Pour savoir quelles étaient véritablement leurs opinions, je devais plutôt prendre garde à ce quâils pratiquaient quâà ce quâils disaient â¦; car lâaction de la pensée par laquelle on croit une chose, étant différente de celle par laquelle on connaît quâon la croit, elles sont souvent lâune sans lâautre.
Descartes, Discours de la méthode
The previous chaptersâ discussion of Althusser and Machereyâs concept of a materialist dialectic â not only in For Marx and Reading Capital, but in many of their subsequent writings, published and unpublished, texts that at times explicitly address Marxâs Capital, but more often do not â provides the means now to return this theoretical position back to bear upon the logics or what Macherey calls the âprocess of expositionâ of Capital itself.1 The plural of my chapter title (âlogicsâ) already indicates a crucial claim of my argument: that as opposed to the still-dominant view that Marxâs theoretical exposition of the capitalist social form deploys a single negation- and contradiction-based logic (i.e., a materialist version of âHegelianâ logic), Capital instead implements a diverse multiplicity of logics.2 These include, predominantly, a post-Aristotelean and Spinozist positive logic of implication that I will call additive synthesis, which coexists with others that range from the imaginary-literary and polemic invective, to the highly original materialist process that Althusser names the determinate âpositioningâ (la position) of concepts, and the related procedure Macherey identifies in Reading Capital as the âexhaustionâ of concepts.
Alongside these logics, remaining instances of a âHegelianâ, negative, contradiction-based dialectic, while existing in marginal passages such as Capitalâs supplementary, historical (as opposed to apodictic) Chapter 23, constitute no more than a conceptually meagre theoretical relic of Marxâs intellectual formation and habitus.3 Marx tendentially suppresses, in this view, the initially predominant negative dialectic of the Grundrisse, with only lingering remnants increasingly relegated to the margins of Capitalâs demonstration. This occurs as a fundamental aspect of the ongoing process of revision that Marx undertakes from his initial enquiries of 1857 to the final 1881 notes on his intended, but never implemented, revisions for a third edition of Capital, Vol. I.
Textual analysis of the various logics of exposition in Capital reveals, I wish to argue, that the negation-based version of so-called âHegelianâ logic that is still widely referred to as Marxâs âdialecticâ, is in fact the least significant of these logics of exposition. More specifically, I wish to argue that Marxâs initial exposition of the concept of the commodity (in Chapter I of Capital) in terms of an internal, constitutive contradiction [Widerspruch] between use-value and exchange-value, and this even as late as the first, 1867 edition of Capital, proves an epistemological impediment,4 one that Marx overcomes through the articulation of a positive, materialist dialectical exposition without (ontological, constitutive) contradiction.
My argument on this score is thus quite specific: it is certainly the case that Marx continues to the end to identify real and crucial theoretical contradictions in his predecessors, such as the conceptual inadequacies that mired the classical political economistsâ analysis of surplus value (i.e., as what he calls, in chapter 5, âContradictions in the General Formula [of Capital]â); it is also certainly the case that Marx identifies real practical contradictions that render capitalism as an actually existing entity necessarily prone, for example, to crisis, via the contradiction between the contradictory systemic demands to reduce variable capital costs while simultaneously assuring the realisation of surplus value through, in part, the consumption of commodities by the working class.5 Instead, here I wish to argue that it is only the specific logic of Hegelian, negative dialectical contradiction that proves an impediment to Marxâs analysis and exposition of the commodity and the capitalist social form more generally.
1 The Discontinuity of the Attributes
The position I present here crucially depends upon the fundamental Spinozist distinction Althusser and Macherey sustain (described in the previous chapters), between the attributes of thought and extension, attributes (along with the infinite others to which humans do not have access) that in Spinozaâs view remain absolutely and infinitely distinct â without, that is to say, being subject to their sublation in the Hegelian Idea of the Absolute Subject.6 Following Althusser and Macherey, the theoretical object I seek to construct here adheres to this Spinozist distinction, and addresses not the historical existence and development of capitalism as a singular existing thing bearing real contradictions, but only the logics or processes of exposition to be found in Capital.
Marx famously never wrote his proposed treatise on his dialectical method,7 and in its absence, the logics of Capital do not constitute an autonomous âmethodâ, but exist only immanently, discernible through what Althusser called their âstructural causalityâ. This singular (as opposed to generalisable or even universal) âmethodâ exists nowhere else than in its real effects, which is to say, in this case, in the text of Capital itself, but in the state of a discursive practice as opposed to an explicit theory of a ramified apodictic demonstration. This implies that to determine the logics at work in Capital, as I seek to do here, requires constructing a theoretical object distinct from Marxâs literal demonstration of the capitalist social form, yet simultaneously insisting that this object of analysis remains determined in its necessity by the material object that is the finite discourse of Capital.8 This process, as what Macherey calls materialist explication, stands opposed to the alternative fabrication of an autonomous interpretation;9 the latter tends in contrast to disregard the materialist determination of Marxâs actual text and to create in its place an (aesthetic idealist) theoretical object (this, I will argue, is the case of Chris Arthurâs interpretation of the logic of Capital).
An example may help to clarify this distinction between the logics of Capital and capitalism as a historically existing, contradiction-prone singular thing. Just as the concept of the circle is not circular,10 the concept of negation is not negative, nor is that of contradiction contradictory; both can easily be defined positively and without contradiction. Bolzano, for example, defines negation positively, as the formal statement âProposition A has no truthâ, while Lalande defines contradiction without contradiction, as âThe relation ⦠that exists between two propositions, in the form: âA is trueâ and âA is not trueââ¯â.11 Though Marx explains how as a lived, historical phenomenon the capitalist social form produces a multitude of lived, practical and theoretical, i.e., merely apparent contradictions, the concept of surplus value, in the adequate, positive formulation it receives in Chapters 6 and 7, is not contradictory in the least. It is this Spinozist distinction, between the logical process of exposition that is the purely conceptual analysis of the capitalist social form in Capital, and the finite, sensuous temporality of the capitalist real, that constitutes the key epistemological proposition and militant theoretical intervention of Reading Capital.
At stake in this book, however, is not merely this straightforward epistemological distinction, albeit one to this day all too frequently ignored in Marxist criticism (including, ironically, by Althusser himself in âContradiction and Overdeterminationâ, as I argued in my Introduction). As already noted, I wish furthermore to argue that Marxâs logical analysis of the concept of the commodity tends to replace a negative dialectical logic of exposition with a positive one. This is to say that although Marxâs initial analysis of the commodity as constituted by an internal, ontological contradiction (between use-value and exchange-value) might well have been demonstrated (as it largely was in the Grundrisse and the first edition of Capital) without contradiction, Marx furthermore, at the level of his categorial exposition, comes to replace this negative dialectical logic with a more adequate, positive logic without (ontological, constitutive) contradiction. The Hegelian logic of constitutive contradiction can certainly be presented without contradiction; for all that, it may well have proven inadequate to Marx for what Althusser calls his âapodictic arrangement of the concepts [as] that type of demonstrational discourse that Marx calls analysisâ.12
2 Totality, Negation, Contradiction
To develop this position, to reprise an argument initiated in this bookâs Introduction, it is important to move beyond the inadequate formulation of Marxâs dialectical (apodictic) method of exposition as a question of âHegel or Spinozaâ, whether we take this conjunction in its differential sense, following Althusser â as the either/or choice between two distinct modes of logical demonstration â or, following Machereyâs argument in his book of that title, also in its connective sense, to suggest as well as the variegated unity of two modes of thought indicated by these famous proper names. Hegelâs relation to Spinoza, for all its real complexity, is no mere question of disavowal and misrepresentation. In crucial aspects, Hegel explicitly and unambiguously reaffirms crucial aspects of Spinozaâs epistemology.
Tellingly, Hegel makes a point of concluding his 1827 Preface to the Encyclopedia Logic with the categorical statement that âIt has been rightly said of the true that it is index sui et falsi, but that the true is not known [gewusst] on the basis of the falseâ.13 Repeating this ringing endorsement of the Spinozist position in the body of his text, Hegel simultaneously appends to it a condemnation of empiricist theories of knowledge dependent upon the adequation of subject and object:
Usually we call truth the agreement of an object with our representation of it. Thus we have an object as a presupposition, and our representation is supposed to conform to it. â In the philosophical sense, by contrast, truth means in general the agreement of a content with itself, to put it abstractly.14
No less than for Spinoza and Althusser, for Hegel, the empiricist model of truth remains radically inadequate and subject to ideological distortions: âFrom the fact that immediate knowing is supposed to be the criterion of truth, it follows that all kinds of superstition and idolatry are declared to be trueâ.15 Aligning himself with the epistemological tradition from Aristotle to Spinoza, Hegel likewise sustains, in his own fashion, the necessity of adequate demonstration and apodictic judgements.16
While I argued in my Introduction that Althusserâs initial presentation of Marxâs theory in For Marx and Reading Capital sacrificed analytical clarity on multiple fronts to the demands of a situated theoretical polemic (i.e., slippage from the theoretical to the historical, the unqualified suppression of the concept of substance, etc.), the extreme theoretical density and interwoven complexity of Machereyâs contrasting argument in Hegel or Spinoza, seeking to parse Hegelâs various (mis)readings of Spinoza through Spinozaâs own proleptic responses to such positions and misunderstandings, is unnecessary fully to rehearse here, since my object is neither Spinoza nor Hegel per se, but rather Marxâs process of exposition in Capital. Instead, in the place of proper names, it is important to focus on the specific logical operations Marx deploys in this process. Thus, instead of vaguely contrasting âHegelianâ and âSpinozistâ logics, I wish more precisely to interrogate Marxâs process of exposition in Capital in relation to three categories, all of which are as central to Hegelâs logic as they are tendentially suppressed from Marxâs: totality, negation, and contradiction. I will proceed by confronting one of the most influential and comprehensive recent defences of a Hegelian reading of Capital â Chris Arthurâs The New Dialectic and Marxâs Capital â with various moments of Pierre Machereyâs critique of these Hegelian categories, at each step bringing this critique back to bear upon the text of Capital itself in the desire not merely to counter neo-Hegelian readings of Capital such as Arthurâs, but to further the interrogation and articulation of Marxâs positive, materialist dialectic as it is deployed in his magnum opus, in the wake of the Althusseriansâ relinquishing of this project after 1967.
3 Totality
Marxâs Capital does not constitute an objective totality, whether we take the term in its material, demonstrative, or logical sense. Such a position, I wish to argue, follows imperatively both from Reading Capital as well as Pierre Machereyâs general critique of the concept of totality in For a Theory of Literary Production (in which he does not discuss Capital explicitly). It also follows directly from a comparison of the Grundrisse with the revised versions of Capital, from which the term Totalität almost entirely disappears. In Grundrisse, the Hegelian concept of totality is vital and determinant, recurring nearly a hundred times in Marxâs notebooks: âThe conclusion we reach is not that production, distribution, exchange, and consumption are identical, but that they all form members of a totality [Totalität], distinctions within a unityâ.17 By the time Marx drafts and subsequently revises Capital Volume one in 1872, the term totality only occurs twice, within a single citation from Hegelâs Philosophy of Right, while in the 1875 French translation, the final version Marx oversaw, the term totalité occurs just once in reference to the figure of a given sum (âla totalité du capital employéâ).18
This claim, to be sure, stands in direct contrast to the Marxist humanist tradition since Lukács and Karel KosÃk, as well as to the exponents of the so-called systematic Dialectical reading of Capital such as Chris Arthurâs neo-Hegelian position in The New Dialectic and Marxâs Capital.19 In what follows, I will develop this position as both a critique of Lukácsâs original affirmation and Arthurâs book, as well as immanently within Marxâs text. I do so in three moments: first, by briefly recalling the Hegelian affirmation of totality; next, through an equally brief critique of its Marxist inflection in Lukácsâs 1921 essay âThe Marxism of Rosa Luxemburgâ followed by an examination of Arthurâs application of this Hegelian doctrine of totality to Marxâs Capital. This will then allow for a consideration of the specific case of Capital and totality, in the three senses just mentioned: as a material totality (whether Capital the book forms a totality); as a demonstrative totality (whether Marxâs process of demonstration in Capital constitutes a totality); and finally, whether the categorial critique of Capital theorises a logical totality (in the sense Arthur affirms, that âCapital [the social form, not Marxâs book] is a closed totality only in formâ).20
The category of totality is central to Hegelâs doctrine of logic, and constitutes one of the most familiar aspects of his systematic thought. The theme of totality is crucial to the systematicity of Hegelian logic, and Hegel strongly underscores this importance in the capstone of his thought, the Encyclopedia Logic.21 Hegel argued that a coherent and comprehensive philosophical doctrine required systematic form, in the sense of its apodicticity, i.e., that all propositions be rigorously derived one from another in a systematic and methodical demonstration. Furthermore, this systematicity necessarily implied for Hegel the culmination of this demonstration (and thus his presentation of that system in the Encyclopedia as the capstone of his lifeâs work) as a single closed system, one that would comprehensively present the logical structures of the real (the Idea, in Hegelâs jargon). As opposed to Spinozaâs absolute separation of the attributes thought and extension, thought for Hegel sublates extensive reality (âNatureâ, in the terminology of the Encyclopedia), such that in conceptualising the real, thought is understood to think itself in schematising the determinations of the natural world.22
This moment of sublation occurs in the crucial, final paragraph of the Encyclopedia Logic, which engenders the passage from the presentation of the system of logic itself to that of the natural world as Idea: âThe idea, which is for itself, considered in terms of this, its unity with itself, is the process of intuiting [Anschauen] and the idea insofar as it intuits is natureâ. The idea, Hegel continues, is not a separate attribute through which to grasp an aspect of being, but is âreleasedâ from its containment in nature:
Yet the absolute freedom of the idea is that it does not merely pass over into life or let life shine in itself as finite knowing [i.e., as mere logical systematicity], but instead, in the absolute truth of itself, resolves to release freely from itself the moment of its particularity or the first determining and otherness, the immediate idea, as its reflection [Widerschein], itself as nature ⦠This idea insofar as it is [diese seiende Idee], is nature.23
In Hegelâs understanding, philosophy itself forms a totality,24 its constructed and reflected unity constituting a whole: âThe science of [the absolute] is essentially a system, since the true insofar as it is concrete exists only through unfolding itself in itself, collecting and holding itself together in a unity, i.e. as a totality [Totalität]â.25 In this manner, Hegelâs system depends upon the notion of totality at all three levels indicated above: the three-volume Encyclopedia constitutes a material totality, its pretension being to present the total system of absolute knowledge â from its most abstract initial moment, to the most concrete, the absolute idea â across the material expanse of its pages and the discourse they convey; a demonstrative totality, the sequence of its argument proceeding apodictically from each moment to that which it logically entails, to demonstrate in sum the systematic unity of being in its totality; and, logically, the Encyclopedia presents the absolute idea as the rational totality of its determinations.
More precisely, Hegelâs entire philosophical system consists in not just one final totality (the absolute idea) in distinction to the contradictory inadequacy of all its prior moments, but through the articulation of its various sections, it articulates a sequence of totalities. This is to say that each determination of being â from the first, most abstract determination of being and nothingness as becoming, through to the complete and sufficient totality of the absolute idea, along with the many other forms of determination Hegel considers along the way (finitude, identity, etc.) â constitutes an aspect of the totality of being according to a specific, determinate form. Hegel famously visualises this as a system in which the totality of being, understood as absolute idea, âpresents itself as a circle of circles, each of which is a necessary moment, so that the system of its distinctive elements makes up the idea in its entirety. ⦠Each sphere of the logical idea proves to be a totality of determinationsâ.26
If each Hegelian determination of being, from the most abstract to the most concrete, forms a totality, each of these (prior to the absolute) must furthermore be understood as ontologically constituted by its inner negativity and inadequacy;27 each determination of being, in other words, is not simply a totality, but stands as an inadequate or illegitimate totality, to adopt Michela Bordignonâs terminology.28 This is to say that each logical determination or category of being through which Hegel articulates his system of logic defines a totality according to a certain form: being as it is perceived under the determination of quantity, of finitude, of identity, etc.
The key point, then, is that if Hegelâs analysis of being under the attribute of identity, or any other determination, constitutes a totality (the totality of being grasped via the concept of identity), this totality must necessarily, insofar as it refers to the totality of being, refer as well to the definition of identity itself as an element of this totality.29 If each logical totality constitutes a set, then the immediate consequence to be drawn is that each and every one of these sets (i.e., each of Hegelâs logical determinations of being) is âillegitimateâ in the familiar sense of Russellâs paradox: in Bordignonâs terms, âeach logical determination denotes a set of which it is a member, and thus refers to itselfâ.30
Hegelâs familiar example of the contradictory logic of identity makes this paradox apparent.31 Being, when grasped under the attribute or determination of identity, constitutes a totality â and since the definition of the absolute as a determinate totality necessarily includes the definition of identity, this set refers to itself (the concept of identity) as well. That identity is identical to itself (necessarily, according to its definition), however, implies, as Hegel shows in the doctrine of essence, that it is different from, not identical to, what it is not, namely, difference. Its difference from difference is thus not merely external, but gives identity its self-identity, making it a member of the set of all being grasped under the determination of identity. And yet, since its difference from difference constitutes in this sense, ontologically, the very identity of identity, it can be said that the concept of identity necessarily, ontologically, contains difference within itself. If this is so, then it cannot be a member of the set of all being grasped as self-same, determinate identity without difference. Or in Bordignonâs recapitulation: âInsofar as identity is identical with itself, identity differs from difference and thus it involves difference in itself and transcends the limit of the totality that it is supposed to define and that it is a part ofâ.32
Now, the interesting conclusion Bordignon draws from this presentation, which simply translates the notion of Hegelian negative dialectic into the language of set theory and Russellâs paradox, is that this âillegitimacyâ of all Hegelian set theoretic determinations of being leads not to their ruination (as it will for Badiou, for example), but rather constitutes the singular power and dynamic source of Hegelian logic. Hegel, she argues, while not anachronistically adopting set theoretical terminology, was nonetheless quite aware of the contradictions governing such logical totalities, but simply rejected their âillegitimacyâ as a symptom of a specific, inadequate form of rationality, precisely one that could not incorporate such contradictions within its compass.33 Instead, Hegel affirmed such contradiction [Widerspruch], in its integral necessity to the totality of the absolute idea, as a new form of logic, one precisely able encompass such limited, determinate forms of totality, negation.
4 The Imaginary Presuppositions of Systematic Dialectics
At stake in this chapter cannot be a summary judgement of Hegelian logic as such, nor abstractly to claim its absolute distinction from Marxâs various modes of demonstration in Capital. As will become clear below, at certain moments, Marx does depend upon precisely such a Hegelian logic of constitutive totality, negation and contradiction (for example in the presentation of the concept of the commodity in the Grundrisse and the first, 1867 edition of Capital). The question instead must be to determine the multiple modes of demonstration that Marx deploys in Capital through an explication of the text itself, without invoking a transcendent, reified totality of which each of these moments would be a determinate expression.34 This Althusserian analytical protocol, as the general rejection of the category of expressive totality, finds analogous iteration in Machereyâs programme in Theory of Literary Production (discussed in the previous chapter); at the same time, it stands in direct opposition to the neo-Hegelian reading of Capital to be found in Chris Arthurâs The New Dialectic and Marxâs Capital.
To confront these two influential readings of Capital then is at once to choose between a reconstructive interpretation of the (Hegelian, negative dialectical) logical form of Capital (Arthur) and the autonomous construction of an analytic theory of Capitalâs modes of demonstration and the necessity governing their organisation. At the same time, it is to clarify the decision drawn between an understanding of Capital as a unified, totalised negative dialectical object, in which each moment incompletely expresses this totality, and Capital as a materialist structure of multiple logics and concatenated conceptual singularities without totality.35 In rejecting the inadequate nominal abstraction of âHegelianâ vs. âSpinozistâ (or Marxian) logics, I choose to focus instead on three aspects of Marxâs apodictic demonstration: totality, negation, and contradiction. I begin with the problem of totality not only because it offers a stark and radical contrast between Arthurâs and Machereyâs understandings of the process of exposition in Capital, but even more because Arthurâs analysis of the status of negation and contradiction in Capital crucially depends upon his initial assertion of the bookâs status as a formal totality.
Chris Arthurâs influential 2002 book The New Dialectic and Marxâs Capital offers a sustained reading of the logic of Capital as what Arthur calls a âsystematic dialecticâ.36 By this, Arthur rightly seeks to distinguish this form of analysis as the attempt logically âto articulate the relations of a given social order, namely capitalismâ, from what he calls the âOld Dialecticâ, the Soviet Stalinist âschool of âDiamatâ, rooted in vulgarised versions of Engels and Plekhanovâ, a tradition that, retaining Hegelâs teleological philosophy of history, has read Capital as the historicist analysis of the origins and progression of capitalism from so-called primitive exchange to the fully developed industrial capitalist social form.37
In contrast, the process of exposition Arthur calls âsystematic dialecticâ adopts Hegelâs concern to demonstrate the logical form of its object, as for example that found in the Logic or the Philosophy of Right, arguing that Marx univocally adopted this Hegelian logical dialectic in Capital.38 While I have argued above that the Spinozist distinction between the historical development of capitalism, in the attribute of temporal extension, and the exposition of its logical structure in that of thought forms the basis of Althusserâs epistemology in Reading Capital â a theoretical reference that Arthur, in his anti-Althusserian Hegelianism unsurprisingly neglects to mention â this quasi-Althusserian distinction that Arthur draws constitutes little more than an opening prelude to his analysis.
Instead, Arthurâs introductory exposition of his project confusingly â from the Althusserian position I am arguing in this book â conflates a salutary rejection of Diamat historicist readings of Capital, with the imaginary, unexamined, and undemonstrated presupposition that Marxâs Capital, via what Arthur calls its âsystematic dialecticâ, presents the logic of capitalism as a unitary expressive totality (âthe significance of each element is determined by its place in the totalityâ, Arthur states categorically) via a negative, contradiction-based dialectic.39
Arthurâs undefended position implicitly invokes the authority of the entire Marxist humanist tradition, a position that originates in Marxâs early writings,40 to find its definitive and most influential formulation in Lukácsâs 1921 essay âThe Marxism of Rosa Luxemburgâ: âThe decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought [is] the point of view of totalityâ.41 In Lukácsâs famous treatment, the category of totality constitutes âthe essence of the method that Marx took over from Hegelâ.42 This position necessarily implies, Lukács argues, the mediated unity of both subject and object as totality, such that âonly classes can represent this total point of viewâ. For Marx, abandoning the initial political sloganeering of the Communist Manifesto, the category of class would come to represent in Capitalâs science of causes the terminal explanandum of its thousands of pages of analysis (in the form of the four, incomplete paragraphs of Volume III, chapter 52, âClassesâ), with the science of value in the capitalist social form its explanans. For Lukács, in contrast, the subjective point of view of totality, which is to say, that of the proletariat, miraculously explains the teleology it presupposes, the faith-based theodicy of revolution: âRevolutionâ, writes Lukács, âis the product of a point of view in which the category of totality is predominant â¦. As doubt develops into certainty the petty bourgeois and reactionary elements disappear without a trace: doubt turns to optimism and to the theoretical certainty of the coming revolutionâ.43 This assertion culminates in Lukácsâs dogmatic certainty of the historical necessity of revolution, as if the imputed, merely imagined proletarian standpoint of totality could predict the fall of paving stones on the collective head of the capitalist class: âThis certitude [of proletarian revolution] can be guaranteed methodologically â by the dialectical method ⦠as the certitude that the ⦠historical process will come to fruitionâ.44
Proletarian revolution having weathered the vicissitudes of the twentieth century, in Arthurâs case, unlike that of Lukács, the âstandpoint of totalityâ remains strictly limited to that of a logical presupposition devoid of any explicit political teleology.45 âOntologicallyâ, Arthur summarises, systematic dialectic âaddresses itself to totalities and thus to their comprehension through systematically connected categoriesâ.46 While, as we have seen, Hegel explicitly understands the object of his various analyses to be totalities, whether this is true for Marx remains uncertain in the absence of some degree of textual analysis on Arthurâs part that would support this fundamental claim. Instead, Arthur simply begs the question regarding this shibboleth of the Systematic Dialectic school, and directly proceeds to draw his own original conclusions from a position that may or may not correspond to Marxâs argument in Capital.47
Arthur thus rightly underlines the specificity of Marxâs logical â as opposed to historical â form of demonstration, stressing its discontinuity with the order of historical events (âThe expositional order of [the] categories does not have to coincide with the order of their appearance in historyâ), while in the very same sentence presupposing without demonstration that the categories of capitalism serve to âconceptualise an existent, concrete wholeâ.48
Macherey, in contrast, decisively rejects a vision of critical interpretation as the revelation of the consonant unity of the work, âthe postulate of harmony or totality: the work is perfect, completed, and constitutes a finished entityâ.49 While in this view its constitutive dissonance subtracts the work from the category of totality, it is nonetheless a singular, existing thing.50 Whether, like Marxâs Capital, it remains a radically unfinished and incomplete work in progress, or nominally complete, like Spinozaâs Ethics or Proustâs A la recherche, the work, despite and even because of its infinite determinations, remains a finite thing, and, consequently, emphatically not a totality: âIf the work does not produce or contain the principle of its own closure, it is nevertheless definitively enclosed within its own limits (though they may not be self-appointed limits). The work is finite because it is incompleteâ.51
Readers of The New Dialectic have tended to focus on the inadequacies of Arthurâs liberal reconstruction of the capitalist social form, taking issue for example with Arthurâs ârandom selection of categories of Hegelâs Logic ⦠applied to a selection of more or less random categories of the first five chapters of Capitalâ, as well as with Arthurâs reconstructivist claim that Marx prematurely introduces abstract labour as the substance of value in the first chapter of Capital.52 Here, I wish to focus not on Arthurâs interpretive reconstruction of the capitalist social form, but instead on the adequacy of categories such as totality and constitutive negation for understanding Capitalâs process of exposition. On this score, Jacques Bidetâs is to my mind the most relevant critique of The New Dialectic, for he asserts (without actually developing this argument) the basic inadequacy of the categories of totality53 and the expressive determination that totality would bestow on each determination.54
The initial presentation of The New Dialectic is predetermined by a significant silence, in the form of its unquestioned presupposition that the concept of âdialecticâ refers to Hegelian, negative contradiction-based demonstration. Here too, Arthur simply presupposes what needs to be shown: if dialectic refers to the notion of logical reasoning in general,55 and Hegelâs dialectic based on constitutive negation and contradiction constitutes only one variety of this process, could it be that Marx deploys other modes of demonstration across the thousands of pages of Capital? Never actually addressing this possibility, one striking aspect of The New Dialectic is Arthurâs general willingness to forgo analysis of Marxâs actual modes of logical analysis and demonstration, and instead liberally to âreconstructâ his own understanding of the (negative) dialectic of capitalism. With the important exception of his chapter 6, where Arthur analyses âThe Negation of the Negation in Marxâs Capitalâ (discussed below), The New Dialectic never develops its claim for Capitalâs âsystematic dialecticâ via a systematic analysis of Capitalâs dialectic (in the general sense of its modes of demonstration), but instead only occasionally inserts citations selected to support its negative dialectical presuppositions, these most frequently being taken from the Grundrisse and earlier drafts and editions of Capital in which the influence of Hegelâs logic remains most pronounced.56
Here too, we can say that Arthurâs procedure confirms Machereyâs critique of interpretation, in its tendency to conceal the complex, overdetermined work and its constitutional dissonance behind the gleaming image of the vision of totality it artfully constructs: primarily directed toward âan external endâ (the articulation of his own original understanding of the negative dialectical systematic dialectic of capital) rather than an explication of the necessary and complex dynamics of the text itself,57 Arthurâs interpretive effort amounts to âa mythical task that endows [the work] with a unity and totality into which it vanishesâ.58 This process of reduction and revelation culminates in Arthurâs schematic and reductive chart of correspondences between Hegelâs Logic and Capital.59
5 The Problem with Totality
Capital is not a totality, whether considered materially or logically. This general conclusion follows simply as a logical consequence of the nature of all axiomatic logical systems.60 Any logical system requires an axiomatic foundation to establish the basic principles allowing for its demonstrations, and the largely informal logical system of Capital is no different. I argue throughout this book that the first sentence of Capital provides such an axiomatic starting point to Marxâs argument â that capitalism is the social form characterized by the generalization of commodity production and exchange, with the commodity as its basic unit â and that many of Marxâs propositions follow apodictically from this initial axiom â that in the capitalist social form, all commodities require a value form; that generalized exchange requires a general equivalent form; that labour power is the only commodity capable of creating surplus value; that the value and price of a commodity tend to diverge, etc.
Now, any axiomatic system can be said to be complete â a logical totality â if it can derive whether any proposition formulated within its language is true or false, and it can be said to be consistent as a totality if its derived propositions do not result in logical contradictions. While I argue that this is the case for the great majority of Marxâs propositions and demonstrations, Macherey, Balibar, Antonio Negri, Jacques Bidet, Riccardo Bellofiore and others have all shown that there exist multiple points of logical rupture and discontinuity in Capital: in other words, that the logic of Capital is incomplete because its own consistency or inconsistency cannot be derived from its initial axioms.61 Without needing to rehearse their various readings, I will simply argue below that it is Arthur himself who undermines his own assumption for the logical totality of Capital, insofar as he can only present this ideological image of a complete functional system by excluding from consideration the anomalous, disjunctive, disruptive power of living labour.
