsumptionist approach to the phenomenon of crisis Harootunian identifies in the work of Rosa Luxemburg. Luxemburgâs insistence on an âoutsideâ to the capitalistically organised global work market, as supply market for goods whose consumption becomes the condition of possibility for capitalâs valorisation and âextended reproductionâ, indicating capitalâs immanent breakdown, also fatally ignores that âthe aim of capitalist production is never use-valueâ, i.e. is never workerâs consumption. See Luxemburg. Also see Chapters 4.2., and especially 4.4.
Walker 2016, p. 153.
Walker 2016, p. 164.
Walker 2012, p. 20.
Walker 2012, p. 20.
Walker 2012, p. 20. Original Emphasis.
Walker 2016, p. 153.
The paradigm of the paradox remains the classic âThis sentence is falseâ, or the Epimenides paradox according to which Epimenides, a Cretan, claims that âAll Cretans are liarsâ.
Marx 1976, p. 1004. It is possibly the gravest mistranslation made throughout the Penguin/NLR edition of Capital and its manuscripts: the original MEGA reads (in accord with Marxâs argument at this point): âEs ist nicht der Arbeiter, der Lebensmittel und Productionsmittel kauft, sondern die Lebensmittel kaufen den Arbeiter, um ihn den Productionsmitteln einzuverleibenâ. MEGA II/4.2., p. 78. It should be the âmeans of subsistence that buy the workerâ, not, as in Livingstoneâs translation, the âmeans of production that buy the workerâ.
Walker 2016, p. 156.
Uno 1974 (UKC 8), pp. 24â5. Quoted in Walker 2016, p. 156. Italics Walkerâs. â[Sic]â the authorâs.
Walker 2016, p. 156.
Walker 2016, p. 158.
Walker 2016, p. 158.
Walker 2012, p. 164.
Walker 2012, p. 23.
Walker 2016, p. 168. Emphasis added.
Walker 2016, p. 168.
Marx 1987 (MECW 29), p. 64, quoted in Walker 2016, p. 177.
âIn order to extract value out of the consumption of a commodity, our friend the money-owner must be lucky enough to find within the sphere of circulation, on the market, a commodity whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption is therefore itself an objectification [Vergegenständlichung] of labour, hence a creation of valueâ. Marx 1976, p. 270.
Marx 1976, p. 1026.
Harootunian 2015, p. 232 and p. 68.
Walker (2012), p. 16. Original emphasis.
Marx 1976, p. 638.
Reinicke 1975.
Pohrt 1976.
Adorno 1966.
Hafner 1993, p. 69. My thanks to Eric-John Russell for helping with the translation.
Reinicke 1975, p. 22. Quoted in Hafner, p. 68.
Marx 1973, p. 311.
Marx 1973, p. 311.
Hafner 1993, p. 82. Emphasis added.
Hafner 1993, p. 82. Emphasis added.
In this sense, M. Lebowitz errs doubly when he identifies a âone-sided Marxismâ resulting from âthe absence of the examination of the part of workersâ struggles in shaping the course of the development of capitalism â¦â Lebowitz 2003 [1992], p. 121. For one, he misrecognises the methodological centrality (despite his insistence on the importance of method) of valueâs real abstraction, inimitably expressed in Alfred Schmidtâs commentary that âThe one-sidedness idealistically lamented as âeconomismâ ⦠is an abstraction not performed by the theorist, but by social realityâ (Schmidt 1968, p. 33). As argued before, the demand for acknowledging âthe goals of workersâ, private (i.e. non-economic) reproduction, etc. loses sight of the specificity of the capital relation, for its is precisely the âdominance of abstractionâ (money) which is capitalâs distinguishing feature as it constitutes the target of critique. Second, Marx was more than aware that resistance to capital has no other source than workersâ struggle, and that, where the length of the working day became a question of equal rights, âforceâ, i.e. class struggle, âdecidesâ (Marx 1976, p. 344). But the proof of the ârighteousnessâ of capitalâs claim to the full product of the labour process â precisely what should instantiate workersâ struggle â does not result from workersâ struggle itself. To the contrary: Marxâs non-empirical analysis of capitalâs âself-imageâ, to remain in the present idiom, is the precondition for a meaningful organisation of class struggle.
Hafner 1993, p. 73.
Marx 1986 [1857â61], p. 337.