Following his private critique of Althusserâs use of the concept of totality in the first edition of Reading Capital,62 Pierre Macherey would develop a more sustained critique of the concept in Theory of Literary Production and his writings on Spinoza.63 Machereyâs critique is extensive, if not systematically argued: totality, he argues, can and should only refer to the fabrication of imaginary, inadequately determinate sets (such as Arthurâs undemonstrated position), and necessarily remains a tendential, incomplete construction of a thought object. In Machereyâs understanding, the explication of a text must seek instead to construct an analysis of the necessity that governs its overdetermined, dissonant complexity:
Rather than sufficiency and ideal consistency, a determinate insufficiency and incompleteness actually shapes the work. The work is necessarily incomplete in itself: not extrinsically, in a fashion that could be completed to ârealiseâ the work. This incompleteness, indicated by the confrontation of distinct meanings, is the true reason for its articulation. The thin line of the discourse is the temporary appearance behind which we recognise the determinate complexity of a text: on the condition that this complexity is not that of a âtotalityâ, illusory and mediate.64
Constitutionally finite and incomplete, the work is never a terminate totality or unified whole. This position, one that Macherey articulates so resolutely, nonetheless itself remains underdetermined: what, we may ask, does the concept of totality in fact indicate, and why does Macherey, following Spinoza, so vigorously assert its epistemological inadequacy?
Derived from the Greek To holon [
The conclusion Macherey draws from Spinozaâs incipient definitions constitutes a rejection of the notion of totality as applied to any finite thing: Spinozaâs âlogic of the finite [indicates that] a finite thing, whatever it may be, can never be thought absolutely for itself, but only relatively by the intermediary of its relation to another thingâ.67 The implication of this initial position is thus that to speak of any finite, determinate thing as a totality (such as the capitalist mode of production and/or the logical system of the book Capital for Arthur) is to have recourse to a merely imaginary figure based on our sense impressions of that object as a discrete and self-sufficient thing, as opposed to adequately grasping its necessarily infinite determinations by other things. Consequently, this imaginary figure (say, Arthurâs abstract hypostatisation of the capitalist mode of production) is then imagined to produce effects upon the various moments of the system. Marx, in Capital, proceeds in precisely the opposite fashion, from the logical demonstration of the essential nature of a thing (such as the commodity) to its necessary effects, without the imputation of what Lukács called âthe standpoint of totalityâ.
Indeed, Macherey indicates in his commentary that the topic of Book I of Ethics is precisely not some finite, determinate thing, but âan object that is infinite, and even infinitely infinite: the set [ensemble] of reality considered in its totality and as a totality, according to the principles that found its unity [and] develop a rational thought on the subject of all [au sujet de tout] by treating this whole according to its nature as whole [sa nature de tout]â.68 It would thus seem that Macherey expressly limits the notion of totality or whole [
I would argue, moreover, that Machereyâs initial use of the terms totality and whole in reference to Spinozist substance that I have just cited is itself merely imagistic, in the sense that the indefinite article (âa totalityâ) tends to hypostatise into a determinate thing, what Macherey goes on to steadfastly and repeatedly argue is precisely not a thing, determinate and countable (as one monist substance): âto think the real in totality according to the synthetic procedure or geometric order that proceeds from the cause to its effects, and not the reverseâ requires a conception of substance not as a thing but as Being, understood as the presupposition that âconditions the set of its [determinate] affectionsâ.69 To think of substance as a thing is âto transfer onto [the concept of substance] characteristics that belong only to its affections â¦. Substance, insofar as it exists necessarily [i.e., as causa sui], thus by virtue of its proper [seule] nature, does not exist in the manner of a finite thing, and thus in the mode of an individual existence, as a singular entity finding its place next to others within a series that can be enumeratedâ. Substance, in other words, is not one or a substance or totality; âit is not âanâ existence, in the sense of a particular existence that would depend upon causes exterior to its nature, but existence itself thought as absolute ⦠the fact of existing understood in itself, thus independent of reference to any particular existence whatsoeverâ.70
To think of Spinozist substance as a determinate thing or totality is to grasp this most difficult concept inadequately, through the imagination.71 âTo attentively think the nature of substanceâ, Macherey observes,
is a new manner of thinking existence, in itself and no longer in number [non plus en nombre], and thus without bringing to bear consideration of exterior causes â¦. The nature of substance is such that it is subtracted from the grasp of the imagination, which can only denature it in replacing it in a network of exterior determinations in which it figures as an existing thing next to or above others [as a transcendent instance or subject of monism, Althusser would have said], which amounts to denying its absolute relation to itself that excludes all relation to anything other than itself.72
To think Spinozaâs idea of substance, then, is to refuse to speak of âaâ substance at all, but instead, Macherey continues, of âsubsisting [le subsister], or existing [lâexister] considered as suchâ.73
If the concept of totality or the whole as hypostatised thing is thus necessarily inadequate and imaginary, both in the case of substance (because to speak of substance as a thing is to reify it as an existing thing) as well as of any determinate object of thought (since the process of adequate construction of an object of thought is infinite), how does Spinoza, in Machereyâs reading, allow for the adequate understanding of any existing thing or âwholeâ (such as the capitalist social form)?
In his letters of 10 and 14 May 1965 to Althusser on the problem of totality in Reading Capital, Macherey somewhat cryptically suggests that Spinozaâs 1665 letter XXXII to Oldenberg contains the theoretical resources to overcome Althusserâs ungrounded references to âthe structured wholeâ in the first edition of Reading Capital: âIt seems to meâ, Macherey writes, âthat when you speak of a set [ensemble] or of a whole, you thereby add a concept that is absolutely unnecessary to the demonstration, and which may later become an obstacle (the idea of the real whole in opposition to that of the spiritual whole is not very clear: the idea of the whole is really the spiritualist conception of structure) â¦. Each time I have encountered the phrase âstructured wholeâ in what you have written, I was struck by the problems that it raisesâ.74 Machereyâs point is that reference to totality or a whole, whether expressive totality, the explicit object of Althusserâs critique in Reading Capital, or structured whole (as Althusser suggests positively) is âabsolutely unnecessary to the demonstrationâ. In what sense is this the case, following the Spinozist logic Macherey refers to?
Let us look at Spinozaâs letter XXXII more carefully than Macherey does in his suggestion to Althusser. There, in answer to Oldenbergâs inquiry into âthe grounds of our belief that each part of Nature accords with the wholeâ, Spinoza begins by pointing out that âthe actual manner of this coherence and the agreement of each part with the whole ⦠is beyond my knowledge. To know this it would be necessary to know the whole of Nature and all its partsâ. Instead, Spinoza argues to his correspondent that our knowledge of any putative whole, and not only being qua being, remains inadequate and imaginary in the absence of its systematic, adequate demonstration, whether through common notions or intuitive knowledge. Rather than developing a systematic and comprehensive demonstration of this point as he does in the Ethics, however, Spinoza fabricates for his correspondent a striking, hauntingly graphic and even fantastic image, his famous parable of the worm in the blood. The point of Spinozaâs allegory is that the decision as to whether an object (such as the blood in which Spinozaâs imaginary worm swims) constitutes a whole or a part is necessarily subjective.75 It is possible to understand any determinate thing as either part or whole, depending on how this knowledge is constructed, whether things are understood to âadapt themselves to one another so that they are in closest possible agreementâ, such that each is a part of a whole, or, alternatively, âare different from one anotherâ, such that each is understood to constitute a whole. As objects of knowledge, the parts of the blood (what we today identify as white and red blood cells, plasma, etc.), in Spinozaâs example, can readily be understood either as whole or part: from the perspective of their âagreement [they] form all together one fluidâ, but were we to consider each in its singular difference from the others (white vs. red cells, etc.), âto that extent we regard them each as a whole, not a partâ.
To call a thing either a whole or a part is thus for Spinoza merely relative and subjective, fundamentally dependent upon how an object of knowledge is constructed, more or less adequately, as a figure of the understanding. As Macherey summarises in Hegel or Spinoza, âFor Spinoza, the notion of totality ⦠does not represent the positive existence of a being ⦠but [depends] on the point of view of the understanding that cuts it up in the infinite chain of singular things, by considering it as a wholeâ. This position, moreover, indicates Spinozaâs fundamental antagonism with Hegelian logic, as the absolute distinction between substance and subject, insofar as the former, by definition for Spinoza absolute and thus indeterminate, can never be figured as a determinate whole.76
That said, Spinoza is not propounding the relativism of all judgements. He clearly indicates to Oldenberg an entirely different path to adequate knowledge of any singular thing: beginning from a true idea, it is possible adequately to understand the essential nature of that thing, and then, constructively, to proceed from one adequately constructed idea to another. This synthetic logic proceeds to construct the âcoherence [cohaerentiam] of partsâ via a cumulative understanding by which âthe laws or nature of another part adapts itself to the laws or nature of another partâ, absent all teleology.77 While we cannot know in totality either the infinite determinations of any singular thing (such as the capitalist social form) nor the infinitely infinite determinations of the whole of Nature, the mind can nonetheless proceed constructively, from an adequate knowledge of one true idea, to the (logical) successor with which it additively forms a part of a larger body.78
Instead of Arthurâs claim for a negative dialectical knowledge based on the contradiction between any determinate concept such as money or value and the (merely presupposed, imaginary) totality of the capitalist social form in all its infinite determinations, Marxâs argument in Capital, in this view, should be understood to proceed constructively, from the adequate knowledge of one concept (the general form of appearance of any society âin which the capitalist mode of production predominatesâ, the commodity form, the substance of value, etc.) to the next with which it is most closely linked (the passage from use-value to exchange-value, for example). This is precisely to indicate what Macherey only suggests to Althusser: the reference to totality is not simply âabsolutely unnecessary to the demonstrationâ, but utterly misleading, in the sense that the concept of totality inherently refers to âthe complete set of elements of a wholeâ (Lalande), a terminally and wholly complete object rather than an inherently infinite construct.79 Neither Capital the book nor the capitalist mode of production, the object of knowledge Marx constructs, is subject to the completion of totality, but only the more or less adequate construction of each of its logical steps and their infinitely complex ramifications and network of correspondences, the sum of which do not make up a whole.
A case in point is Marxâs concept of total surplus value: âEqual amounts of capital, no matter how they are composed, receive equal shares (aliquot parts) of the totality of surplus-value produced by the total social capitalâ.80 Marxâs analysis here explicitly takes as its object not the investigation of specific individual commodities, as did classical economics, but the total mass of commodities, initially in the first sentence of Capital impressionistically described as an undifferentiated, âimmense heapâ (ungeheure Warensammlung), and subsequently and with increasing theoretical concretion, as identical subdivisions or âaliquot partsâ that constitute the general substance of capital.81
As Fred Moseley has shown, Marx meticulously constructs this concept across the three volumes of Capital, such that it serves, in Volume III, as the crucial theoretical object that allows Marx to distinguish between profit and surplus value. The concept has no empirical or even quantitative basis or nature, there exists no Fort Knox of total surplus value, but remains from the first page of Capital to the last a purely theoretical object of increasing theoretical complexity. For all the rigor and adequacy of Marxâs construction, âthe total mass of surplus-valueâ remains in Capital an inherently incomplete concept, as Moseleyâs 400-page analysis amply demonstrates. In the place of Arthurâs impressionistic gesture to capital as a logical totality, a concept such as total surplus-value, which Marx rigorously, if necessarily incompletely, develops, serves to lucidly distinguish Marxâs theoretical analysis from the inherent contradictions of mainstream economicsâ individualist, summative process. From this we might even conclude that Marxâs reference to the âtotalityâ of surplus-value that I cited above is a terminological lapsus, a usage limited to a single instance in the uncorrected 1864 manuscript that Engels reworked into Volume III; instead, Marx in every other case refers to the âtotal mass of surplus-valueâ, arguably tending to avoid the implication of surplus-value as a complete and closed conceptual set.
Arthur, like Lukács before him, plays the role of the worm in Spinozaâs blood: reassuringly swathed in the balm of absolute knowledge (whether that of the logic of Capital or the theodicy of the proletarian revolution), the point of view of expressive totality bestows the aura of absolute truth via its mere assertion. In The New Dialectic, as it had for Lukács, the subjective hypostatisation of the actually existing concept of capitalism as negative dialectical totality offers a reassuring image, the function of imputed totality magically bestowing on every partial, expressive determination of the whole its necessary and sufficient reason. Affectively, the transcendent monism of totality, whether logical or revolutionary theodicy, serves in this view to repress the anxiety of the knowing subject before its constitutive not-knowing, to repress the necessary incompletion of any object of knowledge. It was not for nothing that Lacan initially founded the singularity of any analysis on this Spinozist epistemology: it is Spinoza who most forcefully refuses the imaginary, regressive figure of totality as guarantee. The Ethics, principle among its many virtues, instead initiates a treatment, offering the subject the means to sustain the anxiety of not-knowing via the progressive amendment of the intellect, in the certainty that the finite human mind is capable of more adequate understanding than such imaginary chimera, even to realise a scientia intuitiva â not of totality â but of the absolute.82
6 The Systematic Dissonance of Capital
Materially, it is quite obvious that Marxâs book Capital is a radically incomplete project. Even Volume I of Capital â the publication of which Marx oversaw through its second, revised German edition and first French translation (1872â75) â remains a work-in-progress; Marx made notes for a further complete revision of it in 1881 (which he never carried out). What we know today as Volume I is a bricolage Engels made of the second German edition of 1872 and the French edition of 1872â75. While the bulk of the first draft of Volume I from 1863 is lost, the first German edition of 1867 as well as Marxâs notes for the 1872 edition and his intended further 1881 revision contain many important formulations and developments of his demonstration (in particular, a radically different presentation of the key first chapter on the value-form), aspects absent from Engelsâs posthumous âdefinitive editionâ. Volume III, assembled by Engels after Marxâs death, is based upon a single manuscript from 1864â65; it is thus not only theoretically immature compared to Marxâs subsequent work on Volumes I and II, but in fact terminates abruptly with Marxâs comment âetc.â, a mere five paragraphs into its twenty-fifth chapter dedicated to what presumably would have been one of the essential results of Marxâs analysis, the concept of âClassesâ.83
In fact, attention to the totality of Marxâs drafts, notebooks, and letters from 1857 to 1881, gradually becoming available in the definitive MEGA2 edition of Marx and Engelsâs works, leads Michael Heinrich to draw the distinctly Althusserian conclusion that âin a strict sense, a three-volume work âCapitalâ written by Marx does not really exist. ⦠There is no clear difference between drafts and the final work â we have only differently developed drafts of a shifting, unfinished and incomplete projectâ.84
Given this genetic complexity, it is patently obvious that Marxâs intellectual project of a critique of political economy that we know as Capital does not constitute a totality in any sense of the word, and that the presumption of totality by proponents of Systematic Dialectics such as Arthur and Reuten is a mere article of faith. Their unquestioned certainty underwrites a distinctly theological reading of Capital. This imaginary totality, that of the theoretical object Marx constructed, as well as its materialist basis in the putative totality of actually-existing capitalism, constitutes for this Hegelian school of thought the transcendent instance that bestows meaning on each moment of the (imaginary) whole:
Only on completion of the presentation, [Reuten writes, citing Hegel,] will we know that âthe truth of the differentiated is its being in unityâ. ⦠Once the presentation is complete â and thus when the initial unifying concept [of the commodity] is shown to be inherent in the object-totality, in its full concreteness (
γ ) â will we have come full circle, confirming the truth of the abstract starting point.85
This providential day of theoretical plenitude is one that will never arrive, as Reuten himself knows as well as Althusser or Heinrich: Capital Volume I as we know it, Reuten observes parenthetically, ârequires further concrete grounding of the moments presented in this sequence (Capital Volumes II and III, as well as the books which Marx had planned but did not even begin to draft)â.86 The Hegelian theoretical commitments of this school of Marxology thus lead them â despite their intensive knowledge of the extreme genetic complexity of Marxâs Capital project that makes of it an unequivocally âunfinished and incomplete projectâ (Heinrich) â to adhere to this Lukácsian-Hegelian theoretical imperative, and to bestow upon Capital the aura of a transcendent, emanant totality. Their analytic pursuit recommences a perpetually-in-process inquest into the theoretical promised land that is Marxâs alleged Hegelian palimpsest, as they fervently continue to invoke âthe lonely hour of the last instance [that] never comesâ.87
Similarly, it should be obvious on even the most cursory reading that Marx deploys a multiplicity of demonstrative modalities across the pages of Capital, from Marxâs recurrent recourse to classical modus ponens, if-then propositions,88 to imaginary phantasmagorias89 and other quite original modes of demonstration Macherey, Althusser, and Balibar identify as the âexhaustionâ of concepts (Macherey), the non-dialectical, discrete âpositioningâ (position) of concepts (Althusser), and the methods Balibar calls âcomparisonâ and âresultsâ.90 While Chris Arthur does not literally claim that Marxâs demonstration in Capital, unlike that of Hegelâs Logic, proceeds solely via a dialectic of constitutive, negative contradiction and sublation, his unrelenting and unquestioned focus on this mode of demonstration certainly implies such a belief.
Arthurâs exclusively Hegelian understanding of Capital as a substantive, expressive totality â the presentation of which is driven by the contradictory relation of any of its moments with that totality â grounds his presentation of its logic univocally, to the exclusion of any other mode of presentation:
The [logic of Capital] depends upon the presupposition that there is a whole from which a violent abstraction has [initially] been made so as to constitute a simple beginning â¦; and thus there arises a contradiction between the character of the element in isolation and its meaning as part of the whole. The treatment of this moment as inherently in contradiction with itself, on account of this, is given if it is assumed throughout the dialectical development that the whole remains immanent or implicit in it. This provides the basis for the transitions in the development of the categorial ordering. There is an impulse to provide a solution to a contradiction â a âpushâ one might say â and there is the need to overcome the deficiency of the category with respect to its fulfilment in the whole.91
In this fashion, with no more than sporadic, selective textual references, Arthur bases his claim for the negative dialectical logic of Capital upon the priority of its status as an expressive totality: it is only because Capital is presupposed to form a substantive totality that each of its moments, in its incompletion, can be argued to enter into negative contradiction with that supposed-totality, logically propelling its sublation from one moment to the next.
On my reading of New Dialectic, Chris Arthur variously presents three distinct arguments for the consistency of Marxâs logic of the capitalist social form as a totality, none of which is either systematic (to adopt Arthurâs own term) or even directly relevant to showing that âCapital [the book and its logic? The concept? The social form?] is closed in formâ.92 The first of these âargumentsâ points to the totalising nature of capital, its tendency subsume all things within its logic, and to commodify all things and social relations: âIf value depends for its reality on the full development of capitalist production, then the concepts of Marxâs first chapter can only have an abstract character, and the argument itself as it advances develops the meanings of these concepts, through grounding them adequately in the comprehended wholeâ.93 Arthurâs statement seems to confuse its categories, its first clause on the reality of value apparently indicating the real, material subsumption via commodification of means and relations of capitalist production, the second, confusingly addressing âthe concepts of Marxâs first chapterâ.
Were we to assume, for argument, that Arthur rigorously remains at the level of Marxâs logic, and instead means âthe [concept] of valueâ and â[Marxâs concept of] the full development of capitalist productionâ, this obscure claim (even granted all this the reader must still guess at Arthurâs exact meaning) has been more adequately and systematically explicated by Fred Moseley. In Money and Totality, Moseley comprehensively shows that throughout the expanse of Marxâs economic manuscripts he presumes that âthe means of production in capitalist production are commodities, which have been purchased at the beginning of the circuit of money capital, and which therefore enter the valorisation process with already existing specific pricesâ.94
Even so, while Arthurâs claim may be true that âonly at the end of the reconstruction of the totality is its truth unfoldedâ, this is true not because this so-called âendâ â a point Arthur never concretely indicates within Marxâs exposition, nor could he, since it does not in fact exist within the incomplete and unfinished three volumes we know as Capital â would realise the putative negative dialectical totality of Capitalâs logic of exposition, but only, as Moseley shows, because Marx, like Spinoza in the Ethicsâ Scholia, chose to simplify for his readers this aspect of his initial presentation in the second edition of 1872, such that this âtotalityâ represents no more than a mere reductive, summary position.
In contrast to Arthurâs ungrounded claim, Marx explicitly emphasises this situated, subjective, provisional nature of the concept of the circularity of the reproduction of capital as a whole when, in the final paragraph of chapter 23 he indicates that âThe capitalist process of production, ⦠seen [betrachtet] 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 itselfâ.95 Coming at the end of Volume I, this position is no doubt infinitely more developed and concrete than the initial, minimal true idea with which Marx began Capital (i.e., that the capitalist mode of production appears [erschient] as a general accumulation of commodities); for all that, it is still a partial, incomplete position, a viewpoint obviously possessing none of the further conceptual determinations to be introduced in Volumes II and III.96
The fact that the circuit of money capital constitutes a constant in the capitalist social form, in other words, hardly makes of Marxâs logic or the system itself a totality: the concept of this feedback loop is only one among the throng of dissonant concepts Marx develops, existing alongside quite heterogeneous, but nonetheless crucial concepts such as class struggle, the theory of ground rent, cost price, and a hundred others composing the logical body Marx constructs, step by step, concept by concept, as the finite, dissonant thing without totality that is Capital.
Related to but distinct from this first claim for the logic of Capital as totality is Arthurâs similarly obscure implication that because capital requires not just the valorisation of value (as in the previous argument), but its unceasing accumulation, Marxâs logic thus âtreat[s] a given wholeâ, this because âit is characteristic [of Capital like the works of Hegel] that it demonstrates how [this given whole] reproduces itself â¦. The movement winds back upon itself to form a circuit of reproduction of these moments by each otherâ.97 Certainly, Marx shows the necessity of this circularity of reproduction and accompanying linear accumulation; nonetheless, my response is identical: Arthurâs claim is true and just as wholly irrelevant to the status of capital (whether the book or the social form) as totality, as it is only one among innumerable dissonant concepts in Marxâs logical construct.
Finally, the most developed but just as problematic argument Arthur puts forward for capital as totality is, paradoxically, its partial nature. Building on the previous points regarding the generality of value and subsumption, Arthur argues that âIt is inherent to the concept of capital that it must reproduce and accumulate, and in this it seeks to overcome all obstacles and to make the material reality it engages with conform as perfectly as possible to its requirementsâ. But this it cannot do, âits ideal world of frictionless circulation and growthâ is inevitably dependent upon recalcitrant externalities, namely, living labour and its resistance to subsumption and the objective social demands of the valorisation process.98
Arthur makes this interesting and subtle point, one that in fact subverts the general argument of his book, in the context of a wider claim for the comprehensive logical, as opposed to historical, argument of Capital. He asserts for example that the discussion of the historical struggle over the length of the working day in chapter ten of Volume I âis strictly illustrative and does not advance the [logical] argumentâ.99 While literally correct, I think Arthurâs position fails to indicate the necessity that governs Marxâs inclusion of this material at this point in his analysis. When Marx writes that between the buyer and seller of the commodity labour power there exists âan antinomy, of right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchangeâ, he clearly indicates a point in his analysis that cannot be decided theoretically, one which, having as always first explicated the theoretical parameters of this struggle (between necessary and surplus labour), requires reference to this historical conflict.100
Note, however, how Arthur has externalised the category of class struggle from his governing framework of the âideal world of [capitalâs] frictionless circulation and growthâ: first as merely âillustrativeâ historical data,101 then as a âmaterial realityâ102 that impinges on this ideal logical form (totality). While the data Marx cites may well be merely âillustrativeâ, is it not the case that the presentation of this data nonetheless depends not just upon âmaterial realityâ, but precisely upon a concept of class struggle, a concept obviously vital and necessarily internal to Marxâs entire critique of political economy, for the data Marx presents to make sense in his argument?
When Arthur writes that âThe logical form of capital is by no means absolute but totally insufficient to maintain itself and it requires a transition to the domain of reality;â that âwhile capital has the form of self-realisation it still lacks control over its bearersâ; or that âthe logic of the development can issue only in tendencies, which in truth depend on material premisesâ,103 he unwittingly reveals the nature of the imaginary logical totality he constantly presumes:104 in contrast to the object of Arthurâs analysis, a purely imaginary logical form purged of class struggle, Marxâs (critical) logic of the capitalist social form integrally and essentially positions the dissonant concepts of class struggle and the recalcitrance of living labour as necessary logical components of his logical system.105
In contrast to Marxâs critique, in which concepts such as class struggle and the working day form integral, dissonant moments, the ideal system Arthur presents as âfrictionlessâ totality, from which these dissonances have been externalised, is none other than the ideological apology for capitalism that is classical political economy itself (and neoliberalism more generally), precisely the imaginary totality from which class struggle has been magically erased by an âinvisible handâ. If capital is indeed a totality, it is so only in the imagination of its apologists and benefactors. As Arthur himself is obviously not to be counted among these, one is left to conclude, with Spinoza, that the powerful impression of the univocal Hegelian philosophy of totality has blinded the Marxist analysis of The New Dialectic to the discordant, polyphonous logics of Marxâs theoretical critique.
7 Negation and Contradiction
In the sixth chapter of New Dialectic, Arthur explicates in detail the negative dialectical logic of chapter 32 of Capital Volume I, âThe Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulationâ. While the previous chapters of New Dialectic only punctually cited and analysed Marxâs text to support Arthurâs interpretive reconstruction of the logic of capital, here, Marxâs sole reference to the Hegelian concept of the ânegation of the negationâ in the whole of Capital serves Arthur as the occasion actually to cite and closely analyse the logic of this moment in Marxâs demonstration. Beginning with an extensive, two-page citation (to âremind ourselves of Marxâs textâ), Arthur goes on to construct a detailed, original interpretation of the logic of this passage.
Though the arch-Hegelian figure of the ânegation of the negationâ amply vindicates Arthurâs decision to analyse this long passage in detail, in other respects the section is an odd choice for a study of âsystematic dialecticâ. For not only have this chapterâs summary, teleological claims, as Arthur himself notes, long been an object of ridicule from Dühring on, but their very formulation is precisely the opposite of the painstaking, systematic dialectic (of whatever type) to be found in the initial chapters of Capital. In the place of the apodictic logic of a rigorous demonstration that moves precisely, step by step, sentence by sentence, to demonstrate the essential nature of the commodity and its forms, of surplus value, of capital, etc., in this concluding chapter of volume one, Marx famously makes sweeping, unfounded claims for the inevitable, unitary movement of history: âAt a certain stage of development [the precapitalist mode of production] brings into the world the material means of its own destruction â¦. Its annihilation ⦠forms the pre-history of capitalâ. With the further development of social productive forces, Marx continues, âthe monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside it â¦. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriatedâ.106
Stuck at the very end of Marxâs thousand-page volume, its penultimate chapter retains the grandiose, undemonstrated logic of an inevitable, automatic collapse of capitalism characteristic of the Grundrisseâs famous âFragment on machinesâ, claims buttressed not by rigorous demonstration but instead by the unrevised, teleological Hegelianism of Marxâs Grundrisse notebooks that is precisely the object of Arthurâs fascination: âCapitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation. This is the negation of the negationâ.107 Whether Marxâs grandiose claims do justice to the intricacy of Hegelâs logical demonstrations is doubtful; at the very least, though, their articulation through the Hegelian category of negation constitutes a further instance of my argument in this chapter: that Marxâs process of exposition in Capital follows not one single logical model (Hegelian or otherwise), but deploys a multitude of demonstrative logics.
Despite Arthurâs close attention to the letter and movement of Marxâs text in this passage, its grandiose, telegraphic nature forces him to revert to the process of interpretation (as opposed to textual explication) that guided the previous chapters of New Dialectic. Arthurâs intention, then, is to show that Marxâs deployment of the logic of the negation of negation in this chapter âis more than just metaphor or parodyâ, but instead that its high degree of abstraction in fact constitutes âthe form of the transition [from one mode of production to another] at the most general level, however highly mediated and contingent is the real processâ.108
Arthur thus proceeds interpretively to reconstruct the logic of the âtwo negationsâ Marx indicates in the passage: from pre-capitalist to capitalist social forms, and from the latter to the point at which, in Marxâs words, âThe knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriatedâ. This analysis is predicated on the founding distinction of New Dialectic, i.e., between a traditional historical reading of Capital as describing the passage from simple exchange to the capitalist mode of production, in favour of a âstructural problematic requiring an account of the âgenesisâ [of the capitalist social form] in logical termsâ.109 Given the resolutely historical terms in which Marx presents his claims in this chapter (in this, it is of a piece with the entire concluding historical section eight of Capital on so-called primitive accumulation), Arthurâs point seems to be that even here, in what is argumentatively the weakest chapter of the entire book, Capital remains a resolutely, unflaggingly logical work (as opposed to a historical study of capitalism, its antecedents, and successors).
Arthurâs focus is on the source of the original capital to initiate the capitalist production process (this being the topic of section eight of Capital more generally). Here, Marx castigates the ideological faith that the capitalist gets these funds from his own hard labour. This, Marx observes ironically, is âthe unanimous answer of the spokesmen of political economy. And in factâ, Marx adds slyly, âtheir assumption appears to be the only one consonant with the laws of commodity productionâ.110 The point of Marxâs irony, as any reader of Capital will know, is that this appearance is not just an ideological justification on the part of the capitalists themselves, but possesses its own necessity, given the theoretical inadequacy of the analysis of the question prior to Marx.
Arthurâs claim then is that Marxâs ensuing rectification of this ideological â though necessary â misapprehension adheres to a negative dialectical logic of âthe transformation of the laws of exchange, appropriation, and property, into their oppositesâ.111 And indeed, Marxâs language in this passage, which Arthur cites extensively, seems to indicate the automatic transformation characteristic of dialectical sublation:
It is quite evident ⦠that the laws of appropriation ⦠become changed into their direct opposite through their own internal and inexorable dialectic â¦. The property laws of commodity production must undergo an inversion so that they become laws of capitalist appropriation.112
This passage incontrovertibly constitutes, as Arthur rightly maintains, an instance of Hegelian negative dialectic that Marx continued to deploy at certain moments in Capital, a movement of sublation that Marx presents as a passive process of transformation that occurs automatically, as more adequate categories sublate previous inadequate, ideological ones in the progression of his argument.
This passage should be compared, however, with the strictly analogous preceding passage from chapter five to six and seven, the very crux of Marxâs critique of classical political economy. There, he shows that the âcontradictions in the general formula of capitalâ, i.e., the inability of the classical economists to account for the source of surplus value given the inadequate conceptual terms in which they posed the problem, requires not an automatic sublation of those concepts based on their inner contradictions, one that would retain them in their transformation, but, as Jacques Bidet and Riccardo Bellofiore have both argued, a logical break or leap to another theoretical terrain, one in which Marxâs original concept of labour power â crucially absent from the conceptual framework of classical political economy â can be analysed in its use by its purchaser, the capitalist, to reveal the source of surplus value as the difference between necessary and surplus labour.113
While the object in question differs, Marxâs basic demonstrative procedure is identical in these two passages: he first shows the necessity governing inadequate, ideological forms of appearance of a phenomenon (respectively, the origin of a capital fund and the source of surplus value), and then offers its more adequate analysis in his own theoretical terms. Despite this superficial similarity, the terms of Marxâs demonstration are radically different, fully constituting two singular modes of logical demonstration in the pages of Capital. In both cases, the transformation in question is a transformation in the adequacy of our understanding of the logic governing the capitalist social form; in both cases, Marx contrasts an initial, inadequate and ideological form of appearance of a phenomenon, with the greater adequacy our understanding can attain thanks to the original concepts he has constructed.
For Arthur, the conclusion to be drawn from chapter 24 is merely that even in this most superficially âhistoricalâ analysis, âMarx speaks âvirtuallyâ [i.e., logically] rather than historically, [which] refutes any interpretation of Capital that equates the systematic presentation of the existing totality with historical stages, as if the first chapter explicated some prior regime of simple commodity productionâ.114 While Arthurâs defence of the entirely logical status of Capital is in my view correct, the more interesting question, I think, is one that precisely subverts the claims to logical totality (âthe systematic presentation of the existing totalityâ) that accompany this assertion. A comparison between this passage and the transition from chapter five to six and seven incontrovertibly shows that the unrevised negative dialectical form of presentation in chapter 32 constitutes an epistemological impediment, obscuring Marxâs lucid, apodictic argument behind the foggy automatism and passivity of a putative âinternal and inexorable [negative] dialecticâ.
In its place, Marxâs famous invocation to his readers to solve the riddle that had confounded the greatest minds of classical political economy, âHic Rhodus, hic saltus!â invokes not the imaginary automatism of a Hegelian dialectic but the real power of the intellect to emend its comprehension of an object through the difficult labour of Marxâs concepts. In comparison with the conceptual gymnastics Arthur must perform to reveal the logical kernel of Marxâs eschatological historicist claims in chapter 24, the blatant superiority of Marxâs process of exposition in chapters five, six, and seven lies in the very simplicity of his presentation of a series of powerfully creative critical concepts: when two commodities are exchanged at their value without cheating, the source of profit cannot be readily discerned; for labour power to be sold as a commodity requires that the labourer own their own person as a free subject, not a slave; upon its sale, the commodity labour power is entirely at the disposition of its owner who has purchased it, the capitalist, who may continue to use it beyond what is necessary for the sustenance and reproduction of the labourer, in order to produce surplus value.
As such, Marxâs presentation in part two of the first volume of Capital discards his earlier reliance on the logical automatisms of a negative dialectic in the Grundrisse and other preparatory manuscripts, directly to invoke the fulsome powers of the human intellect more adequately to understand the object of its analysis (âHic Rhodus, hic saltus!â), an invocation analogous to Spinozaâs subjective presentation of the initial definitions of the Ethics. In those opening statements, Spinoza defines each of his founding concepts (causa sui, substance, God, etc.) in resolutely subjective terms, via the concerted repetition of the qualification intelligo [I understand]: âBy substance I understand that which is in itself and is conceived through itselfâ [âPer substantiam intelligo id, quod in se est, et per se concipiturâ].115
Machereyâs illuminating commentary on this crucial dimension of Spinozaâs presentation is worth citing in whole for its resonance with Marxâs method in part two of Capital:
It is important to note that the first statements that confront the reader of the Ethics make an appeal to his capacity to âunderstandâ (intelligere), that is to say, to his âintellectâ (intellectus), through which he is called to know things in themselves, as they are really [réellement] and not only as they could be in the abstract. In this manner, [Spinozaâs] philosophical discourse installs itself immediately in the movement [mouvance] of the third genre of knowledge. It is furthermore notable that Spinoza, in these inaugural definitions, conjugates the verb intelligere in the first-person indicative present [âI understandâ], which necessarily associates the formulation of the idea in question in each of these definitions with an activity of effective thought [pensée effective], fully engaged in its affirmation â¦. It is evident that in constructing in this way the first definitions of the Ethics, Spinoza sought to confer on their expression, and at the same time to the entire sequence of discourse that will be elaborated from them, a personal character, something unusual [décalé] compared to the impersonal form typical of abstract scientific discourse. The reader thus implicitly receives the following message, which amounts to a provocation [défi]: here is what I myself understand, here is how things irrecusably present themselves to my mind, on the model of eternal truths; it is up to you to see whether this thought experiment [expérience] imposes itself on you with the same necessity, or whether you find it possible to understand things otherwise â¦. Spinoza practices philosophical thought as a free spirit [esprit libre] who elaborates the conditions of a communication with other free spirits.116
Like that of Spinoza, Marxâs audacious challenge âHic Rhodus, hic saltus!â is an encomium to the infinite powers of the human intellect progressively to emend its capacity for understanding. While Marxâs early subjection to the fascination of Hegelâs negative dialectic remains determinant in certain marginal moments of Capital even in its second revision, such as its thirty-second chapter, nowhere is this progressive emendation more evident than in the revisions Marx operates upon his extraordinary and unparalleled analysis of the concept of the commodity, as he reworked an initial presentation based upon its putative contradiction-based determinations of reflection [Reflexionsbestimmungen], to formulate instead a novel ramified, additive synthetic dialectic for the 1872 and 1875 editions of Capital.
8 Constituting the Commodity
To argue as Arthur does that Marx deploys a Hegelian totality-based logic of negation in a marginal, historicist recoin of Capital such as its thirty-second chapter is in some ways to offer too easy a target for the post-Althusserian reading of Capital I am developing here. Far more consequential would be to show this negative dialectic at work in the crucial initial chapters of Capital, along with its supersession in the course of Marxâs revisions by an alternative mode of apodictic demonstration. âBeginningsâ, Marx observed in the Preface to the First Edition of Capital, âare always difficult in all sciencesâ.117 This is undoubtedly true not only for the readers of Capital whom Marx cautions in this passage, but for the author himself, who struggled mightily to find the proper mode of demonstration for this crucial initial moment in his argument, and constructed no less than four published versions of his analysis of the value-form (two in the 1867 edition, and two others in the second, 1872 German edition and the 1875 French translation he carefully rewrote), along with an entire manuscript from January 1872 in which he points to the shortcomings of his initial (1867) presentation, in order to revise and emend his analysis in what would become the 1872 edition.118
In fact, as Arash Abazari has shown, Marxâs analysis of the commodity form in the first chapter of the first (1867) edition of Capital âis the only place in Marxâs entire oeuvre where he systematically deploys and develops the concept of dialectical contradictionâ.119 Abazari argues that Marxâs initial analysis of the commodity form deploys the Hegelian logic of constitutive negation [Reflexionsbestimmungen], comparing Marxâs analysis with Hegelâs discussion in the Logic of the âthingâ [das Ding].120 Abazari argues that in the Logic, Hegel distinguishes two forms of the contradictory nature of the thing.121 In the initial logic or doctrine of being, Hegel analyses how the thing constitutes its identity as a positive entity through its negative, contrastive exclusion from other things: salt gains its self-same identity through its negative distinction (difference) from pepper and all other spices, or, in the case of Capital, we could say that capitalism gains its identity through its difference from feudalism and all other modes of production.
In such contrastive negation, Abazari observes, âthere is no contradiction in something. Something excludes other somethings, and, as it were, remains a harmonious ensemble of qualities and quantitiesâ.122 While this form of external contradiction is determinant in the first book of Hegelâs Logic, only occasionally and in passing does Marx define the capitalist mode of production in this exclusive manner, through its distinction from feudalism, slavery, or communism; instead, he develops his critique through the analysis of the categories proper and internal to the capitalist social form itself (the commodity, surplus value, competition, etc.).123
In the second Book of the Science of Logic, the âdoctrine of essenceâ, however, Hegel shows the object to gain its essential determination not through its contrastive exclusion from other things, but instead through the sublation of such external reflection as the inner, constitutive contradiction that he names the âdetermination of reflectionâ [Reflexionsbestimmung].124 By this he indicates the inner, contradictory determination of the thing by dyadic categories such as cause and effect or essence and appearance, categories that are in internal relation to the thing they define.125 The key point for Hegel is that such inner determinations, unlike those of the doctrine of being, stand in negative contradiction to each other:
The self-subsisting determination of reflection [Reflexionsbestimmung] excludes the other in the same respect as it contains it and is self-subsisting for precisely this reason, in its self-subsistence the determination excludes its own self-subsistence from itself. For this self-subsistence consists in that it contains the determination which is other than it in itself and does not refer to anything external for just this reason; but no less immediately in that it is itself and excludes from itself the determination that negates it. And so it is contradiction [Widerspruch].126
This is to argue that the object is not merely a positive entity, its being consisting of a synthetic addition of its various qualities (as shown in Hegelâs doctrine of Being), but constitutes instead, from the perspective of its essence, a negative or contradictory totality: âThe thing as this totality is contradiction [Das Ding als diese Totalität ist der Widerspruch], ⦠the form in which the matter is determined ⦠and at the same time consisting of sorts of matter that ⦠are at once both self-standing and negatedâ.127
The question in the case of the commodity is thus whether use-value and exchange-value, what Marx calls the two âfactorsâ [Faktoren] of the commodity, simultaneously contain and exclude one another to constitute a contradiction in Hegelâs sense, or, instead, stand in positive âoppositionâ [Gegensatz] to one another without contradiction. Note carefully Hegelâs contention: â[Self-subsistence] contains the determination which is other than it in itself â¦; but no less immediately ⦠excludes from itself the determination that negates itâ. Each determination of reflection, in other words, contains its opposite within itself, which I will argue does not obtain in Marxâs analysis of the commodity. There, in contrast, I will seek to show that the determinations or what Marx calls the âfactorsâ of the commodity such as use- and exchange-value merely stand in positive âoppositionâ to one another without mutual reflection, precisely as Marx will state in the revised versions of this analysis.
In Hegelâs recuperation of the concept of contradiction, the object â in its essential, constitutive nature rather than its mere external being â is âthe absolute contradiction [der absolute Widerspruch]â of form and matter.128 While this position famously constitutes the originality of Hegelâs reconstruction of logic as a negative, contradiction-based dialectic,129 it is far from clear that Marx adopts and, above all, holds to this same logic of the determinations of reflection in his analysis of the concept of the commodity.
9 From Dialectical Contradiction to Additive Synthesis
What Abazari does show convincingly is that in the analysis of the concept of the commodity in the first edition of Capital, Marx systematically adopts this Hegelian logic of constitutive negation [Reflexionsbestimmung], the commodity, that is to say, as it has commonly been understood in traditional Marxism âas the contradictory unity of use-value and exchange-valueâ.130 It is not merely the case that Marx initially adopts the Hegelian vocabulary of externalisation, contradiction [Widerspruch], the determinations of reflection [Reflexionsbestimmung], and essence and appearance in the first chapter of the 1867 edition.131 Abazari argues more generally that in Marxâs analysis of the value-form:
The simple form of value, for Marx, is constituted by a contradiction; since, first, the exchange-value of A is contained in the use-value of B, and yet, since the two commodities are necessarily two distinct things, the exchange-value of A is excluded by the use-value of B. The relation is contradictory, since it is composed of two moments that contain, and yet exclude, each other.132
This, then, is the familiar claim for the âcontradictoryâ nature of use- and exchange-value in the commodity, but does it hold up when measured against the actual terminology and argument to be found in Marxâs demonstration in the 1872 edition of Capital?
It is important to distinguish this first chapter of the 1867 edition that founds Abazariâs claim, the argument of which, Marx warns his reader, will âpresent the greatest difficultyâ, from what Marx calls the âsupplementary, more didactic exposition of the form of valueâ that he added as an appendix to that same first edition, at the request of Engels and Kugelmann.133 The latter material then formed the basis of Marxâs 1872 revision of this chapter. In that 1867 appendix â Marx tells the reader in his Postface to the second edition â the process of exposition â[was] completely revisedâ. While the 1867 appendix thus already begins the tendential elimination of this Hegelian vocabulary, a process that will culminate in the 1872 and 1875 editions, a systematic comparison of the five versions of this chapter shows that this tendency is both uneven and incomplete, such that none of Marxâs varied analyses of the value form can be considered as definitive.134
The revision manuscript that Marx drafted in December 1871-January 1872,135 for example, develops the social, communal nature of value-objectivity to a degree unparalleled in any of the three published versions of his analysis,136 while the 1875 French translation by Joseph Roy, which Marx personally and extensively revised, inserts, for example, a negative dialectical passage absent from both the 1867 and 1872 German editions: âLes contradictions que renferme la forme équivalente exige maintenant un examen plus approfondieâ.137 Similarly, the 1872 edition, while abandoning the vocabulary and logic of contradiction [Widerspruch] in its body text, nonetheless inserts a note observing that âdeterminations of reflection [Reflexionsbestimmungen] of this kind [i.e., in the analysis of the value form] are altogether very curiousâ.138
Given this complexity and unevenness between Marxâs various presentations of the value form, it is notable that Marx already distinguishes in 1867 between his materialist derivation of the form of value as âan external material in which labour objectifies [vergegenständlichen] itself ⦠as determinate labour [bestimmten Arbeit]â, and Hegelian idealism, in which, he observes ironically, âit is only the âconceptâ [Begriff] in Hegelâs sense that manages to objectify itself without external materialâ.139 Marxâs 1867 critique of Hegelian idealism is thus precociously analogous to that which Badiou will develop of Frege in Being and Event: thought cannot imperiously determine being, but must remain subject to a materialist determination.140
Heinrich observes, however, that this position nonetheless remains a mere negative critique; it will only be with the further revision in the 1872 version of this chapter that Marx would develop the conceptual means to distinguish the âchimericalâ objectivity of the commodity form from the tangible value form. According to Heinrichâs reading,
both in chapter 1 of the first edition and in [Marxâs 1872] revision manuscript, Marx seems unsure about how exactly to present the relation between the âpurely chimericalâ objectivity of value and its tangible form of existence in the shape of another commodity. Itâs clear that this relation is not to be grasped in the manner of Hegelâs philosophy. In fact, Marx first found an adequate solution [only] in Capitalâs second edition. There, he distinguishes between two levels of investigation: (1) The examination of the exchange relation between two commodities [as â¦] value-objectivity, which cannot be grasped in the case of the individual commodity; (2) The examination of the value-relation between two commodities, which already assumes the result of the analysis of the exchange relation in level (1).141
Here we have one of the clearest examples of the furtive and uneven tendency of development across the multiple versions of Marxâs exposition of the value form, from an initial rejection of Hegelian idealist, negative dialectic that still lacks the means replace this with a positive demonstration, to Marxâs further development by 1872 of what Heinrich and Fred Moseley agree is an additive synthetic method of presentation without negation, one that clearly distinguishes between and synthetically proceeds from an analysis of what Heinrich identifies as the âexchange relationâ to that of the âvalue relationâ, and Moseley, from the substance and magnitude of value in the first two sections of chapter 1, to its necessary form of appearance in the third.142
Abazari, in contrast, finds Marxâs 1872 insertion of the footnote 22 referring to the âDeterminations of reflection [Reflexionsbestimmungen]â in the value-form to be certain proof of a continued reliance on Hegelian logic. In comparison with the body of the text, from which the concept of contradiction is strictly absent, I believe, in contrast, that the insertion of this new footnote in 1872 is rather an example of Marx falling back on an old and familiar category to inadequately indicate a new, post-Hegelian process he is in the process of inventing, an original form of additive, synthetic dialectic.
This would then be another example of what Althusser identified as the symptomatic tendency of a novel theory in its deployment to run ahead of subjective recognition of its novelty:
This is what Marx tells us. And there is no apparent reason not to take him at his word â¦. [And yet,] at certain moments, in certain symptomatic points, this silence [i.e., the absence of a proper name for a novel concept or procedure Marx has invented] emerges as such in the discourse and forces it against its will to produce real theoretical lapses, in brief blank flashes, invisible in the light of the proof: words [such as Reflexionsbestimmungen] that hang in mid-air although they seem to be inserted into the necessity of the thought, judgements which close irreversibly with a false obviousness the space of which seemed to be opening before reason â¦. Marx has not thought what he is doing to the letter.143
It would be incongruous to condemn Marxâs failure to find the time to name and theorise the novel process of exposition he develops in Capital, as Althusser observes more generally, for âno one can be convicted for not saying everything at once. But his too hurried readers can be attacked for not having heard this silenceâ.144 Althusserâs more general claim holds as well for this putative obviousness of the constitutive contradiction between use- and exchange-value, i.e., that it indicates precisely such a âpoint at which the theoretical incompleteness of Marxâs judgement of himself has produced the most serious misunderstandingsâ.145 To determine whether in fact Capital continues to rely on the Hegelian logic of determinate reflection requires actually to follow Marxâs demonstration line by line in the first chapter of Capital, asking furthermore whether the elimination of the category of contradiction and its replacement by that of opposition indicates a fundamental change in the nature of Marxâs demonstration.
10 Toward an Additive Demonstration, Without Contradiction
While the word Widerspruch (contradiction) does not appear at all in Chapter 1 of the 1872 edition, Marx comes to prioritise in its place the concept of Gegensatz (opposition) to indicate the precise nature of the relation of use- and exchange-value in the concept of the commodity. The word Gegensatz (which is only used 4 times in the 1867 version of Chapter 1) appears some twenty-five times in Chapter 1 (1872), as Marxâs term of preference to indicate the relation of use-value and value: i.e., âThe simple form of value of a commodity is the simple form of appearance of the opposition [Gegensatz] between use-value and value which is contained within the commodityâ.146
Gegensatz, synonymous with the German Opposition, does indeed indicate something quite different from Hegelian contradiction and determinations of reflection: the relation of extreme difference, diversity, or contrast between two things, in other words, an intensive positive distinction without contradiction.147 While this etymological distinction seems merely suggestive, it in fact clearly and succinctly indicates for Marx a profound and longstanding theoretical distinction, between Hegelian logical negation and Marxâs own development of a positive, materialist mode of demonstration, a distinction that originates in his intensive engagement with Hegelian and Aristotelean logic in the period 1839â1842.
Briefly put, in the period 1839â1841, Marx initially studied Hegelian and Aristotelean logic not only to prepare his highly original deployment of Hegelian logic in his dissertation, but intending as well, as Charles Barbour has shown, to compose a never-completed Hegelian rebuttal to the leading proponent of Aristotelean logic of the time, Adolf Trendelenburg. Trendelenburg was famous in philosophical circles for his 1833 critical edition of Aristotleâs De Anima, and this likely motivated Marxâs decision to initiate a competing translation of De Anima, as well as his explicit critiques of Trendelenburg in the dissertation.
It was, however, Trendelenburgâs highly influential 1840 critique of Hegelian logic, Logische Untersuchungen, that was the primary focus of Marxâs theoretical ire in March 1841, when he hatched a plan with Bruno Bauer to compose a Hegelian rebuttal to Trendelenburg in the journal the two projected, to be entitled Annals of Atheism.148 While Marxâs initial intent in 1839â1841 was to defend Hegelian logic against Trendelenburg, on at least one count, the latterâs learned exposition of Aristotelean logic and critique of Hegelian dialectics seems to have hit home, and to have provided for this brilliant and learned young reader of Aristotle a signal theoretical distinction between Hegelian idealist and scientific materialist methods of logical demonstration.
In Logische Untersuchungen, Trendelenburg vehemently criticizes Hegel for confusing quite basic Aristotelean logical principles, primary among which in Trendelenburgâs judgment is Hegelâs failure to grasp the fundamental distinction Aristotle makes between what Trendelenburg calls âlogical negationâ and âreal opposition [Gegensatz].â149 If Marx had not already gleaned this theoretical distinction from his reading of Aristotle, it would have been impossible to overlook its primacy in Trendelenburgâs critique. It is, moreover, this distinction between Hegelian âlogical negationâ and Aristotelean, materialist âreal oppositionâ that, I wish to argue, becomes a fundamental theoretical distinction for Marx, from his 1843 âCritique of Hegelâs Philosophy of Rightâ through his revisions to Capital three decades later.
When Marx first came to critique Hegelian logic in the 1843 âCritique of Hegelâs Philosophy of Right,â he reproached Hegel throughout for his logical idealism, for his derivation, that is to say, of the empirical existence of the orders of the state â sovereign, executive, legislative, and the Estates â from their logical Idea. This process inevitably leads, Marx argues, to an uncritical defence of the status quo:
Hegelâs purpose is to narrate the life-history of abstract substance, of the Idea, and in such a history human activity etc. necessarily appears as the activity and product of something other than itself; he therefore represents the essence of man as an imaginary detail instead of allowing it to function in terms of its real human existence. This leads him to ⦠the inevitable result that an empirical existent [eine empirische Existenz] is uncritically enthroned as the real truth of the Idea. For Hegelâs task is not to discover the truth of empirical existence but to discover the empirical existence of the truth.150
Marx instead calls for an opposing materialist-scientific method, one that would arrive at âthe truth of empirical existenceâ through the critical analysis of real, actually-existing entities (in this case, the orders of the state).
Marxâs primary critique of Hegel in this early text, however, is Hegelâs representation of the orders of the state as existing in a negative dialectical relation to one another, such that they derive their identity and legitimacy through their mutual, negative dialectical relations to one another, the contradictions of each order resolving those of the others. This, Marx argues, is to treat actual differences between real, actually-existing entities, what Marx calls âreal extremes,â as mere logical differences that harmoniously sublate one anotherâs contradictions.151
It is precisely here that Marx deploys Trendelenburgâs distinction between âlogical negationâ and âreal opposition,â distinguishing the materialist method he calls for â as the analysis of real âoppositionâ or âextremesâ â from the logical idealism of Hegelâs negative dialectic of Reflexionsbestimmungen:
It is remarkable that Hegel could have reduced this absurd process of mediation to its abstract, logical and hence ultimate undistorted form, while at the same time enthroning it as the speculative mystery of logic [spekulatives Mysterium der Logik], as the scheme of reason, the rational mode of deduction par excellence. Real extremes cannot be mediated precisely because they are real extremes. Nor do they require mediation, for their natures are wholly opposed [sie sind entgegengesezten Wesens].152
It is precisely this theoretical distinction, first developed in the âCritique of Hegelâs Philosophy of Right,â that will govern Marxâs variable recourse throughout his drafting and revisions to Capital to these two modes of theoretical demonstration: the logical idealism of Hegelian negative dialectical âcontradictionâ [Widerspruch] versus the materialist analysis of the real order of existence that takes each thing in its real âoppositionâ [Gegensatz] to others.
In light of Marxâs reading of Trendelenburg and his argument in the âCritique of Hegelâs Philosophy of Right,â my claim is straightforward: when decades later Marx came to draft and subsequently revise the various sections of Capital, it would be this nominal distinction between âcontradictionâ and âoppositionâ that would serve to clearly indicate to an informed reader the distinction between two theoretical procedures of analysis and demonstration. It is a theoretical doublet that allowed Marx succinctly to realise in his various revisions, in part, the task he had given himself in the Grundrisse: the systematic elimination of the impression that the various categories of his analysis are derived from the Idea of the capitalist social form, rather than scientifically constructed from his analysis of a real thing, a society typified by the accumulation and exchange of commodities.153
If now we return to reading Capital to the letter, we do in fact find that what Marx demonstrates in his analysis of the commodity is an âoppositionâ rather than a Hegelian âcontradictionâ between use- and exchange-value.154 Indeed, Marx begins his demonstration by introducing each dimension of the commodity positively, as what he calls âfactorsâ [Faktoren] or attributes. There is no derivation of use-value or exchange-value in the opening paragraphs of Capital; instead, they are simply additively posed or âpositionedâ, as Althusser will say, one after another: âThe commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind ⦠The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-valueâ. And then, in his fifth paragraph, with neither transition nor derivation of any kind, Marx immediately poses the second factor of the commodity: âExchange-value appears first of all as the quantitative relation, the proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kindâ.155
If we abstract from Marxâs intervening analysis of the characteristics of these two factors or attributes of the commodity (satisfying a human need, having both quality and quantity, etc.), we are left with two positive, underived propositions:
-
The commodity has the attribute (âfactorâ) use-value.
-
The commodity has the attribute (âfactorâ) exchange-value.156
In the relation between Marxâs initial proposition that the âindividual commodityâ constitutes the âelementary formâ [Elementarform] of the capitalist mode of production and the additive introduction of these two attributes in the four succeeding paragraphs,157 there is no trace of any deduction or inference whatsoever, to say nothing of a putative negative dialectical sublation such as is to be found in the first lines of Hegelâs Science of Logic (Being|NothingâBecoming).158 At the same time, this additive positioning of concepts is no a priori formalist or abstract axiomatic exercise, but comprises a properly materialist critique, thanks to the necessary determination of this starting point â the true idea that we as subjects of capitalism always already possess of its nature (as general commodification).159 Marx has determined precisely these as the attributes of the commodity, thanks to his painstaking research or âenquiryâ [Forschungsweise] prior to the elaboration of his reproduction [Darstellungsweise] of the capitalist real in the attribute of thought.160
What I am calling Marxâs additive synthetic method is essentially a development, on my part, of Althusserâs abstract assertion that Marxâs exposition proceeds via the âpositioningâ [la position] of one concept after a preceding one has been adequately analysed. âMarxâs thoughtâ, he writes in the Avant-propos au livre de G. Duménil, âproceeds by the positioning [la position] of concepts, inaugurating the exploration (analysis) of the theoretical space opened and closed by this positioning, followed by the positioning of a new concept, thus enlarging the theoretical field, and so forth, to the point of constituting theoretical fields of extreme complexityâ.161 This thesis of the additive positioning of concepts, Althusser observes, âexcludes all appearance of an auto-production of the concept (and a fortiori of the real by the concept) in Hegelian fashion, [versus] the intervention at a given moment of the exposition of the key concepts around which is organised the constitution and exploration of the theoretical field in its multiple combinationsâ.162
Itâs notable in particular how by this late moment in Althusserâs reflection, his analysis of la position proceeds in purely additive fashion, from Marxâs initial research [Forschungsweise] to its demonstration, and within the latter, from one concept to the next, never referring to a putative totality or whole (as does Arthur or as Althusser himself had in the first edition of Reading Capital) that would govern and guarantee the truth of this exposition (as opposed to the crudely suppressed paragraphs in the second edition of Reading Capital that were the object of Machereyâs 1966 critique). This additive procedure that Althusser describes, I would add, thus coheres perfectly with Spinozaâs critique of totality in his 1665 letter to Oldenburg, despite its telegraphic nature in this late moment of Althusserâs thought.
While the variegated analysis of exchange-value and that of the even more complex value relation characteristic of these two attributes will occupy Marx in the rest of chapter one, his three-paragraph analysis of the concept of use-value in the first two pages of Capital starkly illustrates Macherey and Althusserâs claim that Marxâs demonstration proceeds sequentially, via the âexhaustiveâ (Macherey) analysis of each concept; a given conceptâs essential nature having been thoroughly analysed at the corresponding level of abstraction, all without logical contradiction, Marx can then presuppose that analysis as a given, and move to the next level of abstraction as what Althusser calls an additive positioning.
Now, if this were all there were to Marxâs process of exposition, the case for the tendential suppression of Aufhebung in Capital would be closed; indeed, Macherey has it easy on this score by only considering the first five pages of Chapter 1 in his brief contribution to Reading Capital. That said, Marxâs process of exposition throughout Capital, if we look beyond Althusserâs elliptical assertions and Machereyâs brief analysis, is indeed impelled not by contradictory reflections of determinations [Reflexionsbestimmungen], but instead due to what Marx variously calls the âinsufficiencyâ [Unzulägliche], âdefectsâ [Mängel] or âpeculiaritiesâ [Eigentümlichkeit] of a concept, terms that indicate its various inadequacies at that level of abstraction.
Indeed, the real and telling complexities can be said to begin in the third section of the first chapter, precisely the section, that is, that Abazari, and, indeed, Marx himself in footnote 22, identify as the locus of various Reflexionsbestimmungen. It is in this section 1.3 that Marx examines not use-value, exchange-value, and what Heinrich identifies as the basic exchange relation of commodities in abstraction from their value form, but â at this subsequent degree of concretion â the value relation, the complex interrelation of use- and exchange-value in the analysis of the value form, which necessarily culminates in the general equivalent and money form.163
Close attention to Marxâs analysis of the value form in this section unequivocally shows that he additively builds upon his analysis of the exchange relation in the preceding two sections, without those demonstrations being superseded or invalidated. In the initial moment of his demonstration (sections 1.1â1.2), Marx first analysed the exchange relation between two commodities, from which he concluded that they must share a âcommon elementâ, value, the substance of which he shows to be abstract labour. In section 1.3, he then proceeds to the analysis of the form of value, as the section title clearly indicates: âThe Value-form, or Exchange-Valueâ. In this logical progression from sections 1.1 and 1.2 to section 1.3 â the latter arguably one of the most crucial demonstrations of Capital â there is not a trace of negative dialectical, contradiction-based Hegelian logic determining the development of these categories.
Instead, Marx deploys an original process of logical demonstration that I am calling additive synthesis. The demonstration is additive, in the sense that Marxâs analysis of the value relation presupposes his prior adequate and complete demonstration of the exchange relation, the analysis of the value relation constituting a subsequent degree of concretion relative to the initial high level of abstraction of section one.164 This additive mode of positive dialectic in Part One of Capital confirms Jacques Bidetâs abstract assertion, in his review of Arthurâs New Dialectic, that there is no Hegelian, contradiction-based âfluidityâ of Marxâs concepts in the movement from one part or section to another (as Arthur asserts):
It is not the concept that changes [from one section to another]; rather, there is a change of concept, through conceptual determinations â¦. The âtheory of valueâ [in Part One of Capital] is in no way transformed by the theory of surplus-value [in Part Two], which, on the contrary, expressly presupposes it, unchanged, in the pure and perfect form that Marx has given it in his exposition in Part One.165
In the first chapter of Capital that I discuss here, Marx implements a purely additive synthetic method, in which the process of logical synthesis operates in a fashion analogous to that which Macherey identifies in his commentary on Spinozaâs method. Basing his comments on Spinozaâs Preface to the Principles of the Philosophy of Descartes, the only site at which Spinoza reflected on method, Macherey observes that for Spinoza, âsynthesis [as opposed to Cartesian analysis] is the method of formal exposition that allows for the presentation of truths [that have been previously discovered and analysed in the research process] in a demonstrative form that proceeds from the known to the known â¦. Synthesis proceeds from the knowledge of causes to that of their effects, in conformity with the real order of thingsâ.166 For both Spinoza and Marx, such additive demonstration, as a science of causes without superfluous reference to a putative totality or whole, constitutes the adequate modality of a materialist demonstration, the synthetic reproduction of the real order of things in the attribute of thought.
This synthetic mode of demonstration [Macherey continues],
mentally reproduces ⦠the order in which things effectively are and produce one another [sont et se font] â¦. Synthesis concomitantly expresses the productivity of the real [as] a form of discourse, the organisation of which, which is to say its necessary progression, adheres to that of the causal process, and reproduces the order of the real as it is in itself, leading to understanding as if from the interior of things, as they are and as they develop [telles quâelles sont et telles quâelles se font], following the rational movement that leads from causes to effects, rather than the inverse.167
Synthetic demonstration, in this view, constitutes a rigorous form of materialist demonstration, an organisation of discourse whose object is to make visible what Macherey calls âthe syntax of the realâ in its effective constitution and âintrinsic intelligibilityâ.168 Spurning all constraint and guarantees, all formal obligation and teleology, this mode of demonstration, one that I am arguing is shared by Marx and Spinoza as a science of causes, invites the reader to follow the logic of the real, step by necessary step, as a materialist ârestitution of the texture of the real in the form of the order of ideasâ.169 Marx suggests nothing less by his otherwise strange self-quotation from the 1859 Introduction, that he inserts in the first sentence of Capital, as if to say: âThis, reader, is what I have come to understand as the effective constitution of the real order of things and relations of value in the capitalist social form: follow my reasoning carefully, and judge for yourself if this is the caseâ.170
Letâs look at Marxâs analysis of the value relation more carefully. In Marxâs initial analysis of the exchange relation in sections 1.1â1.2, he determined that the value of commodities â a âresidueâ obtained by abstracting entirely from their characteristics as use-values â has no material form at that level of abstraction, and thus cannot exist as a sensuous singular thing, but instead constitutes a mere âspectral objectivityâ.171 This first stage of analysis showed that the substance of the commodityâs value is abstract labour, but did so in abstraction from its phenomenal manifestation in any determinate form whatsoever.
The substance of this value, abstract labour, will only obtain objective, material form, and thus actual existence, as opposed to this mere spectral objectivity, when Marxâs logical demonstration investigates the concrete social relation of one commodity to another, and it is to the nature of this relation that Marx turns in section 1.3.172 At stake in this section, the development of which will culminate in Marxâs unprecedented demonstration of the logical (as opposed to historical) genesis and necessity of the money form, is a problem that had previously remained at best a riddle, and at worst entirely invisible, in the history of political economy: while it is obvious to anyone that money allows for the exchange of commodities, this does not at all explain how it is that money possesses this strange power, and why it must necessarily be so in any society governed by commodity relations: only Marxâs logical genesis of the money form can answer this question.173
My point here is simply to show that each logical step in Marxâs demonstration fully preserves the findings that precede it, and, as opposed to any alleged negative dialectical Aufhebung, proceeds instead through a positive, additive logic of implication. Marx begins this analysis in section 1.3a by constructing the value relation in its most abstract form, one that is âsimpleâ (it investigates only two commodities), âisolatedâ (bearing no relationship to commodities other than these two he has chosen), and âaccidentalâ (because any two commodities could be chosen as examples of this abstract relation).174 This simple isolated and accidental form of the value relation, he next specifies, possesses two âpolesâ [Pole] that coexist and allow for this relation, mutually determining and barring one another, all without contradiction, precisely as the poles of a compass coexist in their opposing, non-contradictory difference to define North and South.
Marx first recalls the results of his prior analysis of the exchange relation, which involved the exchange of two commodities of equal value such that both commodities identically and symmetrically shared a âcommon elementâ (value).175 In marked contrast, when Marx now turns to the analysis of the form of expression of value, that value relationship is by no means symmetrical. Instead, the first commodity (linen) is said by Marx to actively expresses its value in the second commodity (coat), while the second commodity remains passive, serving as the material expression of something else, the value of the first. Marx names these two forms the ârelativeâ and the âequivalentâ form of value. Like the two attributes of the commodity that Marx introduced in the first pages of Capital, Marx here observes that these two forms of value bear two non-contradictory aspects or attributes: they are 1. mutually dependent, each requiring the existence of the other, as well as being 2. mutually exclusive, such that a given commodity can only play the role of one of these two forms at a time.176
Having presented these attributes, in section 1.3.2, Marx next proceeds to analyse the first of these two forms of value, the relative. Though Marxâs initial analysis of the exchange relation has shown that the value of any and all commodities can be reduced to an identical unit (abstract labour), in now analysing the form that this value must take, he proceeds to investigate the particularities of these differential roles (relative and equivalent forms of value), explicitly calling attention to the difference between these two levels of his analysis:
If we say that, as values, commodities are simply congealed quantities of human labour [i.e., the principal finding of his initial analysis of the exchange relation], our analysis reduces them, it is true, to the level of an abstraction, value, but does not give them a form of value distinct from their natural forms. It is otherwise in the value relation of one commodity to another. The first commodityâs value character emerges here through its own relation to the second commodity.177
While it is the case that as values, at the level of the exchange relation, commodities are what Marx describes as âcongealedâ abstract human labour, this common unit, since it possesses not an âatom of matterâ,178 cannot be apprehended in the sensuous, actually existing form of a singular, isolated commodity.179
Now, however, additively building upon this prior determination of an initial âvalue-abstractionâ, Marx proceeds to show that when considered at the higher level of logical concretion of the value relation, the value of the commodity that plays the relative role in this relation (linen) does in fact acquire the material expression of its value in and through the equivalent form possessed by the second, actually existing commodity (coat), a material form necessarily different from its own (the value of linen cannot be expressed in linen).180 From this demonstration, Marx draws a simple, minimal inference: that âthe value of the commodity linen is therefore expressed by the physical body of the commodity coat, the value of one by the use-value of the otherâ.181 This then leads him to offer a summary statement of this stage of his analysis:
Commodity A, then, in entering into a relation with commodity B as an object of value, as a materialisation of human labour, makes the use-value B into the material through which its own value is expressed.182
This completed, in the next step of his analysis, in section 1.3.2.ii, Marx introduces the quantitative aspect of this value relation from which he had abstracted to this point (âThe quantitative determinacy of the relative form of valueâ). As a material expression or actually existing embodiment of value, in contrast to the nonexistent âspectralâ nature of value when considered in the exchange relation, this value form must furthermore be âquantitatively determinedâ as a determinate âmagnitudeâ.183 This being the case, Marx proceeds to consider the four logically possible variations of the relative value of the two commodities in question in this basic form of the value relation: either the value of one or the other changes, while the second remains constant, or both change in identical proportions, or both change in different proportions.184
Having enumerated these cases, Marx next turns to examine the nature of the equivalent form of value in a passage that clearly indicates the additive, non-contradictory nature of his demonstration:
The commodity linen brings to view its own existence as a value through the fact that the coat can be equated with the linen although it has not assumed a form of value distinct from its own physical form. The coat is directly exchangeable with the linen; in this way the linen in fact expresses its own existence as a value. The equivalent form of a commodity, accordingly, is the form in which it is directly exchangeable with other commodities.185
While the first sentence summarises Marxâs analysis of the value form to this point, the second and third add to this a new proposition: the actually existing, material form of the linen expresses the coatâs direct âexchangeabilityâ with it, such that the equivalent form âis the form in which it is directly exchangeable with other commoditiesâ, which is to say, that it requires no mediation (of another commodity) for the exchange process to occur.186
Marx next indicates three âpeculiaritiesâ [Eigentümlichkeiten] (none of which constitute âcontradictionsâ) of the equivalent form, in which he stresses the necessity that governs this form, such that the appearance of the value of the linen in the form of the coat requires and can only occur within this value-relation:
The natural form of the commodity becomes its value-form. But, note well, this substitution only occurs in the case of a commodity B (coat, or maize, or iron, etc.) when some other commodity A (linen etc.) enters into a value-relation with it, and then only within the limits of this relation. Since a commodity cannot be related to itself as equivalent, and therefore cannot make its own physical shape into the expression of its own value, it must be related to another commodity as equivalent, and therefore must make the physical shape of another commodity into its own value-form.187
Here again we find Marx stressing the systematic necessity that governs the value relation between two commodities: since no commodity can express its value in its own material form, it must relate to another, materially distinct commodity as its equivalent, the actually existing material form of its value. The linen (in Marxâs example) must take the physical form of the equivalent commodity (coat) as the form of its value, since the value of linen cannot be expressed in linen. This, Marx shows, is the real, necessary, and positive form of the value relation, involving no contradiction whatsoever between use- and exchange-value, but only a peculiarity that he insightfully notes, one that allows for the value relation materially to exist.
Next, following his famous excursus on Aristotleâs socially determined incapacity to grasp the nature of the value relation,188 Marx summarises his qualitative and quantitative analysis of the simple form of the value relation, to which he adds the important terminological clarification that the two factors or attributes of the commodity introduced at the beginning of chapter one should, strictly speaking, have been identified as use-value and âvalueâ (rather than exchange-value), since exchange-value is merely the âform of manifestationâ of value, not something a given commodity possesses in and of itself. Instead, Marx specifies, âthe commodity never has this form when looked at in isolation, but only when it is in a value-relation or an exchange relation with a second commodity of a different kindâ.189 As Heinrich specifies, âA commodity âisâ something double: use-value and an object of value. But it is not exchange-value; it has exchange-value, when another commodity expresses its valueâ.190 While it may seem that Marx is splitting hairs, the point is important in the context of my argument (and I will argue it applies analogously in Moseleyâs dispute with Heinrich), since it clearly indicates a key conceptual and logical difference from the 1867 edition, where Marx did not yet clearly distinguish between value and exchange-value.
Even more crucial is the next step in Marxâs argument, and in fact the interpretation of this passage condenses and radicalises my entire argument for Marxâs additive, positive dialectical method. Here is Marxâs observation, which I cite in full:
The internal opposition [innere Gegensatz] between use-value and value, hidden within the commodity, is therefore represented on the surface by an external opposition [äusseren Gegensatz], i.e. by a relation between two commodities such that the one commodity, whose own value is supposed to be expressed, counts directly only as a use-value, whereas the other commodity, in which that value is to be expressed, counts directly only as exchange-value. Hence the simple form of value of a commodity is the simple form of appearance of the opposition [Gegensatzes] between use-value and value which is contained within the commodity.191
Here, perhaps more than anywhere else in the first chapter of Capital, we would expect to find a statement of the âcontradictoryâ nature of use-value and exchange-value. Instead, Marx does not simply refuse outright the Hegelian terminology of contradiction [Widerspruch]; whatâs more, he clearly and otherwise defines the nature of this relation â both within the single commodity possessing its two attributes of use-value and value when initially analysed at the level of the exchange relation, and now, at the level of the value relation â as an opposition [Gegensatz].
As I have throughout this book, let me pause to invoke the lucidly contrasting definitions André Lalande offers for these two concepts:
-
âContradictionâ [D. Widerspruch]: the relation existing between the affirmation and the negation of a same element of knowledge, in particular, between two terms, one of which is the negation of the other, such as A and not-A.
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âOppositionâ [D. Gegensatz, Opposition]: the relation of two contrary objects placed facing one another in contrast or distinction.192
The crucial difference between Hegelian contradiction and the âoppositionâ of use-value and exchange-value in Marxâs analysis is that while the former indicates the simultaneous affirmation and negation of âa same elementâ or object (A and not-A), opposition indicates the contrast or distinction between two different objects.
As a point of contrast, take for example Hegelâs famous beginning to the Science of Logic. Hegel here unequivocally indicates a relation of contradiction, as âA and not-Aâ, as opposed to Marxâs indication by the concept of âoppositionâ a relation of contrast, a determination without any implication whatsoever that use-value and exchange-value are in any sense the same thing. In other words, for Hegel, a thing (âBeing, pure being â without further determinationâ), through the necessity governing its essential nature as this phrase defines it (âwithout determinationâ), reveals its selfsame identity to be, âin fact nothing, pure nothingnessâ, i.e., all at once one and the same thing, both A and not-A, both being and nothingness, in what constitutes a real contradiction in the full sense of the word.193
In marked contrast to Hegelâs analysis of Being, Nothing, and Becoming, at no point does Marx ever state or imply that use-value and exchange-value are in any sense the same thing (A and not-A). Instead, he goes to painstaking logical detail to precisely formulate the nature of the differential relation of these two always distinct concepts, and in the case of both the exchange and value relations, and he defines this relation as an opposition. He introduces this concept in the passage I have cited above to indicate at once the dependent and necessary nature of these two distinct attributes of the commodity form, as well as the important distinction that in the more abstract exchange relation, the differential opposition of use-value and exchange-value is internal to (âhidden withinâ, Marx says) any given, individual commodity, while in the value relation between the relative and equivalent forms of the commodity, the differential opposition finds its ârepresentationâ on the surface (as the forms of appearance of the value relation), as an âexternal oppositionâ.
This differential opposition of use-value and exchange-value, Marx has shown, is neither contradictory nor contingent. Instead, in each logical form, it is emphatically and logically necessary, he shows, for this very distinction (as A and B rather than A and not-A) to exist such that commodity and commodity relations may themselves exist (and Marx has begun Capital by defining societies in which the capitalist mode of production predominates, his object of investigation, as the general existence (appearance) of commodities and commodified relations).
In fact, these two contrasting starting points of Hegelâs Logic and Marxâs Capital could not be more radically opposed, though each thinker at the same time fully comprehends and calls attention to the difficulty and crucial nature of the beginning of any scientific analysis.194 For the one, a word, a notion, Being, conceived and defined as a maximum of abstraction, as âwithout contentâ. For the other, a (maximally abstract but positive) definition of capitalism as the general accumulation of commodities, one that is quite the opposite of nothing (it is an âungeheure Waarensammlungâ); instead, having come to this definition and starting point by necessity through his materialist enquiry, Marxâs beginning indicates something very concrete, full of positive implications that remain to be concretised.
The negative dialectical dice are loaded if one picks a notion with no determinate content to start with: then of course this âthingâ without content will of necessity immediately reveal itself as a contradiction, as the negation of itself, as nothing, as A and not-A.195 On the one hand, a logic that begins with a logical contradiction and develops this into an entire science of negative dialectical logic, on the other, a critique of a real social form, one that begins in materialist fashion in media res, with an abstract definition of this determinate mode of production to initiate an increasingly concrete analysis via the logic of ramified additive synthesis and implication.
To prepare the necessary logical passage to the expanded and then general equivalent forms of value, Marx simply indicates that the simple form of the value relation he has analysed to this point in section 1.3 possesses an âinsufficiencyâ [Blick] (as opposed to a Widerspruch) relative to the general equivalent and price-form.196 This is to say that while Marxâs analysis of the simple form is fully coherent and non-contradictory, that simple form is nonetheless logically deficient or inadequate, in the sense that the forms of value (relative and equivalent) inhering between only two commodities cannot account for the general exchange and accumulation of commodities, the defining feature of capitalism for Marx at its most general and abstract level. Simply because linen expresses its value in the form of actually existing coats, it cannot therefore be directly exchanged, in this form of relation, for any other commodity than coats.
In other words, the simple value relation of two commodities cannot express the relation of any given commodity to all other commodities, which, Marx logically assumes from his point of departure, is nonetheless essential in a social form determined by general commodification. Capitalism is not defined by the exchange of two or even a small set of commodities, but by the general commodification and exchange of all things of value, and thus the demonstration of the form of value must proceed adequately to account for the level of generality of exchange this specific social form requires.
Marxâs analysis of the value form therefore progresses sequentially to investigate the âexpandedâ and âgeneralâ forms, indicating along the way both the necessity of each as well as various âdefectsâ [Mängeln] of the former, here again proceeding additively to indicate the (logical) development of the (non-contradictory) Gegensatze that positively, if inadequately, constitute each âpoleâ of the value form: from the symmetrical, and thus âunfixedâ simple form to its subsequent fixation in one commodity set aside as the general equivalent form.197 I leave to the reader to follow the development of this additive logic in the remainder of chapter 1, to turn now to the dispute between Heinrich and Moseley over the substance of value in Capital.
11 When Does Socially Necessary Labour Exist?
In the previous section I have based my own anti-Hegelian argument upon Heinrichâs distinction between the exchange and value relations in the first chapter of Capital.198 Heinrichâs reading has not gone uncriticised, however: Robert Kurz, Barbara Lietz and Winfried Schwarz, and Fred Moseley have all disputed Heinrichâs contention (as they read him) that value is only created through the exchange of commodities, or, to cite Heinrich himself, that âAbstract human labour, as the substance of commoditiesâ value, does not emerge on the basis of the individual commodity but is based on the exchange relation between commoditiesâ.199 Heinrichâs critics argue instead that Marx clearly and repeatedly indicates that, as Moseley puts the matter, âeach commodity is assumed [by Marx] to possess a common property, the âsubstanceâ of value (objectified abstract human labour) in definite quantities ⦠determined in production, independently of exchangeâ.200 Moseleyâs value realism, as I would call it, thus stands opposed to Heinrichâs relational understanding of the substance of value: âCommoditiesâ, Heinrich summarises, âhave value-objectivity only in the social relation of one commodity to anotherâ.201 In turning to this debate over the substance of value, I wish to argue against Heinrichâs critics, that Marxâs analysis of the substance of value is not uniform and unchanging, but instead undergoes an important process of auto-critique. This critique â while revising Marxâs initial Hegelian position that an existing but imperceptible essence or substance of value must appear through its dialectical sublation as exchange-value â remains obscure, since Marx only clearly articulated it in long-unpublished revision notes for the second edition of Capital.
In my view this dispute between Heinrich and Moseley has resulted in a persistent dialogue des sourds in large part due to the failure by Moseley in particular to clearly formulate the terms of their disagreement, relying instead on a hodgepodge of vague, unexamined terms either imputed to or taken directly from Marx. The commodity is repeatedly claimed by Moseley to âpossessâ, âcontainâ, or âhaveâ value, a value which is said to âemergeâ, âcongealâ, âexistâ, âbeâ, or âbecomeâ as a result of the production process. All of these varied expressions can in my view be reduced to a single, theoretically clear (though false) claim on Moseleyâs part: that value exists already in the production process of any single commodity, that, as Moseley writes, âthe value of the coat ⦠does exist by itselfâ, or as Lietz and Schwarz write, âvalue exists as a form-determination ⦠in production, where it arisesâ.202
We should cut this Gordian knot simply by holding here as well to Marxâs Spinozist distinction between a nonexistent thought-construct [Gedankenkonkretum] and actually existing singular things. My interest in addressing this question is not merely to break through this protracted dispute on the origin of value between Heinrich and his opponents; my principal claim is that Marx eventually articulated this clear distinction between the nonexistent abstraction of a thought-construct such as value and that of actually existing, sensuous things such as singular commodities and their price forms, but only in the little-known 1872 Ergänzungen Und Veränderungen preparatory manuscript and in a single, but crucial sentence added only to the 1875 French translation. It was only in these obscure passages that he managed fully to escape the Hegelian hermeneutics of revelation still prevalent in the discussion of the substance of value in the 1867 and 1872 editions of Capital.
These earlier texts do in fact suffer from a conceptualisation of the substance of value as a hermeneutic, in which a latent, formless yet putatively existent essence, simultaneously claimed to be âcongealedâ in the commodity yet âspectralâ, is said to acquire its sensuous form in a moment of sublation. While Marx overcame this mystical Hegelian logic of incarnation by 1875, it nonetheless continues to haunt Moseleyâs otherwise sober analysis into the present. I will first recall the purely theoretical status of abstraction in Capital, before discussing the implication of this on the debate over the substance of value.
That Capital is an abstract theoretical construction of the capitalist social form, and not a historical study of capitalism (as Kautsky argued in Karl Marx: Oekonomische Lehren) is a point on which Heinrich and Moseley (as well as Althusser and Chris Arthur) all agree. As Heinrich points out,
such a conception [as Kautskyâs] baldly contradicts Marxâs claims in the Preface to the first volume. There, he emphasises that the work deals with âtheoretical developmentsâ, and that the text makes reference to conditions in England only as an âillustrationâ of such developments.203
Not only is Capital a âtheoreticalâ study in its entirety; Marx famously identifies for his reader in the Preface to the First Edition the fundamental tool he deploys for this analysis of the capitalist social form: abstraction. âIn the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace bothâ.204 Abstraction, as Lalande comments, âisolates by thought that which cannot be isolated in representationâ.205 The point is simple, but far-reaching and, indeed, eminently Althusserian: abstraction is fundamentally opposed to the representation of an empirical object. Instead, abstraction indicates the sui generis construction of a non-existent thought object, what Marx called in the 1857 Introduction a Gedankenkonkretum.
Marx was no doubt familiar with Hegelâs anti-empiricist appraisal of abstraction in the Encyclopedia: âOrdinary consciousness deals with sensory representations which crisscross and get entangled. In the act of abstraction, however, the mind is concentrated on a single point and, by this means, the habit is acquired of preoccupying oneself with the interiority [of things]â. He emphatically rejected, however, Hegelâs ensuing condescending judgement of Aristotelean
Instead, Marx explicitly deployed âthe power of abstractionâ as the fundamental tool for his entire critique of political economy, such that Heinrich can devote an entire Appendix of his How to Read Capital to the multiple âLevels of Abstraction and the Course of Argument in the First Seven Chapters of Capitalâ.207 Whatâs more, this understanding of abstraction as the construction of nonexistent Gedankenkonkretumen constitutes, since the very beginning of his research in 1857 when Marx first articulated this basic epistemological position, a further confirmation of Althusserâs assertion that Marx rejects Hegelâs model of abstraction as the representational extraction of a kernel of truth from an object (Hegelâs âpreoccupying oneself with the interiority of thingsâ), to instead undertake the fabrication of nonexistent concepts.208 Heinrich repeatedly emphasises this very Althusserian point in his reading of Capital, the subtlety of which is quite surprisingly absent in Moseleyâs rebuttal: âThe object of inquiry, the âcommodityâ, is not simply drawn from experience. Instead, it is constructed, by means of abstractionâ.209
While throughout this book I have repeatedly emphasised this Spinozist-Althusserian distinction between the object of thought and real, actually existing things, the point I wish to make here in appraising Moseley and Heinrichâs debate over the substance of value is simply that the concept of existence should be taken in its rigorous definition as âthe fact of being independently of knowledge, [as] actually presented in [sensuous] perceptionâ,210 in other words, as the distinction between nonexistent thought objects and actually existing singular things in sensuous extension. If this is the case, one must conclude that as concepts, none of the original Gedankenkonkretumen that Marx constructs in Capital, concepts such as use-value, exchange-value, and value, relative and absolute surplus value, and the like, actually exists.211
At the same time, some of those nonexistent concepts are also sensuously manifest as singular existing things. The nonexistent concept of concrete labour, for example, also exists as the actual physical activity, the physiological labour, involved in producing any singular commodity, a real coat or yard of linen. Similarly, the nonexistent concept of exchange-value also exists in sensuous form, for example as the singular price of any given commodity (as a price on a tag), i.e., as the material form of appearance of the value of that actually existing commodity.
The form of value as exchange-value thus constitutes at once a nonexistent abstraction in thought (a concept), as well as indicating actually existing real abstractions to be found in the material world of commodity exchange.212 It is precisely this distinction, between the non-existent thought abstraction, Marxâs Gedankenkonkretum, and the actually existing real abstractions of the manifest, material price-forms of value, that is entirely missing from Moseley and Heinrichâs debate.
Now, Moseley and Heinrich, astute, seasoned readers of Capital that they are, both agree that Marx derives the concept of the substance of value (abstract human labour) as an abstraction from the sensuous, tangible qualities of any singular, actually existing instance of concrete labour, in other words, as a concept that Marx constructs in his analysis.213 Marx summarises this point quite clearly in the Ergänzungen:
The magnitude of value represents a specific quantity of labour, but this quantity is not the coincidental quantity of labour that A or B expend in the production of a commodity. It is socially determined, the labour socially necessary for the production of a thing. ⦠Equality in the full sense between different kinds of labour can be arrived at only if we abstract from their real inequality, if we reduce them to the characteristic they have in common, that of being the expenditure of human labour-power, of human labour in the abstract.214
Yet while being fully aware of this point, Moseley nonetheless repeatedly reaffirms the real existence of the substance of value in any single, isolated commodity: âThe value of the coat cannot be grasped by itself, but it does exist by itself, [as] the values of all commodities (including the linen) exist by themselvesâ.215 If we take existence in the strict sense, however, to mean any real, sensuous thing, sensible to us via what Spinoza calls the attribute of extension, then it is clear that Marxâs abstraction constructs a nonexistent concept: lacking a form of appearance or value-form, there is no actually existing âhuman labour in the abstractâ or âidentical human labour-powerâ; these phrases indicate instead a conceptual construct without sensuous reality. In the attribute of sensuous extension, there are only singular acts of concrete labour.216
The next step in Marxâs argument that both Heinrich and Moseley retrace is to construct, in terms that follow directly from this initial abstraction, the concept of the quantity of the substance of value in any commodity as such. One of Marxâs great advances over the classical labour theory of value is to have understood that this quantity cannot consist in the actual concrete time it took to make any single existing commodity. Marx makes the point simply and memorably in Capital:
It might seem that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour expended to produce it, it would be the more valuable the more unskilful and lazy the worker who produced it, because he would need more time to complete the article. However, the labour that forms the substance of value is equal human labour, the expenditure of identical human labour-power.217
This âequal human labourâ is an abstraction from actually existing concrete acts of labour, and as such, it cannot exist in space and time without a form of appearance, which Marx will only introduce as a further degree of concretisation in the third section of chapter one.218 While Moseley indeed âagree[s] with Heinrich that value is âshownâ or ârevealedâ only in exchangeâ, he immediately adds the mistaken proviso that âthe revelation of value in exchange presupposes an already existing value ⦠created in production and revealed in exchangeâ.219
In repeatedly taking this position against Heinrich throughout Marxâs Theory of Value, Moseley is arguably misled by taking Marx too literally, citing Marxâs published formulations without sufficiently taking into account Marxâs own auto-critique in the Ergänzungen. Unfortunately, Marx only clearly formulates this obvious point â that concepts as abstractions do not exist in the strict sense of the word â in the Ergänzungen, such that numerous descriptions of the quantity of the substance of value read as if Marx were referring to the actual labour time that went into the production of any single commodity. In other words, reading Marx to the letter, Moseley is arguably misled by a problematic lack of clarity already present in Marxâs analysis, prior to his self-criticism in the Ergänzungen, as when Marx writes for example that âThe value of a commodity ⦠varies directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productivity, of the labour which finds its realisation within the commodity. ⦠A given quantity of any commodity contains a definite quantity of human labourâ.220
Moseley then reproduces in turn this same ambiguity inherent in the 1867 and 1872 editions of Capital: âNote that the magnitude of value is a distinct quantity of objectified labour contained in each commodity and thus is an intrinsic property of each commodityâ.221 Moseley places particular emphasis on Marxâs definition of the magnitude of value of any commodity as, in Moseleyâs words, âthe quantity of objectified labour-time contained in the commodity, measured in hours, days, etc.â.222 Despite Moseleyâs recurrent denials that he considers the substance of value to pre-exist in any single commodity in isolation,223 he repeatedly takes Marxâs initial ambiguity literally.
Rather than stating clearly and simply that the scientific object he has constructed â abstract human labour â is, as its name indicates, an abstract concept without spatio-temporal existence, Marx presents his finding in a vivid and unforgettable image, one that seems to confuse even Heinrich. Without a value form, Marx argues, the concept of the substance of value â abstract human labour measured as socially necessary labour time â takes on a disembodied existence, an oxymoron that Heinrich struggles to puzzle through:
Marx describes what remains of the products of labour after abstracting from their use-value, the âresidueâ, as a âphantom-likeâ [or âspectralâ, gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit] objectivity. ⦠This objectivity can no longer be grasped by the senses. If we associate it with weight, color, form, or any other quality, we always come back to use-value â but weâve just abstracted from use-value! Thus, the objectivity is present but is as intangible as a ghost; hence it is a âspectral objectivityâ.224
Now, the one advantage of Marxâs image is to clearly indicate what it means to believe in the existence of an object without sensuous qualities, as Moseley apparently does: it is to believe in phantoms and spectres. Marxâs initial formulation in the 1867 and 1872 editions of Capital of an âobjectivityâ that can, as Heinrich writes, âno longer be grasped by the sensesâ, is needlessly confusing. And in fact, this does confuse Moseley, who, despite his repeated denials that he is not speaking of a single commodity in isolation, constantly reiterates that any commodity âpossessesâ a quantity of the substance of value, as if this were the case for any actually existing commodity in isolation from all others.225 This leads Moseley confusingly to claim, for example, that âthe unobservable equal human labour that exists in production appears for the first time in exchangeâ.226
Moseleyâs critique of Heinrich suffers from a failure clearly to distinguish the nonexistence of Marxâs conceptual abstractions from actually existing phenomena such as real, singular commodities, the concrete labour that produced them, and the actually existing price form of their value.227 To be sure, a certain quantity of value actually exists in the production process of any singular commodity, for example as the commodified inputs the capitalist purchases for the production process, whether in the form of constant (machinery and raw materials) or variable capital (labor power).228 These actually existing values, however, are merely transmitted as such to the commodity in the production process; at issue in this debate as I read it is instead whether a newly produced surplus value obtained via the exploitation of labor power already comes to exist in the production process. Extrapolating on Heinrichâs reading to Marxâs discussion of the working day and unpaid work hours in chapter 10 of Capital, we should say that what exists in the production process on this score are only unpaid hours of real, concrete labor expended to produce any given commodity; for these to exist as surplus value requires, Heinrich rightly argues, that they take a value form and go on to achieve their social validation through commodity exchange.
Heinrich, while more consistently asserting that value only comes to âemergeâ or exist in the exchange relation,229 nonetheless does not formulate this distinction between nonexistent abstractions and actually existing singular things as a theoretical position. Instead, focusing on Marxâs image of the âphantom-likeâ nature of the substance of value, he seeks to puzzle through this conundrum by asserting that already in the first two sections of chapter 1, Marx implicitly analyses the commodity in an âexchange relationâ. âOnly based on the exchange relationâ Heinrich argues, âcan Marx say that there is an abstraction from the use-value of the commodity, and then go on to draw further conclusionsâ.230
Moseley argues at length that Heinrich autonomously imputes the concept of the âexchange relationâ to the first two sections of chapter one in order to make sense of the intangibility of abstract human labour, when Marx in these initial sections only speaks of the concept of the commodity as such in isolation.231
Heinrich presents no textual evidence in this appendix [where he defines his concept of exchange relation] to support his interpretation of exchange relation in Chapter 1, except the one sentence from Marxâs âMarginal Notes on Wagnerâ, which mentions only the commodity and does not mention an act of exchange at all. ⦠Heinrichâs very unusual interpretation of âexchange relationâ as an abstraction from two acts of exchange between commodities and money on the market is just asserted by [him] with no explicit textual evidence.232
What Moseley convincingly shows, in my view, is that Heinrich needlessly introduces a conceptual conflation absent from Marxâs presentation: it is only in section 1.3.2 on âThe Relative Form of Valueâ that Marx will analyse the relation between two commodities as what Heinrich calls their âvalue relationâ, in which âthe coat [in Marxâs example] counts as the form of existence of valueâ of the linen.233 Prior to this, Marx analyses the concept of the commodity in abstraction from its relation to other commodities.
What Moseley does not and cannot show, however, is how Marxâs âphantom-likeâ concept of abstract human labour can exist without a form of appearance. This instead is a mere faith-based assertion in his otherwise scrupulous argument. Moseley arrives at this untenable position because of his uniformly Hegelian reading of Marxâs argument, assuming without discussion that an abstract concept can exist prior to its incarnation in a material form.234 âEssenceâ, Hegel famously asserted without proof, âmust appearâ, a position to which Moseley subscribes without reserve.235
To be sure, Moseley adopts this position underwritten by Marxâs own phrases in the first two editions of Capital, such as the following particularly unclear assertion:
In the production of linen, a particular quantum of human labour exists in having been expended. The linenâs value is the merely objective reflection of the labour so expended, but it is not reflected in the body of the linen. It reveals itself (i.e., acquires a sensual expression) by its value-relationship to the coat.236
Marxâs language implies that he is speaking of the private, concrete âquantum of human labourâ expended in making an actually existing length of linen, but we know this cannot be the case (or else the existing length of linenâs value would automatically be greater the longer it had taken to produce it), and that instead Marx must be speaking of an abstraction, abstract human labour. His language nonetheless clearly reveals the theoretical result of this muddle: a mystical logic of revelation, in which the unseen but âexistingâ spirit (phantom, spectre) becomes incarnate, sublated in a material object (not bread or wine, in this case, but coat).
It is precisely the accomplishment of Marxâs exercise in self-clarification in the Ergänzungen notebook to have worked through this point of mystified theoretical confusion, to have abandoned his previous Hegelian hermeneutic of revelation and incarnation, but without, unfortunately, having sufficiently rewritten his manuscript to reflect this theoretical development:
The coat and the linen as values, each for itself, were reduced [in the first section of chapter 1] to objectifications of human labour as such. But this reduction forgot that neither is in and of itself value-objectivity [Werthgegenständlichkeit]; they are this only in so far as this objectivity is held in common [gemeinsam] by them. Outside of their relationship with each other â the relationship in which they count as equal â neither coat nor linen possess value-objectivity or objectivity as congelations of human labour per se. They only possess this social objectivity as a social relationship (in a social relationship).237
Marx only managed to insert a single but crucial sentence into the 1875 French edition that reflects this auto-critique, while letting stand without clarification sentences such as that cited above (âIn the production of linen, a particular quantum of human labour exists in having been expendedâ), sentences that continue to confuse astute readers such as Moseley into the present.
That new sentence â the meaning of which in the Ergänzungen Heinrich and Moseley disagree on (neither Moseley nor Heinrich discuss the actual published French rendition) â marks a crucial amendment to Marxâs argument, but one that Marx fails explicitly to flag as a general position in his text, even in its more expansive French articulation:
Lâégalité de travaux qui diffèrent toto cÅlo les uns des autres ne peut consister que dans une abstraction de leur inégalité réelle, que dans la réduction à leur caractère commun de dépense de force humaine, de travail humain en général, et câest lâéchange seul qui opère cette réduction en mettant en présence les uns des autres sur un pied dâégalité les produits des travaux les plus divers.
The equality of labours that differ entirely one from another can only consist in an abstraction from their real inequality, only in the reduction of their common character as an expenditure of human force, of human labour in general, and it is exchange alone that operates this reduction, by placing the most diverse products of labour in the presence of one another as equals [in value].238
While Heinrich correctly reads Marxâs âopèreâ [vollszieht sich, âcarried outâ in the German Ergänzungen] to mean that âthe abstraction of equal human labour only exists in exchangeâ, Moseley instead perversely seeks to force the phrase âto be consistent with [Marxâs] earlier paragraphsâ (i.e., precisely the text Marx seeks to correct here) paragraphs that putatively state that, in Moseleyâs words, âequal human labour exists in productionâ.239
In fact, however, Marxâs clarification is not yet clear enough: when Marx writes in the French edition that âThe equality of labours that differ entirely one from another can only consist in an abstraction from their real inequalityâ, he should have added the obvious implication of this, i.e., that this âabstraction from their real inequalityâ results in, precisely and self-evidently, an abstraction, the nonexistent concept of abstract human labour. To clarify the theoretical obscurity that confounds Moseley, and given that his difficult, highly abstract presentation in Chapter 1 relies upon singular examples (coats, linen) to help the reader grasp his argument, Marx should have inserted in his text an analogous clarification to his extremely important note on the difference between value and exchange-value, which he only came to present clearly in the 1872 edition: âOnce we know this, our manner of speaking does no harm; it serves, rather, as an abbreviationâ.240 Once we know that the abstraction of equal human labour only exists as a real abstraction in the exchange relation via its value-form, and is until then a nonexistent concept, our manner of speaking â for example that âIn the production of linen, a particular quantum of human labour exists in having been expendedâ â does no harm.
12 The Raw Materials of Marxâs Additive Synthetic Method
As he repeatedly rewrote the first chapters of Capital â from the simplified Appendix of the 1867 edition, to the second, 1872 edition and its accompanying preparatory notebooks, to his corrections of Royâs 1875 French translation â in the explicit intention to clarify and improve the process of exposition in those initial chapters, Marx in fact gradually abandoned the negative dialectic of totality that predominates in his initial scientific works. While from the 1841 dissertation through the Grundrisse, and as late as the 1867 edition of Capital, this negative dialectical mode of exposition still plays an important role, I have argued that in the process of rewriting, Marx developed an additive synthetic process of exposition, in which the Hegelian logic of totality, contradiction and determinations of reflection [Reflexionsbestimmung] play no further role.
There is no evidence that Marx consciously undertook this process as the invention of a novel materialist dialectical method; instead, he continued to pay homage to the centrality of Hegelâs logic in his own formation, most famously in the Postface to the 1872 edition where he celebrates âthat mighty thinkerâ in the face of the âill-humoured, arrogant and mediocre epigones who ⦠take pleasure in treating Hegel in the same way as the good Moses Mendelssohn treated Spinoza â¦, namely, as a âdead dogââ¯â.241 This transformation in Marxâs process of exposition instead involved a practical development, in the form of the reconceptualisation, clarification, and rewriting of these crucial initial chapters, most visibly for example in Marxâs preparatory notebook for the 1872 edition entitled Ergänzungen und Veränderungen zum ersten Band des Kapitals (Additions and Changes to the First Volume of Capital).242 Since Marx made no systematic statement or reflection on this process, it must be reconstructed immanently from Marxâs text, as I have tried to do here.
Whatâs more, for all his customary polemical conviction, Marxâs two well-known statements on his relation to Hegelian dialectic in the 1872 Postface are quite ambiguous. On the one hand, he famously asserts that due to âthe mystification [Mystifikation] which the dialectic suffers in Hegelâs hands ⦠it must be inverted [umstülpen], in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shellâ, a process of mere inversion that, Althusser famously argued, were it true, would have left intact the principal Hegelian logical categories (negation, contradiction, Aufhebung, etc.).243
Instead, in Reading Capital, Althusser merely asserts what I have here tried to demonstrate: that Marxâs claim fails to do justice to the real transformations manifest in the process of exposition concretely deployed in the second and all subsequent editions of Capital, as what Althusser rightly calls âthe apodictic character of the order of [Marxâs] theoretical discourseâ.244 At the same time, a few lines before that famous statement, Marx does in fact seem to go much further in that very direction, asserting unequivocally (though without presenting any evidence that would indicate more precisely his meaning) that âMy dialectical method is, in its foundations [Grundlage], not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite [direktes Gegenteil] to itâ.245
If by 1872, in the practical process of revision, Marx had transformed his mode of exposition in the opening chapters of Capital into what I have termed a method of additive synthesis,246 without ever committing to paper the systematic analysis of his understanding of method that he never found time to write, he seems to have done so spontaneously, amply drawing on the resources of his own genius to construct an original process of materialist critique. That said, here I wish to indicate a number of theoretical resources in Marxâs theoretical toolkit that necessarily played decisive roles in this process.
The first of these has long been overlooked in Marx studies. In Heinrichâs judgement, however, Marxâs thorough training in law and legal argumentation was decisive for his intellectual formation:
Marxâs knowledge of law left behind clear traces in his work. Directly legal arguments are found in a few of his articles for the Rheinische Zeitung, [and] his Critique of Hegelâs Philosophy of Right from 1843 and some passages in Capital also demonstrate Marxâs legal knowledge. And last but not least, in February of 1849 in Cologne, Marx successfully pleaded before the court twice when the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was charged with insulting a magistrate and in a further trial for inciting rebellion.247
This is relevant in the present context because this training gave Marx what Heinrich describes as âa reasonably solid (theoretical) training in lawâ, one that in addition to his study of logic with Georg Andreas Gabler, for which he unsurprisingly received a mark of âextremely diligentâ, would necessarily have grounded him in the subcategory of positive logic that is legal argumentation.248
Etienne Balibar argues even more strongly that though âthere remains a remarkable blindness in the detailed commentaries on Marxâs Capital to the issue of juridical forms and the function of law in Marxâs analysisâ, in fact, âjuridical form is key to the understanding of Marxâs reasoningâ.249 Balibar shows that the category of legal subject as property owner is crucial to the entire demonstrative arc of Capital, from the initial analysis of exchange in chapter Two, to that of the wage form, and finally that of the accumulation of capital in chapter 24, such that there exists âa homology of the juridical form with the value formâ, in the sense that without the category of legal person the process of valorisation cannot proceed.250
Second, Günther Schmidt has argued that given Marxâs extensive knowledge of the works of Aristotle â including the Physics, Metaphysics, and On Generation and Corruption, to the point of having translated in 1841 sections of On the Soul â he in fact originally intended to write his doctoral dissertation as a comparison of Epicurus not with Democritus, but with Aristotle himself.251 While there is no direct evidence that Marx studied Aristotleâs Prior and Posterior Analytics, the works in which Aristotle literally invented logic as a domain of scientific, philosophical reflection, there is every reason to suppose that given his training in logic, Marx was familiar with these canonical works as well. In any case, Aristotleâs positive logic pervades at every moment the philosophical works that Marx knew intimately, such as the Physics and Metaphysics. Marxâs respect for Aristotle is, moreover, a constant of his intellectual universe, to the point that in Capital he will unequivocally name the inventor of the Peripatetic School, âthe great investigator who was the first to analyse the value-form, like so many other forms of thought, society and nature, ⦠the greatest thinker of Antiquityâ.252
Finally â and here the question of influence is both significantly more obscure but equally crucial to the argument of this book as a whole â there is the problem of Spinoza and Marx.253 Compared to his extensive engagement with thinkers such as Epicurus, Aristotle, Feuerbach, or Hegel, Marx has little to say about Spinoza, all of it rather superficial and in passing (though always positive and admirative). In its generality, Marxâs one theoretically substantive citation of the author of the Ethics, in a footnote to Capital, (âThese gentlemen [the vulgar economists] would do well to ponder occasionally over Spinozaâs âDeterminatio est nagatioââ¯â) most likely relays Hegelâs misrepresentation of Spinoza rather than a substantive engagement with Spinoza himself, repeating Hegelâs erroneous word order rather than the original (âdeterminatio est negatioâ rather than Spinozaâs âdeterminatio negatio estâ).254 For Marx in this footnote, the phrase âDeterminatio est negatioâ is taken to refer in general to âHegelian âcontradictionâ, which [Marx continues] is the source of all dialecticsâ, something quite different than its limited application in Spinozaâs letter to Jelles.255
It would seem that Marxâs other principal reference to Spinoza (âIn opposition [Gegensatz] to Spinoza, [vulgar economics] believes that âignorance is a sufficient reasonâ [die Unwissenheit ein hinreichender Grund ist]â) is, if anything, even less promising in its vagueness.256 I wish in conclusion, however, to pause to consider this phrase that does not seem to have merited the attention of previous commentators on Marxâs relation to Spinoza. It is my conviction that taken in context, and given the importance Marx seems to attribute to it judging from the phraseâs repetition from his 1841 dissertation through the 1872 edition of Capital, this seemingly cliched, even throwaway catchphrase in fact indicates, as a sort of signpost or marker, precisely the additive synthetic epistemological process that brings Marxâs revisions to Capital in proximity to Spinozaâs apodictic, positive logic.
13 On Ignorance and Common Notions
In the existing literature on Spinozaâs possible influence on Marx, the focus has remained unrelentingly limited to questions of the critique of religion and miracles, freedom of speech, and the autonomy of the political. Bernardo Bianchi remains squarely within this field of interpretation, noting only that âAfter 1844, Marx drifts away from Spinoza as well as ⦠the problems relating to the autonomy of the politicalâ.257 No commentator to my knowledge has reflected on the epistemological implications of the statement that âignorance is no argumentâ, though there is unanimous consensus that the source of this phrase in the first volume of Capital is the Appendix to Ethics IP36.258
On at least three occasions spanning his intellectual production, from the 1841 dissertation to the final revisions of Capital, Marx cites Spinozaâs phrase that âignorance is no argumentâ.259 In The German Ideology, Marx briefly cites the phrase to indicate Max Stirnerâs ignorance of real human suffering, but in the case of Marxâs 1841 dissertation, On the Difference between Democritean and Epicurean Physics, Rubel suggests a far more consequential, epistemological dimension, one that I will argue is carried over, amplified, and clarified when Marx repeats it in Capital. While Marxâs lost Appendix to the Dissertation, judging by the Notes that have survived, addressed potentially Spinozist themes related to the TTP such as âOn Individual Immortalityâ, âThe Theology of Epicurusâ and âThe Relationship of Man to Godâ, in the second chapter, Marx writes that âSpinoza says that ignorance is no argumentâ in order to reject the platitudes of commentators who âattributed no qualities to the atomsâ based merely on their inability to âreconcile the qualities of the atom with its conceptâ, in other words, based merely on the inadequacy of their own thought.260
Rubelâs commentary on this reference to Spinoza is suggestive, if hesitant. He argues that this seemingly offhand reference to Spinoza in fact indexifies the dissertationâs fundamentally Spinozist epistemology:
One is tempted to speak of a Spinozist reading of Epicurus on Marxâs part; at both the level of atomist physics as well as its ethics, the [dissertationâs] concepts of reason, the sensible [sensibilité], consciousness and superstition all contribute to the conception of a âmaterialismâ that is not without connection to the rationalism defined by Spinoza in relation to the âsecond genre of knowledgeâ.261
Marxâs dissertation in its surviving form is divided between the theoretical anti-empiricism of its first part, a position coherent with both Spinoza and Hegel,262 and the purely Hegelian negative dialectic of its second section.263 In the former, Marx articulates the fundamental distinction between Democritusâ empiricism and the purely conceptual orientation of Epicurus. Setting off across the Mediterranean world in an endless search for knowledge, Democritus, Marx observes, âis driven into empirical observation [empirische Beobachtung]. Dissatisfied with philosophy, he throws himself into the arms of empirical knowledge [empirischen Wissen]â. Democritus âapplies himself to empirical natural science [empirische Naturwissenschaft] and to positive knowledge, and represents the unrest of observation, experimenting, ubiquitous learning [überall lernenden], ranging over the wide, wide worldâ. Marxâs Epicurus, in contrast, âscorns the empirical [verachtet die Empirie]; embodied in him are the serenity of thought satisfied in itself, the self-sufficiency that draws its knowledge ex principio internoâ.264
Epicurusâ position amounts to the refusal of all supernatural or miraculous explanations of causality, all teleologies of divine intent, and asserts instead the adequacy of a physics-based, âatomisticâ account of nature. âThe atom is perceived only through reasonâ, Marx flatly observes.265 There are no sensations of atoms from which to construct their concept; instead, Epicurusâ philosophical project seeks to articulate the rational order of nature, beginning from the purely theoretical, anti-empiricist concept of the atom and the void, to culminate in a materialist cosmology. Marxâs Epicurus squarely locates the production of knowledge within scientific reflection â as opposed to the extraction of truth from empirical observation so characteristic of Democritus â as the positive construction of an adequate intellection of the real. This position, despite its rudimentary development in the dissertation, nonetheless indicates a purely Spinozist materialist position, in which the real order of nature finds conceptual articulation in the attribute of thought; Marxâs reading of the TTP and Ethics in preparation for the dissertation in all certainty contributed to the articulation of this epistemological position.
The Spinozist theoretical anti-empiricism of Marxâs first chapter stands in marked contrast, however, to the negative dialectical logic of its succeeding sections, the latter deploying a none-too-subtle application of Hegelâs logic of Reflexionsbestimmung to the Epicurean theory of the atom. If Democritusâ assertion of the necessarily, eternally linear fall of atoms through the void describes for Marx a realm of pure necessity, Epicurusâ introduction of the concept of their clinamen or swerve, in Marxâs reading, introduces negation not as the mere external definition of the atom as not-void, but internally, as the negative unity of its becoming-other, its swerve the theoretical basis of self-consciousness and the freedom of human action:
The mode of being which [the atom] has to negate [negiren] is the straight line. The immediate negation [unmittelbare Negation] of this motion is another motion, which ⦠is the declination from the straight line â¦. Epicurus objectifies the contradiction [Widerspruch] in the concept of the atom between essence and existence â¦. In Epicurus atomistics with all its contradictions [Widersprüchen] has been carried through and completed as the natural science of self-consciousness [Selbstbewusstseins].266
Here, the Hegelian logic of the determinations of reflection that would remain a constant in Marxâs thought through the first edition of Capital already offers the young Marx the theoretical means to develop an original reinterpretation of Epicurusâ materialism. The contrast with Marxâs return to Spinoza in chapter 11 of Capital, as we shall see in a moment, could not be greater.
That said, Rubelâs hesitant, passing mention of the importance for the young Marx of Spinozaâs âsecond genre of knowledgeâ, that of common notions [notiones communes], puts us on the trail of the true and penetrating significance of Spinoza for Marxâs process of exposition, the final piece in the puzzle of what I am calling in this book Capitalâs Spinozist epistemology. For while in the dissertation this Spinozism remains superficial, if determinant in Marxâs argument, by the time of its reappearance in Capital, the reference to Spinoza, in the context of Marxâs argument in chapter 11, precisely and exactingly indicates what Rubel could only vaguely infer from the 1841 dissertation and its accompanying notebooks: a full-fledged theoretical reconstruction and deployment on Marxâs part of what Spinoza called general or common notions, notions that Marx names the âlaw of motionâ of the capitalist social form. In other words, taken in the context in which it appears in the eleventh chapter of Capital (âThe Rate and Mass of Surplus-Valueâ), in saying that âignorance is not a sufficient reasonâ Marx is not merely pointing to the âignoranceâ of the classical political economists he criticises, but does so in the context of his contrasting positive elaboration of an adequate mode of knowledge: specifically, the concept of the âlawâ of the rate and mass of surplus value that it is the remit of chapter 11 to formulate.
14 Marxâs Spinozist Theory of Knowledge
âIgnorance is not a sufficient reasonâ. For reasons he never explains, it is this unassuming insight of Spinozaâs, gleaned from his readings and notes in 1841, that permanently stuck in Marxâs mind. When Marx repeats this reference to Spinoza three decades later, in chapter 11 of Capital Volume I, he tellingly does so in the immediate context of a critique of the illusions and misapprehensions of the classical economists regarding the nature of surplus value.267 Immediately following his eminently clear and concise statement of the general âlawâ (Gesetz) governing the âRate and Mass of Surplus-Valueâ (henceforth âLRMSVâ) in the first three pages of the chapter, Marx notes that âThis law clearly contradicts all experience based on immediate appearancesâ.268 This is necessarily the case, he argues, because, as âeveryone knowsâ, the amount of profit made from a commodity by âa cotton spinnerâ or âa bakerâ does not vary according to the relative amounts of variable and constant capital either has invested to produce their cotton or bread, but only according to the general cost of âinputsâ (in mainstream economic jargon) relative to their market price.269
While Marx can assume that âeveryone knowsâ this is the case from their lived experience of commodity production and exchange, this ready familiarity nonetheless directly contradicts the law Marx has just before stated; at this point in his exposition, however, he has not yet explained the real and necessary distinction between surplus value and profit, and Marx will continue to hold their difference in abstraction and to assume instead that the two coincide until many hundreds of pages later, when he will explicate the dynamics and laws governing competition in Volume III via concepts such as cost price and average rate of profit.270
Here, Marx simply indicates that the authors of âclassical economicsâ are just as subject to this empiricist illusion as âeveryoneâ, and necessarily so: in the absence of an adequate theory of value and its necessary concepts such as Marx has developed to this point in his exposition in chapter 11, classical economics can only âhold instinctively to this law, although it has never formulated it, because it is a necessary consequence of the law of valueâ.271 In other words, the only difference between âeveryoneâ and classical economics is that while the former simply observes and follows what is empirically the case, the latter experiences this same fact as a theoretical contradiction that it cannot solve: having posited labour as the source of value, but lacking concepts such as labour power and socially necessary labour time, classical economics embroiled itself in insoluble contradictions trying to explain, for example, how it can then be the case that a commodity is not âmore valuable the more unskilful and lazy the worker who produced it, because he would need more time to complete the articleâ.272
Lacking adequate theoretical concepts, âvulgar economicsâ can only make âviolent [as opposed to scientifically adequate] abstractionsâ; condemned to its empiricist illusions, it âmust rely ⦠on mere semblance as opposed to the law which regulates and determines the phenomenaâ.273 One could hardly imagine a more perfectly Spinozist critique of the necessarily illusory and inadequate nature of empirical, sensuous experience, and it is indeed precisely at this point that Marx then inserts his reference to Spinoza.
The obvious conclusion is not merely that chapter 11 of Capital is explicitly constructed as a perfectly Spinozist critique of the necessity governing the illusions of empiricist, ideological forms of knowledge such as those of âvulgar economicsâ, but furthermore, that Marx offers in contrast an equally perfect demonstration in the immediately preceding paragraphs of what should necessarily take its place to constitute a properly scientific, adequate analysis of a concept such as the rate and mass of surplus value: âthe law that regulates and determines the phenomenaâ, or, in Spinozist terms, its common notion.
Marx thus begins his analysis of this law, in the first paragraph of chapter 11, by reminding his reader that âIn this chapter, as hitherto, the value of labour-power ⦠is assumed to be a given, constant magnitudeâ.274 Superficially, this reminder simply prompts the reader to recall the abstract concept (the value of labour power) that allowed Marx, in chapter 7, to distinguish between necessary and surplus labour, and thus to indicate the source of surplus value in the production process. More importantly, however, this proviso also squarely replaces Marxâs forthcoming analysis of the LRMSV in the purely theoretical domain of thought; the law of the rate and mass of surplus value is, in other words, not an empirical, sensuous thing, but unambiguously a Gedankenkonkretum.
I say replaces because Marx must here forcibly return his reader to the high level of abstraction of the first nine chapters of Capital following the extensive empirical illustration of these concepts in chapter 10 (âThe Working Dayâ); equally, however, this initial prompt must be kept in mind in what follows, because it clearly indicates that the initial presentation of this law stands in utter distinction from the empiricism of both âeveryoneâ and the classical economists he will then excoriate midway through the chapter in the passage discussed above.
This point should not be forgotten when Marx immediately, in the second paragraph, launches into a discussion of âthe workerâ and âthe capitalistâ, offering as well specific numerical quantities of work time (â6 hours a dayâ) and its monetary expression as a specific value (â3 shillingsâ) to calculate a âspecific mass of surplus-valueâ.275 How are âthe workerâ and âthe capitalistâ different, a casual reader might ask, from the âbakerâ or âcotton spinnerâ whose empiricist point of view he will condemn just after presenting this law? In fact, it will shortly become clear â when Marx directly scales his analysis from a single labour process to the âtotal capital of a societyâ (âfor example ⦠the social working day of ten million hoursâ) â that they inhabit utterly distinct theoretical realms: the baker and spinner actually existing, singular examples of productive labourers with their distinct points of view and lived experiences of the production and exchange processes, the âworkerâ and âcapitalistâ mere theoretical, abstract markers or stand-ins, imagistic ciphers of an abstract thought construct that Marx will call âaliquot partsâ of a whole that can be directly scaled up or down at will.276 Marx thus proceeds, in his third paragraph, to scale his analysis from aliquot, representative figures of the individual worker and capitalist, to address âthe total value of all the labour-powers the capitalist employs simultaneouslyâ.277
Marx next examines factors governing the variation on this simple formula for the production of surplus value: when variable capital invested diminishes or increases, and when the corresponding rate of surplus value increases or diminishes, the total mass of surplus value produced will directly vary according to these given proportions.278 These variations, Marx insists, nonetheless remain governed by absolute âlimits, which cannot be overcomeâ, in the form of both limits to the working day (24 hours) and to reductions in the number of workers employed (to the theoretical and potentially real limit of zero).279
All of this combines, in Marxâs various simple, algebraic examples, to indicate the âself-evidentâ nature of the LRMSV: âWith a given rate of surplus-value, and a given value of labour-power, therefore, the masses of surplus-value produced vary directly as the amounts of the variable capitals advancedâ.280 Though Marxâs exposition in volume I to this point has focused on the relative division of capital into its constant and variable forms, âthe law just laid down is not affected by thisâ. This is the case since it is only the element of variable capital, by definition and whatever its relative quantity to constant capital employed in production, that effects âthe valorisation process performed by the labour-powers which set the means of production in motionâ.281
This final observation thus allows Marx to summarise in natural language the LRMSV in its simplest form: âThe masses of value and of surplus-value produced by different capitals â the value of labour-power being given and its degree of exploitation being equal â vary directly as the amounts of the variable components of these capitals, i.e. the parts which have been turned into living labour-powerâ.282 Having done so, Marx turns to his critique of both the common sense of âeveryoneâ as well as the necessary contradictions governing the âvulgar economistsâ discussed above.
Now, the epistemological point I wish to make about Marxâs algebraically simple LRMSV is that on at least eight counts, Marxâs law constitutes a perfect example of what Spinoza called a common notion, i.e., general concepts or formulae that are, in contrast to imaginary ideas, Spinoza insists, always and in all cases necessarily adequate. It is quite extraordinary, I think, that both Spinoza, in propositions 37, 38, and 39 of Ethics II, and Marx in Capital chapter 11:
-
Reject empirical knowledge as radically and necessarily inadequate;
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Propose in its place an abstract science of nonexistent things (res singulares non existentes) without sensuous determination;283
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Emphasise the absolute scalability of this knowledge between aliquot part and whole;
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Understand this form of knowledge as relational and proportional as opposed to the observation-based study of actually existing singular things;
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Articulate this form of knowledge as a process of formalisation that models reality through the power of abstraction â¦
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To produce a necessarily and universally adequate mode of knowledge â¦
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The nature of which follows a necessary genesis that gradually transitions from the inadequacy of imaginary, empirical knowledge to the adequacy of the general, in order to â¦
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Constitute the paradigm of a political epistemology as epistemological commons
In his analysis of Spinozaâs exposition of the concept of ânotions common to all humansâ [notiones omnibus hominibus communes], Macherey initially emphasises the same distinction Marx makes, described above, between the inadequacy of empirical observations and a general notion: while the former are produced âby the chance encounters of bodies, [common notions] differ fundamentally from those produced by the mechanisms of perception and imagination, under conditions subject to infinite variations, which prevents their meaning, always elaborated in a determinate context, in the here and now, to be extended beyond the moment of their appearanceâ.284 In contrast, Macherey argues that such notions common to all humans by their very nature escape from âthe instability inherent in opinionsâ insofar as they possess a fixed and determinant form that allows for their deployment âby all in commonâ.285
What then is the nature of such common notions? For Spinoza, the crucial distinction between the inadequate, imaginary ideas we necessarily form from sense impressions, and common notions, is that the latter are ideas not about any given, actually existing singular thing (such as coats and linen or bakers and cotton spinners, among Marxâs examples), but about certain qualities common to all things in general. In the wake of Galileo, who died in 1642, Spinozaâs privileged example in these propositions is that of physical bodies as such, universally existing in space and following the general laws that govern their relations. If it is the case that âall bodies agree in certain thingsâ286Â â i.e., that aside from their particular existences, they possess common characteristics, which is to say their extension â then they therefore have in common that âthey are determinations of extension, and are universally and identically subject to the same laws of movement and restâ.287
For Spinoza, this common nature is what allows for the development of a general science of bodies, one that is founded on purely mathematical principles. The essential characteristic of this scientific understanding of the physical, material world, Macherey observes, is that it does not âtake into consideration the existence of any specific body in particular, and is thus completely abstractâ.288 This immediately recalls Marxâs famous defence of the powers of abstraction for the analysis and critique of political economy: âIn the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace bothâ.289 Like Marxâs scientific critique of political economy (âThe ultimate aim of this work [i.e., Capital, is] to reveal the economic law of motion of modern societyâ), Spinozaâs âscienceâ, as Macherey reads him, âdetermines figures of regularity that, despite the perpetual variations impressed on [actually existing, singular] bodies due to the fact that they exist en acte, constitute the manifestation of a permanence regarding which laws can be formulated independently of the existence of any particular bodyâ.290
Spinoza further specifies a characteristic of common notions, one that applies not only to physical bodies in extension, but to all actually existing singular things as such: these common characteristics apply equally and absolutely to the part and whole [quod aeque in parte ac in toto est], and are, Macherey stresses, completely independent of any distinction between part and whole, precisely in terms of the scalability that Marx stresses in the example of the LRMSV: when considering aliquot, representative parts of a whole such as the total mass of surplus value rather than actually existing labourers such as bakers and cotton spinners and their lived experience, the law governing the rate and mass of surplus value holds absolutely.
This is necessarily the case, since a common notion such as Marxâs LRMSV represents not actually existing singular things, but relations and proportions, the nature of which, Macherey notes, âremains identical in every dimension [ordres de grandeur], as long as the rule that defines these relations is sustainedâ. As such, a common notion informs by this equivalence all âcomposed and composingâ things, which, in their entirety and universally, constitute relational systems as singular structures of causality that through formalisation come to nonexist, and do so independently of the particular conditions of existence of singular existing things (such as, for Marx, the particular characteristics of baking bread or spinning cotton).291
Now, the astute reader will have noted that in my initial presentation of chapter 11 of Capital, I skipped over what is perhaps the most striking confirmation of my argument that the LRMSV is a Spinozist common notion: Marxâs graphic formula summarising the law itself in schematic form:292
I did so because Marxâs introduction of this formula â though it adds no further information to his presentation of the LRMSV â not only synthesises in schematic form this common notion, but, what is more, its specific history across the various editions of Capital can stand as a final confirmation of my proposition that Marx tendentially supresses his initial reliance on the Hegelian logic of determinations of reflection and contradiction for a properly Spinozist additive synthetic method.
In fact, this schematic reduction and formalisation of the LRMSV, along with the paragraphs directly preceding and following it, is absent from both the 1867 and 1872 editions of Capital.293 Retained by Engels in the 1890 âdefinitiveâ edition of Capital, Marx in fact only inserted this formula, along with a number of abbreviations and clarifications, in his revisions to Royâs 1875 French translation. In the third paragraph, for example, he added a second sentence that more clearly states, at a high degree of abstraction, the additive and scalable nature of variable capital: âSa valeur [that of the variable capital employed] égale la valeur moyenne dâune force de travail multipliée par le nombre de ces forces individuelles ; la grandeur du capital variable est donc proportionnelle au nombre des ouvriers employésâ.294 Immediately following the formula, Marx further emphasises the purely abstract nature of the values it represents: âWe assume throughout, not only that the value of an average labour-power is constant, but that the workers employed by a capitalist are reduced to average workersâ.295 The overall tendency of Marxâs final, 1875 revisions to the first paragraphs of this chapter are clear: simplifying its presentation, while above all emphasising the scalability of his propositions as well as their purely abstract character.
Now, I find it quite extraordinary that in his proof to EIIP37, Spinoza characterises the abstract, general nature of the properties common to all things (i.e., their common notions) by an abstract variable, âBâ, precisely as does Marx in the formula he inserts between the fourth and fifth paragraphs of Chapter 11.296 Common notions apprehend not actually existing singular things but relations, in effect constructing an atemporal formal model of the real. The ethical and political result of this process of abstraction, Macherey observes, is to multiply the powers of the intellect adequately to grasp the essential, relational nature of all things:
It is as though the intellect ⦠surpassed itself, escaping from the limitations of its particular situation as the idea of a particular thing as a body in action, which is how it ordinarily perceives all other things. Instead, [through the development of common notions] it is led to form ideas that are not themselves ideas of particular things, but [nonexistent] ideas, the object of which is the relations among things.297
In fact, Spinoza argues, common notions, though they do not grasp the essential nature of singular things (this he reserves to the third, âintuitiveâ form of knowledge), are nonetheless necessarily and universally adequate, and as such constitute an instance of the political epistemology with which this book as a whole is concerned.
âThose things that are common to all things and are equally in the part as in the whole can be conceived only adequatelyâ.298 Aside from the laws governing the movement and rest of physical bodies, Spinoza also refers to axioms as common notions, in the sense that they hold for âall things that areâ [omnia que sunt].299 When the apparatus of thought moves in this fashion away from the empirical consideration of various actually existing things, to construct instead ideas whose object is the purely abstract relations between things, Macherey observes,
It moves to a new mode of operation [régime de fonctionnement], one that makes it see the things it apprehends in a completely new fashion: no longer via contingent encounters tied to the existence in act of bodies, but from a completely disincarnated point of view â¦. Relating to no specific thing in particular, such an idea, by its nature, can indicate or consider no other thing than that of which it is the idea: it can only be a clear and distinct idea, the transparency of which cannot be corrupted by opacity. It is, therefore, an idea âthat is for us absolute or adequate and perfectâ [quae in nobis est absoluta sive adequate et perfecta].300
Common notions are absolute and complete ideas, precisely in the sense that schematisation (via the introduction of variables, A or B, to replace all reference to actually existing singular things) affords the passage from our inadequate ideas about the actually existing, empirical things we perceive (like Marxâs bakers and cotton spinners) to our conception of universally and eternally valid relations (such as Marxâs LRMSV).
This political epistemology of common notions is grounded in what Macherey terms âa dynamic of rational knowledgeâ, via the perfecting and emendation of the capacity to grasp the real by means of ideas, in which the intellect is led âfrom the activity of [sensuous] perception, in which it is at its most passive, to that of conception, in which it is the most active ⦠passing from the particular to the general through a progressive process of abstractionâ.301
The common notion as such thus possesses an inherent ethical and political dimension: ideas that express properties common to all things are as such necessarily âcommon to all humansâ, Macherey comments, âwhich is to say that they compose a common knowledge that can be universally sharedâ. This common knowledge, accessible to all humans and necessarily identically conceived by all who follow this democratic path, thus constitutes âthe condition for a mental community among all people â¦. In so far as people form common notions that are necessarily adequate, they are actually united, and constitute as such a single intellect and a single bodyâ.302 Macherey insists above all on the real actuality of this intellectual commons of theoretical practice: âIn the intellect of man, whoever he or she may be, there always exist common notions [such as, I suggested above, a minimal idea of the nature of capitalism such as Marx expresses in the first sentence of Capital] through which can be established the forms of their union with other people, which is to say, with the maximum possible others, and tendentially, with allâ.303
If this political dimension of theoretical practice holds for a universal understanding of the law of gravity or logical axioms, in Spinozaâs examples, how much more then is this true of Marxâs critique of political economy in Capital, in which the reader is swept up by Marxâs bracing rhetorical devices and compelling argument, to develop for herself a dynamic of increasingly adequate knowledge of the nature of capitalism, to grasp its essential nature in the fullest complexity of its systematic dynamic, to pierce the ideological untruth of its mere forms of appearance, and to join Marx in the construction, at the highest pitch of an active knowledge, of nothing less than a universal theoretical commons, a communism of the active intellect, as the necessary and adequate prolegomenon to the real âdeath of capitalâ with which this book began.
Needless to say, in the scope of this chapter there can be no question of addressing the huge volume of philological and genetic research into Capital since the 1960s. Here, I only hope to extend Althusserâs and Machereyâs original epistemological propositions in Reading Capital in the context of their later work and its reception, in particular in relation to the problem of a Spinozist reading of Capital. For a summary of this broader discussion, focusing on the Germanophone field and in particular the relation of Hegelâs Logic to Capital, see Heinrich 2009, pp. 71â98 as well as the entire contents of that outstanding volume more generally; and Heinrich 2022 [1999], pp. 167â71; 2023, pp. 263â7. Heinrich summarises his own view on the relation of Hegelian logic to Capital in the following terms: âFor me, the most plausible conclusion is the following: from Hegel, Marx gained a precise perception of the difficulties of presentation ⦠but regarding Hegelâs notions and lines of argumentation themselves, there is no applicationâ (2009, p. 75).
An extreme example of the former position is to be found in Jairus Banajiâs essay âFrom the Commodity to Capital: Hegelâs Logic in Marxâs Capitalâ, in which Banaji presents Marxâs method of exposition as both static and unitary. Unitary since for Banaji every methodological comment Marx made constitutes a moment of an expressive totality (âIt is obvious that the methodological references express a consistent and internally unified conceptionâ) and static, since Banaji identifies examples of this univocal totality â among which Banaji freely translates into Hegelese as necessary â from the 1841 dissertation to Volume II of Capital, the final manuscript on which Marx worked. Banaji 2015, p. 20.
On Marxâs complex appropriation of Hegelian thought from 1836â48, see Levine 2012.
I take the term epistemological impediment from Jacques Bidet, who makes an analogous argument regarding Marxâs appropriation of Hegelian negative dialectic, but without specifically addressing this to the putative negative dialectical contradiction between use-value and exchange-value in the concept of the commodity (Bidet 2005).
In a note Marx placed in his manuscript for Capital, Volume II, he gives an example of this practical form of contradiction: âContradiction in the capitalist mode of production. The workers are important for the market as buyers of commodities. But as sellers of their commodity â labour-power â capitalist society has the tendency to restrict them to their minimum price. Further contradiction: the periods in which capitalist production exerts all its forces regularly show themselves to be periods of over-production; because the limit to the application of the productive powers is not simply the production of value, but also its realisation. However the sale of commodities, the realisation of commodity capital, and thus of surplus-value as well, is restricted not by the consumer needs of society in general, but by the consumer needs of a society in which the great majority are always poor and must always remain poorâ. I take this example as well as the three-way distinction between theoretical, practical, and (Hegelian) dialectical contradictions from Arash Abazariâs article âMarxâs Conception of Dialectical Contradiction in Commodityâ (2019, p. 181). I will return to Abazariâs argument below.
âEach attribute of one substance must be conceived through itselfâ (EIP10). Spinoza goes on to develop this crucial point in the second section of Ethica: âAs long as things are considered as modes of thought, we must explicate the order of the whole of nature, or the connection of causes, through the attribute of Thought alone; and insofar as things are considered as modes of Extension, again the order of the whole of Nature must be explicated through the attribute of Extension only. The same applies to the other attributesâ EIIP7Sch. These assertions derive in turn from Spinozaâs initial propositions EIP2â4, which together imply, Macherey comments, that âthe attributes of substance ⦠can be distinguished without maintaining [entretenir] relations between themselvesâ. Furthermore, Macherey continues, the attributes are precisely âdefined by the fact that they have nothing in common between them and therefore do not reciprocally limit one another â¦. There is a mental reality as there is a corporeal reality, each neither more nor less real than the other, and without reciprocal relations [existing] between themâ (1998, pp. 75, 94, my translation).
Marx was quite clear that despite the decisive influence Hegelâs thought had on his intellectual development, his own method was not Hegelian: âMy method of exposition is not Hegelian, since I am a materialist, and Hegel an idealistâ (Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, 6 March 1868). In consequence, Marx famously wrote to Joseph Dietzgen in 1868 that âWhen I have cast off the burden of political economy, I shall write a âDialecticââ¯â.
âIf knowledge is expressed in discourse, and is applied to discourse, this discourse must by its nature be different from the object which it animated in order to talk about it. Scientific discourse is rigorous because its chosen object is defined by a different order of strictness and coherenceâ. Macherey 2006, p. 7.
Crucial to Machereyâs materialist analysis of texts, as discussed in the previous chapter, is his systematic attempt âto replace interpretation (why is the work made?) by explication [explication] (which answers the question, how is the work made?)â (2006, p. 84, translation altered).
âSpinoza ⦠warned us that the object of knowledge or essence was in itself absolutely distinct and different from the real object, for, to repeat his famous aphorism, the two objects must not be confused: the idea of the circle, which is the object of knowledge, must not be confused with the circle, which is the real object. In the third section of the 1857 Introduction, Marx took up this principle as forcefully as possibleâ (RC, p. 41, translation modified; LC, p. 40).
Bolzano 2011 [1837], p. 299; Lalande 2010, p. 183. I cite Bolzano not only because of the elegant simplicity of his positive definition of negation, a definition as devoid of psychologism as it is of dependency on the concept (negation) it seeks to define (petitio principii), but also because, though Marx could not have known of his work, Bolzano has come to be recognised, since his rediscovery by Husserl after 1893, as the crucial innovator in the development of a positive and objective logic, a logic that he developed, moreover, via explicit critiques of both Kant and Hegelâs positions. His relation to the theory of materialist dialectic I discuss in this book is, moreover, crucial yet still underappreciated, both in the explicit importance of his theory of apodictic demonstration for Jean Cavaillès, and through the latter, indirectly for Althusser and Badiou in particular. I discuss Bolzanoâs importance for Badiou in the following chapter.
RC, p. 51.
Hegel 2010a, p. 21.
Hegel 2010a, p. 62.
Hegel 2010a, p. 121. âTruth in the deeper sense consists in this, that objectivity is identical with the conceptâ; âCorrectness generally affects merely the formal agreement of our representation with its content; however this content may be otherwise constituted. The truth consists, by contrast, in the agreement of the object with itself, i.e. with its conceptâ (Hegel 2010a, pp. 284, 246).
âIn the apodictic judgement we have an individual that relates itself, thanks to its constitution, to its universal, i.e. its concept â¦. The truth has to prove [bewähren] itself precisely to be the truth, and here, within the logical sphere, the proof consists in the concept demonstrating itself to be mediated through and with itself and thereby also as what is truly immediateâ (Hegel 2010a, pp. 134, 254).
âDas Resultat, wozu wir gelangen, ist nicht, dass Production, Distribution, Austausch, Consumtion identisch sind, sondern dass sie alle Glieder einer Totalität bilden, Unterschiede innerhalb einer Einheitâ. Marx 1973, p. 99; MEGA II.1.1 [1857â58], p. 35.
Marx MEGA II.6 [1872], p. 184; Marx MEGA II.7 [1875], p. 529.
Riccardo Bellofiore remarks that âA consensus among all the ISMT [International Symposium on Marxist Theory] authors is that Marx is a systematic dialectician, that is, he proposes the articulation of categories to conceptualise an existent concrete wholeâ. Bellofiore is referring to Arthur, Geert Reuten, Tony Smith, Roberto Fineschi, Patrick Murray, and Fred Moseley, along with himself. Though my own reading of Capital is heavily indebted to the work of the ISMT authors, this is obviously a shared position with which I take issue. Bellofiore 2014, p. 167, emphasis in original. Among these authors, my critique of totality is closest to that of Bellofiore, who stresses, like Machereyâs Spinoza (see below), the perspectival, subjective nature of any actually existing totality: âIn the section on reproduction, Marx was looking at capital relations from a point of view [of] the whole of the capitalist class [and] the whole of the working classâ at which point we âabandon the perspective of the single capitalist and the single worker and look instead at the capitalist class and the working classâ (Bellofiore 2018, pp. 379, 380, emphasis added). Another proponent of the systematic dialectic school is Norman Levine. His book Marxâs Discourse with Hegel, taking account of both recent Hegel scholarship and the MEGA2, offers a detailed and comprehensive examination of Marxâs appropriation of Hegelâs thought, drawing attention both to those texts Marx read, and others he either ignored or which only became available after his death, along with the diverse consequences of this complex dispositif. Unlike the work of Bellofiore, Arthur and Smith, however, Levineâs probing analysis is strictly limited to the years 1836â48, and thus does not address the process of exposition in Capital. See Levine 2012. In general, the Systematic Dialectic position can be said to move backwards from the observed reality of Capital to fabricate its imaginary cause â the Hegelian logical categories to be found in Grundrisse â as opposed to moving forward from 1857 to follow Marxâs general tendency as the necessary replacement of many of the logical categories and operations he took from Hegel with original, more adequate concepts of his own construction, as I seek to do in this chapter, following Althusser and Machereyâs Spinozist protocol for a materialist science of causes.
Arthur 2009, p. 175.
I will focus here on the Encyclopedia, since, in contrast to the more widely discussed Phenomenology, Logic, and Philosophy of Right, each of which constitute only partial elements of this system, the Encyclopedia is the only site in which Hegel systematically (if schematically) develops his system of thought as a totality. See Stein and Wretzel 2022.
For Hegel, the sublation of nature within the absolute idea necessarily maintains what he calls a âreal contentâ, that consists âonly in its exhibition [Darstellung], an exhibition that it [the concept] provides for itself in the form of external existence [Dasein]â. Cited in Schülein 2022, p. 139.
Hegel 2010a, p. 303, emphasis added, translation modified.
âThe history of philosophy presents only one philosophy at different stages of its unfolding throughout the various philosophies that make their appearance â¦. the specific principles each one of which formed the basis of a given system are merely branches of one and the same wholeâ (Hegel 2010a, p. 42).
Hegel 2010a, p. 43, emphasis in original. Though Gesamtheit and Totalität are synonymous in German, Hegelâs preferred term is Totalität, which appears 153 times in the Encyclopedia Logic, while the former is used only once.
Hegel 2010a, pp. 43, 136.
âEverything actual contains within itself opposite determinations, and therefore knowing and, more specifically, comprehending [Begreifen] an object means nothing more or less than becoming conscious of it as a unity of opposite determinationsâ. Hegel 2010a, pp. 94â5.
Bordignon 2022, pp. 115â32.
âThe determination of the finite is the logical form of all there is insofar as all there is, is finite. The determination of identity is a logical form of all there is, insofar as all there is, is identical to itself â¦. If each determination is [therefore] a way in which all there is, is defined, the determination has to define itself too. In this way, the content of each determination is a definition of all there is, including itselfâ (Bordignon 2022, p. 122).
âSince the content of the determination defines a totality â all there is and all that is thinkable â according to a certain form, the whole content of this totality turn out to be inside the totality and, at the same time, paradoxically, outside the totality itselfâ (Bordignon 2022, p. 125). Alain Badiou founds his anti-Hegelian claim that there is no total universe or world of worlds, but only purely multiple worlds each possessing its own logic, upon a version of Russellâs paradox (2008, pp. 109â11). I discuss Badiouâs Logics of Worlds in Chapter 5.
I take the example from Bordignon 2022, p. 124.
Bordignon 2022, p. 125.
Hegel shows, Bordignon concludes, that âRussellâs verdict on the illegitimacy of such totalities is neither universal nor necessary. In effect, his verdict is based on a specific understanding of logic and, more generally, on a specific understanding of thought, which Hegel would relegate to the paradigm of understanding (Verstand)â (Bordignon 2022, p. 126).
It is obviously well beyond the scope of this chapter to undertake such an explication in its entirety, and I will focus here only on certain key passages: the opening paragraphs of Capital, the concept of the commodity developed in Section Three of Volume I, and the concept of the rate and mass of surplus value in Chapter 11. As I write, the standard for such a comprehensive textual explication is set by Michael Heinrichâs 400-page, line by line analysis of the first seven chapters of Capital in How to Read Marxâs Capital. Heinrichâs analysis of Capital has been called into question by Fred Moseley in Marxâs Theory of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital: A Critique of Heinrichâs Value-Form Interpretation (2023). What I take above all from Heinrichâs analysis in How to Read Capital, as will become evident below, is his demonstration of the additive, as opposed to negative dialectical nature of Marxâs demonstration. Moseleyâs critique of Heinrich in contrast addresses a problem extraneous to the issue in question here, i.e., whether value is created by the exchange of commodities (as Moseley reads Heinrich), or entirely in production itself (as Moseley claims). I discuss this critique below.
The tendential fabrication of a mere interpretation, Macherey observes, seeks to reveal âthe apparent expression of the unity of an intention or model that permeates and animates the work, bestowing on it life and the status of an organism. Whether this unity is subjective (the result of an authorial choice, conscious or unconscious) or objective (the embodiment of an essential device â a key signature, frame or model [or, for Arthur, the ubiquitous logical device of the Hegelian negative dialectic]) the assumption remains that it is the whole that is determinantâ (Macherey 2006, 45â6, translation modified).
Arthur has sustained and further specified his original analysis of the capitalist social form in his more recent book The Spectre of Capital: Idea and Reality (2022), as well as in the article âContradiction and Abstraction: A Reply to Finelliâ (2009). I focus here on his earlier book both because it has been the object of sustained interest and critique, and, more importantly, because in his most recent book he largely abandons any earlier pretense actually to read and explicate Capitalâs dialectic and instead borrows freely from Hegel and Marxâs conceptual toolbox such that âwhat I present here [in The Spectre of Capital] should be understood as my own view, not as Hegelâs or Marxâsâ (Arthur 2022, p. 1).
Arthur 2002, p. 3. Michael Heinrich articulates a similar critique of historicist readings of Capital in Wissenschaft vom Wert (2022 [1999], pp. 172â3; see also Heinrich 2023, pp. 260â1).
Macherey is unsparing in his critique of such a procedure: âThe worst defect of such logical formalism is that it tries to explain the work in relation to a single series of conditions: the model, by definition, is unique and self-sufficient. And here we have smuggled back the postulate of the unity and totality of the work; its real complexity has been abolished, dismantled, the better to be ignoredâ (2006, p. 55, translation modified).
Arthur 2002, p. 25. This commitment to capitalism as totality is shared by other representatives of the Systematic Dialectic school, for example Geert Reuten: âThe starting point [of Systematic Dialectics] is an all-encompassing conception of some object-totality (capitalism) that abstractly captures the essence of that object-totality (compare the âcommodityâ for Marxâs Capital)â (Reuten 2014, p. 244).
We thus read in the entry on âTotalityâ in the Harvard Dictionary of Marxist Thought that âWorld history becomes decipherable only when the totalising interconnections objectively arise out of the conditions of capitalist development and competition âwhich produced world history for the first time insofar as it made all civilised nations and every individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of the wants on the whole world [via] the productive forces, which have been developed to a totalityââ¯â (Marx, cited in Bottomore 1983, p. 480, emphasis in original).
Lukács 1968, p. 27.
Ibid.
Lukács 1968, pp. 29, 37.
Lukács 1968, p. 43.
âCapital is closed in form, hence the relevance of Hegelâs totalising logicâ (Arthur 2009, p. 172, emphasis in original).
Arthur 2009, p. 5, emphasis added. Arthur goes on to repeat this undemonstrated presupposition in The New Dialectic (2002), for example pp. 17, 25, 26, 64.
Chris Arthur does not define his own understanding of totality, but simply deploys the term immediately from the beginning of New Dialectic: âMy own view starts from the premise that theory faces an existent totality [and] hence transitions in the argument spring from the effort to reconstruct the wholeâ (2002, p. 6).
Arthur 2009, p. 4.
Macherey 2006, p. 90, translation modified. See also Bellofioreâs contrasting distinction between the reading, interpretation, and reconstruction of Das Kapital. Bellofiore 2018, pp. 358â60.
âWhat begs to be explained in the work is not that false simplicity that derives from the apparent unity of its meaning, but the presence of a relation, or an opposition, between elements of the exposition or levels of the composition, those disparities that point to a conflict of meaning. This conflict is not the sign of an imperfection; it reveals the inscription of an otherness in the work, through which it maintains a relationship with that which it is not, that which happens at its margins. To explain the work is to show that, contrary to appearances, it is not independent, but bears in its material substance the imprint of a determinate absence which is also the principle of its identityâ (Macherey 2006, p. 89, translation modified, emphasis added).
Macherey 2006, p. 90.
Both of these critiques find eloquent elaboration in Elena Louisa Langeâs article âThe Critique of Political Economy and the âNew Dialecticâ: Marx, Hegel, and the Problem of Christopher J. Arthurâs âHomology Thesisââ¯â (2016).
âThe mistake, to my mind, lies in the attempt to represent capitalism as a âsystemâ, whereas it can only be conceived in fact as a âstructureââ¯â (Bidet 2006, p. 132).
In contrast to Arthur, who argues that âthe significance of each element is determined by its place in the totalityâ (2002, p. 26), Bidet rightly reads Marx as presenting each conceptual category âas a moment possessing its own coherence and completion â¦. And this is incompatible with the Hegelian concept of system â¦. It is not the concept that changes [in its negative dialectical determination through the progression of Marxâs argument]; rather, there is a change of concept â¦. The âtheory of valueâ is in no way transformed by the [subsequently introduced] theory of surplus-value, which, on the contrary, expressly presupposes it, unchanged, in the pure and perfect form that Marx has given it in his exposition in Part Oneâ (Bidet 2006, p. 132). Bidetâs position precisely develops Althusserâs schematic proposition, in his 1977 âAvant-proposâ, that Marx proceeds by the positive dialectical âpositioningâ of concepts, to be discussed below, as well as echoing Heinrichâs exhaustively detailed analysis of the additive logic of the first seven chapters of Capital in How to Read.
See above, p. 26.
As for example Arthurâs reliance upon Marxâs formulation in the Grundrisse of the contradiction of money as value âfor itselfâ as opposed to the immediate relation of specific commodities as âvalues âin themselvesâ to each otherâ, from which Arthur draws the imaginary conclusion that âmoney cannot realise the concept of value because of the contradiction that in striving to be value for itself it must be alienated but cannot beâ (2002, p. 31). Bidet argues in this vein that Arthurâs interpretation and its reliance on the Hegelian concepts of totality and system âleans chiefly on the Grundrisseâ (Bidet 2005, p. 124). I will argue below against this widespread assumption that Arthur shares, i.e., that Marx presents the concept of the commodity as constitutively contradictory. On the intensive relation between Grundrisse and Hegelâs Logic, see Uchida 2016 [1988]; the classic reference is Roman Rosdolskyâs The Making of Marxâs Capital (1992 [1968]): âThe Rough Draft [i.e., the Grundrisse] must be designated as a massive reference to Hegel, in particular to his Logic â irrespective of how radically and materialistically Hegel was inverted! The publication of the Grundrisse means that academic critics of Marx will no longer be able to write without first having studied his method and its relation to Hegelâ (Rosdolsky 1992 [1968], p. 323).
âThe literary work is not ⦠a quest for its own vanishing point. The linear simplicity that gives it boldness and freshness is actually only its most superficial aspect; we must also be able to distinguish its real and fundamental complexity. And in this complexity we must recognise the signs of a necessity â¦. In all literary works can be found the tokens of this internal rupture, this decentring, the evidence of its subordinate dependence on precise conditions of possibility. Thus the work is never â or only apparently â a coherent and unified wholeâ (Macherey 2006, pp. 44, 46, translation modified).
Macherey 2006, p. 27. In such an interpretation, âthe work is only the expression of this meaning, which is also to say, the shell that encases it, which must be broken to reveal [this meaning]. The interpreter accomplishes this liberating violence: he dismantles the work to refashion it in the image of its meaning, to make it denote directly that of which it was the indirect expression â¦. Translation and reduction: to reduce the apparent diversity of the work to its unitary significationâ (Macherey 2006, p. 85, translation modified).
Arthur 2002, pp. 108â9.
Thanks to Burhannudin Baki for helping me to think through this logical question.
See RC, Ch. 3; Balibar 1991, Bellofiore 2009, Bidet 2009, and Negri 1985.
See Montag 2013, Ch. 5.
As discussed in the previous chapter, while Macherey does not discuss Capital in Theory of Literary Production, he does explicitly apply its general critique to the case of Capital in his 1967 intervention at the Cérisy âCentennaire du Capitalâ: âThe enterprise of a total or âtotalisingâ reading is ideological in its essence â¦. A scientific text can only be taken up on the condition of being continued: a closed, repetitive reading is itself an ideological reading â¦. The object of Capital is an object constructed theoretically, and this is precisely why Capital is not a formal system. If we were to read it as a closed system, this would constitute an interpretive reading, a repetition and reprisal of a completed systemâ (2006, pp. 57, 61, 92).
Macherey 2006, pp. 88â9, translation modified.
Cassin 2014, p. 1234.
Macherey 1998, pp. 35, 36.
Macherey 1998, pp. 72â3.
Macherey 1998, p. 65, my emphasis. Note how Machereyâs phrasing in the French original seeks to avoid any definite or indefinite articles that would reify substance and to speak instead âau sujet de toutâ, a formulation difficult to render in English.
Machereyâs critique of the substantivisation of Spinozist substance implicitly pursues Althusserâs initial polemical and underdeveloped rejection of Plekhanovist, monist understandings of dialectical materialism (discussed in Chapter 1). After Plekhanov himself, the determinant figure in this regard is the Spinozist Marxism of Plekhanovâs disciple Abram Deborin, editor of Pod Znamenem Marxsizma (Under the Banner of Marxism). Tasked by Lenin and Trotsky from 1922 with developing the theoretical foundations of Bolshevism, Deborinâs contributions to the journal were crucial in particular for orienting the extensive Soviet reception of Spinoza (Oitinnen 2022, pp. 4â5). In this regard, it is notable, for example, that in a 1927 article in which he discusses Spinozaâs âremarkably dialectical formulation of the problem of finite and infiniteâ, Deborin speaks repeatedly of âthe whole of natureâ and ânature as a wholeâ (cited in Oikinnen 2022, pp. 7â8, emphasis added). (Of course, the Russian original, like all Slavic languages other than Macedonian, would not use articles to identify the nominal referents of phrases, as in English or French). On the debates in Soviet philosophy more generally, as well as its reception of Spinoza more particularly, see Yakhot 2012 [1981]. Landon Frim and Harrison Fluss articulate a richly argued contemporary version of Marxist substance monism, for example via a critique of Deleuzeâs reading of Spinoza in âSubstance Abuse: Spinoza contra Deleuzeâ (2018). Fluss and Frim more generally reaffirm the Plekhanovist-Deborin tendency to hypostatise Spinozist substance as countable thing, for example in their theoreticist-materialist intervention âReason is Redâ, where they write that âMarxism ⦠demands monism, the idea that the entire universe is an intelligible Wholeâ (2022).
Macherey 1998, p. 86. Let me reiterate that despite our unyielding disagreement on this point, the generous and probing comments of Landon Frim and Harrison Fluss while drafting this chapter, not to mention their informed and original understanding of the relation between Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx, have been essential in pushing me to better articulate my own position.
Macherey emphasises that the process of enumeration in general is fundamentally linked to the imagination: Spinoza indicates in this way âthe privileged relation that the imagination bears, not only with the consideration of singular existences, but with the very fact of enumerating them, and thus as well with that of counting in general, a preoccupation from which the rational analysis of substance ⦠is completely removed in principleâ (1998, p. 86).
Macherey 1998, p. 87. Macherey continues to develop this point a few pages further in his commentary on the second Scolium to EIP8: âSubstance can only be unique, not in the sense of a nature that would be realised in only a single copy [exemplaire], and thus more than zero and less than two, but of a thing of which all possible forms of realisation enter into the nature that defines it â¦. In the expression âa single substance of the same natureâ, [the indefinite article] âaâ is not to be taken in the sense of the number âoneâ as an element of quantificationâ (Macherey 1998, p. 90).
Macherey 1998, p. 90n1. It is interesting to note how Machereyâs critique of the hypostatisation of substance has distant, far cruder echoes, in the 1920s debate between the mechanistic Spinozism of Liubov Akselrod, with its emphasis on substance as causa sui, and Deborinâs Plekhanovist position that âsubstance is matterâ (Yakhot 2012, Chapter 6.4). Despite basing her critique of Spinoza on a racist antisemitism that deterministically reduces Spinozaâs thought to its putative âJewish originsâ, Akselrod argues: âWhat an absurdity to assert that Spinozaâs substance is matter. To recognise it as matter means to design a very strange entity: substance is matter, one of its attributes is matter, and another attribute is thinkingâ (Akselrod, cited in Yakhot 2012, Ch. 6.4). To indicate the base nature of this impassioned debate (to say nothing of Akselrodâs antisemitism), one need only observe that for Spinoza it is not âmatterâ that is an attribute, as Akselrod claims, but extension, which is an entirely different concept.
Cited in Montag 2013, p. 75.
To be sure, in this letter Spinoza does explicitly speak of âthe whole of Natureâ and of âthe universe as a wholeâ, which seems to imply for his reader a conviction that there is an objective totality of Nature, though our finite minds cannot know its infinitely infinite determinations. This, however, stands in marked contrast to his definitions of substance and God (Nature) in the Ethics, which make no reference of any kind to a whole or totality. In my view, Spinozaâs epistolary recourse to this image of the âwhole of Natureâ marks a rhetorical compromise intended to engage his readerâs inadequate understanding of Spinozaâs position, analogous to Marxâs parable of the linen and coat that speak to one another in âthe language of commoditiesâ in Capital. Rather than speaking more adequately of substance without reference to totality or the whole, as causa sui and the in se as he does in Ethics, Spinoza here instead adopts the relatively unclear and imaginary language of his interlocutor (âI presume that you are asking for the grounds of our belief that each part of Nature accords with the wholeâ), a rhetorical device he regularly adopts in the Scolia of Ethics (Macherey is at pains to indicate many of these passages in his Introduction, for example in his lengthy commentary on the Appendix to Book I). Spinoza regularly does so, Macherey insists, through an ethical commitment to meet his interlocutor halfway, as it were, and to communicate more effectively with a reader who, from habit, necessarily understands something entirely different by familiar terms such as God, Nature, substance, or whole than what Spinoza means by them.
Macherey 2011, p. 184.
Cavaillès modulates this Spinozist position as a philosophy of the mathematical science of the infinite: âThe body of a theory is a certain operatory homogeneity â as described by the axiomatic presentation â but when the theory is carried to the infinite, the iteration and the complications provide results and an intelligible system of contents that are ungovernable, and an internal necessity obliges itself by way of an enlargement, which moreover is unforeseeableâ. Cavaillès 2021, p. 81.
Arthur himself seems to admit to imagining totality and the constitutive negative dialectic of Capital precisely because â as Spinoza argues to Oldenberg â of the (Hegelian) perspective he chooses, ie., as what Lukács called the âpoint of view of totalityâ: âThere is a contradiction in the commodity only if it is claimed that it is imbued with a universal, namely value, as a result of its participation in a whole network of capitalist commodity productionâ (Arthur 2002, p. 70). Precisely so: if one examines the concept of the commodity in itself, as Marx does in the first pages of Capital, then, as a whole, the concept possesses two parts or attributes: its use and exchange-values. If, as subsequently in Marxâs presentation, the commodity is instead examined within the general system of exchange, then it appears as a single component part of that system, precisely as Spinoza argues in his parable of the worm in the blood stream.
âTotalitéâ, in Lalande 2010, p. 1137, emphasis added.
Marx 1981, p. 274, emphasis added.
âIn capitalist production, each capital is assumed to be a unit, and aliquot part of the total capitalâ. Marx, quoted in Moseley 2017, p. 46. Marxâs fractional perspective has confused many readers, since Marx repeatedly frames the rhetoric of his argument in terms of individual examples (coats, linen, tailoring and weaving, and the like), above all in the first chapters of Volume I. Moseley emphasises the purely theoretical nature of Marxâs analysis, observing that âIt is not always clear that Marxâs theory in Volume I is about the total capital and the total surplus value produced in the economy as a whole, because the theory is usually illustrated in terms of an individual capital and even a single, solitary worker â¦. However, the individual capitals in Marxâs examples represent the total social capital of the capitalist class as a whole. Individual capitals are not analysed as separate and distinct real capitals, but rather as representatives and âaliquot partsâ of the total social capitalâ (2017, pp. 45â6). In this sense, one could say of Marxâs examples of specific commodities such as coats and linen what he says of his historical example of English capitalism, i.e., that coats and linen, like âEngland [are] used as the main illustration of the theoretical developments [he] makesâ (Marx 1976, p. 90).
âSensing what the subject can tolerate, in terms of anxiety, is something that puts you to the test at every moment. ⦠As regards anxiety, there isnât any safety net. ⦠Itâs upon the cutting edge of anxiety that we have to hold fastâ. Lacan 2014, pp. 5, 9, 15, translation modified. See McNulty 2009, pp. 1â39.
See Moseley 2016.
Heinrich 2009, p. 96.
Reuten 2014, p. 253.
Reuten 2014, p. 254.
Althusser 2005, p. 153.
A great many of Marxâs principal propositions in Capital are articulated in variations of this form, for example: âIt follows from this that â¦â; âIf then we disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labourâ; âIf we leave aside the determinate quality of productive activity, and therefore the useful character of the labour, what remains is its quality of being an expenditure of human labour-powerâ; âsince the magnitude of the value of a commodity represents nothing but the quantity of labour embodied in it, it follows that all commodities, when taken in certain proportions, must be equal in valueâ; â[Commoditiesâ] objective character as values is therefore purely social. From this it follows self-evidently that [value] can only appear in the social relation between commodity and commodityâ (Marx 1976, pp. 127, 128, 134, 136, 139).
âIf commodities could speak, they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objectsâ (Marx 1976, p. 143).
Balibar proposes the latter two categories in one of his rare analyses of Marxâs method of demonstration in Capital, âUn texte de methodologieâ. This brief analysis appeared only in the first edition of Lire le Capital, in the form of an âAnnexâ following his well-known chapter. One senses that Balibar cut this short, five-page text from subsequent editions because it would require much greater development actually to demonstrate what it only briefly proposes: that the distinction between the concepts of âproduction en généralâ and âproduction généraleâ in Marxâs 1857 Introduction depends upon two distinct and âparallelâ forms of abstraction, and furthermore that this distinction proves that Marxâs method unfolds âtoute entière dans la connaissanceâ, (Balibar 2012, p. 657) rather than in the form of a traditional empiricist theory of knowledge. See Balibar 2012, pp. 655â61.
Arthur 2002, p. 67.
Arthur 2009, p. 172.
Arthur 2002, p. 26.
Moseley 2017, p. 141. âCapitalâ, Moseley summarises, âexists first in the form of money advanced in the sphere of circulation, then in the form of means of production and labour power in the form of means of production and labour power in the sphere of production, then in the form of commodities produced at the end of the production process, and then finally back again in the form of money recovered, including more money than was originally advanced at the beginning of this real historical processâ (2017, p. 11, emphasis in original). See also Marx 1976, p. 709. Moseley further shows that in volume 1 of Capital, Marx simplified for readers, at Engelsâs repeated urging, his initial, comprehensive formulation of the circuit of capital as a wholly monetary process in which both the constant and variable means of production are initially purchased as actual commodities already possessing a price form. This has resulted, in Moseleyâs view, in the âcommon interpretation of Volume I that it is only about labour times, not money or prices, and that Marxâs theory deals with money and prices only in Volume IIIâ (Moseley 2017, p. 9). Through a comprehensive reading of Marxâs various drafts and manuscripts, Moseley shows that the âinterpretation of these passages [in traditional Marxism] ignores and is contradicted by all the textual evidence â¦Â â that the circuit of money capital is the analytical framework of Marxâs theory, and the circuit of money capital begins with an independently existing quantity of money capital (M) ⦠which is âthrown into circulationâ in order to make more money; ⦠the inputs to capitalist production and the valorisation process are commodities with already existing pricesâ (2017, pp. 185â6, emphasis in original). On the wholly monetary nature of the circuit of capital, see also Murray 2017, p. 135; and Bellofiore 2018.
Marx 1976, p. 724, emphasis added.
Here too, among the members of the Systematic Dialectic school of reading Capital, it is Bellofiore who has the position closest to the one I am arguing here, stressing as he does that Capital is composed of âfragments of a systematic reasoningâ such that he refuses the âattempts [of Arthur and Reuten in particular] to ârewriteâ Marx in Hegelian fashionâ and insists instead (while rightly indicating various moments where Marx deploys aspects of Hegelian logic) that âwe are forced to remain in a fragmentary reading of Marxâ. It is likewise surely no coincidence, given this orientation, that Bellofiore is perhaps the only member of this school actually to refer to Althusser and Lire le Capital both explicitly and affirmatively. Bellofiore 2018, pp. 359â60, 357.
Arthur 2002, p. 64.
Arthur 2002, p. 76.
Arthur 2002, p. 75.
Marx 1976, p. 342. As Michael Heinrich observes, âTheorising capitalism in its âideal averageâ ⦠constitutes a precondition [for Marx] for analysing the history of developed, fully-formed capital â¦. The âtheoretical developmentâ of the categories, however, does not just constitute a general background for analysing concrete struggles. The categorical presentation itself leads to points where nothing further can be developed conceptually, and we must turn to the contested historical process instead. Chapter 10 of the first volume, which deals with the working day, demonstrates this in an exemplary way. We cannot determine the limits of the working day based on the âlaws of commodity productionâ. Instead, it is the âviolenceâ (Gewalt) of class struggle and the state that decides these limits, which are repeatedly brought into question. Hence, there are historical depictions in Capital that are not just âillustrationsâ and go beyond telling how capitalist relations emerged. Nevertheless, the location and meaning of these passages are by no means arbitrary but rather are based strictly on the theoretical development of the categoriesâ (Heinrich 2021, p. 398).
Arthur 2002, p. 75.
Arthur 2002, p. 76.
Arthur 2002, pp. 104, 106.
Arthur similarly claims in âContradiction and Abstractionâ that âcapital, as the totalising Subject, is at home with itself only in the world of forms. At that level, it may well be conceded that it is grounded on itself, and achieves closure when producing commodities on the basis of ex nihilo bank credit. [But] the human and natural basis of the economic metabolism remains â¦. Capital is a closed totality only in form; in reality, capital cannot posit its presuppositions where its material conditions of existence are concernedâ (Arthur 2009, p. 175, emphasis added).
And Marx does so precisely, one might add, in order to critique the theoretical incapacity of classical political economy to theorise the substance and nature of surplus value (Hic Rhodus, hic salta!).
Cited in Arthur 2002, p. 112.
Cited in Arthur 2002, p. 113. Marxâs pre-1860 reliance on the Hegelian figures of estrangement, objectification, and alienation, absent from the first seven chapters of Capital, remains predominant in this penultimate one: âBefore he enters the process [of capitalist production], his own labour has already been estranged from him, appropriated by the capitalist, and incorporated with capital, it now, in the course of the process, constantly objectifies itself so that it becomes a product alien to himâ (Marx 1976, p. 716). Arthur rightly notes how this language is âreminiscent of a parallel passage in [Marxâs] 1844 Mssâ (2002, p. 133n18).
Arthur 2002, p. 114.
Arthur 2002, p. 116.
Arthur 2002, p. 119, emphasis added.
Arthur 2002, p. 119.
Marx 1976, pp. 729, 734, cited in Arthur 2002, p. 119.
See Bidet 2006, pp. 161â3; Bellofiore 2018, p. 365.
Arthur 2002, p. 121.
EID3.
Macherey 1998, pp. 29â30.
Marx 1976, p. 89.
On the latter, see Heinrich 2021, pp. 375â80.
Abarazi 2019, p. 182, emphasis in original. Abazariâs article reprises that of W.A. Suchtingâs âMarx, Hegel, and Contradictionâ (1985, p. 409), though without the former clearly indicating his proximity to Suchtingâs analysis, whom he does not cite in his bibliography.
This is one point at which Abazari goes beyond Suchtingâs earlier piece, which based its presentation of Hegelâs logic of contradiction on Chapter 6 of the Encyclopedia rather than, as with Abazari, the analysis of the Ding in the Science of Logic. This difference in approach allows Abazari, in my view, to bring out much more sharply than Suchting the homologous logics of contradiction and Reflexionsbestimmung in Hegel and the 1867 edition of Capital. In the following paragraphs I follow Abazariâs suggestive comparison of the Hegelian logic of Reflexionsbestimmungen and Marxâs 1867 analysis of the commodity, rejecting Abazariâs argument only in its further, undemonstrated claim that âalthough Marx omits [explicit reference to dialectical contradiction] in later editions of Capital, [this Hegelian logic], I believe, remains central to his analysis even in the later editionsâ Abazari 182. In Wissenschaft vom Wert Heinrich criticises Helmut Brentelâs systematic argument for the predominance of a Hegelian logic of determinations of reflection in Capital in Brentelâs Widerspruch und Entwicklung bei Marx und Hegel (Heinrich 2022 [1999], p. 168; 2023, p. 264).
Abarazi 2019, p. 183.
Abarazi 2019, p. 185, emphasis added.
Marx repeatedly invokes feudalism, but only in passing, as a contrastive example or aside in his systematic demonstration, i.e.: âThe medieval peasant produced a corn-rent for the feudal lord and a corn-tithe for the priest; but neither the corn-rent nor the corn-tithe became commodities simply by being produced for othersâ (1976, p. 130).
âDetermining reflection is in general the unity of positing and external reflection â¦. The positing is now united with external reflection; in this unity, the latter is absolute presupposing, that is, the repelling of reflection from itself or the positing of determinateness as its own. As posited, therefore, positedness is negation; but as presupposed, it is reflected into itself. And in this way positedness is a determination of reflection .⦠The determination of reflection is on the contrary positedness as negation â negation which has negatedness for its ground, is therefore not unequal to itself within itself, and hence essential rather than transient determinateness â¦. The determination of reflection ⦠has taken its otherness back into itself. It is positedness â negation which has however deflected the reference to another into itself, and negation which, equal to itself, is the unity of itself and its other, and only through this is an essentialityâ (Hegel 2010b, pp. 352â3).
Abazari focuses his analysis on the Hegelian dyad of form and matter, which becomes problematic when he argues for their direct homology with Marxâs concepts use-value (âmatterâ) and exchange-value (âformâ). Problematic because while the use-value of a commodity may bear a physical form or shape, many commodities are immaterial (the use-value of services for example); on the other hand, exchange-value, as the form of appearance of value, has material attributes (the number printed on a bill or coin, for example). Here, I can only agree with Roberto Fineschi, who writes that âI do not think that we have to look for analogies or homologies between Marxâs theory of capital and Hegelâs logic; this alleged âHegelian approachâ has paradoxically resulted in a very non-dialectical attitude in many scholars. In fact, Marx himself criticised any external application of categories to a given contentâ (Fineschi 2014, p. 140).
Hegel 2010b, p. 374, emphasis in original.
Hegel 2010a, p. 196, translation modified.
Hegel 2010a, p. 268.
âContradiction [is] the negative in its essential determination, the principle of all self-movement â¦. Only when driven to the extreme of contradiction are the many of that manifold quickened and alive to each other: they hold the negativity in them which is the inner pulse of self-movement and lifeâ (Hegel 2010b, pp. 382, 384).
Abazari 2019, p. 188.
Examples of this Hegelian vocabulary from the 1867 edition that are absent from the 1872 edition include: âSince it is, as value, of the same essence [Wesens] as the coat, the natural form of the coat thus becomes the form of appearance of its own valueâ; â[The coatâs] status as an Equivalent is (so to speak) only a reflection-determination [Reflexionsbestimmung] of the linenâ; âThe commodity is the immediate unity of use-value and exchange-value, i.e., of two opposites [zweier Entgegengesetzten]. It is therefore an immediate contradiction [unmittelbarer Widerspruch]. This contradiction [Widerspruch] must enter upon a development just as soon as it is no longer considered as previously in an analytic manner (at one point from the viewpoint of use-value and at another from the viewpoint of exchange-value) but is really related to other commodities as a totality [ein Ganzes]â; (Dragstedtâs translation of first chapter of the first German edition of Capital, entitled âThe Commodityâ, pp. 13, 16, 29â30, translation modified, available at
Abazari 2019, pp. 190â1.
Marx 1976, pp. 89, 94.
Heinrich 2021, pp. 363, 370.
âErgänzungen und Veränderungen zum ersten Band des Kapitals (Additions and Changes to the First Volume of Capital)â.
Heinrich 2021, p. 375.
MEGA II7 1989, p. 38.
Marx 1976, p. 149.
Dragstedtâs translation of Capital, [Chapter 1]: âThe Commodityâ (p. 13),
Here is Heinrich: âIn the second edition of Capital, Marx put the rational kernel of this conceptual form of expression into words: âOur analysis has shown that the form of value, that is, the expression of the value of a commodity, arises from the nature of commodity-valueâ (Marx 1976: 152). That is, the value-form does not arise from the concept of value, but rather from that which the concept of value expresses scientifically, namely the ânature of commodity-valueââ¯â (Heinrich 2021, p. 374). On Badiouâs critique, see below, Chapter 4.
Heinrich 2021, p. 380. Heinrichâs contention that the first chapter of Capital is divided between analyses of the exchange relation and the value relation has not gone unchallenged, in particular by Fred Moseley (2023). I will discuss the dispute between Heinrich and Moseley over the nature of value in Capital below.
Here is Moseley: âThe overall logical structure of Marxâs analysis of the commodity in Chapter 1 is in terms of the concepts of the substance of value, the magnitude of value, and the form of appearance of value. The substance and magnitude of value are derived in Sections 1 and 2, and then the form of appearance of value is derived in Section 3, with the predetermined substance and magnitude of value presupposedâ (Moseley 2023, p. 236). The distinction I make throughout this chapter between Marxâs analytic method of research in preparatory notebooks such as the Grundrisse and the synthetic method of Darstellung characteristic of Capital is also held by the systematic dialectical school of Marxist epistemology, including Heinrichâs vehement critic Fred Moseley, and is explicitly developed for example in Reuten 2014, p. 251. Though I agree with Reuten, Arthur and Tony Smith on the relevance of this analytic/synthetic distinction, as noted above, I reject the positions of this school regarding the concepts of capital as a totality and the putatively contradiction-based process of Marxâs exposition.
RC, pp. 231, 237, emphases added.
RC, p. 235, emphasis in original.
RC, p. 238.
In the 1872 edition, Marx first uses the word Widerspruch only toward the end of chapter 3.1, âThe Measure of Valuesâ: âThe price-form ⦠may also harbour a qualitative contradiction [qualitativen Widerspruch]â (1976, p. 197). Marx refers once to the mere illusory appearance [scheint] that exchange-value is âsomething accidentalâ as a pseudo âcontradiction in adjectoâ, but translates the Latin as âWidersinnâ rather than the more Hegelian synonym Widerspruch [1976, p. 126] (1976, p. 153).
In The Science of Value, Michael Heinrich casually equates the two terms in passing: âDas Mangelhafte an einer Kategorie wird von Marx oft als âGegensatzâ oder âWiderspruchâ ihrer verschiedenen Bestimmungen bezeichnetâ (âWhat is deficient in a category is often defined by Marx as the âoppositionâ or âcontradictionâ between its different determinationsâ) (Heinrich2022, p. 174; 2023, p. 270, my translation). In Hegel or Spinoza, Macherey, in contrast, observes that âThe contradiction (Widerspruch) distinguishes itself from the opposition (Gegensatz) in that it is not a fixed relation between distinct and antagonistic terms but the irresistible movement that discovers in each of these elements the truth of the other and thus produces them as moments of a unique process in which they appear as inseparableâ (2011, p. 121).
Barbour 2023, 18.
Here is Barbour: âIn pure logic or [what Trendelenburg calls Hegelian] âlogical negation,â it is possible to claim that the one term is determined by its difference from another, or through purely logical negation. Being, for example, has meaning insofar as it is not nothing, and nothing insofar as it is not being. But the same is not true in nature or [what Trendelenburg calls] âreal opposition.â For in nature there are no negative terms, only positive facts. The natural existence of a cat, for example, is not to be found in the idea ânot dog,â but in an empirical description of a cat.â Barbour 2023, 22.
Marx, 1974, 98; MEGA2 I.2, 40, translation modified.
Barbour 2023, 26.
Marx, 1974, 155; MEGA2 I.2, 97, emphasis added.
âIt will be necessary later,â Marx noted to himself in the Grundrisse, âto correct the idealist manner of the presentation, which makes it seem as if it were merely a matter of conceptual determinations and of the dialectic of these conceptsâ Marx, 1973, 151.
Here I only summarize relevant moments in Marxâs exposition of the commodity form in Capital, chapter One (1872), referring readers to Michael Heinrichâs more detailed exposition of this chapterâs logic in How to Read Marxâs Capital.
Marx 1976, pp. 125â6.
To call these factors âattributesâ of the commodity implies that, analogously to the infinite attributes of substance that Spinoza identifies, use-value and exchange-value are âthat which the intellect perceives ofâ the âsubstanceâ of the capitalist mode of production â i.e., what Marx has just called its âElementarformâ, the commodity â âas constituting its [the commodityâs] essenceâ at its greatest level of abstraction (EID4).
Marx 1976, pp. 125â6.
This absence of a contradiction-based logic in Capital is one of the principal themes of Althusserâs âAvant-propos du livre de G. Duménilâ (written in February 1977), along with his subsequent (unpublished) seminar of March 1978, the âCours sur le mode dâexposition chez Marxâ (IMEC 20 ALT 28.5): âIn what respect could use-value ⦠be said to contradict the value it âcarriesâ? Mysteryâ (âAvant-proposâ, p. 253). âThe relation between use-value and exchange-value is not a relation of contradiction (as the result of a scission) ⦠the scission of an abstraction of value into use-value and exchange-value â¦. Marx insists on the difference in function of use-value [which] can in no sense be thought of as contradictory to exchange-valueâ IMEC 20ALT 28.5, pp. 16â17. Althusserâs assertion remains little more than that, however, this claim in both these texts cryptically referring to Marxâs passing observation that use-values are the âbearersâ [Träger] of value (âIn the form of society to be considered here [use-values] are also the material bearers [Träger] of ⦠exchange-valueâ) (Marx 1976, p. 126).
What Macherey says of Spinozaâs starting point in Ethics holds identically for Marxâs beginning to Capital: âIf the exposition of the Spinozist doctrine begins with definitions, axioms, and postulates, if it begins with substance rather than God, this does not at all indicate that these primitive notions constitute a source of truth from which all that follows could be simply deduced, following a rigid and predetermined course in the form of an explication. Substance, attributes, and modes, as they appear in these liminary principals, are precisely the equivalent of the rough, unpolished stone that the first smiths needed to âbeginâ their work: these are still abstract notions, simple words, natural ideas that will only truly take on meaning from the moment they function in demonstrationsâ (Macherey 2011, p. 76).
Marx 1976, p. 102. In the Avant-propos to G. Duménil, Althusser offers a qualified agreement with Duménilâs assertion (equivalent to that which Arthur makes in New Dialectic) that ââ¯âPolitical economy is not an axiomaticâ. Certainlyâ, Althusser observes, this is the case âin the sense of an ideological axiomatic: Marx neither positions [pose] nor adds [ajoute] a given concept [merely] to âexploreâ what would follow from it, as a pure hypothesis, or to produce consequent effects. He doesnât indulge in arbitrary variations, nor in the âapprehensionâ of a given phenomenal totality as a mere indulgence [par plaisir]. His exposition is patently guided, behind the scenes, by the great realities discovered by the silent âmethod of researchâ [Forschungsweise]â (Althusser 1998, p. 259). Althusser writes in the 1978 âCours sur le mode dâexpositionâ, in terms that similarly emphasise the materialist determination of Marxâs method, that âthis method is not without resemblance [analogie] with an axiomatic method, with the understanding that the positioning of concepts ⦠plays the role of the conceptual introduction of real [materialist] determinations that must be introduced in abstract form in order simultaneously to think the discontinuity of the field within a previously constituted theoretical continuityâ IMEC 20ALT 28.5, pp. 18â19.
Althusser 1998, p. 257.
Althusser 1998, p. 258. In the âCours sur le mode dâexpositionâ Althusser observes in a similar vein that the additive procedure of the positioning of concepts âis the condition of the discontinuity of the theoretical field [of Capital] â¦. [While] Hegel proceeds by the auto-production of concepts, Marx proceeds by the positioning of a concept, [such that] the positioning of each concept opens and closes a new theoretical fieldâ (IMEC 20ALT 28.5, p. 17).
See Heinrich 2021, pp. 92â143.
Marx initially abstracts from the category of the form of value, in addition to the many other variables held at bay in his incipient analysis of the commodity, such as prices, money, other commodities, commodity owners and buyers, capital, etc. In this, I follow Heinrichâs conclusion: âIf we speak of the âvalue-relationâ between two commodities, then value is already presupposed as a result of the exchange relation â¦. What is new here is that Marx has introduced the concept of form and undertakes a detailed analysis of the value-formâ (Heinrich 2021, pp. 98, 99). In this section of my argument, I am building on Heinrichâs comprehensive but theoretically agnostic presentation, to argue that Marx deploys a novel process of demonstration that I am calling the additive synthetic. Hegel, in The Science of Logic, indicated precisely the methodological procedure Marx would adopt in Capital: â[One must begin a scientific exposition] with the subject matter in the form of a universal â¦. The prius must be ⦠something simple, something abstracted from the concrete, because in this form alone has the subject-matter the form of the self-related universal â¦. It is easier for the mind to grasp the abstract simple thought determination than the concrete subject matter, which is a manifold connection of such thought determinations and their relationshipsâ (cited in Musto 2020, p. 16).
Bidet 2005, p. 133. Though unattributed, Bidetâs argument clearly develops the late Althusserâs concept of la position, described above.
Macherey 1998, p. 17.
Macherey 1998, p. 18.
Macherey 1998, p. 19.
Macherey 1998, p. 20.
âI welcome every opinion based on scientific criticismâ, Marx writes in the Preface to the first edition. âAs to the prejudices of so-called public opinion, to which I have never made concessions, now, as ever, my maxim is that of the great Florentine: âSegui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le gentiââ¯â (1976, p. 93).
Marx 1976, p. 128. This point will prove crucial when I come to discuss Moseleyâs critique of Heinrich in the next section.
âCommodities possess an objective character as values only in so far as they are all expressions of an identical social substance, human labour, [such] that their objective character as values is therefore purely socialâ (Marx 1976, p. 138).
Heinrich 2021, p. 97. See also Bellofioreâs analysis of this spectral aspect of Marxâs demonstration, Bellofiore 2018, pp. 360â1.
Heinrich 2021, p. 97.
Marx 1976, p. 139.
Heinrich 2021, p. 99.
Marx 1976, p. 141â¯f., emphasis added.
Marx 1976, p. 138.
Once again, this point will prove crucial to rebut Moseleyâs critique of Heinrich.
âHuman labour-power in its fluid state, or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value. It becomes value in its coagulated state, in objective form â¦. The value of the linen as a congealed mass of human labour can [thus] be expressed only as an âobjectivityâ [Gegenständlichkeit], a thing which is materially different from the linen itself and yet common to the linen and all other commoditiesâ (Marx 1976, p. 142, cited at Heinrich 2021, p. 104).
Marx 1976, p. 143.
Marx 1976, p. 144, cited at Heinrich 2021, p. 106.
Marx 1976, p. 144.
Marx 1976, pp. 145â6.
Marx 1976, p. 147, emphasis added.
Heinrich 2021, p. 109.
Marx 1976, p. 148.
Marx 1976, pp. 151â2.
Marx 1976, p. 152.
Heinrich 2021, p. 119.
Marx 1976, p. 153, emphasis added. âDer in der Ware eingehüllte innere Gegensatz von Gebrauchswert und Wert wird also dargestellt durch einen äuÃeren Gegensatz, d.h. durch das Verhältnis zweier Waren, worin die eine Ware, deren Wert ausgedrückt werden soll, unmittelbar nur als Gebrauchswert, die andre Ware hingegen, worin Wert ausgedrückt wird, unmittelbar nur als Tauschwert gilt. Die einfache Wertform einer Ware ist also die einfache Erscheinungsform des in ihr enthaltenen Gegensatzes von Gebrauchswert und Wertâ. MEGA II 6, Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik Der Politishen Ãkonomie. Erster Band, Hamburg 1872. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1987, p. 93.
Lalande 2010, pp. 183, 717, emphasis added. I have added the specification âin contrast or distinctionâ to Lalandeâs from the OED definition of opposition.
Hegel 2010b, p. 59. Compare Hegelâs argument with that of Spinoza in proposition 3 of Ethics III, as Macherey reads the latter: âThere is nothing in the essence of a thing, following from its definition, which can cause it not to be [qui puisse faire quâelle ne soit pas], or that its reality encompass [soit marquée] any negativity whatsoever [and thus Spinoza writes:] âthe definition of any thing whatsoever affirms the essence of that thing itself, but does not negate it; that is to say, it posits the essence of the thing but does not suppress itâ (definition cujuscunque rei ipsius rei essentiam affirmat sed non negat; sive rei essentiam point, sed non tollit)â. Macherey 1997 p. 382.
Here is Hegel: âThat which constitutes the beginning, the beginning itself, is to be taken as something unanalysable, taken in its simple, unfilled immediacy; and therefore as being, as complete emptiness â¦. Let those who are still dissatisfied with this beginning take upon themselves the challenge of beginning in some other way and yet avoiding such defectsâ (2010b, p. 53); while Marx famously warns his readers that âBeginnings are always difficult in all sciencesâ (1976, p. 89).
Compare with Caligaris and Starosta, who write, âIn so far as [Hegelâs] systematic dialectic begins with the simplest thought-form (that is, with a purely ideal or formal abstraction), his subsequent derivation of categories is bound to follow the immanent necessity of âpure thoughtâ as such, which does not express the inner movement of the simpler determinations of âreal material beingââ¯â (Caligaris and Starosta 2014, p. 96, emphasis in original).
Marx 1976, p. 154. Heinrich at this point underscores the purely logical nature of this demonstration in terms that again evoke Althusserâs concept of la position: âThe transition from the simple form of value to the expanded form is not a historical transition, which we are merely describing; rather, it is a transition to a new level of analysis, which we are carrying out. Itâs a conceptual development â a development of our conceptual constructions â that aims to dissect what is always mixed up and interconnected in capitalist reality, so that we can understand itâ (Heinrich 2021, p. 124).
While Marx continues to speak only of âGegensatzeâ (âIn demselben Grad aber, worin sich die Wertform überhaupt entwickelt, entwickelt sich auch der Gegensatz zwischen ihren beiden Polen, der relativen Wertform und Ãquivalentformâ), Fowkes inconsistently, if suggestively, at this point translates the term as âantagonismâ (1976, p. 160). For the original German of the 1872 edition, see MEGA II/6, Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik Der Politischen Ãkonomie. Erster Band, Hamburg 1872. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1987, p. 99. The wording of this passage is identical as well in the 1890 edition; cf. MEGA II 10, Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik Der Politischen Ãkonomie. Erster Band, Hamburg 1890. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1991, p. 67.
Heinrich, as noted above, follows Althusser in rejecting the theoretical commonplace that Marxâs dialectic is a materialist revision of Hegelâs Logic, but, to my knowledge, does so only in passing, as opposed to the more sustained attention I seek to give the question in these pages.
Heinrich 2021, p. 66. Note already that in this passage (which Moseley cites on page 117 of Marxâs Theory of Value), Heinrich does not say that value is âcreatedâ by exchange (as Moseley repeatedly reads him), but only that it âemergesâ in this process.
Moseley 2023, p. 50. Here I will primarily address Moseleyâs critique, which develops in more systematic, book-length form a position on Heinrich essentially identical to that of Kurz and Lietz and Schwarz. See also Kurz 2016 and Lietz and Schwarz 2023.
Heinrich 2021, p. 95.
Moseley 2023, p. 155, emphasis added; Lietz and Schwarz 2023, p. 26, emphasis added.
Heinrich 2021, p. 397.
Marx 1976, p. 90.
Lalande 2010, p. 8.
Hegel 2010a, p. 54, bracketed insertion in original.
Heinrich 2021, p. 391.
RC, p. 36. This distinction between Hegelâs empiricist understanding of abstraction and Marxâs Spinozist usage reproduces to some degree the founding distinction in Aristotle between two models of abstraction, respectively, âabstractive inductionâ (âepagôgê [
Heinrich 2021, p. 53. I say the absence of awareness of this distinction is surprising in Moseleyâs argument because the entire, elaborate argument of his finely constructed previous book Money and Totality is based upon the distinction between actually existing capitals and the purely theoretical construction of aliquot subdivisions of a total mass of surplus value. See Moseley, 2017, 45â46; Nesbitt 2022, 224 n. 68.
Lalande 2010, p. 318. On the extremely complex history of the related concepts of the Latin existentia, the French and English âexistence,â and the German pseudo-synonyms Existenz and Dasein, see David, 2014. Bolzano argues that the fundamental, universal characteristic of all Vorstellungen an sich â his preeminent logical concept, analogous to Spinozaâs res singulares non existentes (EIIP9) â is that âVorstellungen an sich haben kein Daseinâ (Bolzano 1978, 75). I discuss Bolzanoâs logic in the next chapter.
Of course, the general theoretical point regarding âexistenceâ that I am making here at the high level of abstraction of the first chapter of Capital I (the site of Moseley and Heinrichâs debate) in no way exhausts the complexity of the relation between living labor and the commodity labor power at greater levels of concretion, for example as what Riccardo Bellofiore calls âthe ambiguity built into the notion of abstract labor itself [:] abstract labor, on the one hand, is the immediately private labor which is becoming social in circulation; on the other hand, it is the private labor which has become socialized on the commodity market. ⦠The origin of the trouble goes back to the fact that Marx mostly deduces abstract labor from exchange âas such,â but he also sometimes defines it as the labor which is opposed to capitalâ (Bellofiore, 2023, 6). In my view, however, the point Bellofiore makes is a merely apparent contradiction, as I will argue below.
Adorno gives a succinct definition of real abstraction in Introduction to Sociology, confusingly conflating at the same time, however, two different forms of real abstraction, the real act of exchange and the material monetary form of value: In âexchange in terms of average social labour time the specific forms of the objects to be exchanged are necessarily disregarded instead, they are reduced to a universal unit. The abstraction, therefore, lies not in the thought of the sociologist, but in society itselfâ (2002, p. 32). On the concept of real abstraction, see Sohn-Rethel 2021; Toscano 2008; and Jappe 2013.
âI agree [with Heinrich] that Marx is not looking for the common property of commodities in the production process of a single commodityâ. Moseley 2023, p. 108. Marxâs âfocusâ, Heinrich writes, âis therefore upon a reduction (and abstraction) that only scientific analysis can make visibleâ (2021, p. 64).
Marx, cited in Moseley 2023, p. 183, emphasis added.
Moseley 2023, p. 155.
Riccardo Bellofiore similarly points out that âin a fully monetary exchange society like capitalism, the real abstraction of labor is only completed ex-post in the final circulation of commoditiesâ (Bellofiore, 2023, 6).
Marx 1976, p. 128.
Here is Moseley: âThe labour that produces commodities is private independent labour, and private commodity producers come into contact with each [other] only through the exchange of their products, and, therefore, the labour expended to produce their commodities can only âappearâ or manifest itself as the exchange-value of the commodities they produce. The exchange-value of commodities is the form of appearance of the social character of the labour expended to produce the commoditiesâ (2023, p. 178).
Moseley 2023, p. 180.
Marx 1976, pp. 131, 144, cited in Moseley 2023, pp. 122, 160.
Moseley 2023, p. 40, emphasis added. Other examples include: â[Marxâs phrase] âquantitatively comparable magnitudeâ presupposes that each individual commodity contains a given quantity of objectified human labour (the magnitude of value)â; âSections 1 and 2 of Chapter 1 presuppose that individual commodities contain definite quantities of objectified human labour-time, as determined in productionâ (Moseley 2023, pp. 68, 70 emphases added).
Moseley 2023, p. 39. Here is Marx: âHow then is the magnitude of value to be measured? By means of the âvalue-forming substanceâ, the labour, contained in the article. The quantity is measured by its duration, and the labour-time itself is measured on the particular scale of hours, days, etc.â (Marx 1976, p. 129, emphasis in original, cited in Moseley 2023, p. 39).
âMy interpretation does not consider a single commodity by itself. Rather (as I have emphasised), my interpretation is about a single commodity as a representative of all commodities (the âelementary formâ or the âcell-formâ) and the properties that all commodities (i.e. each and every commodity) have in commonâ (Moseley 2023, pp. 118â19).
Heinrich 2021, p. 64, emphasis added.
âHeinrichâs explanation confuses expressing value with possessing value. The coat expresses the value of the linen only in relation to the linen, but the coat possesses value on its own, independent of its relation to the linen, as a result of the homogeneous human labour-power expended to produce the coatâ (Moseley 2023, p. 155, emphasis in original).
Moseley 2023, p. 186, emphasis added. Numerous passages in Heinrichâs How to Read Capital also suffer from a terminological vagueness regarding the existence or non-existence of the substance of value prior to appearance in a value-form: âCommodities have value-objectivity only in the social relation of one commodity to another â which is why it first comes to light here. Prior to and outside of this relation, they are mere use-values: they are on the way to becoming commodities, but far from being commoditiesâ. Heinrich, cited in Moseley 2023, p. 151, emphasis added.
Given this terminological vagueness, Moseley can even (correctly) formulate Heinrichâs position in the terms I here insist on, only immediately to reject this position: âHeinrichâs interpretation is that abstract human labour does not exist in production, but instead abstract human labour comes to exist only in exchangeâ (Moseley 2023, p. 130, emphasis added).
Marx presumes in his analysis a fully developed capitalist social form, such that, Moseley writes in Money and Totality, âThe means of production in capitalist production are commodities, which have been purchased at the beginning of the circuit of money capital, and which therefore enter the valorisation process with already existing specific prices.â Moseley, 2017, 141.
âAbstract human labour, as the substance of commoditiesâ value, does not emerge on the basis of the individual commodity but is based on the exchange relation between commoditiesâ (cited in Moseley 2023, p. 117).
Heinrich 2021, p. 59.
Here is one example among countless similarly fastidious statements by Moseley, each of which repeats the same point: âMarxâs first sentence does not say anything about an âexchange relationâ of two commodities. Instead, Marxâs sentence says âour analysis reduces themâ, and âthemâ clearly refers to âcommoditiesâ, and thus âour analysisâ means our analysis of commodities and the value of commodities, not our analysis of the âexchange relationsâ of commoditiesâ (Moseley 2023, p. 154).
Moseley 2023, pp. 98, 99. âThe term âexchange relationââ¯â, Moseley continues, âoccurs only 11 times in Chapter 1: 5 times in Section 1, 0 times in Section 2, 5 times in Section 3 and 1 time in Section 4. None of these passages defines âexchange relationâ as an abstraction from presupposed acts of exchange between two commodities and money on the marketâ (Moseley 2023, p. 99).
Marx 1976, p. 140.
âEven though Marx did not follow Hegelâs idealist conceptual speculation, Marxâs theory of the value-form is a materialist version of Hegelâs logic of essence and appearanceâ (Moseley 2023, p. 31).
Hegelâs famous assertion appears as the subheading that begins âSection II: Appearanceâ of Book II of the Greater Logic. Hegel 2010b, p. 418.
Marx 1976, p. 20, emphasis added.
Cited in Moseley 2023, p. 212, emphasis added. Moseley interprets Marxâs âas congelations of human labourâ to imply that this congelation actually exists already in the individual commodity, when the sentence says just the opposite: that they only âpossessâ this in social relationship with other commodities, not individually in isolation from the social network of exchange.
MEGA II/7: 55 (my translation). In the original German in the Ergänzungen, Marx writes more briefly that âThe reduction of various concrete private acts of labour to this abstraction of equal human labour is only carried out [or accomplished, vollszieht sich] through exchange, which actually equates products of different acts of labour with each otherâ (âDie Reduction der verschiednen konkreten Privatarbeiten auf dieses Abstractum gleicher menschlicher Arbeit vollzieht sich nur durch den Austausch, welcher Producte verschiedner Arbeiten thatsächlich einander gleichsetztâ). MEGA II/6: 41.
Moseley 2023, p. 185, emphasis added.
Having been inserted already in the 1872 German edition, this crucial moment of self-clarification therefore found its way into all subsequent editions and translations, and is thus common knowledge to any attentive reader of Capital the world over: âWhen, at the beginning of this chapter, we said in the customary manner that a commodity is both a use-value and an exchange-value, this was, strictly speaking, wrong. A commodity is a use-value or object of utility, and a âvalueâ. [⦠Its] form of manifestation is exchange-value, and the commodity never has this form when looked at in isolation, but only when it is in a value-relation or an exchange relation with a second commodity of a different kind. Once we know this, our manner of speaking does no harm; it serves, rather, as an abbreviationâ (Marx 1976, p. 152).
Marx 1976, p. 103. Michael Heinrich points out that Marxâs parallel explicitly and admiringly posits Spinoza on equal terms with Hegel in Marxâs judgement, a point to which I will return below. Heinrich 2019, p. 331.
Ergänzungen und Veränderungen zum ersten Band des Kapitals [1871â72], in MEGA II/6, Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik Der Politischen Ãkonomie. Erster Band, Hamburg 1872. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1987, pp. 29â32. See Heinrichâs commentary on this text (2021, pp. 375â6).
See Althusser 2005, âOn the Young Marxâ.
RC, p. 50.
Marx 1976, p. 102.
The analogy with musical sound synthesis is no mere homonymic: the temporal articulation of timbral singularity through the additive composition of sine waves to construct complex harmonic overtone sequences might be said to adhere to Marxâs fundamental (logical) imperative: always to proceed from the most abstract (whether a minimal definition of the capitalist social form or a single pure sine wave) to encompass the fullest degree of concretion, whether that is the composite body of Capital or the most complex timbre frames of an NED Synclavierâs synthesis engine.
Heinrich 2019, p. 310.
Heinrich 2019, p. 299. Marx also took a course on Hegelâs Logic with Gabler in the summer semester of 1838 (Heinrich 2019, p. 300). While the exact content of Marxâs studies in legal argumentation is unknown, legal reasoning at its most abstract follows a syllogistic form, in the sense that a general legal rule or law (major premise) is argued, in relation to a specific claim or case (minor premise), to apply conclusively (conclusion). See Huhn 2022.
Balibar 2023, pp. 75â6.
Balibar 2023, p. 88.
Heinrich 2019, pp. 412â15. Charles Barbour has shown that this extensive familiarity with Aristotle arose in part from Marxâs intensive engagement with post-Aristotelean logic more generally in the period 1839â1842. Marx did so, Barbour shows, not just in preparation for writing his dissertation, but with the intention of writing a never-completed response to the foremost scholar of Aristotelean logic of the time, Adolf Trendelenburg, and his highly influential 1840 critique of Hegelian logic, Logische Untersuchungen (Barbour, âThe Logic Questionâ). See above, pp. 158â60.
Marx 1976, pp. 151, 532.
For systematic enquiries into Marxâs relation to Spinoza, none of which, however, even raises the possibility that Marxâs familiarity with Spinoza may have impacted the epistemology and method of exposition of his critique of political economy, see Maximilien Rubelâs classic article âMarx à la rencontre de Spinozaâ (1977); Matheron 1977; and more recently, Matysik 2023, Chapter 3, âWhen Marx Met Spinozaâ, pp. 97â134; Bianchi 2018; Tosel 2008; Fischbach 2005; Lordon 2010.
Marx 1976, p. 744. Spinozaâs letter of 2 June 1674 to Jelles, in which the phrase appears, is not among those transcribed in Marxâs 1841 notebook on Spinoza, similarly indicating that Marx based his knowledge of the proposition on Hegelâs misreading of Spinoza (MEGA2 VI.1, Berlin, 1977). In contrast, Marx, unlike Hegel, actually cites Spinoza correctly in the identical citation in Grundrisse (1973, p. 90). Macherey argues that Hegelâs addition of the single word âomnisâ in his analyses of Spinoza symptomatically transforms a specific, situated comment on Spinozaâs part into a general proposition on Being as such. See Macherey 2011, Chapter 4, âOmnis determinatio est negatioâ. Marx also substantively engages with Spinoza in The Holy Family (1844), but merely to indicate him as a thinker ârepresentative of a rationalist and abstract metaphysical systemâ (Bianchi 2018, p. 49; see also Tosel 2008, p. 141). Marxâs characterisation of Spinozist thought in his pre-1845 texts repeats aspects of the Hegelian misreading that Macherey has critiqued, for example in the claim that âSpinozaâs substance ⦠is metaphysically disguised nature separated from manâ (cited in Bianchi 2018, p. 50). Bianchi, however, proposes that in arguing against Hegelâs Spinoza, Marx was in fact targeting Hegelian idealism itself (2018, p. 51).
Macherey 2011, p. 162. For Spinoza the determinate figure, the topic of this interjection, serves to constitute any totality as limited to a subjective point of view, as an actually existing singularity rather than a nonexistent thing or even substance itself.
Marx 1976, p. 422.
Bianchi 2018, p. 54.
As for example Fowkes, who adds a translatorâs note at this point to the Penguin edition, that states: âSpinoza, in the Appendix to Part I of his Ethics, rejects the teleological argument for the existence of God, stating that ignorance of other causes is not a sufficient reason for the view that God created Nature with some particular end in viewâ (Marx 1976, p. 1121). Bianchi points out, however, that âthe same argument may also be based on Chapter VI from the Theological-Political Treatiseâ in which Spinoza analyses miracles (2018, p. 39). The latter, moreover, is the chapter from TTP that Marx placed at the head of his selection of excerpts and personally copied in his own hand, as opposed to later sections of these notebooks that were the work of a copyist (Rubel 1977, p. 15). Furthermore, while there is a similar consensus that Marx was familiar with Spinozaâs Ethics, little attention has been paid to Marxâs citation of one of Spinozaâs most original epistemological positions: in his article âComments on the Latest Prussian Censorshipâ from January 1842, Marx notes that âTruth is as little modest as light â¦. Verum index sui et falsi.â Cited at Bianchi 2018, 44. Bianchi comments, âBoth the light metaphor and Spinozaâs sentence expressed as an aphorism â verum index sui et falsi â refer to EIIP43: âIndeed, just as light defines itself and darkness, so truth sets the standard for itself and falsehoodââ¯â (44).
There is no literal equivalent to this phrase in Spinozaâs writings; perhaps the closest is to be found in EIVP17S: âMy purpose ⦠is not to conclude that ignorance is preferable to knowledge, or that there is no difference between a fool and a wise man in the matter of controlling the emotions. I say this because it is necessary to know both the power of our nature and its lack of power, so that we can determine what reason can and cannot do in controlling the emotionsâ.
Marx 1975a, p. 119.
Rubel 1977, p. 11.
In the Encyclopedia, Hegel writes for example that âperception is the form in which matters are supposed to be comprehended [begriffen], and this is the deficiency of empiricism â¦. In perception, one possesses something concrete in multiple ways whose determinations one is supposed to take apart like peeling away the layers of an onion. This process of splitting them up [Zergliederung] is therefore intended to dissolve the determinations that have grown together, breaking them up [zerlegen] without adding anything but the subjective activity of breaking them up. Analysis is, however, the progression from the immediacy of perception to thoughtâ (Hegel 2010a, p. 80).
See Levine 2009; McIvor 2008; Labelle 2020.
Marx 1975a, pp. 99, 107, translation modified. The original German can be found in MEGA II, Karl Marx Werke, Artikel Literarische Versuche bis März 1843. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1975, pp. 27, 30.
Marx 1975a, p. 134. âDas Atom, ihr Fundament, nur durch die Vernunft geschaut wirdâ (MEGA II, p. 49). In the First Notebook on Epicurean Philosophy, Marx observes in more Hegelian terms that âthe motion of the atoms is in principle absolute, that is, all empirical conditions in it are sublated [alle empirischen Bedingungen sind in ihr aufgehoben] â¦. What is lasting and great in Epicurus is that he gives no preference to conditions over notions, and tries just as little to save them. For Epicurus the task of philosophy is to prove that the world and thought are thinkable and possibleâ (Marx 1975a, pp. 186, 189, translation modified). For the German original, see MEGA IV1, Karl Marx Friedrich Engels Exzerpte und Notizen bis 1824. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1976, p. 19.
Marx 1975a, pp. 112, 125, 146. MEGA I/1, pp. 36, 44, 58.
To my knowledge, while many have repeated the assumption that Marxâs citation refers to the Appendix of Spinozaâs Ethics Book I, no one, surprisingly, seems to have reflected on the context in which he inserts this reference in Capital.
Marx 1976, p. 421.
As the US Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the matter with naïve simplicity, âInputs are any resources used to create goods and services. Examples of inputs include labour (workersâ time), fuel, materials, buildings, and equipmentâ (âWhat Are Inputs?â, at
See Nesbitt 2022, pp. 138â52.
Marx 1976, p. 421.
Marx 1976, p. 129.
Marx 1976, p. 421.
Marx 1976, p. 417.
Ibid.
Marx 1976, p. 422. Patrick Murray writes that âMarx replaces the failed classical theory of value, which explains individual prices in terms of individual values and individual profits in terms of individual surplus values, with a labour theory of value that holds at the aggregate level (the level of total capital) and explains subordinate phenomena on that basis â¦. Marx revolutionises the classical labour theory of value by making the aliquot or representative commodity the object of inquiryâ (Murray 2017, pp. 22, 23). This fractional orientation can easily confuse the reader of Capital, however, since Marx repeatedly frames the rhetoric of his argument in terms of individual examples (of coats, linen, tailoring and weaving, or here in chapter 11, bakers and cotton spinners). As discussed above, Fred Moseley observes in this sense that âIt is not always clear that Marxâs theory in Volume I is about the total capital and the total surplus value produced in the economy as a whole, because the theory is usually illustrated in terms of an individual capital and even a single, solitary worker â¦. However, the individual capitals in Marxâs examples represent the total social capital of the capitalist class as a whole. Individual capitals are not analysed as separate and distinct real [empirical] capitals, but rather as representatives and âaliquot partsâ of the total social capitalâ (Moseley 2017, pp. 45â46). In contrast to the examples of chapter one, here in chapter 11 Marx will make explicit this fractional scope of his analysis through the explicit distinction between bakers and cotton spinners on the one hand, and what he calls âthe social working dayâ as a whole, the overarching frame of reference for the LRMSV.
Marx 1976, p. 417.
Marx 1976, p. 419.
On the latter point in relation to capitalist slavery, see Nesbitt 2022, pp. 145â50.
Marx 1976, p. 420.
Marx 1976, p. 421.
Ibid.
On Machereyâs explication of Spinozaâs crucial and difficult distinction between nonexistent things (idealities) and actually existing singular things (res singulares actu existentes) in EIIP8,9, see above, pp. 53â4
Macherey 1997, p. 274.
Macherey 1997, p. 275.
EIIP13L2.
Macherey 1997, p. 278.
Ibid., emphasis added.
Marx 1976, p. 90.
Macherey 1997, p. 281.
Marx 1976, p. 279.
Marx annotates this formula as follows: âLet the mass of the surplus value be S, the surplus-value supplied by the individual worker in the average day s, the variable capital advanced daily in the purchase of one individual labour-power v, the sum total of the variable capital V, the value of an average labour-power P, its degree of exploitation [= aâ/a or: surplus labour divided by necessary labour,] and the number of workers employed, nâ (1976, p. 418).
Schematisation in this sense refers not to the Kantian empiricist application of a category to sense perception, but instead to the systematic replacement of referential terms in a proposition by variables (n), while formalisation refers more generally to the establishment of the logical form of a proposition. See Lapointe 2008, p. 29.
MEGA II7 [1875], Le Capital, Paris, 1872â1875, Dietz Verlag, 1989, p. 257. The English in the Penguin translation reads: âIts value is therefore equal to the average value of one labour-power multiplied by the number of labour powers employedâ (Marx 1976, p. 417). Marx also cut out the succeeding sentence from the end of the third paragraph in the 1867 and 1872 editions, presumably because it made much the same point more verbosely: âDer Werth des vorgeschossenen variablen Kapitals ist also gleich dem Durchschnittswerth einer Arbeitskraft multiplicirt mit der Anzahl der verwandten Arbeitskräfte. Bei gegebnem Werth der Arbeitskraft wechselt also Werthumfang oder GröÃe des variablen Kapitals mit der Masse der angeeigneten Arbeitskräfte oder der Anzahl der gleichzeitig beschäftigten Arbeiterâ (MEGA2 II5 [1867], p. 242; MEGA2 II6 [1872], p. 303).
Marx 1976, p. 418, emphasis added. âEs wird fortwährend unterstellt, nicht nur dass der Werth einer Durchschnitts-Arbeitskraft konstant ist, sondern dass die von einem Kapitalisten angewandten Arbeiter auf Durchsnitts-Arbeiter reducirt sindâ (MEGA2 II10 [1890], p. 274). In fact, this sentence, a footnote in the French, replaces in the 1890 addition within the body text an inconsequential one unique to the French, in which Marx had written: âOr, un produit ne change pas de grandeur numérique, quand celle de ses facteurs change simultanément et en raison inverseâ (MEGA2 II7 [1875], Le Capital, 258). An online scan of the original French 1875 edition can be consulted at
âConceive, if possible, that it does constitute the essence of one particular thing, B. Therefore, it can neither be nor be conceived without B (Def. 2, II). But this is contrary to our hypothesis. Therefore, it does not pertain to Bâs essence, nor does it constitute the essence of any other particular thingâ (EIIP37Pr).
Macherey 1997, pp. 286â7.
EIIP38.
EIP8.
Macherey 1997, pp. 282, 287.
Macherey 1997, pp. 289, 290.
Macherey 1997, p. 290.
Macherey 1997, p. 291.